The Sacrifice Game

(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 alongside 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.

Well, this is still tapirshit, I thought. If any of these guys had their act even remotely together they’d get together and swear out a treaty and go back to peacefully exploiting their thralls. In fact, Koh and I had even discussed trying to reach some understanding with the feline clans-the Ixan Ocelots and Severed Right Hand’s Pumas and the Caracolian Jaguars and all the rest of them. Realitywise, there wasn’t any reason why they couldn’t.

Except that they just wouldn’t. All over Mesoamerica, the avian and feline lineages had always been at daggers. And they always would be. And the other clans-the Rattler’s pledges and the other families with totems that weren’t birds or cats-would always be making an alliance with one side and then with the other. These people were like any other mafias, they thrived on vendettas. It was part of their soup. They counted on fresh booty to keep them solvent. It was like Israel and the Muslim states, even their gods hated each other, despite their being the same.

And now, after the fall of Teotihuacan, both sides had absolutely nailed their colors to the masts. And as far as the independent parties went-I mean the Rattler’s pledges-well, even though both the feline and avian sides saw the Star Rattler cult as a threat to their hegemony, the Rattlers had been in bed with the Harpies for more than a b’aktun, and now there was just too much bad blood for us to even approach the felines. Koh had to support the Harpies right up through the moment the Harpies-gods willing-took control of Ix. And even then the Harpies wouldn’t kick the Ocelots out. Instead they’d blood themselves to the clan and become Ocelots themselves. The whole thing was cray-cray.

Still, if I wanted to get back to 2012, I’d have to go along with it. It was going to be up to me to build a whole tomb for myself, and set up the sarcophagus and mix up the jelly and lay out another set of lodestones and a hundred other things, and there wouldn’t be any way to do that on Harpy territory while the Harpies were under constant attack. Even if the Chocula team found my tomb in one of the Harpy catacombs instead of in the main Ocelot one where we’d planned to put it. Which I couldn’t count on. No, no, no. We simply had to take over the whole place. Even if it didn’t feel possible.

For that matter, right now I didn’t see how I could get everything together before my brain gave out. Hell, hell, hell and corruption. In fact, it didn’t even feel like we’d make it to Ix. All these people around gave you an illusory sense of security, but Severed Right Hand’s forces were just too big and too well trained and on three sides they were all the fuck around us. If we dug in someplace nearer than Ix-anywhere other than a real city-even with stockade fences and an endless water supply and a stock of stored corn, we wouldn’t last a month. And then Ix would be just another hostile city, and my chances of getting in there and pulling off an entombment on the sly would be, I don’t know, roughly the same odds as Mel Gibson’s winning the Nobel Peace Prize. If anything, I should try to make sure we stick to the Ix plan. Basically, get back to Ix, use my Unlimited Personal Power to help 2 Jeweled Skull take the place over or at least reach a favorable truce with the Ocelots, get my tomb built, mix up the necessary compounds, seal myself in, and hope for the best. Getta condo made-a stone-a. No problem. Get in, get down, and get out.

And the first thing to do was hook up Lady Koh with 2 Jeweled Skull. She’d be the next big thing, so it’d be doing him a favor. Scratch his back, et cetera. Even if he was in trouble with the Ocelots, the Harpy Clan was still probably the richest family in Ix, and he was still the head of it. Right? In fact, maybe we should just let everyone know we were going to Ix. As of now, only the leaders knew about it at all. Our given-out destination was Kaminaljuyu, which is, or used to be, where they put Guat City later on. Otherwise all we’d said was that we were going to go through what was later called Oaxaca, and which was now a heavily populated collection of little city-states that had been part of the Empire. On the other hand, if we told anyone, the cats could head us off. Or 9 Fanged Hummingbird could get ready for us, or something, maybe better not…

I lay back and even started to doze off, but then heard something shiveringly familiar:

“1 Porcupine Ass caught two of the three man-beetles.”

I got a shiver for no reason and then it took me a beat to realize it was only a couple of amateur beat-keepers somewhere ahead, chanting verses for drinking-water rations, timing how long each blood could keep his mouth under the waterskin. And they were using the same currently popular song that the Ball Brethren, and their guest bloods from the other Ixian clans, had used to mark the time-outs on that night-definitely the worst night of my life, and there were plenty of other contenders-the night fifty-two days ago when they’d dressed me up as a deer and hunted me down:

(Drink) He ground them up in one big pot, he threw (stop)

(Drink) Twenty blue seed-corn skulls into the pot (stop)…

Well, things were different now. The world might be ending, but at least I was in with the in crowd.