My adder underneath me, 7 Prong, requests assistance from Old Salter, 2JS said.
It took me a minute to get what he meant, but basically Old Salter was one of the gods of the Game, and Old Salter, or Old Salters dust, was also the name of the drug. The thing to remember was that around here everything was personified. You wouldnt say rain is coming from the south, youd say Yellow Man Chac is coming. Corn was Fathermother 8 Bone and chocolate was Lord Kakaw. A dust devil was Little Hurukan and the fog was Lady Cowl. And they called the wind Mariah. Anyway, I signed Agreed. We chose numbers again. It was my turn to move first. I scattered and moved out.
7 Prong hesitated a bit before his first move. He seemed normal, except that his eyes were unfocused, or I suppose its more correct to say they were focused far away.
He moved. I moved. He moved. I moved. He hesitated and moved. Damn. He got my first number. I moved. He moved. I moved. He moved. He got my second number. I moved. He moved. I noticed there were lines of mucus trailing out of 7 Prongs nostrils and back over his cheeks, and snots a characteristic side effect of most psychedelics. He didnt wipe them away and, oddly, I wasnt grossed out to look at them. On the fortieth move I only had one number left and he still had four. There wasnt any point. I resigned.
Damn. What is that stuff? Old Salter, huh?
The guard lit a new set of rushlights. Even though I knew I was being impolite, I sat back a bit and recrossed my legs. They were stiff, but they were used to staying crossed for long periods and somehow they knew how not to get numb. Maybe because there was no weather in the earth-temperature air and almost no indication of time, I wasnt tired or hungry and barely even thirsty, even though wed been sitting here for what must have been at least three hours.
Okay, I thought. Tiebreaker.
I signed that I wanted to play another game.
2JS signed that it was all right with him. 7 Prong signed, Challenge accepted.
I looked at the two upside-down bowls. I looked at 2JS.
He looked back, knowing what I was thinking.
Speak, he signed. I guessed you had to ask for the stuff.
I under you beg to play with the assistance of Old Salter, I said.
2JS got a pinch of the brown powder out of his stash and dropped it on the board in front of me. It was less than half of the amount 7 Prong had gotten. I took some tobacco, chewed it up, scooped it out of my mouth, and kneaded it together with the powder. I was about to pop it into my mouth but 2JS caught me, putting his hand over mine.
Rub it into your thigh, he signaled.
Why? I wondered. 7 Prong did oral. Why cant I do oral? Maybe theyre short-shrifting me here. Well, go along with it.
I rubbed it into my thigh.
Old Salter is a hoary-green man, 2 Jeweled Skull said. You can recognize him by the spots on his cheek and the pack on his back. If he comes in a canoe, hell be sitting in the middle.
Uh, right. I gestured. Ill keep an eye out.
2JS put the first empty bowl down again and lifted up the other. I shivered a little for some reason. Even though the stuff hadnt gone into my mouth, I thought I could taste something, a sort of inhuman, synthetic flowery taste like you might remember from grape bubblegum or Shasta or Froot Loops or something. 2JS got some of the other stuff on his fingernailonly four or five grains, from what I could see in the rushlight, probably less than a tenth of the amount 7 Prong had snortedand held it up to me. Oh, well. I huffed the stuff upsomething at which I was an old proand sat back.
Nothing happened. I thought 2JS might give 7 Prong another blast, too, but maybe he was still flying on the same hit. Well, whatever.
It was 7 Prongs turn to go first. He scattered and moved. I scattered. I moved. He moved. I moved. He moved.
Hmm.
There was a salt taste at the corners of my mouth, and I realized that tickles of mucus were scrolling down on each of my cheeks. Its a common side effect of LSD and most other hallucinogensthat is, a running nose isbut whatever this stuff was, it didnt feel like a hallucinogen. In fact, it didnt feel like much of anything yet.
Yuck, I thought. Still, I didnt touch my face. I got the feeling that snot was a holy manifestation, a stigmata from the smokers of the Game. Maybe thats what some of those tattooed cheek scrolls meant. Snot, not blood. Hmm.
I realized that 7 Prong had moved a while ago. I looked down at the board. It was already pretty obvious where two of his three other numbers were. There was a wisp of something in the air between me and the board and I thought at first that it was a cobweb, but when I focused on it more closely I could see it was a shred of the smoke from 2JSs cigar, hanging motionless in the air. Better move, I thought. I picked up my pebbleexcept, no, my hand was still parked on my knee. I tried to move it and it didnt seem to budge, and for a moment I felt that terror of paralysis rising up in my stomach, but then I saw that my hand had moved, slightly, and was already an eighth of an inch or so off my knee, and was slowly edging toward the quartz pebble, which was about fifteen inches away on the right edge of my side of the board. I tried to move it faster, straining against what felt like gelled air, and it did pick up speed, traveling about an inch to the right in what seemed like about a minute and a half.
Huh.
Normally when youre playing a game, your own time slows down, so that you dont realize how long youve been there until, say, you notice its dark outside. But now the time around me had slowed down. Or, rather, the Old Salters dust was a chronolytic drug, something that sped up the synapses in the brain without giving you a seizure or making you confused or frantic or whatever. I blinked, and the brown darkness of my eyelids rolled down as slowly as a thick cloud front passing overhead. On the other hand, my thinking wasnt at all slower, in fact it seemed clearer. I did a few in-head calculations to check. Pretty soon I was sure about it, and not only that, but I was sure I had a huge amount of working memory available, more than Id had as Jed, which was a lot. When I looked at the board and thought about all the dates and contingencies stretching into the future, it felt as though I was standing under a waterfall of dice, and there was plenty of time to look around and pick one out and read it, and in fact to focus on any and all of them, and to memorize the positions of all of them as they fell past you, and to calculate how each of them would finally land.
Maybe this is it, I thought. Got to get this stuff back to the team. Although when Taro finds out, hell be disappointed. Hed wanted a mathematical answer, something he could teach LEON. Now it looks like its more of an intuition thing. Well, score one for wetware.
Eventually, I completed my move, and 7 Prong movedI watched one of his fingernails and it was like watching the moon fall across the skyand I managed to move again, and he started to move again, although by now I already knew what he was going to do, and I was getting a little bored and looking around the room, rolling my eyeballs slowly around in their sockets. I watched a puff of smoke extrude out of 2JSs nose like a starfish painstakingly inching its way out of a coral crevice. I watched the hair curling out of 7 Prongs face like spring leaves budding on a tree-covered mountain. I watched the flame of a rushlight swaying back and forth as slowly as a Rasta woman at a grounation. On the nineteenth move I plunked my pebble down onto 7 Prongs last number. He didnt even have time to resign.
Hot damn. Just give me a few dime bags of this stuff and Ill cruise back to Century 21 and I wont just track down that doomster, Ill solve the Hodge Conjecture, discover a perfect cuboid, and figure out how to retain formatting between different editions of Microsoft Word. No sweat. 7 Prong made a sign of submissionsort of like saying Congratulations, good gameand stood up slowly. His knees cracked like two hazelnuts. He teetered past me and out of the cave room. The flap of deerskin swished behind me. I was already feeling that sort of winners remorse that always comes over you when you really crush somebody. I noticed there wa
s no feeling in my legs, and I started to stand up myself, but there was a rushing in my ears like two fire-hoses spraying blood against the inside of my skull and a flux of nausea like a bile-filled balloon inflating in my small intestine, and I tipped over into softness. Someone was sprinkling water on my face, and when I got my eyes open I saw it was a guard. A different guard, not the deaf guard. I rolled my head to look around but there was a crack of pain in my neck and I had to give up. I moved a hand. Ouch. I was utterly stiff, the way you get if you take a lot of codeine and sleep for hours without moving. I realized three things: that Id blacked out, that a lot of time had passed, and that maybe, maybe, if I got that Old Salters dust stuff back to the folks in the last baktun, we really might have a chance.
[39]
The guard got me to drink some water. He massaged me in a rough waysomething Chacals body was used toand got me to the point where I could sit upright. Finally he gave me a sort of paste of unsweetened chocolate that you were supposed to lick out of a little cup. I did. Id guess it had about the same amount of caffeine as five espressos. 2 Jeweled Skull crouched into the room and sat on the other side of the game board, where 7 Prong had sat. He wore the same basic outfit as before, with the same chains of jade and spondylus shells, but he looked cleaned up. Maybe hed been in a sweatbath. I heard someone, another guard, probably, come in and sit behind me, but my manners were improving and I didnt look around.
So Old Salt came to you the first time, he said.
Yes, I clicked.
Thats a good sign. He said that most people didnt get much out of him the first time they met him. Like with most drugs, I thought. Except if that wasnt much, whats it like when you get used to it? I bet if I played LEON on that stuff Id be able to spot that doomster in no time. And Id only had a quarter dose, at most. Not that it hadnt nearly killed me anyway, but still.
2JS took a fresh cigar, lit it on a coal, and puffed on it. I watched. Suddenly, and astonishingly, he offered me one. I said the little ritual thanks. He said the little ritual dontmention-its. He lit it on the coals and handed it to me.
I had trouble lifting my hand to take it. Evidently part of the Old Salters dusts distinctive back end was a feeling like you were a victim of selective gravity, or like sixty pounds of miniature lead shot had been injected into your blood. Still, I did manage to grab the thing and get it into my mouthI know when in Rome, I thought, but I still wasnt into nasaland sucked in the smoke. It had a strong vegetal taste, with an overtone of chocolate and hints of mint, flint, and lint on the finish. Damn, thats good. Chacals body was hopelessly addicted.
Well, so maybe old 2JS was at least a bit impressed, I thought. I did pretty much blow away that 7 Prong character, didnt I? Except dont mention it, I thought. Dont insult his adder. Incompetent though the guy might be.
We had an eight-skull adder but he died, 2JS said, apparently reading my mind.
I didnt know what that was or what to say. Maybe it meant that his old adder could play with eight running stones. If that was true, he must have been pretty brilliant. Even though I didnt understand, I clicked, Understood.
7 Prong is a three-skull adder, 2JS said. Were working on getting a seven-skull, from Broken Sky. But supposedly the Macaw House has also made him an offer.
I clicked. So there was a competition between houses to attach the best adders. It was the same way when I grew up in Alta Verapaz; different villages tried to attract the best curanderos.
An inferior wasnt supposed to question a superior, but maybe I could risk it. Hes opening up to me, I thought. We have a special bond. Right?
And who do you above me believe is the best sun adder? I asked.
11 Whirling is the only nine-skull adder in Ix, he said. There are only thirty-one nine-skulls. From the declension it was clear that he meant that was all there were in the entire world. He said that 11 Whirling had been attached to the Ocelot House when he was a little boy, over sixty years ago, and that he was now legendarily powerful. In fact, 2JS said, he might be homing in on me as we speak. Sometime soon hed figure out that deer hunt had been a sham. And hed locate me in one of his Games, and the Ocelots would send a squad to capture me.
I asked why the Ocelots were still angry at usand I mentally stressed the usif wed made things up to them with the deer hunt. Right after I asked I regretted it. Thats either a stupid question or an annoying one, I thought. Watch it.
But if it bothered him, 2JS didnt show it. He said that for one thing, most of the Ocelots probably assumed that we had ruined the sacrifice on the mul on purpose. But the roots of the disagreement went way back. The Ocelots had been the leading family in Ix ever since it was founded on, supposedly, 9 Ahau, 3 Sip, 8.0.0.0.0.0. On that day, One Ocelot had claimed the water caves in his mountain and had divided the land around the mountain between his family and the ahaus of the other four high houses, including, supposedly, One Harpy.
Of course, even if that One Ocelot had really existed, 9 Fanged Hummingbird, the current ahau of ahauob, probably wasnt so directly descended from him as hed have everyone believe. Still, nobody was about to challenge his hereditary control of the sweet watersthat is, irrigation, and therefore pretty much all Ixian agricultureor his monopoly on slaves, which came from the fact that he was the only Ixian who could initiate warfare. The Ocelots also controlled the duties of the Ix collective, that is, the rituals and what you could call the priesthood. And they had monopolistic hunting rights in most places and on certain animals, the right to ask travelers for giftsthat is, to tax the roadsand the right to distribute the spoils of war, the sole right to deal in jade, and on and on. They owned one day out of every uinala month of twenty daysand five extra days out of every tun, the 360-day solar year. Most important of all, they had a monopoly on the Game drugs, which were indispensible and which armed Swallowtail Lineage couriers brought in once every four years from Mexico.
Great, I thought. So basically its still all about the narco trade.
2JS said there was also a second Game drug, one 7 Prong had never tried, called Old Steersmans dust. If you ever meet the Steersman, youll see that hes even older than Old Salter, he said. Hes so old that his skin is dark gray. He stands with a long paddle in the stern of the canoe. It sounded to me as though Old Salter was the personification of the chronolytic drug and Old Steersman was the god of some kind of presumably topolytic onethat is, not in the cellular-chemistry sense, but as in something that collapses ones sense of space. And, supposedly, the two drugs together had a synergistic effect. The adders say that when you have the two old men together, they throw so much lightning in your blood that its like in the days of our great-grandfathermothers, when they could see the entrails of stones.
Still, 2JS said, even with the monopoly on the Game drugs, the Ocelot house wasnt unassailable. It had become top-heavy over the last few katunob. There were too many Ocelot bloods with expensive lifestyles and not much to do. And theyd gotten poorer and poorer. Their new uayob are runts, 2JS said. It meant something like how, in the old days in Europe, they would have said their blood was thinning. For some reason the latest generations of royal-line Ocelots had tended to be subnormal, or stillborn, or something. 9 Fanged Hummingbird was a dwarf, and no one outside his immediate family had ever seen him unmasked. It cant have been because they were eating off lead plates, like the ancient Romans, but they were doing something wrong. And lately theyd mismanaged their estates and squandered resources on festivals and overblown building projects. At their last feast, for their victory in the rigged hipball game, theyd used, and then burned, the feathers of 40,800 green violet-eared hummingbirds, each of which was worth more than a month of slave labor. And that was only one type of feather out of twenty.
Meanwhile the Harpy House and the Macaw House, and to a lesser degree the Snuffler House, had gotten richer. Theyd or
ganized increasingly long-distance trade routes, from Sonora to as far south as Panama. 2JS ran the countrys chocolate trade like a vertical trust. The milperos who grew the cacao trees and harvested the beans were roundhouse thralls or dependents of his. The dozens of villages that husked, fermented, dried, and roasted themchocolate needs a lot of processingwere all headed by members of his extended family. The long-distance traders were blooded to him somehow. And even the goods that came back from abroad, like salt and obsidian-ware, got warehoused in one of 2JSs towns while he decided on the right market and the right time to sell.
Lately the Harpy House had become the Ocelots major creditor, and like other royals around the world, the Ocelots were perennially defaulting. Although he didnt put it that way, of course. The closest thing you could say in Ixian was that the Ocelots were becoming unwelcoming. That is, they werent reciprocating gifts. Instead of giving away any of their core wealth, like some of the water rights, theyd simply dug in. 9 Fanged Hummingbird had started demanding greeting gifts, that is, extra tariffs, from goods that barely even crossed over the Ocelots roads.
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