The Sacrifice Game

by Brian D'Amato

  ( 51 )

  I still wish I could say Koh decided to marry me because she was crazy about me, but I don’t think that was the way it was. I think she found me intriguing. Or at best fun in a liberating way. More than once during my convalescence—that is, when she had a free minute to drop in, and wasn’t busy booting up her new empire—she said she owed me for my silence. She used the words “makik uchi,” “meritorious silence under torture.”

  I hadn’t spilled the beans on the earthstar stuff, I hadn’t sold her out to 2JS, and so she was going to honor her promise to force the five Ixian clans to make me ahau of Ix for the remainder of my section of the cycle. But like I say, that wasn’t the main reason either. What she really needed to do was to legitimate her name. As a first step I’d already been installed in absentia as head of the Harpy House of Ix, that is, I had to take 2 Jeweled Skull’s former position and titles. I got the feeling from her—as much as I could get out of her, in my little room, with her monkey secretaries there, and the sounds of construction outside—that legitimating me had been one of her trickier behind-the-scenes manipulations, and even though her army was in control of Ix it had taken more than a few little assassinations and exiles. But Koh was never one to say anything had been difficult. It was always fait accompli, no prob. I could hardly even get her to talk about how she’d gotten away from Ix and back to her army after the first battle, or ten thousand other things, although I did get a notion of what had gone on that I figured was close to accurate. Evidently Koh had let herself be “protected,” or really captured, by the Ocelots. Then, when 2 Jeweled Skull had taken over, she’d bought her freedom by giving him the tzam lic drugs and apparatus and three captives that he thought were the Scorpion-adders from the Puma House of Tamonat. The trade probably helped make 2JS overconfident, and certainly it gave the Ocelots of Ix fewer bargaining chips. But at some point after Koh had rejoined 1 Gila, 2JS probably found out the Scorpion-adders were impostors. At any rate he sent people after Koh to kill her anyway. After that Koh had managed to stay ahead of the hit squad—who killed two of her doubles—until they got the gossip about the bad situation in Ix and gave up.

  But during the second battle for Ix—“after 2JS’s short reign had collapsed in a hallucinogen-sodden rout,” as I liked to think of it—Koh had had to trade 2JS the three real Scorpion-adders to get me out. She also had to let him go, of course, and he’d probably taken them with him in his retreat force, which she said was only eight score or so bloods. I figured Koh had probably mastered the tzam lic anyway and didn’t even need them anymore.

  I felt not quite like a pawn, maybe, but definitely like a commodity. Still, Koh had kept to her end and gotten me out and that meant a lot, even if I was just part of her bid to establish herself. It all got me to thinking about my whole thing, what was going on and what had gone on before, I mean, before the downloading. I’d just look up at the lengthening cracks in the new plaster and flip through images of my life, trying to think of things that would distract me from my itching stump.

  I asked Koh where she thought 2 Jeweled Skull had gone, and without answering that—annoyingly, a lot of people around here didn’t exactly answer questions, they just sort of commented on them—she said that she thought she might be able to take him again, and that there were people working on tracking him down. I figured she meant the Caracara Clan of Teotihuacán, the ones she’d invited down here along with everybody else. Even back on the mul in Teotihuacán, when she was talking to 3 Talon and I hadn’t heard what they were talking about, she was probably already making that deal, that if she were in charge she’d help the Caracara Clan of Teotihuacán expand into the Ixian area and would deed their leaders some choice formerly Ocelot land—on the condition that they turn over 2 Jeweled Skull. She’d probably convinced them that he was a danger to the house anyway.

  Which was true, kind of. Or at least he was a loose cannon. In the end 2JS was too much of a fraidycat. He didn’t take his new information far enough, he couldn’t get his head around the various paradoxes my consciousness had brought him, and really it was no wonder he’d gotten confused and screwed up.

  Koh was curious. I mean, she had curiosity. She couldn’t get enough history. She made me go over and over the dates and events of the Conquest until she could recite them herself, which she did with a kind of morbid relish. She’d spent her whole life training to figure out just a little bit of the future, and as good as she was at it, for her it was at best like being blindfolded and given ten beats to feel her way through a cathedral. And then suddenly here was someone who’d actually seen it. She was fascinated by the idea of a time when women were closer to the social equals of men. She kept asking whether I thought of women as equal in every respect, and I said I flattered myself that I did, except it was obvious they weren’t as good as men at collecting baseball memorabilia. She couldn’t get enough of whatever I could remember about powerful women in Old World and latter-day New World history, and she’d just sit there filling my sickroom with cigar smoke while I told her about the three Cleopatras, Zenobia, Joan of Arc, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Catherine the Great, Margaret Thatcher, Eva Perón, Madonna, Hillary Clinton, Rigoberta Menchú, Marena, Jenny McCarthy, whoever. She asked whether women fought in wars and I said combat still—and of course I’m using the word still inadvisedly—wasn’t so popular with them as it was with guys. She asked a lot about war, to the point where I thought she might be thinking about training a crossbow squad. She still didn’t get the captives thing, though. She was like, what’s the point if you have to give back your trophies? Nor did she grok the concept of an equal-opportunity society. In her world you either baked tortillas or whacked your enemies—or, rather, watched your hirelings whacking them—and if you didn’t, you were a social nothing, no matter whether you were an architect, a great fresco painter, a Rattler monk, a cantor like On The Left, a flesh picker, or her much-loved favorite dwarf.

  Nerds are forever, though. As I might have expected, she made me go over math more than any other subject. She wasn’t too impressed by Arabic numerals—which are actually Indian, by the way, that is, East Indian—but she was amazed by trig and higher equations and, especially, game theory. Sometimes, after a couple of hours of giving her Probability 101 problems and watching her work them out on a bean abacus, I’d start feeling like if I’d wanted to teach freshmen I’d have stayed home, but I don’t think I ever quite lost patience. Anyway, she was a quick study. She was less interested in art and literature and didn’t get the notion of art for art’s sake, whatever that was. But that stuff is hard to describe. She asked about modern musical scales a couple of times and I tried to demonstrate them but Chacal’s singing voice was one thing that wasn’t much better than Jed1’s. We made paper helicopters and airplanes and unit-origami crystals. She loved them so much she refused to burn them. “They’ll rot in a few revolvings”—seasons—“anyway,” she said, which was true.

  At first I thought I was just opening up to her because I was lonely, but I have to admit I got to liking her. Obviously she reminded me of Marena in a lot of ways, except Marena was all screwed up and sassy-talking and flashily brilliant, and Koh was graver and about a million times more spiritual. Koh had a stately centeredness that would seem chilly. To twenty-first century Westerners, she’d have made Gong Li look warm. As exceptional as she was, she was totally Maya.

  Which did ultimately become a source of friction between us. At one point when she’d dropped by late in the afternoon with some accounts she wanted me to look over she’d mentioned that two villagesful of Ocelot partisan captives were going to be offered at a “racing feast” that night, that is, just for entertainment. It meant that everyone was going to get popped, including the smallest kids. And if I knew anything about the behavior of victorious bloods, Rattler or not—who were mainly just pumped-up corn-beer-soaked teenagers, after all—the civilians were going to be in for a bumpy time. One thing they were doing lately—that is, one of the trendy tor
ture fads—was making the captives swallow little bags of bean flour, one after another. Then they’d force water down their throats and the poor bastards would puff up with beans and gas and explode. Another one they’d probably do at the same event was this thing where they’d tie the subject on top of a stump and force him to kill himself with a little hook, ripping at his own veins. The idea was that if he wasn’t dead by sundown they’d stake him up and leave him for the birds. Anything where the subject was given a choice was considered more interesting.

  Anyway, I told Koh I wished she’d tell them to just cool it. She said I could make humanitarian laws when I was in charge.

  I said it didn’t matter what I did, that she should do what she oughta do. I started laying this whole trip on her about personal responsibility and innocence and everything.

  She asked how many people I figured had died in agony in this k’atun. When I didn’t answer right away she asked how many I figured had died badly in the seventeen hotunob between ours and yours?

  I said between ten and twenty billion, but that it didn’t make it all right. One does what one can, I said.

  She just said it sounded like the so-called twenty-first century was a lot worse, and without any dignity besides.

  I agreed but said it wasn’t my fault.

  Fault is treachery to your own family, she said. Not doing the ordinary thing with your enemies.

  I said maybe she had too many enemies and not enough family, but the minute I said it, it sounded like Deepak Chopra or something. Anyway, I wasn’t going to change her on this issue anytime soon. Koh wasn’t a cruel person, she was just from her own patch of the space-time curve.

  So maybe in some ways we really were too different. At least she didn’t have self-esteem problems, I thought. No hesitation in asserting authority. She was a textbook illustration of how, no matter how patriarchal the society, a few of the very smartest women always manage to get themselves put in charge of things. Even if she had to get hitched to a weirdo like me.

  But she and I couldn’t spend much time getting more acquainted. There were still problems. On the day of the ball game 9 Fanged Hummingbird had been counting on the fact that whatever happened with 2 Jeweled Skull, the Puma coalition under Severed Right Hand was only eighteen or nineteen days away. Now—that is, now at the time of the wedding—he’d camped north of the later Palenque, only four days away, undoubtedly trying to find out if Koh was solidly enough in charge to get a defense together. At least she’d entrenched her position enough to force Severed Right Hand to be careful. And if she stayed on top of things and shored up her defenses, he might be reluctant to attack the city at all. Supposedly his troops were feeling the water shortage and the distance from home. But it wasn’t anything to get flip about. Anyway, one way or another, I let her get everything together and here we were.

  Koh looked up. My “father” 14 Wounded crossed to her and took the end of her k’inil wal, her fan, in his right hand. She inclined her head and said the equivalent of “Yours” or “At your service,” calling him “Father” for the first time. He handed the fan to her own “father,” 1 Gila, and she saluted him in the same way, and then she greeted her mother, and finally my so-called mother took her fan and helped her up. An attendant folded up the door cloth and let in about twenty other relatives, or I guess you’d say guests, Alligator Root and Koh’s other advisers, and Hun Xoc and 14 Black Gila, and basically the whole gang. Koh and her party took their mats on the right side of the door, facing the so-called parents. I was in the middle, facing the screen in the back, sort of linking the two sides. Sometimes at these things there was another big screen down the center of the room to keep even the closest-related women separate, but in Ixian society, at least when I was there, it was considered classier for the women just not to look at the men and be sure to eat a course after the men were done with it. The whole thing was who could look at whom, the married parents could look at each other, the toastmaster could more or less look at everybody, the thralls couldn’t look at anybody, Koh and I could look at each other, a cat could look at a queen, whatever.

  I suppose all the ceremony sounds pretty silly to us modrin folk. But when you were living it, it was different, it was obvious how crucial it was. It wasn’t just bearing, it was an attitude. It kept everything together, it made life bearable, it was like you could make every gesture a work of art, like life was danced, and the main virtue was to be a great dancer. When it worked, you got what everyone wanted most from the world—applause. It was like everyone got the chance to be an actor in this grand, ornate drama of church, state, and media all in one.

  We could hear sounds of a crowd outside, families from our dependent clans who’d heard about the procession over the bridge and had followed and been allowed onto the peninsula. It sounded like it was mainly kids asking for handouts. The guards had orders to keep them quiet but to hand out honey tamales to everyone, and then to everyone again and again. So the throng would probably triple by the end of the meal. Some of the cantor’s apprentices were addressing the crowd, repeating his version of what was happening in the forbidden court.

  Each set of parents sat and saluted the Toastmaster again, one by one and in order. 14 Black Gila ordered his servitors to bring in the marriage table. It was large and low, like a Japanese tea table, newly built for this occasion and scheduled to be destroyed immediately afterward. Waiters brought out miniature canoes full of fresh water and poured them into tripedal basins.

  “Now take the basin, wash each other’s mouth,

  Each other’s hands,” the cantor said, “and taste,

  But not too greedily, not to excess.”

  Oh, please, I thought. Enough with Big Nanny. But of course I did exactly as he said.

  ( 52 )

  That was basically what I did here now, go along with things. Uncomplainingly. The head brewer set a huge tub of balche in the center, bristling with long drinking reeds, and all of us—I mean all the men—crowded around and sucked the pot down to the bottom, like the visual cliché of a nineteen-fifties teenage couple drinking out of the same milkshake with two straws. A pourer refilled the pot with a weaker dilution and the women did the same. Next they handed me a pot of smoking tubes, thin reeds filled with ground tobacco and orchid aromatics, and a stack of tube-rest dishes, like ashtrays. I wobbled up, put the pot under my right arm, and passed them out to the men in order, starting with 1 Gila, handing the tube from my left hand to the recipient’s right hand, like it was a spear. Next I handed out the ashtrays, from my right hand to their left ones this time, like they were shields. I sat down and we puffed as the food came in. It had all been transported here from the Harpy House, right behind the gifts, in big braziers.

  The first dish was a roast giant peccary ornamented with arching bay branches, a gift from my father to Koh’s father. They went through the whole presentation and acceptance thing. 1 Gila sent it back to his storehouse, presumably for later consumption. The next dish was a roast stag, with the same garnish, a gift from my father to the toastmaster. Nobody ate any of that either. On The Left gave it a puff of blessing smoke and sent it off to his house. Finally they brought in the real dinner, all in individual casseroles, one of each item for each guest serving the flesh foods clockwise. There was kind of a choked disturbance at the far end of the room, near the screen, and for a beat I thought the Snuffler Clan really had gotten someone in here to bust up the party, but as I stood up I could see the head bearer had whopped one of his underlings. The servers had to carry the dishes in the palms of their hands, never by the rims, no matter how hot they were, and the guy who was on the floor and crawling out of the room had evidently gotten his thumb in the gravy. I reminded myself to tell Hun Xoc—who was acting as my first lieutenant—not to let them kill him.

  Everyone ate pretty discreetly, almost furtively, in a way. Like On The Left said, it wasn’t good to make noise or seem to be eating too greedily. Certainly we all had better table manners than most people
in, say, the U.S. in the early twenty-first century, although that’s not saying a lot. We also had to keep quiet while Koh’s mother and so-called father asked the toastmaster to explain our marital duties to us, and then we all had to listen to his speech. It went on forever in spite of Koh’s instructions to cut it short. Come on, come on, I thought, it was nearly noon and there was much more serious stuff to take care of, even before the end of the sun. And then we still had to get everybody ready and announce the human-piece version of the Sacrifice Game. It was going to be a long day’s journey into night.

  Back on Meet Your Ex-Leg day, Koh’d said that the hundred and twenty days I would spend recovering from my poison-illness and various “sacred wounds” was just enough time for her to make me into a nine-stone adder. She’d asked me about the visions I’d had, that is, the dreams, and she’d interpreted them and said I was on the right track. And she’d taught me the necessary things about the basic Sacrifice Game, all the things my mother never taught me, things that had taken six hundred years to forget, how to count without looking at the pieces, how to read ahead without looking at the board, how to count yourself down into a divination state without using any drugs, how to listen to your blood and feel its lightning striking different parts of your body, how to lay your body out over the board and the world so that the lightning would really mean something, a location, a time, an event. She said I’d been good when she played the first Game with me and now I was getting great, that I was a natural even though I was learning so late, all that stuff. But she also said she didn’t think I’d ever get more than a few k’atunob ahead. “You have to have it pressed into your skull when it’s still forming, like your forehead-board,” she said. She’d had Lady Creosote Bush sit with me and teach me when Koh was away. CB was her superior in the Orb Weaver Sorority and a higher nine-skull adder than Koh, although I suspected not so naturally talented. She was eighty-four solar years old, certainly the oldest person I’d run into around here, and she’d witnessed the great city-wide version of the Sacrifice Game they played at Teotihuacán in 604, sixty years ago.