The Sacrifice Game

by Brian D'Amato

  The herald said that the Harpies asked to raise the stakes by wagering One Harpy. He meant our first mul and the temple—including the support or family membership or loyalty or service or whatever you’d call it—of One Harpy himself, the founder who’d brought such wealth to our clan over the last nine hundred and fifty-eight solar years. Basically everything we had, including our name.

  The side betting stopped. There were a few murmurs in the silence. A crow cawed an alarm far off to the east. Bad sign.

  The Ocelots took a few score beats to respond. When they did, their crier said they’d see the bet, but he didn’t stake the Ocelots’ mul and founder. Instead he put up what you could roughly call the equivalent, in loyalty, real estate, hunting and fishing rights, salt works, and slaves. It took forever to list everything, but it didn’t sound fair to me. Still, we accepted it.

  There were another eighty beats of expectant silence. I couldn’t see 2 Jeweled Skull but he was probably conferring with his in-house bookies. Finally, he accepted.

  The side odds went to seven to four and there was a whole new spate of what they called “hero bets,” durations and spreads on individual players. I figured that about half of the city’s entire year’s economy was going to redistribute based on this one match.

  Two pairs of untouchables entered the trench. Each lifted a round-bottomed cylindrical jar of powdered pigment on long tongs and balanced it on the top head-plate of each of the square target pegs.

  There were some very complicated rules to hipball, kind of like international ice hockey rules, with a lot of checks and balances in the scoring, but basically a hit on the other side’s target peg was worth a point, and a ball that came up over the top of the peg and either broke the pot or knocked pigment out of the pot scored four points. There weren’t any ring goals on this court, or for that matter on any other that I ever saw in the old days, although they eventually became famous because of the much later court at Chichen Itza, which of course became a tourist attraction in the twentieth century. Which supposedly they gave James Naismith the idea for basketball. Sometimes players practiced by knocking the ball through a big wooden hoop that they rolled on the ground. But using rings in the ball game itself must have started later. Anyway, the first side to score nineteen points won. But—weirdly, but maybe not coincidentally, almost like in modern Ping-Pong or tennis—you had to win by three points. And just like in those games you could go back to “deuce” indefinitely. If you faulted the ball over your own rear goal line, a point went to the other side. You didn’t switch sides. Each team had two substitute players, but that was it, and if more players got knocked out of the ball game it came down to last-man-standing.

  DOOOONG.

  A brace of bearers brought in the doeskin-wrapped ball Hun Xoc had brought back from 31 Courts, holding the too-potent bundle with wooden hands, and tied it to the service cord. An umpire inspected the knot, signaled, and the ball was hoisted up, hanging above the central marker stone.

  “Now, One, Two, Four, Five, Seven, Nine, Thirteen,” the Magister Ludi chanted, switching from the second-person plural imperative to the apostrophic tense you used only when speaking to gods,

  “Now Twenty, Fifty-Two, Two Hundred Sixty,

  O Night, O Wind, O Day, O Rain, O Zero,

  Now, guests, inspect 2 Creeper’s blood-boiled head.”

  2 Creeper had been the greatest Ixian ballplayer in living memory, but he’d sacrificed himself thirty-nine solar years ago after an ankle sprain. The Ball had been wound out of white latex around 2 Creeper’s cranium as a hollow center—to increase the bounce—and then baked black and studded with painted thorns, like little nails. Finally the ball had been purified in two kinds of blood and then washed in original water boiled over the offering fires of both houses’ grandfathers-nests. It was bound on a little below its equator by thirteen turns of a multicolor-stranded rope, and as the last of the ribbons dropped off, the service cord began to unwind. I smelled that old fight-or-flight charge building up in the players around me, joints quivering ever so slightly, weight shifting, glands shooting that rich watch out cortisol mixture into spinal cords no matter what kind of kamikaze ethic their upper brains had been washed in.

  “Li’skuba hun,” the chanter called. “Ready for Ball One.”

  The sunlight clicked behind the mul, but guava light reflected into the court off the eastern roof-combs like they were vertical lakes. They wouldn’t set torches for over thirty-score beats. The bookies called last bets and then hushed up. The right strikers tensed their muscles for their springs, front feet ready to disengage from their lines at the sound of the ball striking the central marker. There were four beats of global motionlessness as the spotter watched the dying sun.

  There were thirty-nine beats of silence.

  He held up his hand, and, delicately, brought it down in a cutting motion.

  There was a stirring and an intake of breath in the crowd. The Magister cut the end of a taut cord attached to the railing of his chair. The end of the cord seemed to dart away from him like a blue racer, and it whistled down to the court and up through three different loops to the ball-sac and the ribbons around the ball uncoiled and fell to the side, exposing the dark sphere. In proportion to our body size it was about as big as a basketball. Knocking it around with your bare flesh was like playing hackysack with a cannonball, and if you got off balance the ball could maim or kill you.

  The untouchables scurried out of the court. The referees stepped behind the end-zone line. The rope unraveled faster and faster and just as the ball began to free itself the Magister Ludi called out “PIIITTZOOOHHM PAAYYEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!,” which I guess the closest thing to in English would be “PLLL—AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAY BALL!!!!!

  ( 34 )

  The knot unraveled, but the ball seemed not to fall but to hover for more than a moment and then to sink reluctantly into the thick air, slowly accelerating down into the round central marker, building up to real speed in the last arm of its fall, and then there was a hollow CHUHN!!!, the sound marking the exact demarcation between yesterday and today for all Ixian historical time.

  “Chun,” the cantor called almost simultaneously with the sound. In ball language chun was the word for base or “trunk” or “root,” since the markers were sections of branches of the tree path to Xibalba. So the cantor’s play-by-play was kind of like Yoruba talking pressure-drums, it both imitated the sounds of the ball game and gave out names and moves and positions, and the whole rap radiated out from the court in a widening circle. Listening to the city was like hearing hundreds of big antique radios picking up a broadcast through some thick medium that slowed it down to much less than the speed of sound.

  Before you could see the black sphere rise off the marker the right-hand strikers had already closed in, Hun Xoc from our side and Emerald Immanent from the west. The ball drooped down again into their double blur and you heard flesh slapping on flesh and then the crisp hollow sound of the ball on a hollow yoke. The head cantor shouted, “Bok!,” the ball word for “yoke,” or “bone” or “horn.” The word was so close to the actual sound that it seemed like one of the echoes off the sloping banks, as the batteries of criers relayed the call out into the suburbs and hamlets and out the roads far through the hinterlands. Village adders memorized it at the first hearing. Troupes of hipball-adders interpreted it based on where the hit came from, by whom, on what beat, and a hundred other considerations, and the human reverberations rippled through signal- and runner-relays out through IX and Ix’s four hundred towns and beyond, out to the corners of the four quarters and up and down to the buds and roots of the Big Tree, the Tree of Four Hundred Times Four Hundred Branches. But of course here the ball-time was moving on ahead, and before the echo had gotten to the second relay circle, beyond the court district, the ball had angled up and hit the Harpies’ goal peg, and there was a wide liquid clap on the huge clay-cylinder scoring drum. The cantor shouted, “T’un!,” which imitated the sound of the ball on
the hollow peg but was also the word for “point.”

  The referees signed that it was legal. A big whooshing spitty whistley hiss rose out of the Ocelots and their partisans, the equivalent of applause, all breaking against a tide of stamping feet on the Harpy side, the more satisfying Maya equivalent of boos.

  “T’un Bolom, kam-chen Bolomob,” the first chanter sang, that is,

  “Goal, Ocelot, one–zero, Ocelots.”

  The circles criers repeated the call, “T’un Bolom, kam-chen Bolomob.”

  At the goal the players retreated behind their end-zone lines. A pair of untouchables ran in and caught the ball together with their gloved hands. One of them stood on the central marker, holding the ball, while the other purified it with a dusting of blood ashes out of a pouch. If the invisibles were like stagehands, the untouchables were a bit more like ballboys. But since they touched the court surface and the blood and the dead and most of all the ball, they were irrevocably polluted.

  “Li’skuba ka.” Ready for Ball Two. I was getting that racehorse-at-the-gate feeling that I’d burst if I didn’t get out on the court. The first invisible faced west and threw the ball underhanded up into the air, expertly dropping it down on the Ocelots’ emerald-green rear marker.

  “Chun,” the chanter called again. Emerald Immanent got the tip again and yoke-bounced the ball upward, controlling it—“Bok”—and passed it gently off his shoulder arm.

  “P’uchik,” the chanter called. The word both meant a hit on the body and imitated the sound of a ball hitting flesh and then snap-disengaging from oiled skin. Emerald Howler, the other Ocelot striker, caught the pass on the side of his yoke, “bok,” and knocked it ahead and right, angling it off the sloped masonry wall like in old-fashioned court tennis.

  “Pak,” the cantor called, imitating the crisp solid sound. It was also the word for “wall.” Emerald Immanent had already run downcourt and positioned himself under the dropping ball for a shot at the target. The crowd noise fell to near silence and all you could hear was the warbling play-by-play chants and the players’ grunts and the squeaks and cracks of their sandals. It wasn’t that spectators weren’t allowed to talk, but that the game absorbed your total attention, even if you couldn’t see it happening. The crowd was so fascinated they actually shut up and let the intensity build until it was released in the paroxysm of applause at the end of a tense play, or a goal, or a death.

  5-5 came up fast and blocked Emerald Immanent’s shot, but Immanent shifted, faded back, shoulder-passed back off the wall to Emerald Howler—“P’uchik pak”—who yoked it up perfectly up into the underside of the Harpy goal: “Bok . . . t’un!”

  “T’un Bolom,” the score-adder called, “wasak-chen Bolomob.”

  “Goal, Ocelot, two–zero, Ocelots.”

  Whistling blasted out of the crowd. It was two hundred beats later before the players settled into their positions and the head invisible served out the third ball. Emerald Immanent got it again and tried the same run-and-feint and back-pass to Emerald Howler, but this time Hun Xoc was there and he intercepted it, pulling the ball out of the air with his wrist-guard and sending it south to Red Beak. It was a signature move of the Harpy School. In most courts around here hipball was more like soccer, because you couldn’t touch the ball with your feet or your hands. But Ixian rules were a bit different, and we each wore a lizard-skin-wrapped wooden extension on the underside of our wrists, extending up into the palms, and you could bat or deflect the ball with those. Even so, the ball was so heavy you couldn’t get much force on it with your arms. And of course you weren’t allowed to catch it, not that you’d want to. Really, it was too heavy to launch seriously with anything but the braced weight of most of your body, and if it had any major momentum behind it you’d have to add some of your own as well. In your big yoke, which came nearly to the nipple level, and the roll of cotton padding peeking up over it, you felt gravity siphoning up through you, and as you received and launched the ball it felt like you were negotiating between a good-sized satellite and the pulling power of the earth. Sometimes you’d have to use your shoulder or calf or even upper arm, but you wouldn’t want to and no matter how hard you were you flinched against the weight. So the idea was to shoot with your hip-yoke whenever possible—which let you get your full weight behind the impact—and then to use your calf, shoulder, thigh, upper arm, and finally the palm guard, in that order of preference. Using your head would be a bad idea.

  Red Beak kneed the ball south, low into the red expanse of the Harpy wall. Hun Xoc dove after it falling on his knees, blocking its rebound with the top angle of his ornate yoke. The ball settled down into the groove, reverberating between the wall and his yoke like a pinball caught between electric bumpers, the criers imitating the accelerating beat, “pak, bok, pak, bok, pak-bok, pak-bok, pak-bok pak-bok pak-bok pakbok pakbok pakbokpakbok pakbokpakbokpakbokpakbok,” into a blur of sound. Hipball was a dignified game, a stolid ritual, an act of worship. But it was also a much faster game even than basketball, at least as fast as jai-alai or Ping-Pong.

  Emerald Immanent recovered but Red Beak backed away from him into the Harpies’ end zone. The main territorial rule was that neither team was allowed into the other’s end zone, which in our case was the left half of the east half of the court, a red area shaped like a backward L. So in this match that meant the Ocelots couldn’t step on red and the Harpy clan couldn’t step on emerald. Each side’s blocker couldn’t leave the zone but the strikers could go anywhere but the enemy’s home quadrant. You couldn’t keep the ball in your zone for more than four bank- or body-bounces, though, and if the ball hit the level floor on your half of the court, it was out and you had to turn it over to the other team, but this hardly ever happened. The ball was too bouncy and the players were too good. Any one of these people could have body-juggled a cinder block and kept it in the air for scores of scores of scores of beats.

  Red Beak waited for Hun Xoc to get between him and Emerald Immanent, and then took a slow run up toward the peg, working the ball with short flesh-dribbles onto the north wall. He shot and missed. Emerald Snapper got the ball and passed to Emerald Howler. Howler shot and missed and Hun Xoc got the ball. The deal was that it was nearly impossible to shoot for a goal from the enemy’s side of the center line, although “backward goals” and even error goals off the opposing team did happen. And since there was only one really good spot on your side to shoot for the opposing goal, the ball tended to follow a fairly set course. You’d gain possession, get the ball into position on your right side, and then charge up along the right bank, shooting ahead and up to the right at the other team’s peg. If you missed the peg, the opposing team would almost always gain possession. Then they’d do the same thing, they’d set up, make their own run and shoot for your goal, on your left side, and then you’d get the ball back and repeat the process. So even though there wasn’t a net, the design of the court itself created a back-and-forth motion and a general counterclockwise draw, like the endless left turn on a racecourse. And the same centrifugal force tended to keep the two teams separate, although not enough to prevent a clash or two. Despite how dangerous it was, it wasn’t really a contact sport, at least in theory.

  Hun Xoc worked the ball up the north bank, “bok, pak, bok, pak,” and suddenly took a long shot, like a three-pointer, sending the big black planet nearly into the Ocelot spectators’ baatob, and even though the ball seemed to miss the goal, it grazed the fragile jar of dyed marble powder. The jar wobbled and fell, trailing emerald-green plumes.

  “Waak’al, waak’al,” the chanter shouted. The word meant “explode,” that is, a great-goal. The Harpy partisans went wild with a special hiss-cheer you used on big points. It wasn’t that stupid Mexican trilling thing, though, like they encourage you to do at tequila bars in the States. It was more like ten thousand panicked crows. The boot-stamping sloshed welcomely over to the Ocelots’ side.

  “Halach tun Kot, lahka tunob Kotob, wasak tunob Bolomob,” the chanter
called,

  “Harpy Great-goal, 2 Ocelots, 4 Harpies.”

  Maybe we’re okay, I thought. The invisibles scurried in to clean up and replace the jars. The Magister flashed his hand-mirror and the fourth serve fell. Red Beak got it and shot. Miss. Emerald Immanent trapped the ball, took two dribbles up the south wall, “bok pak bok pak,” and shot, BOK.

  Miss. Too high. I would have made that. Goddamnit, lemme out there. The ball arced up over the stands and a Harpy spectator, as per custom, deflected it back down—

  But something was wrong, the guy in the Harpy stands should have passed the ball to us, but instead he’d deflected it the wrong way, back toward the Ocelots. Emerald Immanent leisurely repositioned himself, got the rebound, and shot again. He hit the peg.

  “BOK T’UN WAAK’A!” “Great-goal! 6 Ocelots, 4 Harpies.”

  On the Harpy side the sort-of-boos coalesced into “keechtikob, keechtikob, keechtikob,” “spies, spies, spies.” Whoever’d batted the ball in the wrong direction was getting pretty badly torn up. Even if he swore that it was a mistake there was no way they’d believe he hadn’t been turned by the Ocelots.

  Still, it wouldn’t work twice.

  On the next serve Hun Xoc got the tip but Emerald Immanent and Emerald Howler charged on him so fast he passed the ball back to 5-5. The pass overshot and 5-5 missed it. The ball hit the red bank and bounced over our zone down into the trench, about to go out. 5-5 leaned out to make a save and got the ball back in the air, but he was off-balance and fell onto the white, out of the Harpy Zone, which gave the Ocelots a point without a goal. The umpire signaled and the cantor started to call out the new score—