The Sacrifice Game Read online

  We crossed the Second Bridge and passed under the Black Gate and into an alley between the rows of low stone dressing-room buildings that bordered the court precinct. It was male territory, but I guess since Koh was a liminal being it was okay for her to be here. Anyway, she had her two male epicene-attendants holding translucent blue-green feather-fans on either side of her head so that symbolically she’d never stepped outside her holy space. I could hear the players gearing up inside the screened-and-guarded rooms, and beyond that the crowd in the stands, that nervous pre-bloodsporty rustling growl. We passed a couple of vendors selling drinks of hot water at drought prices. Good, I thought, people’s home cisterns are probably pretty much empty. If there was a battle the soldiers and fires would eat up the rest of the stored drinking water in a few thousand beats.

  The Harpy bloods ushered us—I mean Koh and her dwarf and two of her handmaids, and then 2 Hand, 14 Wounded, and me, and our attendants—to the back of what you might call the Visitors’ Field House and through a little anus-door into one of the few tiny hipball-game changing rooms that wasn’t in use. I wished Hun Xoc were with us, but he’d had to go through a special purification. When my eyes got used to the interior dark I saw there was a one-fifth-scale statue of me in a niche—that is, myself as Chacal, the ballplayer. It wasn’t a good one, just a mold-made workshop multiple, but it was still disconcerting. There were figurines of 3 Balls and 1 Big Peccary and these other legendary players alongside. Two more Harpy heralds were flanking the draped mouth-door on the far side of the room, which led out to the Ocelots’ ball court. There were nine of them, but the great-hipball court was by far the biggest. It smelled like sweat and analgesic ball-oil. There needs to be a stronger word than nostalgia for the effect of smells like that. It just shot this jump-through-the-roof rush through my Chacal side, all buzzed up with pride and confidence and determination, but on my Jed side it coughed up all this bad stuff from high school in Nephi, the locker room and the sports doctor’s office with the rolls of adhesive and the Pam Anderson poster on the wall and all these loutish athletes coming in to get taped up before they went out on the field, and me sitting there blue-icing a bruise I’d gotten from a free weight in my Remedial Physical Education program, and just having to sit and plot my revenge while I took all this shit about being an aboriginal faggot freak. And now I was a big shot in this environment. The biggest. I mean, really, you have no idea how huge I was. It was like it was 1999 and I was Michael Jordan and everyone thought I’d died in a space-shuttle accident, but really I was walking around looking at displays of myself in the video stores at O’Hare Airport. In two minutes there’d be so many people there that the floor would collapse. Just wait, I thought. It’s comeback time.

  2 Jeweled Skull’s heralds crouched in and flanked the door.

  ( 29 )

  “And here my sons are,” 2 Jeweled Skull said, “and Lady Koh of the Rattlers, and her backrests and flutes.”

  He meant her supporters. He went on a bit, doling out bits of praise. Hmm. 2 Jeweled Skull was saying all the right things, but there was something different and older about him. Maybe he just didn’t look so scary as he had when I was the new kid in town and he was towering over me with torture implements.

  He teetered over to me, embraced me in that stiff dancey way, and gave me a ceremonial battle-saw. It was a three-arm-lengths shaft with a handle beaded in the pattern of my names and captures, with its last two feet widening into a flat wood blade inlaid with circular pink spondylus shells and edged with double rows of perfectly matched triangular blades of iridescent-yellow obsidian, like the nose of a golden sawfish.

  Whoa, I thought. Usually I was just frustrated by the whole hyperflattering flowery speech thing but for once it didn’t seem like just empty form, it really meant something. It was corny but I was getting all misty and glowy inside.

  “You tilt your basin of blood my way,” I said, correctly. “Perhaps

  You’ve just mistaken me for someone else,

  I who am unreliable, I of vice, of shit,

  May I not think myself a worthy receiver.”

  Yeah, I really did good, didn’t I, I thought. I felt, just, like, warm. Even the long aftertaste of the time he’d tortured me just made him seem more fatherly, in a sick way, I guess, but I couldn’t get distance from the feeling. Anyway, I could understand how he’d felt. After all, he’s old, I thought. He was carrying over sixty solar years, which was old for a Maya, or a preindustrial person from anywhere. Maybe it was up to me to take care of him now. He acknowledged everyone else in correct order but cut the exchange of speeches short. Judging from the tone of the beaters out on the court, the first ball would drop in eight more measures of four thousand beats each, that is, about two hours, which would seem like a while, but 2 Jeweled Skull had so much meeting-and-greeting to do that there was barely enough time to get him into position. Between the beats you could hear the crowd making urgent crackly sounds, like kids opening presents.

  Please take asylum here, 2 Jeweled Skull said to Lady Koh. He touched a bowl of chocolate. His herald handed it to her.

  “Star-Rattler’s Brood would accept your too-bright offer,”

  Koh said, before touching the bowl,

  “But our children have a gift as well for you.”

  She meant the tsam lic and the three captured adders.

  “But they aren’t here yet, and we come with unbent backs.”

  At the risk of being obvious, “with unbent backs” was like saying “empty-handed.”

  2JS couldn’t just say “Oh, yeah? Then when the hell are they showing up?” As host it was his position to say “Oh, that’s all right, anything’s fine, come anytime.” The mode we were speaking in made it all about whatever you weren’t saying as opposed to what you were. It was like Strange Interlude, you pictured everyone speaking out loud through a mask and then whispering what they really meant on the inner side.

  “Our messengers say your children only entered

  Our fields this morning,” he said, “but we all hope

  They’ll join us for our moonrise victory feast.”

  It was Koh’s turn to make a quick decision. She took the bowl of chocolate, held it in the “accepted” gesture, drank, and sent it back.

  “And please take this as our pledge to serve our host

  With all our numbers, genius, blood, and sight,” she said.

  She handed Coati four long blue military-macaw tailfeathers, which he handed to the herald. 2JS accepted them. Everyone didn’t quite sigh with relief, but there was an okay-let’s-get down-to-brass-shit feeling. We sent out the peripheral people so that counterclockwise it was just 2 Jeweled Skull, Hun Xoc, 2 Hand, me, 14 Wounded, Lady Koh, Coati, and Hun Xoc.

  We all squatted in the tiny dark hot room, not wanting to sit on the stone floor or to take the time to set our mats. Coati set a Gila figurine in front of him to acknowledge that he was also speaking for them.

  It was 2 Jeweled Skull’s position to start.

  There was a pause.

  Our backup troops, the Rattler’s Newborn, were just fucking not here.

  You couldn’t blame 1 Gila or anyone for the delay, but it was still a crisis that could sink the whole thing. The mood was shifting from an if-we-keep-our-heads-we’re-going-to-rock feeling to a maybe-we’re-in-trouble-no-matter-what-we-do feeling. 2JS and I looked at each other. We both wanted to get away and just catch up, but this was one time work really did have to come first.

  “So then,” he said, “after the end,

  We may have close frontiers on all four sides.”

  It was a super understatement, like saying “It’s going to be a bumpy night.” I looked at Koh. She looked at me and we both looked at Hun Xoc. It was like, damn, maybe we’re screwed. We’re leftovers-to-be. We came all this way and we were still fucked. I felt guilty about it, I’d walked them into the worst possible situation when we all shoulda stood in bed.

  The troops’ getting behind schedule hadn
’t been any kind of a shock. It had more been one of those things where something’s just a little uneasy-making, and then it gets worse and worse, and as it gets worse you also realize how significant it is, until by the bitter end you’re wondering how you could have let the seed of the situation sprout in the first place.

  Laughter, or what might be better described as frantic giggles, seeped in from the crowd outside. Probably the contortionists and animal jugglers had come on, which meant it was later than I’d thought. Then the mockers would come on and then the first ball would drop at the instant the east end of the court fell completely into the shadow of the Ocelots’ emerald mul. The timing was partly because otherwise one side would be trying to score goals into the low sun, but mainly because the ball was an astral body, so you wanted to launch it only when it wasn’t competing with the sun.

  Hun Xoc asked how many bloods we really had to count on when they did get here. He didn’t use any of the code languages. I guess we’re sure nobody’s listening, I thought. Still, this whole side of the court was supposed to be Harpy territory for the duration of the festival.

  Coati answered that we had at least thirty score coming, but to keep in mind that at least fifteen score of them were loosely trained, not yet full bloods. There were also about ninety score nonmale supporters. It was a huge army by Maya standards and respectable even by Teotihuacanob ones. More than enough to tip the balance if it was deployed correctly.

  Coati asked Hun Xoc whether there was any sense that the Ocelots knew the Rattler’s Brood was headed this way.

  Hun Xoc said apparently not. He said the Harpies only had one informer left inside the Ocelots’ inner household, and she might not even be an accurate source, but that at least as of this morning they all thought Koh’s converts were still heading southwest to Kaminaljuyu. Evidently 1 Gila had even sent a couple of advance parties to Kaminaljuyu and back just to increase that impression. As far as Koh’s presence here at the festival went, the Ocelots seemed to think she was swinging by here to pick up a few deserters and family members from the Harpy House to add to her army of converts on her way to her presumed new city in the south.

  And so, if the Rattler’s Brood is just beginning to trickle into the preserve now, how fast could the first of them get to the gates? 20 Blue Snail asked.

  Coati said 1 Gila and the managers of the Harpy preserves would know better than she would. But from the latest runners he guessed at least a quarter-day, which meant by Vega rising, about two A.M. And if we wanted them to show up armed and briefed and formed up into any kind of battle array and not completely exhausted, it would take longer. Even if we sent word to only send the bloods, and to send them at a run, we were still looking at an arrival time of Jupiter rising, or a little before midnight.

  Hun Xoc started to make some kind of crack about Coati’s name, but 2JS cut him off.

  Unfortunately, 2 Jeweled Skull said, the ball game won’t last half that long.

  ( 30 )

  I’d say everyone looked around at each other, except around here one didn’t eyeball people, so it was more as though we all sensed around at each other.

  2JS said that tonight the Ocelots would make sure they’d win before the crowd got tired, before they’d even peaked, and while there was still plenty of time for them to contest the outcome if they needed to. And the best time for them to start the fight would be right at the end of the hipball game, when their crowd was the most pumped. And they’d pull something even faster if they got an inkling of armed Rattler troops coming close to Ix. The instant the Rattlers show themselves, the maximum time we’d have remaining to win the game would be the time it would take for a spy-runner to get from 2JS’s preserves to 9 Fanged Hummingbird, and for 2JS to issue instructions. Which could be as little as four hundred beats.

  And without the Rattler’s Brood, how long could we hold out in a direct fight? Koh asked through Coati.

  Over a day if we were back at Harpy House on the mainland, Hun Xoc said. But 2 Jeweled Skull and the rest of us are going to be cut off in the temple district. Even supposing we dug in at the council house or one of the field houses, we’d last less than a quarter-day.

  14 Wounded asked for the floor. So, then, our father, he said, what plans do we have?

  Uh-oh, you’re out of line, I thought. You don’t have the seniority to question 2 Jeweled Skull. On the other hand, it wasn’t time to stand on ceremony. On the third hand, they didn’t think of it as ceremony, they thought of it as the way the universe was.

  2JS answered, though. If they cheat, he said, or if they overstep their wager, we’ll fight them with whatever we’ve got. He said he’d position a blowgun squad among our supporters in the stands.

  Blowgun squad? I wondered. Did that mean he’d acted on some military-strategy idea he’d picked out of my head? Wasn’t he afraid of a Cosmic Censor who doesn’t exist? Were we better prepared than he was saying? How much wasn’t he telling me? This is no fun whatsoever, it’s just completely frustrating.

  But beyond that? 14 Wounded asked. His voice was getting a little shrill.

  Beyond that there’s nothing more we can do, 2 Jeweled Skull said. 9 Fanged Hummingbird would get all sorts of kudos for finally capturing us. In fact, he was counting on the fact that Severed Right Hand was only eleven days away—although 9 Fanged Hummingbird would certainly need to be unusurpably in charge of Ix when Severed Right Hand arrived.

  And what support can we count on from the other aquiline clans? 14 Wounded whined again. That is, clans related to the Harpies of Ix, the Caracaras of Teotihuacán, and the sixty or so other Eagle lineages throughout Mesoamerica. It was a serious question but more than a little indelicate and it wasn’t at all right for him to pile one question on another like this.

  2 Jeweled Skull said that his main effort during the last eighty-five days—besides training the team and holding out against the Ocelots’ little raids and tax assaults—had been solidifying his support with other clans, both aquiline and feline. But when he’d appealed directly to the Eagle clans of Motul and Caracol, they’d turned him down. It had been an unpleasant surprise.

  We should never have let 1 Gila split our forces, 14 Wounded said.

  Whoa, I thought again. Dude, you’re getting yourself in trouble. 14 was kind of a goofus but I almost felt a little sorry for him. I tilted my head to the left and they passed the right to speak around to me, like an invisible microphone. Wasn’t it also true that the Ocelots would let the ball game run a little while first? I asked.

  Hun Xoc said that was correct. The Ocelots usually liked to hold off pulling the first fix until at least the ninth ball or so. Otherwise the public—which really meant the guest royalty and village cargo bearers, not so much what we’d call the actual masses—might feel cheated themselves.