Brian D'Amato - The Sacrifice Game

I told them to put us down. They did. I yanked off my helmet and arm protectors. At the Ocelots’ equipment house some big mean-looking guy stepped out in front of us like, hey, what’s going on? I threw my damn stuffed rodent in his face and he ducked in this comical way. It was this magical talisman flying at him with its sharp little claws. I fished a little shell knife out of my crotch pouch, cut the cords off my outer swag of quilted padding, and tossed it to one of the youngest Ocelot bloods in the crowd like it was a major souvenir, which I guess it was.

I am Chacal! I declaimed. Everybody stared. I’ve gone to Xibalba and brought back the Razor Ball! I was overexcited and shifted into English. “By the bomes of Crom, you’re all horsemeat! Shop smart-shop S-Mart!” I was about to add that I was going to sic the United Fruit Company on them. Emerald Immanent was still down on the court behind us, shouting for his brothers to grab us, but he must have been still blocked by the Harpy invisibles. I stepped up onto the first swell in the sea of steps. My little squad followed my lead, surrounding me in an oval formation. Eight steps. Nine. The first tier intersected with a second tide of clear-edged waves and ripples, black flats and green risers scraped and buffed and finished like a Noguchi marble. And the Ocelots let us through. I guess we had a fear edge because-for most of them at least-it really was more like I’d transformed into Chacal than like I’d just been in hiding and then disguised. There was a kind of incomprehension of the whole idea of disguise; even when people wore the costumes of the gods, they were taking on that identity, not just dressing up, and it was a very serious deal. Plus, a lot of the people around the end zone were visitors to Ix, and weren’t prepared for a fight. And of course we were still officially their guests in a place that took hospitality seriously. We were just eight little dudes in the middle of their turf and there was plenty of time for them to rush us. And maybe most of all, they weren’t yet sure whether it was part of the show. They were all watching the fights erupting down on the court and spreading out into the stands, and wondering what the shot was, whether the panic was the beginning of another Carthaginian catastrophe, what was expected of them, whatever. For one reason or another, for about forty beats we were in this limbo between action and reaction, where if you just walk straight up, if you don’t look even slightly nervous, you can get away with a lot.

We edged closer to the Ocelot house on our left. Just a little farther. Their emerald mul loomed on our right. We came up level with the women’s residential quarter of the palace. I guess gynaeceum is the right word for it, but who cares. It wasn’t all walled up like the residences in Teotihuacan. There were still no windows, but there were all these alcoves and inviting little doorways. Bevies of Ocelot women looked down over us from their sort of harem balcony up in the roof gardens. I got my knife down under my back padding and cut into the straps on my ball yoke.

We’re going through there, I tapped on Hun Xoc’s arm. His eyes picked out the same door I’d scoped out. It was only twenty steps off but I resisted the urge to run. I turned to the captain of the Rattler guards and he’d obviously picked up on what we were doing. He seemed pretty eager to follow my orders. Koh must have told him his life was totally at my disposal. It was one of the good things about a feudal caste system, you really could get good help once in a while. Or at least dedicated help.

There was an explosion of combat yells down on the court. Don’t look around, I tapped. I finally twisted off my ball yoke and swung it in my right hand like a battle club, trailing beaded straps on the steps. I kept wishing we’d had time to rehearse this. I veered left into the alcove. The door was just red-oiled quilted deerskin set into the high wall. It was tied down on the inside, but it opened upward and I sliced through the top left thong-hinge. The Rattler leader took my cue, cut the other four, and wrenched the door down. By now there were Ocelot bloods pressing in behind us, asking what the hell we were doing, and our outside Rattler bloods had their maces up. The first six of us pushed into a tiny sweat room and out the far door into a tiny enclosed square courtyard. There were all sorts of freshly dyed cotton festival yarns laid out drying on the floor. There was only one other door into the court, on the far side, and five or six Ocelot women, with undressed hair and wearing only damp emerald-and-white huipils, scampered out through it, but one little round old grandmother just stood in the middle of the space shrieking at the Rattler captain, telling him over and over how we were wrecking all her stuff, and before I could say anything he swung his hand flail through her eyes, taking a chunk out of the bridge of her nose, and she just stood there still squealing until she eventually keeled over. I’m not proud of it, but I just went ahead with what I was doing, maybe feeling a little queasy. I’d gotten kind of inured to this stuff.

Hun Xoc got the Rattlers to pick up these big dye barrels and throw them out the door at the Ocelot bloods. As they dodged the kegs I could see past them for a beat, down into the canyon of the court complex about two vertical ropes below. It was a confused mass of hand fights between ballplayers and partisan spectators, but I could see Emerald Immanent and Emerald Howler’s standards were coming up through the crowd toward us. It meant they’d gotten their trainers and supporters together and were leading them after us in an organized pursuit. The nearer Ocelots looked indecisive to me, though. They were more interested in rushing down to the court area to save 9 Fanged Hummingbird and their other royals. It was like you see at stadium riots or fights at rock concerts or political rallies, the sound and fury covers a lot of plain Brownian motion, the ninety percent of indecisive stuff that happens before, during, and after anyone comes to blows.

The captain left two Rattler bloods to hold the door. We need to get to the mainland, I lied, a little too loud, hoping that the people behind the door heard me or that the rear guard would get taken and talk. If word got back to the ahau it was pretty essential that they assumed we were trying to make a break for it, that we were trying to get onto the curved walkway around the south side of the peninsula and back east to the mainland. And like I said, Ix was a canal city and didn’t really have streets, so to get anywhere you had to either go by boat or practically walk through somebody’s bedroom. I hustled everyone else across the courtyard to the far door. Already a couple bloods had gotten on top of the wall we’d come through. I went in first, even though I wasn’t normally allowed to take the lead. I was too important. I got into this little dark smelly hallway and around a couple crooks and nannies toward the right, uphill. It would have been confusing but my directional sense was another thing that had improved a few thousand percent since I got here. I pushed into a little cook yard, out its trash door on the other side, and through an open alley into one of the food-prep courts. Dozens of the women’s household cooking servants milled around squawking, not knowing what to do. I noticed I was laughing again, partly from adrenaline and whatever but mainly because it was getting like one of those Bond movie chases where they always overturn fruit carts and the irate peddlers shake their fists after them. And what seemed funniest was that we were actually getting away with it so far. For these guys it’s still fresh, I thought. This kind of commando strike was outside the protocol of Mesoamerican warfare.

For the first time I could really see how Cortez was going to be able to take over the whole continent against ten-thousand-to-one odds, how when your thinking is totally outside the system, the people in the system have no way of dealing with you. If you do something that just isn’t done, most of the time, you win. The Rattler captain handed me a short mace and I tied it on to my left hand. I pointed to a low red fabric door in the center of the west wall, a moon-path door. Hun Xoc went up to it and started slashing through the fabric door-it was a quilt of rubberized cotton stretched over a wicker frame-but I could feel the knot of bloods behind me hesitating, like the door was radioactive. Ix had basically four overlapping webs of footpaths used by different classes of people. We were going to take one of what they called “fanged-rabbit-blood walks,” which were segregated routes to special wells used only by menstruating women, all painted red on the insides and roofed with red tent-cloth. No male would even think of walking on the polluted ground.