The Ocelots’ goal was carved as a defleshed sky-cat and stuck with emerald-green macaw down, just for this event. The Harpies’ goal was carved as an earthtoad and, more cheaply, painted Harpy red. I felt all fat and stiff and Megazoid in the padding, like a penis swollen with Viagra. The area beyond the court boundary-which I guess you could call the sidelines-was crowded with VIP punters and a few high-caste bookies, looking us over as though we were racehorses in the paddock. Our team started to strut around the end zone in roughly counterclockwise paths, sawing the air with our hand guards. Our wood-and-leather yokes-big horseshoe-shaped protective belts-bounced off each other like old-time bumper cars. The players who’d stayed here kept looking at me. They, but only they, all knew who I was, and supposedly they’d been briefed about what to do. But they were still freaked out that I was alive and with them. I was still playing as “Red Skink Lizard,” presumably an obscure relief player. My disguise, or new identity, was still holding up. It might not last once I started playing, though. Not if I used any of the old signature moves. I stopped pacing and tucked my head down under my helmet, like I was praying. 2JS came up next to me. He didn’t turn his ornament-swollen head, but he spoke to me in our house language and so low that no one could hear us over the shouting.
“And am I going to lose another son?” he asked. He was referring to five foster sons and two biological ones, including the one he’d sacrificed in my place, who had already died on him. And he was talking about the hipball game, not the battle we were anticipating afterward. Full matches at these stakes were pretty dangerous. I-or rather Chacal-had played twenty-eight full great-hipball games, four of them with nearly identical rules and timing. But that was an exceptional record, and people had been killed around me in almost every match I’d played. The general feeling was that an athlete’s career was so short anyway that you might as well die on the court. And one effect was that ballplayers started playing more recklessly as they get older. Emerald Immanent and a couple of the other Ocelot players were just at that age when you expect them to give it absolutely all they had, which could mean taking you with them.
I said the closest thing to “I’ll be careful.”
2 Jeweled Skull said that if I survived the ball game he wanted me to get off the court and into the middle of a special squad of Harpy bloods led by 7 Wind, who was another of his sons. They had instructions to get me the hell out of there, off the Ocelots’ temple promontory and out to the Harpies’ mountain milpas in the east. Then, even if 2 Jeweled Skull was killed or captured, I’d still have at least a chance of getting back someday and setting up my special tomb.
I said I thanked my father but that I didn’t want to desert him.
He said playing under a new name-that is, not for my own prestige-was enough.
I said I was worried that we’d be cut off from the mainland. Actually, I was trying to get him to open up about what he was going to do. If anything. He said he had sixty score nonbloods from dependent families-what you could call the bulk of the Harpy infantry-waiting outside the eastern gate. They hadn’t been told anything beforehand, though, and they were just now being briefed on what it was their Father of the East, that is, 2 Jeweled Skull, needed from them. Also they weren’t allowed to touch spears, blowguns, or saws, and could only fight with clubs. Still, they had barges ready and were going to lash them together and lay planks over them, and try to get across the canal from the Harpy Quarter to the council house, bypassing the permanent bridge, which of course the Ocelots were guarding. After that, the Harpy clubmen were going to try to take control of the council house and give us at least one relatively secure base on the peninsula.
2JS also said a messenger had come from Koh’s followers saying they were only six-hundred-score beats away. But their scouts had run into Ocelot patrols, and since we didn’t want to tip them off, the Rattlers were going to hold back until they got the word the hipball game had started.
So maybe we’d be all right.
“Well, okay, dude, great, let’s go,” I said in English. “Well, sheesh, this is a long way from the United States Chess Federation Interzonal at the Springfield, Massachusetts, Hyatt Regency Resort Hotel and Convention Center, isn’t it?
2 Jeweled almost smiled. It was enough to give me a little shiver. Maybe it was like Koh had said back under the Tree of Mirror Leaves, that he’d gotten a bigger dose of me than I’d thought. I’d been pretty sure that he just had bits and pieces, random beads that he couldn’t string together into a coherent Jedditude. But being in on stupid little private jokes took a pretty advanced level of understanding someone. Maybe I had a way of growing on you.
“We’ll just Win Through Despondency,” I said, “Harnessing the Power of Self-Loathing.” It wasn’t a gem, but he smiled and then chuckled, and then I did, and for a beat we couldn’t stop laughing, it was like, we’re like twins, we grew up together, we’re homies, we’re just chillin’ out A Harpy messenger came up and signed that the Ocelots were ready. 2JS waved him away. Our talk was over. He blessed the team with his cigar and left to take his place on the platform. I looked after him for a beat as he walked west. I hadn’t realized how lonely I’d been feeling without him to talk to about stuff. He was the only one around who actually understood.
I looked up and peeked around. The muls were all dressed for the occasion, draped in gigantic feather-embroidered tapestry mantles that had last been unfolded at the sheaving of the fifth katun before this one, eighty solar years ago. They were crowned with huge headdresses of radiating tree trunks tufted with ribbons to imitate giant feathers, and trailing necklaces of huge feather-flowers in the air. Uay-animal floats slid deliberately through the walkways, levitating up and down steps and spinning in the squares. The lacework superstructure above the city was filled with kites and papered torch-cages like big multiple lanterns. Effigies of the ahaus and bacabs and various sun-adders stood in the upper steps of the mulob, holding the lords’ places while their flesh bodies were down watching the ball game. I tucked my head down again.
Damn, I thought. There’d been so many things I wanted to ask 2JS. How was he dealing with the debris of myself inside him? Was he more me or less me than he’d been eighty-five days before? Or was I already so different now from the Jed that entered him that it didn’t matter? On top of everything I was feeling, maybe not teary, but a little misty.
Out in the center court the hazing contest had segued into the actual challenge to the match. I could hear the Ocelot negotiator offering to double the purse and the Harpy negotiator accepting. Better not whiff out on this one, I thought. Actually, I hadn’t been stellar in our last practice on the road. But maybe with an impossible challenge, Chacal’s ballplaying genius would come through. Right?
I smelled something. It was Koh’s cinnamon-in-reverse perfume. I broke protocol and looked up.
(32)
Koh and her eight-person escort had gotten into the east zocalo and were pushing toward the end zone. A gang of high-ranked Ixian Rattler converts followed alongside, throwing passionflowers and blue-curl blossoms on the path in front of her and waving petition bundles tied with big bright knots. I signaled to Hun Xoc, who caught the eyes of the rest of the team, and as I drifted over to the boundary line as casually as I could they pressed in behind me. She came up as if she were just scoping out the players. I didn’t look at her. Her escorts held up their traveling screens around her, as though they were shielding her from the sun, but actually to keep the Ocelots from seeing her talk to me. It wasn’t unheard-of for a major sponsor to talk with the players before a ball game, although it must have been the first time in a while that the sponsor had been female. I kneeled down on the court surface and she did the same, so that we were all alone in the sweaty jungle of legs.
What if they don’t get here as fast as we think? Koh asked without a preamble, in her own sign language.
I said I didn’t know.
“This is my burden,” she signed, meaning her fault. She seemed
pretty upset under her poker face. I didn’t know what to say, either, I felt bad about having gotten her into this and angry that she wasn’t getting us out of it like she’d said. It was like “Sorry, it’s my fault,” “No, it’s my fault.”
She asked something else.
I said I couldn’t understand. She leaned her head toward me, over the boundary line. They’re making me sit on the Ocelot side, she said out loud, in one of the code-languages she’d taught me, one we hadn’t used before. It wasn’t a whole separate language, it was more like Carney or Ubby-Bubby, where you inserted nonsense syllables, but it wasn’t something anybody else would be able to figure out right away.
What do you mean? I asked, not believing I’d heard her right.
As she explained it, this guy named “8 Smoking Peeper,” who was the head of Star-Rattler’s cult in Ix-the one Koh’s messengers hadn’t been able to reach-was standing in a swirl of emerald on the Ocelot side, of the north lateral platform of the court, and he’d asked for Koh and her attendants to come and stand at his right hand. The Ocelots had co-opted him. And even though Star-Rattler didn’t have much of a cult here he was her primary relative, and it was something she couldn’t say no to without starting a fight. She had to be gracious about being chaperoned. It was a big deal for a woman to be allowed to watch the match at all.
It was a teeth-gnashingly clever move. Even besides almost certainly setting her up to be captured. One special feature of pitzom as it was played here in the lowlands was spectator participation: each person on each of the two main platforms-the Harpies standing above their goal-peg on the south and the Ocelots above theirs on the north-was allowed a short stick like a miniature hurley called a hatchet or baat, another onomatopoeic word close to the English equivalent. Oddly to the twenty-first-century way of thinking, interference was allowed. Whenever a ball bounced up close to the favored spectators, they would lean precariously down over the banks, stretching out their baatob, trying to deflect the ball away from their goal or, if it lobbed high enough, to swipe it toward a member of their own team. Since the longest-armed supporters could barely get their short baatob down within an arm length of the goal, the bats connected only when the ball lobbed too high, and the spectator-participants ever really influenced the ball game on only a couple of shots. So it worked the supporters into a frenzy without much affecting the score.
But the serious deal was everyone who stood on one of the platforms was officially in the ball game, on that side’s team, just like the ahau in the center, playing through his proxies below. So the Ocelots were forcing Koh to “play” on the Ocelot side, even if no one in her group even touched a ball.
Dammit. Maybe the Ocelots weren’t so dumb as we thought. I wondered how much they guessed about 2JS’s part in the end of Teotihuacan. I can’t believe nobody had thought of this, I thought. No, believe it. Incompetence is forever. She was as good as captured.
Say you have a commitment to stay here, I said.
That’s not a good idea, she said, they’d take it as a huge insult and start the fight now.
She was right.
This isn’t good, I said, they’ll capture you in a hummingbird heartbeat.
I know, she said. She said maybe they wouldn’t get to torturing her right away. If the battle goes all right you can surround the Ocelot House and trade me out.
Right, I said, but we both knew it was too much to count on. There would be too many screw-ups, it was just the way things are. Do you still have the earthstar blood? I asked. The earthstar compound.
She said yes.
I tried to remember what I knew of the layout of the Ocelot district. We weren’t far from the most-holy ch’en, that is, in Spanish, cenote, a giant half-sunken cistern. In this case it was the main source of drinking water for the south bank of Ix, and it had been a cornerstone of the Ocelots’ power since before the third sun, an ever-gushing font of calc-free H 2 0, like Elisha’s Spring at Jericho.
Well, maybe I could actually do it. We’d have a ready-made diversion, that was for sure. And down on the court we wouldn’t be surrounded by Ocelot guards like the bloods in the stands.
Hmm. I really might be able to get there. Just out the west end of the court, into the popol na’s zocalo, that is, the main plaza, into one of the Ocelot compound’s “women’s doors”-which ought to slow down any pursuers a bit-and then onto the roof and up one of the aqueducts straight to Grandmother’s House. No threat, no sweat.
I’ll run for the Great Cistern, I said. If it looks at all possible. Maybe that’ll give you some extra time even if they get ahead in the battle.
She thought about it for what seemed like about sixty-eight beats.
I’ll try to feed Lord Earthstar, she said. She meant she ought to do an offering to get him to release the full power of his dried blood. I gestured like, okay, whatever. I was being pretty tough, I have to admit, but then I ruined the effect by telling her not to let any of her people know we were going for the Great Cistern. It was kind of an insult to tell her that, because it was like saying her bloods might crack under torture, but she didn’t seem to notice.
She whispered to Coati.
Don’t let them give you any water in the basket, I said. By basket I meant the place in the Ocelot house where they kept high-level captives under suicide watch. Like the one 2 Jeweled Skull had kept me in.
I don’t drink water anyway, Koh said. It was kind of a drought-season joke, like “Lips that touch water shall never touch mine.”
Coati came back and handed Koh a red-and-white-wrapped uah’ach, a sort of ceremonial nine-layered tortilla bread women were supposed to give to players before the ball game. Koh messed around with it for a second behind her screens, came forward, and presented it to me over the wall of the pen. I gestured “Accepted,” tore open the dyed corn-husk wrapping, and took a bite. It wasn’t very good.
Koh spoke to Coati again in the same language. Get to 2 Jeweled Skull, she said, or if you can’t get to him, get to Hun Xoc. She told him to let them know what’s going on with the earthstar compound. Maybe they could get back to Harpy House and hold out for a day or so. Make sure they keep it quiet as long as possible, though, she said.
She turned back to me. “Xka’ nan’ech lo’mob kutz,” she said. “Smoke faster than the flies can bite.” It was sort of a casual jokey leave-taking salutation, like “Be good.” She left. The commotion behind her guards picked up, the Ixian Rattler’s Children shouting questions at her in this sort of respectful howl, asking for predictions on the score like she was a combination of the Dalai Lama and Nick the Greek, which, in fact, she basically was. I thought she was going to ignore it, but all of a sudden she turned inside her semitransparent screens and spoke through Coati:
“Now, 10 K’atun, 1 Deer, 11 Thought,” he/she said,
“Before the thirteenth ball rolls up the green,
Look out for ingrown blue hair knots in your walls.”
(33)
There was a trough between the waves of shouting and then a higher crest as the people started reacting to it and asking what she meant. I didn’t get what the carajo she was talking about either. It was like, ease up on the Delphic Sybil trip, babe.
I watched her turn and lead her escort back down the walkway, around the east end zone of the court, and up a side ramp onto the south platform, through hundreds of hostile-looking Ocelot princes in jaguar skins and emerald-green feather spikes, all of them probably waiting for the signal to grab her and rip her into bite-sized morsels. They saluted her and she had to salute back like we were totally honored to be with them. Ocelot guards moved her forward toward the lip of the court, to where the Ixian Rattler-adder was standing at the coveted second rank. Lady Koh and the Rattler Adder greeted each other in public sign language. I pictured little thought-balloons bubbling out of each of their heads saying I’m going to kill you.
She was totally isolated up there. If a fight started, our bloods would have to roll down into the playing tr
ench, claw their way up the slick bank to the opposite platform, and try to grab Koh before the Ocelots behind her pulled her backward. They’d never make it.
Nobody seemed to be watching me. I bent down like I was messing with my sandal, tore open the nine-layered tortilla with my teeth, and pulled out something I recognized, a whitish, double-bladdered bag. The earthstar compound. I dusted some cornstarch off the bag and handed it behind me to Armadillo Shit. I pointed to my hip padding and he reached in through the quilted layers, positioned the bag in the hollow on the left side of my groin, and tied it down with slack ends of weasel gut from my yoke harness. I stood up and Armadillo Shit whisked some bits of offering-confetti and torn-up betting contracts and morning-glory blossoms and dyed feathers and crap out of my helmet.
A long “Eeeee,” a sort of performatively awed gasp, spread through the stands and away into the city. The Ocelots’ hazing team had just brought out a captive harpy eagle, and some of the Harpies in the stands tried to get down to the court to rescue it and had to be held back. Meanwhile Harpies’ mockers had brought out a baby ocelot, and from what I could hear they were starting to yank it around on its leash and poking at it with skewers. I’d say the audience went bananas except that’s not a menacing enough fruit. Torturing specimens of each other’s totems was basically a declaration of war. This thing wasn’t ending with the last goal.
DOOOONG.
It was a note like a chord of D, C, and F sharp way down on the black keys at the left end of an old Boesendorfer, and it came from a slit-gong made from a cedar tree the size of the body of a 707. Hun Xoc walked past me, his waist yokes swinging in opposition to his steps, forward into the playing trench, and took his marker. Only three players from each side were allowed on the court at one time, but including the coaches there were six people on each team. Everyone on our team had a name with the word red in it, so our coach “Teentsy Bear” was really named 3 Red Pine, and Hun Xoc’s full name was 1 Red Shark. Red Beak was going to be our other starting striker, or forward, and then 5 Red Wedge-we called him 5-5-would be our starting “zonekeeper,” which was like a goalie. Red Cord and I were going to be on the bench at first and then substitute in when they needed us.
The Sacrifice Game jd-2 Page 20
