Brian D'Amato

by In the Courts of the Sun

  “I don’t remember that,” I said.

  “You need to eat a big bowl of tapioca,” Hun Xoc said to 2 Hand. It was an idiom for “cool it.” Chacal was under a sort of damnatio memoriae, and even asking about something that had happened to me before the Change was getting too close to breaking the rule that my previous name wasn’t to be spoken. But 2 Hand didn’t pay much attention to stuff like that.

  I could hear 4 Saw-Tongue trying to stifle a giggle.

  “Did that really happen?” I asked.

  “It wasn’t quite like that,” Hun Xoc said.

  “It was exactly like that,” 2 Hand said.

  “Do you remember 22 Scab?” 2 Hand asked me.

  I clicked no.

  “He was one of 3 Balls’s gardeners,” Hun Xoc cut in. “He was all warty and awful-looking, and he used to always go to the sweatbath alone, and then finally one time 22 Sidewinder came in and saw that he had the tip of his penis cut off. And he wouldn’t tell any of us how it had happened.”

  “Do you remember when we found out how it happened, with Shit Hair?” 2 Hand asked.

  “Are you asking me?” I asked. He clicked yes.

  I clicked no. I looked at 2 Hand through my mask. How much was he buying it? I wondered. That is, my amnesia routine? He didn’t strike me as all that swift, but there was still some reservation there. Anyway, how much were the other people in the canoe buying it, or the other people in the expedition, who’d hear about everything I said later on? Did they believe everything 2JS said or were they just going along with it? They weren’t idiots. On the other hand, there wasn’t any great tradition of skeptical secularism around here. Probably it varied. Some of them believed everything and other people thought their religiopolitical leaders tended to overstate things.

  And of course even if they did believe it, they’d be mad at me for messing up Chacal. Apparently that had been part of 2JS’s speech to them, he’d told them I’d come to rescue Chacal too … but still, there had to be some resentment here. And fear, too, probably. They’re not sure I’m human.

  Anyway, don’t get paranoid. It’s not all about you.

  2 Hand went on. “Well,” he said, “on the way back from the game here, we stayed in this mudman village and there was a k’aak”—that is, a domehead girl—“who wanted to fuck everyone. Every hipball player. She had long hair with brown streaks. And she was always hanging around and they called her Shit Hair. You remember?”

  “No,” I said. Actually it was ringing a cracked bell somewhere, but I’d have needed more context to bring it up.

  “Then you don’t remember when you were asleep and 1 Black Morpho rubbed c’an aak’ot on your penis?”

  I clicked no again.

  “What happened?” 4 Saw-Tongue asked.

  “Well, Ch—this one here woke up,” 2 Hand said, “and he started jumping up and down holding his penis, and he was yelling, ‘My penis is too big! MY PENIS IS TOO BIG!!!’ Apparently c’an aak’ot was some kind of topical priapic hallucinogen. And he was running all around the yard and he saw Shit Hair, and he said, Aha! And he grabbed her and started fucking her in the ass. So after a while he is feeling better, and he is wiping off his penis, but now Shit Hair starts to bounce around. She is going, ‘Ayyy, ayyyeee, yee, yee, yee!’ ”

  As you may have guessed, 2 Hand was now imitating voices and performing a vigorous pantomime, almost rocking the boat, so to speak.

  “So she squats down and starts shitting. And all this shit comes out, and the rest of us are standing there staring. And then she starts shitting out her intestine. And more and more intestine just comes out of her ass, and it curls up under her, and then one of the dogs comes over and runs away with the end of it, and that just pulls out more and more. So he starts eating it, and more and more comes out, and then Shit Hair makes this wincing face and this part of her intestine comes out with a lump in it. And so this one”—he meant me—“grabs the intestine away from the dog, and pushes the lump out of the chewed end, and it falls on the ground. It is this little scrawny thing, and it is all wrinkled and warty. It was the tip of 22 Scab’s penis! So this one is saying, ‘I would know this penis anywhere! It is 22 Scab’s! Somebody run and get him! We found it! We found it!’ ”

  The acolytes were biting their lips to keep themselves from giggling. 3 Returning Moth and 4 Saw-Tongue were laughing. The paddlers, luckily, didn’t understand our house language.

  “This is all new to me,” I said. Then I started laughing too. Maybe it was the way he did it. I guess you had to be there.

  “That is enough,” Hun Xoc said. “Finished. The Choppers will smell your hard-on.”

  I may have forgotten to mention this, but we weren’t supposed to do much of anything sexual on this trip. Long-distance travel was the same as a sacred hunt. You shouldn’t even ever have a secret erection, if you could avoid it, because, as Hun Xoc said, the same way it was supposed to spook game animals, it might let enemies smell us coming. But, of course, the bloods were mainly teenagers and of course males.

  “We have to be sac kanob,” Hun Xoc went on. That is, fer-de-lances. The expression meant that, more than any other snake, the fer-de-lance was fast, hard to spot, and, especially, mute.

  2 Hand settled down.

  “Besides,” Hun Xoc said, “you are saying more than really happened. Only a very tiny little bit of her intestines came out.” He leaned back and put a plug of chewing tobacco in his mouth. It was dark already. No twilight in the Courts of the Sun. As we passed the bonfire at Comalcalco we turned northwest— deathward—steering perpendicular to the stars of Teotihuacan, the Vulturess and Vulturess’s Wound, that is to say to Thuban, which was the pole star back in 3113 BC, at the beginning of the Long Count, and its red shadow, ι Draconis. I could see the red in it more clearly than I’d ever seen it before, even with a telescope. Hun Xoc said that we were getting close enough to the stars to hear them hissing as they touched the water. I could hear what he meant, a sound like the sizzle of cigar butts dropping in a puddle, but of course it was just the waves. Phytobacteria flashed at each dip of their paddles, like sparks between flints. Just before dawn, which is the best time for collecting, I’d lean over the side—making an effort not to look at my new reflection, since it always freaked me out—and I’d try to list the inverts. There were peppermint shrimp, of course, and long red lines of krill, but there were also these huge cnidarian medusas and some kind of giant lavender ctenophore like a Venus’s girdle that I didn’t recognize. One time I spotted a ’branch I was sure was undescribed, but when I reached in to try to grab it the water was so full of venomous jellyfish that it stung my hand and I missed it.

  Our rear guard caught up with us at noon. They were in a narrow canoe like a racing scull with ten active and ten resting paddlers. Hun Xoc and the other bloods had their hands on their spear throwers, but the boat was draped in strings of Harpy-colored paper flowers and when they got close the bloods recognized them. Our boats pulled closer to shore and into the lee of a sandbar.

  The head rear guard climbed into our canoe and moved to the back. The steersman left his post and he and everyone else moved forward so the five of us, including me this time, could talk.

  There was a big squad following us, the guard said, ten or fifteen people at least, the same people who had been shadowing us on the river.

  We couldn’t resist looking east. There were a lot of boats on the water, but he said they were too far away for us to pick them out of the pack.

  12 Cayman told the scouts to make port, hire two smaller boats, and follow the people who were following us. Meanwhile we’d outdistance them. If they knew where we were going, he said, they’d stay on the water. Otherwise they’d stop at every port to find out whether we’d been through.

  “And do not catch up with us again until you are sure which it is,” he said.

  The upshot was that instead of making landfall today, we reset our course north by northwest, farther out into the gulf, and paid the paddlers our first bonus for speed. Later tonight we’d reset again, to the west, and try to lose the tail. The
lookouts kept watching the horizon behind us, shielding their eyes with rolled-up skins like telescopes, but the air was getting foggier, or rather smoggier, and they couldn’t pick out anything suspicious.

  By morning the water was swirling with iridescent slicks from dead whales and speckled with bloated carp. We couldn’t see or feel the dust falling on us, but we looked gray around the gills, and if you scrubbed wet cotton lint over your face it came up blackened. The die-off had attracted all the seagulls in the world. I’m not exaggerating. I’m sure of it. Some were only the size of crows and others were as big as pteranadons. When we passed the ragged white carcass of, I think, a porpoise, so many gulls took off from it that some of the paddlers thought they were hatching out of its body. The flies, too, had had a major population spike and there wasn’t enough wind to keep them off, but Armadillo Shit did a good job, constantly dusting me with a human-hair whisk, switching from one arm to the other every few hours. Poor old hardworking Armadillo Shit.

  On our ninth night out of Ix the gulf got choppy and they lashed the canoes together with long boards to make a sort of catamaran. We had to get even farther out from the shore in case the wind got stronger and pushed us toward the rocks. It’s a hurricane, I thought. We’re grouper bait. So much for the Water Quack. He’ll be the first one we toss over. But the shit passed over us and at what I figured was three A.M. the big orange moon slid out from under the clouds like a half a 5 mg Valium and dropped into the water. So auch auf jener Oberfläche sich noch im krystallinischen Zustand befände. The next day we almost surfed into port on the dead rollers. The town was a Teotihuacano outpost called Where They Were Blinded, on the north side of what would be the Laguna de Alvarado. It was mainly a complex of ghatlike mud terraces leading down into a shallow estuary clogged with canoes and barges and crews speaking fifty different languages. There was a big encampment of salters curing swamp rat and croakers, and even with the wind there was a fermenting-fish stench and a general sense of bad vibe.

  While the big guys haggled, 2 Hand and Armadillo Shit set me up in a sort of portable wicker hut, like a bathing machine. I got out my writing stuff and a blank screenfold book with plain covers. I was going to use charcoal, but then 3 got me some splinters of hematite that made good clear marks on the gesso, like silverpoint, and I was all set.

  I wrote and coded up my most recent note home:

  [deciphered]

  NEW KEY WORD: AWHNNBAGHSDDLPFSETQHYTAHBDSZ

  Jed DeLanda

  Tacoanacal Pana’ Tonat (Alvarado)

  Chocula Team

  Ix Ruinas, Alta Verapaz, RG

  Wednesday, March 31, 664 AD, about 11:00 A.M.

  Dear Marena, Taro, Michael, Jed, et al.

  You’ll have noticed that in my first letter I tried to describe some of the local color, as it were, and soon gave up. In this installment I’ll stick to business. As I mentioned, my first priority in Teotihuacan will be to get an audience with the woman from the Codex N, Ahau-na Koh. Here’s what I know so far about her:

  She was born, or rather named, on 1 Ben, 11 Chen, 9.10.13.13.13, in a place called Rotten Cane, which is a small city in B’aakal, in the orbit of Lakamha, Palenque. She was a member of the ruling family there, who were avian rather than feline and descended from 2JS’s maternal grandmother. When she was five, she showed signs and a female adder of the Lakamha Rattler Society taught her the Game. She was especially apt and six years later the Society sent her to Teotihuacan to study with the Orb Weavers, a sort of convent of adderesses in the service of the Rattler cult there.

  Even if it makes things seem more complicated, I guess I should mention that the Orb Weavers—they were named after the giant orb weaver spider, Nephila clavipes—were part of the Aura, or Vulture, or White, or Peacetime, moiety and Synod of Teotihuacan.

  This was probably to help solidify ties between Lakamha and Teotihuacan. Even though Koh had to ceremonially renounce her biological family to become part of the Rattler order, the connection would still help her family politically, especially if she came back. 2JS mentioned that when Lady Koh left her family, the leaders of all the avian clans in the area sent gifts. 2JS gave her an especially talented contortionist named 0 Porcupine, who was still supposedly her favorite jester. In Teotihuacan she was one of a few young adderesses to become a nine-skull, an adept who knows how to use, and maybe formulate, the Game drugs. People say she talks to flies and sheds her skin every peace season. Like a few other Maya members of her order, Koh has either decided not to return to the Maya area or been prevented from leaving because of tensions between the Rattler’s children and the ruling clans. People say that her clothes are woven by spiders, that she remembers being in her mother’s womb, and that she can shed her skin. The cult she belongs to, the Star Rattler Society of Teotihuacan, was founded by a transplanted Maya ahau named 11 Xc’ux Tsuc (Coral Snake), who settled his lineage in the city on August 9, AD 106. It grew steadily over the centuries. Meanwhile, the two councils were dominated by the Aura (Turkey Vulture) House and the Swallowtail House. But starting about eighty years ago the two greathouses and their affiliated lineages moved to reassert the dominance of their own protectors, especially Hurricane, or the Wizened Man, and Koatalatcacalanako, a fanged water woman they call the Jade Hag. The Rattler Society was subjugated and forced to build a wall that blocks the view of the Rattler’s pyramid from Teotihuacan’s fetish-market square, which it had previously dominated. So maybe the Orb Weavers are getting squeezed somehow, and maybe they’ll be willing to cut a deal with me to get out of a bad spot. Well, we’ll see.

  I’m at a loss for a better strategy. I have to admit that I’ve thought about sneaking off somehow and trying to pull a Lord Jim. Maybe I could take over some remote-ass village and then, when their archery was in shape, just march back to Ix and roll over the place. But that could take time I don’t have.

  I also wonder whether there is some other way to take care of the Game and the Game drugs. Wasn’t there some other nine-skull sun adder closer to Ix whom we could capture and get to spill the beans?

  But when I mentioned that to 2JS, he had three good objections. For one thing, any of the feline-clan sun adders would rather die than get captured. Dying was nothing for them, they’d off themselves if you just looked at them funny. And even if you could capture one of them and keep him under suicide watch, there was still no way he’d actually tell you anything. There’s a myth that no one holds out forever under skillful torture, but it isn’t quite true, at least not around here. According to 2JS, you could keep some people screaming 24/7 for twenty years and they still wouldn’t give you the time of day. Second, the adders in this part of the world would only have small stocks of the prepared drugs. What 2JS really wanted was the whole recipe, and the actual plants or whatever, if I could bring ’em back alive.

  Incidentally, he had reasons we couldn’t steal the Ocelots’ stash either. As we saw on the radar, a whole network of caves branches out into the mountains behind the Ocelots’ mul. Right now, they’re supposedly digging 9 Fanged Hummingbird’s tomb in one of them. They say there’s a whole little colony of sucklers down there who hardly ever come out. And they hang on to the drugs. Even if we found where the stuff was, they’d swallow it and kill themselves before letting us get it. You have to realize that bribes don’t often work with greathouses. These people are absolutely incorruptible.

  Forty years ago the Ocelots had assassinated the last of the other lineages’ best sun adders. 2JS is only a four-skull and even so he’s now the senior sun adder of the Harpy House as well as its ahau. His own eight-skull adder died years ago, and now the only adder of more than four skulls left in Ix is 0 Whirling, who belongs to the Ocelots. At this point, as far as anyone knows, all the nine-skull players outside of Teotihuacan are pledged to jaguarian lineages.

  Whether these have been overridden by newer allegiances, and how persuadable she is, remain unknown quantities.

  There also seems to be some conflict between female and male adders. There’s a story that in the
old days, most adders were women, and that some male adders had themselves castrated to improve their level of play. Some people say the female sun adders are more accurate but that they’re being squeezed out by the men. Koh’s group, apparently, gets around the problem by, effectively, becoming men. Supposedly Koh and the other female Rattler adders even have wives, that is, female wives, or concubines or whatever. Although maybe this is just a salacious rumor.

  2JS says that if I come back with the package as planned, he intends to give away doses of the drugs to the heads of the non-Ocelot Ixian lineages, claiming that his ability to make them is evidence that he and not 9FH is the person who One Ocelot, the mythical founder of Ix, wants to have ruling the city. This might weaken the Ocelots enough for 2JS to get the support of the other Ixian greathouses. When they definitely were on his side, he’d find some excuse to call off the Game. Ideally, the other greathouses would force the Ocelots out of power and elect 2JS as ahau. Then, if 2JS lived long enough, he’d leave Ix and found his own city somewhere to the east. For all we can tell archaeologically, 2JS’s family could survive in power in some other city for at least another two hundred years.