The Sacrifice Game

(28)

It was hard to see much of the actual city through all the kites, banners, and offering smoke, but I remember thinking, “Wow, Ix is huge!” I realized I hadn’t gotten much of a look at the city before, since my first visit had been a little rushed. Not that it was endless like Teotihuacan, but it certainly wasn’t a couple of pyramids in the middle of a jungle. It was more like the central cluster of the nine main mulob were there to focus the hundreds of acres of comfortable houses and the thousands of acres of shantytown sprawl. The Harpy Clan’s own mul-which was named One Harpy, the seat and personification of the founder of the line-was the closest from this angle and just spiked up overhead like superheated smoke from an old-fashioned space rocket. I’d never gotten a good look at it before. It was steeper than the others, almost a sixty-degree angle, and red on each side with the directional colors banded through on the north, west, and south. The sacbe branched southwest and we descended four levels into the plain of the valley. The terraced slopes on either side were studded with rows of hundreds of nearly identical compounds, and at least in this district the different sides of most of the houses were painted in the colors of the directions they faced, and the whole thing had a sort of cubist bop to the staggered blocks, like they were all lit with yellow light from the south and black light from the west and so on, no matter what time of day it was. But it wasn’t like Teotihuacan’s brutal crystals, it was all organic, smoothed over at the corners, and the closer you got to the center of town the more everything sprouted a luxuriance of grotesque vegetal ornamentation that I really can’t describe the effect of, it was just so much, forests of multicolored grandfather-poles, tree-people, cornstalk-people, their heads bursting Daphne-like into ceiba-branches that trailed off into long, thin streamer-kites fulgerating against the pewter clouds. I guess you might get something of the volume of the overload by walking around inside a Buddhist temple in Sri Lanka, but the style was different, all shadowy and obsessive, and outlined, every little thing darkly haloed like it was sealed in an infinitely flexible membrane. I got a shiver without knowing why and then realized we were passing a mural of myself, as Chacal, winning the tun’ s halach pitzom against 6 Hurricane at Snapping-Turtle Lake, with a big “in memoriam to the greatest” inscription with all my dates and scores, and I felt this huge flood of vicarious pride or something and had to force myself to cool it. As we crossed the first bridge we could see the canals and the big oxbow around the temple precinct were choked with ceremonial canoes, all draped in cotton banners and red-and-pink geranium chains and flying giant sun-disk kites. A contingent of Harpy bloods had met us and were walking alongside Hun Xoc, code-whispering about arranging for the converts. They’d be able to get inside the valley but they wouldn’t come closer than the second circle of palisades without starting a fight. Bloods and dependents from all different clans, even some Ocelots in their distinctive emerald trogon-feather half-capes, crowded the low walls of the causeway and pushed against the flanking bloods trying to get a peek at Lady Koh. They shouted the same questions over and over, mainly asking for predictions on the big hipball game. Somebody begged her to curse the people who’d raped and “sealed” his four daughters, but he got shouted down. A rumor had gotten around that Koh was powerful enough to call the Rolling Head without harming herself. In general, a curse involving the Head was so powerful it would kill the curser as well as the cursee. But if you were really major, you could do it and survive. Anyway, she ignored the issue. We turned off the sacbe down the steps toward the courts. The city was dressed in its beyond-festive great-hipball game atmosphere. Every surface had been redyed with fugitive overlays, cerulians, violets, and magentas, and oiled and buffed and reoiled, and it all sparkled in the peach light. I kept wanting to look over my shoulder and had to remind myself that was stupid, if they attacked us now we couldn’t do anything about it.

We crossed the Second Bridge and passed under the Black Gate and into an alley between the rows of low stone dressing-room buildings that bordered the court precinct. It was male territory, but I guess since Koh was a liminal being it was okay for her to be here. Anyway, she had her two male epicene-attendants holding translucent blue-green feather-fans on either side of her head so that symbolically she’d never stepped outside her holy space. I could hear the players gearing up inside the screened-and-guarded rooms, and beyond that the crowd in the stands, that nervous pre-bloodsporty rustling growl. We passed a couple of vendors selling drinks of hot water at drought prices. Good, I thought, people’s home cisterns are probably pretty much empty. If there was a battle the soldiers and fires would eat up the rest of the stored drinking water in a few thousand beats.

The Harpy bloods ushered us-I mean Koh and her dwarf and two of her handmaids, and then 2 Hand, 14 Wounded, and me, and our attendants-to the back of what you might call the Visitors’ Field House and through a little anus-door into one of the few tiny hipball-game changing rooms that wasn’t in use. I wished Hun Xoc were with us, but he’d had to go through a special purification. When my eyes got used to the interior dark I saw there was a one-fifth-scale statue of me in a niche-that is, myself as Chacal, the ballplayer. It wasn’t a good one, just a mold-made workshop multiple, but it was still disconcerting. There were figurines of 3 Balls and 1 Big Peccary and these other legendary players alongside. Two more Harpy heralds were flanking the draped mouth-door on the far side of the room, which led out to the Ocelots’ ball court. There were nine of them, but the great-hipball court was by far the biggest. It smelled like sweat and analgesic ball-oil. There needs to be a stronger word than nostalgia for the effect of smells like that. It just shot this jump-through-the-roof rush through my Chacal side, all buzzed up with pride and confidence and determination, but on my Jed side it coughed up all this bad stuff from high school in Nephi, the locker room and the sports doctor’s office with the rolls of adhesive and the Pam Anderson poster on the wall and all these loutish athletes coming in to get taped up before they went out on the field, and me sitting there blue-icing a bruise I’d gotten from a free weight in my Remedial Physical Education program, and just having to sit and plot my revenge while I took all this shit about being an aboriginal faggot freak. And now I was a big shot in this environment. The biggest. I mean, really, you have no idea how huge I was. It was like it was 1999 and I was Michael Jordan and everyone thought I’d died in a space-shuttle accident, but really I was walking around looking at displays of myself in the video stores at O’Hare Airport. In two minutes there’d be so many people there that the floor would collapse. Just wait, I thought. It’s comeback time.

2 Jeweled Skull’s heralds crouched in and flanked the door.