The Sacrifice Game

by Brian D'Amato

  I looked around. The shapes around me looked so unsavory that I closed my eyes again. I wobbled, a little still dazzled from the smoke and the fresh darkness. A voice cawed:

  “Now still you aren’t our flesh.”

  ( 57 )

  There was no one else in the room. Blood drained out of my head. Hallucination? No. Hidden somewhere. Speaking tube. Yes. The stone god in front of me probably sat on a vertical pipe that went down to the tombs and the caves. Really, those things were pretty common, I remembered, there are spirit tubes in pyramids all over Central America. It’s just that the archaeologists all had said they were just spirit things. Like, nonfunctional. But not in this case, the hierophant really was down there. Maybe there were other adders down in the caves with him. Did 2JS know they were still alive down there? I’d have to ask him, if I could convince Lady Koh to let me near his cage for more than a minute. Did Koh know? Did the sitting oracle know where they were, and how to get in there? The oracle had called him with the beat. Did that mean you could ring them up anytime the same way, or did you have to set up an appointment—

  “As when I felt you first you still trail death,”

  the sandstone voice said in old court language.

  I didn’t know what to say, so I mumbled some line from On The Left to the effect of how the inevitable is also the necessary.

  “You want to read your own k’atun,” he said.

  He meant the future. I said yes.

  “Then tell me what I’m going to do with these,” he said,

  “And if you’re right, I’ll give you one of them,

  And if you’re wrong, you don’t get anything.”

  I had to get him to give me the blue one, which was baked with the blood of Ocelot and would make me speak for him in the zero level. Otherwise they’d force one of the others into my mouth and I’d be dead. Or, like he said, he wouldn’t give me anything. In which case I’d also flunk. And he’d give a sign, and when I came out one of the offerers would execute me with a blowgun, and in a few minutes they’d be rolling my corpse down the stairs.

  Fine, I thought. All very Matrix avant la lettre. Whatevs. I love riddles. Give me a beat.

  ( 58 )

  “You’re going to keep the yellow tamale, the red,

  And the black and the white one,” I said. “You won’t give me those.”

  There was a ten-beat pause.

  Gotcha. This statement is false, you bastard.

  “Then take and eat,” he said.

  I took the blue tamale and put it through the mask’s mouth and into my real one. I chewed it up. It was fine. Earth felt the wound. I swallowed—ow.

  Blue liquid sprayed over me. The baby ocelots or cubs or whatever they were—of course they were people, but not only hadn’t I heard them come in, but I was losing track of what things looked like—were blowing ink into the cuts in my genitals. Sizzling sounds rose up in the little room. Outside I could hear giant birch-bark kazoos imitating the gurgling sounds of birth. One of my ears popped, and suddenly my head was filled with a luscious comforting smell, like movies and sleepovers. A stone bell tolled twice, the signal for me to slit open Six Murmuring’s abdomen. I did. Someone handed me a smaller flint scalpel and I reached in and up, far, far in, and finally found her heart, and, with difficulty, cut it out.

  They lifted me up and spun me around and around, rubbing ashes in over the ink, cutting off my costume and weaving me into a new one, strapping wide ribbons around my ankles and wrists, uncording and combing and re-cording my hair. And change the oil, too, I thought. Finally they draped Six Murmuring’s skin over my shoulders. Somehow, while time had raced around me, she’d been sacrified, flayed, hastily tanned, and cut and sewn into a crude manto. A hand fed me a tamale with part of her ground heart inside, and as I swallowed it the uay of a hero, the grandson of One Ocelot, raised his head inside me, shook the ichor out of his hair in a cloud of garnet beads, and looked around. There was another pop and another and then more all around. It wasn’t my ears, I thought, maybe it was the stone rending itself asunder molecule by molecule or something, and then I realized it was corn popping, pouring out of the heated pots. I faced the mouth-door. Some of the cubs had ball scoops and were shoveling the blue-white molecules out through the opening like snow, down the steps and into the breeze. From below it would have looked like the mul’s cat-head was foaming at the mouth. Cool air coiled around me. I stepped outside, into the big blue-green room of the zero level, and even though I kept telling myself not to get carried away, that it was just an act, I really felt that I was being born out of a wound in the pericardium of the sky.

  I watched the white blossoms falling down and away onto the living surface of the city, every visible facet sprouting people like buds on a branch. Infinite focus pressed in on me, the expectation of the human cornrows of bloods and pledges and dependents all sorted into their levels, all staring at me, or rather at the costume that was wearing me, emphasized perspectivally at the apex like Christ’s head at the vanishing point of Leonardo’s Last Supper, acquiring the power of the converging mass of the city, the biomass, the constellations of mountains, the earth and the ocean, and the twenty-two layers of the universe. I felt like a mother spider with thousands of children I wanted to let feed on my own body. Every surface was garlanded with people and I could see into the eyes of every one of them. I stepped to the edge of the threshold stone and stood. The people answered my rebirth with a vast sort of happy vocalized hiss, drawn out on and on, longer than the ovation for an opera diva’s farewell. It was both a welcome and a collective oath of allegiance, or more specifically what we called a “breath gift,” theoretically, at least, as binding as a blood gift. Each person was breathing one of his, or, in a few cases, her, souls into me.

  “Our younger brothers, younger cousins,” I said,

  I need all of your help in planting me,

  In seeding me, 1 Turquoise Ocelot.”

  It was the closest an ahau would come to a populist invocation, since I was asking for a sanctification—or more accurately a “speech gift”—from each individual. The mouth of my mask, I guess like the much earlier ancient-Greek kind, was carved to work as a small megaphone, so my voice carried and echoed before the human echoers picked it up. But I wasn’t satisfied with the tone. It was still too reedy. To really lead a mystery cult you have to have The Voice. Orpheus, Manson, Jones, Koresh, Applegate . . . and just to give them their due credit, 9 Fanged Hummingbird and 2 Jeweled Skull, had beautiful voices. Anyway the crowds answered all together, like a Greek chorus. Which I guess was also a ritual thing before it turned into a stage device.

  “Kimak kimak,” they said. It was like saying “Gladly” or “Of course.”

  “Xtalan,” I said four times to the four directions. “We thank you” or “we will remember you.”

  “Oxlahun ueceb uchic yn uecic,” the crowd chanted. The formula was as ingrained as a Hail Mary had been for me in the twentieth century:

  “Now still our breath is yours, your sap is ours,

  We are your roots, you are our trunk, you branch

  Out to the unrevealed four thousandfold . . .”

  Each voice was individually pitched to its caste and its clan and its place in the clan, so that you could almost pick each individual voice-loop out of the wall of pitched breath.

  Of course, the whole thing was an exchange of obligations. We—I mean, we hotshots—threw these big parties to pay the Morlocks back for all the shit they had to go through, but then we also had to keep making each new party even bigger and wilder than the last one so that it would put them under more of an obligation to us. In Kaminaljuyu and some of the other cities the royals were more blatant about it, begging the public to help them out of debt and even sending out collection boxes. Koh and I had tried to be more circumspect. We’d be making offerings in the name of all the clans and their dependents, and then the clans would show how grateful they were by sending their adders to play in the city-wid
e Sacrifice Game, as a wedding- and seating-gift to us. And then we’d reciprocate by seeding the k’atun. Which meant reading the game, using it to divine what the weather would be and where to settle people and how to lay out the fields and everything else, and, incidentally, reaffirming or redistributing the various clans’ rights and privileges—hunting rights, shares in the irrigation systems, hereditary dress and regalia, client villages, clans of thralls, and much more besides. On my own end, the offerings had to go down right or I’d lose a lot of popular confidence. To put it mildly. I had to show I could do the job.

  The central zocalo had filled up since the masque but now a troupe of twenty terror-clowns whirled out into it and cleared the spectators away with a jerky choosing dance, creeping up on a spectator as though if they caught him they’d offer him as a sacrifice, and then as he got away turning and leaping at another. The bacabs’ oblationers followed them out into the floor, four of them from each of the five clans, each team trailing a long blue rope. They were elect elders, unmasked but weighted down with ornament, and they stomped out in converging spirals, sucking energy out of the earth with a sort of springy flat-footedness. Rigid white fabric wings extended from their thighs, like dragonflies’ wings, and as the spirals contracted into spins the centrifugal force pulled blood out of cuts in their hips until the white had all gone red. It was a pretty showy way to make a blood offering. They clustered in a circle in the center of the zocalo, crushing their limp red wings between them, and reeled the ropes in after them. Meanwhile the Porcupine Clown had worked his way into the line like the fool in a morris dance, dancing along with them and then suddenly braking and disrupting their rhythm. He grabbed the lead oblationer’s position and led the line off its course, like Charlie Chaplin with that parade in Modern Times. The crowd loved it. Porcupine was the only real clown allowed in the zocalo during the gifts or the City Game. Koh had ordered him not to actually mess up anything, but just to relieve some of the tension for the spectators.

  Finally the old men got their act together and brought the first gift to the base of the mul. It was from the Snuffler House, who had backed 9 Fanged Hummingbird before all the unpleasantness and so owed me the first gift. And more. Big-time. I’ll deal with you guys later, I thought. They unwrapped the gold cloth and presented him to me. From what I could see from way up here he was an appropriately beautiful full-blood boy just heading into puberty. The ocelot-ancestor personifiers did this thing where they made these big “surprise” reactions, like they were noticing him for the first time, and then closed in around the teenager and started dancing around him like “We’re going to eat you, we’re going to eat you,” or whatever, and then they sprang at him and covered him up, twitching their tails above them in slow increments, mimicking cats nibbling their live food. Next there was a blast from a clay kazoo and my nacom walked out and into the orange-and-black tangle. The ocelots turned and backed off, like they were relinquishing their food to the leader of the pride, and the nacom took the prisoner’s rope and led him to the stairs. Four invisibles fell into line after them and the little procession started up toward me. The chant was segueing into a sort of fugue, as familiar to us as “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” is to American preschool classes, but it had a sort of haunting expectant interrogatory half-melody. Which I guess isn’t very specific, but it’s tough to describe music anyway. And now there were teasers prodding screamer captives too—different captives—somewhere I couldn’t see, and the screams made it more like a burning than any kind of singing. But they gave it a completeness, like you needed the pain at the edge of the chord.

  ( 59 )

  When the nacom reached the lower apron of the adoratory, I stepped back into the shelter of its mouth, just behind a wide brazier. The attendants laid the kid down on the plain stone table. The nacom bent over him, purified the boy and then his long-handled flint knife with his cigar, slit the kid’s stomach horizontally with a single motion, palmed a smaller knife, reached in and up, worked for a moment inside the abdominal cavity, severing the heart from the aorta and vena cavae—and then pulled out the little red muscle. An attendant held up a dish. The nacom set the heart in the dish, slit it longitudinally, opened it up like a book, and studied it. He turned upstage to me, let an attendant wipe the blood off his arms, and then signaled that the signs were good. I signed the go-ahead, and the attendant ran up past me and tipped the heart into the brazier. I listened to it sizzle and breathed in the sausagey smoke. The different sections of the crowd-orchestras reacted, hitting high notes of relief on a long, slow melody that overlaid the bass line, while the kid’s body rolled down the stairs to the holy chefs. One down, I thought.

  The kid had behaved really well and didn’t even seem drugged. It reflected well on the Snufflers. And on me, too, I supposed. Sometimes you’d be happier if you could get your captive to scream, because you just wanted to humiliate him, but a lot of the time you’d be happy if the victim took it like a mensch, since you wanted to show how hard you were by capturing somebody that tough in the first place. This was more in the second category. Also, there were some occasions when you wanted your adders to divine from their screams, but at a time like this if they freaked out it would just help spoil the invocation.

  The Macaw Clan’s oblationers unwrapped their gift. It was a little boy on his first public-name-date anniversary, which meant he was nearly four years old. They led him to the base and the invisibles mimed hoisting him up to me on his flowery-strung blue ribbon, actually lifting him up, placing him on each step, and lifting him onto the next. The Macaw boy wasn’t too heavily drugged, either, and by the third step you could see that he really was terrified, he’d realized in some way what was actually going on, and he slid into something between a whimper and a screech.

  I guess all this is going to make me completely unsympathetic. Right? I’d made my peace with what was going to happen earlier, when I was going through the wedding rehearsals with Koh’s stand-ins—but I suppose I was still just a fuck to go along with it. Of course, I didn’t see any other way. I was just following orders.

  And remember, this was a big ceremony and we still only did nine or ten people, which isn’t exactly a holocaust, right? I mean, it’s not great, but at least we didn’t do those big wholesale blowout sacrifices like the Aztecs supposedly did later. They’d go through ten times that many people on just a regular day, probably before breakfast. Although on the other hand, I’d recommend getting captured by the Aztecs, instead of the Maya. Since we—I mean the Maya—were a lot more creative torture-wise. At least the Aztecs just killed you.

  And anyway, consider the context, right? We—I mean we like us Ixob dudes again—we were emulating God by being as mean as possible. God obviously enjoys killing little kids, right? At least we didn’t pretend that God doesn’t enjoy torturing innocent people, or pretend not to notice.

  And anyway, I did feel queasy, I did feel sorry. But where do I get off mentioning it anyway? Sorry doesn’t muck the custard.

  Down in the zocalo my own Harpy clan was unswaddling their gift. It was a former foster brother of all of theirs, now disinherited: 18 Jog, 2 Jeweled Skull’s favorite nephew. He’d been sewn into the 2 Jeweled Skull costume from the masque, but he wasn’t the one who’d actually danced 2 Jeweled Skull. We hadn’t trusted him to go through the motions. I focused across the plaza at the central room of the Council House, where 2 Jeweled Skull was being forced to watch from his cage, but it was too dark in there to see him.

  The invisibles stripped off 18 Jog’s regalia and unwrapped his team of five dwarves. They were so fattened they looked table-ready, like kids in turkey costumes in a school Thanksgiving play. But they weren’t official sacrifices, either, and weren’t going into the communion pot. They were just there because 18 Jog was still a greathouse, captive or not, and still deserved attendants to keep him amused on the road out of this level. Dwarves always work. The invisibles led them up, 18 Jog walking stiffly—he was twenty-three solar years old and
, from what I could tell, not so quick or forceful as his famous uncle—and the dwarves followed, struggling up the high steps, trailing veils of tinkling laughter from the crowds. To me they didn’t look very aesthetic, more like Grock, Loopy, Scuzzy, Sullen, and Retarded, only without the beards, but really they were matched and trained and must have cost a lot. Anyway the audience had been waiting for a finale.

  They came to the threshold. 18 Jog just stood there like Jesus until they stretched him over the table. I could hear a couple of his joints popping. Maybe Koh’s people wanted to make him scream. But really it wasn’t a good idea. Anyway since he was a full-blood captive there wasn’t much chance of it. At most you’d get a little unconscious vocalization at the instant of death.

  The nacom purified 18 Jog’s face and chest. I walked forward, let the nacom blow smoke over my halberd, and set its central hooked blade on 18 Jog’s neck.

  Now, as you probably noticed, so far I hadn’t done any of the actual killing myself. In general you didn’t want to get that close to the death-breath. So you let the professional sacred outcastes take care of it. You really just wanted the recipient—Ocelot, in this instance—to give you the credit. It’s like you want to throw the party, but you don’t want to have to cook everything yourself and hand-feed it to your guests. But in this one case I was expected to do a few little things, although I’d still let the nacom give the coup de grâce. It was okay partly because 18 Jog wasn’t a captive I’d taken with my own hands. It was like how when you were hunting it wasn’t cool to eat anything you’d bagged yourself.