The Sacrifice Game

(54)

I was a little freaked out, to say the least. I just sat there for two beats, and then eight, wondering whether to run for it. Although of course there wasn’t anywhere to go. Get outside to Hun Xoc? No, they’d be holding him too. My eye darted to the doorway. Koh’s nacom, an old skin-blackened Rattler sacrificer, was crouching in it with a long-handled flint knife.

Lunge forward. Grab Koh’s neck. Try to hold her as a hostage.

No. Won’t work either. They’ll pry me off her in two p’ip’ilob. She owns this place, I thought. I’ve had it. Serves me right for dealing with these fucking headhunters.

I looked back at Koh. Her look said it was all all right. Thanks a lot, I thought. The nacom kneed toward us. Four Rattler assistants came in behind him, lifted me up, and laid me over the little stone altar table in the center of the room, holding my arms and legs lightly, so that my back wouldn’t break. The nacom sprinkled purifying balche over me, said his little invocation, and touched his flint knife to my Adam’s apple, like he was lighting a fire with a long match. I felt an ultrasharp stone hook catching a fold of my skin and then drawing a long, nearly painless line down my chest. The nacom put the knife aside, put his unclean hand over my abdomen-dangerously close, but not quite defiling my skin-and lifted up a bright-red achiote tamale, sculpted into a stylized heart. He handed it to Koh. Shockingly-I guess it was part of her New Deal religion, showing that she was immune to the pollution of death-she broke off a piece of the crust and swallowed it. Evidently the Orb Weaver Sorority had toned down this part a bit since the even badder older days, back between the time when the Oceans Drank Atlantis and the rise of the sons of Aryas. Novelty baked goods, I thought. Yet another example of Koh’s terrific sense of humor. You never knew where you were with this chick. I leaned back, listening to my sweat and urine dripping on the stone floor. Koh was giggling a little bit. Laugh it up, I thought. She was always pulling stuff like that, riddles, gags, infantile practical jokes. Gullible me. Yuk, yuk.

The rattler ordinands moved me down onto a bobcat-fur-covered pallet and started washing me in three kinds of water and four kinds of sand, purifying me after sex and death and whatever.

I’ve got to have a talk with Koh Babe about this shit, I thought, it’s not funny and it’s wearing me down. A couple more brilliant moments like that and I’ll be the only white-haired aborigine between here and Iceland.

I guess she’s just testing me again, to see how cool I can be. Well, the SATs are over, sweetheart. I’ve been cool enough. I raised my head up on one arm, even though it wasn’t a pose anybody seemed to use around here. Another four-kid Rattler troop had crawled in with a human-size tray. It had a full-size corn-paste figurine of me, very cleverly done, all dressed in the exact same ceremonial clothes and ornaments with the same tats. I watched Koh undress the figurine and bite into the right hand and the cornflour-cake doll-face. Thank God there wasn’t any fake blood inside or anything. She pushed her finger down in its chest cavity, replaced what was left of the heart loaf, poured balche over the open wound, and sent the whole thing back out to the Orb Weaver Sorority feast table. Go for it, I thought. Take, eat, barf, whatever.

I looked over at Koh but she was supervising the damn ritual washing of her private parts. I sat, watching, breathing hard. They finished wiping me and started dressing me, again, this time in male clothes. Koh let her team sew her into a plain white huipil-which only the highest muckamucks got to wear-and then kneed over to the hearth-fire stones. She uncovered a jar of water and a jar of blue corn, soaking in water and lime. Good morning to you, too, I thought. Well, so, that was fun, how about brunch?

I sat patiently, getting worked on, like an actor being made up for a monster role, listening to that krik, krik, krik of the grinding stones. That sound really is like nothing else, I thought. Koh’s having to make symbolic tortillas seemed a little demeaning to me. Here, honey, I’ll do that. I’m a sensitive hubby. Don’t get dishpan hands. Oh, well. It was probably the last time she’d ever make them herself anyway. She wouldn’t have to do it six hours a day every day of her life, like the rest of the gals in this hemisphere.

Eight hundred beats later we reemerged from the house dressed as the joint heads of our united clans. We could hear a crowd outside the gate, mainly kids and festivalgoers from the dependent clans-that is, the closest thing to a middle class-getting free food from the overflow of the wedding. They were giggling and everything but a little awed to be on the peninsula. The whole holy district was off-limits most of the time, but welcoming now.

We formed up in the courtyard, getting ourselves together, Koh and I in the center of the wedding party, with all of us surrounded by Rattler guards with big round shields of iridescent blue-green trogon feathers. The attendants moved the food aside and started packing it up for incineration. We listened. These guys had better be on cue, I thought, but before I’d finished the thought, I picked out that unique roar far away. A nonet of Ocelot musicians, playing the Ixian peace song on long boxwood horns, were coming up on the crowd from the southwest, from the direction of the great zocalo.

On The Left stepped out through the gate, leading two porters carrying the oracle box. It was an arm-span square and pearl-white, woven out of the stripped shafts of egret feathers. The person inside it was, supposedly, a hundred and sixty years old. But of course that was hype.

We heard the guards on the outside making a space for him in the center of the crowd. The horns came around the council house. Plaster walls buzzed in the roar. I imagined the crowds drawing back and doing their varieties of dirt-eating moves as the Ocelot procession came through.

Our band blasted out our entrance chord. The cantor gave his little speech of welcome and the screen of guards fell back, and the twenty of us, Koh and Hun Xoc and the Gilas and our flanking retainers, were all suddenly visible to all these people, real people, like, let’s meet the public.

Na’at ba’al, the cantor said, relayed through his megaphones. The crowd yelled back its welcoming response, somewhere between a reedy cheer and a chant.

I felt all exposed. It had been a while. On The Left asked the crowd if they were ready and they answered that they were. The tone of the expression was something like “Yes, thank you, what are you going to do for us next?”

I tried to listen for signs of trouble in the chord but I couldn’t get any. Koh had had thousands of Rattler families adopted by other clans, so they were interspersed through the crowd, and the others were going along. And at least half the remaining clans really were crazy about us, they thought I was literally the gods’ gift. It was really only the Macaws and Snufflers we had to worry about. And any recidivist Ocelots. Well, at least, no matter how resentful any of them were, they weren’t showing it. They were going along with the shills.

What was our danger quotient on this? Like they used to say, oaths sworn at spearpoint were always worth a little less. I wished we could have controlled better who was coming into the temple district. Normally only people belonging to one of the clan temples on the peninsula would think of coming here. And every family had its spot, so you sort of knew who you were getting. Any group of infiltrators would have been spotted by the people they were trying to stand with.

And Koh’s guards and their guides-that is, local people who helped them recognize other local people-had been out around the clock, ever since the battle, turning the place into a police state. But still, you couldn’t search everybody, or even recognize everybody. The main thing to do with something like this was just for us to keep isolated, stay out of any conceivable kind of projectile range, and then get the hell out before people got too drunk.

The chief herald blew his special trumpet for the first time. It was a long whine like a giant router with a two-inch bit, air raid, ground raid, water raid, ascending into a long squeak like an ulna whistle, and then there was nothing.