Brian D'Amato - The Sacrifice Game

“And once he’s won will he need me around?” she asked.

“He’ll need the tsam lic, and a nine-skull adder,” I said.

“I’m not so sure,” she said, “he’ll get those from

9 Fanged Hummingbird, as soon as he captures him,

If he even thinks he needs the Game at all.”

Koh added two uncertainty stones to 2JS’s stack. I could feel my loyalties dividing. She must have seen it in me, because suddenly she started backtracking:

“I trust my father 2 Jeweled Skull,” she said,

“I wouldn’t plot against him, and I’m not

Positioned to; I only want to shield

Our followers, and leave them an escape

In case another city crumbles on them.”

I said I guessed that sounded like the right thing to do. Sometimes Koh’s forties-Picassoid face would seem all limpid and transparent and I’d feel all cuddly with her-not that I’d ever touched her myself or anything, but just kind of homey and peaceful-and then her face would go opaque again like that glass in Marena’s office and it was like I was alone in an observation room.

Koh unrolled what I thought was a smaller Game-mat, but it turned out to be a detailed and relatively naturalistic map of Ix. “The ball court’s isolated here,” she said, running her little finger down its trench. She was right. The whole temple district had originally been built on a hill surrounded on three sides by a shallow irregular lake, kind of like a miniature San Francisco. Since then the lake level had been raised and palace plots had been extended out into the water, so the temple district was surrounded by wide canals, like the Rialto in Venice. The temple district included the five largest of Ix’s hundred and ten muls, six hipball courts, the Ocelots’ emerald-green greathouse, the council house, and the original sacred well of the Ocelots, which was now fed by aqueducts from the surrounding mountains but was still surrounded by a garden that included a few of the original celestial poison trees. There weren’t any solid bridges on the east, north, and west, just floating pedestrian barges that could easily be moved. Even if we were armed and ready when we took our places in the stands, we’d still be in the center of the Ocelots’ ward, separated from the mainland by the mountains behind the Ocelots’ emerald-and-scarlet mul. Two hundred of us could be trapped and picked off without much trouble. I figured the odds of something unpleasant happening to us on the court, either during or right after the ball game, were at least ten to one.

So what can we do about it? I asked. Not go? Set up shop somewhere else?

No, there are other things we can do, she said. We may not be able to pull another Teotihuacan, but we can do something like it. You might have to be the one to carry some of it out, though.?Yo? I thought. Little moi? Why me again, because I’m the odd man out anyway?

Always me, me, me.

Because you’re such a genius with the ball, she said, answering my thought.

Chacal was the genius, I said, and he’s gone. She just sat there and looked at me, like she knew I could still play as well as before. I kind of felt she was right too. Despite everything I was feeling great these days. Finally I said fine, sure, run it by me. I can deal.

She said as an antepenultimate plan she thought we might disguise me as one of the lesser-known ballplayers on the Harpy team and try to get me into the halach pitzom, the great-hipball game, for a couple of rounds.

“Then you could score a ring or two and win,” she said.

“The Ocelots would have to really cheat,

And might not even get away with it.”

Whoa, I thought. Hang on a beat.

I said it sounded like fun for me-my cocktail of Chacal neurotransmitters was already perking up just at the thought of my getting onto a court.

She said imagine the reaction. The fans would go wild, although she didn’t put it that way. Maybe they’d all give you some big hero thing and you’d be able to take over.

I said that sounded a little too good to be true.

Well, anyway, she said, whatever happens it would at least distract them. They’d be off their stride.

I asked for how long and she said she didn’t know.

So then what? I asked.

Then we go to the antepenultimate plan, she said. Great, I thought. The ultimate plan, as always, was just to kill ourselves as quickly as possible. All right, I thought, what’s the pen ultimate plan? I asked her, as whateverly as I could.

She held out her dark hand out and, slowly, turned it palm-downward. “I’ll show you,” it meant.

Just in sight of the Cloud People’s main citadel, which would be the site of Oaxaca City, there was a place I knew well, with a tree, eventually a rather famous tree, that-which? Who? — that would still be alive at the end of the last b’aktun. I led Koh’s caravan a half-jornada off the route to camp there, and she and I fasted and prepared for a session of the nine-stone Sacrifice Game. We’d agreed that I’d be the only querent, and only her dwarf and Armadillo Shit would be attending.

The big cypress wasn’t big yet. In fact, it looked less than a hundred years old, and it divided into three trunks near the base. So it wasn’t one that you’d ordinarily think of as a major branch of the Tree of Four Hundred Times Four Hundred Branches, the tree at the axis mundi that penetrated down through the hells and soared up through the holes in the centers of the thirteen skies, the tree the Teotihuacanians called the Tree of Razors and that the Motulob-the citizens of Tikal-called the Tree with the Mirror Leaves, and that, in the twenty-first century, generally gets called something like the “Maya World Tree” or even “the Mayan Yggdrasil.” But I convinced Koh that I knew what I was talking about. We started at the naming time of Lord Heat, that is, noon. Twenty arms west of the Tree there was an ancient well surrounded by a five low stone cisterns, each about two arms across. The westernmost cistern had been filled to the brim with fresh water, and Koh sat on its west side, facing east. I sat on its eastern side and, instead of presuming to make eye contact, focused on her hands. Twenty bloods, under Hun Xoc’s command, sat around us in a loose circle with about a fifty-arm radius. The sun went under a rainless cloud shelf. Her dwarf handed her a jade offering basin, with coals still smoldering in it under the ashes of offering paper, and held it up in front of her forehead to stand in for the sky.

I looked down, into the still water. Koh looked down. We nodded to our reflected souls. They nodded back, almost immediately. Koh brought the basin sharply down onto the rim of the cistern, cracking it into pieces and scattering sparks out of the cinders. Without flinching from the embers that burned her palms, she pushed everything into the water. The shards sank and the coals and ashes floated, sizzling.

“

…” she said. That is, in the ancient language,

“Teech Aj Chak-’Ik’al la’ ulehmb’altaj ‘uyax ahal-kaab Ajaw K’iinal…”

“You, Hurricane, who sparked Lord Heat’s first dawning…”

I took over:

“,” I said, “Teech kiwohk’olech la abobat-t’aantaj uxul kiimlal,”

“You over us who foreknows his final dying,”

“Teech Aj k’inich-paatom ya’ax lak…”

“You, sun-eyed coiler of the blue-green basin…”

Hmm. I paused for a second. What’s the next part again? Oh, right. I started to go on, but Koh broke in and finished the sentence herself:

“Teech uyAj ya’ax-’ot’el-pool ya’ax-tuun ch’e’e…”

“You, jade-skinned carver of the turquoise cistern…”

I snuck a glance up at the tree. Mayan languages tend to classify things more by similarity of shape or function than by differences, so that, for instance, insects, bats, and birds are all the same class-and the Maya skeleton of my borrowed brain did the same, so that the tree, which was and is, as I’ve said, a cypress, became in my sight, also, a latex tree, a calabash tree, and especially a ceiba tree, the ceiba tree, ya’ax che, Ceiba pentandra, the kapok tree, the cotton-silk tree, the Generous Tree. It was thorny and umbrelliform, pustuled with phantom orchids sucking its red muculent sap and clouded with Cynopterus sphinx bats harvesting its scoriac nectar, and its branches spread at a curve as steep as the cissoid of Diocles. And then, without seeming to change, it was also a stone tree like a titanic stalagtite, and then it was a stratovolcano, higher than Orizaba, but, of course, upside down, with its buttress roots worming up through the thirteen shells of the sky.