The Sacrifice Game

(56)

Everyone on the dais drew back from me so that I was exposed to the crowd. I teetered up four low steps to the next, smaller platform, the foot of the stairs of the pyramid, a half-rope-length above everyone else. I was alone except for a tall wrapped stele lying in the center of the landing, ready to be lifted and slid into the big hole under its base.

The crowd reacted, although it wasn’t anything you could hear. This was already the first stage in climbing the mul. It meant I was committed to respond to the oracle’s challenge. The whole thing was considered a test. Which I guess is obvious, except it wasn’t just testing me personally. If Ocelot accepted me and infused me with his uay I’d supposedly be strong enough to establish Ix as the seat of another thirteen-k’atun cycle, the way Teotihuacan had been the seat of the previous one, and then Ix would get a whole lot of goodies. Of course, now that the Teotihuacanob coalition had fallen apart, other cities would immediately contest the claim. But everyone was still taking it kind of seriously. Too many snafus from the ruling family and people would start losing confidence. Motivation, I thought. Human resources. Give ’em a leader. Ein Volk, ein Fuhrer. The Ocelot interpreter took out a half-calabash basin. It passed hand to hand like a collection plate, first through the great-bloods on the level below me and then through part of the crowd below them. Each person who got it unwrapped a single small green chili pepper, Capsicum frutescens, a variety so hot that it was used only for torture and poisoning fish-and dropped it into the gourd. The full basin came back to the interpreter. He mashed the chilis with a pestle- the vessel with the pestle has the brew that is true- I thought added a shot of balche, and stirred it up. An ordinand handed him a blue sacrificial cord with ocotillo thorns woven into it. He showed the rope to the crowd and coiled it into the basin, tamping it down with the pestle. He let it sit for a minute and then pulled it out to show how it was soaked with chili water and covered with little yellow seeds. There wasn’t going to be any possible question about it. Nothing up my sleeve.

I turned to the mul and gave it the son-to-father salute. Except for its staircase its entire bulk was draped with the twenty-seven original halach popob, cotton-and-feather weavings rippling over its nine blue-green courses in waves of gold, black, and scarcely believable unfaded Gobelin reds.

Thirteen of them hadn’t been unfolded since the seating of 4 Rabbit, in the first sun in the first tun of the eighth red hotun, 493 AD, at the last quadruple conjunction of Saturn, Venus, Mars, and Jupiter, two hundred and fifty-six years ago. The interpreter handed me the cord.

Okay. Right. No point waiting, I thought. Not everyone in the crowd could see everything, but the great-bloods on my left and right could see plenty.

Can’t fake this one. Nope. Come on, get it over with.

I unwrapped a fresh stingray spine, handling it gingerly like a communion wafer, and tied it to one end of the cord, like I was threading a needle.

Go for it. Goferit. Gfrt.

I untied my little loin-package and took out my penis. It was a little embarrassing, not because I was showing it off or anything but because it was looking kind of puny, pulling its turtle-head into its long foreskin. Shrinking violet. Shying away from the coming inevitable.

Hard up, little dude.

Now, now, NOW NOW NOWNOWNOWNOWNOWNOW. I held up the shaft, slid the spine into the underside right above the bulb, and slipped the point forward in the space between the loose skin and the deep fascia and poked it out again just under the corona, pulling the thorn-thread after it. The first mental state I was aware of was disbelief, amazement that I could be feeling like this and still be alive. The interpreter set the chili-coil basin down on my left, placed a larger terra-cotta trencher in front of me, and dropped thirteen triangles of blue sacrificial paper into it. He seemed to check the menstrual flow out of my glans and then stood back. I was too aware of the scores of great-bloods leaning in closer, watching for even a grimace or twitch of pain that might show I wasn’t the one. I dangled the cord down over the mound of paper, scattering red dots, and kept pulling it through. I watched the blood flow out of my groin, out over the ribbons on my legs, down into the trencher, spilling over its rim and off down the stairs and into the world, the inside becoming the outside, the most-private written out for the universe. It made sense. I pulled it through, hand over hand, as slowly as possible. It was the longest rope in the universe. And the thickest. It made the VSNL transpacific cable seem like a piece of dental floss. Come on. Too late to whiff out now. Go. Go. Go. Go. The heat of the capsaicin had already spread through my body, buzzing my eardrums and activating tear ducts I tried to choke off, but I did manage to just stand there, not jumping a rope-length into the air and screaming like I really had to do but just pulling and pulling, hand over hand, until it sank into its own groove. It was only while these things were happening that you could ever explain to yourself why we did it. I mean, pain has its own world and its own allure, but it’s not describable after the fact. When you get down to it we did it only for the only good reason to do anything, that is, just for the hell of it. It was just suffering for its own sake, or for its own clarity. When you become a connoisseur of agony it gets like anything else, like any acquired taste, you get into controlling it, you learn how to distribute it through your body and through time, how to teeter on the very edge of your expanding personal limit without falling off into insanity. It teaches you to separate yourself from your body and swim out into the ether. You learn how to distinguish four hundred different shades of pain. A ton of stuff. And as far as I know it’s a lost art, like knapping a statue out of obsidian.

I pulled the last thorn-knot through and out with an explosion of droplets and coiled the end of the bloody cord into the offering-trencher, and now the aftermath was already setting in, quarts of endorphins sloshing through my capillaries. Pain releases you from yourself and returns you to yourself. The interpreter took the trencher, raised it and showed it to the sky caves of the four directions, and set it down on a brazier. Curls of blood-smoke slithered up and out, my essence sent into the farthest reaches of the great gas-cloud. It made sense.

I stood there wobbling a bit in the warped gravity. It might have been just a figment of my lack of imagination, but I thought I could hear sniffing, the big cat checking out my scent. I teetered backward and caught myself. Watch it. I was feeling dangerously good. One thing I can guarantee is that that moment of recovering from intense pain is the truest peace anyone can ever experience. Especially if it’s self-inflicted pain. If you can dive into what you’re most afraid of and drift there and not swim up until you’re good and ready, everything gets different, the world looks all washed and every vertex of reality’s ten billion polygons a second is shard-keen against your Malpighian skin, like you’re a sphere of holographic film picking up every photon reflected by every facet of the world.

An acolyte knelt in front of me, squeezed tiny globs of anesthetic honey-lime into the two wounds on my penis, and wrapped it up again in its bloody bands. The sniffing sound segued into something like a purr. My mask came down over my head and my backrack attached itself to my torso, tying itself on with four hundred biting laces in eight hundred invisible hands.

He says to come a little closer, the interpreter said. How did he hear him from this distance? I wondered. Was there somebody else relaying sign language? Well, ask about that later. You can’t be an expert on all their little secrets. Remember, they’ve been staging these things for a long time. They know what they’re doing.

I positioned myself at the first step, sideways to the incline. The stairs had fantastically high risers, twenty-two inches according to the BYU map, and we were small people, so as I stood flat on what was effectively the first step, the one above it was above my knee, between it and the level of my groin. To raise myself up it I had to balance on my peg, lift my intact leg with its stilt-shoe as high as possible, like an eleve in ballet, position it on the upper step, shift my weight to it, and pull the peg up after me. I’d had them drill a shallow hole at the edge of each step, kind of like on Captain Ahab’s deck path, so I could fasten my hidden sole-spike into it between steps. But as I took the first one and wobbled on the pull-up I had trouble getting it in, and when it did slip in I tipped over to that side and panicked until I teetered back upright and found my center of balance. Whoa, I thought. Watch it.

Cripes. Two hundred and fifty-four steps to go. If I pulled this off, it really would be because of divine intervention.

The beaters signaled the next step. Okay. Next. Go. I had to move up one step every five beats. We hadn’t made any allowance for the fact that I’d been maimed. If we changed the requirements or faked it at all, I’d lose too much of my already leaky credibility.

I’d rehearsed this, of course, on a forty-step mock-up. But I hadn’t been brilliant and I’d been too sick to risk the drinking and blood loss. And it was getting breezy, and dark. And mainly I just wasn’t feeling too good. It wouldn’t have been so bad without the damn towering beaky Eagle headdress, I thought. And without the claw-foot Elton John platforms, of course. But I was starting to feel like with them I didn’t have much of a shot. I raised my foot but somehow I flicked my vision upward, toward the sanctuary, and my Cyclops eye somehow let an awareness of depth into my head.

Uh-oh. I’m in trouble.

The stairs just went up and uppity up, but it wasn’t even the horribly steep fifty-one-degree angle that had really hit me, it was the unbrokenness of the span, the subtle strangeness of the absence of railings, absence of landings, absence of turns between flights, the lack of all those little-noticed amenities that all stairs in the rest of the world always have. The stairs projected utter antihumanism, architecture as weapon, not just a complete disregard for comfort and safety but a will to grind you down, to trick you into climbing and then to make you slip and saw you into pulp. There’d never been and wouldn’t ever be anything like these stairs in the architecture of the entire rest of the world. You’re nothing against them, I thought. Call it off.

Nope. Don’t even think about it.

They’ll tear you to bits. Even now. They don’t love you that much. As far as I knew, all the kings and adders who had fallen had been posthumously disowned and wiped out of the records. It was one thing you just couldn’t wuss out on, the risk of being on the stairs was an essential bit of realness in the trial by ordeal.

I pushed up to the second step. I felt synovial fluid squirt out of my knee. I cracked and wrenched and got my peg into the hole almost on cue. Really, I could handle these stairs in a jiff, I thought. I mean if I weren’t also crippled, drunk, blood-poor, and in stilts Stop whining, I thought. Just shut up and deal. Third step. I blasted myself up faster than I was supposed to. My sweat-drenched foot slid forward on the plaster. Christ, watch it, watch the hell out. Slow down. Save it. You aren’t the athlete Chacal used to be. You were able to play that one ball game okay but it’s pretty much spoiled you for anything else. Not even counting injuries sustained since then. Chill. Beat. Fourth step. I could feel eyes pressing on my back, my clansmen and their clansmen, adders and bloods and dependents, all looking up at me, or rather to me. I could feel their need to trust, feel all the responsibility, all that stuff that sounds so dopey. Something was clicking into position beyond fear and resignation. I guess I’d have to call it a comprehension of the particularity of the moment, or of the brittleness of existence, but it was more abstract… anyway, only two hundred and fifty-two steps to go, I thought. No big whoop. Fifth step.

It sounds like I’m bragging but in spite of everything else that had gone on in Mayaland or anywhere else, and no matter what else I’ve ever dealt with, walking up those stairs in that condition was the single most extreme thing I’ve ever forced myself to do. It still feels like it took longer than my entire life before and since. I remember the unique ache of each and every step, so that every number between one and two hundred and fifty-five has an indelible association. The only thing I want to really crow about, ever, is finishing that climb, because I went on for a long time after I’d made up my mind to give up and die.

So anyway, I made it but it was like I’d never do anything again, and I don’t think I really remembered who I was. There was a vibration of relief in the air behind me, but nothing I could hear over my blood-roar. The top level of the mul really had four sublevels, the scarlet level of the floor of the sanctuary, a black step leading up to that, a wide turquoise apron-step below that, and a second narrower black apron-step before you got on to the stairs proper. I got my peg into its hole in the lip of the threshold stone and looked up into the mul’s throat. It was ringed with nacreous barbs like the grinding mouthparts of a lamprey eel. I wavered on my flesh leg, the void behind me sucking on my back, pulling me into the big easy. Watch it. That was exactly how I’d blow it, I thought. I always screwed stuff up that way. I’d finally get through everything and get back here with the drugs and the girl and get it all set up great and then I’d just wipe out at the very last beat. I found my center of balance and let the roaring fade until there was silence everywhere.

“Ahan Bolom,” I said. “Wake Ocelot,

White North, black West, yellow South, red East, and turquoise

Here and near offer you our corn, our children.”

There was an intake of breath that faded into another purr and then into a rumble of compression like the Ross Ice Shelf getting ready to calve, and then it drew itself out into a long rattle and a crack, like lava rolling off Mount Erebus into the volumes of layered ice. I knew it was the orchestras around me cutting the scaffolding out from under their tree drums and letting them collapse and smash onto the flagstones, but even so at the last snap it seemed to me that One Ocelot appeared against the hemorrhaging sun and called me into the citadel. Fire flared up in his mouth and eyes and light flashed out in irregular rays through the smoke, flickering with a greenish aurora-borealis tinge. The flares had been rolled from refined wax-myrtle berries and mixed with whale oil and the whole thing was brighter than any artificial light anyone had seen since the seating of 9 Fanged Hummingbird. The crowds below went weirdly silent. I stepped forward, up onto the second apron, forward, up the two steps, and into the hole in the sky. It seemed bigger than outdoors, even though there were all these cat people-most of them mask-enhanced mummies but a few with living bodies inside-around me and all this heat and light, the fire reflecting and rereflecting off walls mosaicked with polished pyrite, the flames not regressing infinitely like they would with a smooth glass mirror but jumbling together in a kind of metallic fog like a whirlwind of gold watch springs. The oracle came up behind me and led me into the adoratory, the holy of holies, the Kodesh Hakodashim as we Hebrew buffs would call it. It was all full of jars and vases and big pots on hot braziers. I knelt down on a hot mat. In front of me, 6 Murmuring, a captive tortoishell jaguar lay prone, unbound but heavily narcotized on a wide, slightly concave altar. The hierophant squatted on her left and set a short table between us, with five little tamales on it, each the color of its direction. The blue one in the center was bigger than the others. Each of the four outer tamales was studded with tiny sea-urchin spines, and each spine was wound with that same black-and-yellow skin from poison-dart frogs. The oracle backed out and headed down the steps.

I looked around. The shapes around me looked so unsavory that I closed my eyes again. I wobbled, a little still dazzled from the smoke and the fresh darkness. A voice cawed:

“Now still you aren’t our flesh.”