Brian D'Amato - The Sacrifice Game

Wrong. Oh, God are we fucked. We are so very fucked. Royally fucked we fucking very are Cancel that. Buck up. Man up. Gird your loins into the sticking place. Forward, crawl.

At the Isthmus of Tehuantepec we turned yelloward off the commercial track and onto a single-file path through what they called the Protectorship of the Brown Ants. It was the floor of a Devonian sea, coarse calcium sand made of diatoms and crinoid stems and the scales of ancient armored fish. The dunes gave evidence of nocturnal use, musky ropes of fox scat and the parallel-gash tracks of sidewinders, but daylight was dead. Sometimes we’d pass a lump of armadillos, poking around like big sow bugs and licking ants off crumbled lobes of brain coral. Supposedly some of the convert-bloods behind us complained that we were leading them into Kikilbaj, what the Aztecs would later call Miclantechutli, the desert graveyard at the zeroth world’s ragged edge. They kept flipping out about the celestial Puma and Jaguars who were supposedly spying on us, and they were constantly doing all sorts of pathetic little rituals, combinations of bribes, apologies, foster adoptions, and threats. In the unfashionable rear of the now seemingly endless procession, families were offering their younger children to the lords of their hearth fires, making them swallow ashes or ramming hot stones into their eyes.

Another Puma band hit us again that night and we lost four bloods, fifty porters, and three or four hundred thralls. It was only the worst in a long and repetitious string of attacks. Things weren’t going well. At dawn Hun Xoc, speaking for Lady Koh, called a war session. There weren’t many good ideas. Finally 1 Gila suggested we split the forces in two. 1 Gila would take the main body-Koh’s “Four Hundred families” of converts-and would continue southeast along this route. They’d take our palanquins and standards and some of our dressers, so that they could put together look-alikes of me and Hun Xoc. The rest of us, the Harpy bloods, 14 Wounded’s group, and Koh’s officers, greatmothers, and “capturing bloods,” would get rid of our markings and detour southwest, heading the long way down the coast in a much smaller elite unit. Hun Xoc and his squad would stay with us to escort us to Ix, and the other ten emissaries and runners would go with the Four Hundred families. Severed Right Hand’s men would almost certainly follow the bigger group.

It sounded like the right thing tactically but it was a cold move. The untrained converts would be way out in the breeze drawing fire. Koh might be sacrificing half her converts. On the other hand, there were a hundred and sixty score of them now. Even if only eighty thousand made it to Ix they’d be enough to tip the scale of the battle in 2JS’s favor.

Anyway, Koh eventually agreed and 1 Gila’s plan carried the day. At one point Hun Xoc took me aside and said he was a little nervous that 1 Gila would just take off and not make it to Ix at all, but after kicking it around for a while we decided that really they had nowhere else to go. They were marked outcasts far from their now-nonexistent homes, and at this point they’d either get to Ix in a hurry or get eaten. And some of them would get through. We worked out routes that would get both of us into Ix at the same time: The big army would take the direct route to Ix, marching in daylight, and we’d have to hustle around the long way at night.

I functioned. I sat on the strategy committee. I advised Koh. I played a running hipball game whenever the army passed a usable court, and then, as I slept, my bearers ran me to the next court. And I got some of my skills back, nothing like what I’d been as Chacal, but still not bad. But it happened in this smog of despair, that feeling like you’ve suddenly realized that the world is constructed entirely out of damp corrugated cardboard, and of no further interest because, no matter how elaborately and even artistically you cut, fold, paint, and arrange it, damp cardboard is still just damp cardboard. Only, this time it wasn’t just in my mind, it was really the case, the world was going to wink out just as it would be getting interesting. Even though I was way back here, that is, “back” here, in 664, it felt as though the end was going to come tomorrow, later today, in an hour, in a minute, before the end of this sentence, now-and really, in terms of historical time, let alone geological time, it was only an instant away. Oh hell, oh hell, oh hell, oh hell.

Weirdly, though, Koh seemed to understand. She kept surprising me that way. I mean, with what she could understand. And even though the end of the thirteenth b’aktun would be so long after her own time, when everyone she knew would be lucky even to be bones and not just dust, she still wanted the world to continue. Although I think she mainly thought of it in terms of wanting her descendants to continue, but even so… anyway, just after the birth of the next sun we were slogging along on the south bank of the Rio Coatzacoalcos, and I was curled up in my palanquin cursing the day I was born and all other days and all others who had been born, and she had my bearers bring me alongside her and, as we jogged along, she started a conversation-almost a modern-style conversation between equal and skeptical people and not an Olde Mayaland-style formal court exchange.

“Writing it all down wouldn’t be good enough anyway,” Koh said. As far as she was concerned, the Game was such a subtle and physical art that only directly transmitted skill was worth anything. “You have to show your eagle a way to your b’aktun”-by my eagle she meant my primary uay, like my self, or as we’d say, my brain-“and you need to be there yourself to ask Star Rattler to sacrifice another thirteen of the segments of his body, to give your world another thirteen b’aktuns.”

“I can’t say I see a likely route,” I said.

“We’ll plan the route together, at the human game,” she said. “ K’ek’wa’r. ” That is, “Double strength,” or, roughly, “Courage.”

I signed a thank-you-next-to-me.

I have something to show you, she signed back.

Koh had her wickerworkers weave us a temporary ramada and set us just off the towpath alongside the Atoyac River. The day was steamy but it was cool under the cypresses and you could smell the tannin and hear the brown noise of the rushing brown water. Four of her deafened guards set out jars and baskets of drinking water, set up four wide rush screens around us, and took up their positions crouching with their backs to us, watching. Hun Xoc and a few other bloods sat at a distance, between us and the river. Armadillo Shit sat behind me and Koh’s dwarf sat on her shoulder. It was the smallest number of people Koh and I had had around us since before we’d left Teotihuacan, and there wasn’t any chance of our being seen or overheard, but even so, Koh looked around for a minute, listening, before she took something out of her bundle.

It was a polished deer rib. She dipped it in one of the little jars and then stirred the rib around in a second water jar. She said something to her dwarf in their personal code. The dwarf slid down, held her breath, covered the first jar, picked it up, carried it ten steps away to a little channel that ran to the river. Delicately-to her it was a respected living thing-she poured the water into the channel and then, not delicately, she dropped the pot and lid down in after it, shattering them.

I looked down into the drinking-water-pot. Cripes, I thought. What I’m getting is that this is some potent-ass shit. Koh took a dried marigold out of her little kit, picked a single tiny petal off it with a pair of horn almost-chopsticks, dipped the petal into the jar, stuck the tweezers into the mat like a double mast with a single wet flag at the top, and covered the jar. She moved a little myrtle torch closer to the petal, dried it, took it off the tweezers with her fingers, and tore it in half like it was a tab of LSD. She popped one of the halves in her mouth and gave me the other. I could practically hear Grateful Dead music playing in the background. I put the petal on my tongue.