Brian D'Amato

by In the Courts of the Sun

  12 Cayman usually gave orders, but in this case he asked me what I wanted to do.

  I said that we were going to go anyway. “We’ll send a danger gift of equal size,” I said. “Equal or greater.”

  We’ll go right to the big guns. I sent Hun Xoc to get a few things out of the primary bundles.

  “It’s crowded there,” 3 Returning Moth said. He told us that if we went back we should go south as close as possible to the main axis. They were clearing lower-caste people out of the teocalli district, he said, so there was less traffic. But it seemed that the upper-caste people were allowed to be there at least until sundown. 12 Cayman said he’d done a good job. Hun Xoc came back with a big armload of gear.

  I’d settled on two items. The first was a green macaw-feather cape. It was worth a little more than two hundred and ten young male slaves, which meant it cost about as much as the rest of this trip so far. Well, if 2JS had to go into debt for this, that would be the least of his problems. We’d give it to the Rattler’s table, not to Lady Koh, so they’d have to take it and burn it on the altar. That would oblige her to thank us personally. The second was a small white jar filled with what looked like tiny dried leaves about the size of a Scott number-seventy-six five-cent Jefferson stamp. They were symmetrical and jagged-edged, bright pink with biomorphic black marks like Rorschach faces. They were the dried skins of a lethal variety of strawberry poison-dart tree frogs from the Ixian cloud forest. They signified danger—specifically, “Prepare yourself, make darts.”

  I asked 12 Cayman whether the skins could look like a declaration of hostility. He said they wouldn’t. These things had pretty definite meanings, and he was an old soldier who’d seen all of them. We resealed the jar. It was a freshly made piece with a profile-glyphic representation of two of the ancestors 2JS and Lady Koh had in common. The implied message was that we were reminding Koh of her family obligations.

  “I want to add a coda,” I said.

  12 Cayman looked at me. I said the whole thing was serious enough for us to tip our hand a little bit.

  I dictated:

  4 Ahau: ajtonxa pochtal Tamoan …

  In the tenth b’ak’tun, in the fourth k’atun, in the sixteenth tun, In the zeroth uinal [~August AD 530], White Eel [that is, Halley’s comet] burnt over us

  In the tenth b’ak’tun, in the eighth k’atun, in the thirteenth tun, In the eleventh uinal [~February AD 607], White Eel Burnt over us again

  In the tenth b’ak’tun, in the twelfth k’atun, in the eleventh tun, In the third uinal [~April AD 684], White Eel Burns over us again

  Before the fourteenth uinal of the nineteenth tun of the twelfth k’atun

  Of the tenth b’ak’tun [that is, sometime before January AD 692], Teotihuacan is thrown down, abandoned

  Finished.

  None of the dates were in the Codex Nurnberg or in any of the other Game records that I’d heard about from 2 Jeweled Skull. But they were all real events. 2JS had also told me everyone knew about Halley’s comet, naturally. But no one had been able to predict its reappearances exactly, not using the Game or any other way. I told him it was no wonder, since its periodicity is a long way from regular. You need modern instruments to get it within even two years, and they only really nailed it down in the 1960s. Koh would have to be intrigued. Right?

  I made 3 Returning Moth repeat it. He had it right the first time. We sent him off.

  “We won’t wait for a reply,” I said. “We’ll give her four thousand beats”—an idiom for about an hour—“and then we’ll simply be at her door.”

  12 Cayman looked a bit askance at this, but it was my lookout, so he didn’t say anything.

  Hun Xoc, Left Yucca—one of 14’s sons—and I left through a vacant courtyard. Other guests of 14’s household were already setting up to sleep on the roof terrace, but we stepped over them, climbed down into the narrow north alley, and headed east toward the main axis.

  “Let’s keep quiet,” Hun Xoc said. He didn’t want anyone to hear us speaking Ixtob. I’d insisted that we wear light offering masks instead of the nosebar that was driving me rabid—there’s nothing worse than a bad piercing—and we had on local mantas with a gray-and-red scorpion beaded pattern that meant, simply, that we’d set aside our clan responsibilities for now and intended to make rain offerings for the whole city. So you couldn’t tell what lineage we were from. Still, we weren’t quite impersonating Teotihuacano. That could make for real trouble, if they caught us. I looked around. We seemed to have gotten a drop on the spies, if you can call them spies when they’re so much not a secret. I guess it was like in the last decades of the old Soviet Union, when people knew who all the watchers were, or most of them. Maybe they were being overworked by all the new crowds in the city. Confusion would work in our favor. Anyway, we weren’t doing anything subversive, were we? I mean, yet.

  We turned right onto a dark lane like a Middle Eastern alameda. It was about five arms across and roughly the equivalent of a block away from the main axis, so that spatially speaking, it was similar to walking north on a (much narrower) upper Madison Avenue and at every corner getting a glimpse into Central Park. We were taking a different route from the one 3 Returning Moth had used. He would just be getting to the Orb Weavers’ house about now. Give her a little while to listen to him. Read him and weep, as it were. I noticed a big hooknose snake basking on the low wall. They were pretty scrupulous around here about not hassling Squamata serpentes. It was like in India with the temple monkeys or sacred cows. Side benefits included a low rat population and a relatively high number of deaths by snakebite, which were hyped as a good thing since they meant Star Rattler had personally sent one of his grandchildren to fetch your uay to the thirteenth shell.

  Two “blocks” south we crossed a sort of invisible border into a native Teotihuacano area. The north-northwest section of the city, where we were coming from, housed some of the richest Maya embassies. But the houses were older and smaller, and the area had a Maya vibe. I guess it was like ethnic quarters in any city. To keep up the New York comparison, it was like walking down Mulberry Street in New York and crossing the Italo-Chinese boundary on Canal. A trio of clumsy Too-Talls, who were way off their own turf, appeared out of a side arcade. Hun Xoc darted between them and me. I looked at him through my mask, like, thanks.

  Don’t mention it, he eyed back.

  You know, I went on, I don’t trust this Left Yucca character.

  Don’t worry, Hun Xoc looked. We won’t tell him anything. And I’ll watch him like a thief.

  The houses were larger and newer here, all at least two stories, with stone and plaster below and lath and plaster above. Traders and pilgrims passed us with silent salutes, always in groups of three or more. They all had a certain furtiveness, as though they all had assignations as sensitive as ours. We passed a gang of night-soil collectors who stooped deferentially around us under their big stinking jars. Puma sentries strutted down the middle of the street in bands of five. Supposedly they liked to collar people or even barge into houses and confiscate any accessories that could be considered ostentatious.

  The city had a singular sort of silence. In Maya towns somebody was always singing, but I guess here the songs only came at certain times. So you could hear footfalls, and the birds, and sometimes flint chipping and the moan of stone saws on wood, but not much else, and the thick walls gave everything a stony reverb that stewed those sounds together into a kind of liquid hum. It seemed like about half the people were wearing nosebars and the other half, maybe the more traditional types, wore veils or masks. Just as well, I thought. I’d been feeling that sort of travel fatigue you get from having seen too many human faces. They start looking mostly the same and not that interesting. The masks were all about the same, smooth impassive faces made of gessoed bark or the local sort of corn-paste papier-mâché, creamy white with almond eyes, just the blank essence of a face with no expression, no identifiable age, no sex, no ethnicity, not dead, but not quite alive. So, what with the masks, and the long mantas, and the quietness, and the lack
of trees or grass, from street level the only natural thing you saw was the sky changing color overhead and the occasional little bridge over a canal.

  When we were well south of the Hurricane mul we turned left, toward the main axis. There were five Puma guards standing at ease at the corner and 14’s nephew, Left Yucca, spoke Teotihuacano to them with no accent. They acknowledged him, barely, and watched us go by.

  So, I wondered, where are all the chicks? Of course, this was a ceremonial space, so it was segregated. But even on the side streets you hardly saw any women, and not many children either. It was like a Muslim city in that the upscale women were considered too valuable to be let out of the house. Or at least that’s how they explained the segregation to themselves. This place is bugging me, I thought. Nope, wouldn’t want to live here.

  The place was big but still unlike what a twenty-first-century person would think of as a city. It was more like a collection of villages. You could live here your whole life and never go into the part of town that was right next to yours. If you did, it would immediately be like walking into a stranger’s living room. And if you did it anyway, you’d have to spend some time with the first person you ran into, talking about who your relatives were and who his relatives were, and if you couldn’t find any relatives in common, he’d beat you up. There wasn’t any reason to go out either. There weren’t any restaurants—that was an unknown concept—and there weren’t any shops, just the different market squares. There were no theaters, unless you counted the religious dramas in the various plazas, and those were members-only. There was no entertainment, unless you counted visiting some relative’s house and listening to singers in his courtyard. Well, I guess you had to count that. But you know what I mean, you couldn’t just go out and go to a show. In fact, people didn’t really go out, not to speak of anyway. They didn’t go out for walks. They didn’t go out to the country to get fresh air on the weekends. They didn’t drop their kids off at school. Not that they worked all the time either. I figured mostly they took care of obligations, to the family, the lineage, the house, the moiety, the scores of patrons, the living, the unborn, and especially the dead. They did things that we, that is, we twenty-first-century folks, would call ceremonial. To them, though, they were practical. But the point is, the place just had an anhedonic vibe, a dutiful, holy-rollery mood, like in Jerusalem. Maybe it was just contagious piety from all the pilgrims. And like Jerusalem it was too crowded and too edgy. You could tell there were different cults in conflict with each other. And you could almost feel, if you weren’t afraid you were just projecting, that like a lot of other giant capitals, it had simply grown for too long, and its center was rotting. I hadn’t had a great time in Ix, but now I felt homesick for it. For all their hierarchicality Maya cities had a permanently festive quality, and somewhere you’d always hear people laughing. Despite all the teocallis and birds and flowers, this place was dour.

  We pushed our way through to the middle of the plaza. For a second I felt transfixed by a line of force radiating from the Jade Hag’s mul and stopped as though I were dizzy. Hun Xoc touched me and I followed him south. The crowd was thick but moving. As usual, there were stairs in the road. They didn’t tire me out—I was past that stage—but the up and down did create a trancey feeling. Bands of dark and light color on the walls and pavement created a sort of op-art illusion, so that you couldn’t always see the difference in levels, or how close the walls were, or where the next step would be. It was like how if you paint horizontal stripes on stairs, people coming down them will trip and fall. Damn, Marena’d get a kick out of this place, I thought. Shoulda brung her—

  Watch out, Hun Xoc signed to me. I was sort of striding forward, and there was a troop of Pumas coming up, and he wanted to give them a wide berth. We edged over to the right, toward the huge open fetish market—which I guess is the right translation for the place, since it was the designated place for trading things like figurines and drugs and slaves and blades and charms and whatever, that is, things with relatively powerful souls. Anyway, we didn’t have time to shop. We turned east and headed into the Ciudadela, the Rattler’s Court.

  It was both imposing and welcoming, bigger and better finished than any of the other plazas, and raised well above the average level of the city, with twelve big lookout platforms and wide flights of thirty-one steps, each leading up from three sides. You could see why the Spanish had thought it was a fortress. On its east end the top third of the Rattler’s mul jutted up over a high incongruous wall. Supposedly the two Synods had threatened to raise taxes on the Rattlers unless they built the barrier. Apparently they’d thought that if the mul were less imposing, that would cut down the number of converts to the Rattler Society. But if anything it seemed to have had the opposite effect. The place was packed, obviously the most popular destination shrine in town. We pushed through, tacking south by southeast, toward where you could just see the crenellated roofs of the Rattler’s sacristies to the south of the mul. One of them would be the Orb Weavers’.

  The first group we passed was another vingtaine of Puma guards. There seemed to be more of them here, keeping an eye on the Rattlers. The next was a bevy of old women. It was the first time I’d seen women without men out and about. Unlike the plazas to the north the court had a feeling of inclusive-ness, which meant a lot of raggedy characters. 14 Wounded had said that the Sky Eel’s children administered all their charity and judgments from here, but it had more of a feeling of a public square than a religious space. There were no stalls and no visible goods changing hands, but even without speaking the language I could tell there was a lot of business going on, barter brokers making deals, accountants with game-board abaci going over addition, and book-makers taking bets. Old cities really used their public spaces. To do business without money or telephones, you need a forum, you need agoras and piazzas. We passed younger people playing taxac, which was a complicated sort of verbal game, and kak, which you played with your hands. I noticed the pavement under my feet was black, and then, as we passed the big central altar, it turned briefly yellow and then red. It was laid out in Game quadrants, in very bright colors, some kind of dye, I guess, soaked into the limestone. We passed a pair of blue-hatted Rattler oracles who seemed to be just drifting through the crowd, answering questions. Missionary spirit, I thought. We stepped around knots of people bending over fire bowls, making offerings either to the Rattler or, through the Rattler, to absent relatives, ancestors whose names or remains had been lost. Most of the out-of-towners looked to me like village charge-holders. Each one probably represented a few hundred panicked farmers from God knows where. Left Yucca said the drought had driven more people than ever to the Sky Eel, that is, Star Rattler. He said that the Swallowtail and Aura Synods owned their own families of sun adders, but the Rattler Society adders were still considered the best. 14 had said it was because they could write and had preserved a library of refinements too large for any one person, or even a college of griots, to remember. Some of them were Maya immigrants, like Lady Koh, so maybe they’d been keeping up an island of literacy. Supposedly, Koh catered to out-of-towners like the Too-Talls by using several different languages in her offerings. The Rattler didn’t mind, Left Yucca said. And the Rattler didn’t ask for expensive gifts, just music, mint and tobacco smoke, and a few strands of your hair.

  Drumbeats rose around us. The crowd’s motion slowed and stopped.

  The drumming echoed from all over the city, and you could hear it expanding out into the hills and beyond. It was a beat we hadn’t heard before, kind of an ominous five-stroke roll.

  “They say they are closing the city borders now,” Left Yucca said. “Two days early.” They were shutting up the city for the vigil, and no one is getting in or out.

  Damn it, I thought. I looked at Hun Xoc. Well, we’re trapped here now, his return look said. We just have to make the best of it.

  As the drumming stopped, the crowd went back to its business, but more hurriedly and more quietly. Hell and suckstration, I thought. I’d been thinking
about trying to scam a few hits of the Game drugs from somewhere and then getting the hell out of this turkey town now, before the vigil. Well, so much for that idea.

  We edged our way down the packed staircase. There were Puma guards eyeballing us on either side, so I kept my head down and only got a quick look at the Rattler’s mul. It was designed to look as though it had been woven out of two species of giant snakes, or rather two aspects of the Rattler: the Sea Rattler, who was sinuous and naturalistic, and the Sky Rattler, who was stylized and geometric, with goo-goo-googly blue-goggled Chaak eyes and equilateral teeth. Koh’s all-female society lived in one of two compounds on the south side of the Rattler’s Court, and its male counterpart lived in the other. From the buildings you couldn’t tell which was which. They were built of smooth-plastered wood in an older style, with next to no windows, just the occasional slit. Their façades were washed with blue instead of the orange that was usual on this side. The doors were all tiny, carved with scare faces but still not showy. Most of the main doors had a guard or two sitting outside. Were they a permanent fixture or was it just because things had been bad lately? Families of supplicants, Teotihuacanos, Too-Talls, and others, crowded the alley. They didn’t have sleeping bags and there weren’t any fires. They were just sitting, or huddling, and shivering. It’s no wonder Koh didn’t want to talk to us. She was turning them away in droves.