The Sacrifice Game (42 page)

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S
he floated up the steps toward me, twice as tall as her actual height, carried by a pair of dwarf bearers hidden under her long star-scale-skirt. Four of her own attendants followed her, two steps behind. It was a little out of the ordinary for her to be here and there’d be some muttering among the oldsters. But really, since the gifts were over, women could step on the holy ground without polluting anything. Anyway, things are gonna be different around here, I thought. Sisters are doing it for themselves.

I reset my stilt-sandals on the sharp lip of the threshold and nearly fell forward again. In the smoke and the amethyst half-light things seemed closer than they were, even without depth perception. A new set of Harpy Fliers had climbed the poles and were spinning downward, and the Ocelots were dancing through the costumed celebrants, rocking and almost falling, strutting and voguing, uninhibited but also totally controlled. It wasn’t like a nightclub or anything, actually it was just the old men who were supposed to really dance, and the others just sort of bopped. But the righteous dub ran through everything. It was so different from the dour, stale Teotihuacán vigil. It had a sense of beginning. A lot of the spectators and dancers were popping off into orgasmic trances, but even so, they still kept pulsing to the same gemütlich beat. There’s really nothing nearly so powerful as tribal fellow-feeling. And as I watched the rough edges of artifice disappeared and I forgot the dragon had legs, or that there were ropes holding the fliers in the air. The revelers’ masks fused to their flesh and pulsed and rippled and grimaced. I could feel my smile flowing through to the scales of my jade mask, everything meshing. The dancers’ back racks unfolded into pulsing mating displays, the gods’ power rising off them in clouds of musk, and it wasn’t a ceremony anymore but the event itself, gods kicking up the world just for the hell of it a long time ago, now, and again. It was a childlike feeling but it also had this brooding, shrouded purposefulness to it, and a bittersweetness about how I was part of a we, and how we were all so pathetically grand, so hopeful, so alive, I got this love-twinge and felt tears soaking my face-padding. It sounds sappy but it’s really comprehending the quiddity of whatever it is, the what-it-is-ness, how limited it is, how much we could love only each other, that really gets you. Twenty-first-century people haven’t lived at all, I thought. You’ve got to go for it, you have to string yourself along the thread where sex and violence and pleasure and pain and egotism and oblivion all intersect on the intensity graph, to this point of exhilaration without concepts, just thereness, that pure no-doubt living-goal insects feel, and if you haven’t gotten there at least once it’s like you’ve been looking at the ocean through a window without ever swimming in it. Or at least that’s the way it seemed at the time.

Koh rose up in front of me. Invisibles spread the ancient great-mat at the edge of the platform. I stepped onto it and sat down—so slowly that it took over a minute—facing north, so that when I looked over my left shoulder I could see the vertiginous rush of the Steps and the whole roiling zocalo. Actually, the entire area between the two great pyramids was considered a kind of ball court. But it was at least a hundred times the area of an actual playing trench, much too big for humans to play on. Instead the balls were the planets and moon and sun. Normally it just worked on its own, slowly, but in this one ritual Koh and I were going to bounce them forwards ourselves, and use the people to mark where they might land.

The dwarves set Koh down four arms away from me, facing me—that is, south—and slithered off, back into the sanctuary, keeping low so the crowd couldn’t see them. Down in the forum the invisibles were clearing everyone off the central square, an area about three rope-lengths on a side. It had been pumiced and buffed and freshly repainted in the color zones of the five directions with the full Sacrifice Game grid superimposed on it like a squared-off spiderweb. Finally, I thought. The Human Game. Let’s go.

Koh’s attendants snipped off her blue-green-goggle-eyed snake-jaw helmet and instantly started constructing an Ocelot queen’s coiffure and headdress in its place. She was pretty much giving up her old role as a sort of nun to Star Rattler. Still, marrying me was the safest plan for her. Later—not much later—before I entombed myself, I’d announce at the popol na that Koh was going to continue ruling, as the mouth of my uay, and then, eventually, as regent for her son, assuming we were going to have or secretly adopt one. And meanwhile, with me out of the picture, Koh would keep working to unify the Ocelot and Rattler factions until the situation was stable enough for her to relocate. And—at least until the twelfth b’aktun—that would be my contribution to posterity.

She and I saluted each other, but she didn’t say anything. An attendant set a covered Game-table between us.

Down in the forum the invisibles swept and oiled the Game grid. Alligator Root, Koh’s crier, sat two stairs below us, wearing a thin black mask, like a domino mask, fastened over his eyes with wax. At least she hadn’t had him blinded.

The first fifty-nine evaders—or poison oracles—walked out and stood at their posts at the center of the tetragon. Each one held a pair of sticks and they wore tall zero-masks. One of the leading one’s sticks was a big red-streamered staff, twice as tall as he was. Next the fifty-eight masked catchers took their places around them, seven at each of the eight star points and two in reserve outside the grid. Each of the catchers had a little drum on a stick. The hundred and seventeen players had all been chosen from four- or five-stone adders from trusted dependent clans, which meant they could all feel the blood-lightning and count like they had little abacus cashiers in their heads. But presumably it also meant that they wouldn’t know enough to direct a City Game on this scale, or to remember it and take the knowledge with them. They’d picked the thirteen evaders from among themselves, by cleromancy, and tattooed them and studded them with the patterns of the sidereal scorpion, and fed them on liver and deer’s blood to make them strong. And for the last ten days they’d all practiced every hour they were awake. Each one would be, in a way, playing his own separate game, and the totality of games would magnify the totality of the master game.

The Game beaters started on their clay water drums, in time with the beat of the universal festival, but more insistent.

Let’s go, I thought. Letsgoletsgoletsgo. I still couldn’t quite believe that the Human Game was really happening. It was like—well, I don’t know if it was like anything. But if it worked, I’d learn what I needed to know, what we all needed to know. And then, knowing . . . knowing . . .

“You know, at best I’ll only see the moves,” Koh reminded me. “You’ll have to interpret.”

I said I knew that, and I thanked her again. She smiled, like, Hey, no problem, we’re just hangin’ out anyway, right?

As I think I mentioned, as far as anyone knew, this was going to be the first City Game since the one played in Teotihuacán k’atuns before. And given the way the art was dying out, this might turn out to be the last one anywhere. This Game was supposed to be a public demonstration of my ability to read the future, but it would really be Lady Koh who was doing the seeing, and she and I would be playing for our own reasons. And, if all went well, nobody else would find out the farthest-off or the most important things we’d see. We’d throw them a few solid predictions about the next few k’atuns, and keep the rest to ourselves.

Koh lit one of her green cigars—the kind with chili and chocolate threaded through the tobacco—took a hit, and passed it to me. I puffed. She started the invocation. As I think I started to say at some point and then lost track of, it was in the old heavily metaphorical adders’ dialect, and—especially in a heavily accented language like English—it’s hard to get a sense of the swing, which it don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got. So I’ll make this a bit closer than a paraphrase, but less than a translation. Okay, Jedketeers? Right. Here we go:

Koh:

“You, Hurricane, who sparked Lord Heat’s first dawning,

You over us who foreknows his final dying,

You, sun-eyed coiler of the blue-green basin,

You, jade-skinned carver of the turquoise cistern,

You, there, whose hissing javelins strike wildfires,

Deign to respond to us from out your whirlwind.”

Koh looked up, not at my eyes, but at the emerald-green mask of One Ocelot on my pectoral sash. I hesitated, cleared my throat, and launched into my first response.

Jed:

“We who are only dust motes in the whirlwind,

We, born at sun’s fall and gone before its dawning,

Who will be waiting for us by the hearth fire?

Whose hands will polish our bones beyond our dying?

Will our skulls just bounce on the floor of the fresh-sea cistern?

Will the potters rebake the shards of our shattered basins?”

Ahau-na Koh:

“You, Cyclone, grant us a perch below the basin

But over the clouds, above the wrecking whirlwinds:

An overlook above the fourfold cistern

Where we can scatter the seeds of coming dawnings

Where we can count their growings and their dyings

Where we can spot young floods and fresh-sparked fires.”

Jed:

“Where we can warn our heirs of nearing fires,

Where we can feel the first cracks in the basin

And cradle our lineage and forestall its dying,

Where we can hear them crying in the whirlwind,

Where the entire talley of their dawnings

Reads full and clear, above the yawning cistern.”

Ahau-na Koh:

“You at the center of the turquoise cistern

Show us the gold southwest fires,

Let us see redward, through the sierra of dawning,

Southeast to where the horizon meets the basin.

Guide us northeasterly through the bone-dust whirlwinds,

And even northwest, through the soot-black dunes of dying.”

Jed:

“So that in ages far beyond our dying

Our daughters can still pour offerings in your cistern,

Our sons can still feed blood-smoke to your whirlwinds,

Our thralls will always tend your altar fires,

Pouring you chocolate from brimful basins

Through all the days undawned but now soon dawning.”

Ahau-na Koh:

“Dawning we bake our bodies and smash them dying.”

Jed:

“We shatter our basins and drown them in your cistern,

And snuff our last fires to steam, to slake you, Whirlwind.”

Koh scattered the seeds and whispered their position to the cantor. He called them out and the human pieces took their places. She waited five beats.