The Sacrifice Game

(27)

In the youth of the fifth sun following we were in a desert again, and a sixty-blood Puma raiding party somehow got ahead of us under cover of a sandstorm. For a while our bloods dug in and protected our flanks, but by dawn it was clear from the long-distance way the Pumas were fighting that they were just trying to hold us up until the main body of troops under Severed Right Hand could get to us. So we started off, without even going after them. It’s like in Go, sometimes the more you ignore the opponent and don’t even deign to respond to what he’s doing, the better off you are. We kept our convoy in the closest thing to a real defensive march formation we could manage but took some losses on the flanks. Hun Xoc led a party of running spearmen ahead and then back, to try to come up on the Pumas from the rear, but they kept ducking into dry-gulches and getting away. You still couldn’t see much out here, it was like those crummy overpriced photos of Mars.

All during the march that day we-I mean we fearless leaders-ran back and forth and counted and formed up the squadrons. As soon as night covered us three hundred and twenty of us hotshots split off from the big line. 1 Gila’s whole group and thirty-one score Rattler bloods were with them, so they weren’t defenseless. But we hardly sent any Harpies with them, only a score of 14 Wounded’s men and four Ixian Harpy bloods. Good luck, guys, I thought. Have fun taking the heat. Poor bastards.

We rubbed deer feces on our calves-like all Mesoamerican warriors, we dragged along big baskets of the stuff-and silent-marched all night, without audible signals and on new rubber-soled sandals, and camped at dawn under the last stand of trees at the edge of a plain that led down to what I think was later the Rio Mezcalapa. It seemed we hadn’t been followed. At dusk we crept out into the flats and down a long, long incline into marshes of scrub cypress and hyacinths. It seemed like ninety percent of the ground was impassable bog. I couldn’t believe how much you’d have to go the long, long way around, how you’d see a destination hill ahead and have to zig and zag in the opposite direction to get there. I remember mainly wasted time and angst, the pi-r-squared longer everything took. I got the feeling we were avoiding some places because of their bad mojo even though the routes we took were actually more dangerous. I marched or rather jogged myself almost all the time now, building up my lung capacity for the possible ball gig, even though I could still have done the rickshaw thing if I wanted everyone to think I was a total wuss. Dopamine from the exertion kept fogging my head and sometimes I couldn’t even remember who was planning what, I kept breathing “Did I miss something, did I miss something?” as a running-mantra. Did we all miss something? It all kept shifting. What didn’t Hun Xoc tell us? What was Koh really up to? She and I talked every day but somehow we never got around to what she was thinking, it was always what I thought everyone else was thinking. Anyway, she was spending most of her time now interrogating the captive Pumas. Just after the birth of the Grandfather Heat who was also the grandfather of the sun of the great-hipball game-that is, two days before the game-we pushed through into the high forest road along what would later be called the Grijalva River and stopped to meet with two of Koh’s runners from her “Four Hundred,” her army of converts.

The runners said that 1 Gila’s Four Hundred had lost nearly a fifth of their men and more of the women, but they’d also picked up a few villages, even without Koh, and they were on schedule. Hun Xoc sent a different pair of runners back with a message for them to head through the Macaws’ Pass into the Harpy House’s hunting preserves, on the east side of Ix. From there 2 Jeweled Skull’s men would get them as close to the city as possible, less than a hundred-score beats’ march away from the red eastern gate. We also decided to send the three Scorpion-adders and the sensitive cargo-sleds with them instead of taking a chance that the Ocelot inspectors would ask to go through them, even though the really major stuff was in false bottoms under boxes of Koh’s rattlesnakes.

And when we get the word to them, they move in, Koh added. The runners went off and we moved out again, marching in daylight. We were late. In the next sun’s middle age, near what they later called Santa Cruz, we got onto the great western sacbe, a laser-straight causeway with a whitewashed macadam under blue mirage puddles and spews of heat distortion. I hoped we looked fearsome and dragonish, sliding down the immense walkway like a spiny caterpillar on the edge of a porcelain cleaver. If it weren’t for the curvature of the earth we could have seen Ix at its vanishing point far to the east, surrounded by yellow corn plots and orchards. Seeing my ancestral country in its prime-even all withering in the drought, it still looked a lot more prosperous than it would in the bad old twenty-first-made me feel kind of homesick, I kept wondering what Marena would say about all this. She’d have all sorts of isn’t-this-fun apercus.

At dusk runners from 1 Gila came in and said the Four Hundred Newborn Clans were at Two Kinds of Jade, near Palenque, which meant they were behind schedule. Hun Xoc sent them back with a message to double their pace again even if they had to split off a temporary camp for the stragglers and leave them behind. It wouldn’t do for us to get into Ix if they weren’t around to back us up. On our end he forced an extra march overnight and we managed to sight the glow of festival smoke from Ix before dawn on the day of the big ball game. Monkey accountants scampered up and down the line doing the final count-we were down to only about eleven thousand bloods and forty thousand porters-and telling everyone to look peaceable. Even though the road was a free zone we were over Black Macaw territory and had to be cool and act like we weren’t an army, just acquaintances of 2JS’s. A quarter after the zenith, outside Ix’s fourth and outermost circle of palisades, the signal for “weapons ready but not visible” came down through the file, like a wave of motion through our collective centipede. 9 Fanged Hummingbird’s runners had come up. I pushed forward to the back of the van and watched the little conference. One of Koh’s palanquins was there, but for all I knew it wasn’t the one with her in it. The Ocelot ambassadors were all decked out in their signature emerald-green under their tetrahedral parasols and speaking in this really haughty lilt, dandies from the capital slumming it out in the hinterlands. They recited a formal invitation to the great-hipball game, which would start after dawn at the Second Twin Setting, which meant about three-hundred-score beats from now. They made it sound like a huge favor and a big deal, like getting tickets for the Super Bowl. Then, before Hun Xoc could respond, they said they only had room for two hundred of the Rattler’s guests-it was understood that they meant only blooded clan members-and couldn’t properly receive the rest in the city.

So what, it wasn’t supposed to be up to them, I thought, if one of the competing clans had room for a lot of guests, that was their business. Fine, fine, I thought, we’ll crash the afterparty.

Hun Xoc stood facing them in the direct sunlight. He took his time about answering, not even flinching at the deerflies biting him. I wondered if their biting meant rain was coming. If it did, Koh’s idea with the earthstar compound was screwed from go.

It was a bit of a tense moment. If we didn’t accept, it would be an insult and an excuse to start a fight right now. We were in the weakest possible position, uncamped and tired. Since we were on settled hostile ground, our scouts hadn’t been able to check out our flanks. If the Ocelots hit us now they’d be dug in with an easy retreat and we’d be way out in the breeze.

Hun Xoc had signaled that he was ready to answer.

“We all accept with thanks,” he said, “but how

Can we desert our children on the road?” he asked.

The Ocelots drew back and conferred. Evidently they didn’t want to wait here while the runners got the answer to 9 Fanged Hummingbird and brought back his response. Eventually they worked out that we’d all go into Ix, but that a hundred and twenty of our bloods would have to stay as “guests,” that is, really, hostages, in the Ocelots’ grounds on the mainland, far from the temple district. Hun Xoc agreed and made the division, taking the best fighters with us in our two hundred and leaving the others in the lurch. We said greatfathers-protect-yous and did a few little extreme-unction-ish rituals. We’ll never see them again, I thought.

While that was going on covert runners from 1 Gila came in at the back of our line and we had to wait for the damn Ocelots to leave before we could talk to them. 1 Gila’s news wasn’t good. He’d been slowed down by a bad raid and had had trouble making the split. When the runners had left they were still only at Ch’uuk sal-“Sweetwater”-which was still over a full normal day away. We sent back a message asking how much of the force could he get to Ix for the ball game, assuming the first ball dropped on schedule, exactly at the death of Grandfather Heat. I kept asking stupid questions. How long would the hipball truce protect us? Would the Ocelots come after 2JS after the festival, or during it, or even during the ball game? Finally even Hun Xoc told me to quiet down. By full sunlight we’d hired four hundred local porters to carry us into Ix and got the hell going. We wanted all our bloods to be fresh and feisty and ready to kick some head.