The Sacrifice Game jd-2

by Brian D'Amato

  The Macaw Clan’s oblationers unwrapped their gift. It was a little boy on his first public-name-date anniversary, which meant he was nearly four years old. They led him to the base and the invisibles mimed hoisting him up to me on his flowery-strung blue ribbon, actually lifting him up, placing him on each step, and lifting him onto the next. The Macaw boy wasn’t too heavily drugged, either, and by the third step you could see that he really was terrified, he’d realized in some way what was actually going on, and he slid into something between a whimper and a screech.

  I guess all this is going to make me completely unsympathetic. Right? I’d made my peace with what was going to happen earlier, when I was going through the wedding rehearsals with Koh’s stand-ins-but I suppose I was still just a fuck to go along with it. Of course, I didn’t see any other way. I was just following orders.

  And remember, this was a big ceremony and we still only did nine or ten people, which isn’t exactly a holocaust, right? I mean, it’s not great, but at least we didn’t do those big wholesale blowout sacrifices like the Aztecs supposedly did later. They’d go through ten times that many people on just a regular day, probably before breakfast. Although on the other hand, I’d recommend getting captured by the Aztecs, instead of the Maya. Since we-I mean the Maya-were a lot more creative torture-wise. At least the Aztecs just killed you.

  And anyway, consider the context, right? We-I mean we like us Ixob dudes again-we were emulating God by being as mean as possible. God obviously enjoys killing little kids, right? At least we didn’t pretend that God doesn’t enjoy torturing innocent people, or pretend not to notice.

  And anyway, I did feel queasy, I did feel sorry. But where do I get off mentioning it anyway? Sorry doesn’t muck the custard.

  Down in the zocalo my own Harpy clan was unswaddling their gift. It was a former foster brother of all of theirs, now disinherited: 18 Jog, 2 Jeweled Skull’s favorite nephew. He’d been sewn into the 2 Jeweled Skull costume from the masque, but he wasn’t the one who’d actually danced 2 Jeweled Skull. We hadn’t trusted him to go through the motions. I focused across the plaza at the central room of the Council House, where 2 Jeweled Skull was being forced to watch from his cage, but it was too dark in there to see him.

  The invisibles stripped off 18 Jog’s regalia and unwrapped his team of five dwarves. They were so fattened they looked table-ready, like kids in turkey costumes in a school Thanksgiving play. But they weren’t official sacrifices, either, and weren’t going into the communion pot. They were just there because 18 Jog was still a greathouse, captive or not, and still deserved attendants to keep him amused on the road out of this level. Dwarves always work. The invisibles led them up, 18 Jog walking stiffly-he was twenty-three solar years old and, from what I could tell, not so quick or forceful as his famous uncle-and the dwarves followed, struggling up the high steps, trailing veils of tinkling laughter from the crowds. To me they didn’t look very aesthetic, more like Grock, Loopy, Scuzzy, Sullen, and Retarded, only without the beards, but really they were matched and trained and must have cost a lot. Anyway the audience had been waiting for a finale.

  They came to the threshold. 18 Jog just stood there like Jesus until they stretched him over the table. I could hear a couple of his joints popping. Maybe Koh’s people wanted to make him scream. But really it wasn’t a good idea. Anyway since he was a full-blood captive there wasn’t much chance of it. At most you’d get a little unconscious vocalization at the instant of death.

  The nacom purified 18 Jog’s face and chest. I walked forward, let the nacom blow smoke over my halberd, and set its central hooked blade on 18 Jog’s neck.

  Now, as you probably noticed, so far I hadn’t done any of the actual killing myself. In general you didn’t want to get that close to the death-breath. So you let the professional sacred outcastes take care of it. You really just wanted the recipient-Ocelot, in this instance-to give you the credit. It’s like you want to throw the party, but you don’t want to have to cook everything yourself and hand-feed it to your guests. But in this one case I was expected to do a few little things, although I’d still let the nacom give the coup de grace. It was okay partly because 18 Jog wasn’t a captive I’d taken with my own hands. It was like how when you were hunting it wasn’t cool to eat anything you’d bagged yourself.

  I held 18 Jog’s forehead with my left hand, turned his head toward me, made an incision under the earlobe, found the condyle of the mandible, and severed it from the temporomandibular ligament. I turned to the other cheek, did the same thing, handed my long-handled knife to one of the ordinands, pushed 18 Jog’s forehead back so he couldn’t bite me, hooked my right thumb around his lower incisors, and pulled off his jaw. A little sun-shower of blood spattered down around me and saliva sprayed up out of the ducts. I held the jaw up and whirled it around four times. The tongue was still flapping and trailing pink drool. I tossed it down the stairs. The ordinands stood up 18 Jog to show him to the crowd, teasingly tilting him back and forth on the lip of the precipice. He tried to launch himself over but they kept catching him. The crowd went wild and a few sections lost control of the chant. I wasn’t feeling good about the whole thing, but I’ve got to admit-just to get rid of any vestige of sympathy you may have for me-that at the same time I couldn’t help not quite laughing but at least being aware of how ridiculous 18 Jog looked at that moment, with his front teeth sticking down into nothing and his big head wagging around on its little neck. A jawless person is just really, really funny-looking. They handed me my knife, turned him back upstage to me, and I cut into his abdomen longitudinally above the navel. He had abs, not a six-pack or anything, but still abs, so it wasn’t an easy cut, but I got through it in one motion. I got a little dizzy for a beat, maybe from stage fright or conflicting motives or something but maybe more just from the feeling of parting that thickness. Cutting into living flesh is like that feeling of spooning into something soft that keeps its shape, like pudding or cheesecake, and taking out a smooth half-oval. There’s some basic fascination in creating that hollow area. Maybe surgeons feel that all the time. Still, I got it back together, handed off my knife, reached in and up with both arms, and tore through the diaphragm with my nails. This little curtain of flesh, I thought. I found the heart, and held it for a beat. I guess it’s obvious that it must be an odd feeling to hold a still-beating heart in your hands, but it’s hard for me to say exactly why. I guess you could get a sense of it by holding a bird and thinking about crushing it to death. It’s got that same incredible power at the vanishing point of the lines of repulsion and fascination.

  For some reason I looked at 18 Jog’s face and his eyes contacted mine. He didn’t seem angry or panicked or anything, he just had that swooning relaxed look you get when pain goes over the edge.

  The heart wasn’t what we were after in this particular procedure. It would go into a special giant batch of atole later on. I let go of it kind of reluctantly, twisted my hands down and behind it, and found the liver.

  It’s a heavy, fragile, floppy organ, but I found and cut the vena cava and the portal vein, got both big lobes out-along with the gallbladder-and plopped them into the dish. An acolyte wiped my hands with palm oil. I took the dish, turned, and walked up into the sanctuary. It was darker inside now but there were still flares burning and a single feline acolyte crouching in the back next to the heirophant’s casket. I set the basin down on the old great-mat. The acolyte lifted the old man’s torso. He looked at me and then bent down over the liver to inspect it. I came forward and watched. He turned it over. It seemed like a big, healthy, blood-rich sucker, but then he reached into the fissure between the left and quadrate lobes, and pointed to a smelly little abscessed necrosis, like a popped tube of anchovy paste. He looked at me.

  “All right for now, but not for later,” he rasped. Or, well, his voice was a little thinner and finer than a rasp. “He sanded”? “He emeryboarded?” “He nailfiled?” Anyway, I knew I wouldn’t get any more out of him. He was set on
being difficult. I thanked him, did my little obeisance, and walked out back to the threshold.

  “Kimak-kimak,” I said. “All’s good to swim,

  Forward, four times four hundred solar years.”

  The crowd answered with a din like a giant cave full of sea lions. Just to show off, the ordinands released 18 Jog and let him stand on his own for a beat. He just stood there for five beats. His chest and legs were solid red but he was still alive. Finally he tried to take a step toward me but tilted forward, and just as he was about to fall into my arms the acolytes caught him and held him while the nacom expertly sawed the rest of his head off his body and handed it to a preparator-acolyte for wrapping. There was almost no blood from the neck. The ordinands released the body again and the nacom nudged it downstage, over the lip of the saw-stairs. It tumbled over and down almost noiselessly. The crowds went silent for a beat and then slid back into a softer, more awed-sounding cycle of the chant. I felt this wave of protectiveness of them, and I could feel how grateful they all were, love and relief rising off them like heat waves. Sacrifice can create this incredible bond, maybe the strongest bond you can have with more than one other person at a time. And especially with throngs of people you haven’t met. There’s this community epiphany, you get a rush of shared exaltation of surviving on together. You know so clearly you’ve all felt the same thing and lived through the same little terror, it’s like you’ve just had sex with everyone there.

  They rolled the next batch of sacrifices down the stairs alive, just to get the party mood going again, first Loopy, then Retarded, and then Jock, Sullen, and Scuzzy all at once. Since the atole was finished it was all right to pollute the stairs with inferior blood. They bounced over and down and around and around, glortching and squealing, their movements defining five separate arcs from living to dead. To the audience-I almost said “to my family”-it was pretty much the funniest thing in the world. Great sense of humor, guys, I thought. I shoulda brung some tapes of The Benny Hill Show.

  An acolyte tapped the platform next to my foot. I turned. He was offering me a regulation-size ball, freshly wrapped out of white rubber ribbon. Its glyphs said 18 Jog’s head was inside, just in case there was any doubt. I took the ball and held it over my head. I could feel the inrush of breath underneath me. I threw it down the steps. It bounced higher and higher as it fell lower, finally arcing high into the crowd, and then bobbing from one lucky person to another as they hipped it back and forth across the square.

  Pitzom pay-ee, I thought. Let the Game Begin. I signed for Koh’s escort to bring her out. The hissing rose up again from Star Rattler’s mul. The snake poured down her steps again. The crowd below scattered aside. The mul’s temple doorway, recently resculpted as Star Rattler’s giant mouth, vomit-birthed a big blue egg-box and flicked its rattle against it. The egg exploded and Koh emerged headfirst, like a baby, in a cowl of metallic green beetle shells sewn in a celestial map onto a manto pieced from the skins of four hundred black iguanas.

  (60)

  She floated up the steps toward me, twice as tall as her actual height, carried by a pair of dwarf bearers hidden under her long star-scale-skirt. Four of her own attendants followed her, two steps behind. It was a little out of the ordinary for her to be here and there’d be some muttering among the oldsters. But really, since the gifts were over, women could step on the holy ground without polluting anything. Anyway, things are gonna be different around here, I thought. Sisters are doing it for themselves.

  I reset my stilt-sandals on the sharp lip of the threshold and nearly fell forward again. In the smoke and the amethyst half-light things seemed closer than they were, even without depth perception. A new set of Harpy Fliers had climbed the poles and were spinning downward, and the Ocelots were dancing through the costumed celebrants, rocking and almost falling, strutting and voguing, uninhibited but also totally controlled. It wasn’t like a nightclub or anything, actually it was just the old men who were supposed to really dance, and the others just sort of bopped. But the righteous dub ran through everything. It was so different from the dour, stale Teotihuacan vigil. It had a sense of beginning. A lot of the spectators and dancers were popping off into orgasmic trances, but even so, they still kept pulsing to the same gemutlich beat. There’s really nothing nearly so powerful as tribal fellow-feeling. And as I watched the rough edges of artifice disappeared and I forgot the dragon had legs, or that there were ropes holding the fliers in the air. The revelers’ masks fused to their flesh and pulsed and rippled and grimaced. I could feel my smile flowing through to the scales of my jade mask, everything meshing. The dancers’ back racks unfolded into pulsing mating displays, the gods’ power rising off them in clouds of musk, and it wasn’t a ceremony anymore but the event itself, gods kicking up the world just for the hell of it a long time ago, now, and again. It was a childlike feeling but it also had this brooding, shrouded purposefulness to it, and a bittersweetness about how I was part of a we, and how we were all so pathetically grand, so hopeful, so alive, I got this love-twinge and felt tears soaking my face-padding. It sounds sappy but it’s really comprehending the quiddity of whatever it is, the what-it-is-ness, how limited it is, how much we could love only each other, that really gets you. Twenty-first-century people haven’t lived at all, I thought. You’ve got to go for it, you have to string yourself along the thread where sex and violence and pleasure and pain and egotism and oblivion all intersect on the intensity graph, to this point of exhilaration without concepts, just thereness, that pure no-doubt living-goal insects feel, and if you haven’t gotten there at least once it’s like you’ve been looking at the ocean through a window without ever swimming in it. Or at least that’s the way it seemed at the time.

  Koh rose up in front of me. Invisibles spread the ancient great-mat at the edge of the platform. I stepped onto it and sat down-so slowly that it took over a minute-facing north, so that when I looked over my left shoulder I could see the vertiginous rush of the Steps and the whole roiling zocalo. Actually, the entire area between the two great pyramids was considered a kind of ball court. But it was at least a hundred times the area of an actual playing trench, much too big for humans to play on. Instead the balls were the planets and moon and sun. Normally it just worked on its own, slowly, but in this one ritual Koh and I were going to bounce them forwards ourselves, and use the people to mark where they might land.

  The dwarves set Koh down four arms away from me, facing me-that is, south-and slithered off, back into the sanctuary, keeping low so the crowd couldn’t see them. Down in the forum the invisibles were clearing everyone off the central square, an area about three rope-lengths on a side. It had been pumiced and buffed and freshly repainted in the color zones of the five directions with the full Sacrifice Game grid superimposed on it like a squared-off spiderweb. Finally, I thought. The Human Game. Let’s go.

  Koh’s attendants snipped off her blue-green-goggle-eyed snake-jaw helmet and instantly started constructing an Ocelot queen’s coiffure and headdress in its place. She was pretty much giving up her old role as a sort of nun to Star Rattler. Still, marrying me was the safest plan for her. Later-not much later-before I entombed myself, I’d announce at the popol na that Koh was going to continue ruling, as the mouth of my uay, and then, eventually, as regent for her son, assuming we were going to have or secretly adopt one. And meanwhile, with me out of the picture, Koh would keep working to unify the Ocelot and Rattler factions until the situation was stable enough for her to relocate. And-at least until the twelfth b’aktun-that would be my contribution to posterity.

  She and I saluted each other, but she didn’t say anything. An attendant set a covered Game-table between us.

  Down in the forum the invisibles swept and oiled the Game grid. Alligator Root, Koh’s crier, sat two stairs below us, wearing a thin black mask, like a domino mask, fastened over his eyes with wax. At least she hadn’t had him blinded.

  The first fifty-nine evaders-or poison oracles-walked out and stood at thei
r posts at the center of the tetragon. Each one held a pair of sticks and they wore tall zero-masks. One of the leading one’s sticks was a big red-streamered staff, twice as tall as he was. Next the fifty-eight masked catchers took their places around them, seven at each of the eight star points and two in reserve outside the grid. Each of the catchers had a little drum on a stick. The hundred and seventeen players had all been chosen from four- or five-stone adders from trusted dependent clans, which meant they could all feel the blood-lightning and count like they had little abacus cashiers in their heads. But presumably it also meant that they wouldn’t know enough to direct a City Game on this scale, or to remember it and take the knowledge with them. They’d picked the thirteen evaders from among themselves, by cleromancy, and tattooed them and studded them with the patterns of the sidereal scorpion, and fed them on liver and deer’s blood to make them strong. And for the last ten days they’d all practiced every hour they were awake. Each one would be, in a way, playing his own separate game, and the totality of games would magnify the totality of the master game.

  The Game beaters started on their clay water drums, in time with the beat of the universal festival, but more insistent.

  Let’s go, I thought. Letsgoletsgoletsgo. I still couldn’t quite believe that the Human Game was really happening. It was like-well, I don’t know if it was like anything. But if it worked, I’d learn what I needed to know, what we all needed to know. And then, knowing… knowing…

  “You know, at best I’ll only see the moves,” Koh reminded me. “You’ll have to interpret.”

  I said I knew that, and I thanked her again. She smiled, like, Hey, no problem, we’re just hangin’ out anyway, right?

  As I think I mentioned, as far as anyone knew, this was going to be the first City Game since the one played in Teotihuacan k’atuns before. And given the way the art was dying out, this might turn out to be the last one anywhere. This Game was supposed to be a public demonstration of my ability to read the future, but it would really be Lady Koh who was doing the seeing, and she and I would be playing for our own reasons. And, if all went well, nobody else would find out the farthest-off or the most important things we’d see. We’d throw them a few solid predictions about the next few k’atuns, and keep the rest to ourselves.