The Sacrifice Game

by Brian D'Amato

  Damn.

  I’d been in a couple hipball games where somebody switched in a lopsidedly weighted ball, but with those you could call for an examination. If you looked at this ball you probably wouldn’t see anything. And somebody’d rolled up the cord. It was a good one.

  I stood there, looking around like an idiot. Or, as Forrest would say, like a idiot. No call. The elder Harpy bloods were calming the others down. As they should have, I supposed, but it still rankled.

  Like I said, they had to win by three. Just a regular goal, I thought. Can’t pull that one again. No tricks. Don’t think about it. Just like any other point. Play hard. Give it the old Bulldog try. Handsome Dan. Rah.

  Fourteenth serve.

  “Chun.”

  Red Hun Xoc got the tip. Emerald Immanent was hanging back now. Letting the game come to him. Emerald Howler was tied up guarding me. I faded back into our zone, letting the pass hit the bank on my right, and then got back under it and scooped it up. I shot way low and missed on purpose. Emerald Snapper got the ball and sent it to Howler.

  Okay, here’s my trick, I thought. I was downcourt in three steps, onto the black and all over Howler before he could pass. He hip-dribbled low against the angle of the bank, trying to keep it away, but I darted under him and knocked the ball toward me with my knee and in less than a beat I’d balanced it on my right wrist-scoop and shot it way back upcourt into the red. Hun Xoc knew what I was up to—he and I had run this move a hundred times—and he was there.

  I twisted away, faked north, and then blasted back up the middle of the court, tiptoeing on the line between the neutral black and the off-limits yellow, and dove into our home zone just ahead of Emerald Howler.

  Hun Xoc picked up the ball and dribbled it twice up the white zone toward the Ocelots’ goal. I barely signaled at all but he knew what I was getting at. Just before Emerald Immanent was on him he back-passed to me.

  I shouldered the ball up at a long angle, darted around the two-person crunch, and picked it up again on its downward arc. It was something I’d practiced so often from such an early age that I wasn’t even aware of it.

  Emerald Immanent was the first to clock what I was going for but Red Hun Xoc got in on my left and kept him off me. Emerald Howler got around, though, and checked me on my left side, cracking the front of his yoke into the underside of mine.

  “Kaaxtik u bak’el it,” he said through his grunt. “Better clench your asshole.” I tipped right, braced myself on the chalky slope with both hands, and kicked backward at his knees. Emerald Howler dodged away. I guessed that he’d figured the most urgent thing was separating me from the ball, not attacking me, since I was about to get torn apart by the rest of his team anyway, so he’d leave himself open. And he did. As he settled himself and got his yoke down into the path of the descending ball I jumped back and caught his right wrist-guard in the crook of my left arm and twisted backward, straining against it. He was this incredibly strong guy, just a squat chunk of muscle and breakage-enlarged bones like a twisted oak stump, but after a beat I got him over onto me, the ball coming down and bouncing off the cotton beneath his yoke, and as he rolled over to try to crush my legs with his yoke I got my left hand up and too fast for anyone to see it I ripped his nose plug out of his septum, and sort of deflected the spray of blood into his eyes with my hand while I rolled backward. He’d gotten hold of one of my waist straps but I pushed against him with my legs and I finally snapped away, rolling over again once, and I was back on my feet. Hun Xoc had managed to pick up the loose ball and, as he got his last bit of juice together, set up and shot just over my head. He hit the peg dead on, but the vase didn’t move.

  “19 Ocelots, 17 Harpies.”

  Qué el fuck? I thought, No wakal tunI? He fucking tipped the jar, what did they do, glue it on?

  I looked up at the stupid little clay pot. It was just hanging out there, like, who, me? And he’d just sent a brotherfucking earthquake through its little fucking peg.

  “The Harpies request inspection of the bowl,” I started to yell out in formal Chol, but Hun Xoc was already on top of me and he practically stuck his hand down my mouth.

  Shut up, he said. He moved me back into the red. Emerald Howler and Emerald Immanent were on their feet and running in place at us, held back by a fog of invisibles.

  Let’s go, Hun Xoc said. We teetered back to our markers along the north wall, leaving bloody handprints.

  On the fifteenth serve, the Ocelots fouled us, for 19 to 18. Yay. The sixteenth ball made twenty-eight circuits—an unlucky number—but just as I thought we were getting a line on it Emerald Immanent’s lob shot grazed the peg, lightly but fair and square.

  “Ocelot great-goal, 20 Ocelots, 18 Harpies.”

  The Ocelot side whipped up into a cheer orgy. One point away. Bastards.

  Finally everyone quieted down for the serve, and then there was a signal that 2 Jeweled Skull had asked to raise the stakes by what was basically the amount of his personal treasury. It was the signal for the Harpies to get ready for combat. I looked up into our Harpy stands. The three hundred or so war-age bloods were bouncing around and waving their baatob like innocent spectators, but if you were looking for it you could see, just from how still they were, that something was going on. They had a look like the nonexpression of a Japanese gymnast doing an iron cross on the hanging rings. They were dressing each other for combat under their mantos, popping the nuts off the points of their blowgun darts, untying the knots of their mantles and heavier ornaments so they could slip them off at a p’ip’il’s notice—at a blink—tying obsidian knives and saw handles around their upper arms. It was slow going, you had to be careful not to cut yourself or the person you were dressing. Obsidian’s really nothing to screw around with. The edge of an obsidian blade is only one molecule wide, and it can part the molecules of your flesh like it was going through air, often nearly painlessly, so that it takes you longer to notice you’ve been cut. They still use—or I should say they were going to use—skin scalpels with obsidian edges in the twenty-first century. In any pitched battle with obsidian weapons, about half of the combatants were always hash in a flash, like they’d fallen through a stack of windows from the pre-safety-glass era.

  Could the Ocelot spies see something was up? I wondered. Or was it so subtle that you had to know it was happening to catch it?

  The signal came down that Fanged Hummingbird had seen the raise. There was another blast of commotion. I got Hun Xoc and Red Cord into a kind of a huddle and got my mouth onto Hun Xoc’s ear.

  If this turns into a fight we have to head into the Ocelots’ compound, I said. West.

  Why? he signed on my arm. He was planning to stay here and fight it out.

  We have to get to the Ocelots’ tree, I said. There’s something I promised 2 Jeweled Skull I’d do. I didn’t want Red Cord—or even Hun Xoc, I guess—to know about the earthstar compound. Better they thought I wanted to ring or somehow poison the Ocelots’ celestial tree—which would be a reasonable goal, actually, ritually speaking. It would be like killing the clan.

  Hun Xoc signed that he didn’t want to run.

  I started to try to tell him the old thing about how we weren’t running, we were just advancing in a different direction, but I tripped over the words. It wasn’t that easy to translate an English phrase into Chol, or at least it wasn’t for me.

  We’re not running anywhere, I said, I have to ajma-xoc. It meant “follow what our father says.” It was incontrovertible. Come on, I thought, switch hats. You’re not a ballplayer right now, you’re a commando.

  He demurred again. I insisted. Finally he said “Agreed” by contracting his shoulder muscles.

  It’ll just be the three of us and six of Koh’s guards, I said. Maybe not even that many. We can still make it, though.

  Listen, something’s going on, Hun Xoc signed by tapping my yoke.

  What? I asked, but I heard it.

  “Kot Chuupol! Ile Kot Chuupol!” It was Emerald Im
manent’s voice.

  He’d recognized me.

  ( 37 )

  “Kot Chuupol! Ile Kot Chuupol!”

  His voice was like he was trying to throw up, except loud. You’re supposed to be silent like your stupid name, I thought. Ch’uupul was a Chol word for like gay or queer—not in the okay sense of a epicene, but in the sense of being a willing bottom—so the most popular insult-name for me was just something midway in sound between that and “Chacal.”

  “Yan Kot Chacal!” he yelled. “It’s Harpy Chacal!”

  Just ignore them, dear, I thought.

  “Yan Chuupol Chacal! Yan Chuupol Chacal!”

  I was sort of half-aware that a couple of people up in the Ocelot stands had heard Emerald Immanent identifying me, and they were having mixed reactions. Some of them were more than a little spooked and kept on rhubarbing about it. But I was too pumped to pay much attention. The chanter and Magister and beaters and everybody just went on with what they were doing, cruising through the protocol on inertia.

  Anyway, the serve went out. Hun Xoc got it and passed to me. In the femtosecond I spent looking at him I could see he was too winded to make another goal run himself. In a normal ball game, with more bench players, he’d have dropped out already.

  I passed back to Red Cord. Just get me a good shot, I signed to Hun Xoc. Red Cord passed back to me.

  Okay. No point holding back now.

  I scooped the ball out of the air and passed it back to Hun Xoc and fell back and turned, setting up my signature run. I mean Chacal’s signature run. It was like one of Lebron’s dunk-in-the-post, I’d perfected it over so many repetitions it was almost one motion and felt completed as soon as I swung into it. I built up speed and ran up the red wall, like Donald O’Connor in Singin’ in the Rain. I was giving myself away, but I was like, Fine, I don’t give a fuck, I’m doing my transcendent little dance and nothing’s gonna stop me cause I’m the Duke of Earl.

  I turned like a skateboarder just above the lip of the wall and dashed down, building up momentum, and diagonally across the alley and up the Ocelots’ emerald-tinted wall. By the second step up I’d revisualized my path up the bank, felt my speed, yep, everything in place, THE TIME IS NOW!!!

  I came to that moment of perfect equipoise where I was standing motionless like a fly at this crazy forty-five-degree angle. I felt the wind from Ocelot spectators’ fists as they swung at me, not quite connecting. The goal was only six arms ahead of me and three arms above. Hun Xoc yoked the ball up to me like he’d done a thousand times, and it came up just as I was falling, nearly right where I wanted it, so that I could gauge its stately spin by a pink spot of bloody chalk-dust, and I dug my wrist-guard into the black moon and just fed it right into the side of the vase. I could see the bloom of turquoise powder as I fell out of my equilibrium and as I rolled I could hear the chanters squealing above the cheers:

  “20 Ocelots, 22 Harpies.” You could tell from the chanters’ voices that this wasn’t how it was supposed to go. They’d been sure the Ocelots had a lock. Well, choke on this, I thought. One more.

  Hun Xoc got the eighteenth serve, set up, got a solid hit on it, and grazed the peg. Somebody’d checked me, and I’d fallen over. But as I hoisted myself up I could see a tiny but incontrovertible wisp of blue-green dust.

  We did it, I thought, but as the chanters’ voice swelled into a chorus of “Kax kot, kax Kot,” “Win, Harpies, win, Harpies,” I could hear, closer and louder, Emerald Immanent’s voice, and then Emerald Snapper’s, and then two, and four, and then what sounded like a hundred other voices, all screaming:

  “Yan Kot Chacal!” “It’s Harpy Chacal!”

  I staggered toward the central marker. There were Harpy bloods chanting back, “Kax! Kax! Kax!” “Victory! Victory! Victory!” and the Ocelot crowd shouting, “Tuus! Tuus! Tuus!” “Deception, deception, deception.” Nearer, I heard Hun Xoc’s voice.

  “Chokow pol!” It meant “crazy” or “Crazy Man,” another common and somewhat more admiring pun on my name. But he used it only as a warning. I turned. All I could see was this big black thing but I ducked in time for it not to tear my head off.

  4 Blue Howler had scooped up the dead ball and yoked it at my head.

  What’s going on? I thought kind of dully. I was still endorphined out. Ball was supposed to be an elegant game—at its best combining the artistry of rhythmic gymnastics with the excitement and finesse of men’s lacrosse—and now it’s turning into Australian football. Howler ran at me, following the ball. I turned like I was going to run away and then dug my right foot into the bank and pushed off the angle between the floor and the sloping wall, stopping myself. Howler skidded into me from behind. I hunched forward and pushed my rear end back and felt the left prong of my horseshoe-shaped yoke connect with bone. I rolled forward and was on my feet again. Howler was sliding in a clockwise arc down the bank, leaving a wide black streak. The crowd loved it. I crouched into a “turtle,” expecting a tackle from Emerald Immanent, but it didn’t come. I looked up. Red Beak had gotten hold of him. Not for long, though, it looked like. Behind them I noticed Emerald Snapper and the two Emerald bench players running at us. Snapper was huge and big-boned and I thought for a beat that I’d had it, but he got off balance and as he fell toward me I got his head right on the sweet spot of my yoke. There was no crack, it was more like just a quiet glutch. Whatever, I thought, yeah, forget the damn Marquess of Queersbury rules, let’s take the buttons off the foils. As Snapper fell back he got a hand into my yoke and pulled me down onto the slaughterhouse floor. I managed to roll away before he rolled onto me and flattened me. Emerald Immanent was coming back around on my right. The umpires’ drivers and both sides’ invisibles were already out on the court, trying to shield the players they were assigned to.

  “Lothic ekel ytzam,” Howler yelled from the other side of the court. Basically it meant “You’re taco meat,” except ytzam was this really cheap sort of pemmican that the pastless clans ate and sold. It was known for having all sorts of squirrels and bats and bugs and mud and shit in it.

  “Chikin ukumil jotzpaljal,” I said, scooping the ball out of the air with my hand shield. “Your shrunken dick is showing.” That particular word for shrunken meant like with a shrunken head. I launched the ball off my yoke in an arc over his head. It looked like a good lob, but I slipped on blood and fell backward. Up in the stands what had been everyone arguing at once was devolving into everyone shouting at once. Out at either open end of the court, where some of the Ocelot and Harpy partisans overlapped, I could hear a few little slap-fights starting, the kind that turn into big ones. Some of the Harpies were cheering my name, that I was Chacal, I guess figuring I was back from the Underworld.

  Where’s the ball gotten to? I wondered. I rolled over on my stomach—with all the padding we were wearing, falling over was one thing that didn’t usually result in an injury—and for a beat I could see Lady Koh’s eyes watching me, unblinking and seemingly calm, penetrating through the swirls of motion and feather confetti. I thought about signing up to her but it was too far, I’d have to gesture too loud. Ahead and behind I could hear younger bloods were pouring through both end zones into the playing trench.

  I noticed Hun Xoc’s hand under my arm. He pulled me up. Both sides’ bloods were overpowering the drivers, who only had these short ceremonial maces anyway, more just regalia than practical weapons.

  Hun Xoc tensed as Howler came at us again. Howler hit him. Hun Xoc skidded back into me on the bloody floor. I toppled over and there was what seemed like two minutes where Howler was kneeling, looking down at us and babbling through a cluster of little bits of teeth and glogs of foamy mucus, something to the effect of how he was going to fuck us with a barrel cactus, one after the other. I just gritted my teeth and grunted back. Finally there was a crack as Hun Xoc got to an almost-standing position and brought one of his palm guards down on Howler’s head. Howler stopped sputtering. I pulled myself upright, clawing onto one of our invisibles, and
got my hand on Hun Xoc’s shoulder. There was all sorts of jewelry and expensive clothing falling down from the stands and you couldn’t see much, but the main problem was that we were already getting moshed between all these fans, which was usual enough for us except some of them were armed with obsidian-flake saws, and like I said, compared to that shit syringe needles and razor blades seem blunt by comparison. I climbed half-up someone and looked around for Koh. I couldn’t see her but a squad of six of Koh’s Rattler bloods, the ones she’d promised me, were sliding to us down the north bank. The rest of both sides of the crowd took that as a cue to start oozing down the banks into the trench. That’s it, no more play, I thought. Les jeux sont totalement faits, copains. Fear, fear, foes, fuck—

  Four of Koh’s Rattler guards got through and pushed through the knots of churning flesh on the court and kind of enclosed Hun Xoc and me, like an amoeba swallowing a pair of paramecia. Finally they got us up on their shoulders. I looked up and finally picked out Lady Koh. Like us, she was totally cut off, completely separated from the main body of the Harpies. She was gesturing at me. Go for the well. I climbed up on one of the guard’s shoulders and looked west over all the headdresses. The V of the court’s canyons looked invitingly open, with the emerald Δ of the Ocelots’ mul sticking up inside it. I can do this, I thought. Anyway it’s not really like being brave, it’s just like you’re 99.44 percent definitely fucked anyway so why not spend your last minutes of freedom doing something a little wacky? Anyway, it’s not that far. We need only about two minutes of misdirection.

  I looked back up at Koh. She kept signing. Go for the well. Go for the well. Well, well, well. She added an “urgent please.” Ko’ox tuun! Go. Go. Go. GogogogoGOGOGOGO!!!!!!!

  ( 38 )

  Koh’s entourage closed in around her like bees in a ball around their queen. Above us and to the right some of the Death House guards were trying to get through the crowd and jump down at us, but they were all tangled up in the spectators’ capes and scarves and jewelry, like the victims in that bombing at Harrods. The hipball music was still going on, imitating the sounds of fighting. Maybe the musicians just kept playing as a way of staying musicians and not becoming combatants.