Spine and Scarlatina had given up on me and taken out their paddles again, and they steered us through linked lagoons of molten ruby and gold and mercury mixing and separating in marbleized swirls and into a long, straight waterway, and we just coasted forward under crystal epidote vines arching overhead, past milpas of kidney-ore corn growing on neatly heaped bodies. Ahead of us the Halls of the Lords of the Night loomed up at the dead end of the canal like a range of karst towers over the Huang Ho Valley, but no matter how much I paddled they didn’t seem to get any larger, until after monotonous dark suns of stroking, when I was just collapsed over the thwart gasping the molasses-thick atmosphere, the temples finally rose up over us in fungally excrescent magnificence, cultivated porphyry-basalt columns and buttes of black jade erupting with boil-clusters of opal-dripping carnalite on terraces of tiled yellow crocolite in matrices of banded ironstone.
We pulled up onto a sort of ridge of ghats and the Scullers inhumanhandled me out of the canoe onto the granite, thwacking me with their paddles like multiple Charons. Crowds of Sickeners, or I guess we should more respectfully call them Xibalbans, clattered out and pressed in around us, lifting the canoe over me and shaking it. Wet gristly bones and ornate reliquaries fell around me, the boxes bursting open, spilling clouds of dyes and feather embroidery and expensive smokes. The Xibalbans grabbed them but I managed to grab the smallest box, the one for Jaguar Night, and tucked it under the skin of my groin while they were frantically lighting the cigars and smoking them down in single gigantic drags. I watched Serpigo do a fancy exhalation but then Scald closed her mouth over his snot-stringed nose, and she sucked the fumes back into his mouth and down her own throat. Flesh-stained smoke jetted out of carbonized holes in her chest. Scab and Bloody Teeth were fighting over a tied culebra-twist of seven lit cigars, poking for each other’s eyes with their sharp-forked tongues. Finally Bloody Teeth got possession of the bunch but Scab got hold of his arm, ground Bloody Teeth’s stub-holding hand into a pile of tumbled coals, put the smoldering hand in his mouth, took a huge drag, and farted a gigantic brown-green cloud of tar, nicotine, and burning fat. I tried not to breathe.
Ulcer grafted a big floppy skeletal of my bamboo leg and poked at me until I staggered up the ghats through the eastern gate. There was a low screech from a giant cracked flute and the Xibalbans all parted and scattered, and I walked alone into the trench of a ball court the size of all outdoors, with sloped banks cloven out of solid mesas of wave-green jade threaded with veins of cyanotrichite and olivine. As I walked toward the reviewing stand at level seven I focused on the ground, trying not to look up at the Magister Ludi, and so I couldn’t see the thousands of ghouls in the stands, but I could hear their cackling and feel their bulbous eyes on distended optic-nerve stalks, like slugs’ eyes. I stood on my marker.
( 73 )
Jaguar Night, ahau and k’alomte of the nine underwaterworlds, lounged in a high referee’s chair woven from the ribs of whale sharks. He was all gooey with baby oil and laden with bracelets and anklets of glistening human eyeballs and a belt of severed hands endlessly clasping each other. His cape was sewn of thousands of woven eyelids, their lashes rippling over the surface like a thin layer of scalloped fur, and he had barbels on his mucous-slick face, like a catfish. White chunks of raw porous bone protruded from his wrists and his brow ridge and his knees and his back, and fat round ticks and white leeches crawled over his irregularly sited pseudopods, leaving interlocking slime-trails. Blue fungi bloomed in the crevices of his groin. He was sick and decayed and in obvious pain, but in his case his condition just increased his strength, he lived on the power of his own diseases, like a sea urchin digesting the mites on its skin. Beautiful little girls and boys climbed over him, oiling him, scraping and licking his pustules. They weren’t Xibalbans. As far as I could tell, they were living humans from the middle-world. Maybe the Xibalbans snatched them every so often. Or they’d captured some a long time ago and kept them here to breed. A few of the boys and girls lay in gnawed pieces on big plates. A giant fat hairless food dog with a peg-toothy grin rolled on the amber floor, chewing a child’s ear. Four-hundred-scores of husks of lunar fanged rabbits imploded overhead and rained bloody fur like rose petals into the Domus Auria, and orange twilight filtered flickering through a lattice in the floor, the captive sun struggling in the dark below. “My greatest greatfather-greatmother,” I said.
“I know you from somewhere,” he mewed. “Somewhere later on.”
I repeated the salutation.
You don’t fool me, he said, you’re not 2 Jeweled Skull. His voice was a nonvoice, like something on an old Moog synthesizer. He peeled a dark-red strip off this little Scab Boy he had next to him—it was a kid who’d evidently been sanded down a few days ago and allowed to crust over until now—and chewed it up like a tortilla chip.
No, I said, I’m not, I thought you might want his skin so I kept it fresh for you. I didn’t think my voice sounded too convincing. Jaguar Night gestured and two of his preparators came out, carefully cut the skin’s stitches, and shucked it off me. I hung on to my last gift box. The preparators sewed 2JS’s skin onto a big howler monkey, like it was a mannequin, and let it hop around. The crowd went wild. I was naked and getting a serious case of that Maidenform-dream vulnerable feeling.
Why haven’t you brought me anything? Jaguar Night asked.
I brought you a cat and a boy, I said, and—
Where are they? he asked.
Your ambassadors ate them on the way here, I said.
I don’t believe you, he said.
I cracked open my last box, unrolled the bundle in front of me, and fanned out four hundred of the largest and most perfect whole quetzal skins. I made him an offertory gesture. It’s hard to explain how valuable those things were, but they were like Leonardo drawings. If you worked it out in terms of man-hours or whatever, what I’d brought would be worth the Ixian equivalent of between thirty and forty million 2012 dollars. Still, their main attraction wasn’t the cost. We’d chosen them because we figured they were hard to get down here, even more than fresh chewing tobacco.
One of the boys slid a plate under the green fan and climbed up to the Lord’s mangler-hand. He took one of the skins and raised it to stroke his pustulated cheek, enjoying the soft pressure of the feathers against his boils. I guessed it was okay to assume they were accepted. Meanwhile, I’d noticed the largely defleshed name-soul of 2JS seated in the row of ghouls on the reviewing stand, smirking at me. Like everyone who died and went to Xibalba, he was aging in reverse, and despite his skeletality he already looked a little younger than when I’d seen him last.
“Hmm, look who seems to be seated below the salt,” I said.
“2JS has been given the position of Chief Convivitor,” Jaguar Night said. He meant that 2JS mixed up the blood and burning turpentine they drank as toasts to each other.
“Ooh, I’m impressed,” I said. “They really gave you a platinum parachute, didn’t they? You’ve done really well for yourself. That’s like being head urinal attendant at the Wilshire Grand.”
“Laugh while you still have a trachea,” 2JS said.
“Hey, I’m going back and you’re staying here in Tabascoenemastan.”
Enough, I thought. I was being rude to my primary host. I turned back to Jaguar Night.
A question, please, I said.
He made a “whatever” gesture.
We thought you might know where Lady Koh’s uay has gotten to, I said as casually as possible.
We ate it, he said.
Nonsense, I said.
You’re right, we didn’t, he said. She stopped by, but she left two nights ago.
I need to ask her something, I said.
You should have had plenty of suns already, he said.
That’s true, I said.
All right, he said, just give us your own skin, and we’ll see you get to her.
I can’t do that, I said. I didn’t even bother to say that I needed to get back.
He knew that anyway, he was just giving me a hard time.
Too late, he said.
I know you can, I said, I know how strong you next to me are.
I won’t, he said.
Then I challenge your champion to a hipball match, I said. It was my last-resort prepared sentence.
He looked at me with an eye a like plucked-out rabbit’s eye floating in a Petri dish of upscale shampoo. He sighed through his pleuroceles and, pensively, scratched his tentacles with a testic—that is, rather, he stenched his tensicles with—I mean, he tested his scratchsicles with a tenticrotch—never mind.
All right, he screaked. Then field five balls. And if you win we’ll show you the way to Lady Koh.
( 74 )
I should have expected it, but I hadn’t negotiated the rules, and they sent four players out against me: Three Balls, a little rotten but looking tougher than ever, and my old mashed-and-charred friends from my last ball game, 15 Immanent, 20 Silence, and 9 Dog. I can’t deal with this, I thought, it’s too Dawn of the Dead around here, but it didn’t help. What was I thinking? I wondered. I still only had one leg and one eye, for Chrissake, I could barely play five rounds of Rock ’Em Sock ’Em Robots.
“Good luck. Ball One, play ball,” Jaguar Night said.
I got the face-off and hipped the ball west, but as it bounced and 3 Balls gingerly headed it off I realized I’d already screwed up, my hip was spraying blood. They’d let me get to the ball first because the ball was really a spherical knife. It was like this thing that happened to this friend of No Way’s named Cobi, he was in a fight in a school cafeteria and got hit with what they called a ballestero, a hard orange with a whole bunch of single-edged razor blades stuck deep in it with just their corners sticking out. It really messed him up and he had to have about a hundred stitches. Except this thing the Xibalbans had didn’t exactly have blades, it was more like a Möbius strip or a Klein bottle, where even though the surface was round it was still also a big razor-sharp knot that whirled like a Cuisinart blade. Anyway, before I’d gotten it together 3 Balls yoked the thing onto my goal-peg.
I limped back to my marker. Spine ambled out to tidy me up. “Really,” he said, “of all of us, you under me are the most nauseating.” Yeah, yeah, I signed. He dusted me off with a long-haired scalp.
The second ball came down. 9 Dog blasted it into my chest and it stuck. All four of them ran to my side, picked me up, and threw me up against the peg. My ear knocked over the dish of mica flakes and I bounced down the bank like a Gumby doll.
I won the next six balls, though, and won the match.
A cacophony of jeers all rose around me, it was just horrible, like you’d never think people could laugh that way at something so stupid except of course you can see it every day on TV on talk shows. They were gibbering so hard they were gnawing on their own arms, rolling over and down onto the court, lying on their backs and juggling me in the air and kicking me back and forth until I was ricocheting off the stone bank with steel-on-steel impact. I just took it. It certainly didn’t hurt any less than it would have in the real world. They closed around me into a spanking line and thwacked me through it with bone saw-paddles, like I was that chicken the Nephi Knights used to kick around. But I was off in the right direction.
“Hey,” I called to 2 Jeweled Skull. “Toss me another towel, will ya? I’ll schmear you a fiver next time.” I screwed a fist into my working eye and walked forward against the obsidian wind.
( 75 )
I came to the citadel at the crossroads, in the center of the center. The northern path led down into a scabrous clotted horror-desert, past fractal fungal rock-bones impacted and twisted with projecting nodes in serried rows like sharks’ teeth. I felt my scalp peeling back and the flesh shredding off my bones. I turned left at the first new moon, 4 Motion, 7 Thought. Days flickered by underneath me like railroad ties. Whilrlwinds of razors sanded my skeleton. Five layers of fabric parted one after the other, white porcupine quills, yellow leather, mulberry cotton, black snakeskin, and gold-green feathers, and I was through, and I thought I saw someone up ahead, and I saw that what was going to happen on the last day wasn’t going to be a natural disaster, or any known type of man-made disaster, that it meant something but something totally new . . . but then it was gone, and then the floor, or what I was visualizing as the floor, must have just rotted underneath me, because I was lying covered with dirt. I was dirt myself. I must have been decomposing for years, I thought, but when it’s years of pain you lose track fast. I felt leaf-cutter ants growing fungus farms in my adipocere. I oozed through level nine, and ten and eleven and twelve, and the Tree of Mirrors forked out into a white road, the back of the double-headed star-feathered diamondback Rattler, the Milky Way, and I slid down one arc and up another following Sun-Carrier toward the Heart of Sky. The sun crawled out of the ragged cave-mouth, exhausted and bloodless and thirsty after his escape from the dark lords, and stumbled blindly up onto the rim of the blue-green basin, blinking, looking around for prey. I backed up, scrambling down the serpent’s dry, slippery body, but I was stuck, and as I pulled I saw that the serpent was my own foot, or rather the stump under my knee, which had scaled over, and extended, and grown into a rattlesnake. The snake’s neck twisted away from me and reared up like a whip stopped in midcrack, and its vibrating head sighted on me, sensing my body heat through the pits in its cheeks, licking my sweat spray out of the air. I could see my reflection in its opaque lidless eyes. Could I really swallow myself? The snake built up the torsion to strike, its snare-drum-roll-thunder peaking to the snapping point, and with the speed of a crack traveling through a sheet of glass it lunged at my lips, hemotoxin welling out of the grooves in its fangs.
But instead of striking, it held itself still, mouth gaping. There was a wet black ball down in its salmon-pale throat. It just swallowed something, I thought, it hasn’t finished digesting its last gift. But it regurgitated the black bolus up toward me, and I saw the ball was covered with hair, it was the top of a head, and I recognized the whorl. The head turned backward and a bicolored forehead rotated toward me, and I was looking upside-down into Lady Koh’s eyes as she extruded onto the wide scale-path, naked and glistening with cosmic universal solvent and studded with diamond-patterned traceries of jade stars. Wow, I thought. I guess this really is kind of neat. Koh lowered herself up to me along her own death-umbilicus. I know she was more beautiful than ever but I can’t remember what she looked like. Just not the same.
“I wanted a separate time with you,” I said. She gave a Maya click-shrug, but it wasn’t so dismissive as it sounds, there was regret there. I think I was kind of crying, or not really of course, since it probably wasn’t even possible in my not-quite physical state, but I at least felt like crying. I’d thought I was past being too emotional but I really did get just this flood of love or whatever and it kind of freaked me out.
Koh said something like “You didn’t follow me here just to see me again.” Only, it wasn’t exactly in words that had any sound or exact shape to them, so I can’t quote it exactly.
I said I would have anyway, but that of course I wanted to ask her about the Sacrifice Game.
She either gestured or said that I could ask her.
What did you see at the hotun-end? I asked.
I couldn’t see a thing, she said.
No, I don’t understand, I said. I watched you.
It’s just too far, she said. The chance builds up.
I guess I already said the word frustration doesn’t have enough size on it. This was like frustration supersized, with fries, with a bullet. I kept thinking I was getting closer to it, whatever it was, and then it kept shifting shape and backing away.
I’ve got to do something, I said.
You’d have to play in your own time, she said.
I said I wouldn’t know how.
You know enough to do it, she said, just play it there, closer to the edge.
I don’t know a thing, I said, the position’
s no good. Remember? The runner was trapped in the wasteland, there wasn’t any way to keep playing.
So if I show you how to win from that position, she asked, will you give me your bond that if you play in the afterworld, if what you see is wrong, and shouldn’t happen, you’ll stop?
I said of course I would.
You’ll just resign the Game and let your world run out? she asked.
“Wife-sister-father-mother-daughter,” I said,
“Ahau-na Koh, accept your blood-twin. Please.”
Koh hesitated a moment, scooped a handful of stars up out of the road, let some slip out of her fist like corn, and cast them out over the world, the real world, which was now her board. It wasn’t like a globe, it was a flat square, but somehow it also mapped the whole world correctly, and I could see other continents, southern Africa and Australia, under the swirling cloud-steam. The star-crystals bounced and landed into the final position from the City Game, and she set the Sun-Carrier as the runner, trapped in the far northwest.
“And if you see what’s going to happen,” she said,
“And if it’s right, you’ll play it out. If not,
You’ll take the runner to the edge, and jump.”
The word she used for “right,” or rather the silent word I understood, was maybe a bit more like the English words appropriate or inevitable, but stronger than either. It wasn’t just like “Do the right thing,” it was like “Don’t mess up the program.”
The Sacrifice Game Page 44
