The Sacrifice Game

(29)

“And here my sons are,” 2 Jeweled Skull said, “and Lady Koh of the Rattlers, and her backrests and flutes.”

He meant her supporters. He went on a bit, doling out bits of praise. Hmm. 2 Jeweled Skull was saying all the right things, but there was something different and older about him. Maybe he just didn’t look so scary as he had when I was the new kid in town and he was towering over me with torture implements.

He teetered over to me, embraced me in that stiff dancey way, and gave me a ceremonial battle-saw. It was a three-arm-lengths shaft with a handle beaded in the pattern of my names and captures, with its last two feet widening into a flat wood blade inlaid with circular pink spondylus shells and edged with double rows of perfectly matched triangular blades of iridescent-yellow obsidian, like the nose of a golden sawfish.

Whoa, I thought. Usually I was just frustrated by the whole hyperflattering flowery speech thing but for once it didn’t seem like just empty form, it really meant something. It was corny but I was getting all misty and glowy inside.

“You tilt your basin of blood my way,” I said, correctly. “Perhaps

You’ve just mistaken me for someone else,

I who am unreliable, I of vice, of shit,

May I not think myself a worthy receiver.”

Yeah, I really did good, didn’t I, I thought. I felt, just, like, warm. Even the long aftertaste of the time he’d tortured me just made him seem more fatherly, in a sick way, I guess, but I couldn’t get distance from the feeling. Anyway, I could understand how he’d felt. After all, he’s old, I thought. He was carrying over sixty solar years, which was old for a Maya, or a preindustrial person from anywhere. Maybe it was up to me to take care of him now. He acknowledged everyone else in correct order but cut the exchange of speeches short. Judging from the tone of the beaters out on the court, the first ball would drop in eight more measures of four thousand beats each, that is, about two hours, which would seem like a while, but 2 Jeweled Skull had so much meeting-and-greeting to do that there was barely enough time to get him into position. Between the beats you could hear the crowd making urgent crackly sounds, like kids opening presents.

Please take asylum here, 2 Jeweled Skull said to Lady Koh. He touched a bowl of chocolate. His herald handed it to her.

“Star-Rattler’s Brood would accept your too-bright offer,”

Koh said, before touching the bowl,

“But our children have a gift as well for you.”

She meant the tsam lic and the three captured adders.

“But they aren’t here yet, and we come with unbent backs.”

At the risk of being obvious, “with unbent backs” was like saying “empty-handed.”

2JS couldn’t just say “Oh, yeah? Then when the hell are they showing up?” As host it was his position to say “Oh, that’s all right, anything’s fine, come anytime.” The mode we were speaking in made it all about whatever you weren’t saying as opposed to what you were. It was like Strange Interlude, you pictured everyone speaking out loud through a mask and then whispering what they really meant on the inner side.

“Our messengers say your children only entered

Our fields this morning,” he said, “but we all hope

They’ll join us for our moonrise victory feast.”

It was Koh’s turn to make a quick decision. She took the bowl of chocolate, held it in the “accepted” gesture, drank, and sent it back.

“And please take this as our pledge to serve our host

With all our numbers, genius, blood, and sight,” she said.

She handed Coati four long blue military-macaw tailfeathers, which he handed to the herald. 2JS accepted them. Everyone didn’t quite sigh with relief, but there was an okay-let’s-get down-to-brass-shit feeling. We sent out the peripheral people so that counterclockwise it was just 2 Jeweled Skull, Hun Xoc, 2 Hand, me, 14 Wounded, Lady Koh, Coati, and Hun Xoc.

We all squatted in the tiny dark hot room, not wanting to sit on the stone floor or to take the time to set our mats. Coati set a Gila figurine in front of him to acknowledge that he was also speaking for them.

It was 2 Jeweled Skull’s position to start.

There was a pause.

Our backup troops, the Rattler’s Newborn, were just fucking not here.

You couldn’t blame 1 Gila or anyone for the delay, but it was still a crisis that could sink the whole thing. The mood was shifting from an if-we-keep-our-heads-we’re-going-to-rock feeling to a maybe-we’re-in-trouble-no-matter-what-we-do feeling. 2JS and I looked at each other. We both wanted to get away and just catch up, but this was one time work really did have to come first.

“So then,” he said, “after the end,

We may have close frontiers on all four sides.”

It was a super understatement, like saying “It’s going to be a bumpy night.” I looked at Koh. She looked at me and we both looked at Hun Xoc. It was like, damn, maybe we’re screwed. We’re leftovers-to-be. We came all this way and we were still fucked. I felt guilty about it, I’d walked them into the worst possible situation when we all shoulda stood in bed.

The troops’ getting behind schedule hadn’t been any kind of a shock. It had more been one of those things where something’s just a little uneasy-making, and then it gets worse and worse, and as it gets worse you also realize how significant it is, until by the bitter end you’re wondering how you could have let the seed of the situation sprout in the first place.

Laughter, or what might be better described as frantic giggles, seeped in from the crowd outside. Probably the contortionists and animal jugglers had come on, which meant it was later than I’d thought. Then the mockers would come on and then the first ball would drop at the instant the east end of the court fell completely into the shadow of the Ocelots’ emerald mul. The timing was partly because otherwise one side would be trying to score goals into the low sun, but mainly because the ball was an astral body, so you wanted to launch it only when it wasn’t competing with the sun.

Hun Xoc asked how many bloods we really had to count on when they did get here. He didn’t use any of the code languages. I guess we’re sure nobody’s listening, I thought. Still, this whole side of the court was supposed to be Harpy territory for the duration of the festival.

Coati answered that we had at least thirty score coming, but to keep in mind that at least fifteen score of them were loosely trained, not yet full bloods. There were also about ninety score nonmale supporters. It was a huge army by Maya standards and respectable even by Teotihuacanob ones. More than enough to tip the balance if it was deployed correctly.

Coati asked Hun Xoc whether there was any sense that the Ocelots knew the Rattler’s Brood was headed this way.

Hun Xoc said apparently not. He said the Harpies only had one informer left inside the Ocelots’ inner household, and she might not even be an accurate source, but that at least as of this morning they all thought Koh’s converts were still heading southwest to Kaminaljuyu. Evidently 1 Gila had even sent a couple of advance parties to Kaminaljuyu and back just to increase that impression. As far as Koh’s presence here at the festival went, the Ocelots seemed to think she was swinging by here to pick up a few deserters and family members from the Harpy House to add to her army of converts on her way to her presumed new city in the south.

And so, if the Rattler’s Brood is just beginning to trickle into the preserve now, how fast could the first of them get to the gates? 20 Blue Snail asked.

Coati said 1 Gila and the managers of the Harpy preserves would know better than she would. But from the latest runners he guessed at least a quarter-day, which meant by Vega rising, about two A.M. And if we wanted them to show up armed and briefed and formed up into any kind of battle array and not completely exhausted, it would take longer. Even if we sent word to only send the bloods, and to send them at a run, we were still looking at an arrival time of Jupiter rising, or a little before midnight.

Hun Xoc started to make some kind of crack about Coati’s name, but 2JS cut him off.

Unfortunately, 2 Jeweled Skull said, the ball game won’t last half that long.