Brian D'Amato - The Sacrifice Game

“Teech te’ij acho’oh jul-che’o’ob,” Koh went on, “uchepiko’ob’ noj k’ahk’o’ob,”

“You, there, whose hissing javelins strike wildfires,”

“Meent utz anuhko’on wa’ye’ ti’ amosoon.”

“Deign to respond to us, here, from your whirlwind.”

She sunk her dark ring finger in the water and stirred up a cloud of asphaltic steam.

“I can smell him,” she said.

She meant 2 Jeweled Skull.

She paused. “He’s more you than you know.”

I almost broke protocol and asked her what she meant, but she’d moved on, up the trunk of our now-internalized tree, zagging and zigging through the forking branches, setting stones down so fast that sometimes she just let me guide her hand without even looking at the board. Naturally, we had a hell of an edge, since I could use my-well, let’s not be modest, I could use my encyclopedic-ass knowledge of Mesoamerican, world, and economic history to guide her. But even so, as I think I’ve touched on a few times without having the stamina to really go into, we had to deal with the cosmic frustration of not being able to see within our own event cones. That is, what would happen to me, or to Koh, or to people we could influence directly, and so on, those events were still in flux. But as we got farther into the future, paradoxically, things became clearer. So, for instance, we knew the ceremonial district of Ix would be abandoned within the next k’atun — the next twenty years-but we couldn’t pin the date down more closely than that. But the abandonment of Motul-Tikal-was more certain, around 949, and then we both knew and saw how Chichen would be overthrown by treachery in 1199, how the next may capital, Mayapan, would be destroyed by the Xiu in 1441, and then the whole world would-nearly-disappear in the plague, in 1515, nine years before Tonatiuh, that is, Sun Hair, Pedro de Alvarado, would finish it off-nearly-in 1524. The b’aktuns of slavery and pain after that were, of course, well documented, and we crawled together farther and farther out onto the thin green twig of the last possibilities, past the Disney World Horror, past Marena finding-thank God-the Lodestone Cross, and toward a very likely End of Everything, a doomster named M something, in the north, somewhere-Canada! — and then, they-yes, they, we, we stop him! and then Wait.

“The one from the north is not the last,” she said. Her voice was starting to quaver from the strain.

“Not the last doomster?” I asked.

“No.” She ran out of seeds. She scattered again, and, again, climbed up past M. Again, she couldn’t see any details of the last one, the one we had to worry about. Oh, God, I thought, oh, Jesus, oh, oh, hell hell. “I can’t see him,” she said. “He’s too close to you.”

“Is it someone I know?” I asked. “Someone I may be going to know?”

“ Erer k’ani,” she said. Maybe. A pearl of sweat rolled down her light cheek, over the border into the dark side of her chin, and dropped onto the white margin of the board, where it touched the rim of the cistern.

She scattered again. She shivered. She winced, brought up her dark hand, and screwed its heel into one eye and then the other, as though she’d been staring at the sun.

“ Erer k’ani,” she said again.

Pause. Ten beats. Twenty beats.

“The Celestial Rattler has shed seven skins,” she said. “But it”-incidentally I’m using “it” as the pronoun because Mayan is ungendered-“won’t shed another until another until the birth of 4 Ahau. And with that skin, you’ll know that its two heads have parted destinies.”

Foolishly, I looked up. It was only a few four-hundred-beats after noon, and, to boot, the sky was still overcast with smoke from the wildfire, but even so I thought I could see the Rattler’s body, the Ecliptic, sidewinding across the sky’s ninth shell.

Everybody’s probably heard the folk unwisdom about how you can tell how many years old a rattlesnake is by counting its rattles. And most folks now probably know that of course this isn’t true, because although they do gain, roughly, one rattle each time they slough their skin, the little suckers don’t necessarily shed only once a year. Anyway, the tzab, that is, the Rattler’s rattles, were the seven stars of the Pleiades cluster. Koh meant it would gain a new rattle, a new star, just before the end date.

It sounded unlikely. From what I could recall, there were a few possible protostars in the nebulae surrounding the formation, but nothing that made astronomers think there’d be an eighth Pleiade any time soon. Or, rather, that one would have been born around, say, AD 1500, when the light that would strike the Earth in 2012 left the cluster. As to the two heads parting destines, I had no idea what she meant by that. Sometimes Star Rattler was depicted with two heads, not like that poor two-headed fer-de-lance they’d had at the Hogle Zoo, but with at one on each end. That’s the way it was on the double-headed serpent scepter, the one 9 Fanged Hummingbird carried on state occasions. Maybe she just meant there’d be a big saddle point on that day, something to make a decision about. But we knew that already. There had to be more to it than that. I started to ask her to clarify, but she waved me off. “That’s all,” she said. She stretched out her bare light arm and swept the stones off the board. Game over.

“Thanks to you over me,” I said. “And-”

“One more thing,” she said. “It’s someone you know of, but whose face you’ve never seen.”

That was all.

Well, fine. Now, what the bleeding hell did she mean?

We tried again and again, of course, and then, when the tsam lic had worn off, we went over and over the game. Night fell, or maybe just happened. Koh’s shall-we-say praetorian guard prowled around us with increasing impatience and eventually with real alarm, begging us to rejoin the army. Finally she got me to admit that I accepted it, that is, that I accepted the fact that everything I’d done up until now had been useless, that the notes and the jars of tsam lic and the Lodestone Cross burial and all that I’d been so pathetically proud of wouldn’t stop the real doomster, and that if we wanted to work out who the doomster was, or how to stop him, or anything more specific than what we’d just seen, we’d have to play the Sacrifice Game on a vastly larger scale. A human game, specifically. And if that didn’t work I’d have to get my brain back to the twenty-first century in relatively good condition. Either way, we’d have to get back to Ix.

Sometimes-at times like this, I’d say, especially-one might as well just go with the cliche: I was crushed. Yes, it’d be nice to come up with a more clever word than crushed, but really, why bother? Crushed pretty well does the job.

What surprised even me, though, was how much I wasn’t crushed just because I was a lazy slob and I’d thought I could relax. It was that I-even I-was rather annoyed, in fact more than annoyed, in fact, let’s say again, crushed-that the world was still doomed. And I even realized that I cared about it in the general sense, not just personally, that even if I died back here from my neuroblastomas or in a ball game or by the flint dagger or the wooden sword or whatever, even if I didn’t get back to the thirteenth b’aktun to see Marena and the gang and catch the next season of Game of Thrones, I still wanted the good old crazy ratty loathsome ridiculous old world to keep rolling on.

Okay. Look. We can do this, I thought. We’re young, we still have a lot of our health left, we’re capable, we know more stuff than anybody else in the whole world. Just go with the best bet. Get to Ix and help 2JS get put in charge of the place. And in return he’ll help us get together a human game. No sweat. Right?