The Sacrifice Game

(19)

After that, Lady Koh made eye contact with each member of the council in turn and then, instead of speaking, took her hands out of the folds of her manto and signed in Ixian hunting language. Every once in a while, when there was a name that didn’t translate, she spoke a syllable or two to fill in. “He’ll march ahead of us, at least to the oxbow,” she signed. “Then he’ll retrace his route and wait for a west wind dawn.” She moved the largest and brightest of the pink quartz pebbles southeast of our position and then back alongside us, illustrating the maneuver. The idea was that Severed Right Hand would want to come at us with the sun rising behind his men and the wind in front so we wouldn’t smell him. It sounded reasonable. “So we need to have iik and coals ready.” That is, when they attacked, we’d be ready to run baskets full of burning chili peppers upwind, to try and blind them.

“Smoke is for first-time-menstruating nongreathouse second-born girl daughters,” 14 Wounded said. Needless to say, but I’ll say it anyway, the expression sounded better in Mayan. Anyway, it meant that smoke screens were a cowardly tactic.

There was a pause. Cowardly is good, I thought, but I didn’t want to start definding myself on the point, so I just kept walking. Set a good example, I thought. Quiet, uncomplaining, impervious to pain, stoic- ow. Sticklet in my left sandal. Damn. Ow, ow, ow. Why me? Ow, ow, ow, ow, ow. I shook it out. Okay. The trail went over a dry gulch and the platform swayed like a jet in a pocket of low pressure. You could hear thousands of callused and/or sandaled feet padding on gravel.

Finally Coati held up a hand with the thumb and first two fingers touching, which meant basically, “Insignificant as I am, may I yet please speak?” The members of the popol clicked their tongues for “yes.”

They looked at Koh. She signed “yes.”

“All great-alliances collapse from stomach parasites, not predators,” Coati said. It was a well-known line from some old masque, but 14 Wounded didn’t say anything more.

Koh and her privy council spent some time working on the new set of signals they’d give for advances and retreats. She stipulated that after the battle-which, I guess, they all figured couldn’t be avoided-her followers would regather in a village called Place of the Ticks, on a defensible bluff two jornadas to the southwest. From there the migration would bear due south for two days, and then turn east along the Atoyac River to a site on the coast just south of what would later be called Veracruz. She’d resettle them there, she said, and reseat the Star Rattler’s mul — that is, very generally, “pyramid.” And after that, Koh and I would go on to Ix by the inland water route, with a small escort of two hundred and forty Orb Weaver bloods and a hundred and ten nonblood supporting families, meaning about another two thousand people.

The council lasted for two-thirteenths of the day, that is, about three hours. No one could leave until everyone agreed it was over. And in fact, unless one of us drastically changed rank, whenever any combination of us sat together again, it would be in the same relative positions and oriented toward the same directions. There were also twelve people who were allowed in the room but had to sit outside the circle: four servers, two of Koh’s monkey-masked clerks, a silent guy in a striped outfit who was named 0 Porcupine Clown, and who seemed to be kind of Koh’s court jester, 1 Gila’s accountant and two guards, and our own two calligraphers. And, because tonight would belong to Serpigo, who was the most dangerous of the lords of the dusks, there were four censers pacing counterclockwise around the perimeter of the circle, trailing clouds of geranium incense out of their hand burners.

Finally one of the this-meeting-has-to-end votes carried. The bigwigs crouched backward away from the circle and went back to their own families. Hun Xoc stayed. Coati rolled up the Game board, the attendents folded the wicker covering over the four of us, and Koh and I got to speak almost in private.

She said that while I was away on my burial excursion she’d sent four runners forward to 2 Jeweled Skull, my adopted father and the ahau of the Harpy Clan. They were going to-wait, maybe I should mention a few other things about old 2JS. When I’d received Jed 1 ’s mind up on the Ocelots’ mul, 2JS had unexpectedly been in the same tiny room with me, and he’d gotten a bit of scatter, enough of my memories to speak English and Spanish and understand quite a bit of what I was up to. But he hadn’t gotten enough of me to, say, understand that the images he had of airplanes weren’t a species of friendly condor, or that the computers he remembered me using weren’t silent marimbas with captive souls inside. And he was still very much himself. There wasn’t enough of me in there to confuse him about who he was, the way I’d been confused at first about whether I was me or Chacal, the ballplayer whose brain I was, shall we say, staying in as a guest. Luckily for me, Chacal’s sense of self had faded away pretty quickly. But 2 Jeweled Skull had never become me. And knowing so much about me hadn’t exactly seemed to help him empathize with me or my plight. He’d been angry. And I guess he’d had a legitimate beef. But he’d tortured me pretty badly to get me to pull myself out of his mind, and then, when I’d finally convinced him I couldn’t do that, he’d gradually figured out a way to turn the situation to his advantage. He’d sent me to Teotihuacan to break the Teotihuacanian monopoly on tsam lic, the Sacrifice Game enabling drugs, and now here I was.

Anyway, Koh’s runners were going to repeat to 2 Jeweled Skull-in a Harpy House code language that they themselves didn’t understand-the message that I and the other Harpy bloods who’d survived from the team he’d sent, along with Lady Koh and a small Rattler-blood escort, would be sempiternally honored to attend the great-hipball game in Ix on Ixlahun Chuwen, Bolonlahun Yaxk’in, that is 13 Howler, 19 Redness, or July 14, forty-nine days from now. But they weren’t going to mention the great migration. He will have heard about it anyway by now, she said. Calling attention to it would just raise the issue of what we intended to do with them. What if Koh didn’t manage to found her shining-city-on-a-hill and we turned up in Ix leading a hungry multitude?

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 Acaltetepon, 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 Teotihuacan-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 Teotihuacan, 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.