The Sacrifice Game

(36)

Like Teentsy had said, Emerald Immanent pretended to try to make the tip and then he and Emerald Howler came together at Hun Xoc. Just as they were about to trap him, and without looking, Hun Xoc faked a stumble. I got the ball and back-passed to Red Cord. He bounce-passed back to me. I came up to shoot. Howler was about to nail me but Hun Xoc was there and jumped high up in front of him, waving his arms and puffing out his cheeks into a frog face. I shot but just missed the peg. Emerald Snapper got it and passed. Emerald Immanent shot, missed, and then instead of recovering dove into Hun Xoc and gave him a good bump, but Hun Xoc rolled himself up like an armadillo and slipped away backward, back into our home zone. He was the best at that stuff. Red Cord had gotten the ball and sent me a lob pass. I shuffled four finger-widths closer to the north bank. My old systems were still responding, everything flowing pretty well.

Apex. Down. I got my hip into place and braced myself and “bok,” yesssss, ball! Ball! Ball!

Correct angle.

Dodge. Around. Successful. Under.

Ball. Ball. Now.

“BOK!!!”

I got the black sun just at the right nanoinstant and the feeling was like nothing else, so delicate, so powerful, so round, so firm, so fully boked, so violent even though you’re just standing in one place. It’s hard to explain how visceral the impact is, I guess if anything it feels most like doing a “dig” in volleyball, or hitting a chester or header in futbol, I mean, soccer. Or like the way you can launch another person on a trampoline. When you hit the ball with your body the contact’s just erotic, it’s like you’re a slit-gong ringing out this incredible chord made up of all your different nerves, pain, pleasure, position, everything, it’s globally refreshing like every one of your two hundred and six bones pops out of its socket, shakes off all the accumulated pressure of time and gravity, and snaps back into place better than ever, and you just buzz and ring afterward like you went through this electroshock degaussing.

I could feel I was going to make the shot, so instead of a follow-through I dove forward, rolling over along the oiled bank before he could get to me. I couldn’t see the jade dust falling on me, but t seemed as though I could feel it.

Score! GREAT-SCORE! GREAT SCOOORRRE!!!

“ Li’skuba wasak. 17 Ocelots, 12 Harpies.”

On the eleventh serve Hun Xoc shouldered in a great-goal, bringing the score to 17 Ocelots, 16 Harpies. As of now Hun Xoc was the top ballplayer in the known world. I got eye contact with him and his exposed cheeks flashed or implied a smile under his mask. Floods of pride welled up in my chest or heart or wherever such fountains well.

On the twelfth serve I hit a single, for 17 Ocelots to 17 Harpies. It wasn’t spectacular, but it was a whole new game. The cheering went on and on and on. And-the-crowd-goes-wild, my mind looped over and over, in the weird even spondee of Howard Cosell. The Harpy clansmen and partisans and even what you might call “undecideds” were all really roaring this time, like stir-crazy cats in the middle of winter in the old Lion House at the Bronx Zoo, the way when they really got going that reverb would just soak into all the tons of masonry around you until the whole building was like a big old bronze alarum bell. I rolled back and south into our home zone and into a cloud of trash talk, a little afraid the cats were going to pile on top of me even after the call, and didn’t look up until I saw the red paint under me. A big shadow passed on my right, Emerald Immanent glaring suspiciously at me, thinking of hand-smashing me even though the ball was dead. He didn’t do it, though. Even if all the umpires had been fixed they’d have to call a si’pil- a big fault, like a sin-and take him out of the game.

“You’re gonna get balled,” Emerald Immanent muttered. “Balled” meant getting trussed and wrapped up, alive into a big-old ball and kicked around unto death. I was about to say something snappy back but thought better of it. He’d know my voice on the first syllable. It was kind of like if everyone thought Michael Jordan had died and then he came back to play as a rookie with a different number, darker skin, repositioned eyebrows, no moustache, a beard, a blond Afro, and no tongue. If he hung back people wouldn’t pick up on it, but if he started stuffing basket after basket a few people would start saying how much he looked like Jordan, and the word would spread, and in a few minutes the whole stadium would be talking about how he had to be His Airness, and the word would spread, and… well, anyway, I wouldn’t stay unrecognized for long no matter what I did. But there still wasn’t any point tipping cards right away. I was still an unknown scrub who’d just had a lucky shot.

Marker. There. Mine. My spot. My marker.

The thirteenth serve came down. I was there exactly right for the tip but something was off, it was like the ball just caught and paused in midair for half a beat. I’d overshot and tried to step back but by the time the ball had actually fallen Emerald Immanent had gotten a good line on it. He passed it back to Emerald Howler, who took a leisurely shot and made an easy great-goal.

“18 Ocelots, 17 Harpies.”

The ball had been rigged with a nearly invisible gut cord, and it had hesitated just long enough before it snapped the line to throw us off. There was rustling in the Harpy side of the crowd. I looked up at them and heard the word “si’pil,” major cheat.

Damn.

I’d been in a couple hipball games where somebody switched in a lopsidedly weighted ball, but with those you could call for an examination. If you looked at this ball you probably wouldn’t see anything. And somebody’d rolled up the cord. It was a good one.

I stood there, looking around like an idiot. Or, as Forrest would say, like a idiot. No call. The elder Harpy bloods were calming the others down. As they should have, I supposed, but it still rankled.

Like I said, they had to win by three. Just a regular goal, I thought. Can’t pull that one again. No tricks. Don’t think about it. Just like any other point. Play hard. Give it the old Bulldog try. Handsome Dan. Rah.

Fourteenth serve.

“Chun.”

Red Hun Xoc got the tip. Emerald Immanent was hanging back now. Letting the game come to him. Emerald Howler was tied up guarding me. I faded back into our zone, letting the pass hit the bank on my right, and then got back under it and scooped it up. I shot way low and missed on purpose. Emerald Snapper got the ball and sent it to Howler.

Okay, here’s my trick, I thought. I was downcourt in three steps, onto the black and all over Howler before he could pass. He hip-dribbled low against the angle of the bank, trying to keep it away, but I darted under him and knocked the ball toward me with my knee and in less than a beat I’d balanced it on my right wrist-scoop and shot it way back upcourt into the red. Hun Xoc knew what I was up to-he and I had run this move a hundred times-and he was there.

I twisted away, faked north, and then blasted back up the middle of the court, tiptoeing on the line between the neutral black and the off-limits yellow, and dove into our home zone just ahead of Emerald Howler.

Hun Xoc picked up the ball and dribbled it twice up the white zone toward the Ocelots’ goal. I barely signaled at all but he knew what I was getting at. Just before Emerald Immanent was on him he back-passed to me.

I shouldered the ball up at a long angle, darted around the two-person crunch, and picked it up again on its downward arc. It was something I’d practiced so often from such an early age that I wasn’t even aware of it.

Emerald Immanent was the first to clock what I was going for but Red Hun Xoc got in on my left and kept him off me. Emerald Howler got around, though, and checked me on my left side, cracking the front of his yoke into the underside of mine.

“ Kaaxtik u bak’el it,” he said through his grunt. “ Better clench your asshole.” I tipped right, braced myself on the chalky slope with both hands, and kicked backward at his knees. Emerald Howler dodged away. I guessed that he’d figured the most urgent thing was separating me from the ball, not attacking me, since I was about to get torn apart by the rest of his team anyway, so he’d leave himself open. And he did. As he settled himself and got his yoke down into the path of the descending ball I jumped back and caught his right wrist-guard in the crook of my left arm and twisted backward, straining against it. He was this incredibly strong guy, just a squat chunk of muscle and breakage-enlarged bones like a twisted oak stump, but after a beat I got him over onto me, the ball coming down and bouncing off the cotton beneath his yoke, and as he rolled over to try to crush my legs with his yoke I got my left hand up and too fast for anyone to see it I ripped his nose plug out of his septum, and sort of deflected the spray of blood into his eyes with my hand while I rolled backward. He’d gotten hold of one of my waist straps but I pushed against him with my legs and I finally snapped away, rolling over again once, and I was back on my feet. Hun Xoc had managed to pick up the loose ball and, as he got his last bit of juice together, set up and shot just over my head. He hit the peg dead on, but the vase didn’t move.

“19 Ocelots, 17 Harpies.”

Que el fuck? I thought, No wakal tunI? He fucking tipped the jar, what did they do, glue it on?

I looked up at the stupid little clay pot. It was just hanging out there, like, who, me? And he’d just sent a brotherfucking earthquake through its little fucking peg.

“The Harpies request inspection of the bowl,” I started to yell out in formal Chol, but Hun Xoc was already on top of me and he practically stuck his hand down my mouth.

Shut up, he said. He moved me back into the red. Emerald Howler and Emerald Immanent were on their feet and running in place at us, held back by a fog of invisibles.

Let’s go, Hun Xoc said. We teetered back to our markers along the north wall, leaving bloody handprints.

On the fifteenth serve, the Ocelots fouled us, for 19 to 18. Yay. The sixteenth ball made twenty-eight circuits-an unlucky number-but just as I thought we were getting a line on it Emerald Immanent’s lob shot grazed the peg, lightly but fair and square.

“Ocelot great-goal, 20 Ocelots, 18 Harpies.”

The Ocelot side whipped up into a cheer orgy. One point away. Bastards.

Finally everyone quieted down for the serve, and then there was a signal that 2 Jeweled Skull had asked to raise the stakes by what was basically the amount of his personal treasury. It was the signal for the Harpies to get ready for combat. I looked up into our Harpy stands. The three hundred or so war-age bloods were bouncing around and waving their baatob like innocent spectators, but if you were looking for it you could see, just from how still they were, that something was going on. They had a look like the nonexpression of a Japanese gymnast doing an iron cross on the hanging rings. They were dressing each other for combat under their mantos, popping the nuts off the points of their blowgun darts, untying the knots of their mantles and heavier ornaments so they could slip them off at a p’ip’il’ s notice-at a blink-tying obsidian knives and saw handles around their upper arms. It was slow going, you had to be careful not to cut yourself or the person you were dressing. Obsidian’s really nothing to screw around with. The edge of an obsidian blade is only one molecule wide, and it can part the molecules of your flesh like it was going through air, often nearly painlessly, so that it takes you longer to notice you’ve been cut. They still use-or I should say they were going to use-skin scalpels with obsidian edges in the twenty-first century. In any pitched battle with obsidian weapons, about half of the combatants were always hash in a flash, like they’d fallen through a stack of windows from the pre-safety-glass era.

Could the Ocelot spies see something was up? I wondered. Or was it so subtle that you had to know it was happening to catch it?

The signal came down that Fanged Hummingbird had seen the raise. There was another blast of commotion. I got Hun Xoc and Red Cord into a kind of a huddle and got my mouth onto Hun Xoc’s ear.

If this turns into a fight we have to head into the Ocelots’ compound, I said. West.

Why? he signed on my arm. He was planning to stay here and fight it out.

We have to get to the Ocelots’ tree, I said. There’s something I promised 2 Jeweled Skull I’d do. I didn’t want Red Cord-or even Hun Xoc, I guess-to know about the earthstar compound. Better they thought I wanted to ring or somehow poison the Ocelots’ celestial tree-which would be a reasonable goal, actually, ritually speaking. It would be like killing the clan.

Hun Xoc signed that he didn’t want to run.

I started to try to tell him the old thing about how we weren’t running, we were just advancing in a different direction, but I tripped over the words. It wasn’t that easy to translate an English phrase into Chol, or at least it wasn’t for me.

We’re not running anywhere, I said, I have to ajma-xoc. It meant “follow what our father says.” It was incontrovertible. Come on, I thought, switch hats. You’re not a ballplayer right now, you’re a commando.

He demurred again. I insisted. Finally he said “Agreed” by contracting his shoulder muscles.

It’ll just be the three of us and six of Koh’s guards, I said. Maybe not even that many. We can still make it, though.

Listen, something’s going on, Hun Xoc signed by tapping my yoke.

What? I asked, but I heard it.

“Kot Chuupol! Ile Kot Chuupol!” It was Emerald Immanent’s voice.

He’d recognized me.