Текст книги "The Sacrifice Game"

Автор книги: Брайан Д'Амато

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Текущая страница: 22 (всего у книги 45 страниц)

In the center of the bridge we met the spy. He came within twenty steps of us, wheeled around, and ran back to the Rattler House to warn Koh’s relatives. He was an expected part of the act. We stepped down off the bridge and up the steps to a small zocalo that led around the corner of the high council house and into an approach to the fresh serpent-headed wall of Koh’s new compound. There were squeals. Fifteen or so young girls-either Koh’s unmarried female relations or Rattler neophytes taking the part of them or some combination-blocked the entrance to the front court and started throwing pebbles at us, yelling that they weren’t going to let us in, they knew what we were up to, and they weren’t going to let me take Koh away from them even if we chopped them into little bits. I held my left hand over my last eye. The stones got larger and we backed away. Teentsy Bear must have actually gotten a painful hit because he yelped, a real rarity for him, and seemed about to start cursing the girls back. Of course, the little altercation was just another hoary ritual, but Teentsy had zero sense of humor and tended to take things too seriously. On The Left nudged him from behind, telling him to chill out. Sports types never knew how to behave.

“Blue-green daughters here, four breaths, please, four, jade daughters,” the cantor said, appearing from behind us.

The girls eased up on the damn rocks. The cantor walked up to them like Gandhi walking up to a line of British troops.

“A red blood begs for rest beside your hearth,” he said.

The gals calmed down and let him through. He entered the compound. We waited. After four hundred beats-about six minutes and fifteen seconds-the cantor appeared again, made the sign for “patience” at us, and went back in. We stood for another eight hundred beats. The deal was that he was supposed to be begging Koh’s parents to let us inside. I wobbled a bit on my snake-foot.

The cantor came out and gestured for my sponsors and the girls to follow him in. Still, I stood for another twelve hundred beats. The dressers touched up my face paint and dusted me with a sort of blue-clay talcum powder. The beater kept thumping. How did he stand it? I wondered. He was just a human clock. He must be crazy. Come to think of it, professional beaters did tend to act a little odd. The girls gawked at us while, at the same time, trying not to look interested. Finally the cantor came out a third time and gestured for me to come in. I told one of my dressers to run and get the gifts, although if they were on the ball the porters would have already followed us here. I blood-walked alone through the gate into the little courtyard. The first person I recognized was 3 Talon, the Caracara father-mother and aerial-clan patriarch, whom I’d last seen on the burning mul at Teotihuacan. Since he was Koh’s godfather he stood to the left of the single door to the house. 1 Gila, who was taking the part of Koh’s “father,” stood on the right. Lady Vanilla Orchid, Koh’s mother-her real, biological mother, by the way, brought with On The Left, at some risk and expense from Kaminaljuyu-stood way to the left, near the girls, between the charmingly named Lady Creosote Bush, Koh’s sort of mother superior from the Caracara Clan’s Orb Weaver Sorority, and Lady Sourdough, who had kind of the same relationship to Koh in the Rattler Society. Two Rattler monkey scribes crouched on a single mat next to the north wall, ready to take down everything anyone said. The giggle of girls crowded against the south wall with their backs to us, which was considered their most respectful position. I have to admit, purdah systems do have a certain eroticism. When women seem like a totally different and inaccessible species they’re maybe more violently attractive.

There was a pair of Rattler-blood guards at each corner of the yard, and a lookout crouching on each corner of the wall above them. One of Koh’s hunchbacks unrolled a reed trading mat, about one rope-length square, and I squatted on its eastern threshold side, with my back to the gate to show that I didn’t have any enemies. I saluted everyone in order, first 1 Gila-calling him “father”-and then my own so-called father, 4 Wren, and then this wife of his who was playing my mother, and finally Koh’s mother. I’m using the word salute, but really there were dozens of different sign-greetings, everything from banging your nose on the ground and licking the dirt to just stiffening up a little, and which one to use depended on who you were and whom you were talking to. Then there was a little interminable speech I had to say and a triply interminable speech back from each of them. Basically I just said, “Hi, my name’s 9 Wax, I’m not worthy,” and they said, “Hi, yeah, we know.”

My porters trooped in behind me ahead of cue. One of them stood behind me, holding a tall capped jar with my preserved leg inside, just to show that no enemy had gotten it and I was still, officially, a whole person. The head bearer laid three big balls of fresh highland jade, all ready to be worked, in the center of the mat. She stepped back as the other porters started laying baskets around the stones in radial arms, and then followed after them, counterclockwise around the mat, lifting off the close-woven lids. She started with the dishes in front of me, clusters of popped amaranth seeds held together by bright red achiote syrup and molded into Chak figurines, coiled strings of an especially rare kind of tiny chili pepper that supposedly made you bear male children, red manioc wafers and roasted mamey sapote, sweet potato meat sculpted into rabbits and parrots like baroque marzipan, and finally a vat of powdered cochineal extracted from what I figured must have been around two and a half billion cactus-scale Dactylopiae.

(50)

The server moved right, counterclockwise, and opened dishes of transparent-white luxury cornflower cakes like communion wafers, stacks of creamy-looking squash-seed pralines, and a set of four twenty-pound blocks of pure highland-spring salt carved into statuettes of the dwarf year-bearers, and, in a big bundle with claws and a head, the skin of a pure white bear from God knows how far north. Meanwhile the toastmaster launched into his speech on my behalf. It was a set form personalized for the occasion. First he went through all the work I’d supposedly done for Koh’s “parents.” Ordinarily, if you were from, say, a middle caste, you might have to help them with stuff for years, if you wanted to get a desirable wife out of them. But I’d basically gotten all that waived based on the heroic services I’d performed, “rescuing” her from Teotihuacan and winning the ball game and everything. Next he went into a spiel about how great I was, and finally he pointed out some salient features of the gigantic bride-price I was paying. Which I guess wasn’t a total sham-after all, a lot of Harpy land was going to Rattler immigrants-but of course Koh had really done all the negotiating and banking and gifts and everything herself. Anyway, I guess all weddings are at least a bit of a sham. While he was talking the server moved to the western quadrant, directly across the stones from me-practically at 1 Gila’s feet-and started revealing trays of long black vanilla beans, strings of savory dried black water-bugs from what’s now the Lago de Nicaragua, which supposedly made you immune to skin diseases, jars of sinister-looking black mushrooms, inky rolls of cured sharkskin, and finally twenty bricks of preservative linden leaves each wrapped around twenty smaller bundles of anise-scented avocado leaves, each of which contained two hundred and fifty-six sinkhole-grown cacao beans, roasted and ready for grinding. The last quadrant, on my left, started with baskets of papaya and pineapple strips from the islands crystallized in squash-flower honey. Next there were baskets of preserved marigolds, what they call Mexican tarragon, from Choula, and calabashes filled with orchid honey from the cloud forests, and last an item from Panama, still a recent novelty: a nine-string beaded breast-necklace of four hundred turquoise-eyed hummingbirds sculpted in hammered gold. Then the human gifts trooped in and squatted around the borders of the overflowing mat, two master carvers to work the jade, four dyers to handle the cochineal, and ten female chocolate mixers-who’d had been specially raised just to process and prepare chocolate drinks-each with her own clay grinding board and wood roller and her set of tall jars. The trickiest move they did was pouring the hot chocolate-infused liquid from one of the tall jars to the other, over and over, to raise the foam on it. The bigger the head of foam on your chocolate, the hotter shit you were. Anyway all sixteen servants were going to work for Koh’s household for the rest of their lives.

There were only two more presents to go. The first was my own idea, one I’d had made so that she could be surprised by at least one thing, not that gifts around here were supposed to be surprises. I unrolled its case and laid it next to the hearth-fire stones myself. It looked like an ordinary ironwood hand flute, but it was actually chromatic, with six-hole transverse fingering and pitched to D, instead of to the double-pentatonic minor scale they used around here. I’d started the project a hundred and twenty-six days ago, the day Koh introduced me to my severed leg, and it had taken until now to get it tuned and to the flautist to play it. I’d adapted the fingering to the Teotihuacanob style, so she could deal with it, but it would still put out scales no one here had ever heard before.

The last item was definitely a not-least. With an air of finality, the head bearer laid three accordion-folding tribute books across the cold hearth-fire stones. Each book was bound in plucked eagle skin and filled with tribute lists and coded maps representing rights to a hundred and eighteen villages and thousands of acres of Harpy farmlands. They were the only really serious part of the bride-price.

Enough, already, I thought. I’d been thinking of throwing in twelve bloods a-blooding, eleven dwarves a-dwarving, fifty-four other items, and a vulture in a prickly-pear tree. In fact-even though I know it sounds like some conspicuous-consumption event a la the Duc de Berry or the Miller Sisters-this wasn’t even the most elaborate royal wedding. Supposedly, seven hundred and twenty days ago, at the wedding of 1 Chocolate of Caracol, the eight-year-old groom had had four hundred thralls killed just for spectacle, without even offering them to any particular immortal. Of course, he might have been another victim of bad publicity.

The so-called in-laws looked everything over. If only Marcel Mauss could see this, I thought. Finally the room servants started gathering up the loot and 1 Gila said it was okay for me to enter the fucking house.

The room was big, maybe about the size and shape of the Oval Office-which isn’t that big-and except for an opaque screen of state at the back it was totally empty. Not for long, I thought. The two sets of parents and godparents sat on mats at the right side of the door. Teentsy Bear and I sat and faced them from the other side. The girls and the other female relations crowded behind the screen. It was rare for women ever to see men eating, but Koh was making an exception for her mother and my surrogate mother and the various godmothers. 1 Gila sent a “runner” to go get the High Midwife, who was probably watching everything through a hole in the wall anyway. A bearer brought him a basket and he took out a long halach wex, that is, your basic loincloth but very fancy with tiny scales, that is, beads, showing my glyphs and dubious accomplishments. More than a couple seamstresses must have gone blind getting the thing ready in just twenty days. He presented it to me with a presentation speech and I accepted it with an accepting speech. Before I was done everyone snapped into a respectful attitude. The high midwife crouched in.

She was an old Rattler greatfather-mother and besides being a midwife she was also what you might call the Rattler Society’s head. In a way, in the context of this one ceremony, she was the most important person here.

She saluted my father, Koh’s father, my mother, and Koh’s mother.

The toastmaster did the same. The bridal family struck “welcome” poses and saluted everybody else, in order of precedence, by name, with me last. Then the toastmaster saluted everyone again, with me last. I saluted back. Finally the midwife launched into her spiel to Koh’s parents. She said I obviously wasn’t good enough for their daughter, but since I’d worked so hard maybe they should go against their better judgment and let Koh come out of the gynaeceum. Finally, Koh’s parents gave in. One of the girls ran to get her. I counted two hundred and ninety-three beats before Koh appeared in the door. The strata of encrusted ornament seemed to grow out of her flesh, even the smiling jaws of the giant nurturing snake around her head didn’t so much seem to be a separate creature swallowing her as another part of a compound animal, antennae coiling in, under, around, and through her in stitches too complex to follow, fangs curling over her cheeks and around her neck down to her male-Rattler-adder pectoral insignia-and the two shrunken heads looking up from the sides of her wide belt set with eighteen Mixtec crystals, each of which was carved, in intaglio, with her portrait glyph:

She was all backlit by the morning sunlight and looked new-hatched just for display, like the mouthless imago of a male tiger moth on a milkweed, drying its wings. The four parents rose. I turned my head so I could see her with my right eye, even though it was gauche for me to move. My right eye-I mean, the one that wasn’t there-had developed this kind of nondarkness, this absence, like the part behind your head where you can’t see. It’s not dark, it’s just nothing, like death. At first it had just looked dark over there, like it was shut, but now I was this visually lopsided person.

Koh squatted at the threshold, morpho scales and quetzal and macaw plumes fluttering like she’d just flown down for a beat from her gemstone forest on the surface of the sun and she was still shaking off drops of thermoluminescent liquids that deliquesced in the air, leaving flakes of spiced copper-leaf floating to the floor. She held a long k’inil wal in her dark hand, sort of a long combination fan and fly whisk, basically a bunch of thin cloth streamers and strings of flower-petals on the end of a rod, with a perfume sachet at the base, like a Japanese hare stick. Her face would have seemed blank if there hadn’t been a hint that something was unbearable to her. The effect was childlike or even frightened, and I almost thought that through everything I could make out some emotion, maybe even that same old bittersweet song twitching at the curved border between dark and light that ran just left of her left eye.

(51)

I still wish I could say Koh decided to marry me because she was crazy about me, but I don’t think that was the way it was. I think she found me intriguing. Or at best fun in a liberating way. More than once during my convalescence-that is, when she had a free minute to drop in, and wasn’t busy booting up her new empire-she said she owed me for my silence. She used the words “ makik uchi,” “meritorious silence under torture.”

I hadn’t spilled the beans on the earthstar stuff, I hadn’t sold her out to 2JS, and so she was going to honor her promise to force the five Ixian clans to make me ahau of Ix for the remainder of my section of the cycle. But like I say, that wasn’t the main reason either. What she really needed to do was to legitimate her name. As a first step I’d already been installed in absentia as head of the Harpy House of Ix, that is, I had to take 2 Jeweled Skull’s former position and titles. I got the feeling from her-as much as I could get out of her, in my little room, with her monkey secretaries there, and the sounds of construction outside-that legitimating me had been one of her trickier behind-the-scenes manipulations, and even though her army was in control of Ix it had taken more than a few little assassinations and exiles. But Koh was never one to say anything had been difficult. It was always fait accompli, no prob. I could hardly even get her to talk about how she’d gotten away from Ix and back to her army after the first battle, or ten thousand other things, although I did get a notion of what had gone on that I figured was close to accurate. Evidently Koh had let herself be “protected,” or really captured, by the Ocelots. Then, when 2 Jeweled Skull had taken over, she’d bought her freedom by giving him the tzam lic drugs and apparatus and three captives that he thought were the Scorpion-adders from the Puma House of Tamonat. The trade probably helped make 2JS overconfident, and certainly it gave the Ocelots of Ix fewer bargaining chips. But at some point after Koh had rejoined 1 Gila, 2JS probably found out the Scorpion-adders were impostors. At any rate he sent people after Koh to kill her anyway. After that Koh had managed to stay ahead of the hit squad-who killed two of her doubles-until they got the gossip about the bad situation in Ix and gave up.

But during the second battle for Ix-“after 2JS’s short reign had collapsed in a hallucinogen-sodden rout,” as I liked to think of it-Koh had had to trade 2JS the three real Scorpion-adders to get me out. She also had to let him go, of course, and he’d probably taken them with him in his retreat force, which she said was only eight score or so bloods. I figured Koh had probably mastered the tzam lic anyway and didn’t even need them anymore.

I felt not quite like a pawn, maybe, but definitely like a commodity. Still, Koh had kept to her end and gotten me out and that meant a lot, even if I was just part of her bid to establish herself. It all got me to thinking about my whole thing, what was going on and what had gone on before, I mean, before the downloading. I’d just look up at the lengthening cracks in the new plaster and flip through images of my life, trying to think of things that would distract me from my itching stump.

I asked Koh where she thought 2 Jeweled Skull had gone, and without answering that-annoyingly, a lot of people around here didn’t exactly answer questions, they just sort of commented on them-she said that she thought she might be able to take him again, and that there were people working on tracking him down. I figured she meant the Caracara Clan of Teotihuacan, the ones she’d invited down here along with everybody else. Even back on the mul in Teotihuacan, when she was talking to 3 Talon and I hadn’t heard what they were talking about, she was probably already making that deal, that if she were in charge she’d help the Caracara Clan of Teotihuacan expand into the Ixian area and would deed their leaders some choice formerly Ocelot land-on the condition that they turn over 2 Jeweled Skull. She’d probably convinced them that he was a danger to the house anyway.

Which was true, kind of. Or at least he was a loose cannon. In the end 2JS was too much of a fraidycat. He didn’t take his new information far enough, he couldn’t get his head around the various paradoxes my consciousness had brought him, and really it was no wonder he’d gotten confused and screwed up.

Koh was curious. I mean, she had curiosity. She couldn’t get enough history. She made me go over and over the dates and events of the Conquest until she could recite them herself, which she did with a kind of morbid relish. She’d spent her whole life training to figure out just a little bit of the future, and as good as she was at it, for her it was at best like being blindfolded and given ten beats to feel her way through a cathedral. And then suddenly here was someone who’d actually seen it. She was fascinated by the idea of a time when women were closer to the social equals of men. She kept asking whether I thought of women as equal in every respect, and I said I flattered myself that I did, except it was obvious they weren’t as good as men at collecting baseball memorabilia. She couldn’t get enough of whatever I could remember about powerful women in Old World and latter-day New World history, and she’d just sit there filling my sickroom with cigar smoke while I told her about the three Cleopatras, Zenobia, Joan of Arc, Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, Catherine the Great, Margaret Thatcher, Eva Peron, Madonna, Hillary Clinton, Rigoberta Menchu, Marena, Jenny McCarthy, whoever. She asked whether women fought in wars and I said combat still-and of course I’m using the word still inadvisedly-wasn’t so popular with them as it was with guys. She asked a lot about war, to the point where I thought she might be thinking about training a crossbow squad. She still didn’t get the captives thing, though. She was like, what’s the point if you have to give back your trophies? Nor did she grok the concept of an equal-opportunity society. In her world you either baked tortillas or whacked your enemies-or, rather, watched your hirelings whacking them-and if you didn’t, you were a social nothing, no matter whether you were an architect, a great fresco painter, a Rattler monk, a cantor like On The Left, a flesh picker, or her much-loved favorite dwarf.

Nerds are forever, though. As I might have expected, she made me go over math more than any other subject. She wasn’t too impressed by Arabic numerals-which are actually Indian, by the way, that is, East Indian-but she was amazed by trig and higher equations and, especially, game theory. Sometimes, after a couple of hours of giving her Probability 101 problems and watching her work them out on a bean abacus, I’d start feeling like if I’d wanted to teach freshmen I’d have stayed home, but I don’t think I ever quite lost patience. Anyway, she was a quick study. She was less interested in art and literature and didn’t get the notion of art for art’s sake, whatever that was. But that stuff is hard to describe. She asked about modern musical scales a couple of times and I tried to demonstrate them but Chacal’s singing voice was one thing that wasn’t much better than Jed 1 ’s. We made paper helicopters and airplanes and unit-origami crystals. She loved them so much she refused to burn them. “They’ll rot in a few revolvings”-seasons-“anyway,” she said, which was true.

At first I thought I was just opening up to her because I was lonely, but I have to admit I got to liking her. Obviously she reminded me of Marena in a lot of ways, except Marena was all screwed up and sassy-talking and flashily brilliant, and Koh was graver and about a million times more spiritual. Koh had a stately centeredness that would seem chilly. To twenty-first century Westerners, she’d have made Gong Li look warm. As exceptional as she was, she was totally Maya.

Which did ultimately become a source of friction between us. At one point when she’d dropped by late in the afternoon with some accounts she wanted me to look over she’d mentioned that two villagesful of Ocelot partisan captives were going to be offered at a “racing feast” that night, that is, just for entertainment. It meant that everyone was going to get popped, including the smallest kids. And if I knew anything about the behavior of victorious bloods, Rattler or not-who were mainly just pumped-up corn-beer-soaked teenagers, after all-the civilians were going to be in for a bumpy time. One thing they were doing lately-that is, one of the trendy torture fads-was making the captives swallow little bags of bean flour, one after another. Then they’d force water down their throats and the poor bastards would puff up with beans and gas and explode. Another one they’d probably do at the same event was this thing where they’d tie the subject on top of a stump and force him to kill himself with a little hook, ripping at his own veins. The idea was that if he wasn’t dead by sundown they’d stake him up and leave him for the birds. Anything where the subject was given a choice was considered more interesting.

Anyway, I told Koh I wished she’d tell them to just cool it. She said I could make humanitarian laws when I was in charge.

I said it didn’t matter what I did, that she should do what she oughta do. I started laying this whole trip on her about personal responsibility and innocence and everything.

She asked how many people I figured had died in agony in this k’atun. When I didn’t answer right away she asked how many I figured had died badly in the seventeen hotunob between ours and yours?

I said between ten and twenty billion, but that it didn’t make it all right. One does what one can, I said.

She just said it sounded like the so-called twenty-first century was a lot worse, and without any dignity besides.

I agreed but said it wasn’t my fault.

Fault is treachery to your own family, she said. Not doing the ordinary thing with your enemies.

I said maybe she had too many enemies and not enough family, but the minute I said it, it sounded like Deepak Chopra or something. Anyway, I wasn’t going to change her on this issue anytime soon. Koh wasn’t a cruel person, she was just from her own patch of the space-time curve.

So maybe in some ways we really were too different. At least she didn’t have self-esteem problems, I thought. No hesitation in asserting authority. She was a textbook illustration of how, no matter how patriarchal the society, a few of the very smartest women always manage to get themselves put in charge of things. Even if she had to get hitched to a weirdo like me.

But she and I couldn’t spend much time getting more acquainted. There were still problems. On the day of the ball game 9 Fanged Hummingbird had been counting on the fact that whatever happened with 2 Jeweled Skull, the Puma coalition under Severed Right Hand was only eighteen or nineteen days away. Now-that is, now at the time of the wedding-he’d camped north of the later Palenque, only four days away, undoubtedly trying to find out if Koh was solidly enough in charge to get a defense together. At least she’d entrenched her position enough to force Severed Right Hand to be careful. And if she stayed on top of things and shored up her defenses, he might be reluctant to attack the city at all. Supposedly his troops were feeling the water shortage and the distance from home. But it wasn’t anything to get flip about. Anyway, one way or another, I let her get everything together and here we were.

Koh looked up. My “father” 14 Wounded crossed to her and took the end of her k’inil wal, her fan, in his right hand. She inclined her head and said the equivalent of “Yours” or “At your service,” calling him “Father” for the first time. He handed the fan to her own “father,” 1 Gila, and she saluted him in the same way, and then she greeted her mother, and finally my so-called mother took her fan and helped her up. An attendant folded up the door cloth and let in about twenty other relatives, or I guess you’d say guests, Alligator Root and Koh’s other advisers, and Hun Xoc and 14 Black Gila, and basically the whole gang. Koh and her party took their mats on the right side of the door, facing the so-called parents. I was in the middle, facing the screen in the back, sort of linking the two sides. Sometimes at these things there was another big screen down the center of the room to keep even the closest-related women separate, but in Ixian society, at least when I was there, it was considered classier for the women just not to look at the men and be sure to eat a course after the men were done with it. The whole thing was who could look at whom, the married parents could look at each other, the toastmaster could more or less look at everybody, the thralls couldn’t look at anybody, Koh and I could look at each other, a cat could look at a queen, whatever.

I suppose all the ceremony sounds pretty silly to us modrin folk. But when you were living it, it was different, it was obvious how crucial it was. It wasn’t just bearing, it was an attitude. It kept everything together, it made life bearable, it was like you could make every gesture a work of art, like life was danced, and the main virtue was to be a great dancer. When it worked, you got what everyone wanted most from the world-applause. It was like everyone got the chance to be an actor in this grand, ornate drama of church, state, and media all in one.

We could hear sounds of a crowd outside, families from our dependent clans who’d heard about the procession over the bridge and had followed and been allowed onto the peninsula. It sounded like it was mainly kids asking for handouts. The guards had orders to keep them quiet but to hand out honey tamales to everyone, and then to everyone again and again. So the throng would probably triple by the end of the meal. Some of the cantor’s apprentices were addressing the crowd, repeating his version of what was happening in the forbidden court.

Each set of parents sat and saluted the Toastmaster again, one by one and in order. 14 Black Gila ordered his servitors to bring in the marriage table. It was large and low, like a Japanese tea table, newly built for this occasion and scheduled to be destroyed immediately afterward. Waiters brought out miniature canoes full of fresh water and poured them into tripedal basins.

“Now take the basin, wash each other’s mouth,

Each other’s hands,” the cantor said, “and taste,

But not too greedily, not to excess.”

Oh, please, I thought. Enough with Big Nanny. But of course I did exactly as he said.