De todos modos. I thought. Lets blow this joint and get on with the plan. We take the golden road to Tamoan.
12 Cayman gave the first outrunner a sign. He ran off ahead. Noiselessly and without any fuss the line woke into motion and slid forward like a maglev train gliding out of the station without even a hiss of steam. The dogs trotted along without a yip. Even the yearlings wouldnt think of barking unless theyd been told they were on watch. With only a few creaks from the sleds and a squeak or two from one of our two hundred and forty oiled sandals, we headed northeast down a series of stepped ridges into a cultivated valley. The pace was a sort of near jog. Actually we could go faster, but we needed to look normal. Hup, I thought. Hup. No problem. Hup.
The path ran along the male side of a nearly dry streambed, and every forty arms we had to step over an irrigation ditch that branched off toward another newly burned-over milpa, a charred rectangle gasping for rain. Then there would be two fallow milpas from previous seasons, and then another burnt one, sometimes with the skeleton of a temporary granary just under construction. Some of the burnt fields were still smoldering, but the trees in the bands of sericulture orchards running between the milpas still had all their leaves, and there werent any signs that the fires had gotten out of control. The word was that the burning had gone off without any major accidents in any of the Ixian Harpy villages. It was a huge good omen and a sign that, despite his problems, 2JS was still running a tight ship.
And it looked like we were getting out of town, all right. And I felt good. Maybe things were looking up. And at least we had a plan, or at least an outline of a notion of a plan. As soon I got set up in Teotihuacan, somehow Id get an audience with Lady Koh. 2JS and I had agreed that I wouldnt tell her who I really wasthat is, nothing about Jed, which she wouldnt believe anyway, and not even anything about Chacal, if I could help it. Instead Id try to come up with something short of that that would still get her attention. Then Id convince her that I had special information about the imminent end of Teotihuacan and that she should let us spirit her out of the city. As theyd say in the law-enforcement and espionage industries, Id try to flip her. Then, as soon as she got us the components of the Game drugs, and as soon as Id taken notes on how to make it, Id send all that stuff back to 2JS with a team of four-light couriers. In return 2JS would bury a sealed stone box with a sample of the drugs and my notes on the Game. The box would be in the center of a cross of magnetic iron so that Marenas team could find it. And at that point Id be able to consider my mission as basically accomplished. The data would get back to 2012, and the Chocula team would upgrade the Game and spot the Doomster, and the world would get on track and everybody would ride off into the Blu-ray sunset.
Everybody but me, that is. Id still be stuck back here. However, that was why there was a phase 2. As I made my way back to Ix, 2JS would be using his Game-drug manufacturing operation as a bargaining chip. If he controlled the supply, all the nine-stone adders in the world would have to come to him. Also, he said, if he had a more potent batch of the stuff, 7 Prong might be able to compete with the Ocelots adder, 11 Whirling. I wasnt so sure about that, since I didnt think 7 Prong was all that talented. Maybe 2JS meant even 7 Prong would be able to etc. Anyway, if 2JS managed to set himself up as kalomte, or at least neutralize the threat from the Ocelots, and if I got back in time, then wed do basically the same thing as before. But wed use a bigger and more elaborate stone box this time, since my whole body would be going along.
Of course, I wasnt quite clear on why 2JS thought I might be able to pull it all off. Except that maybe once I was out of Ix, and less restrained in what I could do, Id be able to use my Otherness to advantage. I supposed 2JS figured Id made it this farback here, that is, and even into his headso he might as well give me a chance. And he knew I was highly motivated. Other than getting the stuff back to 2012, I didnt have other personal ambitions here, because I wasnt even going to live for very long. And I didnt have anywhere else to go. He owned me. Besides
what was that?
My eyes flicked automatically from side to side, like a deers ears, scanning for movement. Just squirrels in the branches. A nightjar whirred. The path shrunk to a trail. By now we were away from any real villages but still in what I guess we can call one of the Harpy bloods hunting preserves. The trail became more and more twisted, curling close around gigantic trunks. Even Chacals eyes could hardly see anything in the starlight, but my feet automatically found the spots where the others had stepped before me. Anyone trailing us wouldnt be able to tell how many of us there were. Not from the tracks, anyway. And anybody out in the jungle, a trapper, a smuggler, or a spy, say, who wasnt right next to the trail, would hardly hear a thing. Hup. Hup. I could feel crushed carrycillo grass through the layers of deerhide, reed matting, and rubber in my stiff new sandals. We passed three tiny villages, all of them our own. After the third, Hun Xoc dropped back and took me out of the line. Two of the junior bloods, out of five who were my size and dressed just like me for safety, that is, my safety, did the same thing. Hun Xoc whispered to me that my knees still needed to heal where the calluses had been sanded off. I said they were all right. He touched the right one. It was oozing. He signed to the bearers. Four of them stepped out of the line and knelt down. The four of us, that is, including Hun Xoc, climbed into the little seats, with our legs around the bearers waists. My bearer stood up, got his arms over my knees, pressed them to his sides, dashed forward, found my previous place in the line, and fell into step.
About eighteen miles from our starting point the route turned northward, down out of the highlands into uncultivated bush, and tunneled into a wall of black foliage. There was a rushing sound up ahead, the snoring of Great-Uncle Yellow Road, who led north to the brine desert and the white edge of the world.
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We filed downhill into a black valley filled with the rivers negative-ion energy. The line slowed and bunched. I was a jade bundle, that is, something to be protected, so five of the bloods clustered around me, but between their bodies I could just make out the boatmens huts silhouetted against a gray belt of water, the river that would later be called the Río Sebol, which was now called the Kanbe, the Yellow Road. It was less than thirty arms across here, just a bit above its winter low, and it looked barely navigable, but there were at least forty small ten-man canoes stacked on the near bank. In less than three minutes the menials had unlaced the cargo bales, gotten them off the sleds, wrapped them in rubberized cloth, and, taking directions from the boatmen, loaded them into the hulls. There wasnt even a single torch anywhere. But I figured they could all probably do the whole operation blindfolded anyway.
Our porters collapsed the sleds. We got ourselves out of our sandals. 12 Cayman offered a bundle to a big rock that held part of the rivers uay ; the boatmen guided the rest of us into the canoes. The bloods were in the last five, except for the two rearguard boats that would follow ten boat lengths behind. Each canoe had eight passengers, four bloods and their attendants sitting between the boats owner, who stood with a long pole, on a projecting board in the prow, and the steersman in the stern. They put me in the second-to-last boat, the safest position. When I stepped in, the hull gave under my feet. It wasnt wooden but woven, or rather bundled, out of rushes. There was that old sensation of state change you get when you shift into the floating world with its different physical laws, and wed already pushed off downstream. The stars faded as clouds came over and we were in that scarier sort of woolly darkness. Even so, the boatmen didnt light the prow torches and just kept poling us along by feel and the occasional glimmers of foxfire fungus and glowworm beetles. Tapetal eyes blinked between invisible tree trunks, monkeys, kinkajous, and owls, or even, one imagined, jaguars. We passed through aural mountains of tiny clicks that I realized were the sound of caterpillars chewing leaves, through zones where chitin rasps of a hundred kinds of orthoptera drowned ou
t all other sounds, and through belts of the innumerous grunts of wo frogs, like hordes of ancient diesel tractor engines straining, unsuccessfully, to start, a sound that in my own, that is, Jeds, childhood, had the same cheerful meaning it had now: RAIN SOON, and which, come to think of it
That was it. That was the thing that had been missing from the soundscape back in 2012, when I was here with Marena.
They couldnt all have died out, I thought. Could they?
I suppose they could have. Those polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons are pretty heavy shits. Damn.
And even with all the noise Chacals ears could also tell that something wasnt quite right. Maybe it was a little too noisy. Or maybe the tone was wrong. Maybe it was that there werent any owls. Owls are pretty smart, I thought. They know the eruptions messed something up, weatherwise.
And the other bloods feel it, too, dont they? There was a stiffness in their pace that shouldnt be there … and its not just me. And its not just the political stress. Everyone really is a little more on edge than usual. Seismic activity makes critters nervous. Temblors. Giants in the earth these days.
As the river widened we passed other parties of canoers, some with rushlights on their prows, and before dawn wed already blended into a stream of commercial traffic. We set a fast pace and passed dozens of other boats. Sometimes I could hear 12 Cayman, in the second vanguard boat, shouting at fishermen to get their traps out of the center channel. Just before dawn the Yellow Road merged with the Gray Road, that is, the later Río San Diego, at a town called Always Roaring Place, whose ruins would much later be known as Tres Islas. Like Tyre, the little city had overgrown its peninsula and new buildings rose directly out of the water. I got an impression of perpetual fire in the eyes of the little mulob and of sweepers clearing a treeless market plaza lit by high torches like streetlamps. At daylight the water was the color and texture of worn battleship linoleum and the banks were a monotonous scroll of avocado-green sapote orchards and half-woven halach yotlelob, that is, raised granaries or drying sheds. At the second thirteenth of the day the river merged with the wider and faster Ayn Be, the Crocodiles Road, which would be called the Río Pasión. There was a glimpse of a city called Chakha, Red Water, which would be El Ceibal, a hunched white mound of palaces and storehouses stacked over a hill like a heap of sugar cubes, so that you couldnt tell what was construction and what was cut out of live stone, and then it was gone as the river doubled back south. Just as we heard whitewater ahead the boatmen beached us on a paved bank and a team of porters unloaded and raised the canoes over their heads and jogged off down the towpath. As the bearers lifted me out and rushed me after them, I got a glimpse of the falls between huts and pilings, oddly regular cataracts over smooth white platforms of encrusted lime. Hun Xoc said they were sacrificial stairs, which the mud babies had built during the third sun. We shot through a Class II rapids onto what we called Great Uncle Howlers White Road, which would later be the Río Usumacinta.
They call the Usumacinta the Maya Nile. But the Nile flows fairly straight, through flat deserts, and it floods them and recedes more or less on schedule. The Usumacinta twists around mountains and through gorges and then widens and slows as it eases through the lowlands in long looped meanders. Even so, in a country without wheels or horses or even llamas, it was the only game in town.
Dawn oozed up in a greasy, saturated mauve. The color meant that it wasnt ordinary clouds over us. It was ash from San Martín. At the second thirteenth of the day, PaChan, Broken Sky, that is, Yaxchilán, appeared on our female side. The city covered a bluff in the center of an oxbow, so, like Constantinople, it was circled by water on three sides and fortified on the fourth. Palace façades fronted the river to advertise the wealth of their clans and five flights of wide pilgrimage stairs zigzagged up the main hill to a fivemul acropolis. Its a perfect site because foreigners could pass close-up and get the full tour from the oxbow, but they couldnt very easily attack from the water. It was still too swift here to land easily, even if there were any good landings, and even if someone did try it, they could throw nets across the river above and below the invaders and lock them in.
We rounded the last curve of the hill and drifted under the halach be, the great suspension bridge, two immense square piers thirty-six feet across at the base and sixty feet high, with a six-hundred-foot roadway and a two-hundred-three-foot span in the middle. Currently, in 664, it was the longest suspension bridge in the world, and nothing this long would be built in Europe until they finished the Charles Bridge, in Prague, in 1377. Just in front of the bridge there was a row of forty naked captives along the paved bank, hung on poles like yellow scarecrows. Or rather, I saw as we got closer, it was just their stuffed skins. That is, the skins included the hands and feet, but the heads were fake, maybe made of gourds, and they were yellow because theyd been cured in latex. Their limbs were plump and inarticulate, like sausages. I guessed they were stuffed with corn silk. Hun Xoc said four of them were Vampire Bat House bloods from Ix, whod been taken in a botched raid six years ago. As he was talking, our lead boat edged up to the shore and one of 12 Caymans men leaped out. He waded to the embankment, climbed up three tiers of pilings, ran across the square to the vampire dudes, added one of our bundles to the mound of offerings at their feet, and, just as it looked like we were going to leave him behind, jumped into our last canoe. Our other bloods gave him a big whistle, the equivalent of a cheer. Show-off.
As we passed into the shadow of the bridge there seemed to be snow around us. I looked up. The roadbed fifty feet above us was ten feet wide, supported by a double set of ropes that looked about six inches thick. People were just standing up there, watching the hundreds of boats, a line of men and, unusually, a cluster of unmarried greathouse women. One of the women was shaking a basket of the white stuff down in a long swirl over the river traffic. Hun Xoc leaned precariously far over the gunwale, caught one of the flakes, and ate it for luck. It was popcorn.
On our male side the buildings grew in size and finish until I realized we were looking at Yaxchiláns greatest rival, Yokib. They also called it the princess of the jewel cities, and much later it would be called Piedras Negras. Yokib meant Entrance or Threshold, and there was supposed to be a cave there that led straight to the main hipball court of Xibalba, the Underworld. Yaxchilán was a peach city, and Ix was turquoise, but Yokib was yellow and in fact, it was all a horribly intense yellow, almost exactly a Bloxx Cadmium Yellow Light, banded with black so that even in the diffuse ashy light the city was hard to look at, a geometricized valley of flickering moirés, like it had been painted by Bridget Riley. The main mul was pure yellow, a steep fin thrusting out of the shimmer, with workers crawling around on it polishing the stucco like paper wasps resurfacing their combs. Supposedly the latest shell of the pyramid had been built a katun ago, when the city had eradicated two of its rival towns and taken thousands of captives, with lime made from the captives ground-up bones, like the Palace of Mud and Blood at Dahomey. I counted fifty-four heads on display at the river gate. It wasnt a huge number, and also they looked so fresh that I figured they were wooden fakes. Then, as we passed them, I saw that the older ones, on the lower racks, were wrinkling. So they were real, but theyd been cleaned, salted, stretched over clay forms, oiled, and cosmeticized, and probably covered when it rained. Their names and capturing dates had been tattooed on their foreheads, probably while they were still alive, and their sewn lips had been puffed out somehow to look lifelike. Their eyeballs had been replaced with plain white stones, so they seemed to stare at you. Probably their brains and tongue and whatever had been pulled out from the bottom so they wouldnt rot. At least they werent all scroggy like those guys back at Sky Place. Or, for that matter, the ones they used to leave out breeding maggots on Temple Bar until 1746.
Outside of the portages we didnt stop, not even for water. Vendors canoes came up alongside us and we shopped as we
moved. Our nightsoil collectors poured our urine over the side and fed the excrement to the dogs. They seemed to like it. Maybe they were some special type with an inbred fetish. Then later on the collectors would bundle the dogs feces in elephant-ear leaves and hand them to local nightsoil men who came up alongside in boats surrounded by clouds of dung flies. Our outrunners dashed ahead along the towpaths, making sure there was a full crew waiting at the next rapids. In the twenty-first century people are always like, Oh, theres no time anymore, modern life is so fast-paced, not like in the old days before cell phones or TV or whatever, but if Ive ever learned one thing about the past, its that it wasnt any more leisurely than the present. Not if you were one of the paranoid elite, anyway, rushing to get your act together before someone else took you out. And deadlines were always deadlines. As I think I mentioned somewhere, there was going to be a solar eclipse on what wed call May 1. 2JS had said the Teotihuacano would probably close the borders five days before that, on 6 Death, 14 Stag, which was only twenty-two days from today. On that day the entire population of Greater Teotihuacan would start observing a silence, and nobody would get in or out of the valley until after the sun was back on track. Speaking of whichcontrary to popular beliefeclipses werent something only the elite knew about. Word had gotten out, and when the day came around, everybody and his greatfathermother was ready for action. The city would be packed. Although it sounded like it would be more of a vigil, or a wake, than a festival.
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