Brian D'Amato

by In the Courts of the Sun

  Anyway, the point is that when 2JS had said we’d get to Teotihuacan in twenty-seven days, I’d thought it was major wishful thinking. I mean, it was 658 miles, for God’s sake. If you were a crow. By car it would have been about 1,250 miles, and that was on mainly modern highways. And now not only didn’t we have cars, but we didn’t even have wheels. And the nearest horse was in Ireland. I’d remembered something about how Napoleon’s army in Austria covered 275 miles in twenty-three days, and at the time that was considered a miracle. On the other hand, an army doesn’t have relays of porters. Each of those poor French grunts had to cover every inch on his own feet. And no matter how hard the emperor drove them, they had to camp every night for at least a little while. It looked like we were going to be moving day and night, and sleeping, drinking, eating (mainly raw river snails, turkey jerky, and ch’anac, a kind of solidified corn gruel mixed with dog blood), delousing, defecating, and gods know what else all on our bearers’ backs. Supposedly the relays of Inca runners could get a message from Cuzco to Quito, in Ecuador, in less than five days, and that’s about a thousand miles. Right? Although they were faster. But still, if an expert hiker with a small pack can make twenty miles per day, figure that if we kept getting fresh porters we could make fifty. And then on the water … well, twenty miles per day is really outstanding for a canoe trip. But that’s with a two-person canoe, and a longer one’ll go faster. So if we have fresh paddlers coming in from shore, say we might also make almost fifty miles per day, even on the ocean. So to be on the safe side, let’s say we have to cover 1,600 miles, then maybe our schedule wasn’t quite impossible. Assuming no weather or whatever delays. Although it still sounded a little tight. But these guys did this all the time, I thought. Right? And anyway, 2JS wouldn’t have any reason to bullshit me about something like that. Maybe we had a shot.

  At a city called Where They Boiled 3 Tortoise—it would later be Ruinas Aguas Calientes—we passed our first enemy caravan. The town was a glut of multitiered complexes on both banks, with two rope bridges over us and an odd ruling-clan mul on our female side that had been covered with half-height wooden dolls. I guess they were offerings for a specific festival, but they were all elaborately carved and dressed and in a riot of colors, so that the place had an almost Tamil feeling of visual overload. A chain of large, ornate canoes was idling at a sort of ghat below the mul, and Hun Xoc said that the yellow and green on their streamers meant they were nephews of K’ak Ujol K’inich, the ahau of the Jaguar House of Oxwitzá, that is, Caracol, who’d been in a constant state of vendetta with the five greathouses of Ix for over four k’atunob.

  Word came down the line that our paddlers should stick to their pace and that everyone should pretend not to see the Oxhuitzob’ unless they saluted us first.

  So far we’d exchanged some sort of greeting with everyone we’d passed. Our boatmen hailed people they knew, sometimes effusively and sometimes with just a slight raise of the right shoulder, the equivalent of a nod. Evidently our trade party was a regular occurrence, just a little off-season and unusually hurried.

  But the Jaguar boats did signal to us, and we slowed and edged over to them like we’d been planning to acknowledge them all along. In the shallows our boatmen turned their extra-long paddles around and used them as poles. I could feel the bloods in our canoe stiffen, and Hun Xoc’s hand drifted an inch toward the roll of blowguns and maces he had tied under the gunwale. It’s nothing, I thought. They had peace perfume out and so did we. That is, each boat had a little animal figurehead, a prow godling, lashed to a short bowsprit, with threads of incense streaming from its nostrils. Burning cakes of acacia gum and powdered tobacco told everyone you were coming without any violent agenda. As we got closer I could pick out their leader in the last boat. He had a high cat headdress, a blackened body, and a whitened face, and he scanned us with deep eyes. I and the five bloods who were duplicating me were wearing wide conical straw hats like Vietnamese nonlas, and I tried to angle my head down without breaking posture. Chacal had played against the Agouti Hipball Society of Oxwitzá, and won. Some of these cats must have seen the game.

  It’s going to be fine, I thought. Nobody’s going to make you out of context. Like most hipball players Chacal had both played and accepted awards wearing an animal helmet that more than half masked his face. Even the best figurines of him were vague, likenesswise. And what with the hair extensions, the lack of ball calluses, the new tats and body mods, and the fact that I’d lost so much weight nobody’d think I’d ever been a hipball player at all, no outsider, we hoped, would connect me with Chacal. 2JS’s idea was that I should try to come off as sick and maybe a bit retarded, so that people wouldn’t talk to me so much. And of course I wouldn’t look anyone in the eye.

  12 Cayman’s cantor sang a greeting song. A herald jumped out into the water and handed the whitefaced guy’s attendant a red bundle of tobacco, jade, and our signature powdered chocolate.

  There was a pause. Ix had lost hundreds of bloods to these people over the years, in a war that was just one strand of the eternal web of revenge that made the world stay put. At least it was limited, individualized warfare, not a total mobilization. It was more like you had to worry if someone had vowed that they were out to get you, specifically, or if you got onto the wrong turf, which you just wouldn’t do. It was like gangs walking around downtown in daylight, crossing the street to avoid each other. Or you could say it was like the Middle East, where there can be, or rather, usually is, a war going on and there are still commercial flights taking off and landing all the time, strings of tour buses at the borders, and civilians all over the combat zone.

  But the waterways were also sort of churches, as well as markets and stock exchanges. They’d been the only real commons for a thousand years. When you were on water you were under the protection of Jade Hag, who had dug the river in the days of the third sun, before Seven Macaw came. An attack on the river was as rare and despicable as the Pazzis attacking Giuliano de’ Medici in the Duomo. Anyone who did anything violent was in danger of getting torn apart, not just by watchful locals but by his own party. Also, the cliché about how walking into a traditional village is like walking into someone’s living room is absolutely true. Around here, wherever you were, you were somebody’s guest, and you and they were woven into a web of reciprocal hospitality. Instead of handing over passports and bribes and ticket money, you gave gifts and got cheaper gifts back. And if your gifts weren’t good enough, or if you made any trouble, people would remember, and it would come back to you later, and worse, somehow.

  Finally, someone in one of the other Jaguar boats sang back the antistrophe of the greeting song, and someone else gave us a bundle of whatever their kind of shit was, and we were off.

  “He looked at you,” Hun Xoc told me through unmoving lips like a ventriloquist. When we were out of sight he made me put on a light mask, and my five doubles did the same. I guess wearing a mask around seems odd. But the fact is that in Europe people wore masks well into the nineteenth century. Men and women wore traveling masks partly because of the dust from the roads, and partly because, like respirators today, they were supposed to protect you from some diseases, but mostly just not to get hassled. Even in the U.S., even into the 1950s, lots of ordinary women still wore hats with veils. Right? It’s not all that outré. And besides, the concept of disguise wasn’t a common one around here. If you put on a mask, it didn’t mean you were concealing something but rather that you were honoring or in fact embodying the being whose mask it was. Masks made you more the thing you really were.

  A bigger danger than getting spotted was that part of our caravan could get separated, or ambushed, or turned, or all three, and someone would give something away to an enemy that would, eventually, get back to the Ocelots. Of course, all of the bloods in the caravan, and a few of their attendants, knew that Chacal hadn’t really been killed at the end of the deer hunt. But they’d been given to understand that two of what you could call Chacal’s souls, his uay and his inner name, had left his body at th
e exorcism. Now only Chacal’s breath was still here, and his other souls had been replaced by mine.

  Characteristically, 2JS had spun the situation as a positive development: 10 Red Skink, he said, had come from the Harpy House’s mountain before his time to be born in order to warn the lineage that they were in danger and to help them persevere.

  The head of our rear guard was waiting at the next portage. 12 Cayman, 18 Dead Rain, and Hun Xoc stood aside and met with him. They didn’t ask me to be a part of it and they whispered in a hunting language I didn’t know. But when we got back on the water Hun Xoc told me that the rear guards said there was a crew of twenty or so people following us, both in boats and, maybe, by porters on the towpaths. The guards couldn’t tell where they were from, and from the little they’d been able to hear, they were speaking in market Ixian. The head guard had said he thought their headdresses meant they were from the Catfish House of Xalancab, near Kaminaljuyu, which was a neutral house in respect to both the Harpies and the Ocelots, but on the other hand no one had recognized any of them so they could just be in disguise. The Catfish were an obscure house that didn’t get out much, so it would have been an easy deception.

  Hun Xoc said 12 Cayman had asked whether they moved or signed like monkey shooters. The word could mean “manhunters” or “assassins.” The head of the scouts said he couldn’t tell. But they definitely weren’t trying to catch up with us. 12 Cayman asked whether it seemed like they knew where we were going or only following. But the guard didn’t know.

  “If I had to bet on it I would say two to one they are Choppers,” Hun Xoc said. As I think I mentioned, Choppers was a nickname for “Ocelots.” They’d gotten it because they had the right to use a special kind of large ax in combat.

  Maybe 9 Fanged Hummingbird had spotted us when he was prowling around as his nocturnal uay, Hun Xoc said. Maybe he’d come to suspect that Chacal was still alive. If the Ocelots captured me it would prove that the Harpies had perpetrated a blasphemous deception, and 9FH would be able to seize everything owned by the Harpy House, including goods, water and land rights, and people, without much protest from the other clans.

  I didn’t know what to say. Just don’t dump me over the side until you’re sure, I thought. Next I thought about asking whether our pursuers could have been sent by 2JS himself, but I caught myself in time. If they had been, either Hun Xoc didn’t know about it or he was trying to fool me.

  Besides, it was good for these guys to think I was closer to 2JS than I maybe really was. They were letting me in on a few things, letting me sit with the big kids in the lunchroom, but I had a feeling—well, let’s call it a certainty—that they’d also gotten orders to keep an eye on me at all times. I never woke up from sleeping without finding one of them watching me. I never left the file of bloods without 2 Hand or Armadillo Shit running farther out than I had, outflanking me. And I noticed they never let me near the extra sandals, or the food, or the water.

  And really, 2JS was right to be worried. Of course, I had to trust him. One takes the deal because it’s the only deal. But there was still the little fact that he’d tortured me that kept popping up in the back of my mind. And even with all the pomp and bling-itude about adopting me, and all the bonding, and even with how much a stranger in a strange land wants to have a family, still, in my most selbst ehrlich moments, I had to admit that I didn’t have any reason to think he had my interests at heart. And his objectives weren’t the same as mine. He really just wanted the secret special sauce recipe. If he could break the Teotihuacano monopoly on the drugs, he’d be able to write his own ticket. But as far as my own lookout went—well, if I thought I could get away from the bloods, find some secluded village, do some tricks to get the locals on my side, put a raiding troop together, grab some sun adder out of one of the smaller cities—and supposedly there were at least forty-five nine-stone adders in Mesoamerica, outside of the seventy or so in Teotihuacan—and get samples of the drogas and bury them for the Chocula team to find (and really, they didn’t need more than a mg or two of each one to be able to analyze them) then maybe I would have … well, come to think of it, now it was all sounding kind of daunting. But the point is, it was possible, at least, and 2JS had to be worried that I might try it.

  So, my guess was that if I made a break for it, or if I even started planning to make a break, I’d find myself trussed up like a Christmas goose in about one second.

  Still, I thought, maybe this is the right thing to do. Let’s not forget that Lady Koh was the authoress of the Game in the Codex. Right? Even if she wasn’t the best-known adder out there—and according to 2JS, that would either be 11 Whirling, who belonged to the Ixian Ocelots, or Boiled Tapir, who worked for Pacal the Great at Palenque—she might still be the best person to get on our side. Maybe she was something really special, one of the great adders, the kind who, as 2JS had said at some point, only come along once in a b’akt’un. Maybe if I got in to see her, everything after that would be smooth sailing. She might know everything and clear it all up for us. Maybe she’d scope out the Doomster right away. Just get that name back to the Chocula team and the twenty-first-century world’ll be just fine. Maybe she’d even throw in a few stock picks. When/if I got back, I’d be richer than Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Bin Abdulaziz.

  So go with it, Jed. For now. Don’t overthink.

  I asked whether the people who were following us could be from Teotihuacan. Hun Xoc said they could have been hired by someone from there, but why would anyone want to? And Lady Koh—or the Twenty-second Daughter of the Orb Weavers, as he called her in order not to alert her uay by pronouncing her name—wouldn’t have hired them because she’s a nine-skull adder. She would already have seen that we were coming in one of her Games.

  Right, I said. I don’t think so, I thought. No matter how great she is, the Game still isn’t a crystal ball—

  The sea.

  It was that Precambrian smell of salt, or more accurately of salt-loving things. I looked around at the others. You could tell they smelled it, too, from the way their movements were quickening. We were nearly at the edge of the dry world. Tomorrow we’d be out on the gulf, on the trade lanes to the Empire of Razors and the Lakes of Wings.

  [42]

  Two sea canoes and their crews were waiting with the advance men at a rendezvous point on the coast, a hidden beach three miles north of the outlet. It can’t have been much of a secret, because there were about three hundred scruffy-looking people standing around on a strip of buttery sand broken by jags of black lava and the corpse of a lemon shark pulsating in the wash. There was a delay when the canoe’s owners said that because of the eruption, the paddlers were afraid of being boiled and eaten by the Earthtoadess and we’d have to go farther off land than was usually considered safe. So naturally they hit us up for a higher rate even than what they’d agreed on a few hours before. Also we had to hire a highly thought-of local k’al maac. He was like what in South Africa they call an inyanga, a water doctor, someone who keeps you afloat by constant chanting and pouring baby oil on troubled waters and whatever. I figured he was just another faker, but later I saw him using an odd and, to my eye, simplistic version of the Game to suss out the sea weather. 18 Dead Rain did the haggling and finally we got loaded. Our rear guard stayed on shore. They’d look around to see if we were still being followed and catch up to us later. We offered blood to the Cradlers of the Northwest and launched.

  I guess it might not seem like you could get over two hundred people into two canoes, but these weren’t Old Towns. I figured each was about ninety-five feet long and eight feet across at the widest point. They were dugouts, or rather burnedouts, made from from mahoganies the size of Luna, Queen of the Redwoods. The lead canoe had a long neck on the prow with a little head like an elasmosaurus’s, and the second, the one we’d be riding in, had a kind of lobsteresque thing with antennae. Their black hulls were scaled with orange and white glyphs and glistening with manatee oil. They also had canopies on them that made them look like Cleopatra’s barge, but 12 Cayman made the cre
w take them off for speed. There were no sails anywhere. Maybe I should show them how to chef one up, I thought. Except better not. Don’t attract attention.

  As we got safely out past the breakers, the bloods seemed to loosen up. Finally, for the first time since we’d left Cocoa Town, they could chat.

  “Ac than a puch tun y an I pa oc’ in cabal payee tz’oc t pitzom?” a voice asked. “Remember when we played here and you knocked out the forward’s eye?”

  It took me a beat to realize he was talking to me.

  “B’aax?” he asked. It was like saying “Hello, Earth to 10 Skink.”

  It was 2 Hand, Hun Xoc’s brother. He was sitting behind me. Hun Xoc was sitting in front of me, and the other major people in the canoe were 3 Returning Moth—the remembrancer—and 4 Saw-Tongue, one of my sort-of doubles. Our acolytes sat on our left. I turned around.

  “Ma’ax ca’an,” I said. “That wasn’t me.”

  “Well, he fell down and you hipped the ball at him and hit him on the back of the head, and his scarves kept his head from cracking, but his eye fell out.” 2 Hand was big and squat with a kind of bug-eyed face, and he pulled back the lids of his right eye and bulged it out as much as possible. “And he could still see with the other eye, so he tried to stuff the loose one back into the socket and couldn’t, and then didn’t know what to do with it, and he knew he was about to pass out and didn’t want us to get it. So he ate it.”