The Sacrifice Game

(24)

Just in sight of the Cloud People’s main citadel, which would be the site of Oaxaca City, there was a place I knew well, with a tree, eventually a rather famous tree, that-which? Who? — that would still be alive at the end of the last b’aktun. I led Koh’s caravan a half-jornada off the route to camp there, and she and I fasted and prepared for a session of the nine-stone Sacrifice Game. We’d agreed that I’d be the only querent, and only her dwarf and Armadillo Shit would be attending.

The big cypress wasn’t big yet. In fact, it looked less than a hundred years old, and it divided into three trunks near the base. So it wasn’t one that you’d ordinarily think of as a major branch of the Tree of Four Hundred Times Four Hundred Branches, the tree at the axis mundi that penetrated down through the hells and soared up through the holes in the centers of the thirteen skies, the tree the Teotihuacanians called the Tree of Razors and that the Motulob-the citizens of Tikal-called the Tree with the Mirror Leaves, and that, in the twenty-first century, generally gets called something like the “Maya World Tree” or even “the Mayan Yggdrasil.” But I convinced Koh that I knew what I was talking about. We started at the naming time of Lord Heat, that is, noon. Twenty arms west of the Tree there was an ancient well surrounded by a five low stone cisterns, each about two arms across. The westernmost cistern had been filled to the brim with fresh water, and Koh sat on its west side, facing east. I sat on its eastern side and, instead of presuming to make eye contact, focused on her hands. Twenty bloods, under Hun Xoc’s command, sat around us in a loose circle with about a fifty-arm radius. The sun went under a rainless cloud shelf. Her dwarf handed her a jade offering basin, with coals still smoldering in it under the ashes of offering paper, and held it up in front of her forehead to stand in for the sky.

I looked down, into the still water. Koh looked down. We nodded to our reflected souls. They nodded back, almost immediately. Koh brought the basin sharply down onto the rim of the cistern, cracking it into pieces and scattering sparks out of the cinders. Without flinching from the embers that burned her palms, she pushed everything into the water. The shards sank and the coals and ashes floated, sizzling.

“

…” 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, Mayapan, 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.”