The Sacrifice Game

by Brian D'Amato

  They carried us west, over the Ocelots’ end-zone line. Keep your head up, I thought. Win through intimidation. The Ocelot bloods and partisans parted in front of us, not like the Red Sea, though, more like they just wanted to get a look at us before they decided whether to tear us apart. We got past the players’ pen, out into the small zocalo between the Ocelots’ end zone and the beginning of the three tiers of steps that led up to the razor stairs of their mul, rising up only about four rope-lengths away. The long emerald-green-stuccoed stone wall of the Ocelots’ clan house was on our left side, and beyond and behind that there were two actual semiresidential sections of wood and plaster climbing up the rising ground. The nearer one was for women and the higher, the holier one was for men. Beyond that I could see the top of a gaudy ceremonial wall worked with deep frets and triangular crenellations and behind that a long red-and-green smudge, the manicured and pollarded treetops of the Ocelots’ poison garden, surrounded by a thorn wall. It wasn’t really that far.

  I told them to put us down. They did. I yanked off my helmet and arm protectors. At the Ocelots’ equipment house some big mean-looking guy stepped out in front of us like, hey, what’s going on? I threw my damn stuffed rodent in his face and he ducked in this comical way. It was this magical talisman flying at him with its sharp little claws. I fished a little shell knife out of my crotch pouch, cut the cords off my outer swag of quilted padding, and tossed it to one of the youngest Ocelot bloods in the crowd like it was a major souvenir, which I guess it was.

  I am Chacal! I declaimed. Everybody stared. I’ve gone to Xibalba and brought back the Razor Ball! I was overexcited and shifted into English. “By the bomes of Crom, you’re all horsemeat! Shop smart—shop S-Mart!” I was about to add that I was going to sic the United Fruit Company on them. Emerald Immanent was still down on the court behind us, shouting for his brothers to grab us, but he must have been still blocked by the Harpy invisibles. I stepped up onto the first swell in the sea of steps. My little squad followed my lead, surrounding me in an oval formation. Eight steps. Nine. The first tier intersected with a second tide of clear-edged waves and ripples, black flats and green risers scraped and buffed and finished like a Noguchi marble. And the Ocelots let us through. I guess we had a fear edge because—for most of them at least—it really was more like I’d transformed into Chacal than like I’d just been in hiding and then disguised. There was a kind of incomprehension of the whole idea of disguise; even when people wore the costumes of the gods, they were taking on that identity, not just dressing up, and it was a very serious deal. Plus, a lot of the people around the end zone were visitors to Ix, and weren’t prepared for a fight. And of course we were still officially their guests in a place that took hospitality seriously. We were just eight little dudes in the middle of their turf and there was plenty of time for them to rush us. And maybe most of all, they weren’t yet sure whether it was part of the show. They were all watching the fights erupting down on the court and spreading out into the stands, and wondering what the shot was, whether the panic was the beginning of another Carthaginian catastrophe, what was expected of them, whatever. For one reason or another, for about forty beats we were in this limbo between action and reaction, where if you just walk straight up, if you don’t look even slightly nervous, you can get away with a lot.

  We edged closer to the Ocelot house on our left. Just a little farther. Their emerald mul loomed on our right. We came up level with the women’s residential quarter of the palace. I guess gynaeceum is the right word for it, but who cares. It wasn’t all walled up like the residences in Teotihuacán. There were still no windows, but there were all these alcoves and inviting little doorways. Bevies of Ocelot women looked down over us from their sort of harem balcony up in the roof gardens. I got my knife down under my back padding and cut into the straps on my ball yoke.

  We’re going through there, I tapped on Hun Xoc’s arm. His eyes picked out the same door I’d scoped out. It was only twenty steps off but I resisted the urge to run. I turned to the captain of the Rattler guards and he’d obviously picked up on what we were doing. He seemed pretty eager to follow my orders. Koh must have told him his life was totally at my disposal. It was one of the good things about a feudal caste system, you really could get good help once in a while. Or at least dedicated help.

  There was an explosion of combat yells down on the court. Don’t look around, I tapped. I finally twisted off my ball yoke and swung it in my right hand like a battle club, trailing beaded straps on the steps. I kept wishing we’d had time to rehearse this. I veered left into the alcove. The door was just red-oiled quilted deerskin set into the high wall. It was tied down on the inside, but it opened upward and I sliced through the top left thong-hinge. The Rattler leader took my cue, cut the other four, and wrenched the door down. By now there were Ocelot bloods pressing in behind us, asking what the hell we were doing, and our outside Rattler bloods had their maces up. The first six of us pushed into a tiny sweat room and out the far door into a tiny enclosed square courtyard. There were all sorts of freshly dyed cotton festival yarns laid out drying on the floor. There was only one other door into the court, on the far side, and five or six Ocelot women, with undressed hair and wearing only damp emerald-and-white huipils, scampered out through it, but one little round old grandmother just stood in the middle of the space shrieking at the Rattler captain, telling him over and over how we were wrecking all her stuff, and before I could say anything he swung his hand flail through her eyes, taking a chunk out of the bridge of her nose, and she just stood there still squealing until she eventually keeled over. I’m not proud of it, but I just went ahead with what I was doing, maybe feeling a little queasy. I’d gotten kind of inured to this stuff.

  Hun Xoc got the Rattlers to pick up these big dye barrels and throw them out the door at the Ocelot bloods. As they dodged the kegs I could see past them for a beat, down into the canyon of the court complex about two vertical ropes below. It was a confused mass of hand fights between ballplayers and partisan spectators, but I could see Emerald Immanent and Emerald Howler’s standards were coming up through the crowd toward us. It meant they’d gotten their trainers and supporters together and were leading them after us in an organized pursuit. The nearer Ocelots looked indecisive to me, though. They were more interested in rushing down to the court area to save 9 Fanged Hummingbird and their other royals. It was like you see at stadium riots or fights at rock concerts or political rallies, the sound and fury covers a lot of plain Brownian motion, the ninety percent of indecisive stuff that happens before, during, and after anyone comes to blows.

  The captain left two Rattler bloods to hold the door. We need to get to the mainland, I lied, a little too loud, hoping that the people behind the door heard me or that the rear guard would get taken and talk. If word got back to the ahau it was pretty essential that they assumed we were trying to make a break for it, that we were trying to get onto the curved walkway around the south side of the peninsula and back east to the mainland. And like I said, Ix was a canal city and didn’t really have streets, so to get anywhere you had to either go by boat or practically walk through somebody’s bedroom. I hustled everyone else across the courtyard to the far door. Already a couple bloods had gotten on top of the wall we’d come through. I went in first, even though I wasn’t normally allowed to take the lead. I was too important. I got into this little dark smelly hallway and around a couple crooks and nannies toward the right, uphill. It would have been confusing but my directional sense was another thing that had improved a few thousand percent since I got here. I pushed into a little cook yard, out its trash door on the other side, and through an open alley into one of the food-prep courts. Dozens of the women’s household cooking servants milled around squawking, not knowing what to do. I noticed I was laughing again, partly from adrenaline and whatever but mainly because it was getting like one of those Bond movie chases where they always overturn fruit carts and the irate peddlers shake their fists after them. A
nd what seemed funniest was that we were actually getting away with it so far. For these guys it’s still fresh, I thought. This kind of commando strike was outside the protocol of Mesoamerican warfare.

  For the first time I could really see how Cortez was going to be able to take over the whole continent against ten-thousand-to-one odds, how when your thinking is totally outside the system, the people in the system have no way of dealing with you. If you do something that just isn’t done, most of the time, you win. The Rattler captain handed me a short mace and I tied it on to my left hand. I pointed to a low red fabric door in the center of the west wall, a moon-path door. Hun Xoc went up to it and started slashing through the fabric door—it was a quilt of rubberized cotton stretched over a wicker frame—but I could feel the knot of bloods behind me hesitating, like the door was radioactive. Ix had basically four overlapping webs of footpaths used by different classes of people. We were going to take one of what they called “fanged-rabbit-blood walks,” which were segregated routes to special wells used only by menstruating women, all painted red on the insides and roofed with red tent-cloth. No male would even think of walking on the polluted ground.

  We’re going that way, I repeated. Hun Xoc and the captain seemed up for it but the other five Rattler bloods just gawked at me.

  Everybody’s a fucking superstitious insubordinate schmuck, I thought. Good help indeed. You could never get things together, nothing ever worked. And things never will work.

  Hun Xoc got a handsaw and stood in front of the nearest blood and ordered him through the door. The kid was terrified but he still started to make some objection, something about how it wouldn’t be good for us. While he was still talking, Hun Xoc reached down into the kid’s scale-patterned apron, grabbed his penis and testicles, knocked his legs out from under him, and whipped the short saw under his hand. The kid barely made a sound. Hun Xoc stood up and tossed the kid’s bloody genitals at one of the other bloods. They splatted on his chest and flopped jiggling on the floor.

  “You’ll take the women’s path as men right now,

  Or we can make you women first,” Hun Xoc said.

  The amputee sucked in his whimpers and tried to stand up, and the rest of the crew just stood around silently. It was a weird moment. The bloods seemed to be really considering the alternative.

  I pushed in through the shredded leather into the creepy mauve light.

  ( 39 )

  A couple of old greathousewomen were in the tunnel and freaked out and scuttled off. I stuck my head out. Finally the amputee limped for the door, and one after another the rest followed him. Maybe they figured it was okay now because the streaks of blood down his legs added realism. Hun Xoc prodded from the rear.

  We went about twenty rope-lengths west and south and two rope-lengths uphill through the twisting walkway to another courtyard, a so-called “moon-blood latrine,” where the unclean water from the female compound emptied into the “excremental water” of the canals. There was a cistern in the center fed through an open half-log pipe from the mountain above. We all boosted each other up onto the roof terrace. The culvert led up to a branch of the great southern aqueduct. Hun Xoc climbed one rope-length up the intricate relief into the culvert. I followed him and the guards came after me and we crouch-ran uphill in single file, stepping on the sides of the channel, trying not to slip on the trickles of water. It was twilight but with the damn big moon it was just too bright. So much for under the cover of darkness. There were spatters of coded alarm cries behind us. We’d definitely been spotted. The aqueduct zigzagged up the slope and at the first bend I got a view down to the Ball district.

  Usually fighting around here was more like a series of little duels than a battle, but this was different. There was still a knot of Harpy bloods in the center of the northern platform, and each one had a long blowgun. It was the same story on the steps of the council house, except the Harpies there were arrayed in a four-deep line, with the ones in front aiming and the ones in back loading, Frederick the Great style. They must have snuck in the blowguns broken down into two or three pieces, I thought. And then at the last minute they’d twisted them together. Meanwhile the Ocelots had taken control of the court floor as well as their back and some of the east zocalo, but there seemed to be as many dead and dying Ocelots as live ones. I heard a Harpy whistle that sounded suspiciously like a signal to load, and then the wet sound of hundreds of darts sliding into spit-wet breeches. A bunch of Ocelots charged up at them but the Harpies fired a single volley across the court into the wave of bloods. It sounded like a huge cough and hiss. I couldn’t see anything, and the Ocelots certainly couldn’t, just this invisible tidal wave of poison rolling at them at four hundred feet per second. Five out of six Ocelots pitched back and sank into the mass of emerald-speckled bodies. A second wave of Ocelots somehow sped up and rolled at them before the platform squad had quite gotten themselves together for a second volley—

  What’s going on? Hun Xoc asked. I’d stopped running. I looked around and he pointed down to the zocalo. There were about twenty or twenty-five people definitely on our tail and Emerald Immanent was definitely the ringleader. They’d been slowed down by the crowd and were still at least four hundred beats away, but it was still disturbing, we’d gotten less misdirection out of the situation than I’d hoped. Some of them saw us looking at them and shouted to us to stop and come join the party.

  Nothing, I signed to Hun Xoc. I got myself together and ran on uphill. Yeah, what the hell is going on? I wondered, but I knew the answer. 2 Jeweled Skull—my brain mate and adopted and spiritual father—had been drilling his Harpy bloods. He’d taught them to keep together in a tight body, seek cover, lay down fire, and most of all don’t try to take live prisoners, all the most basic stuff from a pre-radio-communications military perspective. But it wasn’t obvious in a wigged-out chivalry system. I mean, in Europe it had taken hundreds of years just to get the generals not to ride out in front of their troops with a flag labeled SHOOT ME.

  I turned another zigzag. The Ocelots probably hadn’t even expected them to aim to kill, I thought. If anything they always expected an opposing force to drop back out of missile range and challenge individuals to come out and fight.

  Fabulous. Maybe 2 Jeweled wasn’t in so much trouble as I’d thought. I certainly could of, should of, and really would of figured he’d come up with something. What would he think of, after all? Probably the exact same thing I would think of.

  Would it be enough for him to win? I snuck another look back and down. The Harpies were throwing wounded bodies down into the irregular charging chunk of bloods. They’re acting cleverly for once, I thought. Maybe they do have a chance.

  What did that mean? Something I wasn’t thinking about. No time now.

  About six rope-lengths farther on—one vertical rope-length above the highest roof of the Ocelots’ greathouses—the aqueduct passed over the Ocelots’ mountain’s southern walkway, and we dropped down onto the stuccoed surface. It was pretty narrow, just a processional path that led down from the peak through stepped passes to the inner yellow gate to the Snufflers’ quarter and out to the mainland. There was no railing or anything on our left, just a one-rope-length drop down to the level of the lower terrace. The emerald wall of the Ocelots’ poison garden was on our right hand. It was only half a rope-length high but it was topped with a big nasty crucifixion-thorn hedge, the kind with the two-finger-width needles. Behind us, about two hundred paces back, the causeway intersected with a more major route—which meant two people could almost walk abreast on it—leading from the inner rectories of the mul complex up to the top of the mountain behind it. There was a bigger gang on our tail now, charging up the main route only about a hundred paces away from the intersection, frustratingly clear in the zinc light. They’d figured we were heading for the mainland and had just gone around the women’s house. I didn’t see Emerald Immanent’s standard but I was pretty sure it was them.

  We can make it, Hun Xoc said. He ges
tured ahead and down to the canal. I could see a few emerald-sashed figures on the causeway—Ocelot partisans—but not anyone we couldn’t get through. I’d forgotten that Hun Xoc still thought I was going for the mainland. There seemed to be new Harpy blowgun squads out in boats in the canals. Beyond that there was fighting in the Snufflers’ quarter, but from this distance the battle looked purposeless, like a red ants’ raid on a black ants’ nest, a thousand higgledy-piggledy games of ritualized tag.

  We have to break into groups, I said. I noticed that we’d lost Armadillo Shit somewhere. Whatever, don’t think about it. I picked out two of the Rattler bloods and ordered them to go hold the path against Emerald Immanent’s hunting group. Their captain repeated the order and they didn’t hesitate, they just charged down to certain death. I turned around south again because there was something going on. Two Ocelot guards had come up out of nowhere ahead of us on the path, and a couple of the Rattler bloods were fighting them off. I’d thought it would be deserted up here, wasn’t everybody supposed to be watching the ball game? The Rattler captain smashed one of them on the head with his mace but the guy just staggered a bit and kept coming and he had to hit him another few times to get him down. The other Rattlers had gotten the other gardener down to the ground and were working on skinning his face—they weren’t into that scalp thing around here, by the way, that was strictly for low-life nomads from the deserts north of Teotihuacán—but the captain told them to skip it and they straightened up. There were already another bunch of four or five Ocelots behind them, coming up toward us from the yellow gate. I wondered how they’d been alerted. I looked around. There were only five of us, one still bleeding and limping from his emasculation.