The Sacrifice Game

(42)

There’s no memory in there of my being grabbed. But there was a moment somewhere when my numb wet head seemed to swell to mul-size in air that felt like dry heat. Grab air. Nose full. INHALE, no, hard chunk. Spit it out. Spoot it eett, GET IT OUT!!! and there was this sensation of swallowing myself, like the way if you put a dragonfly’s tail in its mouth it’ll eat until it dies. At some point I realized that someone stuffed my left hand into my own mouth, the embedded shards of flint cutting through my upper lip. I blew my nose and opened one nostril and managed to breathe through that.

I think after that there’s a longer period that I don’t remember at all. And in a way that’s sad because the moment of your capture is one of the most important in your life. It’s a sacrament. But I don’t remember hearing my captors’ speeches, or my saying any of the little poems of submission, or anything. I do remember wearing ceremonial bindings, like the ones I’d been wearing on the mul, and I remember being in total dark smelling dead people near me. They smelled like they’d been beheaded, maybe, or eviscerated, which lets them drain a bit so they don’t get quite so smelly as people who die from disease. You don’t usually smell in dreams, I thought. Does that mean I’m awake? My swollen tongue scraped against cakes of blood on my inner cheeks. My leg was cold and big but when I finally got my bonds twisted around so I could reach down and feel it, it didn’t seem to be around. There was something fleshy there, according to my hand, but it was utterly numb, like I was touching someone else’s leg, and it seemed swollen like I had elephantiasis. Before, after, or during that whole dark period I remember being prodded and surrounded. I reached out and felt their fur leggings. They were made of baby-ocelot skin, the kind only 9 Fanged Hummingbird’s personal guards got to wear. What’s happening with the earthstar compound? I wondered again. Is it working? If it’s working, some people should be acting strange by now. They should be acting too happy, anyway. Right? Or maybe they’re onto it. Maybe they’re being smart, they’re only drinking water they’ve held on to for a while. Hell, hell, hell.

Ow. Someone kicked me. I think someone ordered me to get up and walk and I think I tried to tell them I couldn’t. I also don’t remember being dragged or carried, but at some point I was in a different, fresh-air space, probably a treaty tent. I was with four other high-ranking Harpy bloods. We were all gagged, but from what we could grunt out in tonal language it seemed like none of us knew anything about the outcome of the battle. I was pretty sure none of them were major homies of mine. My messed-up right hand felt all big and fun and floppy where it had contacted the earthstar powder.

I remember the neutral-zone weave of the big trading mat they set me on, all by myself, which meant they were doing a special deal for me. I automatically took the captive’s hunched position but I did get my head up long enough to check out what was being offered on the other side. You always want to know what you’re worth.

It was a tray with a set of four stuffed quetzals, symbols of safe conduct out of the area. There were glyphs burned into them but I couldn’t read who they were from or who they were for. Voices started up all around. I recognized one of them but couldn’t place it and then realized it belonged to 18 Jog, who was 2 Jeweled Skull’s favorite nephew. His name meant a critter halfway between a jaguar and a dog. Other voices haggled for a while in ambassadors’ dialect. Apparently this was a pretty big deal. I felt like a pricey prostitute. Finally heard enough to get that some of some of 9 Fanged Hummingbird’s commanders were buying their passage into exile-or maybe even 9 Fanged Hummingbird’s-with a number of captives, especially me.

Maybe we were getting somewhere. Maybe the earthstar stuff had worked. Maybe Lady Koh’s army had gotten the upper hand somehow. Hot spit. Maybe.

They struck a deal. An Ocelot guard took the birds and handed my leash over to Hun Xoc.

It took a minute to register. Four cheers for our side, I thought. We dun it. We grabbed the gold, won the battle, war, big bajoor, whatever. Victoria! I was getting something close to a flood of relief, but I was still too freaked to really latch on to it. Hun Xoc led me through a low door but as I got up I collapsed again and I remember only a little bit of getting brought into a small off-square Ocelot courtyard. The walls were frescoed with cat immortals. Some of the younger, less powerful ones had simply been canceled by gouging out their onyx eyes, but the main ones had been placated with flowers and smears of blood. If 2JS was going to take over, he’d have to get himself adopted into the Ocelots’ clan and start courting the Ocelots’ gods’ goodwill. To be in charge of Ix you really had to be an Ocelot. It was an Ocelot town. I guess it sounds silly, but everybody just knew that jaguars were the mightiest creatures and if you were on the very top, you were descended from jaguars. You couldn’t just change the title.

They took me to a round raised platform in the center of the courtyard. I checked out the sky, maybe for the last time. It was just a parallelogram of overcast and white smoke but I could tell it was sometime in the morning. I could hear a few far-off Harpy war shouts but none close by. Things still looked a little droopy and I wondered whether I was thinking clearly, even aside from exhaustion and blood loss and poison darts and whatever, and I thought maybe I wasn’t. I guessed I’d gotten a brush of that stuff during my little dip. They pushed me down on a convalescence mat and a couple of dressers started working on me, rubbing ashes and perfumes into my lacerations. They gave me soothing warm beverages and prechewed honey tortillas. At some point I heard shells and cabochons tinkling and saw 2 Jeweled Skull had come into the courtyard. I was so glad to see him I would have wet my breechclout if I hadn’t been emptied during my latest period of unconsciousness. He came over to where I was sprawled out on the mat, which was a big deal for him and a big honor for me. He was all decked out, the ultimate example of how you could be loaded down with ornament and still not look ridiculous. The blue circles tattooed around his orbitals made him look cool and mysterious, like you were seeing his eyes through sunglasses, and he had his black pyrite mirror on his forehead, like that third eye thing doctors used to wear.

“My son is a four-hundred-blood capturer,” 2 Jeweled Skull said to me. It meant I was going to be seated in the Harpy clan as an ahau. It was the highest promotion you could get besides becoming a bacab, like 2JS, or the ahau of ahauob, like 9 Fanged Hummingbird. I’ve arrived, I thought.

“Your game has been recorded as a win

For the Harpy House,” he said. Also a very big deal. I mumbled an unofficial thank-you and started one of the short speeches of congratulations on his “capture of the center of the world,” his taking Ix. He cut me off.

“Our win has yet to be solidified,” he said. On the west side of the courtyard, the public side, a messenger came in with a dispatch 2JS had to deal with and he took his leave for a moment, using an among-equals form. Evidently he was really busy. I’ll just hang out here for a while, I thought. Me and the rest of the big shots. Relief soaked into me again. Except, wait, I wondered, where’s Lady Koh? There were four-hundred-tesseracted things I had to ask her. Starting with whether she’d remembered to tell all our friendlies not to drink the water.

I started to get up. The dressers couldn’t hold me down because they didn’t have the authority, so they let me get halfway to standing. Then they caught me as I keeled over. I heard 2JS talking with Hun Xoc and some of his commanders.

You have to wait, I thought. I looked up at the sky. I don’t know whether I faded out or not but at some point later 2 Jeweled Skull had come back again and was asking me if I was all right.

I said I felt ready to play another ball game right now. He smiled.

And something in the smile Something wasn’t quite right. I’d been about to ask him whether they’d told him not to drink the water, to make sure he knew about the earthstar compound. But there was something-hmm.

I’ve never thought of myself as a great judge of character. When other kids in grade school were learning spelling from flash cards, I had a special set of cards that were supposed to teach me emotions, like it had a face with X’s for eyes and a tongue sticking out and I was supposed to check off the word disgusted. But maybe Chacal was a better judge. Or at least he picked up on the vocal microtones of a lie, or inimical pheromones, or something. Anyway, somewhere in Chacal’s lower brains, the cortices that scent danger on a reptilian level, somewhere in there a neuron fired that said Don’t tell him.

And I didn’t. Instead, I congratulated him again on the victory. He said thanks, it was nothing-part of the polite protocol-and then said it looked secure but had cost the Harpy House a lot of bloods. I said that was too bad but that they died “in the right place,” as we put it, and he said yes. I asked him if I could ask him a question. He said fine.

I asked-or inquired politely-whether Hun Xoc or 5–5 was still “in the middle level,” that is, alive.

My son 5–5 is dead, 2 Jeweled Skull said. My son Hun Xoc is missing, and not claimed by the Ocelots.

I said the necessary things. After that I was expected to ask, “And who else of our family have we lost?” to which he’d recite the list. Then I’d ask, “And whom have we taken?” and he’d recite that presumably much bigger list. But we didn’t do any of that. I guess he’d gotten enough of me to be a little less formal. Instead he said we’d hear the triumphant speeches later, around the conquest feast, but that he had to go see to the repair of the palisades. He said he was already digging a dry moat across the “Right Shoulder,” the narrowest part of the northern pass into the valley.

I asked if I could ask about something else.

He said all right.

I asked whether he knew where Lady Koh was.

I don’t know, he said, we had to win without Lady Koh’s help. Which is why “win” may still be a bit of an exaggeration.

I held my right hand up to my mouth, with the palm open, and rotated it to the right, meaning, “That’s hard to believe, tell me more.”

2 Jeweled Skull said that he’d seen images from my memory in his mind, historic battles and formations of paper soldiers over vast map tables, and that after I’d left he’d drilled a squad of a hundred of his best blowgun marksmen as an archery-style firing line. He’d broken the families up into smaller units and told them to keep fighting even if their lords and standards were captured, just like I’d tried to do back at Teotihuacan. He’d done everything right. Lady Koh’s army never showed up, but despite inferior numbers he’d taken the temple-district peninsula and most of the city.

But we’re still vulnerable, he said, we still need the Rattlers’ help, and Koh’s army isn’t here.

I said that even if Koh had been captured by the Ocelots, 1 Gila was supposed to be bringing in the Rattler army anyway.

He said the equivalent of “Well, we’re waiting.”

I asked whether he had any idea what had happened to Lady Koh after the ball game. I was getting this dizzy, ripped-off, betrayed feeling.

2 Jeweled Skull said that if the Ocelots had captured her he would have heard about it. They would have offered to trade her. Either she’d sold us out and made a deal with 9 Fanged Hummingbird, or somehow she’d had her guards spirit her away at the very beginning of the battle, or maybe she’d gotten out some other way. If she had made a deal with the ahau of the Ocelots, that is, 9 Fanged Hummingbird, it would mean she was coming back later, with him and Severed Right Hand, to retake Ix.

So 9 Fanged Hummingbird is still alive and outside the city? I asked.

Yes, he said. I think Koh may have been plotting with 8 Smoking Peeper, the Ixian Rattler feeder. Maybe that whole business with the Ocelots getting 8 Smoking Peeper onto their side was just an excuse for her to get away from us. It was setup city.

But the Rattler army was in our own territory, I said. The border patrols out there would have to know where they are.

I haven’t heard anything, he said.

We looked at each other.

Dang.

I started to make a formal apology. It wasn’t like I’d vouched for Lady Koh or anything, but still, I guess I should have seen this coming.

2 Jeweled Skull said I’d done more than any of his other sons had ever done for him.

I gestured, “Thanks to my Father,” and he gestured, “Accepted.”

There was another pause. Behind me 2JS’s commanders were impatient to go. He looked past me at them and gestured for them to wait another ten beats. He looked back at me. Under all the fooferaw, he was starting to look like a worn-out old politician.

I said I supposed no one from 1 Gila’s squad had given him the Scorpion-adders or the tzam lic either. He can’t know about the earthstar drug, I thought. Can he? No, no way. Koh and I’d kept that one too close to our vests. Didn’t “No,” 2JS said. “They haven’t given me anything.”

I didn’t answer. He asked whether I had gotten any idea of where Koh might have gone. I said no.

Was there anyplace they talked about in the region? he asked. Anywhere they might have supporters and space and cover, where they could go to regroup?

I said I didn’t know of any. If anyone had set something like that up, it would have been 1 Gila.

And Lady Koh never told you anything? he asked.

I said no. I thought we’d talked through everything, but evidently she fooled me. I’m a fool, I’m a porcupine, I’m not worthy.

“Nothing?” he asked again.

“No,” I said, “I didn’t-”

I paused like there was something in my throat.

2 Jeweled Skull looked at me.

I looked back.

He’d looked at me that way, with that same scraping-the-back-of-your-skull look he’d had when he first interrogated me such a hard, if not long, time ago, and I understood.