The Sacrifice Game (47 page)

( 68 )

I
got back to 2 Jeweled Skull at the end of the second afternoon watch. The teasers had kept him alive, but he’d managed to trance himself out somehow and it took a while to get him responsive again. When he was finally focusing on me I asked for the Giving Knives and laid the large one on his abdomen.

He couldn’t speak but his eyes asked me if I was actually going to let him go for telling the truth about the feather.

“No,” I said, “I take it back.” I tried to smile but his face was just bleak and exhausted like a ragged mouthless moth’s, completely exposed to my tough mercies, just trying to die. I probably look more evil than I can imagine, I thought. Face it, Jed, you’re a jerk. Chacal would have been pleased. I made a transverse cut under his rib cage, worked my hand in with the small knife, cut through the diaphragm, and wriggled up to his heart. When you were executing somebody yourself you were supposed to be kind of a psychopomp and help him on his way into the reflecting world. But you’ve got to be a pretty smooth character to pull it off. I think most often at the moment you start to kill someone the only feeling you remember later is frustration, it’s like, just get out of my world. It’s the pesky-fly syndrome. His heart struggled electrically against my hand and I twisted and pulled, snapping it like it was the spine of a rat. There was a peak of tension and spastic shuddering and a long exhalation of wet breath, then total relaxation and then there wasn’t anything there, he was just a shriveled old corpse. It felt like I’d birthed his uay like a scent essence. I fell backward and signed for them to get my dresser. So, fuck you, your punishment was to get screwed, I thought. I felt a little bad about just plain lying and everything, but in his case it seemed okay to make an exception to general principles. Anyway, I still wondered whether he’d told me about the feather because of what I’d offered, or just because he came up against that level of terror that’s so basic, anyone from any culture’s the same. Or maybe he had another reason. My attendant lifted me up and I signaled for him to rub me down and change me into court dress. I was feeling kind of misty and sentimental, and at first I thought it was because I was tired and upset about Koh but then I realized that despite myself I might be missing 2JS, since now I really was kind of alone here.

I put in an hour on my ruling mat, getting a few details in order. I ordered a few offerings, including a jaguar and an unblemished and good-looking fourteen-year-old captive. I lined up seven more attendants, two flautists, two cantors, a beater, and two messengers. Just before the sun died I led the team back down into the caves and toward the western tube. I’ll meet her again, I thought. Believe, believe. I will, I will, I will.

( 69 )

T
he twenty of us—or twenty-one, if you count 2JS’s body—descended in a widening sinistral spiral, first down gravel but then onto flagstone steps again as we passed clusters of sealed passages, each one marked with coded numbers, some of them tripled or quadrupled because the passages beyond them branched out farther on. Even with four porters handling 2JS’s body—we’d brought him along to help with my coming excursion—they dropped him two and a half times. The attendants leading the fourteen-year-old didn’t have an easy time, either, since he was too drugged to really walk. And the jaguar—well, drugged or not, you can imagine. At the fifty-ninth passage we checked the markings and cut our way through into a limestone passage that opened out around us. It was dripping with tiny silver stone-roots. There were ragged holes in the ceiling and even through the cantors’ dirge I could hear a trillion intergalactic clickings of far-off colonies of bats. Two rope-lengths in, the floor fell away again into a steep slope. My bearers took me and helped me down a rope rigging to a wicker bridge over a still clear pool that glowed in the green-gold light like it had been made with a few shots of crème de menthe. From the middle of the bridge I could follow the cliffs of striated agate down three rope-lengths. I thought the cliff sides were rippling somehow under the water and then saw they were covered with tiny white crabs, all scuttling away from the light.

Another rope-length past the bridge the bubble-passage ended suddenly in an ancient cave-in and the attendants spread out my mats and put me down. Mask of Jaguar Night traced his finger over a stained, convoluted wall to the side of the collapse. It looked the same as any other. Alligator Root looked around a little anxiously, lifting one foot and then another up off the cold ground. The head workman hammered leather-wrapped flint wedges into a vertical crack with a wooden mallet. I readjusted my bamboo leg and rubbed the oiled scar tissue on the side of my stump. It was getting flaky and raw. A fleck of torchlight brushed a cluster of tiny white eyeless newts clinging to a white-lichened rock. There was a soft crunch and the wall seemed to cave in a few finger-widths, blowing puffs of lime dust. The workmen positioned their staves and pushed against it. At first there was just the woody sound of plaster, but finally the chunk swung inward, it was counterweighted somehow, and there was a shrieking KREEEEEEEEEEN that I saw as a shower of icy scarlet ripples, and a hiss of old, unbreathed, mineral-rich air.

Mask of Jaguar Night tossed a triple-headed torch through the cleft to test the air. Light filtered back through the dust.

We sent an attendant back up to the sentries, to make sure this Grandfather Heat had died. Even though we knew he had, you still had to check to make sure, the way they don’t start the Islamic month until they actually spot the new moon. I sent everyone back a bit and waved for Hun Xoc to stay.

You’re going to have to make a decision, he said. He was the only person left who’d talk to me like that. The only one who’d start a conversation or talk directly to me at all, actually. He meant my choice was to stay aboveground to lead the defense of Ix or go down to look for Koh.

I said of course I was going to choose going down, since it was only probably futile as compared to definitely.

“Then start the fires but take the people with you,”
I said.

I’d done enough dirty deeds for a few lifetimes and didn’t want to commit more genocide than necessary. My idea was that Hun Xoc would arrange for any clans that wanted to leave to spirit their way out of Ix by the river routes at night. Then he’d lead them north with what was left of Koh’s cult. Ideally when Severed Right Hand got here he’d find a destitute gang of collaborationists and a whole lot of charcoal.

“No, I don’t need to live and wear a diaper,”
Hun Xoc said.

“I’ll plan the exodus, but stay with you.”

I tried to talk him out of it, but I didn’t have the whatever to order him. It was hard trying to talk with the sort of death march in the background, it felt like we were all in some old war movie about to jump out of an airplane. Hun kept saying how he really wanted to go down with the ship. Finally I said all right.

The expectation was for me to go through the cleft first. It was kind of disconcerting but I just scrunched through the jaggies into blackness. I wondered whether they were just going to seal the opening behind me and leave me to go insane in the dark and die nibbling on my toes. But they squeezed in after me, the porters maneuvering their big bundles hand to hand. The first thing I saw was a starburst of thirteen skeletons shrink-wrapped in skin, laid out on the floor of the cavern at my feet, ringed with bits of brain coral and stingray spines. They were the workmen and attendants who’d assisted in the last ritual here, 9 Fanged Hummingbird’s seating twenty years ago at the age of sixteen, on April 30, 644 AD. Beyond them the dumbbell-shaped primeval cavern branched into irregular feeder tubes flecked with cancrinite. Near the center a stump of petrified softwood had been ground down into a low altar table and I hobbled toward it, my foot crunching a thin membrane of white lime-crust that had accumulated like frost over the last k’atun. My attendants spread my mat over the table, laid me down on it, and undressed me while Mask’s acolyte laid out his baskets of pouches and jars and started the process that would, supposedly, protect me when I came into contact with the Sickeners.

( 70 )

“Thirteen are the coolings of your skin,”
Mask said,

“In thirteen layers are our carbon salves;

You are the great exuder, the great stancher.”

They wiped and strigiled me and started to fill each sector of my body with a different essence: my foot and stump got the head oil of an iguana that could lose an entire leg and regenerate it, supposedly overnight, and my eye and socket were daubed with vitreous humor from the eyes of harpy eagles. They shot ocelot musk into my anus and rubbed my genitals with ointments made from the skin-husking creatures of transformation, the coral snake, the
Barba amarilla,
the fer-de-lance, and Star Rattler’s daughter, the giant diamondback. They rubbed my head and torso with thickened oil from Ocelot were-toads, which weren’t the pretty little tzam lic toads but big warty black things from a colony the Ocelot-adders had kept forever, children of Earthtoad they’d taken as hostages when they entered these caves long ago, right after the first birth of the fourth sun. Behind me Mask was lighting something. I just lay back and went with it all. Of course, no matter how Ixian I’d become I didn’t believe I’d exactly meet the Lords of Tonight the way Mask thought I might. What they were really talking about was what the dream-catcher school of native-American buffs call a vision quest. Anything that happened down there—besides getting lost or assassinated or freezing to death or whatever—was going to be happening in my own head. But I had seen enough weird stuff around here—not magic stuff, maybe, but certainly borderline psychic stuff—to at least give them a chance, since it was the last thing left to try. Anyway, I couldn’t let myself start thinking like a skeptic or I wouldn’t get into it enough for anything to happen. I had to doublethink myself into credulity.

So I let them go through with the whole ritual thing. Anything to get another minute with Lady Koh, I thought. Even a half a minute. Even with only half of her. Or one of her uays, rather. And if I didn’t let them do all the mumbo-jumbo they wouldn’t have let me do this at all. You’d think I could just give orders, but it wasn’t really that way. When you’re in charge of a tottering organization you need to strike a balance, you need people pushing for you. Mask came into my field of vision carrying a long multiple-bone tube taller than I was. He put one end in my mouth and held the other below me, near the floor. In my former life I’d seen the same kind of tube on burial jars, usually with a vision snake sprouting from it. It had been kind of an archaeological mystery, I remembered one time when all those Mayanists at Taro’s office at BYU were sitting arguing about what it was. And it was really a monstrous bong. I sucked in the smoke and held it down until I couldn’t anymore. He took the tube away. I exhaled through my nose—and I think maybe my ears—and went into a coughing fit, keeping it as quiet as possible while the acolyte bled me from my earlobes and collected the blood in a little jar.

He handed me the warm jar and rubbed tattoo paste into the cuts. I blessed the jar and handed it to the attendant who was acting as Hun Xoc’s hands. He poured a measure of preservative honey into the jar, stopped it, and molded wax over the stopper. It was going next to the essences of my predecessors in the lists of kings. If it even lasted that long. I lay back, feeling the motionless stump rock under me like a kayak. Maybe we should ease up on the exotic unguents, I thought, but they were just getting started. They kneaded the head oil of hundred-year-old sea tortoises into my scalp and filled my nostrils with a honey that a specific kind of black bee made from maroon orchids that grow on high ceiba trees at the cloud-forest canopy. They dusted me with strings of a white immortal fungus that grew on yew logs, and then powder from an infinitely rarer blue fungus that grew in dark soil, after a lightning rain, over the bodies of armadillos. I tasted bergamot and aloe root through my eye socket and fennel and valerian through my underarms. They rubbed a spiced oil into my mouth that had been ground with the dried blood-essence of a special colony of
sanguiverous
bats, which were fed only on a family of special deer that fed only on a certain plantation of marigolds, a kind of living triple-tiered chemical-distillation process. Finally they let me wash it all down, but with water mixed with forty drops of honey, eighty of fermented prickly-pear juice, and twenty-six drops of the ancient honey-blood preservatives, two each from each of the thirteen ahauob of Ix, 14 Ocelot Night and 4 Shield and 13 Skull and 9 Fanged Hummingbird and all the others, taken and preserved during their self-offerings at their own pilgrimages here over the centuries.

And that was about it. But I was already feeling the mute gods of the source animals were seeping into my mind and I was seeing through the toads’ eyes, remembering what they remembered, feeling myself metamorphose from a spore-speck-sized egg to a quarter-fingerwidth tadpole and then to a legged tadpole and to a complete, eye-lidded, fingered-and-toed toad the size of a water drop, and then to a toad two thousand times that size, looming over a pebble of red gravel that three days ago had been as big to me as El Capitan. I felt myself growing out of a near-zero-G world of surface tension and static and currents of honey-air into a thin-atmosphered high-gravity planet where the muscles in my body were all about springing against gravity, out of a wet world where I could easily grow and grow just by eating thousands of my hundreds of thousands of brothers and sisters, into this arid place where I had to pick off bony sharp flies as they zetsed away from me like little flying tamales—

“Now don your father-no-more,”
Mask said,
“and let the Lords

Take you for him, and capture you, and if

They recognize you, slip him off; and let them

Regurgitate you into Xibalba River

And swim for our nets, and let us fish you up.”

They unwrapped 2 Jeweled Skull’s body. It was all puffed up and jiggly. Mask opened the stomach with a Jester flint and took out the liver. There was a tumorized abscess on it in the same place his son’s had been, but it was bigger, a grapefruit-sized mass of dead flukes and black necroses like devilish sandwich spread. Mask started trying to tell me what a bad sign it was and that I should call the whole thing but I cut him off and said I knew it was bad and that we were going ahead.

So, reluctantly, he washed and flayed the body. Getting a skin off a person in one piece is a tricky thing, but an old person’s skin separates more easily, and 2JS had been force-fed corn mush under Koh—so that he’d taste better—and then recently, of course, he’d lost weight, so it didn’t take forever. When the skin was off and his acolytes were cleaning and sewing and soaking it, Mask cut off 2JS’s earlobes and filleted a strip of muscle off his right flank and dropped them in a pot of hot broth. The attendants finished oiling and spicing. Mask recited another litany in time with the chant and they fed me into the skin. It was all moist with lymph and fat inside and under the spices it smelled like fear-sweat and venom, but as I got into it, it got better, and even, oddly refreshing. Hun Xoc helped my bamboo leg over the hump of the knee down into the foot. By the time they closed the torso over my chest my own skin was expecting it with that tingling like first putting on clothes in the morning, and as they sewed it over me it felt like a big tongue coiling around me and then finally like a mouth holding me, a mother jaguar carrying her cub. Skin held the real essence. Everyone was about the same inside. Even animals were the same inside. But the skin was like a book, a bible-biography of the owner. They pulled his scalp up behind my neck and rolled the cowl of his face down over mine. It was all expertly done, with the nose still intact, remounted over cloth on the inside, and as I opened my eye and looked out through 2JS’s eyelids I thought I got a flash of memory of the ball game, except I was up on the reviewing stand, looking down at Chacal. I, or rather Chacal, looked vicious and insane. They rerobed me over the skin in a fresh plain white cape of the ahau
of ahaus. And my bearers helped me off the altar and supported me, onward and downward.

They helped me crawl into the fifth passage, their hands slipping against my double skin, and squeezed after me one by one. We came out into a dry gallery at the old water table that opened laterally into a forest of pillars. I took over and led again, leaning on my halberd. Farther on the roof rose up. You couldn’t see much in the torchlight, but you could make out the columns separating into stalagmite/stalactite pairs, first just about to link and then thousands of years away from linking. The ridged path, cut centuries before, ran under clumps of helictites like twisty icicles just budding on the arches overhead and threaded between bulbous stalagmites sparkling pink and yellow in the bacterialess air. We were definitely out of amphibian territory and into the mineral world. No newts is good. We threaded through honeycombed bowels in almost four-dimensional convolutions of knotted tubes, impossible to visualize, over thousands of maimed stalactites lying in sections like logs in a jam. At some point I felt some kind of thrum filtering through the stone and my perspective kind of flipped, I realized the place wasn’t lifeless at all, we were almost lifeless by comparison.

The path sloped off again down an organ-pipe cliff and my bearers formed a chain and handed me down to a sediment bed near the current water table. A high wall of milky crystal bulged ahead of us like it was breathing, taking decades between breaths, and we edged behind it through a one-drip-at-a-time waterfall and out a narrow vertical fissure into a big space. My shadow grew in front of me and then shrunk again as the bearers came through. I turned and looked around, but the torchlight only lit an oval of the high fluted wall we’d come through and a half-circle in the silver sand around us, and everything else was black. I stood and waited. There was something unsettling about the sound of the cantors and pipers coming through. The echoes were coming back too late.

Evidently the room was a lot more huge than I’d thought it could be. We waited until finally everyone formed up. I signaled. The dirge slid into its ending stave and faded away. Finally the echoes faded too. I signaled again and the bearers stuck their torches headfirst in the sand and they sputtered out. Shedding more artificial light than you had to in the halls of the night was just begging for trouble. At first the darkness was total, like what I’d had in my blind eye, just before it became nothing at all. But we waited, and eventually we could at least see our silhouettes against the green chemoluminescence sweating from the walls.

Mask came up beside me and steered me down a long, long gentle slope, my foot feeling its way over the ridges and my snake-leg stumping along, and we twisted through narrownesses and vastnesses of spiraling alabaster walls. From the tone of our foot-scrunches the spaces seemed to be growing larger and larger, as though we were following the air tube of a chambered nautilus.
Build me more stately mansions, O my soul
.

Finally we edged into a dark cleft in the glow and out through into a deep vaulted sound-dissipating cavern like a black stadium, bigger than I would have thought any cave could be. The ridges vanished under rough sand but Mask kept steering me forward and down, toward a faint nebula of clear light-spicules, not quite moving but still different from stone somehow, and then the sparkles resolved themselves into reflections on liquid. Mask guided my hand to a treelike shadow and when I touched the smooth scalloped stone the procession stopped.

The phosphorescence was fainter here but eventually my eye was able to pick out ancient offerings, laceworks of arm and leg bones spread out over the gray rubble, branched into vertebral columns with multiple necks and mouths for fingers, the human bones forced into merging with alligator-boas with monkey heads and frogs sprouting from their ears, spires radiating and bursting into rosettes of blowfish and cone shells.