Brian D'Amato - The Sacrifice Game

I looked at him. You couldn’t read anything under the duckbill mask. I couldn’t stop thinking about how much he looked like one of the plates in this nineteenth-century book on the Maya by Stepanwald. I pretended to ease myself back and used the motion to sneak a look at Koh. I had the feeling she understood what 20 Blue Snail was saying, and that he was right.

They passed the speaking cup to Lady Koh.

She asked when we’d have our meeting with 2JS. I guess she didn’t want to deal with anyone but him and you couldn’t blame her.

He can’t come outside Ix to meet you, Hun Xoc said. From the way he said it I got the feeling 2JS was under polite house arrest. 20 Blue Snail said we wouldn’t all be able to talk when we got near the city, either, we’d be in a ceremonial procession and under constant observation. It was going to be like an inauguration or royal ball. For now, all we could do was accept the invitation and get there.

Then we need to get a few beats alone with him just before the hipball game, Koh said.

20 Blue Snail said he’d try. And if a fight breaks out, what then? he asked.

The Rattler’s children will support their host, Koh said.

The Ocelots won’t let all of your followers into the court district, Hun Xoc said. At most they’ll let in two or four hundred of the highest bloods. The rest will have to stay as close as possible outside and wait for our signal.

Koh signed that was good enough. We voted “agreed.”

You could have individual conversations in the “smoke,” the after part of the mat circle, when you were all just hanging around, not necessarily at your own position, and it was even considered polite to doze off. Sleeping’s a big part of bonding. It’s hard to describe the cozy factor of the huge foster family and my growing place in it. The clan definined who and what you were so strongly and so completely that, as naturally as F = ma, you’d be willing to die for it in a beat. It, and not you, was you. Anyway, at the southwest end of the round room, Hun Xoc, 1 Gila, and 2 Hand were getting their knee calluses massaged and drinking out of the balche pot through long bullrush straws. On the white side, I mean, the northeast side, near the little door, the two Rattler greatmothers were still sitting bolt up on their backrests and chatting together, smoking and weaving elaborate shrouds on little hip-strap looms. Coati was stirring the fire. The emissaries had already done their big leave-taking, so they wouldn’t have to go through it again, and Zero Porcupine Clown had taken them off to their own over-storm house with a bunch of the Rattler Clan’s sex workers and gamblers, a few of whom were also trained listeners and mnemonists, just in case they said anything. Koh had told the gamblers to let them win. Most of them would escort us to Ix, but a couple of runners were going to rush back to 2JS as soon as the storm let up. I was reclining on top of my two dressers and pets, and the younger brother was rubbing oil into my feet and ankles, which were still scabby from volcanic ash. I guess maybe that sounds a little odd. But it wasn’t in a sexual way. In fact, none of us were supposed to do any sex on the trip, even though the local chicks and dicks all wanted to service us godlings, because the adders said our semen trail would make it easier for Severed Right Hand’s hit squads to track us. I was just leaning on them because they were used to it and it was cold and I was entitled to the service. There was more touching in general around here, although if you touched someone you weren’t supposed to that was it for you. Supposedly Shang emperors used to sleep on mounds of people. Anyway I was just calming down enough to close my eyes when Koh kneed over to me. Her big quilted turquoise-blue manto was tied a little like a giant stiff bathrobe. My dressers propped me up into a more formal attitude. Koh settled into her position on the mat and unrolled another world-map version of the Sacrifice Game board, a less elaborate traveling model. On this one the central circle represented our own army or migration or whatever, and she piled stones in it representing how many different types of people we had, 62-score full bloods, 9-score sick or wounded bloods, 410-score scouts, dressers, and calligraphers, about 700-score converted men and roughly 1,202 score converted women and children, 812-score porters, 2,108-score thralls and captives, and over 3,500-score stragglers who really didn’t have any reason to be with us. Of course, the Star Rattler societies in other cities were revitalized by Koh’s success, and they were pledging tens of thousands of new converts, but until her chickens got here she wasn’t counting them.

She subtracted stones for how many of each grade of person we were likely to lose to raids and how many to attrition and starvation. A lot of people don’t have a head for logistics, how many bowls of gruel each soldier ate per week or whatever. They want to hear how a lone hero won a whole war single-handed. Koh was the opposite. She wanted to reduce the uncertainty as much as possible before she even started to do her really serious calculations.

Koh set out carved disks representing the major cities, with a saucery green one standing in for Ix, and then started laying out glyphic stones into them. I recognized the stones that represented 2 Jeweled Skull, 9 Fanged Hummingbird, Severed Hand, 3 Talon-who was the patriarch of the shall-we-say “international” alliance of aerial clans-and our troops and followers, and a lot of the other clans, and us. But in general I could still understand only about ten percent of her visualization. Pretty soon she was using little brown seeds that represented hypotheticals, often in doubles and triples. She positioned the hit squads that were chasing us in four different possible spots. She guessed at food sources and weather along the route into Ix. And when she’d come to the end of her own knowledge she started asking me things. What did I think the other Caracara Greathouses were up to? How much has 2 Jeweled Skull asked them for help? What was his real relationship with the small Rattler Society of Ix? Why hadn’t the Ixian Rattler Feeder responded to her messages?

Why do you think the Ocelots are so confident? she whispered.

I said I guessed that actually a lot of them were terrified by the end of Teotihuacan, but that some of them were thinking they might be able to fill the gap and carry on the business of the empire with a bigger cut for themselves. They’d have to get rid of the Harpies first, though, and so they’d spent quite a bit in bribes to the supposedly neutral hipball officials, probably much more than 2JS could afford.

But 20 Blue Snail-Shit makes 2JS sound confident, too, she said.

I said maybe it was 6’s job to put a good spin on things.

Koh said she thought 2JS was pretty smart. He’d have to have something worked out, some unpleasant surprise for the Ocelots that wouldn’t depend on what we did.

I looked at her. I mean, into her eyes, which you just didn’t do. Normally her eyes-even the one surrounded by her light skin-were as cowled and tragic as if they’d been been painted by Pontormo. But now they were transparent. And they weren’t tragic. They were wary. I could tell she was thinking that 2 Jeweled Skull-in exchange for the safety of his own house-might sell her out to the Ocelots.

“2 Jeweled Skull set this up,” I said. “Your guilt is his.”

“He might deny that,” Koh said. “Now that more

Feline-clan bloods hate my house than hate his.”

If he turned you in they’d get him later anyway, I said. She didn’t answer, but from her face it seemed that she realized that was true. The Ocelots would renege. They knew he was bound up in this from the beginning and they’d never forgive him.