Текст книги "The Sacrifice Game"

Автор книги: Брайан Д'Амато

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Текущая страница: 12 (всего у книги 45 страниц)

(25)

That was all.

Well, fine. Now, what the bleeding hell did she mean?

We tried again and again, of course, and then, when the tsam lic had worn off, we went over and over the game. Night fell, or maybe just happened. Koh’s shall-we-say praetorian guard prowled around us with increasing impatience and eventually with real alarm, begging us to rejoin the army. Finally she got me to admit that I accepted it, that is, that I accepted the fact that everything I’d done up until now had been useless, that the notes and the jars of tsam lic and the Lodestone Cross burial and all that I’d been so pathetically proud of wouldn’t stop the real doomster, and that if we wanted to work out who the doomster was, or how to stop him, or anything more specific than what we’d just seen, we’d have to play the Sacrifice Game on a vastly larger scale. A human game, specifically. And if that didn’t work I’d have to get my brain back to the twenty-first century in relatively good condition. Either way, we’d have to get back to Ix.

Sometimes-at times like this, I’d say, especially-one might as well just go with the cliche: I was crushed. Yes, it’d be nice to come up with a more clever word than crushed, but really, why bother? Crushed pretty well does the job.

What surprised even me, though, was how much I wasn’t crushed just because I was a lazy slob and I’d thought I could relax. It was that I-even I-was rather annoyed, in fact more than annoyed, in fact, let’s say again, crushed-that the world was still doomed. And I even realized that I cared about it in the general sense, not just personally, that even if I died back here from my neuroblastomas or in a ball game or by the flint dagger or the wooden sword or whatever, even if I didn’t get back to the thirteenth b’aktun to see Marena and the gang and catch the next season of Game of Thrones, I still wanted the good old crazy ratty loathsome ridiculous old world to keep rolling on.

Okay. Look. We can do this, I thought. We’re young, we still have a lot of our health left, we’re capable, we know more stuff than anybody else in the whole world. Just go with the best bet. Get to Ix and help 2JS get put in charge of the place. And in return he’ll help us get together a human game. No sweat. Right?

Wrong. Oh, God are we fucked. We are so very fucked. Royally fucked we fucking very are Cancel that. Buck up. Man up. Gird your loins into the sticking place. Forward, crawl.

At the Isthmus of Tehuantepec we turned yelloward off the commercial track and onto a single-file path through what they called the Protectorship of the Brown Ants. It was the floor of a Devonian sea, coarse calcium sand made of diatoms and crinoid stems and the scales of ancient armored fish. The dunes gave evidence of nocturnal use, musky ropes of fox scat and the parallel-gash tracks of sidewinders, but daylight was dead. Sometimes we’d pass a lump of armadillos, poking around like big sow bugs and licking ants off crumbled lobes of brain coral. Supposedly some of the convert-bloods behind us complained that we were leading them into Kikilbaj, what the Aztecs would later call Miclantechutli, the desert graveyard at the zeroth world’s ragged edge. They kept flipping out about the celestial Puma and Jaguars who were supposedly spying on us, and they were constantly doing all sorts of pathetic little rituals, combinations of bribes, apologies, foster adoptions, and threats. In the unfashionable rear of the now seemingly endless procession, families were offering their younger children to the lords of their hearth fires, making them swallow ashes or ramming hot stones into their eyes.

Another Puma band hit us again that night and we lost four bloods, fifty porters, and three or four hundred thralls. It was only the worst in a long and repetitious string of attacks. Things weren’t going well. At dawn Hun Xoc, speaking for Lady Koh, called a war session. There weren’t many good ideas. Finally 1 Gila suggested we split the forces in two. 1 Gila would take the main body-Koh’s “Four Hundred families” of converts-and would continue southeast along this route. They’d take our palanquins and standards and some of our dressers, so that they could put together look-alikes of me and Hun Xoc. The rest of us, the Harpy bloods, 14 Wounded’s group, and Koh’s officers, greatmothers, and “capturing bloods,” would get rid of our markings and detour southwest, heading the long way down the coast in a much smaller elite unit. Hun Xoc and his squad would stay with us to escort us to Ix, and the other ten emissaries and runners would go with the Four Hundred families. Severed Right Hand’s men would almost certainly follow the bigger group.

It sounded like the right thing tactically but it was a cold move. The untrained converts would be way out in the breeze drawing fire. Koh might be sacrificing half her converts. On the other hand, there were a hundred and sixty score of them now. Even if only eighty thousand made it to Ix they’d be enough to tip the scale of the battle in 2JS’s favor.

Anyway, Koh eventually agreed and 1 Gila’s plan carried the day. At one point Hun Xoc took me aside and said he was a little nervous that 1 Gila would just take off and not make it to Ix at all, but after kicking it around for a while we decided that really they had nowhere else to go. They were marked outcasts far from their now-nonexistent homes, and at this point they’d either get to Ix in a hurry or get eaten. And some of them would get through. We worked out routes that would get both of us into Ix at the same time: The big army would take the direct route to Ix, marching in daylight, and we’d have to hustle around the long way at night.

I functioned. I sat on the strategy committee. I advised Koh. I played a running hipball game whenever the army passed a usable court, and then, as I slept, my bearers ran me to the next court. And I got some of my skills back, nothing like what I’d been as Chacal, but still not bad. But it happened in this smog of despair, that feeling like you’ve suddenly realized that the world is constructed entirely out of damp corrugated cardboard, and of no further interest because, no matter how elaborately and even artistically you cut, fold, paint, and arrange it, damp cardboard is still just damp cardboard. Only, this time it wasn’t just in my mind, it was really the case, the world was going to wink out just as it would be getting interesting. Even though I was way back here, that is, “back” here, in 664, it felt as though the end was going to come tomorrow, later today, in an hour, in a minute, before the end of this sentence, now-and really, in terms of historical time, let alone geological time, it was only an instant away. Oh hell, oh hell, oh hell, oh hell.

Weirdly, though, Koh seemed to understand. She kept surprising me that way. I mean, with what she could understand. And even though the end of the thirteenth b’aktun would be so long after her own time, when everyone she knew would be lucky even to be bones and not just dust, she still wanted the world to continue. Although I think she mainly thought of it in terms of wanting her descendants to continue, but even so… anyway, just after the birth of the next sun we were slogging along on the south bank of the Rio Coatzacoalcos, and I was curled up in my palanquin cursing the day I was born and all other days and all others who had been born, and she had my bearers bring me alongside her and, as we jogged along, she started a conversation-almost a modern-style conversation between equal and skeptical people and not an Olde Mayaland-style formal court exchange.

“Writing it all down wouldn’t be good enough anyway,” Koh said. As far as she was concerned, the Game was such a subtle and physical art that only directly transmitted skill was worth anything. “You have to show your eagle a way to your b’aktun”-by my eagle she meant my primary uay, like my self, or as we’d say, my brain-“and you need to be there yourself to ask Star Rattler to sacrifice another thirteen of the segments of his body, to give your world another thirteen b’aktuns.”

“I can’t say I see a likely route,” I said.

“We’ll plan the route together, at the human game,” she said. “ K’ek’wa’r. ” That is, “Double strength,” or, roughly, “Courage.”

I signed a thank-you-next-to-me.

I have something to show you, she signed back.

(26)

Koh had her wickerworkers weave us a temporary ramada and set us just off the towpath alongside the Atoyac River. The day was steamy but it was cool under the cypresses and you could smell the tannin and hear the brown noise of the rushing brown water. Four of her deafened guards set out jars and baskets of drinking water, set up four wide rush screens around us, and took up their positions crouching with their backs to us, watching. Hun Xoc and a few other bloods sat at a distance, between us and the river. Armadillo Shit sat behind me and Koh’s dwarf sat on her shoulder. It was the smallest number of people Koh and I had had around us since before we’d left Teotihuacan, and there wasn’t any chance of our being seen or overheard, but even so, Koh looked around for a minute, listening, before she took something out of her bundle.

It was a polished deer rib. She dipped it in one of the little jars and then stirred the rib around in a second water jar. She said something to her dwarf in their personal code. The dwarf slid down, held her breath, covered the first jar, picked it up, carried it ten steps away to a little channel that ran to the river. Delicately-to her it was a respected living thing-she poured the water into the channel and then, not delicately, she dropped the pot and lid down in after it, shattering them.

I looked down into the drinking-water-pot. Cripes, I thought. What I’m getting is that this is some potent-ass shit. Koh took a dried marigold out of her little kit, picked a single tiny petal off it with a pair of horn almost-chopsticks, dipped the petal into the jar, stuck the tweezers into the mat like a double mast with a single wet flag at the top, and covered the jar. She moved a little myrtle torch closer to the petal, dried it, took it off the tweezers with her fingers, and tore it in half like it was a tab of LSD. She popped one of the halves in her mouth and gave me the other. I could practically hear Grateful Dead music playing in the background. I put the petal on my tongue.

“Boiling this doesn’t much hurt its power,” she said,

“They’d have to steam-distill their drinking water.”

The exact word meant “steamed onto cloth,” but it meant distill. Which no one would do anyway. With only clay or wood or leather or whatever vessels it was hard to boil water in big quantities, and people were in the habit of relying on mountain-spring water diverted or fetched directly to their homes. In Ix the drinking-water system was separate from the irrigation systems, which in turn were separate from the water in the artificial lake and the canal system, which was much more tannic and saline. Supposedly all the “sacred original” water, that is, the pure water, came from the Never-Empty Font of Waterlily Ocelot, the central reservoir of Ix. The huge cistern was fed directly from two cold underground streams that burst out the side of the hill. It was the heart of the city and the umbilical cord of the world, the Tree of 400 ^ 4 Branches, woven when the Earthtoad was a soft-shelled egg. Water was more holy the more upstreamness it had, and when it came out of the earth and for some time thereafter it was under the direct control of the Ahau, the Lord of the Fertilizing Waters, and it fed the cities’ twelve drinking-water fountains and then, farther down the line of impurity, the whole system of floodgates that let the ahauob program the city’s irrigation cycles. The Ocelots had always owned the water, and it fed hundreds of little fountains through the city, both on the Ocelots’ peninsula and on the surrounding mainland. It had been one of the foundations of the Ocelots’ power since the beginning of the city as a tiny irrigation society over a thousand years ago.

“On the court you’ll face their garden,” she said, pointing at the spot,

“Their goal’s three hundred paces from the well

On their great-mul’s female side. Run for the mainland,

Pretend to drown yourself, and release the bag,

And hold out till the Ocelots’ eyes fog over.”

Sure, I thought. I bought an unction of a mountebank. I said it all sounded a little wacky, although of course I didn’t put it that way, I said it as well as possible in the high-equals language we were still using with each other. Even if all that went exactly according to plan, the minute people started freaking out from the usual water, the Ocelots would switch to some other source.

We lit cigars.

And how long do you think it will take them to feel it? she asked. Do you feel anything?

I said no, not really. Maybe my tongue felt a little numb and frisky, but I wasn’t giddy or anything. Given what a long day it had been I felt totally in control.

“Well, listen, if you take the court,” she said,

“You can always have this with you just in case.”

I said something along the lines of “Sure, whatever.” You’re delusional, babe, I thought. I guess again she could tell what I really thought because she said something like “Well, we may not need it anyway,” lit another pair of cigars, and handed me one. After a few puffs we exchanged cigars. It was a gesture of extreme hospitality.

I leaned back on Armadillo Shit and puffed. We exchanged cigars again, completing the little ritual.

“Just now this picture flew through me,” Koh said. “What would you say to it?”

I pointed to my ear, meaning that I was listening.

“If you could really move your ruling uay from one skin to another,” she said, “then you could stay on this level forever. You wouldn’t have to paddle downstream through the canyons.” She meant I wouldn’t have to die.

That’s right, I said. I could just possess someone younger. She was right. I’d thought about that particular implication of the consciousness transference only a couple of times. But there wasn’t any reason it wouldn’t work. You wouldn’t have to invent all the gigantic neural nets and zettabyte storage networks and everything else you’d need to make a mechanical substitute of the brain. You could just have yourself copied and zap into whoever. Or if you felt bad about killing someone that way you’d just clone a few babies of yourself, keep them drugged and unconscious until they get to a good brain-size age, and then use them as vessels. It might be a good growth industry to get into, I thought, another few billion for the Warren Organization.

Still, I can’t do this from here, I thought. Let’s not build castles in the air. Deal with the here-and-now here and now. And then if you get Back to the Future you can take care of Marena and Lindsay and the Warren Group and the whole unholy crew. Right?

Warren. Lindsay “Big Data” Warren. Christ allwhitey. Back to Square Zero. Hell.

Everything I’d gone through in 2012 seemed pretty remote. Once in a while I’d even catch myself thinking it hadn’t been real, that I was just a regular Maya ballplayer with delusional paranoia and a lot of imagination, and I’d have to remind myself that no old Maya dude could have made up the history of the entire Western world, no matter how clever he was.

And how clever am I? I wondered. Maybe Koh’s right to worry about 2 Jeweled Skull. Maybe I should worry more. Maybe I didn’t worry enough about coming here in the fucking first place. Maybe I hadn’t been that thoughtful about that whole business with the Warren Corporation.

I don’t know, Idunno, idddnnnow. I was getting pretty sure that Marena wouldn’t have gone to all the trouble of dealing with me if she hadn’t been thinking of sending me even then, from before the beginning.

Maybe Tony Sic never really wanted to go in the first place. The more I thought about it the clearer it seemed. They’d needed somebody inconsequential, so naturally they’d chosen little yo. Fruck. Yuck. Well, the joke’s on me HOT! OUUUCH, TA’, TA’, TA’! Shitskies! There were all these scalding drops of water on my face and I brushed them away. Confusion over us. Somehow I was lying on the ground and Armadillo Shit was rolling on top of me, squealing a little like he was in pain. Orange flies. Two bloods were pulling on me and we all fell back I squinted into the dark forest, toward the river. Hun Xoc and another person were rolling over broken pottery and pools of liquid. There were a couple of big thumps, Hun Xoc butting his head into the other person’s face. I looked around for Lady Koh and couldn’t find her and then it turned out she was behind me. She had a funny expression and at first I thought she was in pain but then saw that she was laughing silently. She’d gotten a few drops of hot stuff, too, but her dwarf was already daubing them with ointment, like one of those movie makeup people who rush in and redoes your entire look in the two minutes between takes. I looked back at Hun Xoc. The others were holding him up. The man he’d butted with his head was still on the ground, mashed and moaning. You couldn’t make out much of his face anymore, but his threadbare manto had been newly edged with Lady Koh Blue, which implied that he was one of the village elders who’d been adopted into our household and was, supposedly, serving us.

Well, I thought, I guess he really had tried to kill us. But I was laughing so hard that it took everyone a while to explain to me that it had been an assassination attempt, that the dude had tried to throw a pot of boiling oil into our faces. They also explained that we were under attack again, but even though I could hear the alarm calls and the whistles of bull-roarers, it still all seemed incredibly funny to me, no prob, no sweat, no brain, no pain, and I still couldn’t stop giggling.

They bundled me into a sled and we took off. I squinted up at the beige sky. It turned pink and then green and then, oddly for a sky, it disappeared. Boy, I guess that crud really does creep up on you after all, I thought. So let’s see, if it had taken about a hundred-score beats to hit me last night, it might take three times as long in cold water, so maybe you could count on over a half a day of delay. Maybe Koh really had a point with that stuff.

Nobody’d gotten anything out of the village greatfather who’d tried to kill Koh or me or both of us. The other elders said he had been out foraging the day before and had probably gotten co-opted by the Pumas then. The Harpy bloods started to kick the other elders around but I was pretty sure none of them had anything to do with it and got them to let them go. My good deed for the month. Well, the year. Lifetime. It was hard to even tell them what I wanted since I was still cackling like a moron, but Hun Xoc asked Koh whether I’d had too much wild tobacco-which was strong enough to be hallucinogenic in medium doses-and Koh said probably. She didn’t want to tell the Harpy Clan or even the Rattlers about the earthstar compound until the last possible moment, in case somebody got captured and turned.

Again, embarrassingly, I giggled. Maybe things weren’t really so bad.

(27)

In the youth of the fifth sun following we were in a desert again, and a sixty-blood Puma raiding party somehow got ahead of us under cover of a sandstorm. For a while our bloods dug in and protected our flanks, but by dawn it was clear from the long-distance way the Pumas were fighting that they were just trying to hold us up until the main body of troops under Severed Right Hand could get to us. So we started off, without even going after them. It’s like in Go, sometimes the more you ignore the opponent and don’t even deign to respond to what he’s doing, the better off you are. We kept our convoy in the closest thing to a real defensive march formation we could manage but took some losses on the flanks. Hun Xoc led a party of running spearmen ahead and then back, to try to come up on the Pumas from the rear, but they kept ducking into dry-gulches and getting away. You still couldn’t see much out here, it was like those crummy overpriced photos of Mars.

All during the march that day we-I mean we fearless leaders-ran back and forth and counted and formed up the squadrons. As soon as night covered us three hundred and twenty of us hotshots split off from the big line. 1 Gila’s whole group and thirty-one score Rattler bloods were with them, so they weren’t defenseless. But we hardly sent any Harpies with them, only a score of 14 Wounded’s men and four Ixian Harpy bloods. Good luck, guys, I thought. Have fun taking the heat. Poor bastards.

We rubbed deer feces on our calves-like all Mesoamerican warriors, we dragged along big baskets of the stuff-and silent-marched all night, without audible signals and on new rubber-soled sandals, and camped at dawn under the last stand of trees at the edge of a plain that led down to what I think was later the Rio Mezcalapa. It seemed we hadn’t been followed. At dusk we crept out into the flats and down a long, long incline into marshes of scrub cypress and hyacinths. It seemed like ninety percent of the ground was impassable bog. I couldn’t believe how much you’d have to go the long, long way around, how you’d see a destination hill ahead and have to zig and zag in the opposite direction to get there. I remember mainly wasted time and angst, the pi-r-squared longer everything took. I got the feeling we were avoiding some places because of their bad mojo even though the routes we took were actually more dangerous. I marched or rather jogged myself almost all the time now, building up my lung capacity for the possible ball gig, even though I could still have done the rickshaw thing if I wanted everyone to think I was a total wuss. Dopamine from the exertion kept fogging my head and sometimes I couldn’t even remember who was planning what, I kept breathing “Did I miss something, did I miss something?” as a running-mantra. Did we all miss something? It all kept shifting. What didn’t Hun Xoc tell us? What was Koh really up to? She and I talked every day but somehow we never got around to what she was thinking, it was always what I thought everyone else was thinking. Anyway, she was spending most of her time now interrogating the captive Pumas. Just after the birth of the Grandfather Heat who was also the grandfather of the sun of the great-hipball game-that is, two days before the game-we pushed through into the high forest road along what would later be called the Grijalva River and stopped to meet with two of Koh’s runners from her “Four Hundred,” her army of converts.

The runners said that 1 Gila’s Four Hundred had lost nearly a fifth of their men and more of the women, but they’d also picked up a few villages, even without Koh, and they were on schedule. Hun Xoc sent a different pair of runners back with a message for them to head through the Macaws’ Pass into the Harpy House’s hunting preserves, on the east side of Ix. From there 2 Jeweled Skull’s men would get them as close to the city as possible, less than a hundred-score beats’ march away from the red eastern gate. We also decided to send the three Scorpion-adders and the sensitive cargo-sleds with them instead of taking a chance that the Ocelot inspectors would ask to go through them, even though the really major stuff was in false bottoms under boxes of Koh’s rattlesnakes.

And when we get the word to them, they move in, Koh added. The runners went off and we moved out again, marching in daylight. We were late. In the next sun’s middle age, near what they later called Santa Cruz, we got onto the great western sacbe, a laser-straight causeway with a whitewashed macadam under blue mirage puddles and spews of heat distortion. I hoped we looked fearsome and dragonish, sliding down the immense walkway like a spiny caterpillar on the edge of a porcelain cleaver. If it weren’t for the curvature of the earth we could have seen Ix at its vanishing point far to the east, surrounded by yellow corn plots and orchards. Seeing my ancestral country in its prime-even all withering in the drought, it still looked a lot more prosperous than it would in the bad old twenty-first-made me feel kind of homesick, I kept wondering what Marena would say about all this. She’d have all sorts of isn’t-this-fun apercus.

At dusk runners from 1 Gila came in and said the Four Hundred Newborn Clans were at Two Kinds of Jade, near Palenque, which meant they were behind schedule. Hun Xoc sent them back with a message to double their pace again even if they had to split off a temporary camp for the stragglers and leave them behind. It wouldn’t do for us to get into Ix if they weren’t around to back us up. On our end he forced an extra march overnight and we managed to sight the glow of festival smoke from Ix before dawn on the day of the big ball game. Monkey accountants scampered up and down the line doing the final count-we were down to only about eleven thousand bloods and forty thousand porters-and telling everyone to look peaceable. Even though the road was a free zone we were over Black Macaw territory and had to be cool and act like we weren’t an army, just acquaintances of 2JS’s. A quarter after the zenith, outside Ix’s fourth and outermost circle of palisades, the signal for “weapons ready but not visible” came down through the file, like a wave of motion through our collective centipede. 9 Fanged Hummingbird’s runners had come up. I pushed forward to the back of the van and watched the little conference. One of Koh’s palanquins was there, but for all I knew it wasn’t the one with her in it. The Ocelot ambassadors were all decked out in their signature emerald-green under their tetrahedral parasols and speaking in this really haughty lilt, dandies from the capital slumming it out in the hinterlands. They recited a formal invitation to the great-hipball game, which would start after dawn at the Second Twin Setting, which meant about three-hundred-score beats from now. They made it sound like a huge favor and a big deal, like getting tickets for the Super Bowl. Then, before Hun Xoc could respond, they said they only had room for two hundred of the Rattler’s guests-it was understood that they meant only blooded clan members-and couldn’t properly receive the rest in the city.

So what, it wasn’t supposed to be up to them, I thought, if one of the competing clans had room for a lot of guests, that was their business. Fine, fine, I thought, we’ll crash the afterparty.

Hun Xoc stood facing them in the direct sunlight. He took his time about answering, not even flinching at the deerflies biting him. I wondered if their biting meant rain was coming. If it did, Koh’s idea with the earthstar compound was screwed from go.

It was a bit of a tense moment. If we didn’t accept, it would be an insult and an excuse to start a fight right now. We were in the weakest possible position, uncamped and tired. Since we were on settled hostile ground, our scouts hadn’t been able to check out our flanks. If the Ocelots hit us now they’d be dug in with an easy retreat and we’d be way out in the breeze.

Hun Xoc had signaled that he was ready to answer.

“We all accept with thanks,” he said, “but how

Can we desert our children on the road?” he asked.

The Ocelots drew back and conferred. Evidently they didn’t want to wait here while the runners got the answer to 9 Fanged Hummingbird and brought back his response. Eventually they worked out that we’d all go into Ix, but that a hundred and twenty of our bloods would have to stay as “guests,” that is, really, hostages, in the Ocelots’ grounds on the mainland, far from the temple district. Hun Xoc agreed and made the division, taking the best fighters with us in our two hundred and leaving the others in the lurch. We said greatfathers-protect-yous and did a few little extreme-unction-ish rituals. We’ll never see them again, I thought.

While that was going on covert runners from 1 Gila came in at the back of our line and we had to wait for the damn Ocelots to leave before we could talk to them. 1 Gila’s news wasn’t good. He’d been slowed down by a bad raid and had had trouble making the split. When the runners had left they were still only at Ch’uuk sal-“Sweetwater”-which was still over a full normal day away. We sent back a message asking how much of the force could he get to Ix for the ball game, assuming the first ball dropped on schedule, exactly at the death of Grandfather Heat. I kept asking stupid questions. How long would the hipball truce protect us? Would the Ocelots come after 2JS after the festival, or during it, or even during the ball game? Finally even Hun Xoc told me to quiet down. By full sunlight we’d hired four hundred local porters to carry us into Ix and got the hell going. We wanted all our bloods to be fresh and feisty and ready to kick some head.