The Sacrifice Game

(44)

They strung me in the center of the platform and set Armadillo Shit on my right, a little ahead of me and facing in so I could look at him. They’d trussed him up in a fetal position, stuffed him into a big wicker jar, and poured wet lime-plaster down around him so that only his head was showing. I gave him a “Sorry” expression and he gave me that pathetic anything-for-you-boss devoted-underling look back. There was a ring of morning glories around his panting head. The setup was artful in its way. I guessed they were going to keep him alive as long as possible and just see what happened. I shivered at it a bit, but I could understand their fascination in the experiment. It’s like the way little kids’ curiosity is totally cute, but it has a cruel side. I’m not proud of being receptive to it, but that stuff has an allure that’s hard to explain to Fifth-Sunfolks, that is, citizens of the twenty-first-century. You have to think of that stage that children go through. I guess it’s usually around the ages of nine to fourteen, at least in the industrialized late-capitalist West or whatever. Anyway, at some point in there, most kids, especially the boys, are obsessed with really gross-out stuff, including theoretical if not actual torture devices. Supposedly they prefer whatever toys seem most repulsive to their parents. And we still had a lot of that sensibility. I mean we, like, the Maya ruling class. Twenty-first-century sophisticates would dismiss it as preadolescent humor, but we thought of as tragicomic religiotheatrical art.

Come on, think, I thought. Maybe last chance to think for a while. Come on. Get it straight. I was having trouble getting it together. I was still a bit more disturbed by the possibility that Koh had abandoned me than by the possibility of spending the next twenty years in continuous and indescribable torment.

Okay. 2JS never had any intention of honoring his commitment to Koh. He wouldn’t need a rival in Ix later anyway. Once he was entrenched in Ix he’d need peace with the Ocelots, the Pumas, all the other cat clans, everybody. Right? Right. He’d want to become one of them. He’d have zero reason to keep his word. Except for his family bonds. Which he probably cared less about since he’d gotten an infusion of relativism out of my consciousness. My little contribution had created a monster They brought in Hun Xoc. He’d been knocked around a bit but not badly wounded. The Ocelots had probably let him take out two or three of their bloods in order to get him alive. They tied him to a prefabricated scaffold in the Good Thief position, a bit in front of me on my left. I looked at him like “Sorry, I screwed up,” and he looked back like “No, I screwed up.” Otherwise he just looked confused. Why was his father doing this to him? Because he hadn’t played well enough in the ball game? One of the teasers started playing with Armadillo Shit, tweaking his face with a thistle stalk. Just a warm-up act. No more massages, I thought. No more fixing up extensions for old 9 Wax’s hair. I was getting a little sad. Squelch that. Armadillo Shit’s breathing was already quick and shallow and it got worse. I wondered what his skin felt like. Lime is corrosive. Another one tied a thong around Hun Xoc’s left elbow, twisting it tighter and tighter with a stick.

Damn, I thought, I blew it. I nearly had it, just forty-seven days left, and I failed. Fail, flail, frailed.

Maybe it’s okay if 2 Jeweled Skull goes back instead of me. I mean, instead of this me.

Except it’s not, is it? If he does go back he’s going to do something rotten. There’s just something bad about that guy. Maybe I was a bad influence on him. No, maybe he was always bad. I don’t know.

I was sure he wouldn’t do the right thing, though.

2 Jeweled Skull’s attendants put an ocelot-pelt cushion behind him and he sat back on it, nibbling a honey tortilla and watching us like we were TV. Trying to act casual. It’s not going to work, I thought. He’s worried something’s up.

“Ti ku ti bin xot u cal tumen,” 2JS said to Hun Xoc. “You (inferior) have shat in our house.” Suddenly he was all Chol court language again.

He’s not me, I thought, 2JS isn’t me.

I was pretty sure. I wasn’t running 2JS, or rather, the other copy of Jed 1 wasn’t running him. He was running himself. It wasn’t because he was being such a bastard and I was such a great guy or anything. It was just because I really would have handled everything a little differently. Maybe worse, even, but differently. It’s hard to explain. Somehow you could tell this guy was still thinking like a Maya ahau. Not like screwed-up little me.

“Please offer me, my father,” Hun Xoc said.

His arm was puffing up like a nuked hot dog.

“Your brother’s parasite came here to wreck us,”

2JS said. “It’s just a gut-snake speaking through

The mouth of Son Chacal’s decaying skin.”

“This blind, unworthy non-son didn’t know,” Hun Xoc said.

He said he didn’t know what he was being asked for or how he’d screwed up. No kidding, I thought. 2JS can’t really be expecting Hun Xoc to know much. They’d brought him here more for my benefit. What did Hun Xoc really understand about me, anyway? Not a lot when you got down to it. I’d really leveled with him, almost as much as I had with Koh. But he wasn’t the intellectual she was. I was sure he expressed it all to himself in terms of familiar concepts, wandering uayob and whatever. He thought I was still Chacal somehow, like Chacal’s disembodied spirit had visited this weird place during a night journey. He’d asked a lot about the seventy-eighth hotun but I’d always had to simplify my account. Certainly I’d never been able to really explain how engines worked or anything. He’d been interested in it but it was like Strange Tales of Another Dimension to him, he’d never apply any of it to his own experience 2JS signaled again. One of the teasers had a short wood-and-flint bone saw, and he positioned it on Hun Xoc’s forearm, just below the elbow, and pulled the first stroke. Purple deoxygenated blood sprayed up like beads, turning red in the air. His teaser twisted his arm slightly, directing the spray away from himself and into Hun Xoc’s face. I hadn’t been watching but my own teaser had gotten another mouthful of chili water and blew it up into me, farther this time, while someone behind me squeezed the enema bag again. Staccato sting-rolls spread out of my groin and through every micrometer of my earth’s-diameter-length network of arteries and veins and capillaries, and congealed into a mesh of razor wire. When I could think at all again I waited for the pain to slide onto its descending curve. It was the only part where you could get anything together mentally.

Okay. I retreated into chess mode. Next move. Other side. On track. Think. I visualized a pudgy little Hercule Poirot doll waddling around in my head, stroking his mustaches and pointing out inconsistencies.

What’s Koh doing?

Maybe she’d gotten herself killed somehow. Or maybe when she saw she was going to get captured she’d just cut herself with a poison ray spine. Maybe she didn’t want to be traded out to what was, after all, just another enemy. Maybe 1 Gila took control of her troops and didn’t tell her.

No, that’s ridiculous. They’re fanatically loyal to her. She has Unlimited Personal Power. Her armies are still out there somewhere, waiting for something.

Okay, Logic.

Koh hadn’t trusted 2 Jeweled Skull and she wouldn’t trust the Ocelots either.

She’d anticipated that 2 Jeweled Skull would sell her out once he’d used me to lure her to Ix. She never had any illusions about what would happen to her once she helped seat 2 Jeweled Skull on the Ocelots’ Emerald Mat. She knew he would have come after her next. Even if he wanted to promote the Star-Rattler cult after he came to power, he’d to do it through manipulatable venerators, not through a headstrong leader like Koh.

Okay. So she saw it coming. She knew he’d fuck her over, so she told the Rattler Children to stay away. No wonder we didn’t get any word from the twelve Harpy emissaries all that time, I’d bet a buck she issued orders for 1 Gila to kill them immediately so they couldn’t report back to 2JS.

For that matter, she’d probably set up 1 Gila’s idea to split the forces in the first place. That whole thing was just an act. Okay.

Koh’s still out there, with her army, or what’s left of it. Okay. So when Koh’s army didn’t show up, though, that actually surprised 2JS. Right? Right. He’d been counting on them to take the heat in the fight. The idea was to co-opt them and then sacrifice them once they put him in a good position. Even so, though, his blowgun squad carried the day.

Okay. So what about Koh’s long-range plan? What was she up to? Or more to the point, what was she up to with me?

Maybe I was only good to her for the well run. Koh couldn’t have sent her own squad to the well because then 2JS would have wondered what they were doing there. The most convincing story would be that I was trying to escape. It would keep him from thinking about where I was when I was captured “Where were you going when they took you?” 2JS asked Hun Xoc.

“The mainland,” Hun Xoc said.

“To do what?”

“To meet someone, that’s all I know,” Hun Xoc said.

Ah so, I thought. 2JS thinks we were going to meet Lady Koh. The teaser twisted off Hun Xoc’s forearm and started working on the other one. To my right they were peeling strips of skin off Armadillo Shit’s cheeks.

2JS walked over to me, reached out, and took my chin, like he was thinking of pulling my jaw off. His hand left little images of itself trailing after it in the air. Evidently I was still pretty messed up.

“So, Koh has something up her cunt, right?” he whispered in English.

“Sure, she’s heading for Kaminaljuyu,” I lied. “By a west-coast route. She’s going to regroup her force there and decide on the next move.”

“Bullshit,” he said. “If there’s one thing I know about it’s what’s going on in fucking Kaminaljuyu.” He reached out and touched my jaw with a sharpened index nail.