The Sacrifice Game

by Brian D'Amato

  I changed the subject.

  “So may I ask,” I asked, “do these fingers work as well as the others?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Are they weaker?”

  “A little weaker than their aunties,” she said, meaning her pinkies. “And they do hurt sometimes. This one doesn’t have a nail.” She wobbled the artificial or rather commissioned nail. It was sewn on through a piercing in the flesh below. I stretched and looked at the ceiling and held her ear. We’d hit one of those great natural pauses like it could have been anytime, anywhere.

  “Chocolate and deer is the gift of this sun,” she said. It meant it had been a good day.

  “Utz-utz,” I said. “Very good.”

  “It’s time, now, though,” she said, using the word that meant “this very instant.”

  I asked what she meant.

  “I have to light the cooking stones,” she said. “Female orb weavers always eat their mates.”

  ( 54 )

  I was a little freaked out, to say the least. I just sat there for two beats, and then eight, wondering whether to run for it. Although of course there wasn’t anywhere to go. Get outside to Hun Xoc? No, they’d be holding him too. My eye darted to the doorway. Koh’s nacom, an old skin-blackened Rattler sacrificer, was crouching in it with a long-handled flint knife.

  Lunge forward. Grab Koh’s neck. Try to hold her as a hostage.

  No. Won’t work either. They’ll pry me off her in two p’ip’ilob. She owns this place, I thought. I’ve had it. Serves me right for dealing with these fucking headhunters.

  I looked back at Koh. Her look said it was all all right. Thanks a lot, I thought. The nacom kneed toward us. Four Rattler assistants came in behind him, lifted me up, and laid me over the little stone altar table in the center of the room, holding my arms and legs lightly, so that my back wouldn’t break. The nacom sprinkled purifying balche over me, said his little invocation, and touched his flint knife to my Adam’s apple, like he was lighting a fire with a long match. I felt an ultrasharp stone hook catching a fold of my skin and then drawing a long, nearly painless line down my chest. The nacom put the knife aside, put his unclean hand over my abdomen—dangerously close, but not quite defiling my skin—and lifted up a bright-red achiote tamale, sculpted into a stylized heart. He handed it to Koh. Shockingly—I guess it was part of her New Deal religion, showing that she was immune to the pollution of death—she broke off a piece of the crust and swallowed it. Evidently the Orb Weaver Sorority had toned down this part a bit since the even badder older days, back between the time when the Oceans Drank Atlantis and the rise of the sons of Aryas. Novelty baked goods, I thought. Yet another example of Koh’s terrific sense of humor. You never knew where you were with this chick. I leaned back, listening to my sweat and urine dripping on the stone floor. Koh was giggling a little bit. Laugh it up, I thought. She was always pulling stuff like that, riddles, gags, infantile practical jokes. Gullible me. Yuk, yuk.

  The rattler ordinands moved me down onto a bobcat-fur-covered pallet and started washing me in three kinds of water and four kinds of sand, purifying me after sex and death and whatever.

  I’ve got to have a talk with Koh Babe about this shit, I thought, it’s not funny and it’s wearing me down. A couple more brilliant moments like that and I’ll be the only white-haired aborigine between here and Iceland.

  I guess she’s just testing me again, to see how cool I can be. Well, the SATs are over, sweetheart. I’ve been cool enough. I raised my head up on one arm, even though it wasn’t a pose anybody seemed to use around here. Another four-kid Rattler troop had crawled in with a human-size tray. It had a full-size corn-paste figurine of me, very cleverly done, all dressed in the exact same ceremonial clothes and ornaments with the same tats. I watched Koh undress the figurine and bite into the right hand and the cornflour-cake doll-face. Thank God there wasn’t any fake blood inside or anything. She pushed her finger down in its chest cavity, replaced what was left of the heart loaf, poured balche over the open wound, and sent the whole thing back out to the Orb Weaver Sorority feast table. Go for it, I thought. Take, eat, barf, whatever.

  I looked over at Koh but she was supervising the damn ritual washing of her private parts. I sat, watching, breathing hard. They finished wiping me and started dressing me, again, this time in male clothes. Koh let her team sew her into a plain white huipil—which only the highest muckamucks got to wear—and then kneed over to the hearth-fire stones. She uncovered a jar of water and a jar of blue corn, soaking in water and lime. Good morning to you, too, I thought. Well, so, that was fun, how about brunch?

  I sat patiently, getting worked on, like an actor being made up for a monster role, listening to that krik, krik, krik of the grinding stones. That sound really is like nothing else, I thought. Koh’s having to make symbolic tortillas seemed a little demeaning to me. Here, honey, I’ll do that. I’m a sensitive hubby. Don’t get dishpan hands. Oh, well. It was probably the last time she’d ever make them herself anyway. She wouldn’t have to do it six hours a day every day of her life, like the rest of the gals in this hemisphere.

  Eight hundred beats later we reemerged from the house dressed as the joint heads of our united clans. We could hear a crowd outside the gate, mainly kids and festivalgoers from the dependent clans—that is, the closest thing to a middle class—getting free food from the overflow of the wedding. They were giggling and everything but a little awed to be on the peninsula. The whole holy district was off-limits most of the time, but welcoming now.

  We formed up in the courtyard, getting ourselves together, Koh and I in the center of the wedding party, with all of us surrounded by Rattler guards with big round shields of iridescent blue-green trogon feathers. The attendants moved the food aside and started packing it up for incineration. We listened. These guys had better be on cue, I thought, but before I’d finished the thought, I picked out that unique roar far away. A nonet of Ocelot musicians, playing the Ixian peace song on long boxwood horns, were coming up on the crowd from the southwest, from the direction of the great zocalo.

  On The Left stepped out through the gate, leading two porters carrying the oracle box. It was an arm-span square and pearl-white, woven out of the stripped shafts of egret feathers. The person inside it was, supposedly, a hundred and sixty years old. But of course that was hype.

  We heard the guards on the outside making a space for him in the center of the crowd. The horns came around the council house. Plaster walls buzzed in the roar. I imagined the crowds drawing back and doing their varieties of dirt-eating moves as the Ocelot procession came through.

  Our band blasted out our entrance chord. The cantor gave his little speech of welcome and the screen of guards fell back, and the twenty of us, Koh and Hun Xoc and the Gilas and our flanking retainers, were all suddenly visible to all these people, real people, like, let’s meet the public.

  Na’at ba’al, the cantor said, relayed through his megaphones. The crowd yelled back its welcoming response, somewhere between a reedy cheer and a chant.

  I felt all exposed. It had been a while. On The Left asked the crowd if they were ready and they answered that they were. The tone of the expression was something like “Yes, thank you, what are you going to do for us next?”

  I tried to listen for signs of trouble in the chord but I couldn’t get any. Koh had had thousands of Rattler families adopted by other clans, so they were interspersed through the crowd, and the others were going along. And at least half the remaining clans really were crazy about us, they thought I was literally the gods’ gift. It was really only the Macaws and Snufflers we had to worry about. And any recidivist Ocelots. Well, at least, no matter how resentful any of them were, they weren’t showing it. They were going along with the shills.

  What was our danger quotient on this? Like they used to say, oaths sworn at spearpoint were always worth a little less. I wished we could have controlled better who was coming into the temple district. Normally only people be
longing to one of the clan temples on the peninsula would think of coming here. And every family had its spot, so you sort of knew who you were getting. Any group of infiltrators would have been spotted by the people they were trying to stand with.

  And Koh’s guards and their guides—that is, local people who helped them recognize other local people—had been out around the clock, ever since the battle, turning the place into a police state. But still, you couldn’t search everybody, or even recognize everybody. The main thing to do with something like this was just for us to keep isolated, stay out of any conceivable kind of projectile range, and then get the hell out before people got too drunk.

  The chief herald blew his special trumpet for the first time. It was a long whine like a giant router with a two-inch bit, air raid, ground raid, water raid, ascending into a long squeak like an ulna whistle, and then there was nothing.

  ( 55 )

  Just a few more little tests, I thought. Testlets. Testes. Just quizes, really. Before the Human Game, anyway. That would be the real test.

  I waited. The crowd waited. And I was sure the sun waited, and that the semidomesticated flock of scarlet macaws that had been circling around their nest niches on the Macaw clan’s mul were now hanging motionless in the air, but of course that was one of those chronopathological brain spikes I’d been getting lately. The silence before had been really a rustling, breathy silence, but this silence was nearly absolute, just a hint of breeze and the eternal beat pulsing in my syncopated ears. Then there was a static apogee moment when the silence maybe sounds like rustlings that might just be ancient sounds, from long-gone b’aktuns, still echoing through the canyons, and then a point when that suspicion of sound had definitely become rustlings and making-readies, something dressing itself over a subacoustic drone. The drone sank into the subsonic hum of long, long approaches, something getting bigger and bigger until you can’t believe its size, Plutonian barges and giant coal-burning trains dopplering through perpetual fog.

  At first it was obviously coming out of the citadel at the top of the mul, but it was picked up and echoed and reechoed above and below, the echoes anticipating each other too fast for sound, either too clearly from too far away or too diffuse from much too close, the space way out of joint, and then it all petered out into a crackle of gibbering from the oracle in the box.

  There was still a test I had to pass before I could play the human-piece Sacrifice Game. Get ready, I thought. I’d trained for this to the point where I was sure I could do it backward, but even so—

  Cancel that. Don’t think fail thoughts. Just don’t screw up.

  “One Ocelot may show himself, he says,” the interpreter said,

  “When he learns what happened to the bloods who came

  And fed him over this k’atun, who claimed

  His rights and titles. Where have they all gone?”

  On The Left answered:

  “Those bloods abandoned him,” he said. “They lied

  When they said 9 Fanged Hummingbird would be here now;

  They ran off under thorn trees, under bushes.

  Tell Ocelot, ‘Look down on us and see

  What’s happened,’ and we’ll show him, and we’ll wait

  For his response, his judgment, we attend.”

  There was a crash on a rack of clay bells as the clowns entered out of the council house and poured down the steps, pretending to slip and fall and roll in their padded parodies of the bacabs’ vestments. The crowd broke into a sea of relieved laughter. At least they did laugh a lot around here, I thought, whatever else they did. Koh’s Porcupine Clown, the one I’d seen in Teotihuacán, bounced out of the ahauob’s entrance and tumbled down the stairs in a ball, crashing into a table of ale pots and coming up out of the splinters and foam with one of them on his head like a top hat. He rolled a long way in his ball, his feather suit collapsing, and then sprang up and staggered around, blindly bumping into people, blinking under his bandit-banded makeup. People were collapsing from laughing. By this time the invisibles had cleared a Sacrifice Game–gridded square in the center of the zocalo, and the actor personifying me spun out into the green center uncoiling a long geranium-flowered umbilical ribbon. He was covered in red wrappings with down tufts to show that he was still a baby, and his big mask was a 3-D version of my head glyph, or what you might call the logogram of my name, not anything that resembled me personally. Actors strutted out personifying 9 Fanged Hummingbird and 4 Orange Skull—that is, 9 Fanged Hummingbird’s elder brother, who died in the fifteenth yellow k’atun, AD 726, before 9 Fanged Hummingbird took the mat. They all paraded once around the square. The 9 Fanged Hummingbird giant crept up on 4 Orange Skull from behind and chopped off his lime-gessoed wicker head. Can’t he just do something classy, like drizzle poison in his ear? I wondered.

  I could tell the polyrhythms were speeding up. 9 Fanged Hummingbird started chasing the Chacal actor around the square. Chacal popped himself off his umbilical cord and hid behind an ember pot. The actor playing 2 Jeweled Skull of the Harpy House crept in, reacted to 4 Orange Skull’s headless body, grabbed Chacal, and pulled him away into the red zone of the Sacrifice Game grid. 9 Fanged Hummingbird mimed looking around, but couldn’t find them.

  “2 Jeweled Skull took 9 Wax into his ball-school

  In Blue Stone Mountain, far, far East, in safety,” On The Left said.

  We were totally rewriting history, of course. Especially my—or Chacal’s—undistinguished genealogy. Chacal wasn’t blood-related to the Ocelots at all, he was just a dependent-clan provincial kid who’d shown early talent and gotten himself into the league.

  Still, the same old story gets ’em every time. I hoped.

  9 Wax—now called Chacal—became the greatest ballplayer ever, of course. The actor did a couple nice stunt versions of my spectacular saves. Then pretty soon the 9 Fanged Hummingbird character suspected who he was and tried to sacrifice him. But then there was the eruption, well-suggested by batteries of tree-drums and long ratchets. Our hero fled to Teotihuacán, destroyed it apparently single-handedly, brought the Star Rattler—in this scene, a long-jointed wooden snake—back to Ix, and challenged 9 Fanged Hummingbird to a big hipball match. The square filled with acrobats wearing huge full-head masks like toy bobble-heads, one for each of the famous ballplayers. The tumbler who was playing the ball knocked the Ocelot champions’ heads off one after another. And invisibles scurried in and cleaned up the stage for the war. It had all taken less than a half an hour so far but I was getting impatient. I knew how it came out. Warrior-mimes faced each other across the square, advanced one by one, and paired off into slow-motion duels. Up on the four cedar poles the twelve acrobat kids spread their Harpy-ancestor wings and let themselves drop. Their gut cords unwound from the pole, spinning them counterclockwise in widening gyres down toward the eastern crowd. The Ocelot ancestors crept out on the western side, not just giant cats but Ocelot-catfishes with bulbous bulging-stomached popcorn-stuffed suits so big each outfit took four jaguars’ skins to make and jutting jawless faces waving long flagella and feelers and trailing hairy barbels. They didn’t look ridiculous, though, they stalked forward with that wary catty deliberation behind each silent pad-placement and it was really kind of disturbing. They grouped on the raised border of the zocalo, two rope-lengths in front of where we were standing, and watched. Down on the battlefield the Harpies were winning. 9 Fanged Hummingbird turned and ran to his ancestors for help, but they rejected him and pushed him back into the ring.

  “You’re weak and treacherous,” the cantor said,

  imitating the voice and language of the Ocelot Ancestors.

  “Bring us our heir, the son of our greatfathers,

  And seat him on the mat, or you’ll be slaughtered.”

  The 9 Fanged Hummingbird character spun around frightenedly and ran off. I guess On The Left’s going to do all the voices himself, I thought. Is that supposed to make it more arty? Down on the battlefield the Ocelot bloods seemed to be gett
ing the upper hand again. The 2 Jeweled Skull character ran back and forth, trying to show as clearly as possible that his side was in big trouble. Finally he ran up to the Chacal character, who was dispatching another Ocelot blood at the extreme southeastern corner of the court, just below the Star Rattler’s blue-green mul.

  “My son, 9 Wax, help us kill the Ocelots,” the cantor said in an imitation of the voice of 2 Jeweled Skull.

  “I can’t kill my own family,” “Chacal” said.

  “Then stop the battle,” “2 Jeweled Skull” said. “Take

  The Ocelot’s mat, and also take my mat,

  The Harpy’s mat, and sew the two together,

  Unite both great-greatfathers in one blood.”

  Wow, this really is bullshit, I thought. That wasn’t at all the way things happened. Would the guests really believe it? Except don’t even think that way, I thought. Believing it doesn’t matter. It’s about whether the ones who know what actually happened can deny the truth. And of course they can. That’s what people are good at. It’s media, for God’s sake. Right? And everybody’ll go home and tell two friends about what they saw, and they’ll tell two friends, and by tomorrow afternoon it’ll be like it all really happened.

  The Chacal character pointed his saw at the sun. The clashing warriors in the battle separated and froze into listening attitudes. There was a long, long hiss from orchestras of maracas, like shipyardsful of woodworkers running sharkskin over lignum vitae. Everyone—including guards and watchmen who were supposed to face their posts—turned and looked toward the Star Rattler’s mul. The low sun hit its façade flat-on and saturated it with light filtered to a pure spectrum-band of cadmium-orange deep through the still-omnipresent ash roof. I smelled that smell again, the one that followed Koh, more insistent now, and as smoke curled up like fangs out of the mouth of the high sanctuary something emerged and flowed down the stairs with the deceptive nonmotion of a lava flow and rolled coiling into the zocalo, sidewound forward, tasting the space, and then reversed itself and slithered up to the peak of the mul again, its head passing its tail at the top, and then as its tail thrashed it slid down again with horrible purposefulness and coiled in the zocalo’s blue-green central zone, scattering the warriors, and oriented itself to the invisible milky way. It paused, licking the air with jointed tongues—they were made like those novelty wooden snakes that bend sideways but not up and down—and then wriggled warily toward us across the court, its movement so perfectly snakelike or rather centipedal that it was hard to shake the sense that it was alive. It had that angular movement that isn’t really movement, where the thing just shifts mysteriously from one spot to another without seeming to be in between, without crawling or even sliding, more just sucking itself obliquely forward by torsion building and releasing and building, surfing on the liquid sine wave of the universe, and for a beat I realized it was lining its side-stars up with the earthstars of the mulob, remaking or mirroring the astronomical moment, Antares setting and Saturn in the Crab. It drew itself up at the apron of the Ocelots’ mul—which had been emerald and scarlet but was now black, scarlet, and Lady Koh’s signature blue-green—and reared back, flaring its ruff like a horned lizard and inflated its chest like a mating quail’s. It seemed to be about to speak and then it puffed its cheeks to bursting, like a frog’s, and extended its eyes on long stalks like a slug’s, feline-slitted pupils rolling round and around, inspecting us. It opened its mouth, and first nothing and then a sound came out, a gurgling of petrified glyptodonts bubbling up out of tar pits, a wheeze and release like sneezing out broken glass. A dark-green flood of writhing globules vomited out of its mouth, separated into lumps with legs and hands, and rolled blindly over the stones squealing in mock pain, dwarves dressed as toads covered with glistening thick oil that mimicked digestive juice. The dragon coughed, shook its head, unfolded and spread its thirteen pairs of wings, opened its jaws again, and spoke: