4 Screaming took thirty beats to sign to his squad, and they all took off again without even asking for drinking water. God, I thought, these guys are tough as jackboots. Gluttons for punishment.
Well, good for our side. We could keep digging.
By eighty-score beats before dawn, or what would have been dawn under normal conditions, the top of the mesa looked exactly like it had when we’d gotten here. To me, anyway. To an experienced tracker, it-well, you can’t cover everything, I thought. Better to get the hell out of here even if it’s not perfect. Anyway, there was still wood ash falling. That would even it out a bit. I gave the signal for the crew to reassemble at the southeastern rim of the basin. Without being asked, thirty-eight of the men squatted in two rows of nineteen, facing northwest, toward their birthplaces. 2 Hand-another adopted son of 2 Jeweled Skull’s, who was also officially senior to me but who was increasingly acting as my third lieutenant-went down the rows, taking their offering letters. We’d burn them to Star Rattler at the next celestial date. The first one signed that he was ready and our nacomour untouchable executioner-squatted behind him and hammered, or almost just tapped, once, on the back of his head, driving the occiput into the brain stem. The sound was as soft as if he was hitting balsa wood, not bone.
The porters loaded the bodies onto the empty sleds and started to pull them down the mesa. They’d be defleshed and, presumably, brought all the way with us to-well, to wherever we were going, which was a bit of a vexed issue-and then stored in the Star Rattler’s ossuary. It wouldn’t do to have any of their cranky uays hanging around here, leading some warlock or fortune-hunting wraith or whatever back up here to the basins. On either side of the trail, every so often, you could just make out one of the outrunners lurking along, making sure that none of the much-reduced crew ran off. But it didn’t look like they would. The thing was, these days, you really could get good help. Or, to be less flip, these guys counted themselves among the lucky ones. Around here, the rodent-uayed-that is, ordinary people-didn’t do much better in the afterlife than they did here on the zeroth level. Most of their multiplicitous souls would just wander around and eventually starve. After all, nobody among the living would bother to feed them, or at least not for long. These guys had guaranteed, if not lavish, support in the next levels. They wouldn’t have to be slaves to one of the Nine, or even to the Thirteen. They could relax a bit, finally, and work their way toward what everyone aspired to: oblivion. And it would take them only twenty years or so. Only the feline-uayed stuck around for any length of time-not because immortality would be fun, since it wouldn’t, especially when people on the zero level started to forget to send you blood and tobacco-offerings-but because they had a responsibility to keep an eye on the other members of the clan, living, dead, and unborn.
And besides, I thought, Koh had insisted. Right? It couldn’t be helped. Except, no. Don’t try to shift the responsibility, Jed-head. You had the witnesses iced and that’s all there is to it. And, not even very indirectly, you’ve accounted for a lot of other poor bastards over the last few few tunob. And, frankly, it’s started not even to bother you very much. You’re just another realpolitiker. You evil fuck.
We humped back southwest down the long grade. The porters kept begging for the honor of carrying me, or at least pulling me on a sled, but Chacal’s body had been feeling like it was getting soft-he’d been a top athlete, after all, before all the excitement started-and I insisted on marching. I wore out another pair of rubberized sandals on the scurf. That’s five so far, I thought. 4 Screaming rematerialized and he and 2 Hand and I had a quick, silent confab. He said Lady Koh and her entourage had moved six-score rope-lengths up the line already, so we adjusted our course to intersect hers, branching off our previous track onto a new route that zigzagged down out of the high ground into charred scrub and then into damper air and what you could charitably call rolling meadows. Each of the recently abandoned milpas-that is, corn-and-squash fields-had a scarecrow of sorts in the center, usually a dog skull with a ragged cape on a tall stick, with strings of bird femurs and clamshells clicking and clopping in the occasional breeze. It was as though somebody’d mandated that everyone go out of their way to make things as creepy and depressing as possible. It looked like some of the corn had been harvested, too young, but most of the pinkie-sized ears were burnt and withered on the stalks, with a few popped kernels standing out like big whiteheads. Even this far south the drought had lasted fifty-six days so far-since the eruption of San Martin-and everything had burned as fast as Chinese dead money. It seemed like even the rocks burned. We’d seen villagers spreading the fires around their houses, torching their own granaries and huts with their wives and children screaming inside them.
It wasn’t logical, but the average Mesoamerican still seemed to think that the world needed some help ending itself, and there’d been a thousand orgies of self-immolation all the way from the Sonoran Desert to what would be Costa Rica. We’d seen whole families staked out alive on the ground for the insects and vampire bats, kids peeling strips of loose arm skin off exhausted but conscious oldsters and eating it like it was Fruit Roll-Ups, mothers killing their toddlers by forcing pink-hot pebbles down their throats, a thousand things you wish you could unsee. And by now, except for the animals on the run, there was basically nothing left. Fuck Severed Right Hand, I thought. He won’t be able to feed his troops around here. Ten more days and he’ll lose interest. Why was he so determined? It can’t be because of the tsam lic. According to Koh’s informers he had his own sun-adders and they were rebuilding the pharmacopeia in Choula.
There’s got to be something else going on that I don’t know about. Maybe I should confront Koh about it? Except, in general around here you didn’t get very far with direct questions. Just watch her, I thought. Watch and deduce. Then when she gets the people to wherever they’re going-hmm. Well, I needed to get back to Ix for my last act. That is, the entombment. But the refugees-well, even if the Maya lowland zones hadn’t been agriculturally exhausted yet, the way they would be in two hundred years, there still wouldn’t be enough unclaimed farmland in Ix’s orbit. If they could even learn how to do that kind of bog-reclamation planting, which I doubted they would. People don’t learn. Lately, Lady Koh had been saying that the Rattler had shown her the site of a new city, in the coastal flats on the farthest marches of the Harpy Clan’s red territory-that is, somewhere on the Quintana Roo coast. The current deal was that 2 Jeweled Skull would provide an escort for safe conduct to the site and give her lineage the area in perpetuity. But it sounded vague to me. And most of these people wouldn’t get nearly that far anyway. We had food for another forty days or so, but once we were into the dry season, it was… hell. It was depressing.
Don’t think about it. Anyway, you did the main thing, right? Maybe the Lodestone Cross bit was going to be enough. Maybe I’d already just become the biggest hero since Hercules. Since Jesus, for that matter. Maybe I was done here. Maybe I can just relax. Except not. Still ought to go through with the backup plan. Get back to Ix. Get the ol’ memories back to Marena. Do the full meal deal.
The light faded to a more delicate shade of scab. 4 Screaming’s second-in-command came up and signed that they’d sniffed a large crowd of strangers to the northeast. They couldn’t tell yet if they were the Teotihuacanian soldiers, but we picked up speed. They asked to carry me again and I said no. Oddly, despite everything, I felt pretty good.
At the end of this Grandfather Heat’s youth-about ten A.M. -the breeze shifted up and we smelled our caravan. It was basically that same aroma as when a really hard-core homeless person shuffles onto the subway and everybody risks a ticket to cross between the moving cars rather than stay even fifteen beats in the presence of the indescribable hell stench. But what was odd about it now was that to me, coming in from the cold as it were, it smelled reassuring, or even pleasant, like home. I guess it really is all context. Hun Xoc touched my arm and pointed ahead at ten o’clock. At first I couldn’t see
anything and then I made out a human figure against the brown sky, levitating two rope-lengths over the scrub. As we got closer I could see it was a lookout, or as I’ve said, a sniff-out, one of our shortest, scrawniest, and sharpest-eyed bloods, wobbling in a sort of a crow’s-nest on the top of a tower woven of weeping bamboo. It looked so flimsy you wouldn’t think it could support a squirrel. He signed down to us that things were clear. Another came into view behind him, and then another and another, so that as we got close to our line of march there was a whole troop of them, like a thin reflection of the dust-wreathed caravan below. You could squint and just imagine that it was a camel train on the Silk Road, headed toward Samarkand. Nights in the Garden of Allah. Song of the Sheikh. Midnight at the Oasis. Ah, zee Englishwoman is a thoroughbred which no man has yet dared to ride. Bring her to my tents, Hasan. Have zee serving girls anoint her with essences of oud and Ubar and drape her in the finest Murshidabadian silks and suchlike. I will school her in the ways of the Rif. Blue heaven, and you, and I, and sand, kissing the moonlit sky… the desert breeze, whisp’ring a lullaby…
I was used to it by now, but I suppose to the twenty-first-century eye one of the odder things about this place-I mean Mesoamerica, or for that matter the entire New World-was that everything was single file. Even if you had a hundred thousand people on the move, there were never even two of them abreast. The thin human snake just slid on forever, curving over both horizons. 2 Hand-Hun Xoc’s younger brother and, unofficially, something like my second mate-came out with a veintena of men to meet us and said that the number of Koh’s followers had gone up by a fifth-again-just while we were away, so despite our adjustments we’d still come in about four thousand marchers behind the great woman and her entourage. 2 Hand called her “the Elderess,” which made me wonder whether he was starting to believe some of her hype. Bad sign. We cut through the line and jogged ahead on its southern side, with what they called the Iguana River, a sad yellow trickle at the low point of the long Nochixtlan Valley, on our right hand. It was light enough to see faces now, although today’s sun wouldn’t show itself. I passed-or to be socially correct I should say “my bearer, my scarefly, my weapons valet, my faithful fellator Armadillo Shit,” and I passed-a delicate-looking fourteen-year-oldish girl who was pulling her family’s big ratty old travois single-handedly, or I guess I should say single-headedly, since it was drawn by a tumpline that cut deep into her forehead. There was a mole a half inch below the right of her hornet-stung lips, just like the one on, hmm, some actress, who was it-oh, yeah, Claudine Auger, the girl who played Domino in Thunderball. Her mother and sisters were walking in front of her, and her father, a brother, and four other male relatives sat in the sled, taking it easy. Patriarchal fucks, I thought, although I should mention that the four male relatives were deceased, just masked mummy bundles sitting as stiffly upright as Quaker ministers, so they were probably pretty light. But then there were also three big hearthstones on the sled, and one of those big wooden Teotihuacanian host statues, the kind that have all the little statues inside them, and a bunch of other bundles that I guessed were just more garbage, and I was on the verge of going up and shaking the paterfamilias and screaming, “You fuck, first, you get out and pull the sled, and second, you toss those dead guys and the other crap right now and fill up every waterskin you’ve got, and beg, borrow, or steal as much rock salt as you can possibly drag, and then maybe you all have a chance of lasting another twenty days, you FUCKHEAD,” but of course you’d have to tell everybody the same thing and the important thing was to keep a low profile and get yourself and the tsam lic critters back to Ix, and anyway you couldn’t argue with these people. Or any people. Then there were three loners, each dragging a fresh or-let’s say “still unprepared”-corpse. There just weren’t enough defleshers to go around, even though they were working day and night, stuffed with extra rations and sitting in unaccustomed luxury on special sleds as they picked over the bodies with their inch-long fingernails. And they were hurrying. It was lousy mojo-obviously-if the dogs got any of you, but even so a big scurfy pack of them seemed to be making its whole living following the catafalques. When the bones finally dried out, an engraver would carve their owners new names-that is, their postholocaust, Koh-given names-into the ulnas and tibias. Although you’d think there wouldn’t be time for such niceties. But even with fire, starvation, bandits, disease, and troops of more novel apocalyptic horsemen, everybody found the leisure to give themselves new names, brands, tattoos, tooth decor, and whatever else. Craziness.
The next big group we passed was a clanlet of well-to-do Swallowtail-affiliated traders, about fifteen blood family members and two veintenas of thralls hauling them on eight extralong sleds. On the last sled, three eight-year-old girls, who looked like triplets, fanned the patriarch with huge chocho palm leaves that had recently been blanched and then dyed blue-green. Which, I guess, is getting into more detail than necessary, but I wanted to mention it while I’m thinking of since it became an issue later: all of Koh’s followers who could afford it wore or carried something in her signature turquoise-blue shade-there were vats of the indigofera dye on special sleds-so that from a distance the procession looked like it had been sprinkled with periwinkle blossoms. Something old, something new, I thought. Something borrowed, something askew. And something too nauseating even to name. Still, they all thought they were part of a larger being. And despite everything, there was an element of fun to it, or if not quite fun at least adventure. For most of them this was the first time they’d been away from their home ground. For that matter, some of the women probably hadn’t ever been two rope-lengths outside their hamlets. This was the primary event in their lives, and in their family’s lives, all the way back to their first ancestor at the first birth of this sun on 4 Lord, 8 Seed Maize, 0.0.0.0.0., that is, August 11, 3113 BC, and ahead to their last descendant, who, of course, would die on the last 4 Ahau of the last b’aktun, in AD 2012.
There were about three hundred big palanquins in the high-rent district of the line. They varied in size and opulence but they all had arrays of cushions and big round wicker roofs covered with embroidered cloth, so that they looked incogruously like psychedelicized Conestoga wagons. Lady Koh held court on the largest of the palanquins. It was only about eight arms wide-still wider than any of the others-but about forty long. Right now there were sixteen people sitting on it and forty carrying it. There was a breeze, but another gang of thralls carried a portable windbreak, and the feathers on the mat barely stirred. A squad of guards ran alongside on each hand. There was a strong smell of monarda-a kind of horsemint that upscale valets crushed and strewed around their masters-which didn’t much cover up the hellish odors, and under that a hint of what people said was the breath of Koh’s most secret uay, and what a modern person would call her signature scent. When I’d first smelled it I’d described it to myself as the opposite of the smell of cinnamon, and now, after what seemed like years, I still didn’t have a better description. But I did know, now, that its main component was enfleuraged from what I was pretty sure was a species of Brassia, the genus of orchids that mimics spiders, and that as far as anyone seemed to know, it was unique to her and her close followers.
Koh’s guards all knew Hun Xoc, but it still took a while to pass through their circles. I was already doing rage-abatement breathing by the time my bearer finally set me down on the edge of the platform. It rocked just a bit as it moved along, pleasantly boatlike. Koh sat in the turquoise center of a feather-cloth Sacrifice Game board two arm-lengths square. Her eyes were closed and she was mumbling to one of her uays in some animal language. There were eight members of the popol na — the mat house, that is, the council, up here, and they greeted me and went back to talking among themselves. They were all in expensive gear, but it was still a pretty motley crew. Crue. Whatever. The youngest of them, 14 Wounded, was eight tuns, that is, a little less than eight solar years, older than I was. He’d been the trade representative in Teotihuacan for my adoptive
clan, the Harpies, who were the richest family in Ix besides the ruling clan, the Ocelots. Or they might now be even richer, because of the Ocelots’ gigantic debts, except it was harder to put a value on things here than it was back in the twenty-first. Anyway-oh, except there was one who was younger, Koh’s Steward of Invisible Things. His title meant he was something like a legal counsellor. His name was Coati, that is, kind of a raccoon. I’d barely met him back in Teotihuacan, but now he was with her every minute.
The group had started as a temporary meeting of the major greathouse ahaus, but now it had hardened into a government. Well, whatevs. The other seven people on the platform were attendants, fanning us and whisking away the screwflies. None of them looked at Koh. Ordinary folks who saw her face might get scorched by her captive lightning.
Hun Xoc manuevered next to me and squatted. I kneed to the edge of the Game cloth. It was strewn with jade and quartzite pebbles, and after a minute I could see that she was using it as a battle map. A long line of turquoise pebbles, stretching diagonally from the center of the white quadrant to the upper corner of the black one, represented our caravan. The clusters of pink quartz that approached it on its north side were Severed Right Hand’s army, and it looked to me like they were color-coded like in an old Kriegspiel layout, darkening as they became increasingly hypothetical. But beyond that I couldn’t read what she was up to. There was at least an equal number of other stones, mainly black and yellow, distributed in other zones of the board, and aside from the fact that they had more to do with time than space I couldn’t tell what they represented. For all I knew, some of them were just there to confuse the other members of the council.
Well, if so, it was working. They were all stone-cold killers and word-is-law patriarchs, and now they were sitting patiently, waiting, speaking in hushed mutters, and casting apprehensive looks at her as we jogged along. Either they all believed she was getting her orders from a higher authority, or they figured enough of the others believed that none of them wanted to question her.
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