In the Courts of the Sun (68 page)

We made it to the west side of the Sidewinder Court and down the northernmost steps into the main axis.
Our hope had been that even if the Puma bloods found their commanders and got into their squads, they still wouldn’t be prepared for a small, focused charge into an offbeat part of their compound. Maybe they’d even leave the pharmacopoeia relatively unguarded. Well, we’ll see about that when we get there.
Ouch. Ouch.
Two slaps on my right shoulder. It meant that we were about to turn right.
I wriggled my arm back and slapped the shoulder of the blood behind me.
We turned right.
The testudo reformed, lengthening along the north-south main axis and narrowing on the east-west one. Now 12 Cayman, who’d been four ranks to my right, was three ranks ahead of me, commanding from near the head of the formation. The sign to march forward seemed to carry through our squad as quickly as cracks in glass.
I was swept up in the charge, pressed between human stalks so I could barely breathe. I could’ve rested just by raising my feet and getting carried along in the center of the turtle. I got a flow of—well, I guess you could call it courage, or group courage. I suppose it’s what the legionnaires felt.
Damn, I thought. We’re unstoppable.
We headed up the main axis. We’d go a quarter-mile farther north and then, just before we reached the southwest corner of the Hurricane mul, we’d turn sharply right and east and force our way into the Pumas’ pharmacopoeia. We’d planned the routes over a model of the city and made the bloods memorize the route backward and forward.
Besides the turtle, I’d introduced one other innovation to the squad: an injunction not to try to take prisoners. It had turned out to be one of the most difficult things for them to accept. Around here prisoners, and not territory, were the final object of war. Loot was secondary. But we’d told them that on this raid, if any of our bloods broke formation to take a captive, that blood, and his dependent family, would be derated and banished. Their only goal was to get us through as fast as possible. 12 Cayman was a gifted drillmaster and so far they seemed to have understood.
We got the stop signal. We waited.
Another more complicated signal came back in the Harpy’s hunting sign language:
The Gilas are here.
I felt the squad shifting around me, and I got a glimpse of blue Gila regalia through the press of bodies. We’d just met up with six vingtaines, that is, a hundred-and-twenty-man contingent, of Gila bloods. They absorbed us like an amoeba swallowing a paramecium, and the enlarged creature moved forward. In a panicked crowd it can actually be easy to go upstream, since they’re so eager to get around you. So far, so good.
Soon we were on the Street of the Dead. With the crowds streaming around us, we had to feed our collective body through these narrow gaps, up and down through flights of stairs, up, down, and do it again. Each time we crossed over the top of the wall that separated one plaza from another, at that moment, going over the hump, I could get at least a glimpse of what was going on. When we trooped over the next wall, I held back for a second and took a better look around.
Whoa. Bad.

[57]

S
warms of humans flooded down the Hurricane mul toward bonfires lit from flaming leaves and banners and offering paper. People staggered to the fire with loads of thatch and cloth and hearth wood, pushed through the circle, and dumped the stuff into the flames. I watched one white-banded Morning Glory blood, a bit older than me, holding up a little kid, away from the flames, as he tried to pick and push his way to the steps in the wall of the court. It was kind of heroic, I thought. At least somebody was saving somebody. People aren’t all bad. He stepped over a circle of ancient women. They were sitting on singed bodies, munching on flowers and peppers from the festival garlands while right next to them their grandchildren were strangling each other and hacking trophies off the corpses.
They were laughing.
And not only were they laughing, they were helping themselves get killed. For instance, I saw this one character hold his arm out and dare this other guy, who I thought was his brother, to chop it off. And his brother hacked at it with a battle saw. It took three chops to get the forearm off the humerus and sever the extensor tendon. Then his brother handed him the saw and he tried to chop off his brother’s arm, except he was too weak already to do it. It was like some creepy slapstick comedy act, like that bit with the Black Knight in
Monty Python and the Holy Grail,
except you could tell that these people really were in pain after getting maimed, even if they were still laughing. I saw a bunch of acolytes taking turns diving off the wall onto the stairs. They weren’t getting up. A kid was running through the circle of musicians and toward the bonfire. I thought he was going to try to jump over it. He’ll never make it, I thought, it’s impossible. But instead he took a running leap and dove into the heart of the fire, in a puff of sparks. His friends cheered. It was like they were playing at doing these things.
It certainly wasn’t a popular revolt in the twenty-first-century sense. Nobody was planning to set up a people’s state. For that matter, I don’t think anyone from any of the lower clans ever expected or hoped to take charge of anything. It was pretty easy to tell if people were related, from their clothing and markings, and now we could see brothers, fathers and uncles and children killing and maiming each other, clustering in these little groups and practically beating their heads together, picking up the grandmother, say, and throwing her into the air, or biting each other in the back of the neck. And then people who would never have even touched were messing with each other. Social distinctions were dissolving. Women were dancing with men from rival clans. Porters in paper loincloths were were slap-fighting with Puma javelinmen in their outrageous finery, A line of twenty nearly naked slaves, who had sawed through their anchor rope but were still tied together at the waist, slithered like a centipede between us and the bonfire, grabbing bits of food from fallen offering bundles and stuffing it into their mouths. An hour ago it would have been a capital offense. The city had been held together by a brittle pyramid of hierarchies, and when you pulled out a few, they all tumbled down.
It wasn’t like what you’d think of as a riot. It was all more of a Mardi Gras gone bad, a Black Plague debauch, a gradual dissolution into chaos that I associated with the last day of the year in Jubal High, when wastebaskets would fly out the windows and kids would tip over desks and tear and scatter torn-up books down the stairwells. Or when a crowd slides out of control after a sporting event and turns vandalistic. Those are all on a pretty small scale, of course, but the mood was the same, and eternal. Nothing feels more freeing than the permission to destroy, to give in to the hatred of life and blow it all in a Sardanapalian flourish. It was abandon befitting the end of the world.
La gran puta,
I thought. The idea had been just to create a diversion, to get people to start raising hell so that we could get in, get the goods, and get out. We hadn’t wanted things to get this much out of control. They can’t really want to burn down their own homes, I thought. Can they?
Maybe it’ll happen in any situation when you get the right mix of stressors. They had that deadly combination of economic despair and religious conviction going on here, just like with, say, the PLO. But like with the suicide bombers, I think the main motivator was a sense of insult. They weren’t just ready to do what Koh said but so angry at the feline clans that they’d do almost anything. For Star Rattler’s followers this one dark day would recover their
baach—
that is, their toughness, coolness, macho,
soldatentum,
honor, manliness, heart, or however you want to translate it. This was their chance to settle old scores.
Well, at least so far the Pumas hadn’t even started to come after us. The “diversion” had worked, right?
I noticed that the white-banded Morning Glory blood had turned back to the bonfire. He held his child with both hands, one on the kid’s hair and one on the back of his belt, and swung the kid forward and back to build up speed, and then, just like he was tossing a sack of potting soil into a truck, threw his son into the inferno. The child screamed in the air, stopped screaming when he hit the coals, and screamed again, more and more shrilly, until his little lungs filled up with smoke.
Hun Xoc grabbed me with two fingers of his spear hand and steered me forward. Up here we were exposed to dart fire. I galumphed down the stairs into the plaza. We formed up again and moved forward.
We made it halfway across the square before I realized that the swarm ahead of us had thickened. The bloods in the vanguard thrashed at the crowd. I stumbled forward, leaning on the blood in front of me, who turned out to be 4 Sunshower, the skin mender. Good. It’s always nice to have a doctor around. Ouch.
I couldn’t see.
I turned, groped around, and found Armadillo Shit’s shoulder. It had a burn scar on it, so I knew it was his. I gestured at my eyes. He leaned forward, nearly pushing me over, took my head in his hands, opened my eyelids with his fingers, and licked my eyeballs.
It was a move we’d all rehearsed, to supplement the salve. To an outside observer it would have looked like we were taking time out from the battle to make out. And in fact, even through the quilting, I couldn’t help feeling that Armadillo Shit did have a rock-hard erection. It’s just stress, I thought of saying to him. Don’t get any ideas.
I got my eyes open. Ah. Better. Something pushed into our part of the turtle. It was one of the Gila bloods. He was just a limp body. He’d been badly wounded on the outside of the formation and passed in to the center. They laid him down one row in front of us. We couldn’t help stepping on him. Our nacom, our executioner, killed him by slitting the axillary arteries under his arms.
The problem here was that everyone wanted to carry their dead along with the group. You didn’t want enemies getting the corpses of members of your family. But 12 Cayman and I had said we couldn’t afford to do it. The bloods hadn’t been able to deal with the idea of just leaving them, though. And we didn’t want them to think that if they were killed, they’d be left and have to work as slaves in the mountain of our enemies’ souls. So we’d worked out a compromise. The nacom cut off the blood’s pigtail and his testicles, to take back to his family, and spoiled the corpse, canceling the tattoos with a rasp and chasing out the blood’s breath, name, and uay with a little sharkskin flail. Even so, 12 Cayman had to order the bloods around the body to drop it. It was like he was telling a pair of dogs to drop a dead fish on the beach.
We waited. The blood’s blood was sticky under the rubber soles of our raiding sandals. We nudged forward every so often and kept getting repulsed, like a little dog pushing at the door of his crate.
Maybe we wouldn’t get any farther. What was going on? 4 Sunshower took a step forward. I did the same, stepping over the corpse’s legs. More resistance. Damn—and then there was a feeling of release, something breaking, then we were flowing forward faster and faster. I got my feet on the ground. I felt soft impacts through the bodies around me. The crowd was giving way in front of us. I strained my head up, trying to see where we were, but all I could see was the headdress of the blood in front of me and the dark-yellow wedge of the Hurricane mul looming behind it. I heard coded yells going back and forth, not any of ours. Probably Pumas, I thought. Hell. I felt the signal to turn right pass through our composite body. We lurched and I crushed into the body of the blood in front of me until I was practically sucking on his blue-tattooed earlobe. We seeped, slowly, into a narrow alley between two plazas. The vanguard was only able to feed into it a few people at a time. I noticed a hand was gripping my free wrist and then realized that it was tapping out a message:
Keep close.
It was Hun Xoc. I got my fingers around it and squeezed back that I was all right. Now we could hear actual fighting at the outskirts of our squad. There was no clanging of armor, of course. Combat with flint axes and obsidian-flake spears sounds like shuffling feet and breaking glass, with a few taunts, screams, cracks, and shouts thrown in.
Something gave and we were moving again, the squad oozing forward like dough out of a kneading machine, and I let myself get carried under an arch and down into a sunken courtyard. Now my feet were actually touching the ground, or rather the layer of quivering bodies we were walking on. We pushed up four steps and into another courtyard, crossed it, and then poured down sixteen steps into another plaza. Sixteen steps, I thought. Good. That means we’re almost there.
I stumbled, took three steps on my knees, and then got hoisted up by 2 Hand and Armadillo Shit. In a gap between two walls of crowd noise I heard 12 Cayman shouting for us to keep the turtle together.
Everything slowed. We stopped. Crowds pressed in on our perimeter. Ow. Now my left eye was blinking. Damn. The poison ivy stuff was supposed to burn out after a minute or two. We strained against each other, trying to maintain the latticed structure of our formation, like a crystal under compression, craning our heads up to try to get fresh air. We took another three steps forward, gooshing over bodies. It felt like wading through living lasagna. Something grabbed my right ankle. It was a hand. I kicked at it with my other foot and tipped over. The blood in front of me pushed me back, not good-humoredly. I balanced again and brought down my spear on the wrist. It reacted but didn’t release. I followed the arm back to the head. The head was biting my left ankle. Damn it. I jammed the obsidian point into his cheek. It went through and scraped on teeth. He released and lunged up to bite again, staring up at me with this expression that was wild, hateful, and sleepy at the same time. I pressed the shaft down into his eye, pulled it out, and jammed it into his mouth. His hand let go of my ankle. I pried the javelin out of him and we moved forward. Damn. He’s messed up. You messed him up. Damn.
There are too many of them, I thought vaguely, I’ll be crushed to death and nobody’ll ever know what happened. And Marena will just think I wussed out. She won’t even know I got this far, I did all this good work, I really, really tried. Serves me right for getting involved with fanatics. All these people think they can walk on lava. Idiot.
Todo por mi culpa.
Damn I’m tired.
Yeah. Tired. Rest a second. Just see what happens. I felt myself collapsing just as we started moving again.
Move. Okay. Move. Forward. Half a league, halfaleague, halfaleagueonward. Hup. Hup. We came up on another staircase. Up and over. Down. I grabbed Hun Xoc and held on to him like he was the thwart of our canoe as we went over the rapids in the crush of sweat and oil.
Across. Push. Push. One more. Up. Over the top, doughboys. This wall was twice as high as the last one and when I got to the top I risked another look around. From here we could see out over the plazas and could get a good look at the northern and western suburbs and the adobe-covered hills beyond them. Plumes of smoke rose and widened, angling only a little to the west in the still air. Behind them streams of pilgrims were pouring over the crest of the ridge, down into the valley. They eddied and coiled, slowly pressing toward the teocalli district.
It took me a minute to get it through my head what was going on. Instead of running away from the fire, the crowds were rushing toward it, into the city, toward the main axis, pushing inward, into the flames.
Now, I’d seen one or two dicey things lately. But at this moment I really was freaking horrified. All those people were going to push in, and bunch up, and crush each other to death like turkeys in a thunderstorm. So far the holocaust was just getting started. It was like watching a train heading for a collapsed bridge. We heard the first shrieks of people being crushed to death, but they were just the first. Mass death was on the way. Hell. Hell.
We’d assumed that once the fire started, people would run away. That is, they’d run
out
of the city. Even Koh thought that. Didn’t she?
Armadillo Shit grabbed me and steered me toward the stairs into the plaza. I twisted out of his hands. Leggo, I’ll do it myself. I tromped down through a collapsed fence of offering poles and into the wide square. We formed up and moved on.
We pushed into the Puma’s Plaza. A bonfire roared at its midpoint, about four hundred arms ahead of us. To the right the staircase of the Hurricane mul angled up. Puma javelinmen poured down it, silhouetted against glowing steam from the flooded plazas to the north. The bonfire was only fifty arms away from the point where the Pumas spewed into the plaza, so as soon as they got down they were in danger of burning up. Evidently there was no other way off the mul. That is, there was no interior staircase, and although I suppose you might be able to climb down the back or the sides, it wouldn’t be easy. There were twenty-arm drops between the levels, and they weren’t really level at all but sloped, and smooth enough to be tough to hold on to. And even then, the fires were getting stronger in the eastern barrios, behind the mul. So apparently the people up there had decided their best shot was to go down the normal way and then move up the main axis toward the Jade Hag’s mul, where there wasn’t yet any fire, and then onto the trade roads up to Cerro Gordo.
A signal came back through our squad: two open-handed slaps on the chest. It meant we were clear to break up the formation and troop along the wall in double file.