The Sacrifice Game (34 page)

( 48 )

T
he thirty Grandfathers of Heat between July 16, the day Koh traded me out of captivity, and today—13 Motion, that is, January 22, 664 AD, the first day of my combined wedding-and-seating festival—isn’t quite a total dropout. I remember stuff. But I was in such a flaky mental state that either I don’t remember what came before what, or I think I must be remembering the explanation of what had happened to me that someone gave me later instead of the actual occurrence. And trying to sort it out seems like a labor of Penelope.

In fact, having my coiffure done in the once-in-a-lifetime Hero Twins Senegalese-twistesque style—which took them over five hours, mainly because my natural hair was still only two inches long and they insisted on hitch-knotting each strand of the extensions on separately—is almost the first thing I can remember as a definitely time-marked event. I remember thinking how I’d come a long way—how Koh was in charge of Ix, and how pretty soon she’d put me nominally in charge by marrying me—and how much I still had to do. I had to organize a human Sacrifice Game with Lady Koh, and play it until we got to the 4 Ahau date of the last b’aktun. And even if we didn’t come up with anything—well, since I’d buried the Lodestone Cross cache, I’d learned what felt like ten times as much about the Game. Maybe even if I didn’t get my brain back, it would still be enough to make Taro’s version of the game sufficiently powerful, powerful enough to neutralize the 2012 dooomster. So I had to write that all down in a form that, if I didn’t make it back, Jed
₁
would still understand. I had to take over 2 Jeweled Skull’s ROC gel operation and make sure we had enough of all the different compounds. I had to get the tomb in order. I had to figure out how to bury myself in a way that would ensure that my tomb would be undisturbed. And those were only the main things. Each of them needed hundreds of other things to get done first, even to have a chance of working. And I was already getting double images and microblackouts and spike headaches and other brain-tumor symptoms. And before I could do anything else, I had to heal my leg and my eye and get at least half-functional. I lay still for days on end in a tiny pinkwashed room that adjoined a different, smaller sweat-bath, kind of a celebrity hospital and detox center, just feeling my wounds itchily stitch themselves together. I’d lie there doing yoga eye-exercises with my one eye, moving my focus as slowly as possible from upper left to lower right, repeating the process hundreds of times, getting comfortable with the most interesting pocks and cracks on the stucco ceiling. I wasn’t exactly depressed in that way where the whole world seems like it’s made out of Homasote, but I was definitely fuged out and totally exhausted, with a flavoring of that resignation you get to when you know you’re really broken beyond repair. Sometimes when I’d fall asleep a tattoo scribe would sneak in, rub anesthetic into, say, my upper arm, and when I’d wake up there’d be a sore patch with another row of twenty head-glyphs and the name of each captive I’d supposedly taken. Of course I hadn’t actually captured anyone, but Lady Koh had dedicated their blood to me because I’d made it all possible. Becoming a capturer was like being a “made” man in the Mafia, where you’re sort of certified by performing a killing.

Koh had thoughtfully traded Hun Xoc out of captivity too. He hung out with me a lot. His arms had healed, although you could see the crescent cross-sections of bone in the center of the cauterized crust at the stumps, and exposed bone is painful, especially in cold weather. He’d had fake arms made of human skin stretched over wicker, with stylized hands like flowers, that fastened onto studs in his stumps. But when he was hanging out with me he’d have them taken off and let one of my male nurses massage him with oil. Of course I kept asking him and everyone about the battle. He said that before we’d even gotten to Ix, Koh had told 1 Gila and her main body of troops to stall for another two days after first being sighted by 2 Jeweled Skull. Koh had made sure that the Ocelots and Harpies would fight each other as long as possible, so that when her own troops came in, the Ixob would be exhausted as well as drugged.

I’d gotten the earthstar compound into the well a bit before midnight, and it wasn’t until the evening of the next day that the first Harpy bloods who’d drunk from the water system started to feel unusually happy. Of course most people attributed the elation to their great victory, and what with the fog of the aftermath of the battle and all the balche drinking and premature feasting and raping and pillaging and whatever that went on after the Ocelots’ military structure fell apart, the drugged water had spread through most of the city and especially most of the Harpy clan before more than a couple non-judgment-impaired people had realized what was going on. Best of all, it had taken out five of 2 Jeweled Skull’s eight commanders along with their troops. It hadn’t gotten 2 Jeweled Skull or 9 Fanged Hummingbird. They probably drank only rainwater. Certainly their food was tasted, stored, cooked, retasted, and then selected at random. Anyway, it had been plenty.

From what the dressers said I gathered that Koh had let 2 Jeweled Skull think she’d retreated northeast, and then kept moving her band of converts around the perimeter of the Harpy Clan’s scouting range. Supposedly she’d even let a couple of her doubles get captured just to throw the Harpies off. And then, when the earthstar drug hit, she’d moved in her big old ragtag horde in the confusion. Supposedly the short siege had been more like a bunch of parades converging on a riot. She’d pushed through to the lake in less than half a day and then used her numbers to block the bridges and cut off the peninsula and the temple district. By late that evening the holdout Harpy bloods had collapsed most of the Ocelot compound around themselves. And by now—I mean by 13 Motion—there wasn’t any real fighting still going on, just a few fires still burning in the north and west where Ocelot-allied clans had torched their granaries.

I still didn’t really know what the hell was going on, though. Had Koh really won? Was she really in charge? Had 2 Jeweled Skull really lost? What had happened to 9 Fanged Hummingbird? How had Koh gotten away to begin with? Hadn’t she been sitting in the middle of all these Ocelot bloods at the hipball game? All of whom had been primed to capture her?

I closed my eye. Don’t even try to understand right now, I thought.
The answers to these questions and more
 . . .

( 49 )

“Now the Southeastern peak breathes blood,”

the Wedding Symposiarch sang,

“So now unfurl the newborn warlord, peacelord,

Sun-eyed avenger, Lord of Morning Twilight,

One Turquoise Ocelot. And now face Coldwards

And now to Whitewards, now to Knownwards, now

Enthrall to him and face the Unrevealed.”

And in fact the orange steam all around me was so fierce that when they lifted me out I did feel newborn, in fact prematurely born, and as I began scraping the extruded sebum flesh-worms off my open-pored swollen skin with cockleshells it felt like they were carving me out of a protostellar cloud. This second room was like a tepidarium, cooler and lighter than the sweat bath, with a slatey predawn glow dripping through the oculus. The beat was clearer out here, although I didn’t need to hear it at all anymore since I was sure my heart had been permanently tuned to it. At this point it was like the world ticking on forever. Or at least until 4 Ahau, 2012. My dressers rubbed a base coat of harpy-eagle oil into my spongy white flesh and began clothing me, or rather wrapping me, tying my long red cotton wex with a complicated female-style knot like a pillow in my lower back, a knot that was only used at weddings. You’re always getting dressed or undressed around here, I thought. It’s all before and after, you’re always getting ready to make an offering or coming back from making an offering and getting ready to make another offering, and the actual thing was usually over in a beat. They inserted a new plug in my lip, a female one, and fresh spondylus shell spools in my ears, and an embroidered anesthetic herbal ball in my empty eye socket to soak up the tears.

I’d be appearing in women’s clothes—and Lady Koh would be in male clothes—because we were going to be a sun-telling couple. That is, we were both father-mothers. I guess the cross-dressing sounds a little odd for a wedding, but actually you could still sometimes see Maya shamans wearing women’s clothes at harvest festivals in the twenty-first century. Anyway, like a lot of things, it had to be done this way. One thing I could be sure of was that Koh had checked every detail.

Lady Koh needed to marry me. Or, rather, she needed to marry the Ahau and K’alomte of Ix. The Classic Maya world wasn’t so gynophobic as, say, Islamic society, but women who wanted to run things still had to do it through their menfolk. Or, at best, in the Yaxchilanian and Ixian and other traditions, they had to be widows of the ahau. Which was what she’d be in a few months. I’d be as canned as Charlie the Tuna and she’d still be corking along. And if she conceived a male child with me, that would be even better for her. She could reign until he was blooded, at fifteen or sixteen, and then, undoubtedly, keep him tied to the huipil strings. Or if she didn’t, she could either adopt an Ocelot baby or even fake a pregnancy and just pick up some kid from the slave market. So I was a convenient choice. And, as the miraculously revivified Chacal, the semidivine hipball legend who’d predicted the San Martín eruption, I was, especially with Koh’s spin-doctoring, even a popular choice with a large slice of the public. Of course, a lot of folks still viewed me with extreme suspicion. But things had changed a lot in Ix, and throughout Mesoamerica, over the last tun, and people had come to accept events that, before the destruction of Teotihuacán, would have seemed upside down.

Even so, though, I was lucky. Koh could have set up somebody else, probably one of the younger Ocelot bloods. So I was pretty sure that Koh’s real motivation was that she really wanted me to get back to the thirteenth b’aktun. I still wasn’t a hundred percent sure why. But I wasn’t ruling out sheer goodwill, or, let’s say, sheer sense of duty. She saw her role as a protector of her lineage, and if she could protect their descendants long after her death, her uays would remain powerful long b’aktuns from now. They might even grow more powerful. After all, despite everything she’d learned from me about astronomy and physics and even twenty-first-century thought in general, she was still a believer.

And, also, she had 2 Jeweled Skull in her custody.

I hadn’t seen it happen. Koh’s men had surrounded him during the Earthstar riots and, amazingly, had taken him alive. Now she had him in a basket in what had been the Ocelots torture pavilion, with two guards watching him at all times so that he couldn’t commit suicide in some clever way like, say, biting a chunk out of the inside of his cheek and swallowing his own blood until he bled to death—something that had, in fact, been done more than once by twenty-year captives.

On the other hand, a lot of the Ball Brethren and the other Harpies were still loyal to 2 Jeweled Skull, so we had to treat him well and keep up the polite fiction, which of course nobody believed, that I was taking over the Harpy House at his request. And, I suspected, Koh was cagily holding him in reserve. If I got out of line she could always reinstate him and get rid of me. Just one more reason I had to watch it.

My two dressers stood me up. My stump sank into the wicker cone of my shell-inlaid leg—which was made from the femur of someone larger than I’d been, and carved as a snake with its head straining forward where my foot would be—and they wove it onto my knee with gut straps. It still hurt a bit inside despite all the analgesic salves. They combed my hair with a brush like a whisk broom and oiled it, scented it, corded it, beaded it, bound it, tasseled it, and attached the extensions. They wrapped me in a long red skirt with obsidian-mirror stars and sewed me into a sort of feather-woven tunic. My new valet fastened wide neon-orange spiny-oyster shell cuffs around my upper arms and jade ones just above my wrists. Another back-sash went around my waist and they draped a white-jade beaded sort of poncholike thing over my shoulders. My hairdresser coiled all the complicated hair into a bun and set it into what was kind of like a spangled turban with a stuffed
muan
bird on the top, a combination critter made of several other birds with the head of a baby caiman and the beak of a condor. Then they dusted me off.

The cantor crouched out through the tiny door first. He was a famous neutral-clan professional adder from Kaminaljuyu, whose poetic name was On The Left, and who I guess you could also call the toastmaster or the master of ceremonies. He was serving as the head of my marriage-sponsor party. The dressers half picked me up and handed me out to him. The little room had gotten full of hot and sour breath and carbon di- and monoxide, like we were inside a big smokers’ lung, and now the fresh air sucked on me.

We were in the same inner courtyard of the Harpy House where 2 Jeweled Skull had stored me in a scavenger’s-daughter body basket a billion psychological years and 244 days ago. The square of sky looked like an old chalkboard with Eos’s talons scraping on the eastern side. My two marriage-sponsors stood at the west side of the court: 24 Pine, that is, Coach Teentsy Bear, who was taking the part of my
halach ayadoj,
that is, the equivalent of my godfather—and an elder Harpy named 4 Wren, whom I’d adopted as my surrogate father. I’d sent for Teentsy when I heard he hadn’t quite been killed during the battle, and he and I had gotten pretty close again—again, that is, in that he’d been close to Chacal. I was less crazy about 4 Wren. But Koh had been adamant that dynastically and politically speaking he was the only real choice. Our main problem now was legitimization. Anyway, the sponsors’ roles were just ceremonial. Elders had to be brought in as go-betweens and surrogate parents in the marriage negotiations, which were supposedly kept secret from the bride and groom—although of course in this case Koh was running everything.

The six of us left the compound through the west door, headed through an alley between high fretted walls, and went down a swept and red feather-strewn stepped walkway toward the ghatlike steps leading down into the canalized lake. Guards in black night-raid paint kept pace with us on either side, with more ahead and behind, part of a rotating squad of sixty full-blood Rattler guards. Since they weren’t part of the official entourage they had to protect us from a slight distance, but we’d kept them on high alert. The Snuffler and Macaw clans and their dependents were as resentful as ever, and what was left of the Ocelot dependents were obviously still in a murderous rage, no matter what cessation oaths they’d sworn. Well, what fricking ever, I thought, we’re going to take care of all that tonight. And if they didn’t like it they were in for yet another little purge. I was becoming a big believer in the Seven Habits of Highly Effective Stalinists. And Habit number 1 was “Kill First, Interview Later.”

The Rattlers had repaired the floating bridge to the occupied Ocelot compounds and the court precinct. Ten of our dark guards crossed and stationed themselves along the bridge before we even stepped onto the rustling wood. We went single-file, first the so-called godfather, then the so-called father, then me, then my two dressers, then On The Left, the cantor, and finally a beater striking a muffled water drum, so softly you could barely hear it—since the procession to the bride’s family’s house was supposedly a secret, even though, again, everybody in town knew about it. From here you couldn’t see the peninsula that connected Ix’s temple district to the mountains behind, and the encrustation of muls dotted with watch fires in the cold mist looked ageless and aloof, like the island of Mont Saint-Michel. At the far end of the bridge we could just see the newly enlarged Rattler House, which had been built on Ocelot grounds just north of the council palace. The sky and its reflection had shifted to transparent Prussian blues with strings of Swainson’s hawks, coming through right on schedule, uncoiling across them. An osprey stooped down into the water on our left and disappeared with barely a splash. I was afraid it wouldn’t come up, but finally it resurfaced with a big catfish writhing in its talons and made its way heavily shoreward. If the fish had dragged it down everybody would probably have thought it was such a bad omen they would have called the whole thing off. Yesterday one of Koh’s spies had said that some bloods from the Snuffler clan had heard about the wedding and were going to try to stop it. They’d been behind more than a few “little disturbances,” or what you might call civil unrest or gang squabbles, over the last ten days, and they were getting more belligerent despite or because of Koh’s death squads. So everyone was a little edgy.

In the center of the bridge we met the spy. He came within twenty steps of us, wheeled around, and ran back to the Rattler House to warn Koh’s relatives. He was an expected part of the act. We stepped down off the bridge and up the steps to a small zocalo that led around the corner of the high council house and into an approach to the fresh serpent-headed wall of Koh’s new compound. There were squeals. Fifteen or so young girls—either Koh’s unmarried female relations or Rattler neophytes taking the part of them or some combination—blocked the entrance to the front court and started throwing pebbles at us, yelling that they weren’t going to let us in, they knew what we were up to, and they weren’t going to let me take Koh away from them even if we chopped them into little bits. I held my left hand over my last eye. The stones got larger and we backed away. Teentsy Bear must have actually gotten a painful hit because he yelped, a real rarity for him, and seemed about to start cursing the girls back. Of course, the little altercation was just another hoary ritual, but Teentsy had zero sense of humor and tended to take things too seriously. On The Left nudged him from behind, telling him to chill out. Sports types never knew how to behave.

“Blue-green daughters here, four breaths, please, four, jade daughters,”

the cantor said, appearing from behind us.

The girls eased up on the damn rocks. The cantor walked up to them like Gandhi walking up to a line of British troops.

“A red blood begs for rest beside your hearth,”
he said.

The gals calmed down and let him through. He entered the compound. We waited. After four hundred beats—about six minutes and fifteen seconds—the cantor appeared again, made the sign for “patience” at us, and went back in. We stood for another eight hundred beats. The deal was that he was supposed to be begging Koh’s parents to let us inside. I wobbled a bit on my snake-foot.