The Sacrifice Game (28 page)

Hun Xoc signed that he didn’t want to run.

I started to try to tell him the old thing about how we weren’t running, we were just advancing in a different direction, but I tripped over the words. It wasn’t that easy to translate an English phrase into Chol, or at least it wasn’t for me.

We’re not running anywhere, I said, I have to
ajma-xoc
. It meant “follow what our father says.” It was incontrovertible. Come on, I thought, switch hats. You’re not a ballplayer right now, you’re a commando.

He demurred again. I insisted. Finally he said “Agreed” by contracting his shoulder muscles.

It’ll just be the three of us and six of Koh’s guards, I said. Maybe not even that many. We can still make it, though.

Listen, something’s going on, Hun Xoc signed by tapping my yoke.

What? I asked, but I heard it.

“Kot Chuupol! Ile Kot Chuupol!”
It was Emerald Immanent’s voice.

He’d recognized me.

( 37 )

“K
ot Chuupol! Ile Kot Chuupol!”

His voice was like he was trying to throw up, except loud. You’re supposed to be silent like your stupid name, I thought.
Ch’uupul
was a Chol word for like gay or queer—not in the okay sense of a epicene, but in the sense of being a willing bottom—so the most popular insult-name for me was just something midway in sound between that and “Chacal.”

“Yan Kot Chacal!”
he yelled. “It’s Harpy Chacal!”

Just ignore them, dear, I thought.

“Yan Chuupol Chacal! Yan Chuupol Chacal!”

I was sort of half-aware that a couple of people up in the Ocelot stands had heard Emerald Immanent identifying me, and they were having mixed reactions. Some of them were more than a little spooked and kept on rhubarbing about it. But I was too pumped to pay much attention. The chanter and Magister and beaters and everybody just went on with what they were doing, cruising through the protocol on inertia.

Anyway, the serve went out. Hun Xoc got it and passed to me. In the femtosecond I spent looking at him I could see he was too winded to make another goal run himself. In a normal ball game, with more bench players, he’d have dropped out already.

I passed back to Red Cord. Just get me a good shot, I signed to Hun Xoc. Red Cord passed back to me.

Okay. No point holding back now.

I scooped the ball out of the air and passed it back to Hun Xoc and fell back and turned, setting up my signature run. I mean Chacal’s signature run. It was like one of Lebron’s dunk-in-the-post, I’d perfected it over so many repetitions it was almost one motion and felt completed as soon as I swung into it. I built up speed and ran up the red wall, like Donald O’Connor in
Singin’ in the Rain
. I was giving myself away, but I was like, Fine, I don’t give a fuck, I’m doing my transcendent little dance and nothing’s gonna stop me cause I’m the Duke of Earl.

I turned like a skateboarder just above the lip of the wall and dashed down, building up momentum, and diagonally across the alley and up the Ocelots’ emerald-tinted wall. By the second step up I’d revisualized my path up the bank, felt my speed, yep, everything in place, THE TIME IS NOW!!!

I came to that moment of perfect equipoise where I was standing motionless like a fly at this crazy forty-five-degree angle. I felt the wind from Ocelot spectators’ fists as they swung at me, not quite connecting. The goal was only six arms ahead of me and three arms above. Hun Xoc yoked the ball up to me like he’d done a thousand times, and it came up just as I was falling, nearly right where I wanted it, so that I could gauge its stately spin by a pink spot of bloody chalk-dust, and I dug my wrist-guard into the black moon and just fed it right into the side of the vase. I could see the bloom of turquoise powder as I fell out of my equilibrium and as I rolled I could hear the chanters squealing above the cheers:

“20 Ocelots, 22 Harpies.” You could tell from the chanters’ voices that this wasn’t how it was supposed to go. They’d been sure the Ocelots had a lock. Well, choke on this, I thought. One more.

Hun Xoc got the eighteenth serve, set up, got a solid hit on it, and grazed the peg. Somebody’d checked me, and I’d fallen over. But as I hoisted myself up I could see a tiny but incontrovertible wisp of blue-green dust.

We did it, I thought, but as the chanters’ voice swelled into a chorus of “
Kax kot, kax Kot
,” “Win, Harpies, win, Harpies,” I could hear, closer and louder, Emerald Immanent’s voice, and then Emerald Snapper’s, and then two, and four, and then what sounded like a hundred other voices, all screaming:

“Yan Kot Chacal!”
“It’s Harpy Chacal!”

I staggered toward the central marker. There were Harpy bloods chanting back,
“Kax! Kax! Kax!”
“Victory! Victory! Victory!” and the Ocelot crowd shouting,
“Tuus! Tuus! Tuus!”
“Deception, deception, deception.” Nearer, I heard Hun Xoc’s voice.

“Chokow pol!”
It meant “crazy” or “Crazy Man,” another common and somewhat more admiring pun on my name. But he used it only as a warning. I turned. All I could see was this big black thing but I ducked in time for it not to tear my head off.

4 Blue Howler had scooped up the dead ball and yoked it at my head.

What’s going on? I thought kind of dully. I was still endorphined out. Ball was supposed to be an elegant game—at its best combining the artistry of rhythmic gymnastics with the excitement and finesse of men’s lacrosse—and now it’s turning into Australian football. Howler ran at me, following the ball. I turned like I was going to run away and then dug my right foot into the bank and pushed off the angle between the floor and the sloping wall, stopping myself. Howler skidded into me from behind. I hunched forward and pushed my rear end back and felt the left prong of my horseshoe-shaped yoke connect with bone. I rolled forward and was on my feet again. Howler was sliding in a clockwise arc down the bank, leaving a wide black streak. The crowd loved it. I crouched into a “turtle,” expecting a tackle from Emerald Immanent, but it didn’t come. I looked up. Red Beak had gotten hold of him. Not for long, though, it looked like. Behind them I noticed Emerald Snapper and the two Emerald bench players running at us. Snapper was huge and big-boned and I thought for a beat that I’d had it, but he got off balance and as he fell toward me I got his head right on the sweet spot of my yoke. There was no crack, it was more like just a quiet
glutch
. Whatever, I thought, yeah, forget the damn Marquess of Queersbury rules, let’s take the buttons off the foils. As Snapper fell back he got a hand into my yoke and pulled me down onto the slaughterhouse floor. I managed to roll away before he rolled onto me and flattened me. Emerald Immanent was coming back around on my right. The umpires’ drivers and both sides’ invisibles were already out on the court, trying to shield the players they were assigned to.

“Lothic ekel ytzam,”
Howler yelled from the other side of the court. Basically it meant “You’re taco meat,” except
ytzam
was this really cheap sort of pemmican that the pastless clans ate and sold. It was known for having all sorts of squirrels and bats and bugs and mud and shit in it.

“Chikin ukumil jotzpaljal,”
I said, scooping the ball out of the air with my hand shield. “Your shrunken dick is showing.” That particular word for
shrunken
meant like with a shrunken head. I launched the ball off my yoke in an arc over his head. It looked like a good lob, but I slipped on blood and fell backward. Up in the stands what had been everyone arguing at once was devolving into everyone shouting at once. Out at either open end of the court, where some of the Ocelot and Harpy partisans overlapped, I could hear a few little slap-fights starting, the kind that turn into big ones. Some of the Harpies were cheering my name, that I was Chacal, I guess figuring I was back from the Underworld.

Where’s the ball gotten to? I wondered. I rolled over on my stomach—with all the padding we were wearing, falling over was one thing that didn’t usually result in an injury—and for a beat I could see Lady Koh’s eyes watching me, unblinking and seemingly calm, penetrating through the swirls of motion and feather confetti. I thought about signing up to her but it was too far, I’d have to gesture too loud. Ahead and behind I could hear younger bloods were pouring through both end zones into the playing trench.

I noticed Hun Xoc’s hand under my arm. He pulled me up. Both sides’ bloods were overpowering the drivers, who only had these short ceremonial maces anyway, more just regalia than practical weapons.

Hun Xoc tensed as Howler came at us again. Howler hit him. Hun Xoc skidded back into me on the bloody floor. I toppled over and there was what seemed like two minutes where Howler was kneeling, looking down at us and babbling through a cluster of little bits of teeth and glogs of foamy mucus, something to the effect of how he was going to fuck us with a barrel cactus, one after the other. I just gritted my teeth and grunted back. Finally there was a crack as Hun Xoc got to an almost-standing position and brought one of his palm guards down on Howler’s head. Howler stopped sputtering. I pulled myself upright, clawing onto one of our invisibles, and got my hand on Hun Xoc’s shoulder. There was all sorts of jewelry and expensive clothing falling down from the stands and you couldn’t see much, but the main problem was that we were already getting moshed between all these fans, which was usual enough for us except some of them were armed with obsidian-flake saws, and like I said, compared to that shit syringe needles and razor blades seem blunt by comparison. I climbed half-up someone and looked around for Koh. I couldn’t see her but a squad of six of Koh’s Rattler bloods, the ones she’d promised me, were sliding to us down the north bank. The rest of both sides of the crowd took that as a cue to start oozing down the banks into the trench. That’s it, no more play, I thought.
Les jeux sont totalement faits, copains.
Fear, fear, foes, fuck—

Four of Koh’s Rattler guards got through and pushed through the knots of churning flesh on the court and kind of enclosed Hun Xoc and me, like an amoeba swallowing a pair of paramecia. Finally they got us up on their shoulders. I looked up and finally picked out Lady Koh. Like us, she was totally cut off, completely separated from the main body of the Harpies. She was gesturing at me. Go for the well. I climbed up on one of the guard’s shoulders and looked west over all the headdresses. The V of the court’s canyons looked invitingly open, with the emerald Δ of the Ocelots’ mul sticking up inside it. I can do this, I thought. Anyway it’s not really like being brave, it’s just like you’re 99.44 percent definitely fucked anyway so why not spend your last minutes of freedom doing something a little wacky? Anyway, it’s not that far. We need only about two minutes of misdirection.

I looked back up at Koh. She kept signing. Go for the well. Go for the well. Well, well, well. She added an “urgent please.”
Ko’ox tuun!
Go. Go. Go. Gogogogo
GOGOGOGO!!!!!!!

( 38 )

K
oh’s entourage closed in around her like bees in a ball around their queen. Above us and to the right some of the Death House guards were trying to get through the crowd and jump down at us, but they were all tangled up in the spectators’ capes and scarves and jewelry, like the victims in that bombing at Harrods. The hipball music was still going on, imitating the sounds of fighting. Maybe the musicians just kept playing as a way of staying musicians and not becoming combatants.

They carried us west, over the Ocelots’ end-zone line. Keep your head up, I thought. Win through intimidation. The Ocelot bloods and partisans parted in front of us, not like the Red Sea, though, more like they just wanted to get a look at us before they decided whether to tear us apart. We got past the players’ pen, out into the small zocalo between the Ocelots’ end zone and the beginning of the three tiers of steps that led up to the razor stairs of their mul, rising up only about four rope-lengths away. The long emerald-green-stuccoed stone wall of the Ocelots’ clan house was on our left side, and beyond and behind that there were two actual semiresidential sections of wood and plaster climbing up the rising ground. The nearer one was for women and the higher, the holier one was for men. Beyond that I could see the top of a gaudy ceremonial wall worked with deep frets and triangular crenellations and behind that a long red-and-green smudge, the manicured and pollarded treetops of the Ocelots’ poison garden, surrounded by a thorn wall. It wasn’t really that far.

I told them to put us down. They did. I yanked off my helmet and arm protectors. At the Ocelots’ equipment house some big mean-looking guy stepped out in front of us like, hey, what’s going on? I threw my damn stuffed rodent in his face and he ducked in this comical way. It was this magical talisman flying at him with its sharp little claws. I fished a little shell knife out of my crotch pouch, cut the cords off my outer swag of quilted padding, and tossed it to one of the youngest Ocelot bloods in the crowd like it was a major souvenir, which I guess it was.

I am Chacal! I declaimed. Everybody stared. I’ve gone to Xibalba and brought back the Razor Ball! I was overexcited and shifted into English. “By the bomes of Crom, you’re all horsemeat! Shop smart—shop S-Mart!” I was about to add that I was going to sic the United Fruit Company on them. Emerald Immanent was still down on the court behind us, shouting for his brothers to grab us, but he must have been still blocked by the Harpy invisibles. I stepped up onto the first swell in the sea of steps. My little squad followed my lead, surrounding me in an oval formation. Eight steps. Nine. The first tier intersected with a second tide of clear-edged waves and ripples, black flats and green risers scraped and buffed and finished like a Noguchi marble. And the Ocelots let us through. I guess we had a fear edge because—for most of them at least—it really was more like I’d transformed into Chacal than like I’d just been in hiding and then disguised. There was a kind of incomprehension of the whole idea of disguise; even when people wore the costumes of the gods, they were taking on that identity, not just dressing up, and it was a very serious deal. Plus, a lot of the people around the end zone were visitors to Ix, and weren’t prepared for a fight. And of course we were still officially their guests in a place that took hospitality seriously. We were just eight little dudes in the middle of their turf and there was plenty of time for them to rush us. And maybe most of all, they weren’t yet sure whether it was part of the show. They were all watching the fights erupting down on the court and spreading out into the stands, and wondering what the shot was, whether the panic was the beginning of another Carthaginian catastrophe, what was expected of them, whatever. For one reason or another, for about forty beats we were in this limbo between action and reaction, where if you just walk straight up, if you don’t look even slightly nervous, you can get away with a lot.

We edged closer to the Ocelot house on our left. Just a little farther. Their emerald mul loomed on our right. We came up level with the women’s residential quarter of the palace. I guess
gynaeceum
is the right word for it, but who cares. It wasn’t all walled up like the residences in Teotihuacán. There were still no windows, but there were all these alcoves and inviting little doorways. Bevies of Ocelot women looked down over us from their sort of harem balcony up in the roof gardens. I got my knife down under my back padding and cut into the straps on my ball yoke.

We’re going through there, I tapped on Hun Xoc’s arm. His eyes picked out the same door I’d scoped out. It was only twenty steps off but I resisted the urge to run. I turned to the captain of the Rattler guards and he’d obviously picked up on what we were doing. He seemed pretty eager to follow my orders. Koh must have told him his life was totally at my disposal. It was one of the good things about a feudal caste system, you really could get good help once in a while. Or at least dedicated help.

There was an explosion of combat yells down on the court. Don’t look around, I tapped. I finally twisted off my ball yoke and swung it in my right hand like a battle club, trailing beaded straps on the steps. I kept wishing we’d had time to rehearse this. I veered left into the alcove. The door was just red-oiled quilted deerskin set into the high wall. It was tied down on the inside, but it opened upward and I sliced through the top left thong-hinge. The Rattler leader took my cue, cut the other four, and wrenched the door down. By now there were Ocelot bloods pressing in behind us, asking what the hell we were doing, and our outside Rattler bloods had their maces up. The first six of us pushed into a tiny sweat room and out the far door into a tiny enclosed square courtyard. There were all sorts of freshly dyed cotton festival yarns laid out drying on the floor. There was only one other door into the court, on the far side, and five or six Ocelot women, with undressed hair and wearing only damp emerald-and-white huipils, scampered out through it, but one little round old grandmother just stood in the middle of the space shrieking at the Rattler captain, telling him over and over how we were wrecking all her stuff, and before I could say anything he swung his hand flail through her eyes, taking a chunk out of the bridge of her nose, and she just stood there still squealing until she eventually keeled over. I’m not proud of it, but I just went ahead with what I was doing, maybe feeling a little queasy. I’d gotten kind of inured to this stuff.

Hun Xoc got the Rattlers to pick up these big dye barrels and throw them out the door at the Ocelot bloods. As they dodged the kegs I could see past them for a beat, down into the canyon of the court complex about two vertical ropes below. It was a confused mass of hand fights between ballplayers and partisan spectators, but I could see Emerald Immanent and Emerald Howler’s standards were coming up through the crowd toward us. It meant they’d gotten their trainers and supporters together and were leading them after us in an organized pursuit. The nearer Ocelots looked indecisive to me, though. They were more interested in rushing down to the court area to save 9 Fanged Hummingbird and their other royals. It was like you see at stadium riots or fights at rock concerts or political rallies, the sound and fury covers a lot of plain Brownian motion, the ninety percent of indecisive stuff that happens before, during, and after anyone comes to blows.

The captain left two Rattler bloods to hold the door. We need to get to the mainland, I lied, a little too loud, hoping that the people behind the door heard me or that the rear guard would get taken and talk. If word got back to the ahau it was pretty essential that they assumed we were trying to make a break for it, that we were trying to get onto the curved walkway around the south side of the peninsula and back east to the mainland. And like I said, Ix was a canal city and didn’t really have streets, so to get anywhere you had to either go by boat or practically walk through somebody’s bedroom. I hustled everyone else across the courtyard to the far door. Already a couple bloods had gotten on top of the wall we’d come through. I went in first, even though I wasn’t normally allowed to take the lead. I was too important. I got into this little dark smelly hallway and around a couple crooks and nannies toward the right, uphill. It would have been confusing but my directional sense was another thing that had improved a few thousand percent since I got here. I pushed into a little cook yard, out its trash door on the other side, and through an open alley into one of the food-prep courts. Dozens of the women’s household cooking servants milled around squawking, not knowing what to do. I noticed I was laughing again, partly from adrenaline and whatever but mainly because it was getting like one of those Bond movie chases where they always overturn fruit carts and the irate peddlers shake their fists after them. And what seemed funniest was that we were actually getting away with it so far. For these guys it’s still fresh, I thought. This kind of commando strike was outside the protocol of Mesoamerican warfare.

For the first time I could really see how Cortez was going to be able to take over the whole continent against ten-thousand-to-one odds, how when your thinking is totally outside the system, the people in the system have no way of dealing with you. If you do something that just isn’t done, most of the time, you win. The Rattler captain handed me a short mace and I tied it on to my left hand. I pointed to a low red fabric door in the center of the west wall, a moon-path door. Hun Xoc went up to it and started slashing through the fabric door—it was a quilt of rubberized cotton stretched over a wicker frame—but I could feel the knot of bloods behind me hesitating, like the door was radioactive. Ix had basically four overlapping webs of footpaths used by different classes of people. We were going to take one of what they called “fanged-rabbit-blood walks,” which were segregated routes to special wells used only by menstruating women, all painted red on the insides and roofed with red tent-cloth. No male would even think of walking on the polluted ground.

We’re going that way, I repeated. Hun Xoc and the captain seemed up for it but the other five Rattler bloods just gawked at me.

Everybody’s a fucking superstitious insubordinate schmuck, I thought. Good help indeed. You could
never
get things together, nothing
ever
worked. And things never
will
work.

Hun Xoc got a handsaw and stood in front of the nearest blood and ordered him through the door. The kid was terrified but he still started to make some objection, something about how it wouldn’t be good for us. While he was still talking, Hun Xoc reached down into the kid’s scale-patterned apron, grabbed his penis and testicles, knocked his legs out from under him, and whipped the short saw under his hand. The kid barely made a sound. Hun Xoc stood up and tossed the kid’s bloody genitals at one of the other bloods. They splatted on his chest and flopped jiggling on the floor.

“You’ll take the women’s path as men right now,

Or we can make you women first,” Hun Xoc said.

The amputee sucked in his whimpers and tried to stand up, and the rest of the crew just stood around silently. It was a weird moment. The bloods seemed to be really considering the alternative.

I pushed in through the shredded leather into the creepy mauve light.