They steered me out of the main room into a dark diagonal gash that led to a side passage, half-natural and half-hewn-out, with the most dangerous spicules ground away to a level just above our heads and an irregular floor sloping up at thirty degrees. Before we were quite in the dark zone, they stopped in the middle of a sort of antechamber and called back the dressers. We waited. The dressers showed up and cleaned me up again. At least you dont have to do your own toilette around here. When I was at school I went out for a while with this woman from Indiain fact, she was once Miss India, although I dont expect you to believe thatand I was surprised to find out that shed never washed her own hair, not once, in her entire life. It turned out that wasnt unusual in India, where the maids have maids, and they have maids. So around here, even a jailbird like me got a stylist. When that was done they stood me up and we went on into total blackness, feeling our way along a ridged path cut into the limestone floor. We spiraled deeper into the mountain. There was less ventilation here and less-healthful smells. My feet felt a floor leveled with clay and the passage widened into an L-shaped room with a dim fuzz of daylight. In here the walls had been cut into shelves and packed with unornamented jars and, above them, ranks of little clay ancestors looking squalid and ad hoc. One shelf held a row of these sort of pornographic wood statues of gargoyley old men groping young women. Each was kitschier than the last. Well, so they have lousy taste here too. Not everything from the past is great. One just tends to think it is because its mainly the good stuff that gets saved, and the only time you do see how most of everything from the past was junk is when everything happens to get preserved all at once, like in Pompeii. Now, that was a tacky town. The Coconut Grove of ancient
Whoops. They ducked-and-pulled me through a deerskin flap I hadnt seen and steered me thirty steps up a torchlit ramp to another flap, this one scaled with shell beads. There was an older Harpy blood sitting in front of it, and he and the captain of the porters exchanged a nonsense code greeting. The old blood stood up, lifting the flap, and flattened himself against the wall to let us pass. There was a cardamomy smell of wild allspice. Hun Xoc and I crouched into a small tertiary chamber the size of a refrigerator and then through another little door into a bubble-shaped room about the size of a one-car garage. There was no natural light, but there were two rushlightsreeds dipped in tallowburning at the far end, and instead of the smokes filling up the place it practically shot up into a crack in the far wall, caught in a steady cool breeze. Just from the air you could tell it was what spelunkers call a dry room, that is, a room sheltered from rain and above the flow of any running water, with nonporous walls that wouldnt mold. The far wall was artificial, made of cut blocks, but the side walls had been roughed out of the natural cave, and on our right two gray flowstone stalagmites had been left relatively untrashed. The largest was carved into an old-fashioned half-statue of a Harpy lord. His seating date was still readable as 9 Ahau, 3 Sip on the first day of the eighth baktunthat is, September 7, 41 AD, 244 days after the assassination of Caligula. There were old covered offering jars around its base, most of them broken. The rest of the libraryor maybe I should say records room or genizahwas filled with neat stacks of breadbox-sized chests. Four of them were open and in one I could see a screenfold book half-buried in rock salt.
Including Hun Xoc and me, there were eight people in the room. 2 Jeweled Skull sat on a cushion at the far side, with his legs wrapped in a quilted cotton blanket. A big guard squatted on his right-hand side, facing down at the floor. He stiffened as we came in but didnt look up. He was about a head taller than and twice as heavy as anyone else, and he was older than the other guards Id seen, which maybe meant he was trusted. He wore a light quilted padding on his shoulders and hips, and according to the tattoos on his calves, during his military career hed offered eight captives to One Harpy. Two people squatted between me and the guard, also on the left side of the room. The first was a thin old man with a dark manta over his shoulders and with his head wrapped up in a kind of veil under a hat, like a pith helmet with mosquito netting. I couldnt see much of him, but he seemed familiar. There was something odd about his forearms, but I couldnt quite put my finger on what it was. Next, closest to me, there was the same monkey-costumed scribe who Id seen before in the red-feathered room. He had a long, thin paintbrush tied to his index finger, and without looking at us he went on with what he was doing, copying tallies of something onto sheets of dried palm leaf in quick sloppy columns of dots and bars. In fact, the word scribe sounds a little grand and monastic for him. It might be less misleading to call him a combination stenographer and accountant. Or maybe we should just translate his title literally: remembrancer.
Three other men sat against the right-hand wall. 2JSs grand-uncle 12 Unwinding was closest to me, and then there was 2JSs great-great-grandfather 40 Weasel, and finally someone else, whose wrappings were too old and crumbly for me to read, sat close to 2JSs left hand. They were dead, of course, and semimummifiedthat is, they were basically shrunken heads, probably stuffed with the allspice, sitting on top of bundles of a few key bones, ulnas and fibulas and so on, each on a little platform like an Indian tea table, all in a line on the left wall. Their skulls would be buried somewhere else for safety along with the rest of their bones and favorite wives and whatever. Present but not voting.
2JS spread his hands apart in a blossoming gesture, the Maya equivalent of a shrug.
Hun Xoc positioned me on a subordinates mat. I turned down my eyes and automatically my right hand moved to my left shoulder. I heard Hun Xoc crouch out behind me. 2JS spoke:
Again, take out your worm.
What the hell? I wondered. I thought wed gone through this. By now, Id caught on to the protocol around here enough to know that if I didnt have anything to say, I should just shut up. I looked down at the ground. Hell, I thought. Hes still going to kill me. Hell, hell, hell.
I knock you the ninth hipball, he said. It was like saying, This is your last chance.
I looked up.
Jed? I asked. Get out of there, okay? Or just stifle. Please. Take one for the team.
Naturally, there was a pause, and naturally, nothing happened. If the Jed in his head did anything special on hearing me, 2JS didnt say so.
Will he ever listen to you? 2JS asked finally.
I said I didnt know.
I suggested, delicately, that 2JS might be able to purge himself of me the way hed had me purged of Chacal.
What is the Jed inside you saying? I asked.
He is screaming, 2JS said.
I shuddered. Damn. Imagine that poor larval retarded me in there, writhing under the lashes of 2JSs indomitable will. Wow. That must really suck
I see it but dont know its names. In me,
Your life is like a pile of broken pots,
he said, for the first time sounding almost uncertain.
Huh, I thought. Well, at least now were talking. I was beginning to learn to trust Chacals bodys automatic responses, to worry about the big decisions and otherwise let his body do what it did instinctively. This time it knew the correct way of not responding, and without missing a beat I clicked my tongue and gestured, As you above me say. Dont volunteer information, I thought. The more you tell him, the more expendable you become. Right? He needs you around to help him make sense of the alien mishmash in his head. Not that he couldnt just torture it all out of you anyway. But maybe he doesnt really want to torture you. Maybe he isnt really that bad, and he just got angry because he felt violated. Anybody would have. Right?
Damn. Now I was feeling irrationally guilty. Or maybe not that irrationally. After all, I was a cocephalic colonialist. Forget it, I thought, dont start feeling sorry for him. Hed kill you in a second.
You underneath me
Have cost me a son
And have ruined our household,
he said.
What? I thought. Son? Oh, right.
As I think I mentioned, Id already guessed what had happened, that 2JSs son had been sacrificed in my place when I spoiled the ceremony on the mul. I didnt know whether to pretend I didnt know about it or not, so I asked for more information.
I underneath you
Now beg absolution,
But I underneath you
Do not understand
How I birthed this catastrophe,
How it unfolded.
It was the closest thing to asking a direct question that I could manage, since the language made it almost impossible for an inferior to question a superior. And even this much wasnt exactly polite. Still, 2JS did answer. He told mein a formal, accusative waythat two solar years ago he had been asked to give the ruling house, the Ocelots, a gift to commemorate the renaming and reseating of their patriarch, 9 Fanged Hummingbird, as Lord of the Fertilizing Waters and kalomtewarlordof Ix. The gift would either have had to be an absolution of debtwhich I gathered hed been unwilling to door one of his own sons, as a proxy to be used in 9 Fanged Hummingbirds mock autosacrifice. But since 2 Jeweled Skull only had two biological sons, hed been able to negotiate a compromise: One of his adopted sonsthe Harpy Houses hipball champion, Chacalwould throw a high-ceremonial hipball game against 9 Fanged Hummingbird, and then, as the new hipball, or the loser, throw himself down off the mul in place of 9 Fanged Hummingbird.
Then, during the ceremony, when Chacal had spoiled the whole thing by apparently freaking out, 2 Jeweled Skull had had Chacal wrapped up and saved for laterfor an excremental killing, as he put itand sent a messenger down to his two primary sons, who had been standing in the Harpy House formation in the plaza at the base of the mul. The elder son, 23 Ash, immediately climbed the stairs. The preparators had quickly painted him in the sacrificial blue, and he dove.
2 Jeweled Skull paused.
Damn, I thought. No matter how cold-ass you are, losing a kids got to hurt. Here is the firestone and the wood, but where is the sheep for a burnt offering? Do I apologize again? Somehow it didnt feel right. Instead I said Id do whatever I could to make up for it.
He said,
You underneath me,
Would need to give more than your head,
More than twenty times twenty tunob of pain,
More than your ancestors children.
Sorry, I thought.
He said,
Also 8 Steamings sons jawboned themselves,
And 3 Fars son, the deer hunts following sun.
What this meantand it took me a minute to figure it outwas that the three bloods Id beaten up during the hunt had been so humiliated that each of them had poked a hole through his platysma musclejust behind his chinpushed a rope up through the hole, pulled it out through his mouth, tied it, and then tied the rope onto a tree or whatever and fallen backward, yanking off his own jawbone.
And as if that werent bad enough, he added that one Harpy blood had been killed and four were injured in my suicide attempt on the traverse. One of the injured bloods was crippled permanently and was asking to be killed.
There must have been porters hurt, too, I thought. But of course that wouldnt matter to him. I started to say that it wasnt I whod leapt down the slope but Chacal, but I stopped. 2JS already knew that, and it didnt matter. I still held responsibility for the event.
And even all that was nothing, he said, next to what you might call the religiopolitical damage. People were saying that Chacals scandalous screwup on the mul had made the Earthtoadess sick and had turned what should have been a little coughing spell into a guts-vomiting seizure. Today, couriers had come in from the coast with accounts of how huge the eruption in San Martín really was. As always, gloomy types were saying it was the end of the world.
Well, gee, I thought, maybe taking credit for the eruption in my speech on the mul actually hadnt been such a brilliant idea. Oh, well, they cant all be gems, right?
So, he said, coming to the end of his litany of woe, what can you offer to to compensate?
I still know some things that are going to happen
Like the Earthtoadesss seizure? he asked.
I said yes.
9 Fanged Hummingbird had already named that sun, two tunob ago.
Hell. Wasnt my prediction more accurate? I asked.
He said yes, and that hed used it to time the deer hunt to wind down at the right time. What else did I know? he asked. What would happen to the Harpy House after his death?
I had to say that we didnt know, but that as far as we could tell, Ix would be abandoned within twenty-five years. Or, at least, much of the irrigated land in the area would return to an uncultivated state, occupational residues and trash deposits would drop to near zero, and there wouldnt be any further stone buildings or monuments.
And what will happen to me after my death, in the next katun? he asked.
What? Oh, he means his head and skeleton. I said I didnt know. He didnt move, and the tone of his voice didnt change, but somehow you could tell he was losing patience fast. Shouldnt he already know these things? I wondered. I snuck a glance up at his face and was a little surprised at something I thought I saw. There was something in there behind the poker eyes, something almost maybe feeble, or rather pained, or even despairing. He asked about his intended heir, 17 Jog. As it turned out, this wasnt his other son but a favorite nephew whom hed sent away to Oxwitzá, that is, the site in Belize that in the twenty-first century would be called Caracol.
I said I didnt know, but I didnt recall the name turning up on any monuments. This isnt going well, I thought.
And will our descendants suckle us on our lights? he asked. He meant would they burn offerings to him and his family on their various anniversaries.
I started to talk about how there was still a generalized respect for the ancestors in what we would call traditional Maya communities, and how they do burn offerings on some of the same festivals, and whatever, but the more I said the less convincing it sounded. As far as specifics went, I started to say, your nameswell, frankly, by the end of the next baktun your name will probably be forgotten even by your own descendants, and your inscriptions, if any, will be covered up for sixty katunob until they get dusted off and mistranslated by a bunch of PhDed grave robbers. That is, unless I get back, I said, thinking of what seemed like a clever segue. In fact, I told him, we could even write down all his accomplishments and the history of his whole dynasty, and I could take it back with me and make sure my people made a fuss over him
He made an audible intake of breath. It was like saying, You have our permission to shut up.
I did.
He asked what was going to happen over the remaining 256 lights of this current tun.
10 Jade Smoke of Kan Ex will be seated on 4 Raining, 17 Ending, I said. Hell capture 2 Sparkstriker of Lakamha 23 lights after that. [Note to self: too many confusing names. Go back and explain what the hell is going on. Jed]
And how much smoke does that send my way? 2JS asked. That is, why should I care?
Maybe no smoke, I said. Damn. I was running out of A material. Maybe I should just the hell ask him about the Game. No, dont. Youre still on thin quicksand around here.
What else?
Hell. Come on, JD, think of something. Maybe just make something up. Then at least he wont have already seen it. Except, no, really, hes a pretty shrewd character. Dont try to fool somebody whos already proven himself to be sharper than you are. Just let him decide you can help out around the house. Okay.
I can help Harpy House prevail in any fight, I said. My Ixian sounded a little stilted, but at least now I was yacking away in it without having to think too much first. Look in Jeds memories for weapons.
What weapons? he asked.
I describ
ed explosions and said there had to be some in my memories. He seemed to understand. I explained how I could mix up gunpowder in less than twenty days of processing.
Instead of answering, 2 Jeweled Skull lit a cigar on a rushlight. He put a finger over one nostril and sucked in the smoke through the other.
If anyone saw a weapon like that, he said, if anyone even heard of it, theyd say we bought it from a scab caster.
Brian D'Amato Page 46
