The Sacrifice Game jd-2

by Brian D'Amato

  Embarrassingly, I still hadn’t learned that much about the Star-Rattler’s children, who were a secretive lot, and even though I was considered adopted into it I hadn’t seen any of its rituals. When they’d appeared on their mul during the vigil it was as spectators of the Jaguar-Scorpions’ procedure, not as participants. But the religion, if you can call it that, really was an improvement on the old ancestor cults. It had a certain glorification of poverty and austerity, and not in the same way as the flesh-piercing tortures of the old ruling class. Although there was still plenty of that. It was more meditative and Theravada-ish, the kind of thing that would become the New Age bullshit I generally love to hate, but as I saw more of it I realized it was just another kind of human technology that drew on people’s fatalism in a different way, maybe even in a needed way. In the old clan hierarchies, someone from a dependent family would kill himself if his greatfathermother said to, because otherwise he and his children would be doomed to nearly everlasting agony. But people under the sign of the Rattler seemed more stoic, happier with the austerities of life and death, I guess because at least they got a smidgeon of respect and a better deal in the afterlives-not pie in the sky yet, but a promise of, at least, some goddamn rest.

  Very few of the new lower-lineage converts ever saw Koh personally, but some of their leaders did, and from what I could tell they were impressed. They’d talk about how the Rattler’s Children foresaw things that other people couldn’t, how the great serpent’s venom could wash the cataracts out of their eyes. In order to keep the blood of their lineages alive through coming generations, each of the new apostles had a special charge to follow Lady Koh into the realms of the next suns. Her intimates had become a fanatically loyal core, and no matter how many more she wanted to attract, she followed Lenin’s dictum in advance, that a handful of committed souls is better than an army of unmotivated mercenaries.

  And Koh naturally took to statecraft. She sent emissaries to all the main Orb Weaver and Caracara families, to some nonaffiliated clans, and even a few to disaffected cat families. Apparently her literacy had been a big deal in Teotihuacan, and one of her businesses had been having her scribes keep records and accounts for the less literate Teotihuacanob ruling families. She’d even been part of a project that was writing down Teotihuacanob history-which had been kept in picture and textile writing with oral supplementation and whatever-in the Teotihuacanob language written with a system of Chol characters, and she’d hung on to some of the manuscripts. Other rulers had already sent messengers asking for copies, and she had a whole three monkey clans-that is, calligraphers, who, impressively, were able to write with a tiny brush while they were swinging in sedan baskets-and she kept them all busy every day. In fact, since the histories had been rewritten to make Koh look good, I suppose you could even say that she was grinding out paper propaganda.

  And maybe it would have an effect, I thought. Maybe things were less desperate than they felt. Maybe enough of the lowland clans would support us that we-except, wait a second, who were we? If “we” meant the leaders of the Rattler’s Children, maybe “we”’d do all right. But if “we” meant the Ball Brethren and the other traveling contingents of the Harpy clan-well, then “we” were going from being Koh’s saviors to being her guests. And around here it was a short step from “guest” to “hostage.” But that would change when we got to Ix, right? Maybe. Anyway, when we did get back, it wouldn’t hurt for me to have some pull with the Muhammadess of Mesoamerica. If we got back. If the Ixian Ocelots didn’t pick us off first. If Koh hadn’t gotten too uppity by then. If the Lord be willing and the cricks don’t rise. If, if, ifffff.

  At the birth of the next sun there were still some fights going on ahead and behind the safeish central area reserved for us VIPs and the captive Scorpion-adders, who were trussed up in padded sleds. At least every twenty-score beats or so some gang from some third-rate cat family would rush one of the straggling groups in our train, like a cougar picking the sickest-looking bison out of the herd, and a few of our bloods would have to run forward or back to help drive them off. But we headed south on the main Caracara road, through the later Texcoco along the east edge of the great lake, passing thousands of other refugees, south and up into the highlands, toward what would later be Ciudad Oaxaca and was now called the Citadel of the Valley of Clouds and Steam.

  (20)

  What? Whoa. Off balance. And awake. I was awake.

  My bearers were having trouble keeping me level. Rock me gently, for Chrissake, I thought.

  I uncovered my eyes and squinted up at the rusty sky. There weren’t any stars or obvious change but somehow you could tell it was near dawn. I sat up. Someone was coming up alongside us. A runner.

  “You over me, my elder brother 10 Red Skink Lizard?” my flanking guard asked, using my numbered code name. “Five Score and Two is coming, my elder brother.”

  I rolled onto my side, steadying myself on the edge of the wicker pallet, and the guard nearly looked me in the eye and looked down. He wasn’t supposed to stare at VIPs. It was another beige dawn already and the wind was picking up. We were in a wide valley between five-rope-lengths-high mesas, bristling with tall hardwoods all recently killed by the changing water table. When a breeze came through, yellow leaves dropped off their branches as fast as those cards flying up when you’ve solved a hand of Freecell Solitaire.

  Hun Xoc’s palanquin came back alongside the file and settled next to me, his bearers expertly turning in place and reversing direction so that he was running alongside. He looked princely reclining under his quilt. Fiddle-dee-dee, I thought. Wonder what the poor people are doing today.

  “The whistlers have come back with word from our sun-eyed venerand, the quick of speech, our greatfather 2 Jeweled Skull,” he said in the Harpy House code-language. The “whistlers” were a Kaminaljyob mountain tribe with a tonal language that could be whistled or even played on flutes, and we used them as code talkers. They’d said that 18 Jog, 2JS’s nephew, was going to meet us in one of the last towns before the Third-Sunfolks’ Boneyard, as they called the Tehuantepecan salt flats. I asked how many suns away the flats were and he said three or four. 10 Red Skink Lizard will be painted and ready, I said. I didn’t even ask whether it was possible that the message was a fake from the Pumas or their relatives in Ix, the Ocelots. Communications was one thing the Harpy House did have their act together on. Before we’d left, Hun Xoc had memorized thousands of columns of word substitutions, and he and 2JS used each pair only once, so that a given word never meant the same thing again, kind of like a one-time pad. Every important message from us to 2JS and from 2JS to us was carried by at least four teams of covert runners, each on a different route, and one or two had probably been intercepted and interrogated. But no one could make anything out of a string of nonsense words, not even an NSA mainframe and certainly not the Ocelots, no matter how psychic they were.

  Since that was the end of the formal conference Hun Xoc asked how I was and I said fine. Maybe you and I can kick a ball around sometime today, I said. He said that sounded fun. He had to go back and pass the news to 14 Wounded, who was leading the rear guard. He reversed his porters again and disappeared.

  Well, this is still tapirshit, I thought. If any of these guys had their act even remotely together they’d get together and swear out a treaty and go back to peacefully exploiting their thralls. In fact, Koh and I had even discussed trying to reach some understanding with the feline clans-the Ixan Ocelots and Severed Right Hand’s Pumas and the Caracolian Jaguars and all the rest of them. Realitywise, there wasn’t any reason why they couldn’t.

  Except that they just wouldn’t. All over Mesoamerica, the avian and feline lineages had always been at daggers. And they always would be. And the other clans-the Rattler’s pledges and the other families with totems that weren’t birds or cats-would always be making an alliance with one side and then with the other. These people were like any other mafias, they thrived on vendettas. It was part of their soup.
They counted on fresh booty to keep them solvent. It was like Israel and the Muslim states, even their gods hated each other, despite their being the same.

  And now, after the fall of Teotihuacan, both sides had absolutely nailed their colors to the masts. And as far as the independent parties went-I mean the Rattler’s pledges-well, even though both the feline and avian sides saw the Star Rattler cult as a threat to their hegemony, the Rattlers had been in bed with the Harpies for more than a b’aktun, and now there was just too much bad blood for us to even approach the felines. Koh had to support the Harpies right up through the moment the Harpies-gods willing-took control of Ix. And even then the Harpies wouldn’t kick the Ocelots out. Instead they’d blood themselves to the clan and become Ocelots themselves. The whole thing was cray-cray.

  Still, if I wanted to get back to 2012, I’d have to go along with it. It was going to be up to me to build a whole tomb for myself, and set up the sarcophagus and mix up the jelly and lay out another set of lodestones and a hundred other things, and there wouldn’t be any way to do that on Harpy territory while the Harpies were under constant attack. Even if the Chocula team found my tomb in one of the Harpy catacombs instead of in the main Ocelot one where we’d planned to put it. Which I couldn’t count on. No, no, no. We simply had to take over the whole place. Even if it didn’t feel possible.

  For that matter, right now I didn’t see how I could get everything together before my brain gave out. Hell, hell, hell and corruption. In fact, it didn’t even feel like we’d make it to Ix. All these people around gave you an illusory sense of security, but Severed Right Hand’s forces were just too big and too well trained and on three sides they were all the fuck around us. If we dug in someplace nearer than Ix-anywhere other than a real city-even with stockade fences and an endless water supply and a stock of stored corn, we wouldn’t last a month. And then Ix would be just another hostile city, and my chances of getting in there and pulling off an entombment on the sly would be, I don’t know, roughly the same odds as Mel Gibson’s winning the Nobel Peace Prize. If anything, I should try to make sure we stick to the Ix plan. Basically, get back to Ix, use my Unlimited Personal Power to help 2 Jeweled Skull take the place over or at least reach a favorable truce with the Ocelots, get my tomb built, mix up the necessary compounds, seal myself in, and hope for the best. Getta condo made-a stone-a. No problem. Get in, get down, and get out.

  And the first thing to do was hook up Lady Koh with 2 Jeweled Skull. She’d be the next big thing, so it’d be doing him a favor. Scratch his back, et cetera. Even if he was in trouble with the Ocelots, the Harpy Clan was still probably the richest family in Ix, and he was still the head of it. Right? In fact, maybe we should just let everyone know we were going to Ix. As of now, only the leaders knew about it at all. Our given-out destination was Kaminaljuyu, which is, or used to be, where they put Guat City later on. Otherwise all we’d said was that we were going to go through what was later called Oaxaca, and which was now a heavily populated collection of little city-states that had been part of the Empire. On the other hand, if we told anyone, the cats could head us off. Or 9 Fanged Hummingbird could get ready for us, or something, maybe better not…

  I lay back and even started to doze off, but then heard something shiveringly familiar:

  “1 Porcupine Ass caught two of the three man-beetles.”

  I got a shiver for no reason and then it took me a beat to realize it was only a couple of amateur beat-keepers somewhere ahead, chanting verses for drinking-water rations, timing how long each blood could keep his mouth under the waterskin. And they were using the same currently popular song that the Ball Brethren, and their guest bloods from the other Ixian clans, had used to mark the time-outs on that night-definitely the worst night of my life, and there were plenty of other contenders-the night fifty-two days ago when they’d dressed me up as a deer and hunted me down:

  (Drink) He ground them up in one big pot, he threw (stop)

  (Drink) Twenty blue seed-corn skulls into the pot (stop)…

  Well, things were different now. The world might be ending, but at least I was in with the in crowd.

  (21)

  My dresser-not Armadillo Shit, but an attendant who was even lower on the totem stele-came up with my urine bag. Ahh, redivivus. He gave me a shot of cold cacao out of a dogskin, checked and oiled my feet and tied on a fresh pair of running sandals, and ran off-road to bury my excretion so that nobody’d get hold of it and work action-at-a-distance curses on me. Go for it, guy, I thought. Do whatever you gotta do. I had them put me down and I broke into our near-jog. The thin stony air felt detoxifying. I went off-path for a minute and could see Koh’s three identical palanquins a score or so rope-lengths up the line. I guess the idea was that if we got raided they wouldn’t know which one she was in. The defile opened out into a high plain between extinct volcanoes, still showing the grid of an ancient city, speckled with dead scrub oaks and dead agaves and ocatillos and my namesake firebushes and all crawling with mating-drifts of black ladybugs. Oddly, there were still flakes of wood ash following us from the house fires behind us and they swept across the overgrown courts and twirled into Grasshopper pranksters, dust-devils, dervishing goofily ahead of us toward the old temple precinct. A few bloods were out in the ruins, canceling old cat-related zoomorphs. We didn’t want to leave a specific trail, even though there was no way the track sweepers in the rear could really eradicate the traces of so many people. Some “pastless clans”-people who, in the twelfth b’aktun, we’d call the homeless-had squatted in the old palaces, but when we came through they waddled away from us like dazed postnuke mutants and peeked out from behind charred adobe walls.

  By the sun’s death we’d come into the Knife Mines. It was a glistening black rockscape of flash-frozen lava spatters, basically a holograph of a few seconds in a geologically violent day that, tradition said, was the starting date, 8/18/-3041, Gregorian. The white sky turned red, meaning that our ancestor, the Great Eastern bacab- timebearer — was coming out to watch us, and as the red deepened he blew a different wind our way, one with a fertile eggy scent. I could feel magma throb through the ground, radiating almost-reassuring maternal energy from the giant watchful presence ahead. Out beyond the bluffs green sheet lightning crackled up along the rim of the sky. Wind rose and Hun Xoc decided that since it might cover our tracks we should move the whole chain from the main road to a smaller trail. To get there we had to strike across this Ishtar-Terra-ish plateau in the dark and it was a little extreme, you couldn’t hear anything and most of the time you couldn’t see Thing Zero, so there was no way to get bearings and Hun Xoc’s Rattler guides were navigating by literature. Lightning would coil around overhead into repulsive knots, and for a beat you’d see everything in all-over powdery light like industrial fluorescents. By morning we were in a long north-south valley with a few dead trees all tilting in the same direction, away from the Deer, that is, Virgo. The only good part was that the villagers sold us some snow from the peaks. We insisted on having our own chef make it into guava-pickle slushies.

  The ash cloud was all around us now, as though we’d gone through a big door into a world all modeled out of gray Plasticine. Once I thought some of the ash flakes were alive and then realized they were clouds of mating whiteflies. Every village we passed had the corpses of at least a few sacrifices staked up in the scrungy little zocalos, usually good-looking little kids, but in a lot of different stages of decay. There was one style of doing it where the stakes went up through their anuses and came out their mouths. Some of them looked like they’d had their hands or feet burned off when they were alive to put them in sympathy with the Toad’s fiery mood. Obviously the offerings hadn’t helped, though, and a lot of the villages were abandoned. Sometimes there were drifts of old offerings of yams and manioc and dogs that were way too magotty and dessicated to eat, but our small chain of captives grabbed them and gnawed on them anyway.

  By the death of the fifteenth new sun we were in the aspha
lt swamp around the Toad’s Cigars, cracked flats pocked with sputtering vents. When a gas bubble would tear up through the sticky crust the bloods would invariably say “She’s hatching another whopper,” or something, like they were saying “gesundheit.” The great cinder cone grew imperceptibly on our left, jarringly regular with the same forty-nine-degree angle as the Rattlers’ mul in Teotihuacan, silhouetted against its own dust and streaked with thin glowing pink seeps that folded and congealed into scoriac glaciers. The guides made us veer west to detour around something called Xibalba-Chen, Deathland Well, which from what they said must have been a crater lake that spurted out tons of carbon dioxide. Supposedly it had killed a whole lot of people and animals. We picked our way through a plain of fumaroles and steaming mineral wells down to a path along the Atoyac River, southeast through the Sierra Madre del Sur past Etla and Mitla, places I’d thought I knew pretty well from the twenty-first that were now unrecognizable, even though we passed less than a jornada from the city they later called Monte Alban. I guess some of it was beautiful but I remember mainly monotony, the smell of the runners’ skins crisping in the sun, the fatal localness of the jillion little no-name hamlets, all beginning to feel the domino effect of the continent-wide wave of depression that had started in Teotihuacan.