The Sacrifice Game

(72)

There were nine Scullers in the black shell. I recognized Spine in the prow, just like his portrait glyph with his one-eyed silver vulture face and the lancet through his beak. Next there were Serpigo-a hunchback with badger claws sprouting spine-grass like a Chia Pet-and Scald, a bloated corpse with big black-steaming egg-eyes, and then Scab, with ribbons of flesh flapping over his carbuncles. Snatchbat sat on the thwart, squinting and sniffing around with his gnarly flat-nosed-face, and then there was Yaw, known in Mesoamerica as, particularly, the scourge of the lowland forests, all spider-sucked and shriveled. Sarcoma sat in the rear, covered with clusters of tumerous masslets, and then there was Scurf, not just a disembodied head now the way he was represented in codices and on monuments, but a tall full figure with the tentacled face of a star-nosed mole, and last there was the old steersman, Skitters, the fanged rabbit, so much clearer than his profile on the moon, holding the tiller. It was the whole notorious gang, the netherworld’s bosomfoes working tooth and nail overtime in earthveins, toadcavities, chessganglions, saltklesters, underfed, nagging firenibblers knocking…

The boat glided up onto the beach and Spine hopped out onto the sand. I didn’t move. Behind them two canoes-full of white-faced attendants hove to on either side. Spine jumped up on me like a mongoose, grabbed the cigars with both hands, lit one with his eye, and puffed it into life through his other empty eye-socket. Scald and Serpigo had followed him out and grabbed for the cigars but he twisted around and poked them in the eyes with his toe-talons, stuffing the smokes into a sort of marsupial pouch in his distended stomach. A claw grabbed my stump and yanked me off-balance down into the lake. I’m afraid I really did scream, that time, or at least yelp. The water felt like lightbulb-glass shards suspended in boiling aspic. Someone held my head down. I hadn’t gotten a breath and swallowed all this crushed-ice sand before he pulled it out again. I started to get in a last swig of air but he stuffed me under again. I could hear them cackling at me through the water. Eventually somebody hauled me up into the boat by my goddamn breechclout and wrang it from behind, crushing one of my testicles until I could feel whatever was inside it squirting into my scrotum like caviar. Don’t worry, it’s all in your head, I thought. Monsters from the Id. No, wait, don’t think about that or they might fade. Go with it.

They tied me onto the spiked thrall-thwart and handed me a long war paddle with a sharpened blade. By the time I’d gotten it turned around and into the water they’d handed me the other seven barbed war-paddles, and I was dropping paddles in the water and trying to pick them up and they all lounged back and laughed, thwacking the paddles on my head-which struck sparks, for some reason-and pulling on 2JS’s skin, which I have to admit probably looked pretty lumpy and awful. Yaw grabbed 2JS’s penis, stretched it out like a bungee cord, and snapped it back. I yelped again. General laughter all around.

Scab climbed in with my other personal offerings and the corpse of the jaguar and the boy all burritoed up in my mat. Snatchbat poked a spiked goad into my neck and I took one long paddle and started stroking away from the shore.

No problem, I thought, I’m in.

Skitters made a quick fake-out motion and ripped into Spine’s pouch, digging the cigars out through the wound. Spine whirled and grabbed for them but Fang threw them up in the air and they all grabbed them and started frantically lighting them. The boat rocked and then capsized underneath us, but then it rolled up like a kayak and they all came up dripping, laughing until they were just collapsing with breathy piping wheezes. Snatchbat poked me again and again and faster and faster and we shot out over the frictionless clarity, out toward the center of the vast basin, leaving a stinking-yellow trail glowing in the black water.

I lost count after four hundred and ten strokes. The rest of the crew wouldn’t help at all, they were just grabbing at the boy’s body and tearing it apart while they smoked the cigars down as fast as they could. I couldn’t see anything but I could tell the current was veering to port and we were going with it.

Snatchbat jabbed me on the left side of my neck. I paddled harder but we kept drifting left. He lashed me across my eye. I started feathering and then backpaddling on the right but we just kept getting drawn counterclockwise. I looked back. Skitter wasn’t even touching the tiller now, he was just munching on one of the kid’s thumbs and peeling the skin off the jaguar I’d brought. I was about to say something like “hey, help me out here” but we were already past that moment when you realize you’re too far gone to get back in control, and it’s like you’re slipping down a toboggan run, clawing at the ice even though you know there’s just no way. We were just sliding over and around and around into the suction at the heart of the lake, and the circle narrowed and closed in and the surface of the water turned inside out and poured down into the whirlpool, and the canoe rolled over and the water poured in. The paddlers screamed as though it was a total surprise. My lungs filled up and that mind-snapping certainty that you’re dying just clicked on in me and my drowning-panic exploded into something else. It’s hard to describe but it was like the panic itself was the baseline and I was building the rest of my mind back on top of it.

The canoe righted itself and I was relieved for about a beat before I realized it was the wrong way round, we were paddling upside-down, under the water, on the thin bubble-surface of the air. Snatchbat prodded me again and I paddled automatically, wondering when I’d be dead. And then everything started to seem normal, the way anything will after a while. The deal was that Xibalba was the flip side of the world; your Xibalba-self walked upside down underneath you, sharing your shadow, your two pairs of feet meeting when you touched the surface of the earth. You can get a sense of it when you see your reflection in a pool or even in an ordinary mirror, you might be looking into your reflection’s eyes and realize that the person there isn’t quite you, not just that it’s slightly distorted but that it’s got something else on its mind, something a bit hostile or a little crazy, and when it smiles back at you, you can see it really doesn’t like you.

So I just kept stroking. It was thicker going, of course, and it was harder paddling air than water. I kept noticing how the bubbles I stirred up were different from water drops. But otherwise everything actually seemed to be going all right. Scarlatina handed me a feathered fan-paddle that worked better on air, and I took us forward and out in a widening curve. I spat up a few last air bubbles and sucked the cold water in through my alveoli. 2 Jeweled Skull’s skin acted like a wetsuit, keeping me warm. The current drew us fast forward into rapids and down a fjord between white thorny anthodites, clusters of knifelike stalagmites lit with flickering tourmaline. Everything was utterly clear, like my eye was a scanning tunneling electron binocular microscope. I guess I still knew it was in my mind, but I also knew-or at least I was certain at the time-that I was perceiving another less transient space than the world I’d come from. Not that it was anything wooshy or mystical, if anything it was less mysterious than my lives before, like I’d been staying in a dark haunted old hotel room and suddenly one of the staff just came in and turned on a ceilingful of arc lights and I could see all the electric wires powering the hologram ghosts.

We coasted down into level minus four, past shores cluttered with impaled bodies of humans and animals, white sea-maggots pouring out of their mouths like extruding blobs of mayonnaise and the staccato reports of gas-swollen stomachs popping around us, and then the dendritic copper channel narrowed, roaring through a canyon into Blood River, and spat us through an intersecting gorge into Pus River. Lymph bubbled over the gunwales but Skitters steered us down staggered cataracts into Lancet River, a wide reach of churning spines, and finally into a sluggish river of black bile, with drifting clumps of necrotic liver and gangrene slicks. For a minute I wondered whether it was something I was making up because of 2JS’s liver problem, but then I remembered, no, the hierophant had mentioned it.

Spine and Scarlatina had given up on me and taken out their paddles again, and they steered us through linked lagoons of molten ruby and gold and mercury mixing and separating in marbleized swirls and into a long, straight waterway, and we just coasted forward under crystal epidote vines arching overhead, past milpas of kidney-ore corn growing on neatly heaped bodies. Ahead of us the Halls of the Lords of the Night loomed up at the dead end of the canal like a range of karst towers over the Huang Ho Valley, but no matter how much I paddled they didn’t seem to get any larger, until after monotonous dark suns of stroking, when I was just collapsed over the thwart gasping the molasses-thick atmosphere, the temples finally rose up over us in fungally excrescent magnificence, cultivated porphyry-basalt columns and buttes of black jade erupting with boil-clusters of opal-dripping carnalite on terraces of tiled yellow crocolite in matrices of banded ironstone.

We pulled up onto a sort of ridge of ghats and the Scullers inhumanhandled me out of the canoe onto the granite, thwacking me with their paddles like multiple Charons. Crowds of Sickeners, or I guess we should more respectfully call them Xibalbans, clattered out and pressed in around us, lifting the canoe over me and shaking it. Wet gristly bones and ornate reliquaries fell around me, the boxes bursting open, spilling clouds of dyes and feather embroidery and expensive smokes. The Xibalbans grabbed them but I managed to grab the smallest box, the one for Jaguar Night, and tucked it under the skin of my groin while they were frantically lighting the cigars and smoking them down in single gigantic drags. I watched Serpigo do a fancy exhalation but then Scald closed her mouth over his snot-stringed nose, and she sucked the fumes back into his mouth and down her own throat. Flesh-stained smoke jetted out of carbonized holes in her chest. Scab and Bloody Teeth were fighting over a tied culebra — twist of seven lit cigars, poking for each other’s eyes with their sharp-forked tongues. Finally Bloody Teeth got possession of the bunch but Scab got hold of his arm, ground Bloody Teeth’s stub-holding hand into a pile of tumbled coals, put the smoldering hand in his mouth, took a huge drag, and farted a gigantic brown-green cloud of tar, nicotine, and burning fat. I tried not to breathe.

Ulcer grafted a big floppy skeletal of my bamboo leg and poked at me until I staggered up the ghats through the eastern gate. There was a low screech from a giant cracked flute and the Xibalbans all parted and scattered, and I walked alone into the trench of a ball court the size of all outdoors, with sloped banks cloven out of solid mesas of wave-green jade threaded with veins of cyanotrichite and olivine. As I walked toward the reviewing stand at level seven I focused on the ground, trying not to look up at the Magister Ludi, and so I couldn’t see the thousands of ghouls in the stands, but I could hear their cackling and feel their bulbous eyes on distended optic-nerve stalks, like slugs’ eyes. I stood on my marker.