The Sacrifice Game (20 page)

( 25 )

T
hat was all.

Well, fine. Now, what the bleeding hell did she mean?

We tried again and again, of course, and then, when the tsam lic had worn off, we went over and over the game. Night fell, or maybe just happened. Koh’s shall-we-say praetorian guard prowled around us with increasing impatience and eventually with real alarm, begging us to rejoin the army. Finally she got me to admit that I accepted it, that is, that I accepted the fact that everything I’d done up until now had been useless, that the notes and the jars of tsam lic and the Lodestone Cross burial and all that I’d been so pathetically proud of wouldn’t stop the real doomster, and that if we wanted to work out who the doomster was, or how to stop him, or anything more specific than what we’d just seen, we’d have to play the Sacrifice Game on a vastly larger scale. A human game, specifically. And if
that
didn’t work I’d have to get my brain back to the twenty-first century in relatively good condition. Either way, we’d have to get back to Ix.

Sometimes—at times like this, I’d say, especially—one might as well just go with the cliché: I was crushed. Yes, it’d be nice to come up with a more clever word than
crushed,
but really, why bother?
Crushed
pretty well does the job.

What surprised even me, though, was how much I wasn’t crushed just because I was a lazy slob and I’d thought I could relax. It was that I—even I—was rather annoyed, in fact more than annoyed, in fact, let’s say again, crushed—that the world was still doomed. And I even realized that I cared about it in the general sense, not just personally, that even if I died back here from my neuroblastomas or in a ball game or by the flint dagger or the wooden sword or whatever, even if I didn’t get back to the thirteenth b’aktun to see Marena and the gang and catch the next season of
Game of Thrones,
I still wanted the good old crazy ratty loathsome ridiculous old world to keep rolling on.

Okay. Look. We can do this, I thought. We’re young, we still have a lot of our health left, we’re capable, we know more stuff than anybody else in the whole world. Just go with the best bet. Get to Ix and help 2JS get put in charge of the place. And in return he’ll help us get together a human game. No sweat. Right?

Wrong. Oh, God are we fucked. We are so very fucked. Royally fucked we fucking very are—

Cancel that. Buck up. Man up. Gird your loins into the sticking place. Forward, crawl.

At the Isthmus of Tehuantepec we turned yelloward off the commercial track and onto a single-file path through what they called the Protectorship of the Brown Ants. It was the floor of a Devonian sea, coarse calcium sand made of diatoms and crinoid stems and the scales of ancient armored fish. The dunes gave evidence of nocturnal use, musky ropes of fox scat and the parallel-gash tracks of sidewinders, but daylight was dead. Sometimes we’d pass a lump of armadillos, poking around like big sow bugs and licking ants off crumbled lobes of brain coral. Supposedly some of the convert-bloods behind us complained that we were leading them into Kikilbaj, what the Aztecs would later call Miclantechutli, the desert graveyard at the zeroth world’s ragged edge. They kept flipping out about the celestial Puma and Jaguars who were supposedly spying on us, and they were constantly doing all sorts of pathetic little rituals, combinations of bribes, apologies, foster adoptions, and threats. In the unfashionable rear of the now seemingly endless procession, families were offering their younger children to the lords of their hearth fires, making them swallow ashes or ramming hot stones into their eyes.

Another Puma band hit us again that night and we lost four bloods, fifty porters, and three or four hundred thralls. It was only the worst in a long and repetitious string of attacks. Things weren’t going well. At dawn Hun Xoc, speaking for Lady Koh, called a war session. There weren’t many good ideas. Finally 1 Gila suggested we split the forces in two. 1 Gila would take the main body—Koh’s “Four Hundred families” of converts—and would continue southeast along this route. They’d take our palanquins and standards and some of our dressers, so that they could put together look-alikes of me and Hun Xoc. The rest of us, the Harpy bloods, 14 Wounded’s group, and Koh’s officers, greatmothers, and “capturing bloods,” would get rid of our markings and detour southwest, heading the long way down the coast in a much smaller elite unit. Hun Xoc and his squad would stay with us to escort us to Ix, and the other ten emissaries and runners would go with the Four Hundred families. Severed Right Hand’s men would almost certainly follow the bigger group.

It sounded like the right thing tactically but it was a cold move. The untrained converts would be way out in the breeze drawing fire. Koh might be sacrificing half her converts. On the other hand, there were a hundred and sixty score of them now. Even if only eighty thousand made it to Ix they’d be enough to tip the scale of the battle in 2JS’s favor.

Anyway, Koh eventually agreed and 1 Gila’s plan carried the day. At one point Hun Xoc took me aside and said he was a little nervous that 1 Gila would just take off and not make it to Ix at all, but after kicking it around for a while we decided that really they had nowhere else to go. They were marked outcasts far from their now-nonexistent homes, and at this point they’d either get to Ix in a hurry or get eaten. And some of them would get through. We worked out routes that would get both of us into Ix at the same time: The big army would take the direct route to Ix, marching in daylight, and we’d have to hustle around the long way at night.

I functioned. I sat on the strategy committee. I advised Koh. I played a running hipball game whenever the army passed a usable court, and then, as I slept, my bearers ran me to the next court. And I got some of my skills back, nothing like what I’d been as Chacal, but still not bad. But it happened in this smog of despair, that feeling like you’ve suddenly realized that the world is constructed entirely out of damp corrugated cardboard, and of no further interest because, no matter how elaborately and even artistically you cut, fold, paint, and arrange it, damp cardboard is still just damp cardboard. Only, this time it wasn’t just in my mind, it was really the case, the world was going to wink out just as it would be getting interesting. Even though I was way back here, that is, “back” here, in 664, it felt as though the end was going to come tomorrow, later today, in an hour, in a minute, before the end of this sentence, now—and really, in terms of historical time, let alone geological time, it was only an instant away. Oh hell, oh hell, oh hell, oh hell.

Weirdly, though, Koh seemed to understand. She kept surprising me that way. I mean, with what she could understand. And even though the end of the thirteenth b’aktun would be so long after her own time, when everyone she knew would be lucky even to be bones and not just dust, she still wanted the world to continue. Although I think she mainly thought of it in terms of wanting her descendants to continue, but even so . . . anyway, just after the birth of the next sun we were slogging along on the south bank of the Río Coatzacoalcos, and I was curled up in my palanquin cursing the day I was born and all other days and all others who had been born, and she had my bearers bring me alongside her and, as we jogged along, she started a conversation—almost a modern-style conversation between equal and skeptical people and not an Olde Mayaland–style formal court exchange.

“Writing it all down wouldn’t be good enough anyway,” Koh said. As far as she was concerned, the Game was such a subtle and physical art that only directly transmitted skill was worth anything. “You have to show your eagle a way to your b’aktun”—by my
eagle
she meant my primary uay, like my self, or as we’d say, my brain—“and you need to be there yourself to ask Star Rattler to sacrifice another thirteen of the segments of his body, to give your world another thirteen b’aktuns.”

“I can’t say I see a likely route,” I said.

“We’ll plan the route together, at the human game,” she said. “
K’ek’wa’r.
”
That is, “Double strength,” or, roughly, “Courage.”

I signed a thank-you-next-to-me.

I have something to show you, she signed back.

( 26 )

K
oh had her wickerworkers weave us a temporary ramada and set us just off the towpath alongside the Atoyac River. The day was steamy but it was cool under the cypresses and you could smell the tannin and hear the brown noise of the rushing brown water. Four of her deafened guards set out jars and baskets of drinking water, set up four wide rush screens around us, and took up their positions crouching with their backs to us, watching. Hun Xoc and a few other bloods sat at a distance, between us and the river. Armadillo Shit sat behind me and Koh’s dwarf sat on her shoulder. It was the smallest number of people Koh and I had had around us since before we’d left Teotihuacán, and there wasn’t any chance of our being seen or overheard, but even so, Koh looked around for a minute, listening, before she took something out of her bundle.

It was a polished deer rib. She dipped it in one of the little jars and then stirred the rib around in a second water jar. She said something to her dwarf in their personal code. The dwarf slid down, held her breath, covered the first jar, picked it up, carried it ten steps away to a little channel that ran to the river. Delicately—to her it was a respected living thing—she poured the water into the channel and then, not delicately, she dropped the pot and lid down in after it, shattering them.

I looked down into the drinking-water-pot. Cripes, I thought. What I’m getting is that this is some potent-ass shit. Koh took a dried marigold out of her little kit, picked a single tiny petal off it with a pair of horn almost-chopsticks, dipped the petal into the jar, stuck the tweezers into the mat like a double mast with a single wet flag at the top, and covered the jar. She moved a little myrtle torch closer to the petal, dried it, took it off the tweezers with her fingers, and tore it in half like it was a tab of LSD. She popped one of the halves in her mouth and gave me the other. I could practically hear Grateful Dead music playing in the background. I put the petal on my tongue.

“Boiling this doesn’t much hurt its power,” she said,

“They’d have to steam-distill their drinking water.”

The exact word meant “steamed onto cloth,” but it meant distill. Which no one would do anyway. With only clay or wood or leather or whatever vessels it was hard to boil water in big quantities, and people were in the habit of relying on mountain-spring water diverted or fetched directly to their homes. In Ix the drinking-water system was separate from the irrigation systems, which in turn were separate from the water in the artificial lake and the canal system, which was much more tannic and saline. Supposedly all the “sacred original” water, that is, the pure water, came from the Never-Empty Font of Waterlily Ocelot, the central reservoir of Ix. The huge cistern was fed directly from two cold underground streams that burst out the side of the hill. It was the heart of the city and the umbilical cord of the world, the Tree of 400
⁴
Branches, woven when the Earthtoad was a soft-shelled egg. Water was more holy the more upstreamness it had, and when it came out of the earth and for some time thereafter it was under the direct control of the Ahau, the Lord of the Fertilizing Waters, and it fed the cities’ twelve drinking-water fountains and then, farther down the line of impurity, the whole system of floodgates that let the
ahauob
program the city’s irrigation cycles. The Ocelots had always owned the water, and it fed hundreds of little fountains through the city, both on the Ocelots’ peninsula and on the surrounding mainland. It had been one of the foundations of the Ocelots’ power since the beginning of the city as a tiny irrigation society over a thousand years ago.

“On the court you’ll face their garden,”

she said, pointing at the spot,

“Their goal’s three hundred paces from the well

On their great-mul’s female side. Run for the mainland,

Pretend to drown yourself, and release the bag,

And hold out till the Ocelots’ eyes fog over.”

Sure, I thought.
I bought an unction of a mountebank
. I said it all sounded a little wacky, although of course I didn’t put it that way, I said it as well as possible in the high-equals language we were still using with each other. Even if all that went exactly according to plan, the minute people started freaking out from the usual water, the Ocelots would switch to some other source.

We lit cigars.

And how long do you think it will take them to feel it? she asked. Do you feel anything?

I said no, not really. Maybe my tongue felt a little numb and frisky, but I wasn’t giddy or anything. Given what a long day it had been I felt totally in control.

“Well, listen, if you take the court,” she said,

“You can always have this with you just in case.”

I said something along the lines of “Sure, whatever.” You’re delusional, babe, I thought. I guess again she could tell what I really thought because she said something like “Well, we may not need it anyway,” lit another pair of cigars, and handed me one. After a few puffs we exchanged cigars. It was a gesture of extreme hospitality.

I leaned back on Armadillo Shit and puffed. We exchanged cigars again, completing the little ritual.

“Just now this picture flew through me,” Koh said. “What would you say to it?”

I pointed to my ear, meaning that I was listening.

“If you could really move your ruling uay from one skin to another,” she said, “then you could stay on this level forever. You wouldn’t have to paddle downstream through the canyons.” She meant I wouldn’t have to die.

That’s right, I said. I could just possess someone younger. She was right. I’d thought about that particular implication of the consciousness transference only a couple of times. But there wasn’t any reason it wouldn’t work. You wouldn’t have to invent all the gigantic neural nets and zettabyte storage networks and everything else you’d need to make a mechanical substitute of the brain. You could just have yourself copied and zap into whoever. Or if you felt bad about killing someone that way you’d just clone a few babies of yourself, keep them drugged and unconscious until they get to a good brain-size age, and then use them as vessels. It might be a good growth industry to get into, I thought, another few billion for the Warren Organization.

Still, I can’t do this from here, I thought. Let’s not build castles in the air. Deal with the here-and-now here and now. And then if you get Back to the Future you can take care of Marena and Lindsay and the Warren Group and the whole unholy crew. Right?

Warren. Lindsay “Big Data” Warren. Christ allwhitey. Back to Square Zero. Hell.

Everything I’d gone through in 2012 seemed pretty remote. Once in a while I’d even catch myself thinking it hadn’t been real, that I was just a regular Maya ballplayer with delusional paranoia and a lot of imagination, and I’d have to remind myself that no old Maya dude could have made up the history of the entire Western world, no matter how clever he was.

And how clever am I? I wondered. Maybe Koh’s right to worry about 2 Jeweled Skull. Maybe I should worry more. Maybe I didn’t worry enough about coming here in the fucking first place. Maybe I hadn’t been that thoughtful about that whole business with the Warren Corporation.

I don’t know, Idunno, idddnnnow. I was getting pretty sure that Marena wouldn’t have gone to all the trouble of dealing with me if she hadn’t been thinking of sending me even then, from before the beginning.

Maybe Tony Sic never really wanted to go in the first place. The more I thought about it the clearer it seemed. They’d needed somebody inconsequential, so naturally they’d chosen little
yo
. Fruck. Yuck. Well, the joke’s on me—

HOT! OUUUCH,
TA’, TA’, TA’!
Shitskies! There were all these scalding drops of water on my face and I brushed them away. Confusion over us. Somehow I was lying on the ground and Armadillo Shit was rolling on top of me, squealing a little like he was in pain. Orange flies. Two bloods were pulling on me and we all fell back I squinted into the dark forest, toward the river. Hun Xoc and another person were rolling over broken pottery and pools of liquid. There were a couple of big thumps, Hun Xoc butting his head into the other person’s face. I looked around for Lady Koh and couldn’t find her and then it turned out she was behind me. She had a funny expression and at first I thought she was in pain but then saw that she was laughing silently. She’d gotten a few drops of hot stuff, too, but her dwarf was already daubing them with ointment, like one of those movie makeup people who rush in and redoes your entire look in the two minutes between takes. I looked back at Hun Xoc. The others were holding him up. The man he’d butted with his head was still on the ground, mashed and moaning. You couldn’t make out much of his face anymore, but his threadbare manto had been newly edged with Lady Koh Blue, which implied that he was one of the village elders who’d been adopted into our household and was, supposedly, serving us.

Well, I thought, I guess he really had tried to kill us. But I was laughing so hard that it took everyone a while to explain to me that it had been an assassination attempt, that the dude had tried to throw a pot of boiling oil into our faces. They also explained that we were under attack again, but even though I could hear the alarm calls and the whistles of bull-roarers, it still all seemed incredibly funny to me, no prob, no sweat, no brain, no pain, and I still couldn’t stop giggling.

They bundled me into a sled and we took off. I squinted up at the beige sky. It turned pink and then green and then, oddly for a sky, it disappeared. Boy, I guess that crud really does creep up on you after all, I thought. So let’s see, if it had taken about a hundred-score beats to hit me last night, it might take three times as long in cold water, so maybe you could count on over a half a day of delay. Maybe Koh really had a point with that stuff.

Nobody’d gotten anything out of the village greatfather who’d tried to kill Koh or me or both of us. The other elders said he had been out foraging the day before and had probably gotten co-opted by the Pumas then. The Harpy bloods started to kick the other elders around but I was pretty sure none of them had anything to do with it and got them to let them go. My good deed for the month. Well, the year. Lifetime. It was hard to even tell them what I wanted since I was still cackling like a moron, but Hun Xoc asked Koh whether I’d had too much wild tobacco—which was strong enough to be hallucinogenic in medium doses—and Koh said probably. She didn’t want to tell the Harpy Clan or even the Rattlers about the earthstar compound until the last possible moment, in case somebody got captured and turned.

Again, embarrassingly, I giggled. Maybe things weren’t really so bad.