Brian D'Amato - The Sacrifice Game

The Ocelots’ goal was carved as a defleshed sky-cat and stuck with emerald-green macaw down, just for this event. The Harpies’ goal was carved as an earthtoad and, more cheaply, painted Harpy red. I felt all fat and stiff and Megazoid in the padding, like a penis swollen with Viagra. The area beyond the court boundary-which I guess you could call the sidelines-was crowded with VIP punters and a few high-caste bookies, looking us over as though we were racehorses in the paddock. Our team started to strut around the end zone in roughly counterclockwise paths, sawing the air with our hand guards. Our wood-and-leather yokes-big horseshoe-shaped protective belts-bounced off each other like old-time bumper cars. The players who’d stayed here kept looking at me. They, but only they, all knew who I was, and supposedly they’d been briefed about what to do. But they were still freaked out that I was alive and with them. I was still playing as “Red Skink Lizard,” presumably an obscure relief player. My disguise, or new identity, was still holding up. It might not last once I started playing, though. Not if I used any of the old signature moves. I stopped pacing and tucked my head down under my helmet, like I was praying. 2JS came up next to me. He didn’t turn his ornament-swollen head, but he spoke to me in our house language and so low that no one could hear us over the shouting.

“And am I going to lose another son?” he asked. He was referring to five foster sons and two biological ones, including the one he’d sacrificed in my place, who had already died on him. And he was talking about the hipball game, not the battle we were anticipating afterward. Full matches at these stakes were pretty dangerous. I-or rather Chacal-had played twenty-eight full great-hipball games, four of them with nearly identical rules and timing. But that was an exceptional record, and people had been killed around me in almost every match I’d played. The general feeling was that an athlete’s career was so short anyway that you might as well die on the court. And one effect was that ballplayers started playing more recklessly as they get older. Emerald Immanent and a couple of the other Ocelot players were just at that age when you expect them to give it absolutely all they had, which could mean taking you with them.

I said the closest thing to “I’ll be careful.”

2 Jeweled Skull said that if I survived the ball game he wanted me to get off the court and into the middle of a special squad of Harpy bloods led by 7 Wind, who was another of his sons. They had instructions to get me the hell out of there, off the Ocelots’ temple promontory and out to the Harpies’ mountain milpas in the east. Then, even if 2 Jeweled Skull was killed or captured, I’d still have at least a chance of getting back someday and setting up my special tomb.

I said I thanked my father but that I didn’t want to desert him.

He said playing under a new name-that is, not for my own prestige-was enough.

I said I was worried that we’d be cut off from the mainland. Actually, I was trying to get him to open up about what he was going to do. If anything. He said he had sixty score nonbloods from dependent families-what you could call the bulk of the Harpy infantry-waiting outside the eastern gate. They hadn’t been told anything beforehand, though, and they were just now being briefed on what it was their Father of the East, that is, 2 Jeweled Skull, needed from them. Also they weren’t allowed to touch spears, blowguns, or saws, and could only fight with clubs. Still, they had barges ready and were going to lash them together and lay planks over them, and try to get across the canal from the Harpy Quarter to the council house, bypassing the permanent bridge, which of course the Ocelots were guarding. After that, the Harpy clubmen were going to try to take control of the council house and give us at least one relatively secure base on the peninsula.

2JS also said a messenger had come from Koh’s followers saying they were only six-hundred-score beats away. But their scouts had run into Ocelot patrols, and since we didn’t want to tip them off, the Rattlers were going to hold back until they got the word the hipball game had started.

So maybe we’d be all right.

“Well, okay, dude, great, let’s go,” I said in English. “Well, sheesh, this is a long way from the United States Chess Federation Interzonal at the Springfield, Massachusetts, Hyatt Regency Resort Hotel and Convention Center, isn’t it?

2 Jeweled almost smiled. It was enough to give me a little shiver. Maybe it was like Koh had said back under the Tree of Mirror Leaves, that he’d gotten a bigger dose of me than I’d thought. I’d been pretty sure that he just had bits and pieces, random beads that he couldn’t string together into a coherent Jedditude. But being in on stupid little private jokes took a pretty advanced level of understanding someone. Maybe I had a way of growing on you.

“We’ll just Win Through Despondency,” I said, “Harnessing the Power of Self-Loathing.” It wasn’t a gem, but he smiled and then chuckled, and then I did, and for a beat we couldn’t stop laughing, it was like, we’re like twins, we grew up together, we’re homies, we’re just chillin’ out A Harpy messenger came up and signed that the Ocelots were ready. 2JS waved him away. Our talk was over. He blessed the team with his cigar and left to take his place on the platform. I looked after him for a beat as he walked west. I hadn’t realized how lonely I’d been feeling without him to talk to about stuff. He was the only one around who actually understood.

I looked up and peeked around. The muls were all dressed for the occasion, draped in gigantic feather-embroidered tapestry mantles that had last been unfolded at the sheaving of the fifth katun before this one, eighty solar years ago. They were crowned with huge headdresses of radiating tree trunks tufted with ribbons to imitate giant feathers, and trailing necklaces of huge feather-flowers in the air. Uay-animal floats slid deliberately through the walkways, levitating up and down steps and spinning in the squares. The lacework superstructure above the city was filled with kites and papered torch-cages like big multiple lanterns. Effigies of the ahaus and bacabs and various sun-adders stood in the upper steps of the mulob, holding the lords’ places while their flesh bodies were down watching the ball game. I tucked my head down again.

Damn, I thought. There’d been so many things I wanted to ask 2JS. How was he dealing with the debris of myself inside him? Was he more me or less me than he’d been eighty-five days before? Or was I already so different now from the Jed that entered him that it didn’t matter? On top of everything I was feeling, maybe not teary, but a little misty.

Out in the center court the hazing contest had segued into the actual challenge to the match. I could hear the Ocelot negotiator offering to double the purse and the Harpy negotiator accepting. Better not whiff out on this one, I thought. Actually, I hadn’t been stellar in our last practice on the road. But maybe with an impossible challenge, Chacal’s ballplaying genius would come through. Right?

I smelled something. It was Koh’s cinnamon-in-reverse perfume. I broke protocol and looked up.

Koh and her eight-person escort had gotten into the east zocalo and were pushing toward the end zone. A gang of high-ranked Ixian Rattler converts followed alongside, throwing passionflowers and blue-curl blossoms on the path in front of her and waving petition bundles tied with big bright knots. I signaled to Hun Xoc, who caught the eyes of the rest of the team, and as I drifted over to the boundary line as casually as I could they pressed in behind me. She came up as if she were just scoping out the players. I didn’t look at her. Her escorts held up their traveling screens around her, as though they were shielding her from the sun, but actually to keep the Ocelots from seeing her talk to me. It wasn’t unheard-of for a major sponsor to talk with the players before a ball game, although it must have been the first time in a while that the sponsor had been female. I kneeled down on the court surface and she did the same, so that we were all alone in the sweaty jungle of legs.