Brian D'Amato - The Sacrifice Game

What if they don’t get here as fast as we think? Koh asked without a preamble, in her own sign language.

I said I didn’t know.

“This is my burden,” she signed, meaning her fault. She seemed pretty upset under her poker face. I didn’t know what to say, either, I felt bad about having gotten her into this and angry that she wasn’t getting us out of it like she’d said. It was like “Sorry, it’s my fault,” “No, it’s my fault.”

She asked something else.

I said I couldn’t understand. She leaned her head toward me, over the boundary line. They’re making me sit on the Ocelot side, she said out loud, in one of the code-languages she’d taught me, one we hadn’t used before. It wasn’t a whole separate language, it was more like Carney or Ubby-Bubby, where you inserted nonsense syllables, but it wasn’t something anybody else would be able to figure out right away.

What do you mean? I asked, not believing I’d heard her right.

As she explained it, this guy named “8 Smoking Peeper,” who was the head of Star-Rattler’s cult in Ix-the one Koh’s messengers hadn’t been able to reach-was standing in a swirl of emerald on the Ocelot side, of the north lateral platform of the court, and he’d asked for Koh and her attendants to come and stand at his right hand. The Ocelots had co-opted him. And even though Star-Rattler didn’t have much of a cult here he was her primary relative, and it was something she couldn’t say no to without starting a fight. She had to be gracious about being chaperoned. It was a big deal for a woman to be allowed to watch the match at all.

It was a teeth-gnashingly clever move. Even besides almost certainly setting her up to be captured. One special feature of pitzom as it was played here in the lowlands was spectator participation: each person on each of the two main platforms-the Harpies standing above their goal-peg on the south and the Ocelots above theirs on the north-was allowed a short stick like a miniature hurley called a hatchet or baat, another onomatopoeic word close to the English equivalent. Oddly to the twenty-first-century way of thinking, interference was allowed. Whenever a ball bounced up close to the favored spectators, they would lean precariously down over the banks, stretching out their baatob, trying to deflect the ball away from their goal or, if it lobbed high enough, to swipe it toward a member of their own team. Since the longest-armed supporters could barely get their short baatob down within an arm length of the goal, the bats connected only when the ball lobbed too high, and the spectator-participants ever really influenced the ball game on only a couple of shots. So it worked the supporters into a frenzy without much affecting the score.

But the serious deal was everyone who stood on one of the platforms was officially in the ball game, on that side’s team, just like the ahau in the center, playing through his proxies below. So the Ocelots were forcing Koh to “play” on the Ocelot side, even if no one in her group even touched a ball.

Dammit. Maybe the Ocelots weren’t so dumb as we thought. I wondered how much they guessed about 2JS’s part in the end of Teotihuacan. I can’t believe nobody had thought of this, I thought. No, believe it. Incompetence is forever. She was as good as captured.

Say you have a commitment to stay here, I said.

That’s not a good idea, she said, they’d take it as a huge insult and start the fight now.

She was right.

This isn’t good, I said, they’ll capture you in a hummingbird heartbeat.

I know, she said. She said maybe they wouldn’t get to torturing her right away. If the battle goes all right you can surround the Ocelot House and trade me out.

Right, I said, but we both knew it was too much to count on. There would be too many screw-ups, it was just the way things are. Do you still have the earthstar blood? I asked. The earthstar compound.

She said yes.

I tried to remember what I knew of the layout of the Ocelot district. We weren’t far from the most-holy ch’en, that is, in Spanish, cenote, a giant half-sunken cistern. In this case it was the main source of drinking water for the south bank of Ix, and it had been a cornerstone of the Ocelots’ power since before the third sun, an ever-gushing font of calc-free H 2 0, like Elisha’s Spring at Jericho.

Well, maybe I could actually do it. We’d have a ready-made diversion, that was for sure. And down on the court we wouldn’t be surrounded by Ocelot guards like the bloods in the stands.

Hmm. I really might be able to get there. Just out the west end of the court, into the popol na’s zocalo, that is, the main plaza, into one of the Ocelot compound’s “women’s doors”-which ought to slow down any pursuers a bit-and then onto the roof and up one of the aqueducts straight to Grandmother’s House. No threat, no sweat.

I’ll run for the Great Cistern, I said. If it looks at all possible. Maybe that’ll give you some extra time even if they get ahead in the battle.

She thought about it for what seemed like about sixty-eight beats.

I’ll try to feed Lord Earthstar, she said. She meant she ought to do an offering to get him to release the full power of his dried blood. I gestured like, okay, whatever. I was being pretty tough, I have to admit, but then I ruined the effect by telling her not to let any of her people know we were going for the Great Cistern. It was kind of an insult to tell her that, because it was like saying her bloods might crack under torture, but she didn’t seem to notice.

She whispered to Coati.

Don’t let them give you any water in the basket, I said. By basket I meant the place in the Ocelot house where they kept high-level captives under suicide watch. Like the one 2 Jeweled Skull had kept me in.

I don’t drink water anyway, Koh said. It was kind of a drought-season joke, like “Lips that touch water shall never touch mine.”

Coati came back and handed Koh a red-and-white-wrapped uah’ach, a sort of ceremonial nine-layered tortilla bread women were supposed to give to players before the ball game. Koh messed around with it for a second behind her screens, came forward, and presented it to me over the wall of the pen. I gestured “Accepted,” tore open the dyed corn-husk wrapping, and took a bite. It wasn’t very good.

Koh spoke to Coati again in the same language. Get to 2 Jeweled Skull, she said, or if you can’t get to him, get to Hun Xoc. She told him to let them know what’s going on with the earthstar compound. Maybe they could get back to Harpy House and hold out for a day or so. Make sure they keep it quiet as long as possible, though, she said.

She turned back to me. “Xka’ nan’ech lo’mob kutz,” she said. “Smoke faster than the flies can bite.” It was sort of a casual jokey leave-taking salutation, like “Be good.” She left. The commotion behind her guards picked up, the Ixian Rattler’s Children shouting questions at her in this sort of respectful howl, asking for predictions on the score like she was a combination of the Dalai Lama and Nick the Greek, which, in fact, she basically was. I thought she was going to ignore it, but all of a sudden she turned inside her semitransparent screens and spoke through Coati:

“Now, 10 K’atun, 1 Deer, 11 Thought,” he/she said,

“Before the thirteenth ball rolls up the green,

Look out for ingrown blue hair knots in your walls.”

There was a trough between the waves of shouting and then a higher crest as the people started reacting to it and asking what she meant. I didn’t get what the carajo she was talking about either. It was like, ease up on the Delphic Sybil trip, babe.

I watched her turn and lead her escort back down the walkway, around the east end zone of the court, and up a side ramp onto the south platform, through hundreds of hostile-looking Ocelot princes in jaguar skins and emerald-green feather spikes, all of them probably waiting for the signal to grab her and rip her into bite-sized morsels. They saluted her and she had to salute back like we were totally honored to be with them. Ocelot guards moved her forward toward the lip of the court, to where the Ixian Rattler-adder was standing at the coveted second rank. Lady Koh and the Rattler Adder greeted each other in public sign language. I pictured little thought-balloons bubbling out of each of their heads saying I’m going to kill you.