The Sacrifice Game Read online

  “ . . .” she said. That is, in the ancient language,

  “Teech Aj Chak-’Ik’al la’ ulehmb’altaj ‘uyax ahal-kaab Ajaw K’iinal . . .”

  “You, Hurricane, who sparked Lord Heat’s first dawning . . .”

  I took over:

  “,” I said, “Teech kiwohk’olech la abobat-t’aantaj uxul kiimlal,”

  “You over us who foreknows his final dying,”

  “Teech Aj k’inich-paatom ya’ax lak . . .”

  “You, sun-eyed coiler of the blue-green basin . . .”

  Hmm. I paused for a second. What’s the next part again? Oh, right. I started to go on, but Koh broke in and finished the sentence herself:

  “Teech uyAj ya’ax-’ot’el-pool ya’ax-tuun ch’e’e . . .”

  “You, jade-skinned carver of the turquoise cistern . . .”

  I snuck a glance up at the tree. Mayan languages tend to classify things more by similarity of shape or function than by differences, so that, for instance, insects, bats, and birds are all the same class—and the Maya skeleton of my borrowed brain did the same, so that the tree, which was and is, as I’ve said, a cypress, became in my sight, also, a latex tree, a calabash tree, and especially a ceiba tree, the ceiba tree, ya’ax che, Ceiba pentandra, the kapok tree, the cotton-silk tree, the Generous Tree. It was thorny and umbrelliform, pustuled with phantom orchids sucking its red muculent sap and clouded with Cynopterus sphinx bats harvesting its scoriac nectar, and its branches spread at a curve as steep as the cissoid of Diocles. And then, without seeming to change, it was also a stone tree like a titanic stalagtite, and then it was a stratovolcano, higher than Orizaba, but, of course, upside down, with its buttress roots worming up through the thirteen shells of the sky.

  “Teech te’ij acho’oh jul-che’o’ob,” Koh went on, “uchepiko’ob’ noj k’ahk’o’ob,”

  “You, there, whose hissing javelins strike wildfires,”

  “Meent utz anuhko’on wa’ye’ ti’ amosoon.”

  “Deign to respond to us, here, from your whirlwind.”

  She sunk her dark ring finger in the water and stirred up a cloud of asphaltic steam.

  “I can smell him,” she said.

  She meant 2 Jeweled Skull.

  She paused. “He’s more you than you know.”

  I almost broke protocol and asked her what she meant, but she’d moved on, up the trunk of our now-internalized tree, zagging and zigging through the forking branches, setting stones down so fast that sometimes she just let me guide her hand without even looking at the board. Naturally, we had a hell of an edge, since I could use my—well, let’s not be modest, I could use my encyclopedic-ass knowledge of Mesoamerican, world, and economic history to guide her. But even so, as I think I’ve touched on a few times without having the stamina to really go into, we had to deal with the cosmic frustration of not being able to see within our own event cones. That is, what would happen to me, or to Koh, or to people we could influence directly, and so on, those events were still in flux. But as we got farther into the future, paradoxically, things became clearer. So, for instance, we knew the ceremonial district of Ix would be abandoned within the next k’atun—the next twenty years—but we couldn’t pin the date down more closely than that. But the abandonment of Motul—Tikal—was more certain, around 949, and then we both knew and saw how Chichen would be overthrown by treachery in 1199, how the next may capital, Mayapán, would be destroyed by the Xiu in 1441, and then the whole world would—nearly—disappear in the plague, in 1515, nine years before Tonatiuh, that is, Sun Hair, Pedro de Alvarado, would finish it off—nearly—in 1524. The b’aktuns of slavery and pain after that were, of course, well documented, and we crawled together farther and farther out onto the thin green twig of the last possibilities, past the Disney World Horror, past Marena finding—thank God—the Lodestone Cross, and toward a very likely End of Everything, a doomster named M something, in the north, somewhere—Canada!—and then, they—yes, they, we, we stop him!, and then—

  Wait.

  “The one from the north is not the last,” she said. Her voice was starting to quaver from the strain.

  “Not the last doomster?” I asked.

  “No.” She ran out of seeds. She scattered again, and, again, climbed up past M. Again, she couldn’t see any details of the last one, the one we had to worry about. Oh, God, I thought, oh, Jesus, oh, oh, hell hell. “I can’t see him,” she said. “He’s too close to you.”

  “Is it someone I know?” I asked. “Someone I may be going to know?”

  “Erer k’ani,” she said. Maybe. A pearl of sweat rolled down her light cheek, over the border into the dark side of her chin, and dropped onto the white margin of the board, where it touched the rim of the cistern.

  She scattered again. She shivered. She winced, brought up her dark hand, and screwed its heel into one eye and then the other, as though she’d been staring at the sun.

  “Erer k’ani,” she said again.

  Pause. Ten beats. Twenty beats.

  “The Celestial Rattler has shed seven skins,” she said. “But it”—incidentally I’m using “it” as the pronoun because Mayan is ungendered—“won’t shed another until another until the birth of 4 Ahau. And with that skin, you’ll know that its two heads have parted destinies.”

  Foolishly, I looked up. It was only a few four-hundred-beats after noon, and, to boot, the sky was still overcast with smoke from the wildfire, but even so I thought I could see the Rattler’s body, the Ecliptic, sidewinding across the sky’s ninth shell.

  Everybody’s probably heard the folk unwisdom about how you can tell how many years old a rattlesnake is by counting its rattles. And most folks now probably know that of course this isn’t true, because although they do gain, roughly, one rattle each time they slough their skin, the little suckers don’t necessarily shed only once a year. Anyway, the tzab, that is, the Rattler’s rattles, were the seven stars of the Pleiades cluster. Koh meant it would gain a new rattle, a new star, just before the end date.

  It sounded unlikely. From what I could recall, there were a few possible protostars in the nebulae surrounding the formation, but nothing that made astronomers think there’d be an eighth Pleiade any time soon. Or, rather, that one would have been born around, say, AD 1500, when the light that would strike the Earth in 2012 left the cluster. As to the two heads parting destines, I had no idea what she meant by that. Sometimes Star Rattler was depicted with two heads, not like that poor two-headed fer-de-lance they’d had at the Hogle Zoo, but with at one on each end. That’s the way it was on the double-headed serpent scepter, the one 9 Fanged Hummingbird carried on state occasions. Maybe she just meant there’d be a big saddle point on that day, something to make a decision about. But we knew that already. There had to be more to it than that. I started to ask her to clarify, but she waved me off. “That’s all,” she said. She stretched out her bare light arm and swept the stones off the board. Game over.

  “Thanks to you over me,” I said. “And—”

  “One more thing,” she said. “It’s someone you know of, but whose face you’ve never seen.”

  ( 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 w
ork 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 cliché: 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 Río 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 Teotihuacán, 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 someth
ing 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 4004 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.