They lifted me onto the shelf. Koh’s dresser fanned her. My dresser fanned me. Koh kneed over to me. I balanced myself while my valet held my knee stump. Her maid took my bursting penis and guided it clinico-choreographically into Koh. The instant I was enveloped by that ridged cylindrical tongue, what self-control I had over whatever aphrodisiac had been in that damn tamale just evaporated. My hips jerked back and forth involuntarily and I was basically just fucking away, which I guess is at least a good way to break the ice. Koh reciprocated. There was a lot of pressure and speed down there but I was still surprised that Koh had an orgasm almost immediately. She stifled it a bit but there wasn’t any doubt. It was like a teenager’s orgasm. First sex all over again. Koh had had plenty of sexy fun with her maids and women-in-waiting or whatever in the Star Rattler Society, but not with any men. So I guess maybe it was the novelty. Although it wasn’t a whole Buster Hymen thing. Virginity wasn’t such a big deal at this level, somebody as major as she was didn’t have to prove anything.
There was definitely something drive-in-movieish about it for me, though. Like I guess if you’re a guy, especially, and if you grew up dealing with primitive, superstitious peoples, like say the middle class in the U.S. in the 1970s, you might have been making out with someone and for whatever reason this person didn’t want to slide for home. So you staggered back home or out to the car or whatever and started masturbating and your testicles were so swollen like two Jiffy Pop bags, pebbles of cum overflowing and backing all the way up into your ductus deferens, so that it actually took minutes of near-pain to get into org-mode, and then when you got over the hump you just exploded in a total agony that submerged any more delicate pleasure sensations you might have gotten but which knocked you into such a long slide of incredible release-as you lay aching and groaning in this rain of semen-that you still might give quite a bit to reexperience that intensity. So, yeah, anyway, this was like that. When I could hear again, On The Left was giving the scene his little “well done” blessing. He left. The servants poured balche over the four pots of embers in the corners of the room and left, too, tying the door behind them. We had about nineteen minutes, which we had to spend together to keep our putative child from being polluted by Koh’s looking at any other person. I wondered whether I really would get her pregnant. It was an odd idea for me. Except if I had a kid with Koh it wouldn’t take after me anyway. It would be like Chacal. And of course, even if Koh and I didn’t conceive, she’d either have a kid with someone else or just commission one secretly and pretend it was hers.
Koh sort of slid out from under me and I sank prone on the olingo-skin cushions and looked at her. We were more or less in bed together and more or less alone in the twilight steam.
She started giggling and tied my hair back out of my face. As a rule, I can’t say the Maya were very cuddly, but there was definitely affection there. Although she didn’t seem into oral stuff. We messed around a little more and I was trying to get her to come again when she said she appreciated how I had a lot of different ideas but she thought she still basically preferred sex with women. She lay back and played with my penis, pulling the foreskin over it and then pushing it back. She said it reminded her of the ovipositor of one of her wasps because of the way it was striped. I bent down and tried kissing her again but it just wasn’t one of her tropes of demonstrating affection. Mouths around here were more for biting and chewing and getting yours near someone was like an attack. I said it was like when she’d put the drugs into my mouth seventy-four suns ago, but she still wasn’t into it. Cuddling was different too. I’d see something as a sexual preliminary and she would see it as juvenilizing. Like the way some people like baby talk and some people can’t stand it. I stroked her, though, from one nipple down to the next and back up the other side, over and over and as lightly as possible so that I was really just gliding over her almost nonexistent body hair, and she did like that. She sat up and started checking out my stump. I blew air over her to cool her.
I’d been thinking for a while about maybe getting Koh to come back with me. Back to my old overripe turn-of-the-century hood. I imagined myself bringing her around to meet the folks. Hey, dudes, this is my main squeeze, the Dragon Princess.
I asked her.
She laughed in a you-idiot way. She had dynasties to found and enemies to plunder and everything. Despite her natural curiosity she wasn’t even remotely intrigued by the notion of coming to Florida like an e-mail-order bride and trading in her growing rack of shrunken heads for Prada suits and publicity agents and dinners at the Delano. She’d seen a bit of the future and had decided it wasn’t much.
Which you couldn’t argue with, I thought. I’d been getting all bittersweet and misty and now I was starting to chuckle a bit myself. Watch the mood swings, I thought. Anyway, she was right. Anyway, even if I did get her in my casket with me I didn’t really know if it was even possible to upload her consciousness or whatever on the other end. You should have asked about that, you dwurk, I thought. And anyway, who was I going to get for a donor? Was I going to run around like some murdering body-snatcher preying on the innocent to keep my vampire bride alive, like she was Jessica Harper in some Dario Argento movie? Had I lost every last shred of decency?
I changed the subject.
“So may I ask,” I asked, “do these fingers work as well as the others?”
“Yes,” she said.
“Are they weaker?”
“A little weaker than their aunties,” she said, meaning her pinkies. “And they do hurt sometimes. This one doesn’t have a nail.” She wobbled the artificial or rather commissioned nail. It was sewn on through a piercing in the flesh below. I stretched and looked at the ceiling and held her ear. We’d hit one of those great natural pauses like it could have been anytime, anywhere.
“Chocolate and deer is the gift of this sun,” she said. It meant it had been a good day.
“Utz-utz,” I said. “Very good.”
“It’s time, now, though,” she said, using the word that meant “this very instant.”
I asked what she meant.
“I have to light the cooking stones,” she said. “Female orb weavers always eat their mates.”
(54)
I was a little freaked out, to say the least. I just sat there for two beats, and then eight, wondering whether to run for it. Although of course there wasn’t anywhere to go. Get outside to Hun Xoc? No, they’d be holding him too. My eye darted to the doorway. Koh’s nacom, an old skin-blackened Rattler sacrificer, was crouching in it with a long-handled flint knife.
Lunge forward. Grab Koh’s neck. Try to hold her as a hostage.
No. Won’t work either. They’ll pry me off her in two p’ip’ilob. She owns this place, I thought. I’ve had it. Serves me right for dealing with these fucking headhunters.
I looked back at Koh. Her look said it was all all right. Thanks a lot, I thought. The nacom kneed toward us. Four Rattler assistants came in behind him, lifted me up, and laid me over the little stone altar table in the center of the room, holding my arms and legs lightly, so that my back wouldn’t break. The nacom sprinkled purifying balche over me, said his little invocation, and touched his flint knife to my Adam’s apple, like he was lighting a fire with a long match. I felt an ultrasharp stone hook catching a fold of my skin and then drawing a long, nearly painless line down my chest. The nacom put the knife aside, put his unclean hand over my abdomen-dangerously close, but not quite defiling my skin-and lifted up a bright-red achiote tamale, sculpted into a stylized heart. He handed it to Koh. Shockingly-I guess it was part of her New Deal religion, showing that she was immune to the pollution of death-she broke off a piece of the crust and swallowed it. Evidently the Orb Weaver Sorority had toned down this part a bit since the even badder older days, back between the time when the Oceans Drank Atlantis and the rise of the sons of Aryas. Novelty baked goods, I thought. Yet another example of Koh’s terrific sense of humor. You never knew where you were with this chick. I leaned b
ack, listening to my sweat and urine dripping on the stone floor. Koh was giggling a little bit. Laugh it up, I thought. She was always pulling stuff like that, riddles, gags, infantile practical jokes. Gullible me. Yuk, yuk.
The rattler ordinands moved me down onto a bobcat-fur-covered pallet and started washing me in three kinds of water and four kinds of sand, purifying me after sex and death and whatever.
I’ve got to have a talk with Koh Babe about this shit, I thought, it’s not funny and it’s wearing me down. A couple more brilliant moments like that and I’ll be the only white-haired aborigine between here and Iceland.
I guess she’s just testing me again, to see how cool I can be. Well, the SATs are over, sweetheart. I’ve been cool enough. I raised my head up on one arm, even though it wasn’t a pose anybody seemed to use around here. Another four-kid Rattler troop had crawled in with a human-size tray. It had a full-size corn-paste figurine of me, very cleverly done, all dressed in the exact same ceremonial clothes and ornaments with the same tats. I watched Koh undress the figurine and bite into the right hand and the cornflour-cake doll-face. Thank God there wasn’t any fake blood inside or anything. She pushed her finger down in its chest cavity, replaced what was left of the heart loaf, poured balche over the open wound, and sent the whole thing back out to the Orb Weaver Sorority feast table. Go for it, I thought. Take, eat, barf, whatever.
I looked over at Koh but she was supervising the damn ritual washing of her private parts. I sat, watching, breathing hard. They finished wiping me and started dressing me, again, this time in male clothes. Koh let her team sew her into a plain white huipil-which only the highest muckamucks got to wear-and then kneed over to the hearth-fire stones. She uncovered a jar of water and a jar of blue corn, soaking in water and lime. Good morning to you, too, I thought. Well, so, that was fun, how about brunch?
I sat patiently, getting worked on, like an actor being made up for a monster role, listening to that krik, krik, krik of the grinding stones. That sound really is like nothing else, I thought. Koh’s having to make symbolic tortillas seemed a little demeaning to me. Here, honey, I’ll do that. I’m a sensitive hubby. Don’t get dishpan hands. Oh, well. It was probably the last time she’d ever make them herself anyway. She wouldn’t have to do it six hours a day every day of her life, like the rest of the gals in this hemisphere.
Eight hundred beats later we reemerged from the house dressed as the joint heads of our united clans. We could hear a crowd outside the gate, mainly kids and festivalgoers from the dependent clans-that is, the closest thing to a middle class-getting free food from the overflow of the wedding. They were giggling and everything but a little awed to be on the peninsula. The whole holy district was off-limits most of the time, but welcoming now.
We formed up in the courtyard, getting ourselves together, Koh and I in the center of the wedding party, with all of us surrounded by Rattler guards with big round shields of iridescent blue-green trogon feathers. The attendants moved the food aside and started packing it up for incineration. We listened. These guys had better be on cue, I thought, but before I’d finished the thought, I picked out that unique roar far away. A nonet of Ocelot musicians, playing the Ixian peace song on long boxwood horns, were coming up on the crowd from the southwest, from the direction of the great zocalo.
On The Left stepped out through the gate, leading two porters carrying the oracle box. It was an arm-span square and pearl-white, woven out of the stripped shafts of egret feathers. The person inside it was, supposedly, a hundred and sixty years old. But of course that was hype.
We heard the guards on the outside making a space for him in the center of the crowd. The horns came around the council house. Plaster walls buzzed in the roar. I imagined the crowds drawing back and doing their varieties of dirt-eating moves as the Ocelot procession came through.
Our band blasted out our entrance chord. The cantor gave his little speech of welcome and the screen of guards fell back, and the twenty of us, Koh and Hun Xoc and the Gilas and our flanking retainers, were all suddenly visible to all these people, real people, like, let’s meet the public.
Na’at ba’al, the cantor said, relayed through his megaphones. The crowd yelled back its welcoming response, somewhere between a reedy cheer and a chant.
I felt all exposed. It had been a while. On The Left asked the crowd if they were ready and they answered that they were. The tone of the expression was something like “Yes, thank you, what are you going to do for us next?”
I tried to listen for signs of trouble in the chord but I couldn’t get any. Koh had had thousands of Rattler families adopted by other clans, so they were interspersed through the crowd, and the others were going along. And at least half the remaining clans really were crazy about us, they thought I was literally the gods’ gift. It was really only the Macaws and Snufflers we had to worry about. And any recidivist Ocelots. Well, at least, no matter how resentful any of them were, they weren’t showing it. They were going along with the shills.
What was our danger quotient on this? Like they used to say, oaths sworn at spearpoint were always worth a little less. I wished we could have controlled better who was coming into the temple district. Normally only people belonging to one of the clan temples on the peninsula would think of coming here. And every family had its spot, so you sort of knew who you were getting. Any group of infiltrators would have been spotted by the people they were trying to stand with.
And Koh’s guards and their guides-that is, local people who helped them recognize other local people-had been out around the clock, ever since the battle, turning the place into a police state. But still, you couldn’t search everybody, or even recognize everybody. The main thing to do with something like this was just for us to keep isolated, stay out of any conceivable kind of projectile range, and then get the hell out before people got too drunk.
The chief herald blew his special trumpet for the first time. It was a long whine like a giant router with a two-inch bit, air raid, ground raid, water raid, ascending into a long squeak like an ulna whistle, and then there was nothing.
(55)
Just a few more little tests, I thought. Testlets. Testes. Just quizes, really. Before the Human Game, anyway. That would be the real test.
I waited. The crowd waited. And I was sure the sun waited, and that the semidomesticated flock of scarlet macaws that had been circling around their nest niches on the Macaw clan’s mul were now hanging motionless in the air, but of course that was one of those chronopathological brain spikes I’d been getting lately. The silence before had been really a rustling, breathy silence, but this silence was nearly absolute, just a hint of breeze and the eternal beat pulsing in my syncopated ears. Then there was a static apogee moment when the silence maybe sounds like rustlings that might just be ancient sounds, from long-gone b’aktuns, still echoing through the canyons, and then a point when that suspicion of sound had definitely become rustlings and making-readies, something dressing itself over a subacoustic drone. The drone sank into the subsonic hum of long, long approaches, something getting bigger and bigger until you can’t believe its size, Plutonian barges and giant coal-burning trains dopplering through perpetual fog.
At first it was obviously coming out of the citadel at the top of the mul, but it was picked up and echoed and reechoed above and below, the echoes anticipating each other too fast for sound, either too clearly from too far away or too diffuse from much too close, the space way out of joint, and then it all petered out into a crackle of gibbering from the oracle in the box.
There was still a test I had to pass before I could play the human-piece Sacrifice Game. Get ready, I thought. I’d trained for this to the point where I was sure I could do it backward, but even so Cancel that. Don’t think fail thoughts. Just don’t screw up.
“One Ocelot may show himself, he says,” the interpreter said,
“When he learns what happened to the bloods who came
And fed him over this k’atun, who claim
ed
His rights and titles. Where have they all gone?”
On The Left answered:
“Those bloods abandoned him,” he said. “They lied
When they said 9 Fanged Hummingbird would be here now;
They ran off under thorn trees, under bushes.
Tell Ocelot, ‘Look down on us and see
What’s happened,’ and we’ll show him, and we’ll wait
For his response, his judgment, we attend.”
There was a crash on a rack of clay bells as the clowns entered out of the council house and poured down the steps, pretending to slip and fall and roll in their padded parodies of the bacabs’ vestments. The crowd broke into a sea of relieved laughter. At least they did laugh a lot around here, I thought, whatever else they did. Koh’s Porcupine Clown, the one I’d seen in Teotihuacan, bounced out of the ahauob’s entrance and tumbled down the stairs in a ball, crashing into a table of ale pots and coming up out of the splinters and foam with one of them on his head like a top hat. He rolled a long way in his ball, his feather suit collapsing, and then sprang up and staggered around, blindly bumping into people, blinking under his bandit-banded makeup. People were collapsing from laughing. By this time the invisibles had cleared a Sacrifice Game-gridded square in the center of the zocalo, and the actor personifying me spun out into the green center uncoiling a long geranium-flowered umbilical ribbon. He was covered in red wrappings with down tufts to show that he was still a baby, and his big mask was a 3-D version of my head glyph, or what you might call the logogram of my name, not anything that resembled me personally. Actors strutted out personifying 9 Fanged Hummingbird and 4 Orange Skull-that is, 9 Fanged Hummingbird’s elder brother, who died in the fifteenth yellow k’atun, AD 726, before 9 Fanged Hummingbird took the mat. They all paraded once around the square. The 9 Fanged Hummingbird giant crept up on 4 Orange Skull from behind and chopped off his lime-gessoed wicker head. Can’t he just do something classy, like drizzle poison in his ear? I wondered.
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