The Sacrifice Game

by Brian D'Amato

  I held 18 Jog’s forehead with my left hand, turned his head toward me, made an incision under the earlobe, found the condyle of the mandible, and severed it from the temporomandibular ligament. I turned to the other cheek, did the same thing, handed my long-handled knife to one of the ordinands, pushed 18 Jog’s forehead back so he couldn’t bite me, hooked my right thumb around his lower incisors, and pulled off his jaw. A little sun-shower of blood spattered down around me and saliva sprayed up out of the ducts. I held the jaw up and whirled it around four times. The tongue was still flapping and trailing pink drool. I tossed it down the stairs. The ordinands stood up 18 Jog to show him to the crowd, teasingly tilting him back and forth on the lip of the precipice. He tried to launch himself over but they kept catching him. The crowd went wild and a few sections lost control of the chant. I wasn’t feeling good about the whole thing, but I’ve got to admit—just to get rid of any vestige of sympathy you may have for me—that at the same time I couldn’t help not quite laughing but at least being aware of how ridiculous 18 Jog looked at that moment, with his front teeth sticking down into nothing and his big head wagging around on its little neck. A jawless person is just really, really funny-looking. They handed me my knife, turned him back upstage to me, and I cut into his abdomen longitudinally above the navel. He had abs, not a six-pack or anything, but still abs, so it wasn’t an easy cut, but I got through it in one motion. I got a little dizzy for a beat, maybe from stage fright or conflicting motives or something but maybe more just from the feeling of parting that thickness. Cutting into living flesh is like that feeling of spooning into something soft that keeps its shape, like pudding or cheesecake, and taking out a smooth half-oval. There’s some basic fascination in creating that hollow area. Maybe surgeons feel that all the time. Still, I got it back together, handed off my knife, reached in and up with both arms, and tore through the diaphragm with my nails. This little curtain of flesh, I thought. I found the heart, and held it for a beat. I guess it’s obvious that it must be an odd feeling to hold a still-beating heart in your hands, but it’s hard for me to say exactly why. I guess you could get a sense of it by holding a bird and thinking about crushing it to death. It’s got that same incredible power at the vanishing point of the lines of repulsion and fascination.

  For some reason I looked at 18 Jog’s face and his eyes contacted mine. He didn’t seem angry or panicked or anything, he just had that swooning relaxed look you get when pain goes over the edge.

  The heart wasn’t what we were after in this particular procedure. It would go into a special giant batch of atole later on. I let go of it kind of reluctantly, twisted my hands down and behind it, and found the liver.

  It’s a heavy, fragile, floppy organ, but I found and cut the vena cava and the portal vein, got both big lobes out—along with the gallbladder—and plopped them into the dish. An acolyte wiped my hands with palm oil. I took the dish, turned, and walked up into the sanctuary. It was darker inside now but there were still flares burning and a single feline acolyte crouching in the back next to the heirophant’s casket. I set the basin down on the old great-mat. The acolyte lifted the old man’s torso. He looked at me and then bent down over the liver to inspect it. I came forward and watched. He turned it over. It seemed like a big, healthy, blood-rich sucker, but then he reached into the fissure between the left and quadrate lobes, and pointed to a smelly little abscessed necrosis, like a popped tube of anchovy paste. He looked at me.

  “All right for now, but not for later,” he rasped. Or, well, his voice was a little thinner and finer than a rasp. “He sanded”? “He emeryboarded?” “He nailfiled?” Anyway, I knew I wouldn’t get any more out of him. He was set on being difficult. I thanked him, did my little obeisance, and walked out back to the threshold.

  “Kimak-kimak,” I said. “All’s good to swim,

  Forward, four times four hundred solar years.”

  The crowd answered with a din like a giant cave full of sea lions. Just to show off, the ordinands released 18 Jog and let him stand on his own for a beat. He just stood there for five beats. His chest and legs were solid red but he was still alive. Finally he tried to take a step toward me but tilted forward, and just as he was about to fall into my arms the acolytes caught him and held him while the nacom expertly sawed the rest of his head off his body and handed it to a preparator-acolyte for wrapping. There was almost no blood from the neck. The ordinands released the body again and the nacom nudged it downstage, over the lip of the saw-stairs. It tumbled over and down almost noiselessly. The crowds went silent for a beat and then slid back into a softer, more awed-sounding cycle of the chant. I felt this wave of protectiveness of them, and I could feel how grateful they all were, love and relief rising off them like heat waves. Sacrifice can create this incredible bond, maybe the strongest bond you can have with more than one other person at a time. And especially with throngs of people you haven’t met. There’s this community epiphany, you get a rush of shared exaltation of surviving on together. You know so clearly you’ve all felt the same thing and lived through the same little terror, it’s like you’ve just had sex with everyone there.

  They rolled the next batch of sacrifices down the stairs alive, just to get the party mood going again, first Loopy, then Retarded, and then Jock, Sullen, and Scuzzy all at once. Since the atole was finished it was all right to pollute the stairs with inferior blood. They bounced over and down and around and around, glortching and squealing, their movements defining five separate arcs from living to dead. To the audience—I almost said “to my family”—it was pretty much the funniest thing in the world. Great sense of humor, guys, I thought. I shoulda brung some tapes of The Benny Hill Show.

  An acolyte tapped the platform next to my foot. I turned. He was offering me a regulation-size ball, freshly wrapped out of white rubber ribbon. Its glyphs said 18 Jog’s head was inside, just in case there was any doubt. I took the ball and held it over my head. I could feel the inrush of breath underneath me. I threw it down the steps. It bounced higher and higher as it fell lower, finally arcing high into the crowd, and then bobbing from one lucky person to another as they hipped it back and forth across the square.

  Pitzom pay-ee, I thought. Let the Game Begin. I signed for Koh’s escort to bring her out. The hissing rose up again from Star Rattler’s mul. The snake poured down her steps again. The crowd below scattered aside. The mul’s temple doorway, recently resculpted as Star Rattler’s giant mouth, vomit-birthed a big blue egg-box and flicked its rattle against it. The egg exploded and Koh emerged headfirst, like a baby, in a cowl of metallic green beetle shells sewn in a celestial map onto a manto pieced from the skins of four hundred black iguanas.

  ( 60 )

  She floated up the steps toward me, twice as tall as her actual height, carried by a pair of dwarf bearers hidden under her long star-scale-skirt. Four of her own attendants followed her, two steps behind. It was a little out of the ordinary for her to be here and there’d be some muttering among the oldsters. But really, since the gifts were over, women could step on the holy ground without polluting anything. Anyway, things are gonna be different around here, I thought. Sisters are doing it for themselves.

  I reset my stilt-sandals on the sharp lip of the threshold and nearly fell forward again. In the smoke and the amethyst half-light things seemed closer than they were, even without depth perception. A new set of Harpy Fliers had climbed the poles and were spinning downward, and the Ocelots were dancing through the costumed celebrants, rocking and almost falling, strutting and voguing, uninhibited but also totally controlled. It wasn’t like a nightclub or anything, actually it was just the old men who were supposed to really dance, and the others just sort of bopped. But the righteous dub ran through everything. It was so different from the dour, stale Teotihuacán vigil. It had a sense of beginning. A lot of the spectators and dancers were popping off into orgasmic trances, but even so, they still kept pulsing to the same gemütlich beat. There’s really nothing nearly so pow
erful as tribal fellow-feeling. And as I watched the rough edges of artifice disappeared and I forgot the dragon had legs, or that there were ropes holding the fliers in the air. The revelers’ masks fused to their flesh and pulsed and rippled and grimaced. I could feel my smile flowing through to the scales of my jade mask, everything meshing. The dancers’ back racks unfolded into pulsing mating displays, the gods’ power rising off them in clouds of musk, and it wasn’t a ceremony anymore but the event itself, gods kicking up the world just for the hell of it a long time ago, now, and again. It was a childlike feeling but it also had this brooding, shrouded purposefulness to it, and a bittersweetness about how I was part of a we, and how we were all so pathetically grand, so hopeful, so alive, I got this love-twinge and felt tears soaking my face-padding. It sounds sappy but it’s really comprehending the quiddity of whatever it is, the what-it-is-ness, how limited it is, how much we could love only each other, that really gets you. Twenty-first-century people haven’t lived at all, I thought. You’ve got to go for it, you have to string yourself along the thread where sex and violence and pleasure and pain and egotism and oblivion all intersect on the intensity graph, to this point of exhilaration without concepts, just thereness, that pure no-doubt living-goal insects feel, and if you haven’t gotten there at least once it’s like you’ve been looking at the ocean through a window without ever swimming in it. Or at least that’s the way it seemed at the time.

  Koh rose up in front of me. Invisibles spread the ancient great-mat at the edge of the platform. I stepped onto it and sat down—so slowly that it took over a minute—facing north, so that when I looked over my left shoulder I could see the vertiginous rush of the Steps and the whole roiling zocalo. Actually, the entire area between the two great pyramids was considered a kind of ball court. But it was at least a hundred times the area of an actual playing trench, much too big for humans to play on. Instead the balls were the planets and moon and sun. Normally it just worked on its own, slowly, but in this one ritual Koh and I were going to bounce them forwards ourselves, and use the people to mark where they might land.

  The dwarves set Koh down four arms away from me, facing me—that is, south—and slithered off, back into the sanctuary, keeping low so the crowd couldn’t see them. Down in the forum the invisibles were clearing everyone off the central square, an area about three rope-lengths on a side. It had been pumiced and buffed and freshly repainted in the color zones of the five directions with the full Sacrifice Game grid superimposed on it like a squared-off spiderweb. Finally, I thought. The Human Game. Let’s go.

  Koh’s attendants snipped off her blue-green-goggle-eyed snake-jaw helmet and instantly started constructing an Ocelot queen’s coiffure and headdress in its place. She was pretty much giving up her old role as a sort of nun to Star Rattler. Still, marrying me was the safest plan for her. Later—not much later—before I entombed myself, I’d announce at the popol na that Koh was going to continue ruling, as the mouth of my uay, and then, eventually, as regent for her son, assuming we were going to have or secretly adopt one. And meanwhile, with me out of the picture, Koh would keep working to unify the Ocelot and Rattler factions until the situation was stable enough for her to relocate. And—at least until the twelfth b’aktun—that would be my contribution to posterity.

  She and I saluted each other, but she didn’t say anything. An attendant set a covered Game-table between us.

  Down in the forum the invisibles swept and oiled the Game grid. Alligator Root, Koh’s crier, sat two stairs below us, wearing a thin black mask, like a domino mask, fastened over his eyes with wax. At least she hadn’t had him blinded.

  The first fifty-nine evaders—or poison oracles—walked out and stood at their posts at the center of the tetragon. Each one held a pair of sticks and they wore tall zero-masks. One of the leading one’s sticks was a big red-streamered staff, twice as tall as he was. Next the fifty-eight masked catchers took their places around them, seven at each of the eight star points and two in reserve outside the grid. Each of the catchers had a little drum on a stick. The hundred and seventeen players had all been chosen from four- or five-stone adders from trusted dependent clans, which meant they could all feel the blood-lightning and count like they had little abacus cashiers in their heads. But presumably it also meant that they wouldn’t know enough to direct a City Game on this scale, or to remember it and take the knowledge with them. They’d picked the thirteen evaders from among themselves, by cleromancy, and tattooed them and studded them with the patterns of the sidereal scorpion, and fed them on liver and deer’s blood to make them strong. And for the last ten days they’d all practiced every hour they were awake. Each one would be, in a way, playing his own separate game, and the totality of games would magnify the totality of the master game.

  The Game beaters started on their clay water drums, in time with the beat of the universal festival, but more insistent.

  Let’s go, I thought. Letsgoletsgoletsgo. I still couldn’t quite believe that the Human Game was really happening. It was like—well, I don’t know if it was like anything. But if it worked, I’d learn what I needed to know, what we all needed to know. And then, knowing . . . knowing . . .

  “You know, at best I’ll only see the moves,” Koh reminded me. “You’ll have to interpret.”

  I said I knew that, and I thanked her again. She smiled, like, Hey, no problem, we’re just hangin’ out anyway, right?

  As I think I mentioned, as far as anyone knew, this was going to be the first City Game since the one played in Teotihuacán k’atuns before. And given the way the art was dying out, this might turn out to be the last one anywhere. This Game was supposed to be a public demonstration of my ability to read the future, but it would really be Lady Koh who was doing the seeing, and she and I would be playing for our own reasons. And, if all went well, nobody else would find out the farthest-off or the most important things we’d see. We’d throw them a few solid predictions about the next few k’atuns, and keep the rest to ourselves.

  Koh lit one of her green cigars—the kind with chili and chocolate threaded through the tobacco—took a hit, and passed it to me. I puffed. She started the invocation. As I think I started to say at some point and then lost track of, it was in the old heavily metaphorical adders’ dialect, and—especially in a heavily accented language like English—it’s hard to get a sense of the swing, which it don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got. So I’ll make this a bit closer than a paraphrase, but less than a translation. Okay, Jedketeers? Right. Here we go:

  Koh:

  “You, Hurricane, who sparked Lord Heat’s first dawning,

  You over us who foreknows his final dying,

  You, sun-eyed coiler of the blue-green basin,

  You, jade-skinned carver of the turquoise cistern,

  You, there, whose hissing javelins strike wildfires,

  Deign to respond to us from out your whirlwind.”

  Koh looked up, not at my eyes, but at the emerald-green mask of One Ocelot on my pectoral sash. I hesitated, cleared my throat, and launched into my first response.

  Jed:

  “We who are only dust motes in the whirlwind,

  We, born at sun’s fall and gone before its dawning,

  Who will be waiting for us by the hearth fire?

  Whose hands will polish our bones beyond our dying?

  Will our skulls just bounce on the floor of the fresh-sea cistern?

  Will the potters rebake the shards of our shattered basins?”

  Ahau-na Koh:

  “You, Cyclone, grant us a perch below the basin

  But over the clouds, above the wrecking whirlwinds:

  An overlook above the fourfold cistern

  Where we can scatter the seeds of coming dawnings

  Where we can count their growings and their dyings

  Where we can spot young floods and fresh-sparked fires.”

  Jed:

  “Where we can warn our heirs of nearing fires,

  Whe
re we can feel the first cracks in the basin

  And cradle our lineage and forestall its dying,

  Where we can hear them crying in the whirlwind,

  Where the entire talley of their dawnings

  Reads full and clear, above the yawning cistern.”

  Ahau-na Koh:

  “You at the center of the turquoise cistern

  Show us the gold southwest fires,

  Let us see redward, through the sierra of dawning,

  Southeast to where the horizon meets the basin.

  Guide us northeasterly through the bone-dust whirlwinds,

  And even northwest, through the soot-black dunes of dying.”

  Jed:

  “So that in ages far beyond our dying