The Sacrifice Game

by Brian D'Amato

  I was used to it by now, but I suppose to the twenty-first-century eye one of the odder things about this place—I mean Mesoamerica, or for that matter the entire New World—was that everything was single file. Even if you had a hundred thousand people on the move, there were never even two of them abreast. The thin human snake just slid on forever, curving over both horizons. 2 Hand—Hun Xoc’s younger brother and, unofficially, something like my second mate—came out with a veintena of men to meet us and said that the number of Koh’s followers had gone up by a fifth—again—just while we were away, so despite our adjustments we’d still come in about four thousand marchers behind the great woman and her entourage. 2 Hand called her “the Elderess,” which made me wonder whether he was starting to believe some of her hype. Bad sign. We cut through the line and jogged ahead on its southern side, with what they called the Iguana River, a sad yellow trickle at the low point of the long Nochixtlán Valley, on our right hand. It was light enough to see faces now, although today’s sun wouldn’t show itself. I passed—or to be socially correct I should say “my bearer, my scarefly, my weapons valet, my faithful fellator Armadillo Shit,” and I passed—a delicate-looking fourteen-year-oldish girl who was pulling her family’s big ratty old travois single-handedly, or I guess I should say single-headedly, since it was drawn by a tumpline that cut deep into her forehead. There was a mole a half inch below the right of her hornet-stung lips, just like the one on, hmm, some actress, who was it—oh, yeah, Claudine Auger, the girl who played Domino in Thunderball. Her mother and sisters were walking in front of her, and her father, a brother, and four other male relatives sat in the sled, taking it easy. Patriarchal fucks, I thought, although I should mention that the four male relatives were deceased, just masked mummy bundles sitting as stiffly upright as Quaker ministers, so they were probably pretty light. But then there were also three big hearthstones on the sled, and one of those big wooden Teotihuacanian host statues, the kind that have all the little statues inside them, and a bunch of other bundles that I guessed were just more garbage, and I was on the verge of going up and shaking the paterfamilias and screaming, “You fuck, first, you get out and pull the sled, and second, you toss those dead guys and the other crap right now and fill up every waterskin you’ve got, and beg, borrow, or steal as much rock salt as you can possibly drag, and then maybe you all have a chance of lasting another twenty days, you FUCKHEAD,” but of course you’d have to tell everybody the same thing and the important thing was to keep a low profile and get yourself and the tsam lic critters back to Ix, and anyway you couldn’t argue with these people. Or any people. Then there were three loners, each dragging a fresh or—let’s say “still unprepared”—corpse. There just weren’t enough defleshers to go around, even though they were working day and night, stuffed with extra rations and sitting in unaccustomed luxury on special sleds as they picked over the bodies with their inch-long fingernails. And they were hurrying. It was lousy mojo—obviously—if the dogs got any of you, but even so a big scurfy pack of them seemed to be making its whole living following the catafalques. When the bones finally dried out, an engraver would carve their owners new names—that is, their postholocaust, Koh-given names—into the ulnas and tibias. Although you’d think there wouldn’t be time for such niceties. But even with fire, starvation, bandits, disease, and troops of more novel apocalyptic horsemen, everybody found the leisure to give themselves new names, brands, tattoos, tooth decor, and whatever else. Craziness.

  The next big group we passed was a clanlet of well-to-do Swallowtail-affiliated traders, about fifteen blood family members and two veintenas of thralls hauling them on eight extralong sleds. On the last sled, three eight-year-old girls, who looked like triplets, fanned the patriarch with huge chocho palm leaves that had recently been blanched and then dyed blue-green. Which, I guess, is getting into more detail than necessary, but I wanted to mention it while I’m thinking of since it became an issue later: all of Koh’s followers who could afford it wore or carried something in her signature turquoise-blue shade—there were vats of the indigofera dye on special sleds—so that from a distance the procession looked like it had been sprinkled with periwinkle blossoms. Something old, something new, I thought. Something borrowed, something askew. And something too nauseating even to name. Still, they all thought they were part of a larger being. And despite everything, there was an element of fun to it, or if not quite fun at least adventure. For most of them this was the first time they’d been away from their home ground. For that matter, some of the women probably hadn’t ever been two rope-lengths outside their hamlets. This was the primary event in their lives, and in their family’s lives, all the way back to their first ancestor at the first birth of this sun on 4 Lord, 8 Seed Maize, 0.0.0.0.0., that is, August 11, 3113 BC, and ahead to their last descendant, who, of course, would die on the last 4 Ahau of the last b’aktun, in AD 2012.

  There were about three hundred big palanquins in the high-rent district of the line. They varied in size and opulence but they all had arrays of cushions and big round wicker roofs covered with embroidered cloth, so that they looked incogruously like psychedelicized Conestoga wagons. Lady Koh held court on the largest of the palanquins. It was only about eight arms wide—still wider than any of the others—but about forty long. Right now there were sixteen people sitting on it and forty carrying it. There was a breeze, but another gang of thralls carried a portable windbreak, and the feathers on the mat barely stirred. A squad of guards ran alongside on each hand. There was a strong smell of monarda—a kind of horsemint that upscale valets crushed and strewed around their masters—which didn’t much cover up the hellish odors, and under that a hint of what people said was the breath of Koh’s most secret uay, and what a modern person would call her signature scent. When I’d first smelled it I’d described it to myself as the opposite of the smell of cinnamon, and now, after what seemed like years, I still didn’t have a better description. But I did know, now, that its main component was enfleuraged from what I was pretty sure was a species of Brassia, the genus of orchids that mimics spiders, and that as far as anyone seemed to know, it was unique to her and her close followers.

  Koh’s guards all knew Hun Xoc, but it still took a while to pass through their circles. I was already doing rage-abatement breathing by the time my bearer finally set me down on the edge of the platform. It rocked just a bit as it moved along, pleasantly boatlike. Koh sat in the turquoise center of a feather-cloth Sacrifice Game board two arm-lengths square. Her eyes were closed and she was mumbling to one of her uays in some animal language. There were eight members of the popol na—the mat house, that is, the council, up here, and they greeted me and went back to talking among themselves. They were all in expensive gear, but it was still a pretty motley crew. Crüe. Whatever. The youngest of them, 14 Wounded, was eight tuns, that is, a little less than eight solar years, older than I was. He’d been the trade representative in Teotihuacán for my adoptive clan, the Harpies, who were the richest family in Ix besides the ruling clan, the Ocelots. Or they might now be even richer, because of the Ocelots’ gigantic debts, except it was harder to put a value on things here than it was back in the twenty-first. Anyway—oh, except there was one who was younger, Koh’s Steward of Invisible Things. His title meant he was something like a legal counsellor. His name was Coati, that is, kind of a raccoon. I’d barely met him back in Teotihuacán, but now he was with her every minute.

  The group had started as a temporary meeting of the major greathouse ahaus, but now it had hardened into a government. Well, whatevs. The other seven people on the platform were attendants, fanning us and whisking away the screwflies. None of them looked at Koh. Ordinary folks who saw her face might get scorched by her captive lightning.

  Hun Xoc manuevered next to me and squatted. I kneed to the edge of the Game cloth. It was strewn with jade and quartzite pebbles, and after a minute I could see that she was using it as a battle map. A long line of turquoise pebbles, stretching diagonally from
the center of the white quadrant to the upper corner of the black one, represented our caravan. The clusters of pink quartz that approached it on its north side were Severed Right Hand’s army, and it looked to me like they were color-coded like in an old Kriegspiel layout, darkening as they became increasingly hypothetical. But beyond that I couldn’t read what she was up to. There was at least an equal number of other stones, mainly black and yellow, distributed in other zones of the board, and aside from the fact that they had more to do with time than space I couldn’t tell what they represented. For all I knew, some of them were just there to confuse the other members of the council.

  Well, if so, it was working. They were all stone-cold killers and word-is-law patriarchs, and now they were sitting patiently, waiting, speaking in hushed mutters, and casting apprehensive looks at her as we jogged along. Either they all believed she was getting her orders from a higher authority, or they figured enough of the others believed that none of them wanted to question her.

  When I—

  —Ow. Damn. One of the scareflies had gotten a hair into my eye. I glared at him. He quaked in terror, almost literally. And I almost felt guilty, but I got over it. I watched Koh. She moved two of the black stones. She was as unhurried as though no one else was there.

  Hmm. When I know more of tactics than a novice in a nunnery, I was going to say. Well, our own nunnery novice had certainly convinced these cats that she knew something. Just two tuns ago—I would have said “short tuns” if they hadn’t seemed longer than python turds—Koh had been just one of the more promising young members of the Orb Weaver Sorority. It was an elite group of epicene veneratoresses to Star Rattler, high-stone sun-adderesses who usually wore men’s clothing so that they could operate in male spaces. Although now she was wearing bits of both male and female clothing. And as far as I knew, this was her own idea. She was becoming all things to all people.

  Geez Belize, I thought, I’ve created a monsteress. I gave this girl her start. I mean, I was the one who’d contacted her in the first place, because there was a picture of her in the Codex Nuremberg. But the Codex wouldn’t be written until long after this, sometime in the 1100s. And it wasn’t clear from the Codex whether she’d still be alive or not after she became a big deal. She could end up like Jesus and be dead for a hundred years before the franchise really got going. And if she turned into a martyr, most likely she’d take me down with her. Well, don’t worry about it. I was still pretty useful to her. Wasn’t I? I mean, I knew stuff nobody around here knew, not even her. I could even still mix up some gunpowder if she wanted me to, although of course I didn’t want to call that much attention to myself. Somebody’d say I was a dangerous scab-caster—like a warlock—and every other ambitious blood would be looking to off me.

  The mumbling stopped. Lady Koh raised her eyes, and they met mine, and, without actually moving a single muscle of her face, somehow she conveyed a smile.

  ( 19 )

  After that, Lady Koh made eye contact with each member of the council in turn and then, instead of speaking, took her hands out of the folds of her manto and signed in Ixian hunting language. Every once in a while, when there was a name that didn’t translate, she spoke a syllable or two to fill in. “He’ll march ahead of us, at least to the oxbow,” she signed. “Then he’ll retrace his route and wait for a west wind dawn.” She moved the largest and brightest of the pink quartz pebbles southeast of our position and then back alongside us, illustrating the maneuver. The idea was that Severed Right Hand would want to come at us with the sun rising behind his men and the wind in front so we wouldn’t smell him. It sounded reasonable. “So we need to have iik and coals ready.” That is, when they attacked, we’d be ready to run baskets full of burning chili peppers upwind, to try and blind them.

  “Smoke is for first-time-menstruating nongreathouse second-born girl daughters,” 14 Wounded said. Needless to say, but I’ll say it anyway, the expression sounded better in Mayan. Anyway, it meant that smoke screens were a cowardly tactic.

  There was a pause. Cowardly is good, I thought, but I didn’t want to start definding myself on the point, so I just kept walking. Set a good example, I thought. Quiet, uncomplaining, impervious to pain, stoic—ow. Sticklet in my left sandal. Damn. Ow, ow, ow. Why me? Ow, ow, ow, ow, ow. I shook it out. Okay. The trail went over a dry gulch and the platform swayed like a jet in a pocket of low pressure. You could hear thousands of callused and/or sandaled feet padding on gravel.

  Finally Coati held up a hand with the thumb and first two fingers touching, which meant basically, “Insignificant as I am, may I yet please speak?” The members of the popol clicked their tongues for “yes.”

  They looked at Koh. She signed “yes.”

  “All great-alliances collapse from stomach parasites, not predators,” Coati said. It was a well-known line from some old masque, but 14 Wounded didn’t say anything more.

  Koh and her privy council spent some time working on the new set of signals they’d give for advances and retreats. She stipulated that after the battle—which, I guess, they all figured couldn’t be avoided—her followers would regather in a village called Place of the Ticks, on a defensible bluff two jornadas to the southwest. From there the migration would bear due south for two days, and then turn east along the Atoyac River to a site on the coast just south of what would later be called Veracruz. She’d resettle them there, she said, and reseat the Star Rattler’s mul—that is, very generally, “pyramid.” And after that, Koh and I would go on to Ix by the inland water route, with a small escort of two hundred and forty Orb Weaver bloods and a hundred and ten nonblood supporting families, meaning about another two thousand people.

  The council lasted for two-thirteenths of the day, that is, about three hours. No one could leave until everyone agreed it was over. And in fact, unless one of us drastically changed rank, whenever any combination of us sat together again, it would be in the same relative positions and oriented toward the same directions. There were also twelve people who were allowed in the room but had to sit outside the circle: four servers, two of Koh’s monkey-masked clerks, a silent guy in a striped outfit who was named 0 Porcupine Clown, and who seemed to be kind of Koh’s court jester, 1 Gila’s accountant and two guards, and our own two calligraphers. And, because tonight would belong to Serpigo, who was the most dangerous of the lords of the dusks, there were four censers pacing counterclockwise around the perimeter of the circle, trailing clouds of geranium incense out of their hand burners.

  Finally one of the this-meeting-has-to-end votes carried. The bigwigs crouched backward away from the circle and went back to their own families. Hun Xoc stayed. Coati rolled up the Game board, the attendents folded the wicker covering over the four of us, and Koh and I got to speak almost in private.

  She said that while I was away on my burial excursion she’d sent four runners forward to 2 Jeweled Skull, my adopted father and the ahau of the Harpy Clan. They were going to—wait, maybe I should mention a few other things about old 2JS. When I’d received Jed1’s mind up on the Ocelots’ mul, 2JS had unexpectedly been in the same tiny room with me, and he’d gotten a bit of scatter, enough of my memories to speak English and Spanish and understand quite a bit of what I was up to. But he hadn’t gotten enough of me to, say, understand that the images he had of airplanes weren’t a species of friendly condor, or that the computers he remembered me using weren’t silent marimbas with captive souls inside. And he was still very much himself. There wasn’t enough of me in there to confuse him about who he was, the way I’d been confused at first about whether I was me or Chacal, the ballplayer whose brain I was, shall we say, staying in as a guest. Luckily for me, Chacal’s sense of self had faded away pretty quickly. But 2 Jeweled Skull had never become me. And knowing so much about me hadn’t exactly seemed to help him empathize with me or my plight. He’d been angry. And I guess he’d had a legitimate beef. But he’d tortured me pretty badly to get me to pull myself out of his mind, and then, when I’d finally con
vinced him I couldn’t do that, he’d gradually figured out a way to turn the situation to his advantage. He’d sent me to Teotihuacán to break the Teotihuacanian monopoly on tsam lic, the Sacrifice Game enabling drugs, and now here I was.

  Anyway, Koh’s runners were going to repeat to 2 Jeweled Skull—in a Harpy House code language that they themselves didn’t understand—the message that I and the other Harpy bloods who’d survived from the team he’d sent, along with Lady Koh and a small Rattler-blood escort, would be sempiternally honored to attend the great-hipball game in Ix on Ixlahun Chuwen, Bolonlahun Yaxk’in, that is 13 Howler, 19 Redness, or July 14, forty-nine days from now. But they weren’t going to mention the great migration. He will have heard about it anyway by now, she said. Calling attention to it would just raise the issue of what we intended to do with them. What if Koh didn’t manage to found her shining-city-on-a-hill and we turned up in Ix leading a hungry multitude?