The Sacrifice Game (29 page)

( 39 )

A
couple of old greathousewomen were in the tunnel and freaked out and scuttled off. I stuck my head out. Finally the amputee limped for the door, and one after another the rest followed him. Maybe they figured it was okay now because the streaks of blood down his legs added realism. Hun Xoc prodded from the rear.

We went about twenty rope-lengths west and south and two rope-lengths uphill through the twisting walkway to another courtyard, a so-called “moon-blood latrine,” where the unclean water from the female compound emptied into the “excremental water” of the canals. There was a cistern in the center fed through an open half-log pipe from the mountain above. We all boosted each other up onto the roof terrace. The culvert led up to a branch of the great southern aqueduct. Hun Xoc climbed one rope-length up the intricate relief into the culvert. I followed him and the guards came after me and we crouch-ran uphill in single file, stepping on the sides of the channel, trying not to slip on the trickles of water. It was twilight but with the damn big moon it was just too bright. So much for under the cover of darkness. There were spatters of coded alarm cries behind us. We’d definitely been spotted. The aqueduct zigzagged up the slope and at the first bend I got a view down to the Ball district.

Usually fighting around here was more like a series of little duels than a battle, but this was different. There was still a knot of Harpy bloods in the center of the northern platform, and each one had a long blowgun. It was the same story on the steps of the council house, except the Harpies there were arrayed in a four-deep line, with the ones in front aiming and the ones in back loading, Frederick the Great style. They must have snuck in the blowguns broken down into two or three pieces, I thought. And then at the last minute they’d twisted them together. Meanwhile the Ocelots had taken control of the court floor as well as their back and some of the east zocalo, but there seemed to be as many dead and dying Ocelots as live ones. I heard a Harpy whistle that sounded suspiciously like a signal to load, and then the wet sound of hundreds of darts sliding into spit-wet breeches. A bunch of Ocelots charged up at them but the Harpies fired a single volley across the court into the wave of bloods. It sounded like a huge cough and hiss. I couldn’t see anything, and the Ocelots certainly couldn’t, just this invisible tidal wave of poison rolling at them at four hundred feet per second. Five out of six Ocelots pitched back and sank into the mass of emerald-speckled bodies. A second wave of Ocelots somehow sped up and rolled at them before the platform squad had quite gotten themselves together for a second volley—

What’s going on? Hun Xoc asked. I’d stopped running. I looked around and he pointed down to the zocalo. There were about twenty or twenty-five people definitely on our tail and Emerald Immanent was definitely the ringleader. They’d been slowed down by the crowd and were still at least four hundred beats away, but it was still disturbing, we’d gotten less misdirection out of the situation than I’d hoped. Some of them saw us looking at them and shouted to us to stop and come join the party.

Nothing, I signed to Hun Xoc. I got myself together and ran on uphill. Yeah, what the hell
is
going on? I wondered, but I knew the answer. 2 Jeweled Skull—my brain mate and adopted and spiritual father—had been drilling his Harpy bloods. He’d taught them to keep together in a tight body, seek cover, lay down fire, and most of all don’t try to take live prisoners, all the most basic stuff from a pre-radio-communications military perspective. But it wasn’t obvious in a wigged-out chivalry system. I mean, in Europe it had taken hundreds of years just to get the generals not to ride out in front of their troops with a flag labeled
SHOOT ME.

I turned another zigzag. The Ocelots probably hadn’t even expected them to aim to kill, I thought. If anything they always expected an opposing force to drop back out of missile range and challenge individuals to come out and fight.

Fabulous. Maybe 2 Jeweled wasn’t in so much trouble as I’d thought. I certainly could of, should of, and really would of figured he’d come up with something. What would he think of, after all? Probably the exact same thing I would think of.

Would it be enough for him to win? I snuck another look back and down. The Harpies were throwing wounded bodies down into the irregular charging chunk of bloods. They’re acting cleverly for once, I thought. Maybe they do have a chance.

What did that mean? Something I wasn’t thinking about. No time now.

About six rope-lengths farther on—one vertical rope-length above the highest roof of the Ocelots’ greathouses—the aqueduct passed over the Ocelots’ mountain’s southern walkway, and we dropped down onto the stuccoed surface. It was pretty narrow, just a processional path that led down from the peak through stepped passes to the inner yellow gate to the Snufflers’ quarter and out to the mainland. There was no railing or anything on our left, just a one-rope-length drop down to the level of the lower terrace. The emerald wall of the Ocelots’ poison garden was on our right hand. It was only half a rope-length high but it was topped with a big nasty crucifixion-thorn hedge, the kind with the two-finger-width needles. Behind us, about two hundred paces back, the causeway intersected with a more major route—which meant two people could almost walk abreast on it—leading from the inner rectories of the mul complex up to the top of the mountain behind it. There was a bigger gang on our tail now, charging up the main route only about a hundred paces away from the intersection, frustratingly clear in the zinc light. They’d figured we were heading for the mainland and had just gone around the women’s house. I didn’t see Emerald Immanent’s standard but I was pretty sure it was them.

We can make it, Hun Xoc said. He gestured ahead and down to the canal. I could see a few emerald-sashed figures on the causeway—Ocelot partisans—but not anyone we couldn’t get through. I’d forgotten that Hun Xoc still thought I was going for the mainland. There seemed to be new Harpy blowgun squads out in boats in the canals. Beyond that there was fighting in the Snufflers’ quarter, but from this distance the battle looked purposeless, like a red ants’ raid on a black ants’ nest, a thousand higgledy-piggledy games of ritualized tag.

We have to break into groups, I said. I noticed that we’d lost Armadillo Shit somewhere. Whatever, don’t think about it. I picked out two of the Rattler bloods and ordered them to go hold the path against Emerald Immanent’s hunting group. Their captain repeated the order and they didn’t hesitate, they just charged down to certain death. I turned around south again because there was something going on. Two Ocelot guards had come up out of nowhere ahead of us on the path, and a couple of the Rattler bloods were fighting them off. I’d thought it would be deserted up here, wasn’t everybody supposed to be watching the ball game? The Rattler captain smashed one of them on the head with his mace but the guy just staggered a bit and kept coming and he had to hit him another few times to get him down. The other Rattlers had gotten the other gardener down to the ground and were working on skinning his face—they weren’t into that scalp thing around here, by the way, that was strictly for low-life nomads from the deserts north of Teotihuacán—but the captain told them to skip it and they straightened up. There were already another bunch of four or five Ocelots behind them, coming up toward us from the yellow gate. I wondered how they’d been alerted. I looked around. There were only five of us, one still bleeding and limping from his emasculation.

We can make it, Hun Xoc signed in the direction of the Yellow Gate, we can get through them.

We can’t make it, I signed back.

?!?!?
he signed.

I pulled his face in front of mine so that the Rattler bloods couldn’t see and gestured to the wall with my eyes. He looked into my eyes—which was like a really aggressive, inquisitorial thing to do—and I gave him a look like “It Must be Done!” and he accepted it.

I pulled the Rattler captain over and whispered into his ear. You’re going to take the last three of your bloods and my standard and get down to the Yellow Gate, I said.

He started to object. Koh’d probably told him he couldn’t leave me no matter what. Then he thought better of it and ran off at the head of his little group in that awkward way you run on unfamiliar ground at night. They won’t even make it to the gate, I thought. The amputee limped after them but Hun Xoc said, “Not you,” and pulled him back. He didn’t have much mileage left on him.

Just the two of us left, I thought. Better anyway. Hun Xoc boosted the amputee up onto the wall and made him lay his torso prone over the thorns. I could hear him biting through his lips to stifle his shriek. Behind us Emerald Immanent’s posse was only just around the curve of the causeway, less than a hundred paces off. Hun Xoc lifted me up onto the amputee’s hot, oily back. It shivered a little as it crunched down into the spines. I couldn’t resist taking a quick look back down at the court. It looked like Harpies had sent shock squads around through back alleys to come up behind the Ocelots’ formations and attack their flanks. What had happened to Koh?

Don’t think about it, I thought. Just take care of your end. I hopped onto the poor bastard’s seventh cervical vertebra, grabbed his pigtail with both hands, and vaulted over his head down onto the invisible foliage below. Hun Xoc climbed up him and slid down next to me. I got my head up out of the dewy sego-lily leaves and looked for the cistern.

Eyes. Hot orange-green eyes in a scary-clown face, a jaguar colored with blue powder. I looked into the eyes and breathed. It was a big jaguar, just watching us in that lazy-alert way.

I am not afraid, I thought, and started counting. At twelve the cat turned and disappeared between a pair of these twisty ancient trees all inlaid with arabesques of tourmaline and spondylus shells. It was a weird transition from the urban setting we’d been in. Behind me Hun Xoc was ordering the amputee to get off the wall. I guess he hadn’t even seen the jaguar. He pulled up the kid’s bloody face with both hands and pushed it upward. The amputee must have gotten the idea because he arched his back and pushed himself off the thorns with what must have been his last erg of free will. I listened to him clatter onto the causeway.

It’s got to be that way, I thought.

I pointed. I pushed up and hunt-ran around the trees, uphill of the cat.

( 40 )

H
un Xoc followed. The trees were boxed in milpas set in check-dam terraces, laid out just like any poor person’s garden, or anyone’s garden, anywhere else in Mesoamerica, the same exact 91.2 by 92.2-foot rectangle with the same orientation to Kochab.
Jotzolob
ran between the milpas, uncultivated trenches that were combination dirt sources, rock dumps, irrigation channels, and flood ducts. My feet automatically found one of the main channels and we headed “upwater,” toes gooshing into the muddy bottom. The trees on either side gave us a little cover until we came to a clearing with intersecting aqueducts and four giant bulbous stelae of the Ocelots’ Watching Greatfathers sticking up in scarlet, emerald, and black against the deep cobalt sky. It was getting too dark to see things clearly. I did a quick head-check and climbed up out of the trench onto a milpa thigh-high with marigolds. A couple of these big flightless birds, rheas or something that the ahau
kept as pets, walked stupidly toward me, maybe expecting me to feed them. Scram, I thought. Behind a grove to the south a couple of old Ocelot gardeners hobbled away from us to spread the alarm.

It didn’t look guarded, though. I guessed no one but the highest Ocelots would ever think of coming in here anyway. You can really do a lot with taboos. Just hang out in places where everyone else thinks they’re going to get fried by the bad mojo. Of course, they still get you eventually, but it does take them longer.

I got to the cistern. Too little. It wasn’t the right one. This wasn’t the actual source, just a way station, one of a bunch of little holding tanks. Their main feeder culvert sloped higher up the ridge toward the east slope of One Ocelot’s Mountain.

Damn. The place was a lot more detailed than Koh’s stupid model.

Higher up, I signed to Hun Xoc. I ran. That spot on the ball of my right foot was itchy. A weird red bird flew over my head and cut into the leaves in front of us, and after a moment I realized it was a
lem-lem,
a barbed throwing stick, basically a boomerang that doesn’t come back but which flies a lot farther than an ordinary stick. It took me another two beats to realize that meant Enemies Behind.

How far?

Left. Around the corner of a thick pepper grove. I dropped down into the prickly gulch. A point on the mace on my left hand cut into my thumb. Hun Xoc dropped down into the nettles next to me. We were both gasping too hard to say anything. I edged over to him through the wet stalks and held on to his arm. I put my head against his chest for a beat. He reached forward down into my
wex
—I guess you’d have to call it a loincloth or a breechclout or some other ridiculous term—and held on to my penis, trying to calm me down. Just a little casual military homoerotism. Breathe, I thought.

There can’t be that many of them. Some of them must have followed the Harpy standard. How far away were they?

Well, at least two terraces below. We can make it. Stay out of sight lines. It’ll still take them two hundred beats to find us up here. Well, one hundred. And also, those guys had just been watching the match, so they weren’t even winded. Except for Emerald Immanent, but he was just supernatural. I couldn’t resist bringing my foot up to scratch it. There was something there.

My foot couldn’t feel my fingers. And when my hand felt my foot, it felt too big.

“I’m stung,” I said, “the male foot.”

Hun Xoc let go of my Jed junior and took the foot in his hands. I could feel him digging the dart out of the puffy wound with a shell knife, but the sensation was far away. I listened to him him suck-and-spit. A timeless craft. Too late, though. I’m fucked, I thought. Oh, cripes.

I’m over the limit, it’s payback time. TILT, GAME OVER, INSERT ONE TOKEN FOR ANOTHER PLAY, 12, 11, 10, 9, 0.

Hun Xoc rubbed dirt into the wound to stop the bleeding. I noticed I wasn’t dead yet. It was like when you’re stoned and you look at your watch because you think you’ve been wherever you are for days and you’re going to be late for whatever and it’s only five minutes later.

We’re going the wrong way, I signed on his chest. You down-this-way go. I up-that-way go.

I stuck one eye up over the curve of the slope, like it was on a stalk, and looked around 220 degrees. I got an impression of figures advancing on us without really seeing them.

I know what I’m doing, I signed. I’m ready.

We looked at each other. He made the sign for “accepted” and vaulted up out of the ditch, running through the south
jotzol,
parallel to the rise of the peak. I jumped out and headed at right angles to him uphill. The trees ahead were wilder and thicker. They’d been allowed to branch relatively naturally because the area of the Source was the house of Chac. It was like the way an ahau’s house was always just sealed up and never touched after his death, unless his heirs enlarged it or an enemy canceled it. Something made me look left. Below me Hun Xoc seemed to trip and fall, knocked back and then jerked forward off his feet like a roped steer. He’d probably been hit with a string club, kind of a big sharp yo-yo. I looked around. I still couldn’t see the attackers but I could hear them stomping through the bracken below him, not bothering to be quiet. It was one of those instant-decision moments. Go and charge the Ocelots and try to disentangle him? But if I stopped, there wasn’t any point anyway. I turned and kept going. There was a breaking-glass sound of Hun Xoc’s mace going through jewelry and skin and an exhalation of air. We were both going to get taken in less than a minute anyway, I thought. Complete the objective.

Left.

Hun Xoc. Damn. Don’t think about it.

The trench leveled out. This has got to be it, I thought. I spun around twice. The crest was laid out like a big rustic pyramid, with a cyclopean platform in the center and relatively straight hewn steps leading down to the four directions. There was a rough star of clothes and jewelry and human and animal gristle and bones on the platform, like the offerings had been laid out carefully but then picked over by the jaguars. Where’s the cistern? There wasn’t even any aqueduct.

I ran around the platform, kind of frantically. No well.

Stairs. Back down. No, up. Stairs too big. Everything wrong size. Clearing. Same one? Hump in the center. Maybe that’s it.

No, too small.

No, that’s it. I picked out the main feeder aqueduct that led into it from the spring source in the side of the mountain. I hadn’t seen it before because it was covered over with U-shaped limestone slabs, almost like a regular old pipe.

Okay, Tonto. Just across this little clearing here. One milpa. Fifty-four regular steps. Fifty-three if you stick out your chest at the tape.

Just go.

I’ve got about ten more beats of total freedom, I thought. In that amount of time I can do whatever I want.

Just don’t look like you’re going for the well.

Just go.

Okay.

I dashed out. They came out to meet me.

Thirty more steps. I was limping. I couldn’t feel my leg at all. Numb past the knee. Probably not anything fatal, I thought, they really want to bring you in kicking. Assuming they’ve got their act together. “We’re going to kill all the men, rape all the women, and steal all the cattle,” I yelled. “And for Gog’s sake, get it right this time.
Disperse, ye rabble, die, ye scurvy scum, arrgghh, die!!!
”

I’ll never really get this down, I thought, I just can’t take it enough to heart. Twenty more steps. I could tell there were about a billion people around, or at least it seemed like a billion, but only one was really close. Keep going, he’s not on me. No, he’s on me. I had to turn around. Of course, it was Emerald Immanent, surprise, surprise. He just had to do his whole hero thing and add “Twice-Born-9 Chacal-Capturing” to the front of his name. If Emerald Immanent didn’t cover himself with glory they’d all just be on top of me all at once in about two p’ip’ilob,
and they’d just take group credit for the offering.

Emerald Immanent, the Ocelots’ star striker, slashed at my bad leg with a long-handled hunting saw, trying to hobble me. I rolled behind one of the steles. It had about a fifteen-finger-width diameter and was coated in smooth, thick, black, white, and green paint like it had been dipped. There was the swish of air over a sharp surface and a dramatic constellation of sparks as his flints glanced off the stone. Tiny shards spattered through the air and one of them got into my right eye. Great, just what I needed.

“Kuchul bin ycnal,”
Emerald Immanent growled. “You’re a runner.” It meant I’d abandoned the ball game because I was afraid we’d lose.

“Xejintic ub’aj,”
I said. It meant “Vomit on yourself” but it was like saying “Bullshit.” I didn’t have any voice left, so I kind of stage-whispered it.

“Lothic ah tabay,”
he said. “You were beat.”

“
You
were beat,” I said. “Beat, beat, beat.”

I let go and bolted for the well. Someone had gotten ahead of me. I butted into him and twisted around him to the side of the cistern. My hands grabbed relief-work starfish-glyphs and I could feel the firm resonance of the hundreds of cubic tons of water on the other side. It was streaming fast despite the drought, still more than enough to serve the whole city. The rim was only at chest height. Just get over it, I thought. The guy grabbed my pigtail but it was still two-thirds fake and the extension pulled off in his hand. More people grabbed at me. I edged back and rolled up onto the wide lip, trying to look like I was panicking. The octagonal opening was only a rope-length across. I could feel negative ions blasting up out of it and I was all refreshed all of a sudden, somehow thinking clearly even though my body was a firecracker string of unbearable pain. They were dragging me down off the rim. You’ve got to act more, I thought. Otherwise you’ll be giving it away. It’s not enough to just dress up, you have to act. I wrenched up and back, shifting my weight to pull at least one person up with me. The blood got his elbow around my throat as I edged us off-balance and we tipped back into cold.