The Sacrifice Game (35 page)

The cantor came out and gestured for my sponsors and the girls to follow him in. Still, I stood for another twelve hundred beats. The dressers touched up my face paint and dusted me with a sort of blue-clay talcum powder. The beater kept thumping. How did he stand it? I wondered. He was just a human clock. He must be crazy. Come to think of it, professional beaters did tend to act a little odd. The girls gawked at us while, at the same time, trying not to look interested. Finally the cantor came out a third time and gestured for me to come in. I told one of my dressers to run and get the gifts, although if they were on the ball the porters would have already followed us here. I blood-walked alone through the gate into the little courtyard. The first person I recognized was 3 Talon, the Caracara father-mother and aerial-clan patriarch, whom I’d last seen on the burning mul at Teotihuacán. Since he was Koh’s godfather he stood to the left of the single door to the house. 1 Gila, who was taking the part of Koh’s “father,” stood on the right. Lady Vanilla Orchid, Koh’s mother—her real, biological mother, by the way, brought with On The Left, at some risk and expense from Kaminaljuyu—stood way to the left, near the girls, between the charmingly named Lady Creosote Bush, Koh’s sort of mother superior from the Caracara Clan’s Orb Weaver Sorority, and Lady Sourdough, who had kind of the same relationship to Koh in the Rattler Society. Two Rattler monkey scribes crouched on a single mat next to the north wall, ready to take down everything anyone said. The giggle of girls crowded against the south wall with their backs to us, which was considered their most respectful position. I have to admit, purdah systems do have a certain eroticism. When women seem like a totally different and inaccessible species they’re maybe more violently attractive.

There was a pair of Rattler-blood guards at each corner of the yard, and a lookout crouching on each corner of the wall above them. One of Koh’s hunchbacks unrolled a reed trading mat, about one rope-length square, and I squatted on its eastern threshold side, with my back to the gate to show that I didn’t have any enemies. I saluted everyone in order, first 1 Gila—calling him “father”—and then my own so-called father, 4 Wren, and then this wife of his who was playing my mother, and finally Koh’s mother. I’m using the word
salute,
but really there were dozens of different sign-greetings, everything from banging your nose on the ground and licking the dirt to just stiffening up a little, and which one to use depended on who you were and whom you were talking to. Then there was a little interminable speech I had to say and a triply interminable speech back from each of them. Basically I just said, “Hi, my name’s 9 Wax, I’m not worthy,” and they said, “Hi, yeah, we know.”

My porters trooped in behind me ahead of cue. One of them stood behind me, holding a tall capped jar with my preserved leg inside, just to show that no enemy had gotten it and I was still, officially, a whole person. The head bearer laid three big balls of fresh highland jade, all ready to be worked, in the center of the mat. She stepped back as the other porters started laying baskets around the stones in radial arms, and then followed after them, counterclockwise around the mat, lifting off the close-woven lids. She started with the dishes in front of me, clusters of popped amaranth seeds held together by bright red achiote syrup and molded into Chak figurines, coiled strings of an especially rare kind of tiny chili pepper that supposedly made you bear male children, red manioc wafers and roasted mamey sapote,
sweet potato meat sculpted into rabbits and parrots like baroque marzipan, and finally a vat of powdered cochineal extracted from what I figured must have been around two and a half billion cactus-scale
Dactylopiae
.

( 50 )

T
he server moved right, counterclockwise, and opened dishes of transparent-white luxury cornflower cakes like communion wafers, stacks of creamy-looking squash-seed pralines, and a set of four twenty-pound blocks of pure highland-spring salt carved into statuettes of the dwarf year-bearers, and, in a big bundle with claws and a head, the skin of a pure white bear from God knows how far north. Meanwhile the toastmaster launched into his speech on my behalf. It was a set form personalized for the occasion. First he went through all the work I’d supposedly done for Koh’s “parents.” Ordinarily, if you were from, say, a middle caste, you might have to help them with stuff for years, if you wanted to get a desirable wife out of them. But I’d basically gotten all that waived based on the heroic services I’d performed, “rescuing” her from Teotihuacán and winning the ball game and everything. Next he went into a spiel about how great I was, and finally he pointed out some salient features of the gigantic bride-price I was paying. Which I guess wasn’t a total sham—after all, a lot of Harpy land was going to Rattler immigrants—but of course Koh had really done all the negotiating and banking and gifts and everything herself. Anyway, I guess all weddings are at least a bit of a sham. While he was talking the server moved to the western quadrant, directly across the stones from me—practically at 1 Gila’s feet—and started revealing trays of long black vanilla beans, strings of savory dried black water-bugs from what’s now the Lago de Nicaragua, which supposedly made you immune to skin diseases, jars of sinister-looking black mushrooms, inky rolls of cured sharkskin, and finally twenty bricks of preservative linden leaves each wrapped around twenty smaller bundles of anise-scented avocado leaves, each of which contained two hundred and fifty-six sinkhole-grown cacao beans, roasted and ready for grinding. The last quadrant, on my left, started with baskets of papaya and pineapple strips from the islands crystallized in squash-flower honey. Next there were baskets of preserved marigolds, what they call Mexican tarragon, from Choula, and calabashes filled with orchid honey from the cloud forests, and last an item from Panama, still a recent novelty: a nine-string beaded breast-necklace of four hundred turquoise-eyed hummingbirds sculpted in hammered gold. Then the human gifts trooped in and squatted around the borders of the overflowing mat, two master carvers to work the jade, four dyers to handle the cochineal, and ten female chocolate mixers—who’d had been specially raised just to process and prepare chocolate drinks—each with her own clay grinding board and wood roller and her set of tall jars. The trickiest move they did was pouring the hot chocolate-infused liquid from one of the tall jars to the other, over and over, to raise the foam on it. The bigger the head of foam on your chocolate, the hotter shit you were. Anyway all sixteen servants were going to work for Koh’s household for the rest of their lives.

There were only two more presents to go. The first was my own idea, one I’d had made so that she could be surprised by at least one thing, not that gifts around here were supposed to be surprises. I unrolled its case and laid it next to the hearth-fire stones myself. It looked like an ordinary ironwood hand flute, but it was actually chromatic, with six-hole transverse fingering and pitched to D, instead of to the double-pentatonic minor scale they used around here. I’d started the project a hundred and twenty-six days ago, the day Koh introduced me to my severed leg, and it had taken until now to get it tuned and to the flautist to play it. I’d adapted the fingering to the Teotihuacanob style, so she could deal with it, but it would still put out scales no one here had ever heard before.

The last item was definitely a not-least. With an air of finality, the head bearer laid three accordion-folding tribute books across the cold hearth-fire stones. Each book was bound in plucked eagle skin and filled with tribute lists and coded maps representing rights to a hundred and eighteen villages and thousands of acres of Harpy farmlands. They were the only really serious part of the bride-price.

Enough, already, I thought. I’d been thinking of throwing in twelve bloods a-blooding, eleven dwarves a-dwarving, fifty-four other items, and a vulture in a prickly-pear tree. In fact—even though I know it sounds like some conspicuous-consumption event à la the Duc de Berry or the Miller Sisters—this wasn’t even the most elaborate royal wedding. Supposedly, seven hundred and twenty days ago, at the wedding of 1 Chocolate of Caracol, the eight-year-old groom had had four hundred thralls killed just for spectacle, without even offering them to any particular immortal. Of course, he might have been another victim of bad publicity.

The so-called in-laws looked everything over. If only Marcel Mauss could see this, I thought. Finally the room servants started gathering up the loot and 1 Gila said it was okay for me to enter the fucking house.

The room was big, maybe about the size and shape of the Oval Office—which isn’t that big—and except for an opaque screen of state at the back it was totally empty. Not for long, I thought. The two sets of parents and godparents sat on mats at the right side of the door. Teentsy Bear and I sat and faced them from the other side. The girls and the other female relations crowded behind the screen. It was rare for women ever to see men eating, but Koh was making an exception for her mother and my surrogate mother and the various godmothers. 1 Gila sent a “runner” to go get the High Midwife, who was probably watching everything through a hole in the wall anyway. A bearer brought him a basket and he took out a long
halach wex,
that is, your basic loincloth but very fancy with tiny scales, that is, beads, showing my glyphs and dubious accomplishments. More than a couple seamstresses must have gone blind getting the thing ready in just twenty days. He presented it to me with a presentation speech and I accepted it with an accepting speech. Before I was done everyone snapped into a respectful attitude. The high midwife crouched in.

She was an old Rattler greatfather-mother and besides being a midwife she was also what you might call the Rattler Society’s head. In a way, in the context of this one ceremony, she was the most important person here.

She saluted my father, Koh’s father, my mother, and Koh’s mother.

The toastmaster did the same. The bridal family struck “welcome” poses and saluted everybody else, in order of precedence, by name, with me last. Then the toastmaster saluted everyone again, with me last. I saluted back. Finally the midwife launched into her spiel to Koh’s parents. She said I obviously wasn’t good enough for their daughter, but since I’d worked so hard maybe they should go against their better judgment and let Koh come out of the gynaeceum. Finally, Koh’s parents gave in. One of the girls ran to get her. I counted two hundred and ninety-three beats before Koh appeared in the door. The strata of encrusted ornament seemed to grow out of her flesh, even the smiling jaws of the giant nurturing snake around her head didn’t so much seem to be a separate creature swallowing her as another part of a compound animal, antennae coiling in, under, around, and through her in stitches too complex to follow, fangs curling over her cheeks and around her neck down to her male-Rattler-adder pectoral insignia—and the two shrunken heads looking up from the sides of her wide belt set with eighteen Mixtec crystals, each of which was carved, in intaglio, with her portrait glyph:

She was all backlit by the morning sunlight and looked new-hatched just for display, like the mouthless imago of a male tiger moth on a milkweed, drying its wings. The four parents rose. I turned my head so I could see her with my right eye, even though it was gauche for me to move. My right eye—I mean, the one that wasn’t there—had developed this kind of nondarkness, this absence, like the part behind your head where you can’t see. It’s not dark, it’s just nothing, like death. At first it had just looked dark over there, like it was shut, but now I was this visually lopsided person.

Koh squatted at the threshold, morpho scales and quetzal and macaw plumes fluttering like she’d just flown down for a beat from her gemstone forest on the surface of the sun and she was still shaking off drops of thermoluminescent liquids that deliquesced in the air, leaving flakes of spiced copper-leaf floating to the floor. She held a long
k’inil wal
in her dark hand, sort of a long combination fan and fly whisk, basically a bunch of thin cloth streamers and strings of flower-petals on the end of a rod, with a perfume sachet at the base, like a Japanese
hare
stick. Her face would have seemed blank if there hadn’t been a hint that something was unbearable to her. The effect was childlike or even frightened, and I almost thought that through everything I could make out some emotion, maybe even that same old bittersweet song twitching at the curved border between dark and light that ran just left of her left eye.