The Sacrifice Game

by Brian D'Amato

  I asked how I’d be able to tell what was right. She said I’d have to be the umpire on that one, and anyway, it ought to be easy. I promised again that I’d do what she said. Koh looked at me and took the four far corners of the square board, two in each hand, like the world was a map on a square of stiff cloth, and folded them up over the center. They met in the middle, making a pyramid.

  “The farthest points are all the same,” Koh said.

  I felt like Immanuel Kant must have felt when he suspected how the Milky Way could be the foreshortened section of a galaxy, and suddenly the universe was bigger for him than it had ever been for anyone. Although of course that was his own idea.

  So the board was a mat, a pop, and it was flexible. The mulob were the same map folded convexly into pyramids—a mountain fold, as they say in origami—and the ball courts were the same map folded concave, in a valley fold. And even the globe of the earth had something to do with the same map, twist-folded back on itself somehow, a torus mapping the inside of a sphere. I almost had a glimpse of insight into how the colors and directions and tendencies and cycles all meshed, how the Sacrifice Game wasn’t absolute but just a visualization of a subtle tendency in the universe, put in a form a human being could almost, but not quite, comprehend, like a three-dimensional model of a four-dimensional solid. It was easy to see how the Runner could escape by jumping from the corner where he was trapped. But then after that he could move off anywhere. Although I thought I saw something, not an idea but just a notion—

  And then it just slipped away, like the eighth move in a chess game, it was just too much for my pea brain. I didn’t have the organizing principle, it was like I was looking at a disk sliced out of the body of a snake and trying to guess what its head looked like.

  I’m not taking much back, I thought. Just one trick. One idea, as we say in chess.

  “Even from here I see it only dimly,” she said. “But I see you alongside him.” Or, I should mention again at this point, Mayan is ungendered so it might have meant either him or her. “It’s someone you know, but whose face you’ve never seen.”

  “I’ll try it as soon as I get back to the zeroth level,” I said.

  “Don’t bother, you won’t see anything from there,” she said, “you’ll only drown yourself. Wait until you’re all the way there.” By all the way there she meant “then,” that is, in the last b’aktun. “A lot of things can happen from the same position,” she said, although those weren’t her exact words, which I don’t remember. Or maybe she didn’t exactly speak in words. “When you’re closer you’ll see the move you need to make. If we played now we’d be hunting in the dark.”

  I said all right. It wasn’t the time to argue. I was dubious, though. Even knowing about the strategy for the move, I was a long way from feeling like I’d be able to play through and get it right. Even assuming I got back.

  I’ll just have to take really good notes, I thought. Leave it to Marena. She’ll figure it out. She’ll give it to LEON.

  Below us the sun bubbled up in ecstasy at the horizon apex of the mul board, bloated with offerings, glowing a bloodier-than-blood oxygenated red that was simultaneously blue-green, yax, the double-faced color of life, and for a p’ip’il I thought I saw Waterlily Jaguar at its center.

  I asked her if she could just stay for a beat.

  I can’t, she said, I have to go. If you see your Marena, would you give her a message?

  What? I thought. Of course, I said.

  “Just tell her not to wait until the sun’s

  Last beat,”

  she said. “And ask her to calculate the remainder

  of twenty minus thirteen.”

  What do you mean? I thought. Seven? It can’t be that simple. “Do you—” I started to say, but she’d already slid away above me and I slipped backward down along the hard shell of the sky, rolling around it like a marble in a bowl. The sick sun slid into the black land, crashing and bleeding out as the mouth of the Earthtoad closed over it, and it was night again, and the skeleton-joint jewelscape of Xibalba rotated over me, the layers of heaven swinging underneath like giant multiple eyelids, and I clawed and scrambled at the sky shell but there was nothing to hold, it was like a water slide at one of Lindsay Warren’s old AquaParks, and as I vortexed down into the galactic sewer I know I saw something past the rim, up in the thirteenth level, some kind of a structure I recognized, but I was already in that waking-up state where you feel the dream’s sharp-carved details deliquescing into foam but you can’t do anything about it, and when they hauled me up out of the ice water I’d already forgotten. They dragged me out of the wet cave to an ember basket in the antechamber and said it was only two suns since I’d begun the vigil. I guess I must have been on dreamtime. Even so, Hun Xoc said I was pretty sick from dehydration. Eventually I looked up at him. He was in his capturing face.

  ( 76 )

  I had them scrape me clean and get me up out of the caves, up the newly cleared interior staircase to the top of the mul. Even from inside I could hear that weird oceanic all-over noise. It wasn’t loud like an industrial-age battle, it was more just the amount and multiplicity of the voices that made it up, the shouts and dogs barking and the raiding drums and signal horns and bull-roarers all combining into a desperate whirring wave. My attendants screened the door of the sanctuary enough for me to peep out without being spotted. It was clear the situation was way hopeless. It was midafternoon on 20 Cayman. The lace blanket of the city around us was on fire at its edges and wide waves of pus-colored grass smoke rolled southeastward through the temple district. I couldn’t see much actual flame but from the amount of smoke behind the mountains it was obviously too late to put them out without help from a massive rainstorm, which the Chak-answerers said wasn’t likely to happen. I couldn’t see much of the defense from here, either, but it definitely looked disorganized. Thousands of refugees had pressed inward onto the peninsula, instead of doing the rational thing and taking off, and they were eddying around just outside the holy courts, not knowing what to do and expecting us to protect them with our nonexistent magic.

  Severed Right Hand had attacked after dawn with at least ninety thousand bloods, about twice the number Hun Xoc had been able to get together for the defense. And it was probably just Severed Right Hand’s first wave. The attackers seemed to have picked up some of the Napoleonic tactics 2 Jeweled Skull had introduced, at least to the extent of going for the kill as a goal and not just the capture. Maybe through 9 Fanged Hummingbird.

  It looked too late to do anything but leave. Severed Right Hand would be here in less than two days. And my brain spikes were getting so bad that I worried that at any moment I might collapse into a 75-IQ blob. Dag, I’ve really made a mess, I thought. I was in charge for the shortest possible time and I got the whole place trashed. If I died today—I mean, if I died forever today—I wouldn’t have too much to be proud about.

  I pulled back into the dim antechamber and took my mat. There were twelve other people crowded into the little room, not counting attendants. Hun Xoc went into his report. He said that for the last three suns the Rattler partisans had been holding the Puma alliance off with walls of dart fire, and how we’d been getting desertions and mass suicides and the clans weren’t going to hold out another night. Tomorrow would definitely be Ix’s last sun. I cut him short and motioned for 14 Black Gila, 1 Gila’s son. He kneeled over and crouched in front of me.

  He reported that 1 Gila had kept his group together and that nearly five hundred score of Koh’s Rattler families were still with him. He was camped around the eastern palisades, his son said, and so far holding off Severed Right Hand’s men, but he was going to be forced to retreat northward. I had the feeling 1 Gila was going to come out of this whole thing on top, and maybe even ahead. Which was fine, it’s nice when at least a few people know what they’re doing.

  We’ll blood to your father, I said to 14 Black Gila, if he can take so many dependents with him.

  Speakin
g for his father, 14BG pledged that he would.

  And once they set the fires in the temple district, I want him to order our bloods to surrender, I said. The closest word they had to surrender was suicide, so I had to explain what I meant. He promised that too. Hun Xoc set a small screenfold book on the altar table in front of me and spread it out. The pages were way too hurriedly done, nothing like the right style for this job, but it looked complete. I held up my left hand and he pricked the palm with a stingray spine. I dipped the end of a wet lettering brush into the blood and drew a set of four glyphs on each page. It wasn’t exactly a will, but it commended or pledged all my bloods and goods and land and rights—except the tombs of me and my new ancestors—to 1 Gila of the Spider House as the legitimate head of the Star Rattler Society. I blotted and folded the book, slipped it into its deer-stomach case, tied it, and handed it to 14 Black Gila.

  “By your hand only to his only,” I said. He acknowledged the order with an I’ll-die-to-protect-this gesture and left. Snotty little bastard, I thought.

  So, what else did I have to do around here? I wondered. Any important assassinations? I wondered if I should make doubly sure they torched my office at the Ocelot House. No, not necessary, I thought.

  Any messages to send out? The rest of Koh’s followers were under this new Rattler person. No use talking to him. Or to the other bacabs. 14 Wounded had been killed, supposedly. Alligator Root was coming with me to repay part of his of his burden to Koh. And it was Mask of Jaguar Night’s job to die with me. Maybe I should have the rest of Mask of Jaguar Night’s acolytes killed, too, I thought. No, also not necessary. They probably wouldn’t get that far anyway. They were double traitors as far as the Pumas were concerned.

  I wondered what Marena was up to. Would be up to. She would have been able to deal with all this stuff, I thought. Better than I did, anyway.

  Fine, I thought, it’s no fun ruling Egypt by myself anyway. The hell with this ring-ding-run country. I feel like Boris Yeltsin.

  I gave the order to set up my entombment.

  ( 77 )

  My bearers lifted me off the Ocelot mat and Mask’s acolytes rolled it up for the last time. They carried me to the doorway and handed me my double-headed serpent bar scepter. I could smell lime plaster burning. The fires were already lapping at the stone precinct. The bloods and dependents were laid out below in their ranks and files and orders and levels, with only a few absences. There were four squads of five-score bloods each stationed at the base of the mul, with orders to defend it indefinitely. They looked a little uncertain. I wondered how long they’d actually stay after we disappeared. They all made their unified gestures of submission. But they seemed to be sinking into the sour haze and my horns and stone drums sounded muffled. I couldn’t even see the Nest of One Harpy, the Mountain of the East. The sun died behind me as if it were trying to reenact my seating as ahau, only it didn’t look so good this time.

  Nothing like a little pomp ’n’ circumstance while everything goes to hell, I thought. At least there were enough people watching so there won’t be any question about where I was going.

  What I was doing had been pitched to the public, if you could call them that, as a royal autosacrifice. Or that’s what anthropologists would call it. In Ixian it would be more like “freeing all our greatfathermother’s uays to intercede for us at the smokers’ hearths.” It wasn’t uncommon. In fact, after ruling for a k’atun you were really supposed to do away with yourself, unless you could fudge it with a proxy the way 9 Fanged Hummingbird had with me, way back in the day. I was just taking an early retirement as a grand gesture. Supposedly my uay would protect the city from the invaders, as long as my body stayed in its mul. I kind of hoped the poor bastards wouldn’t buy it, though. Maybe they’d wise up and finally get the hell out. Anyway, my body wouldn’t actually be under the mul at all. It would be way back in the cave under the hills, ideally covered with a few hundred tons of pulverized karst.

  We should go in before we get smoke-cured, Hun Xoc said behind me.

  I signed. The musicians stepped it up and crescendoed. The crowd answered. I withdrew my divine fucking presence and we stumbled back into the sanctuary.

  At this point the only bloods in the sanctum were me, Hun Xoc, Alligator Root—who was acting as his hands—and Mask of Jaguar Night. Then there were my four bearers holding my mat and staff and private box, five attendants, and thirteen workmen huddled in clusters on heaped bags of gravel, holding unlit torches and bundles of flint axes. I signed for them to open the floor-door to the Nether Throat.

  You should really go with 1 Gila, I said to Hun Xoc.

  I wouldn’t enjoy it, he said,

  “Now that I’m just a lump of dough with eyes.”

  I next to you am sorry about that, I gestured.

  Just tell your new clan about all the ball games we won, and list the captives we took, he said.

  I said of course I would. Yeah, I’ll tell the gang that once there was a fleeting wisp of glory that was known as Camelot. And they’ll be like, so what?

  Still, I did at least get the Sacrifice Game skillz, I thought. And the drugs. That’s something I haven’t quite fucked up on. Yet.

  If it still works after all that time. Maybe when you take it out of Toyland the magic drains out—

  Squelch. Cancel. Can—

  But wait, even if everything works, how likely is it that your little rotten brain is going to work? Not bloody. Memember, Mebecca? They’ll screw it up, you’re just going to rot. I wasn’t even sure I’d made enough gel, the lodestones I’d managed to get seemed weak, maybe I didn’t have enough salt, maybe it was too wet down there, the sandbags might not work—

  FOCUS, I yelled to the projectionist behind my eyes. Don’t even think about it.

  The true flaming hell of it was, I thought, I didn’t even feel displaced or centerless or whatever here anymore. I felt at home. Even if I did get back to Planet Dismal I’d feel exiled there. I guess that’s part of the punishment, I thought, you only get things when you don’t want them anymore.

  I sent a single torchbearer down ahead of us and let them carry me down the steep inner stairs. They were still dirty from the last excavation. Everyone followed except six of the workmen, who were going to fill the staircase up after us. The ventilation tubes had been cleared, too, and the Jaguar-adders’ singing from the ritual outside came in through the pipes and feedbacked around in the stone. I’d say it was like a death march except its melody didn’t repeat or resolve itself, it was more kind of an ever-rising fugue of sad, extended tonal interrogations, questions you felt you must have asked a long time ago and now somebody was asking you, and you didn’t have any answers. We went down three hundred and sixty steps from the top of the mul into the Jaguar’s caverns, the bearers lowering me in time with the beat of suspended logs on the façades resonating through the stone, the entire mul acting as a drum:

  Throoomb,

  Throoomb,

  Throoomb . . .

  ( 78 )

  Throoomb,

  Throoomb . . .

  FOMP.

  The shock wave punched through the stone and then the sound came and went suddenly, a round echoless explosion like a report shell in a sound studio, and then migraineish pain through my head over an absolute silence I’d never experienced before. The pressure had popped my eardrums.

  So what, I thought, I won’t need them. Finally, after a lifetime of noise. It was a kind of peace you could get used to.

  I was already in the uterus-shaped sarcophagus, sitting upright like it was a bathtub. I must have looked kind of silly. There were only three other people in the room, Hun Xoc, Alligator Root, and my attendant. Mask of Jaguar Night and the rest of the workmen and attendants had been out in the collapse. Just as well I can’t hear them screaming, I thought, if that’s what they’re doing. That would have harshed me out. Hun Xoc was leaning his callused elbow-stumps on the rim of the casket. We smiled at each other. A drop of blood scrolled o
ut of his ear, wobbling on his cheek, threatening to detach and fall on me, but then it didn’t. I pointed to my ear and Hun Xoc nodded and made a casting-off gesture. I thumped my right hand on his left shoulder, the equivalent of a thumbs-up. He raised his left elbow-stump to his right shoulder, the pledge position. Still just a couple of old vets.

  The tomb’s inner chamber hadn’t been decorated, but the prepared white limestone walls were covered with charcoal cartoons for reliefs that would never get carved. The small square room was bare except for the four piles of lodestones, one in each corner, and in the center the mahogany scaffolding surrounding the ovary-shaped coffin with its arm-length-thick granite walls. The thick stone lid hung a half a rope-length above me, suspended on hemp ropes and counterweighted by two huge embroidered sandbags plopped on the ground like severed testicles. Then there were four big bulging liquid-baskets suspended from the ceiling, two on either side of the scaffolding, filled with the thin solution that formed the base of the aminoplastic gel. It was basically salts, my imitation camphor powder, and a few different anesthetics suspended in a mixture of urea formaldehyde, and methanol. Each basket held more than enough of the stuff to overflow the casket. The rest were just for fail-safe. And that was about it.

  Okay, Step Two, I thought. It’s easy. Don’t rush it.

  I signed a “now” to Alligator Root. He poked a bone dagger into the marked zero on the liquid-baskets. Horrible-smelling yellow stuff shot out, like the thing was a urinating mastodon. He got the attendant to hold the bamboo trough under the stream so that it flowed into the casket. The stuff felt colder than water, like rubbing alcohol, and at first it splashed up over my face. Alligator Root wiped me off and handed me the Little Cup, mint pulque mixed with about five percent of belladonna tea and a few other tranqs. I chugged it down. If I’d dosed it right it would have me nearly knocked out just before I drowned. No matter what anybody says, suffocation is not a fun way to go. He reached in and folded my pillow-sandbag so I could keep my head up out of the liquid.