Brian D'Amato

by In the Courts of the Sun

  And of course, he said, the adders in Teotihuacan had fresh dust each peace season, and that was why they’d been able to safeguard the city so well for so long. They could see threats coming from a long way away, both in space and in time. But it wouldn’t last much longer.

  2 Jeweled Skull paused. And when he paused, he really paused. Even though he was bare-chested under all his bling, you couldn’t see him breathe.

  I sat. I took a long drag. Damn, that’s strong. Whew. Well, that’ll turn you upside down, shake the change out of your pockets, and spend it on Night Train.

  “I under you have a question,” I said. “Is it true that the last sun of Teotihuacan hasn’t yet been named?”

  He said not so far as he knew. “But I can see in your worm,” he said, “that the city will not last another two k’atunob.”

  I clicked.

  “When the empire is gone, the Ocelots will suffer,” 2JS said. “Still, it will be too late for us.”

  No kidding, I thought. I only had about seven months left before my brain turned into Fluffernutter.

  There was another of those insufferable pauses. My legs were going numb despite their training. Maybe I should ask for another shot of something.

  “You over me, why was there stoning around Star Rattler’s house?”

  He said he didn’t know exactly. But the problem went back a long way. Star Rattler was the greatest of a class of beings who weren’t just not human, but who weren’t even related to any ancestors. I suppose you could call them gods, but that doesn’t get the distinction. The ancestors were gods, too, and so were important living people. In fact, as somebody once said, everything was full of little gods. Maybe a better word for the Rattler—and for the Earthtoadess, the four Chacs, and a bunch of lesser critters like mountains and lakes—would be “elementals.” Each one had a shrine and sucklers and followers in every major town. But right now, in 664, the Rattler’s cult was growing faster than any of the others.

  And, as you probably know, it continued to grow. Later on, Von Humboldt called the Rattler the Maya Dragon. Morley called it the Feathered Serpent and Salman Rushdie called it the Snakebird. The Rattler’s Yucatec name, Kukulkan, became pretty well-known, and its Nahuatl name, Quetzalcoatl, became so famous it’s even a character in Warcraft.

  Since the Rattler’s body was the Milky Way itself, its offering societies weren’t connected with any single house or color. Theoretically, they embraced all of them. So there was an internationalism associated with the cult that made it a bit of a subversive element. Even so, it still had royal support. In Ix, and I suppose in any Maya city, any person of substance would be a member of several temple societies besides his own ancestors’, and certainly all the Ixian greathouses donated to the Rattler. Star Rattler’s mul in Ix was small, but it was old, well-groomed, and rich.

  But in Teotihuacan the Rattler was an especially big deal. And it was an increasing annoyance to older entrenched interests. Supposedly—and the news was delayed by about twenty days—the Rattler’s children were pledging more and more oblationers, that is, followers, every day. The two great Teotihuacano synods—who owned the two giant pyramids, the ones the Aztecs would later call the Pyramid of the Sun and the Pyramid of the Moon—still allowed the cult to operate, but they’d been increasing restrictions on it, and apparently that was what had set off the riot. After that, the forty Rattler adderesses had basically become political prisoners, under permanent house arrest in their compound at the south end of the city.

  Hmm, I thought.

  “Is the Lady Koh loyal to the Ocelots?” I asked.

  There was another pause. It stretched out and out, like scamorza cheese out of a hot pizza. Suddenly 2JS laughed. It was the first time I’d heard him laugh, and it was such a charming, Santa Claus chuckle, and I started laughing myself.

  She was more closely related to the Ocelots, he said. On the other hand, they had sent her off to Teotihuacan when she didn’t want to go.

  Hmm. Maybe she missed the tropics, I thought. Most people from the tropics who aren’t in the tropics miss the tropics.

  Yeah. Maybe the thing was to try an indirect approach, to come at the Ocelots from outside.

  Okay, Jedster. Go for it. He’s got to feel you can really do something, something essential, something that could bail us all out. Otherwise, why keep you alive? And he can’t get away. But you can.

  I suggested to Ahau 2 Jeweled Skull that maybe I underneath him should visit Teotihuacan.

  [40]

  At the ninth of the orchids—that is, the first watch of the night, just after sundown—2 Jeweled Skull presented me to the Harpy 11 Viper Caravan Society. It was a new organization—or you might call it a new brotherhood or even a new corporation—that had been created ostensibly for an unscheduled trade run, with the real purpose of getting me to Teotihuacan.

  We sat on feather mats on the burned-over peak of a low conical hill that was sheltered between two higher folds of the sierra. We were still close enough to Cacao Town—which was what they called 2JS’s capital village—that there was a whiff of chocolate in the air. I faced southeast. The nineteen other blood members of the society—bloods usually traveled in k’atob, that is, vingtaines, companies of twenty—sat facing me in a semicircle with their legs and arms crossed. Much later, the Oglala Sioux in the cast of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West would sit in a similar way, and it would come to be called “Indian style.” But when these people sat, it wasn’t just sitting. It was a state of compact readiness, like a compressed volute spring. 2 Jeweled Skull—the Bacab of the East, Fathermother of the Harpy House, Torturer of Jed “Chump” DeLanda, and All-Around Big Chalupa—sat next to me, on my male, right, side. 3 Blue Snail, the dwarf cantor, waddled in front of him arranging bundles on an offering mat. He spoke in his wise-child voice:

  “All of us underneath him hear:

  Our carver,

  Our Fathermother,

  Modeler, dissolver,

  2 Jeweled Skull

  May speak to us.

  We listen,

  Below him

  We wait crouching,

  We attend.”

  2 Jeweled Skull said:

  “I one address you many next to me.”

  And everyone except me answered:

  “We underneath you answer you above us.”

  “Will you accept this gift,

  Take on this burden?”

  2 Jeweled Skull asked. His voice wasn’t louder than anyone else’s, but it seemed to carry farther and to echo back from distant invisible cliffs. I’d known he was famous as an orator, but until now I hadn’t understood why.

  There was a pause for the bloods to examine me. I stared at them. Making and holding eye contact was a martial art around here. If you did it, you had to be ready to fight. They stared back. Hun Xoc and his younger brother 2 Hand sat together at the far right of the line. They’d been Chacal’s first and second backcourt men, and they were the ones who’d looked out for me in the deer hunt. Hun Xoc and 2 Hand were two of only four people in the caravan who knew, roughly, what had happened, that is, that I’d been Chacal and now I was somebody else. The other bloods had seen Chacal play, but they hadn’t seen him close up, and so far, none of them seemed to suspect anything. The old dude on their left was named 18 Dead Rain. He was our Steward of Burdens, which was like the chief financial officer. He was chubby, smooth-skinned, and apparently good-natured. The schlep on his right was the remembrancer, a different one from the one 2JS had in his cave. He was a short, slight guy with bulgy eyes and monkey markings. Then on the extreme left there was a wiry character, with receding eyes and sun-stretched skin, named 12 Cayman. He was 2JS’s niece’s husband’s brother and his main title was Steward of Long Things. It basically meant “master of arms,” like the war leader, and he was also the nojuchil, or company captain. He had unattractive snaggle teeth and two lumps on his shoulder where bits of flint points were still embedded in his flesh. The sides of his torso were dotted with memorial tattoos for a high-ranked brother killed in a raid on Motul. There was a r
umor that he could see in pitch darkness because his grandfather had been a badger. He was the oldest one in the group. Then, on his right, there was a lesser blood in oblationer’s colors named Hun Aat, or just Aat, that is, “Penis,” who was an acolyte to 3 Blue Snail. He was the fourth person who knew about the Chacal thing. He’d be our ritualist and official sun adder. How much does he know about the Game? I wondered. Probably not even as much as 7 Prong. God, what a bunch of losers. Okay, who else … damn, this moment-of-silence bit’s going on a little long, isn’t it? Maybe they’re really going to come up and start poking me and find something wrong and reject me. This whole thing’s dead in the water. Hell, hell, hell, and—

  Suddenly the bloods spread their right hands over their left shoulders in an extended salute and spoke, almost in unison:

  “We underneath you,

  We do not deserve this gift,

  But we will cherish it,

  We will look after him.”

  Whew, I thought. Glad we’ve got that straight.

  “So then, now these are

  Your own elder brothers

  Your own younger brothers.”

  2 Jeweled Skull said to me,

  “Follow them, serve them,

  Don’t weaken, don’t shame me.”

  I answered:

  “I underneath you

  Will pass their tests.”

  “You are accepted. We’re finished,”

  2JS declared.

  I stood and turned 360 degrees counterclockwise, offering myself to each of the five directions, and then crouched to the ground, with both hands on my forehead, submitting to my family. The Steward of Long Things walked forward first and presented me with my blowgun. Thanks, just my size. Next I got a fresh, mint-scented stalking wi’kal, which was kind of a midlength cloak made of quilted cotton. Everybody wore them when it got cold. The word poncho doesn’t quite get it, because they’re round or octagonal, and the slit goes all the way to the edge, but the word cloak sounds like there would be a bit of tailoring to it and maybe a hood. Well, I’m going to call them mantas. Mine had a red-and-black border of interlocking talons, like the rest of the Harpy bloods’. Its core was some kind of bamboo, but it was wrapped in deerhide thongs woven into my name and genealogy signs. The steward’s main carver had been awake for two days getting it ready. After that each of the remaining bloods stepped up and gave me something—a pair of complicated rubber-soled sandals, a pair of ear spools, a network of deerskin straps and harnesses, a black right-wrist cuff, a string of twenty blowgun darts with their tips stuck in baby pinecones for safety, a traveling mask, a jar of skin poison, a jar of oral poison, a pouch for my nonsacred personal stuff, a pouch for my sacred personal stuff, a plain blanket, everything but a quetzal in a prickly pear tree. Finally, 2 Jeweled Skull gave me a spear with an eagle-feathered ferrule cushion, which meant that in addition to being a blowgunner I was also a member of his family guard. A pair of bearers entered the circle, hoisted 2 Jeweled Skull up on their shoulders, turned him through the four terrestrial directions, and then started off down the hill to the east. As soon as they got out of eyeshot, we were free to go. The bloods stood and arranged themselves. My acolyte came up to me and hunched his body into a ball, which was like kowtowing. It was the first time I’d seen him, but I knew that his provisional name, until he became a blood, was Armadillo Shit. He was thirteen years old. Maybe I should call him a squire instead of an acolyte—except that makes it sound like I was something like a knight or samurai myself already, and I really wasn’t. Not yet. Maybe I should just call him my personal assistant, except that doesn’t get how much he was like an altar boy. Well, actually, I guess I’m kind of embarrassed to call him what we really called him and the other acolytes. But I suppose since we’ve made it together this far, I’ll just spill it, so to speak. They were called a’anatob, “fellators.” The reason is that when you were on a raid, or hunting or whatever, you weren’t supposed to have sex with anyone or anything because it could deplete your manly whateverness, and, even worse than that, the smell of it could tip off your enemies’ prowling uays and, even worse than that, if you left semen lying around in strange orifices, your enemies might find it and use it to cast scabs on you. However, most of the bloods you’d have on raids or hunts, or on caravans, which, ritually speaking, were the same as hunts, were men between the ages of fourteen and twenty. So you can imagine the rule was tough to enforce. And so, every so often, the interns had to take care of our carnal appetites. That way we’d keep everything in-house, as it were. It’s one of those Secrets of the Warrior Lodge kindsa things.

  Whew. Well, I’m glad that’s off my chest.

  Anyway, Armadillo Shit packed up all my new loot, right down to the earspools. 12 Cayman signed for everyone to stand. The bloods saluted the directions of their ancestors’ villages and I copied them, feeling first-day-of-high-school self-conscious, and followed them through a makeshift ceremonial gate.

  Without any discussion we trooped down from the crest of the hill to its flat eastward shoulder. The line of nonbloods—what you might call the support staff—stood packed and ready on a freshly watered path, in marching order:

  • Six forerunners, or advance scouts

  • Four snake watchers, who carried big brushes like leaf rakes, watering gourds, and rattles

  • A pair of formal messengers with long wooden flutes strapped over their shoulders, like heralds

  • Four flank scouts

  • Ten dedicated bearers with empty wicker back racks, like big yuppie toddler carriers

  • Nine porters in charge of the three big travois sleds

  • Five individual porters, each with a big cylindrical basket on his back held by a tumpline across his forehead. They carried emergency backups in case we lost the sleds

  • Two brothers from a strange little clan with an incomprehensible language whose hereditary job was carrying, buying, purifying, and distributing drinking water

  • One masticator, that is, someone between a taster, a chef, and an apothecary

  • Two dog handlers, each in charge of fifteen fat food/pillow dogs and ten hunting/watchdogs

  • Four people from a very low caste whom I’ll call groomers. Or maybe “scareflies” is a better word, since their main job was to keep bugs away

  • A tailor or valet

  • A sandal maker

  • A mask steward, who was in charge of all regalia, not just masks

  • Two armorers, or spear smiths, in the service of 12 Cayman

  • A fire wrangler with his flints and drills and a basket of hot coals

  • A separate sandaler for the nonbloods

  • A separate cook for the nonbloods

  • Four people whom one might call untouchables. Two were nightsoil collectors with their twenty dogs. The dogs’ only job was to eat our excrement so that enemies couldn’t get it and use it in curses. The other two humans were nacamob, sacrificers, standing apart from the rest of the line like a pair of crows waiting for a flock of red vultures to vacate a carcass. They would do any killing if necessary and also handle dead bodies. The four of them, and their porters, if any, would follow either in a separate boat or forty paces behind us and a little to the side, so they wouldn’t pollute our path.

  • Nine outrunners, or scouts. Four of them were stalkers and the other five were what we called “four-light couriers,” that is, specially skilled stealth runners who’d have the task of bringing the Game drugs and information back to 2JS from Teotihuacan. Supposedly they were able to run for four solid days and nights, with two of them carrying a spare sleeping courier on their backs, although I was sure this was an exaggeration.

  • Finally, there was a rear guard of four. Three would drop back in stages and watch for tails. The other would stay closer to the line to make sure no one had dropped anything, not even a hair bead. He’d also sprinkle chili pepper behind us to eradicate our trail, ceremonially and to some extent olfactorily.

  So the total was 120 heads, not counting the dogs. So there were five lower
-caste supporters to each blood. Which actually wasn’t quite first-class around here. But 2JS wanted enough of a squad to hold off attackers and let me escape, but not enough of an army to look threatening.

  There was a pause. The ranks tightened.

  18 Dead Rain signed something. The nineteen bloods and I—or I guess I should proudly say “we twenty bloods”—slipped into our places in the middle of the line, with 12 Cayman in the lead and the second-lowest-ranked blood at the end. I was the lowest-ranked blood, but I was breaking protocol by traveling in the middle of the body, with Hun Xoc ahead of me and 2 Hand behind. Our twenty-one acolytes formed up behind us.