The Sacrifice Game

(16)

The words came out as smoke. Or, rather, what happened was, the smoke from his cigar contorted into a rising pillar of Ixian cursive glyphs, and at some point I noticed that I wasn’t hearing him speak, but just reading the vertical column.

“I don’t know,” I said. It was a question I’d been asking myself a bit lately, in a different way. At first, of course, I’d felt like I must still be pretty much like the Jed, for clarity let’s keep the convention and say Jed 1 — who’d stayed back-“back”-in 2012. But things happened to me, and I saw things, mainly disturbing things, and I did things-not all, or not even mainly good things. And I guess I’d changed because now, when I thought about the other Jed, the one we’re calling Jed 1, I thought of him as, well, not as a total dolt, maybe, but certainly as a lucky but clueless naif who wouldn’t know shit from Shinola, and it was only going to get more so, even if I got-hmm, I was going to use the word back again, but it’s bugging me. And, come to think of it, what does Shinola look like? Maybe I don’t know so much as I “And so,” he asked, “what ill chance has brought you into this vexed wilderness?”

“I came to plant a message in the Earthtoadess,” I said.

“You mean for your n’aax caan ”-the expression meant something like “favorite dominatrix” or “pussy-whipper prostitute”-“in the thirteenth b’aktun.”

Uh, right, I grunted. Should I offer him something? I wondered. What did we have with us? We’d brought jade celts worth about six hundred adolescent male slaves, just in case we had to trade our way out of something, but I didn’t think he’d want them.

“That Marena of yours, tia buena, ” he said, smacking his lips once.

I just nodded. How did he know about that? I wondered. Well, I guess he knows a lot. Not everything, like Jehova would, but still a lot. You’ve got to watch this guy around the ladies. I remembered something my mother had told me when I was six or so, how in her hometown in Honduras, back when her grandfather was young, one day all the men went off to fight the Spanish and left Maximon at home to protect the women, and then when the men came back, the women were all pregnant. So the men flayed Maximon alive, and hung his skin on a monkey-puzzle tree. But the women were so devastated that they made the men set up his effigy in the church. And then he didn’t stay dead for long anyway.

“So you need to find a quiet spot,” Maximon said.

“Yes. Exactly.”

“Quiet for how long?

“Like, four b’aktuns,” I said. About fourteen hundred years.

He raised his head and, leisurely-ly, looked over his left shoulder, toward the west. You could just see a low orange smudge, not the sun but the reflection of Coixtlahuaca, the nearest of the hundreds of cities burning in sympathy with the destroyed capital, Teotihuacan. Lady Koh’s caravan was between us and the city, back almost half a k’intaak- that is, a jornada, a day’s journey. We couldn’t go much farther if we were going to come back and meet up with them before dawn. And we couldn’t be walking around like this in daylight, even if the daylight was going to be as dim as twilight. Some village bumpkins would still be alive somewhere, and they’d spot us, and the word would get back to one of the Puma Clan’s hit squads, and that would be it. They’d have our guts for G strings. On the other hand, if the gear was going to keep for thirteen centuries before Marena dug it up, it would have to be pretty damn out in the boonies. Dang, darn, damn.

“Lllll,” Maximon went. He took another drag and blew a smoke snake that read, with the formal, archaic voice of written Mayan, “I would try up yonder.” He pointed northeast with his lip toward a pair of twin mesas. “No one ventures there.” He used a continuing indefinite tense that meant not now, not before now, and not ever. “Even our grandfather Rucan 400 Shrieks”-that is, the east-going Whirlwind-“refuses to dance there.” I almost didn’t get the last part because as soon as I was reading each word, it would start dissolving.

“Okay, buen consejo. Thank you, senor.”

“No problemo,” he said. He said it orally this time, and in Spanish. And the abruptness suggested that the interview was over, but I hesitated.

“Yes?” he asked, a little impatiently.

“Oh, I was, I was just wondering if you over me might have noticed anything farther down the road.”

“You mean the road to Ix?”

“Well…” I said.

I was getting the feeling that he knew the answer already, and was asking me just to see how honest I was, or how I’d justify what I was doing.

“… yes,” I finished. It was supposed to be a secret-that is, when we got into the lowlands we were going to lead the people to Ix and not toward Palenque like Lady Koh had given out.

“You’d better watch out for the Pumas and the rest of the pack,” he said.

I know that, I thought. But I just clicked-an Ixian gesture that meant “yes”-and then, redundantly, nodded.

By pack he’d meant, like, “pack of cats.” That is, the remnants-numerous remnants, I should say-of the feline clans of Teotihucan and its hundreds of satellite cities. They’d regrouped after the unpleasantness and were out gunning for Lady Koh and anyone connected with her.

“We’ll manage it,” I said. Be confident. Chicks and gods dig confidence. And it was true, right now I was ahead of the game. Especially with this Lady Koh thing. I knew a star when I saw one. She already had her eighty thousand-plus people under her little blue thumb. And she was just getting started. And for whatever reason of her own, to the extent that she understood my plans to preserve the Sacrifice Game and get myself back to the last b’aktun, she approved of them. “And I’m going to get the hell back too.”

This time he didn’t ask “Back to where?” and I was sure he understood that I meant back to the twenty-first century. If one can use the word understand in this context.

“You’re not worried about Severed Right Hand?” Maximon asked.

Zing. Maybe I’d sounded a little too flip there. Watch it.

Hmm. Severed Right Hand’s name had come up around Koh’s council mat, but he was kind of a shadowy figure. Supposedly he’d been a junior member of the synod of the red moiety of Teotihuacanian, that is, the war clans, and he owned only two bundles of pink reeds-that is, he was only eighteen years old. Yesterday, according to Lady Koh’s G2, he-well, of course we didn’t call them G2, we called them b’acanob, “whisperers”-hmm, let’s say, according to our intelligence units, he’d already killed the remaining patriarchs of his own Swallowtail Clan, and had captured the next two Puma duarchs and most of the surviving synodsmen.

“Maybe I should be much more worried,” I said.

“Severed Right Hand is quite energetic,” Maximon said. “And he’s just adopted another twenty-eight thousand bloods.”

I clicked three times, respectfully, meaning, “Please go on.”

Maximon said that Severed Right Hand was now commanding at least four thousand veintenas, that is, platoons of twenty. About fourteen thousand of those were full bloods from the Puma clans. They were experts with the javelin launcher, the Teotihuacanian signature weapon, and they’d be the hardest to fend off if there was a direct battle. He’d set up his mobile headquarters at Tehuacan-which, despite the similar name, was not the same as, or even a satellite town of, Teotihuacan. It was two jornadas due whitewards, north, of us. He’d brought along what was left of the city’s council of four hundred, which he now dominated. And he’d sworn to capture all the Rattler’s Children and give their heads and skins to the Green Hag, a sort of fresh-water elemental who’d been the elder patroness of Teotihuacan.

Severed Right Hand was claiming that Koh-or, as she was now styling herself, the Great-Elderess of All Star Rattler’s Children-hadn’t just foretold the city’s destruction, but had caused it. The claim had the advantage of being basically the truth, although this hadn’t seemed to have hurt Koh’s standing with her own followers. Even our cleverer clan leaders, the ones who’d gotten the gossip about her machinations, seemed more loyal to her than ever. So even though the official motive for the now-unavoidable civil war was, as always, revenge, it was revenge in the Maya sense of capturing Koh’s uays.

More specifically, Teotihuacan had been like the Lourdes, Jerusalem, Rome, and Mecca of Mesoamerica, and anyone who could have destroyed it was vastly powerful. If Severed Right Hand captured Koh and, through torture, annexed her uays-her most active souls-her powers of prophecy and domination would accrue to him. Her former followers would be constrained to obey him, since his uays would hold hers within his skin. He would become both the avenger of the destruction of Teotihucan and its prime beneficiary.

But even with all that, the main reason they were after us, like the real reason for almost anything, was economic. The displaced Puma clans had lost most of their wealth and they needed negotiable items to trade for new homesteads. And every family in our volkerwanderung had brought as much of their high-value gear as they could drag, jewelry, celts, top-grade blades and obsidian cores, textiles, feathers, furs, raw jade, gold dust, and even some chips and pebbles of unworked turquoise-which we called xiuh, a proto-Nahuatl word, since there was no word for it in Mayan, and which was the latest almost-unaffordable sensation from the farthest edge of the world’s bleached northeast. The greathouse lineages had also brought thousands of rubber-sealed baskets swelling with about a hundred varieties of spices and drugs, and thousands of examples of the sort of jade objects that we twenty-first-centuryites would call “art.” And, especially, they’d brought slaves. Although they weren’t really like old-world slaves. Maybe it’d be closer to the Cholan sense to call them “thralls.” For one thing, there wasn’t any clear line between slaves and nonslaves, since even rich clans were like slaves in respect to their local ruling lineage, and then that lineage was like slaves to the ahau, and then, the ahau was a slave to his most deified ancestor. And the slaves could be from any ethnic group. Still, they could be ordered around, and sold, and eaten. Just as, theoretically at least, anybody could be, all the way up to the ahau. And he could get eaten by the smokers.

Anyway, the point is that we-the long train of Koh’s followers-were, despite our bedraggled look, a seductive target. And we wouldn’t be able to put up much of a fight. Most of the support for Koh’s Star Rattler Society had come from Teotihuacan’s white moiety, the peace clans, who were related to the red war moiety through mandatory exogamy, but usually didn’t train their own sons as warriors. Our caravan had about eight thousand bloods with war experience who’d come from other Rattler-pledged clans, but they weren’t well organized like the Teotihuacanian infantry, or, yet, very well coordinated with each other. To say the least. And we had a few thousand Maya bloods from the expatriate Ixob Ocelot lineage and some allied Maya trading clans from Tik’al and Kaminaljuyu, but they already weren’t getting along with the Teotihuacanians. Finally, at the bottom of the social pyramid, we were dragging along about eighteen thousand families of thralls. About twelve thousand of these were warrior-aged males, nonbloods who we could send in to fight, but who were armed only with pikes and weren’t effective in battle except as a buffer. And their kinsfolk-well, they fetched and carried, and their young folks took care of the greathouse males’ sexual needs, and they were meat on the hoof, as it were-but really, most of the time they felt like a liability.

The upshot was that in a direct fight we’d be in trouble. We’d agreed-we meaning Lady Koh, her provisional council of clan patriarchs, and I-had all agreed that our best strategy would be to just keep moving as fast as possible and draw Severed Right Hand away from his logistical support base in the Valley of Mexico.

“Severed Right Hand seems to be holding his own against your Lady Koh,” Maximon said.

“You mean in the Sacrifice Game?” I asked. She’d told me that she played against him every night-long distance, of course, and by the equivalent of telepathy. And then in the mornings she’d issue orders accordingly.

“Yes,” Maximon indicated, somehow.

“You’re right.” He seemed to be fading-I mean, visually-and my voice started hurrying. “In fact it seems like sometimes he knows where we’re heading before we decide to go there.”

“Of course, it’s really his advisers playing.”

“Oh?” I asked. “Who are they?”

He said they were five nine-stone players who’d worked for years for the capital’s twin synods, and who were so permanently in camera that nobody, not even the synodsmen themselves, knew their names. Supposedly they didn’t have tongues, and they spoke only in a house sign language, and they had white skin, like vestal virgins, and two of them were over a hundred and twenty years old.

“Well, that’s good to know,” I said. It sounded like it was just hocus-pocus.

“And they also say he’s a great hun sujri, ” he said. Now he’s really got to be jiving me, I thought. The word literally meant “skin slougher,” or, to save syllables, let’s say “molter,” that is, a skin changer or a metamorphoser, someone whose animal uay was so unusually strong that it could transform his physical body. It especially applied to people with big-cat uays, Jaguars and Pumas. They were known for metamorphosing into cats, of course, but they also supposedly sometimes appeared as boys, as capturing-age bloods, or as old men, depending on the occasion. And the most powerful of them were always adding to their stock of new uays, human and animal.

“Which of his uays would you over me guess that he’d favor?” I asked, trying for a nonconfrontive reply. That is, what would he likely metamorphose into?

“I’d keep an eye out for snatch-bats,” Maximon said. He meant the big camazotz vampire bats, Desmodus draculae, which had a longer wingspan than any of their related species that would survive into later centuries. They were fearsome-looking suckers.

“You wouldn’t happen to know whether Severed Right Hand is planning to attack us right now, would you?” I asked.

“He has his own problems,” Maximon said, or his glyphs said. “He’ll wait to cut you off at the Rio Capalapa.” His outlines seemed less distinct than ever.

Wow, I thought. How did he know that? Or, what I mean is, how did I know that? I mean, you only get out of these things what you already have in there somewhere.

Hmm. We were still four solid jornadas from the Capalapa. Send a runner back to Lady Koh? Except I don’t have any evidence. We could reroute the march west, and then go south along the Mixteco instead. But that’s a pretty big deal. Anyway, he could be wrong. That is, I could be wrong. Severed Right Hand could attack us tomorrow. Better wait and get back to her and then send out some recons and try to confirm.

“Thanks,” I said.

“You’ll be all right if you hurry.” He said something else, but I couldn’t read the last four glyphs. Damn. Ashes. I rubbed my eyes but the glyphs, and Maximon, looked blurrier than before.

“Thanks.”

“ Dominos Nabisco,” he said, orally. Did I hear that right? I wondered. “And also with you,” I said. I started to back away from him Maya-underling style, but after only ten steps all I could see was the tip of his cigar floating in the infrareddening haze.