Brian D'Amato

by In the Courts of the Sun

  It wasn’t like what you’d think of as a riot. It was all more of a Mardi Gras gone bad, a Black Plague debauch, a gradual dissolution into chaos that I associated with the last day of the year in Jubal High, when wastebaskets would fly out the windows and kids would tip over desks and tear and scatter torn-up books down the stairwells. Or when a crowd slides out of control after a sporting event and turns vandalistic. Those are all on a pretty small scale, of course, but the mood was the same, and eternal. Nothing feels more freeing than the permission to destroy, to give in to the hatred of life and blow it all in a Sardanapalian flourish. It was abandon befitting the end of the world.

  La gran puta, I thought. The idea had been just to create a diversion, to get people to start raising hell so that we could get in, get the goods, and get out. We hadn’t wanted things to get this much out of control. They can’t really want to burn down their own homes, I thought. Can they?

  Maybe it’ll happen in any situation when you get the right mix of stressors. They had that deadly combination of economic despair and religious conviction going on here, just like with, say, the PLO. But like with the suicide bombers, I think the main motivator was a sense of insult. They weren’t just ready to do what Koh said but so angry at the feline clans that they’d do almost anything. For Star Rattler’s followers this one dark day would recover their baach—that is, their toughness, coolness, macho, soldatentum, honor, manliness, heart, or however you want to translate it. This was their chance to settle old scores.

  Well, at least so far the Pumas hadn’t even started to come after us. The “diversion” had worked, right?

  I noticed that the white-banded Morning Glory blood had turned back to the bonfire. He held his child with both hands, one on the kid’s hair and one on the back of his belt, and swung the kid forward and back to build up speed, and then, just like he was tossing a sack of potting soil into a truck, threw his son into the inferno. The child screamed in the air, stopped screaming when he hit the coals, and screamed again, more and more shrilly, until his little lungs filled up with smoke.

  Hun Xoc grabbed me with two fingers of his spear hand and steered me forward. Up here we were exposed to dart fire. I galumphed down the stairs into the plaza. We formed up again and moved forward.

  We made it halfway across the square before I realized that the swarm ahead of us had thickened. The bloods in the vanguard thrashed at the crowd. I stumbled forward, leaning on the blood in front of me, who turned out to be 4 Sunshower, the skin mender. Good. It’s always nice to have a doctor around. Ouch.

  I couldn’t see.

  I turned, groped around, and found Armadillo Shit’s shoulder. It had a burn scar on it, so I knew it was his. I gestured at my eyes. He leaned forward, nearly pushing me over, took my head in his hands, opened my eyelids with his fingers, and licked my eyeballs.

  It was a move we’d all rehearsed, to supplement the salve. To an outside observer it would have looked like we were taking time out from the battle to make out. And in fact, even through the quilting, I couldn’t help feeling that Armadillo Shit did have a rock-hard erection. It’s just stress, I thought of saying to him. Don’t get any ideas.

  I got my eyes open. Ah. Better. Something pushed into our part of the turtle. It was one of the Gila bloods. He was just a limp body. He’d been badly wounded on the outside of the formation and passed in to the center. They laid him down one row in front of us. We couldn’t help stepping on him. Our nacom, our executioner, killed him by slitting the axillary arteries under his arms.

  The problem here was that everyone wanted to carry their dead along with the group. You didn’t want enemies getting the corpses of members of your family. But 12 Cayman and I had said we couldn’t afford to do it. The bloods hadn’t been able to deal with the idea of just leaving them, though. And we didn’t want them to think that if they were killed, they’d be left and have to work as slaves in the mountain of our enemies’ souls. So we’d worked out a compromise. The nacom cut off the blood’s pigtail and his testicles, to take back to his family, and spoiled the corpse, canceling the tattoos with a rasp and chasing out the blood’s breath, name, and uay with a little sharkskin flail. Even so, 12 Cayman had to order the bloods around the body to drop it. It was like he was telling a pair of dogs to drop a dead fish on the beach.

  We waited. The blood’s blood was sticky under the rubber soles of our raiding sandals. We nudged forward every so often and kept getting repulsed, like a little dog pushing at the door of his crate.

  Maybe we wouldn’t get any farther. What was going on? 4 Sunshower took a step forward. I did the same, stepping over the corpse’s legs. More resistance. Damn—and then there was a feeling of release, something breaking, then we were flowing forward faster and faster. I got my feet on the ground. I felt soft impacts through the bodies around me. The crowd was giving way in front of us. I strained my head up, trying to see where we were, but all I could see was the headdress of the blood in front of me and the dark-yellow wedge of the Hurricane mul looming behind it. I heard coded yells going back and forth, not any of ours. Probably Pumas, I thought. Hell. I felt the signal to turn right pass through our composite body. We lurched and I crushed into the body of the blood in front of me until I was practically sucking on his blue-tattooed earlobe. We seeped, slowly, into a narrow alley between two plazas. The vanguard was only able to feed into it a few people at a time. I noticed a hand was gripping my free wrist and then realized that it was tapping out a message: Keep close. It was Hun Xoc. I got my fingers around it and squeezed back that I was all right. Now we could hear actual fighting at the outskirts of our squad. There was no clanging of armor, of course. Combat with flint axes and obsidian-flake spears sounds like shuffling feet and breaking glass, with a few taunts, screams, cracks, and shouts thrown in.

  Something gave and we were moving again, the squad oozing forward like dough out of a kneading machine, and I let myself get carried under an arch and down into a sunken courtyard. Now my feet were actually touching the ground, or rather the layer of quivering bodies we were walking on. We pushed up four steps and into another courtyard, crossed it, and then poured down sixteen steps into another plaza. Sixteen steps, I thought. Good. That means we’re almost there.

  I stumbled, took three steps on my knees, and then got hoisted up by 2 Hand and Armadillo Shit. In a gap between two walls of crowd noise I heard 12 Cayman shouting for us to keep the turtle together.

  Everything slowed. We stopped. Crowds pressed in on our perimeter. Ow. Now my left eye was blinking. Damn. The poison ivy stuff was supposed to burn out after a minute or two. We strained against each other, trying to maintain the latticed structure of our formation, like a crystal under compression, craning our heads up to try to get fresh air. We took another three steps forward, gooshing over bodies. It felt like wading through living lasagna. Something grabbed my right ankle. It was a hand. I kicked at it with my other foot and tipped over. The blood in front of me pushed me back, not good-humoredly. I balanced again and brought down my spear on the wrist. It reacted but didn’t release. I followed the arm back to the head. The head was biting my left ankle. Damn it. I jammed the obsidian point into his cheek. It went through and scraped on teeth. He released and lunged up to bite again, staring up at me with this expression that was wild, hateful, and sleepy at the same time. I pressed the shaft down into his eye, pulled it out, and jammed it into his mouth. His hand let go of my ankle. I pried the javelin out of him and we moved forward. Damn. He’s messed up. You messed him up. Damn.

  There are too many of them, I thought vaguely, I’ll be crushed to death and nobody’ll ever know what happened. And Marena will just think I wussed out. She won’t even know I got this far, I did all this good work, I really, really tried. Serves me right for getting involved with fanatics. All these people think they can walk on lava. Idiot. Todo por mi culpa. Damn I’m tired.

  Yeah. Tired. Rest a second. Just see what happens. I felt myself collapsing just as we started moving again.

  Move. Okay.
Move. Forward. Half a league, halfaleague, halfaleagueonward. Hup. Hup. We came up on another staircase. Up and over. Down. I grabbed Hun Xoc and held on to him like he was the thwart of our canoe as we went over the rapids in the crush of sweat and oil.

  Across. Push. Push. One more. Up. Over the top, doughboys. This wall was twice as high as the last one and when I got to the top I risked another look around. From here we could see out over the plazas and could get a good look at the northern and western suburbs and the adobe-covered hills beyond them. Plumes of smoke rose and widened, angling only a little to the west in the still air. Behind them streams of pilgrims were pouring over the crest of the ridge, down into the valley. They eddied and coiled, slowly pressing toward the teocalli district.

  It took me a minute to get it through my head what was going on. Instead of running away from the fire, the crowds were rushing toward it, into the city, toward the main axis, pushing inward, into the flames.

  Now, I’d seen one or two dicey things lately. But at this moment I really was freaking horrified. All those people were going to push in, and bunch up, and crush each other to death like turkeys in a thunderstorm. So far the holocaust was just getting started. It was like watching a train heading for a collapsed bridge. We heard the first shrieks of people being crushed to death, but they were just the first. Mass death was on the way. Hell. Hell.

  We’d assumed that once the fire started, people would run away. That is, they’d run out of the city. Even Koh thought that. Didn’t she?

  Armadillo Shit grabbed me and steered me toward the stairs into the plaza. I twisted out of his hands. Leggo, I’ll do it myself. I tromped down through a collapsed fence of offering poles and into the wide square. We formed up and moved on.

  We pushed into the Puma’s Plaza. A bonfire roared at its midpoint, about four hundred arms ahead of us. To the right the staircase of the Hurricane mul angled up. Puma javelinmen poured down it, silhouetted against glowing steam from the flooded plazas to the north. The bonfire was only fifty arms away from the point where the Pumas spewed into the plaza, so as soon as they got down they were in danger of burning up. Evidently there was no other way off the mul. That is, there was no interior staircase, and although I suppose you might be able to climb down the back or the sides, it wouldn’t be easy. There were twenty-arm drops between the levels, and they weren’t really level at all but sloped, and smooth enough to be tough to hold on to. And even then, the fires were getting stronger in the eastern barrios, behind the mul. So apparently the people up there had decided their best shot was to go down the normal way and then move up the main axis toward the Jade Hag’s mul, where there wasn’t yet any fire, and then onto the trade roads up to Cerro Gordo.

  A signal came back through our squad: two open-handed slaps on the chest. It meant we were clear to break up the formation and troop along the wall in double file.

  We did. I pressed my back against the tooled plaster. It was warm and sticky.

  We trudged forward, slowly, snaking north along the eastern wall, toward the alley that would lead to the pharmacopoeia. Where was Koh? I wondered. She should be coming up behind us somewhere. We’d worked out code calls, but now it was too noisy to use them. Well, just stick to your end, Jed. Ouch. I was hot, I realized. Really hot. My skin on the side facing the bonfire was drying out and ready to peel. I found 4 Sunshower and stood in his lee. He had a strip of manta cloth tied over his face like a Wild West bandito. Good idea. I yanked off one of the wide ribbons in my hair and tied it over my mouth.

  Two taps on my shoulder. Turn right. We narrowed and fed into a kind of ceremonial alley between high walls, with feliform pilasters snarling at us from each side. There were no Puma bloods in the alley. Maybe they wouldn’t hassle us at all. We’ll just get in, get out, and get off. No sweat. Now that I was only two bloods from the edge of our double line—what was left of the turtle formation—I could see into doorways as we passed. There were glimpses of families huddling inside, chanting atonement songs.

  We’d come to a big door, not a high trapezoid like Maya doors, but a squat, swollen rectangle in a two-story wall covered with black and red fanged cat masks.

  12 Cayman divided the forces. Most of the bloods were going to wait here and secure the entrance. They’d make a path for Lady Koh and her escort, if they got here. Thirty of us left our shields and spears and went in two at a time. I yanked the little mace off my left thigh and wound its loose hide thongs around my hand. A mace is a terrible thing to wind. Hun Xoc and I stepped over the dead doorkeepers and onto wet steps, down into a wide, dark passage. Lasciate ogni speranza. We didn’t have torches, but smoky daylight filtered down through angled light wells in the roof. The passage went straight east for sixty paces and then forked. We went right, like Koh had said. The passage narrowed into a trapezoidal tunnel dripping with condensed breath. The place had a smell of secrecy and exclusion, and the sporiferous scent of mushrooms. The light disappeared. Hun Xoc stopped. There were fighting sounds up ahead. The tunnel curved a bit, so we couldn’t see anything. Damn. We’d hoped we wouldn’t run into many people, because absolutely everybody had to be outside during the vigil. But evidently the Pumas weren’t stupid. Some of them had come back into the compound when things started going wrong. Hell. They could hold us off for hours—wait. The line of bloods ahead of us moved again. We’d won. Oops. Spoke too soon. We stopped. We moved. We moved, stopped, and moved. It was dead dark. Hun Xoc and I picked our way over what felt like bodies. One was still wheezing and as I kneed over him I felt the handle of a mace. I felt down along it. It was sticking out of his mouth. I pulled it out and moved on. There was light ahead. We came out into an enclosed courtyard with a weird camphorish smell and blank, high walls rising to a square of sun about two stories above us. The screams from the panicked city around us seemed far away. The floor was soft. It was dirt. Rich, black dirt, in fact. The courtyard was filled with trees, something like the gum tree they call indio desnudo in the islands. They had red, peeling, and probably toxic bark, and there were twenty of them in four neat rows, each about ten arms tall. There were little fruits all over them, growing directly out of the branches like persimmons. I looked closer at a branch. The fruit was snails. Or rather the branch was crawling with orange-and-black tree snails. They were some kind of Liguus, but I hadn’t ever seen the species. I didn’t get a good look at them before Hun Xoc pulled me around the perimeter of the garden to a low door. I ducked my head and crawled after Hun Xoc, my knuckles splotching through warm mud and shallow water. We shuffled through a heap of broken jars and through a slashed hide door. Hun Xoc helped me stand up in the room on the other side. It was the pharmacopoeia.

  [58]

  It was the largest interior space I’d been in yet. I mean, back here in the good old days. It was wide and weirdly long, going back and back. A double row of ancient wooden pillars held up the roof. They were carved into guards like at the so-called Temple of the Warriors at Chichén and freshly painted in Puma colors. Weak daylight slid through slits high in the walls. The stone walls were lined with niches and the place was chockablock with big baskets, low tables and rollers, man-size water jars, basins, dippers, strainers, stoppers, mortars, pestles, pots, phials, and on and on. Evidently they were making a lot of stuff in here in addition to the Game drugs. Probably just quack remedies. Snake oil and Daffy’s Elixir. There were little water runnels cut into the high wall and a big stone basin tub, like a porn-movie Jacuzzi, with ducks flopping around in it. Along with the barnyard smell of the ducks and a horrible pond-muck odor, the place even had a bit of that icky scented-candle-and-potpourri smell of the ersatz country store. Adders and acolytes were stumbling around, frantically tipping clay basins out of the niches and smashing them on the floor.

  The Harpy bloods pushed in, grabbing the staff and trying to pin them down before they could swallow poison or slash an artery. The room filled with crashes and smoke. No, not smoke. Dust. The compounders, or compoundresses—a dead one near me was a woman dressed as a man, so
maybe Koh had been right—were pulling vases of narcotic powders off the shelves and dashing them to the floor. Yellow clouds of powder twisted up into the smoke holes above the cold hearths. I could hear our men choking and stumbling in the dust, and Hun Xoc yelled for everyone to cover up. Stinging particles puffed over me and even with my facecloth, and breathing through my nose, I still got a whiff of the shit. It felt like I’d snorted a line of curry powder.

  I sat back on the bloody tiles, sneezing. Ticks and pops of pink and white light and ghastly seventh chords of synesthetic sound flickered around my vision. Whatever I’d inhaled, it wasn’t FDA-approved.