Brian D'Amato

by In the Courts of the Sun

  Hun Xoc turned back to the rest of the group and started reordering them for the climb down the stairs. I realized I was being held only by a single mittened hand around each of my wrists.

  Just the one lookout man ahead of me. One untouchable behind me. Then the dogs. Then the stairs.

  The geese banked right, to the south. No better time. Now.

  I twisted against the untouchable’s thumbs, got free, butted my way past the surprised lookout, dove at the top step, and somersaulted out over the edge. Even before the rush in my ears and the release of weightlessness, the shame sloughed off me like a radiation-soaked lead suit. I giggled in midair and it was my Jed side giggling, too, feeling absolutely free for once, almost for the first time, and even though I’d realized it wasn’t me, that Chacal had reasserted himself, all I could feel was the cocainesque exhilaration of—

  My right shoulder exploded at the impact of a stone stair. I bounced once and turned over slowly in space. My left hip cracked down next, but the impact was mushy, somehow, not enough pain, not quite there. I should have been picking up speed but instead I was slowing down, there were hands all over me, they’d jumped down after me and they were clinging to my body, shielding me, digging their knees and elbows into the rocks. A few of them grunted, but no one screamed. I rolled over four more times, the center of a giant warm Loony Tunes snowball of shredding flesh, and then we ground to a stop with a swirl of gurgling sounds. Damn. I pushed the remaining air out of my lungs. Got to suffocate myself. No. Not me. Chacal. Chacal holding our breath. Shit. Can you really hold your breath until you die?

  Chacal seemed to answer that he could do anything.

  Things started to get all soft the way they do when you’re blacking out, and then the limbs around me shifted. Someone yanked my head back by the hair and I thought, Finally, I am being beheaded, I under you thank you, fathermothers, take my head, it’s what—

  [36]

  So, you were just lying low, I thought at Chacal. You were waiting for the first unsupervised moment to bounce up and off us both. Pretty lame. Chacal didn’t answer. I could tell he was there, though. I could feel him crouching sullenly in a cortex fold, knotting, clotting, coiling …

  I know you’re hearing this, I thought. You enjoyed watching me getting all terrified when we were being hunted down. That’s big fun for you, feeling me be afraid. You’re pathetic. Still, if you wanted to kill yourself, why didn’t you just take over on the hunt?

  No answer.

  You could have just made us run our head into a rock. But you didn’t. You didn’t want to get captured, right? That’s it, isn’t it? You’re okay with killing yourself, that’s fine, but you didn’t want to get humiliated by some Ocelot punkwad. Right?

  Nothing.

  Hmm. Well, if you want to sulk, fine.

  Okay. Where was I this time?

  Well, first of all, this time I really had been drugged. And it felt like a plain narcotic, maybe ololiuqui or some other morning-glory derivative. So there wasn’t a lot to remember. I knew I’d been carried again for a long time, first horizontally and then vertically. And now I’d been laid down on a mat inside what smelled like a freshly built, or, as we say, freshly bound, reed hut. I still had a sponge gag in my mouth and some kind of sticky stuff over my eyes. My hands were tied in front of me—which seemed like a luxury at this point, compared to having them tied behind my back—and my feet seemed to be tied together, although there was too much throbbing and numbness down there to really tell. The antlers and, as far as I could feel, the other elements of the deer costume were gone. There was a rushing sound somewhere, maybe wind in bare branches, and a sense of water. Maybe there were birds, because I was pretty sure it was just after dawn.

  Got to make sure I’m in charge, I thought. I wriggled a bit. Yeah, I think I’m running the show. For now, anyway. When Chacal’s mind was in charge it felt more like—

  Hmm. What was it like, really? That’s a tough one. On a general level I guess it felt like … I don’t know. It felt like the taste of salt. It felt like the sound of a viola. It felt like a four-dimensional sphere.

  Something was different.

  The rhythm of the people carrying us had slowed and deregularized, like they were coming to their destination. The air was different.

  I know this place, Chacal thought all of a sudden. There was a feeling in him I hadn’t felt before, not rage or panic but more of a creeping unease. Our arbor, he thought. The Place Where Our Clay Comes From.

  We were near Bolocac, Chacal’s village. I got an image of a forested defile, and the rushing sound resolved itself into a gurgle of rapids and beyond that the steady off-white noise of a waterfall.

  Hmm. You seem a little upset, I thought at him.

  He didn’t answer, so to speak.

  You know, I thought, I’m sure we can work out a time-share on this body. How about you can have it whenever we’re eating or having sex, and the rest of the time I’ll—

  Air. I realized I wasn’t breathing. I took a breath. Nothing. Oh, hell.

  I found a connection to my body and sucked in. Stuffed up. Come on—

  Got it. I snuffled my nose clear. The air trickling in carried that cool sweet reassuring clay smell and hints of other scents beyond it, roasting corn, something like creosote, a pinch of the rendering-works stink of burnt fat gone rancid. There was a smell of cardamom somewhere, or rather something that smelled almost like it. An orchid, maybe?

  My smell, Chacal thought. Mine.

  Gac. I choked again. Come on. Get control. Grab that neurosystem. It felt like we were playing that game where you and a similar-sized kindergarten friend sit on a teeter-totter and each one tries to keep his end down on the ground. The slightest lean backward or just a barely perceptible lowering of your body’s center of gravity can make the difference between staying down or getting bounced up, and you each become so extrasensitive to the other’s weight and position it starts to feel like you’re conjoined twins.

  Gkk. Suck in. Come on.

  Now, despite what you may have heard, it actually isn’t possible to kill yourself by swallowing your tongue. The most you can do in most suicide-restraint situations is bite off the tip of your tongue and maybe some of your lips, keep spitting the blood out, and hope that when you pass out you’ve lost enough to die. But even that’s not a sure thing. In fact, a marine sergeant tried it in Iraq in ’04, right after the Salat-al-Isha, and the rebels still found and revived him in the morning. And at any rate, so far the sponge gag in my/our mouth had kept Chacal from doing it. But there had been—or would be—cases of kidnapping victims getting stuffed up and choking to death in their gags, and this was what he was aiming for.

  I swallowed a bubble of air. I’m not letting you choke us to death. I found a connection to my lungs and squeezed, gritting my arms and legs like teeth. I’m as tough as you are and I’m in charge—

  Eastward our breath is stopped,

  Northward it stops,

  Our breath is dead,

  It stops, it dies, it stops—

  My breath, I thought, but there was no breath. I tensed and writhed but nothing came in. He was running the lungs. Oh, hell, I was just clucking, gargling, my ears were ringing like the locked groove at the end of the first cut of the original vinyl of Metal Machine Music. Heart racing upstairs. Thirteen flights. My tongue swelled to a lump the size of a tennis ball. Going green-gray—

  It stops, it ends—

  Let it out. Out. Hell. This isn’t good. People who’ve nearly drowned say there’s a moment when you have to let your breath out even though you know the water’s going to come in and kill you. But Chacal had this willpower thing going on, in fact that was still too weak a word, and he was going to do it, he was going to drown us in our own carbon dioxide, and for a second I felt I was diving down to an ocean floor swirling with electric-ultramarine Phyllidia varicosa and ruby coral. Just let it happen. Just let yourself sink for one more mo—

  Crock. Hkk. Slammed into.

  Hhhhs. Hit in the stomach.r />
  Gasp. Ha! Air. Involuntary reaction.

  Mittened fingers held my teeth open, probed down into my mouth, and yanked out the gag like a stopper out of a drain. Air whistled in and my chest ballooned up. Sweetness. Pop. Jaw hinges cracked. So what. Thank frooging God. I was afraid you guys were asleep at the switch. Morons. About time. Someone jammed a stick of something into my mouth, propping it open, yes yes no no no no no onononononono—

  Shut up, I thought. They want to keep me alive. You got that?

  Just die, let’s simply die,

  We die, we die—

  They were holding me up and someone was sort of Heimliching my abdomen, but I was still graying out. Chacal can’t just will me to die, can he? That’s just not possible. They’re keeping me alive, alive, alive—

  Thump. I exhaled everything. Gak. The mittened hands sat me up again. I was breathing, somewhere. Good. Step in the right—

  Afraid, you’re so afraid,

  You’re soiled, polluted,

  You’re afraid, afraid—

  Fine, whatever, so what? I thought back. Stupidly, though, I still felt … well, I felt embarrassed. Of course I was frightened, and of course Chacal knew it, and he knew that I knew he knew it. There just wasn’t a hell of a lot of privacy in this relationship. It’s true, come to think of it, my strongest and most persistent emotion so far had been just plain embarrassment.

  You’re too ignorant to be frightened, I thought at him. You’re just like everybody else, you believe whatever they told you when you were—

  You’re not from the thirteenth b’ak’tun, Chacal thought at me. You just made that up. You made up your whole life. Think about it, pictures shooting through the air, canoes that swim to the moon, a box the size of your tongue that knows more than you do, it’s all a ridiculous lie.

  Well, it does seem a little improbable, I thought. But, no, I didn’t make it up. I couldn’t have. Nobody could possibly make up the DNA spiral, or China, or Anna Nicole Smith. It happened.

  B’aax? Really? Which is more likely, that there are such things, or that you are just a deluded cacodemon?

  You have no curiosity, I thought at him. You’d actually be interested in where I come from if you were more interesting yourself. You’re just like any other small-town bore.

  Even as I thought it, I sounded wishy-washy, like I was sitting in an interrogation room with a Texas sheriff and trying to explain the difference between Baroque and rococo. Besides, I was just being peevish. One thing in all this that had kind of disappointed me was that Chacal hadn’t been more blown away by what I’d brought along. I’d have thought that the second he met me, if that’s what to call it, he’d have been completely awestruck and it would just be like, Yessuh, massa Jed, suh. But he’d been totally unimpressed. He was all about contempt. I mean, I always had resentment and hatred and everything, too, but Chacal had true, pure, confident contempt. Classist, racist, everythingist contempt. If you weren’t a Harpy or an Ocelot, you were barely even fit to eat. I mean, like, to be eaten.

  What a bastard, I thought. To know is definitely not to forgive. I could have killed him. But there was nowhere to go with that. Even if I could have bopped myself on the head or whatever, that was what Chacal wanted. Right?

  On the other hand, he did have a point—the twenty-first century did seem a little improbable. From where I was writhing, anyway. Kind of arbitrary. Well, even if I had made up some of it—

  Whoa. Wait. Hang on. That way lies madness.

  Now the mittens were dipped in palm oil and they were massaging us, scraping us—

  Ah cantzuc che, Chacal’s mind shouted. You have the inner-eye disease. That is, you’re crazy. Ah cantzuc che!!!

  I understand you’re upset, I thought back, it’s not every day your whole conception of the universe turns out to be totally bogus. Every other day, maybe. But still—

  B’ukumil bin cu—

  Cram it, I thought. You’re the one nobody wants. 2 Jeweled Skull doesn’t care about you. He wants to keep me around.

  No.

  Yes, he does, you know it’s true.

  He is keeping you just to torture you.

  No, he’s keeping me for something potentially profitable. You’re out, loser.

  Ah cantzuc che, ah cantzuc che …

  Ouch. Shit. They were suturing up my chest. Although suture might be too grand a word, since it felt like they were using knitting needles and speaker wire. One million stitches later I felt them oiling us again, turning us over like we were a baby getting diapered. We felt them tie an embroidered breech-cloth around our groin and push wide-flaring spools through our distended earlobes. They brushed and redressed our stumpy hair. I guessed they were tying in extensions. It was like I was a shih tzu at a dog show. They fastened cuffs of stone scales onto our wrists and strapped an ornamental stone hipball celt to our right palm. We got some kind of rather heavy headdress and a ceremonial stone hipball yoke around our waist, much too heavy to use in a real game. Finally, they dusted us with a powder that Chacal knew from the smell was cinnabar and bone ash. With, of course, a hint of vanilla. I was sure we looked and smelled good enough for even a god to eat. However, that wasn’t what we were here for.

  The preparators stood us up, let Chacal get our balance—he was back in charge again, somehow, although right now he wasn’t making trouble—and guided us out of the low door. We took nine steps into light. They set us down and positioned us on a stiff, smooth mat. The head preparator—who, I noticed, didn’t use the mittens—peeled the sticky bandages or whatever they were off my eyes and licked the remaining goo out of them. They blinked open.

  We were deep in a treesy gorge, facing east, twenty feet from the bank of a narrow stream. Everything was sheltered, cool green, and vertical, like the Hiroshige print of Fudo Falls. We could hear the water cascading in several stages from what seemed to be the crest of a limestone cliff about a hundred feet above us—even now, I or Chacal thought, at the end of the dry season—but we couldn’t see it.

  Around our mat a fifteen-arm square of turf had been burned down and covered with wild magnolias, like an artificial snowfall. It was dotted with shallow baskets of different sizes, each ostentatiously overflowing with a different commodity—coral beads, greenstone currency ax heads, cigars, rolls of undyed cotton flannel, vanilla beans, cacao beans, quite a little hoard for a guy like Chacal, who was, after all, just a prole from the provinces made good. Five men sat at the east side of the square. 2 Jeweled Skull was in the center, on a thick snakeweave state mat, wearing a harpy-eagle mask and headdress. He held a live red-tailed hawk on his right wrist, not hooded like in old-world falconry, but tied by its feet to a thick wooden bracelet. You could hardly see his skin under all the ropes of jade, and in the center of his chest there was a big oval mirror, like a Claude glass, ground out of a single chunk of pyrite.

  Damn, he looked good.

  Two representatives of the Harpy Hipball Brethren sat on his right. First there was Hun Xoc, the one with the smooth, amused face. He’d been Chacal’s principal blocker, or backcourt man. Then there was a much older blood who looked like a smaller, scruffier version of Ben Grimm, the Thing from The Fantastic Four. I felt a sunbeam of affection for him pass through Chacal, despite or because of the dude’s having beaten Chacal within inches of death on several occasions. His name and title clicked into my head: 3 Rolling, the yoke steward of the Harpy Hipball Society. The title basically meant he was the coach. He was Chacal’s second uncle, and an adopted cousin of 2JS, and his nickname was 3 Balls, for the simple reason that he was a whole lot más macho than anybody. Before he’d become Chacal’s mentor and first foster-father, he’d been a legendary blocker, never defeated but badly injured in his last game, eighteen war seasons ago. In that game he’d gotten pretty messed up on top of the extent to which he was already messed up, and now his left hand was frozen into a nonfunctional claw, and there were only two teeth and one eye poking out between the cauliflower folds of his wide face. But he still looked like if you got too close to him he might c
rush your neck in his good hand and rip your head off with his gums. Two local people sat on 2JS’s female side, that is, on his left: first, a rustic gentleman in a tall blue cylindrical hat, the little hamlet’s current burden-bearer. He was a roundhouser—that is, he was one of the class that lived in round huts instead of the squared-off houses the elite lived in—and he was way out of his social league in this group, but he still came off as dignified. Chacal knew him, of course, but he also gave me—I mean, me, Jed—the biggest rush of nostalgia I’d felt since I’d gotten here, since he looked 98 percent like Diego Xola, one of the cofradios from T’ozal, the village where I grew up. Things hadn’t really changed that much, I thought, or wouldn’t. Next to him—sitting on the ground, since he didn’t rate a mat—was my, that is Chacal’s, biological father. He was a coarse-looking and surprisingly young milpero, with bad teeth and a creased brow from carrying loads with a tumpline. His wide straw hat looked beachy and almost 1960s-moderne. His name was Wak Ch’o, that is, 6 Rat, a typical peasanty roundhouser name. Somewhere I knew that Chacal’s mother was dead, not that she would have been allowed near here anyway, and not that it seemed to have made much of an impression on Chacal. But he had brothers, and they weren’t around. Hmm. Anyway, you’d think seeing his father again would have brought up emotions like love and sadness and whatever in Chacal. Right? But if they did, I didn’t feel it. All I felt from Chacal right now was shame. Or maybe his emotion was a little more specific than that, more like … hmm. Oh, I know. It was more like stage fright.