“Maybe I should be much more worried,” I said.
“Severed Right Hand is quite energetic,” Maximon said. “And he’s just adopted another twenty-eight thousand bloods.”
I clicked three times, respectfully, meaning, “Please go on.”
Maximon said that Severed Right Hand was now commanding at least four thousand veintenas, that is, platoons of twenty. About fourteen thousand of those were full bloods from the Puma clans. They were experts with the javelin launcher, the Teotihuacanian signature weapon, and they’d be the hardest to fend off if there was a direct battle. He’d set up his mobile headquarters at Tehuacan-which, despite the similar name, was not the same as, or even a satellite town of, Teotihuacan. It was two jornadas due whitewards, north, of us. He’d brought along what was left of the city’s council of four hundred, which he now dominated. And he’d sworn to capture all the Rattler’s Children and give their heads and skins to the Green Hag, a sort of fresh-water elemental who’d been the elder patroness of Teotihuacan.
Severed Right Hand was claiming that Koh-or, as she was now styling herself, the Great-Elderess of All Star Rattler’s Children-hadn’t just foretold the city’s destruction, but had caused it. The claim had the advantage of being basically the truth, although this hadn’t seemed to have hurt Koh’s standing with her own followers. Even our cleverer clan leaders, the ones who’d gotten the gossip about her machinations, seemed more loyal to her than ever. So even though the official motive for the now-unavoidable civil war was, as always, revenge, it was revenge in the Maya sense of capturing Koh’s uays.
More specifically, Teotihuacan had been like the Lourdes, Jerusalem, Rome, and Mecca of Mesoamerica, and anyone who could have destroyed it was vastly powerful. If Severed Right Hand captured Koh and, through torture, annexed her uays-her most active souls-her powers of prophecy and domination would accrue to him. Her former followers would be constrained to obey him, since his uays would hold hers within his skin. He would become both the avenger of the destruction of Teotihucan and its prime beneficiary.
But even with all that, the main reason they were after us, like the real reason for almost anything, was economic. The displaced Puma clans had lost most of their wealth and they needed negotiable items to trade for new homesteads. And every family in our volkerwanderung had brought as much of their high-value gear as they could drag, jewelry, celts, top-grade blades and obsidian cores, textiles, feathers, furs, raw jade, gold dust, and even some chips and pebbles of unworked turquoise-which we called xiuh, a proto-Nahuatl word, since there was no word for it in Mayan, and which was the latest almost-unaffordable sensation from the farthest edge of the world’s bleached northeast. The greathouse lineages had also brought thousands of rubber-sealed baskets swelling with about a hundred varieties of spices and drugs, and thousands of examples of the sort of jade objects that we twenty-first-centuryites would call “art.” And, especially, they’d brought slaves. Although they weren’t really like old-world slaves. Maybe it’d be closer to the Cholan sense to call them “thralls.” For one thing, there wasn’t any clear line between slaves and nonslaves, since even rich clans were like slaves in respect to their local ruling lineage, and then that lineage was like slaves to the ahau, and then, the ahau was a slave to his most deified ancestor. And the slaves could be from any ethnic group. Still, they could be ordered around, and sold, and eaten. Just as, theoretically at least, anybody could be, all the way up to the ahau. And he could get eaten by the smokers.
Anyway, the point is that we-the long train of Koh’s followers-were, despite our bedraggled look, a seductive target. And we wouldn’t be able to put up much of a fight. Most of the support for Koh’s Star Rattler Society had come from Teotihuacan’s white moiety, the peace clans, who were related to the red war moiety through mandatory exogamy, but usually didn’t train their own sons as warriors. Our caravan had about eight thousand bloods with war experience who’d come from other Rattler-pledged clans, but they weren’t well organized like the Teotihuacanian infantry, or, yet, very well coordinated with each other. To say the least. And we had a few thousand Maya bloods from the expatriate Ixob Ocelot lineage and some allied Maya trading clans from Tik’al and Kaminaljuyu, but they already weren’t getting along with the Teotihuacanians. Finally, at the bottom of the social pyramid, we were dragging along about eighteen thousand families of thralls. About twelve thousand of these were warrior-aged males, nonbloods who we could send in to fight, but who were armed only with pikes and weren’t effective in battle except as a buffer. And their kinsfolk-well, they fetched and carried, and their young folks took care of the greathouse males’ sexual needs, and they were meat on the hoof, as it were-but really, most of the time they felt like a liability.
The upshot was that in a direct fight we’d be in trouble. We’d agreed-we meaning Lady Koh, her provisional council of clan patriarchs, and I-had all agreed that our best strategy would be to just keep moving as fast as possible and draw Severed Right Hand away from his logistical support base in the Valley of Mexico.
“Severed Right Hand seems to be holding his own against your Lady Koh,” Maximon said.
“You mean in the Sacrifice Game?” I asked. She’d told me that she played against him every night-long distance, of course, and by the equivalent of telepathy. And then in the mornings she’d issue orders accordingly.
“Yes,” Maximon indicated, somehow.
“You’re right.” He seemed to be fading-I mean, visually-and my voice started hurrying. “In fact it seems like sometimes he knows where we’re heading before we decide to go there.”
“Of course, it’s really his advisers playing.”
“Oh?” I asked. “Who are they?”
He said they were five nine-stone players who’d worked for years for the capital’s twin synods, and who were so permanently in camera that nobody, not even the synodsmen themselves, knew their names. Supposedly they didn’t have tongues, and they spoke only in a house sign language, and they had white skin, like vestal virgins, and two of them were over a hundred and twenty years old.
“Well, that’s good to know,” I said. It sounded like it was just hocus-pocus.
“And they also say he’s a great hun sujri, ” he said. Now he’s really got to be jiving me, I thought. The word literally meant “skin slougher,” or, to save syllables, let’s say “molter,” that is, a skin changer or a metamorphoser, someone whose animal uay was so unusually strong that it could transform his physical body. It especially applied to people with big-cat uays, Jaguars and Pumas. They were known for metamorphosing into cats, of course, but they also supposedly sometimes appeared as boys, as capturing-age bloods, or as old men, depending on the occasion. And the most powerful of them were always adding to their stock of new uays, human and animal.
“Which of his uays would you over me guess that he’d favor?” I asked, trying for a nonconfrontive reply. That is, what would he likely metamorphose into?
“I’d keep an eye out for snatch-bats,” Maximon said. He meant the big camazotz vampire bats, Desmodus draculae, which had a longer wingspan than any of their related species that would survive into later centuries. They were fearsome-looking suckers.
“You wouldn’t happen to know whether Severed Right Hand is planning to attack us right now, would you?” I asked.
“He has his own problems,” Maximon said, or his glyphs said. “He’ll wait to cut you off at the Rio Capalapa.” His outlines seemed less distinct than ever.
Wow, I thought. How did he know that? Or, what I mean is, how did I know that? I mean, you only get out of these things what you already have in there somewhere.
Hmm. We were still four solid jornadas from the Capalapa. Send a runner back to Lady Koh? Except I don’t have any evidence. We could reroute the march west, and then go south along the Mixteco instead. But that’s a pretty big deal. Anyway, he could be wrong. That is, I could be wrong. Severed Right Hand could attack us tomorrow. Better wait and get back to her and then
send out some recons and try to confirm.
“Thanks,” I said.
“You’ll be all right if you hurry.” He said something else, but I couldn’t read the last four glyphs. Damn. Ashes. I rubbed my eyes but the glyphs, and Maximon, looked blurrier than before.
“Thanks.”
“ Dominos Nabisco,” he said, orally. Did I hear that right? I wondered. “And also with you,” I said. I started to back away from him Maya-underling style, but after only ten steps all I could see was the tip of his cigar floating in the infrareddening haze.
(17)
“We’re turning whiteward,” I signed to Hun Xoc, shielding my hands with the drape of my manto so the men wouldn’t see that I was actually the one in charge. He didn’t ask why, he just gave the order, signing over his turbaned head so that everyone could see. We marched to the crossroads and turned onto the left path.
The redirect took up about fifteen hundred beats-around twelve minutes-because we had to signal the front-runners, and then they signaled that they were coming back to show us what they insisted was a path in the right direction, although when we got to it I couldn’t see it. We marched-well, let’s say “slogged”-toward the nearest mesa of the low northern sierra. If I remembered right we were about eight thousand feet above sea level now, so up there it would be nearly nine thousand.
This had better be the right decision, I thought. What if I’m really losing it? Maybe the fact that the Maximon thing had been so realistic was something I ought to worry about. Maybe I’d gotten a whiff of psychoactives back when we were raiding the Puma’s pharmacopoeia, and they’d taken until now to kick in. Or maybe it was the neoplasm. I mean, the brain tumors that would have been seeded by the downloading. They had to be getting big enough now to start causing problems. I’d picked up roughly two sieverts of gamma radiation that had zwapped an image of my memories into Chacal’s brain fifty-one days ago. The Consciousness Transfer Protocol and the downloading routine and everything were all amazing technology, but the downsides were that there was damage to the host brain, the host spinal cord, and a few other vital areas. I figured the body I was in was good for another seven months or so, tops. Sometime around the thirteenth k’in of this uinal-in the Gregorian calendar, say, before January of 665-I’d be too unhealthy to function at all normally. Well before that time, I’d need to be signed, sealed, and entombed. And we’d just have to see whether I’d get delivered.
Well, don’t stress on it. Except should I really be taking Maximon’s advice? I mean, it was really my own advice, but if I was getting screwy…
Well, even so, if I’d learned one thing from these Olde Mayaland folks, it was that-well, actually, I’d learned a few things, but one of them was-it was that your brain isn’t one thing. The way they put it, you had sort of a stable of different souls. Some were human, some were animals, and some, like your ik’ar, your “wind,” or let’s say your breath, were practically mineral. And if you were clever, you let them talk to each other, and you made sure they all listened.
The crew and I struggled up the slope of crumbled sandstone. Finally we gave up on dignity and climbed on all fours, with our feet turned outward for extra grip. Still, I slid more than once, ripping cuts in my forearms. I kept looking around and seeing, with a reliable little chill, how small our troop looked against the cyclopean landscape. Like I said, I’d only brought twenty-two porters, four Harpy Clan bloods counting my adopting brother Hun Xoc, Six Ixian Rattler bloods, 7 Iguana-the Harpy sacrificer-and our head outrunner, 4 Screaming, with his own crew of nine, and a few other miscellaneous functionaries. It wasn’t enough to fight off even a single veintena of actual soldiers. If they found us.
The slope leveled out into a wide oval tableland that floated over the ash shroud around us, so that it felt like we were in a crater on some C-class asteroid. We posted lookouts at the rim and I marked three hundred and fifty paces to the nearer center of the oval and signed to Hun Xoc. He relayed the command to the porters and they set down their packs, put together their wooden shovels, and started digging. Hun Xoc and his two porters and I got out a forty-arm’s-length right-triangle surveyor’s cord and marked out the four smaller holes where we’d drop in the lodestones. In the twenty-first century, they’d be brazenly visible from any of Warren Communication’s microwave-sounder satellites. Before that was done, the crew hit rock, four arm-lengths down, but they changed their wood shovels for picks and kept at it. Hun Xoc, the other bloods, 7 Iguana, and I all sat on the piles of rubberized bags and watched. Greathouse bloods didn’t do dirt.
We waited. Maximon had been right about the wind. Lord Papagayo had been walking strong on the plain, but up here when you dropped dust out of your hand it fell straight down. Weird.
We’d brought six nearly identical terra-cotta round ovens, each about twenty finger-widths across. Each one was wrapped in rubberized deerskin so that it looked like a half-deflated yellow beach ball. Inside each of the vessels were two more nested terra-cotta bowls with a layer of wax between them. So each round oven had only about forty cubic inches of interior space. Still, one of these interior spaces held four duplicate screenfold books with my notes on the Game, copied, two tiny jadeite bottles of the refined tsam lic compounds, toads and other critters mummified six different ways, and two folded miniature feather-cloth Game boards, all packed in expensive Cholulan rock salt. I hoped it would give Marena and company enough information to stave off Armageddon. Still, I couldn’t just slack off. Even if they got the package-well, I was pretty sure they’d get it, but let’s say even after they got it-there’d be a chance that without the sort of specialized knowledge and skills I was picking up from Koh, they wouldn’t be able to use the Game effectively enough to stop all potential doomsters. If we wanted to be closer to certain, I’d have to get my working brain back, with all its precious cargo. Or most of it.
The other five round ovens held various counterfeit versions of the stuff, convincing enough, I hoped, to satisfy any treasure hunters who might get the gossip.
After four hundred times four hundred beats I strolled over and looked in. They’d gotten down another two arm-lengths. Good enough. We started them on the second hole, one rope-length-about twenty-one feet-west of this one. Again, we sat and watched. Armadillo Shit picked fleas out of my hair. The flint pick heads struck showerlets of sparks on the bedrock. Hun Xoc told them to speed it up.
He’s right, I thought. They’re working hard, but they don’t seem eager to finish.
They know.
Well, it can’t be helped.
After another hundred-score beats they’d finished fifteen holes. Enough to fill the Albert Hall, I thought. All right already. I signed to 7 Iguana to get ready, and he opened his pack and took out a short muffled mace, like a ball-peen hammer with its head wrapped in rubber tape.
(18)
We buried the rest of them, raked over the scars, and spread gravel and cinders over them as realistically as we could in the half-light. I didn’t even tell Hun Xoc which of the vessels was the important one, although he might have been able to guess from the pattern of the other nine holes. Each of these-the smaller holes-received a heavy rubberized deer-hide sack the size of a bowling-ball bag. Five of the bags were full of very ordinary rocks in a big wad of wax. The other four, the ones forming a perfect two-rope-length cross with the primary vessel at the center, were full of chunks of meteoric magnetite, which I’d bought thirty-one days ago at the fetish market in Teotihuacan, at a cost equal to about fifty good adolescent male slaves. The magnetite was also, of course, in a big wad of wax. I figured it was probably overkill, but why cut corners on your signature project? As the men filled in the holes I rotated them around a bit, hoping they’d get confused. Not that it would matter unless we got stopped unexpectedly Bdrdrdrdroododoodoot. We all froze.
A pygmy-owl hoot. Also just detectably artificial. It was the outrunners. Seventy beats later a silhouette materialized on the north ridge and held his hands over his head, pal
ms down, signing “No danger, but wait.” A hundred and thirty beats later-a Maya beat was a little shorter than a second, so say about two minutes-4 Screaming, our chief outrunner, was standing next to us. His rubber-soled-sandaled feet hadn’t made even a slight crunch on the cinders and packed gravel. His name was 4 Screaming, but despite his name, he was silent and permanently furtive, and like all the outrunners-actually they were called k’antatalob, “sniffers,” because around here you usually smelled your enemies before you could see them-he was long-legged and wiry, with pocked skin smeared with deer feces.
“No Pumas,” he signed, “but there are tracks half a day north, and in Coixtlahuaca we counted about twice four hundred skinless bodies.” The Pumas-who’d been the leading war lineage of Teotihuacan, and whose remnants were following Severed Right Hand-routinely flayed their kills, animal and human. He started to go through the list of the towns and paths and milpas where they’d seen the biggest concentrations of corpses, but after a minute I just looked at Hun Xoc-who was senior to me and nominally the ranking captain but who was easygoing enough to be basically acting as my second-in-command-and flicked my eyes northeast. Hun Xoc signed for 4 Screaming to take his squad that way as far as possible for two-ninths of a night-about four hours-and then report back again.
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