The Sacrifice Game Read online

  I moved back to one of the long, narrow Ball Brethren sleeping toboggans—for some reason they had a team of four watchdogs pulling it today, instead of the usual pairs of thralls—and crashed between two of my teammates. It was male-on-male cozy in a way that would have weirded me out as fagophobic old Jed. We trudged on through the night. What I thought were low stars behind the smoke turned out to be bonfires up in the hills that loomed invisibly on both sides of the trail. Just before the next dawn an alarm went down the line. There were always hairless dogs barking, arfing, and yipping, but some of us could distinguish the voices of the actual watchdogs, and when their pitch went up, it meant we were under attack. The Teotihuacanians were ahead of us, just like Lady Koh had said, but somehow they’d managed to ambush two veintenas of our forerunnners and they were closer than we’d allowed for. Ahead of me Koh gave the first of her coded commands. Armadillo Shit stripped off my wristlets and anklets and other rank signifiers and wrapped me up like I was a low-clan elder. My manto looked normal, but it was made of quilted cotton filled with sand, which pretty effectively stopped most thrown darts. Naturally, Koh had prohibited me from fighting. But for some reason—maybe it was emotion carrying over from Chacal—I realized that, irrationally, I really, really wanted to get my hands bloody.

  Well, resist that impulse. It didn’t matter. Right? Why should it? I shouldn’t care about these people. Those I fight I do not hate, I thought. Those I guard I do not love. Except maybe I did. Already I could hear the moan of long bull-roarers and the grunts and occasional screams from up ahead. Then there was another hoarse sound, children screaming through megaphones. It’s a pretty hard sound to describe, like cats in traps, maybe, but more sort of bagpipish, so much so that I wondered whether bagpipes had first been invented to imitate it. Severed Right Hand was torturing some of his youngest captives. Then there were the ringing sparks of flint points in the last dark, like little stone bells, and the barely audible click of darts leaving the spear-throwers, and the hisses and sizzles as the first of the flaming spears came in. The line started to smell like a giant pit latrine, as all battles do, plus vomit, and with the addition of chili smoke. Jaguar-Scorpion battle-cries welled up and the Rattler bloods started screeching coded instructions to each other—we did have war cries, by the way, but I never heard any that were like that whoo-whoo-whoo thing the Plains tribes do in old movies—and at the same time one of the Harpy bloods who was shielding me put his hand up to his face and picked a thin blowgun-dart out of one eye, like a long flowered thorn stretching out forever. Even in the firelight reflected off the smog-roof I could see the point was wrapped in the black-and-yellow-striped skin of a harlequin creeper. I suppressed a flinch. You couldn’t let anything faze you in front of these people. But if you could just suck it up, you were almost home.

  We crouched with our shields up and backed into the crowd of Rattler bloods behind us. The blood who’d been hit broke from the group, turned around with his bloody wink, and saluted us—our salute was generally more of a casual “Hey, bro,” than a military deal—and ran wobblingly off to charge the Jaguars while he was still alive. While that was happening and before it was over a runner came through from Hun Xoc and led us farther back into a narrow pass. Koh’s entourage was already in the center. They set guards at each end so that if it looked like we might get cut off on one side we’d get ready to break on the other. I listened, trying to separate the code-calls from the screeches and the whirs of whistle-spears, but couldn’t get anything. It was still too dim to see detail. Someone was pushing through to us. It was Hun Xoc. He said the outrunners didn’t think Koh had been singled out yet, so neither had I. We should just dig in. In the meantime 1 Gila had taken a division south and was going to come back in from the east with noise like there were a whole lot more of us.

  Well, the plan sounds—oh, wait. Who the hell is 1 Gila? Okay. The largest Teotihuacanian war clan that was solidly bonded to Koh and her Star Rattler Cult—and so were declared enemies of Severed Right Hand—were the Lineage of the Acaltetepón, that is, Heloderma horridum, the Mexican beaded lizard. 1 Gila wasn’t the patriarch of the clan—that was his much older uncle—but he was their war leader, and he was probably Lady Koh’s most powerful supporter.

  Okay.

  Well, the plan sounds great, I thought. Yup. You’ve got my blessing. I asked about our second-largest battle-ready group, 3 Talon’s contingent and the rest of his Mexican Eagle Clan. Or let’s be correcter and say “Caracara Clan.” Hun Xoc said they were fighting other feline clans themselves, but that as far as he could tell they’d already split off. Just before we needed them. The spies said they were going to consolidate in a fortified Caracara town about four jornadas west of the Valley. We didn’t know what they’d do after that. Probably they’d try to start another Teotihuacán-like city nearby with themselves in charge, although we knew from history that it wouldn’t be such a big deal. Anyway, they didn’t want to tell us much or make commitments, but since they were in shit with the cat clans they wanted peace, if not necessarily union, with the Rattlers. Nobody wants to fight on two fronts, except for crazies like late-period Hitler.

  For a while things didn’t look good. 1 Gila’s people, who knew the area, could tell which different vendetta squads had taken advantage of the collapse of government in the region and come through ahead of us just from the number of headless bodies tied up in trees. The number of white buzzards overhead seemed to double every fifty-score beats and it started to really bug me, I couldn’t stop thinking about how hot and sour they must feel even way up in the air, all these fat suckers with their little heads like barbed penises, just slacking around in these high, agonizingly slow interlocking spirals, the most patient birds in the world. But by the end of the day—the day that was already being called the first Grandfather Heat of the fifth family of suns, “the Grandfathers of Heat to be born after the end of the earthly paradise”—it became clear that in this case bad for others was good for us. At noon we met the main body of Koh’s Rattler Newborn, or converts, which was listed at fourteen thousand but was obviously triple that if you counted women and children and thralls. About a third of Koh’s followers from the zocalo, that is, the plaza, had been killed by the Jaguars or by the fires, but the ones who had gotten away credited her with saving them. Most of them had picked up their extended families in the suburbs—who knew her prophecy already—and packed up whatever they had left to follow Koh to the Promised Land. Of course, they didn’t know she hadn’t yet decided where that would be.

  And Koh’s k’ab’eyob—“rumorers,” rumor spreaders, or I guess we can call them advance men—had also done their job. More and bigger towns joined us every day, and more and more clan leaders pledged themselves and their dependents to Koh. Her runners ran up and down organizing them, adding the blue-green band to their colors, having them swear impromptu oaths, setting marching and foraging orders, whatever. She’d brought cases of cosmetics along—as always, first things first—and her dressers worked on everyone, from Koh on down, making us look more like a real royal entourage and not a messed-up gang of escapees.

  By the old age of the first Grandfather Heat, the sun, as we headed into what would later be Puebla, our line stretched out so far that someone could go off-road and take a nap at the head of the first file, get woken up two- or three-hundred-score beats later as the last stragglers passed, and then, if they could afford bearers, have themselves run up to the front of the line again. Koh’s clowns ran up and down the sides of the line, under the direction of her favorite Porcupine Jester, and entertained the marchers with lampoons on the Pumas.

  Finally, just as the same Grandfather Heat died, another round of messages went up and down the line between Koh, Hun Xoc, 1 Gila, 14 Wounded, and me. Without meeting in person we reached a consensus that we—“we” meaning us greathouse leaders and our core bloods—couldn’t afford to camp. We didn’t have enough guards to resist a full assault from the Pumas, so we’d have to stay on the
move or they’d have time to set up an ambush somewhere. We had only fifteen suns left to get back to Ix before the big great-hipball game, barely enough for an ambassador with staged porters, let alone an army. So the Rattler Fathermothers and 14 Wounded’s posse and the Harpy bloods and me and the other hotshots kept going through the night, carried in stages by bearers who’d collapse exhausted at the end of their stint and sleep in the side-scrub until the trail sweepers in the rear guard prodded them. The heralds ran ahead to tell potential converts to wait for us so they could help carry the leaders. Mao had the Long March, but if this one got that kind of press it was going to be known as the Fast March. Or the Scatterbrained Dash, or something.

  But, incongruously, it had a festive side. Since there was no question of secrecy, Koh had dancers with royal blue-flame myrtle-berry torches swirling in snake-coils ahead and behind her three palanquins, so that from a distance we must have looked like a long trail of glowworms with a single turquoise-tinted chemical mutant in the center. I thought it was silly of her to mark her position. But Koh was surrounding herself more and more with the trappings of divinity in other ways too. She asked for her pledged followers to get special perks and rationing, as opposed to other people we had in our train, and after some hemming and hawing even 14 Wounded said okay. Up and down the line and up and down the social scale she was the main subject of conversation, people repeating themes she’d started herself. She’d used old stories about One Ocelot’s daughter to make herself seem like the fulfillment of a prophecy, the same way that, much later, the nations that Cortez co-opted would spread rumors that he was “fulfilling” a prophecy that hadn’t existed before.

  From what I could tell, she played the rest of the Star-Rattler Society pretty well too. Each of the high-ranked members of her order, including the nine-skull epicene adders, of which Koh was one of nine, advised and took care of a troop of dependents, generally lesser clans and villages that had converted, but also some individuals and smaller families. And Koh never made an overt statement against any of them. She cultivated her seniors in the Sorority—only three of whom were with us anyway—and played down her separatism. She had to get a coalition together but also position herself as a new dispensation, a kind of popular outreach. Forty days ago, before the Last Fourth Sun, the majority of the Rattlers’ children hadn’t specifically been Koh’s own followers, or even much aware of her. But now, after the Pumas had attacked all of the Rattlers indiscriminately, Koh made it look like she was in charge of the resistance, and thousands more had come over to our side. Or her side.

  Embarrassingly, I still hadn’t learned that much about the Star-Rattler’s children, who were a secretive lot, and even though I was considered adopted into it I hadn’t seen any of its rituals. When they’d appeared on their mul during the vigil it was as spectators of the Jaguar-Scorpions’ procedure, not as participants. But the religion, if you can call it that, really was an improvement on the old ancestor cults. It had a certain glorification of poverty and austerity, and not in the same way as the flesh-piercing tortures of the old ruling class. Although there was still plenty of that. It was more meditative and Theravada-ish, the kind of thing that would become the New Age bullshit I generally love to hate, but as I saw more of it I realized it was just another kind of human technology that drew on people’s fatalism in a different way, maybe even in a needed way. In the old clan hierarchies, someone from a dependent family would kill himself if his greatfathermother said to, because otherwise he and his children would be doomed to nearly everlasting agony. But people under the sign of the Rattler seemed more stoic, happier with the austerities of life and death, I guess because at least they got a smidgeon of respect and a better deal in the afterlives—not pie in the sky yet, but a promise of, at least, some goddamn rest.

  Very few of the new lower-lineage converts ever saw Koh personally, but some of their leaders did, and from what I could tell they were impressed. They’d talk about how the Rattler’s Children foresaw things that other people couldn’t, how the great serpent’s venom could wash the cataracts out of their eyes. In order to keep the blood of their lineages alive through coming generations, each of the new apostles had a special charge to follow Lady Koh into the realms of the next suns. Her intimates had become a fanatically loyal core, and no matter how many more she wanted to attract, she followed Lenin’s dictum in advance, that a handful of committed souls is better than an army of unmotivated mercenaries.

  And Koh naturally took to statecraft. She sent emissaries to all the main Orb Weaver and Caracara families, to some nonaffiliated clans, and even a few to disaffected cat families. Apparently her literacy had been a big deal in Teotihuacán, and one of her businesses had been having her scribes keep records and accounts for the less literate Teotihuacanob ruling families. She’d even been part of a project that was writing down Teotihuacanob history—which had been kept in picture and textile writing with oral supplementation and whatever—in the Teotihuacanob language written with a system of Chol characters, and she’d hung on to some of the manuscripts. Other rulers had already sent messengers asking for copies, and she had a whole three monkey clans—that is, calligraphers, who, impressively, were able to write with a tiny brush while they were swinging in sedan baskets—and she kept them all busy every day. In fact, since the histories had been rewritten to make Koh look good, I suppose you could even say that she was grinding out paper propaganda.

  And maybe it would have an effect, I thought. Maybe things were less desperate than they felt. Maybe enough of the lowland clans would support us that we—except, wait a second, who were we? If “we” meant the leaders of the Rattler’s Children, maybe “we”’d do all right. But if “we” meant the Ball Brethren and the other traveling contingents of the Harpy clan—well, then “we” were going from being Koh’s saviors to being her guests. And around here it was a short step from “guest” to “hostage.” But that would change when we got to Ix, right? Maybe. Anyway, when we did get back, it wouldn’t hurt for me to have some pull with the Muhammadess of Mesoamerica. If we got back. If the Ixian Ocelots didn’t pick us off first. If Koh hadn’t gotten too uppity by then. If the Lord be willing and the cricks don’t rise. If, if, ifffff.

  At the birth of the next sun there were still some fights going on ahead and behind the safeish central area reserved for us VIPs and the captive Scorpion-adders, who were trussed up in padded sleds. At least every twenty-score beats or so some gang from some third-rate cat family would rush one of the straggling groups in our train, like a cougar picking the sickest-looking bison out of the herd, and a few of our bloods would have to run forward or back to help drive them off. But we headed south on the main Caracara road, through the later Texcoco along the east edge of the great lake, passing thousands of other refugees, south and up into the highlands, toward what would later be Ciudad Oaxaca and was now called the Citadel of the Valley of Clouds and Steam.

  ( 20 )

  What? Whoa. Off balance. And awake. I was awake.

  My bearers were having trouble keeping me level. Rock me gently, for Chrissake, I thought.

  I uncovered my eyes and squinted up at the rusty sky. There weren’t any stars or obvious change but somehow you could tell it was near dawn. I sat up. Someone was coming up alongside us. A runner.

  “You over me, my elder brother 10 Red Skink Lizard?” my flanking guard asked, using my numbered code name. “Five Score and Two is coming, my elder brother.”

  I rolled onto my side, steadying myself on the edge of the wicker pallet, and the guard nearly looked me in the eye and looked down. He wasn’t supposed to stare at VIPs. It was another beige dawn already and the wind was picking up. We were in a wide valley between five-rope-lengths-high mesas, bristling with tall hardwoods all recently killed by the changing water table. When a breeze came through, yellow leaves dropped off their branches as fast as those cards flying up when you’ve solved a hand of Freecell Solitaire.

  Hun Xoc’s palanquin came back al
ongside the file and settled next to me, his bearers expertly turning in place and reversing direction so that he was running alongside. He looked princely reclining under his quilt. Fiddle-dee-dee, I thought. Wonder what the poor people are doing today.

  “The whistlers have come back with word from our sun-eyed venerand, the quick of speech, our greatfather 2 Jeweled Skull,” he said in the Harpy House code-language. The “whistlers” were a Kaminaljyob mountain tribe with a tonal language that could be whistled or even played on flutes, and we used them as code talkers. They’d said that 18 Jog, 2JS’s nephew, was going to meet us in one of the last towns before the Third-Sunfolks’ Boneyard, as they called the Tehuantepecan salt flats. I asked how many suns away the flats were and he said three or four. 10 Red Skink Lizard will be painted and ready, I said. I didn’t even ask whether it was possible that the message was a fake from the Pumas or their relatives in Ix, the Ocelots. Communications was one thing the Harpy House did have their act together on. Before we’d left, Hun Xoc had memorized thousands of columns of word substitutions, and he and 2JS used each pair only once, so that a given word never meant the same thing again, kind of like a one-time pad. Every important message from us to 2JS and from 2JS to us was carried by at least four teams of covert runners, each on a different route, and one or two had probably been intercepted and interrogated. But no one could make anything out of a string of nonsense words, not even an NSA mainframe and certainly not the Ocelots, no matter how psychic they were.

  Since that was the end of the formal conference Hun Xoc asked how I was and I said fine. Maybe you and I can kick a ball around sometime today, I said. He said that sounded fun. He had to go back and pass the news to 14 Wounded, who was leading the rear guard. He reversed his porters again and disappeared.