Brian D'Amato - The Sacrifice Game

We can make it, Hun Xoc signed in the direction of the Yellow Gate, we can get through them.

We can’t make it, I signed back.?!?!? he signed.

I pulled his face in front of mine so that the Rattler bloods couldn’t see and gestured to the wall with my eyes. He looked into my eyes-which was like a really aggressive, inquisitorial thing to do-and I gave him a look like “It Must be Done!” and he accepted it.

I pulled the Rattler captain over and whispered into his ear. You’re going to take the last three of your bloods and my standard and get down to the Yellow Gate, I said.

He started to object. Koh’d probably told him he couldn’t leave me no matter what. Then he thought better of it and ran off at the head of his little group in that awkward way you run on unfamiliar ground at night. They won’t even make it to the gate, I thought. The amputee limped after them but Hun Xoc said, “Not you,” and pulled him back. He didn’t have much mileage left on him.

Just the two of us left, I thought. Better anyway. Hun Xoc boosted the amputee up onto the wall and made him lay his torso prone over the thorns. I could hear him biting through his lips to stifle his shriek. Behind us Emerald Immanent’s posse was only just around the curve of the causeway, less than a hundred paces off. Hun Xoc lifted me up onto the amputee’s hot, oily back. It shivered a little as it crunched down into the spines. I couldn’t resist taking a quick look back down at the court. It looked like Harpies had sent shock squads around through back alleys to come up behind the Ocelots’ formations and attack their flanks. What had happened to Koh?

Don’t think about it, I thought. Just take care of your end. I hopped onto the poor bastard’s seventh cervical vertebra, grabbed his pigtail with both hands, and vaulted over his head down onto the invisible foliage below. Hun Xoc climbed up him and slid down next to me. I got my head up out of the dewy sego-lily leaves and looked for the cistern.

Eyes. Hot orange-green eyes in a scary-clown face, a jaguar colored with blue powder. I looked into the eyes and breathed. It was a big jaguar, just watching us in that lazy-alert way.

I am not afraid, I thought, and started counting. At twelve the cat turned and disappeared between a pair of these twisty ancient trees all inlaid with arabesques of tourmaline and spondylus shells. It was a weird transition from the urban setting we’d been in. Behind me Hun Xoc was ordering the amputee to get off the wall. I guess he hadn’t even seen the jaguar. He pulled up the kid’s bloody face with both hands and pushed it upward. The amputee must have gotten the idea because he arched his back and pushed himself off the thorns with what must have been his last erg of free will. I listened to him clatter onto the causeway.

It’s got to be that way, I thought.

I pointed. I pushed up and hunt-ran around the trees, uphill of the cat.

Hun Xoc followed. The trees were boxed in milpas set in check-dam terraces, laid out just like any poor person’s garden, or anyone’s garden, anywhere else in Mesoamerica, the same exact 91.2 by 92.2-foot rectangle with the same orientation to Kochab. Jotzolob ran between the milpas, uncultivated trenches that were combination dirt sources, rock dumps, irrigation channels, and flood ducts. My feet automatically found one of the main channels and we headed “upwater,” toes gooshing into the muddy bottom. The trees on either side gave us a little cover until we came to a clearing with intersecting aqueducts and four giant bulbous stelae of the Ocelots’ Watching Greatfathers sticking up in scarlet, emerald, and black against the deep cobalt sky. It was getting too dark to see things clearly. I did a quick head-check and climbed up out of the trench onto a milpa thigh-high with marigolds. A couple of these big flightless birds, rheas or something that the ahau kept as pets, walked stupidly toward me, maybe expecting me to feed them. Scram, I thought. Behind a grove to the south a couple of old Ocelot gardeners hobbled away from us to spread the alarm.

It didn’t look guarded, though. I guessed no one but the highest Ocelots would ever think of coming in here anyway. You can really do a lot with taboos. Just hang out in places where everyone else thinks they’re going to get fried by the bad mojo. Of course, they still get you eventually, but it does take them longer.

I got to the cistern. Too little. It wasn’t the right one. This wasn’t the actual source, just a way station, one of a bunch of little holding tanks. Their main feeder culvert sloped higher up the ridge toward the east slope of One Ocelot’s Mountain.

Damn. The place was a lot more detailed than Koh’s stupid model.

Higher up, I signed to Hun Xoc. I ran. That spot on the ball of my right foot was itchy. A weird red bird flew over my head and cut into the leaves in front of us, and after a moment I realized it was a lem-lem, a barbed throwing stick, basically a boomerang that doesn’t come back but which flies a lot farther than an ordinary stick. It took me another two beats to realize that meant Enemies Behind.

How far?

Left. Around the corner of a thick pepper grove. I dropped down into the prickly gulch. A point on the mace on my left hand cut into my thumb. Hun Xoc dropped down into the nettles next to me. We were both gasping too hard to say anything. I edged over to him through the wet stalks and held on to his arm. I put my head against his chest for a beat. He reached forward down into my wex — I guess you’d have to call it a loincloth or a breechclout or some other ridiculous term-and held on to my penis, trying to calm me down. Just a little casual military homoerotism. Breathe, I thought.

There can’t be that many of them. Some of them must have followed the Harpy standard. How far away were they?

Well, at least two terraces below. We can make it. Stay out of sight lines. It’ll still take them two hundred beats to find us up here. Well, one hundred. And also, those guys had just been watching the match, so they weren’t even winded. Except for Emerald Immanent, but he was just supernatural. I couldn’t resist bringing my foot up to scratch it. There was something there.

My foot couldn’t feel my fingers. And when my hand felt my foot, it felt too big.

“I’m stung,” I said, “the male foot.”

Hun Xoc let go of my Jed junior and took the foot in his hands. I could feel him digging the dart out of the puffy wound with a shell knife, but the sensation was far away. I listened to him him suck-and-spit. A timeless craft. Too late, though. I’m fucked, I thought. Oh, cripes.

I’m over the limit, it’s payback time. TILT, GAME OVER, INSERT ONE TOKEN FOR ANOTHER PLAY, 12, 11, 10, 9, 0.

Hun Xoc rubbed dirt into the wound to stop the bleeding. I noticed I wasn’t dead yet. It was like when you’re stoned and you look at your watch because you think you’ve been wherever you are for days and you’re going to be late for whatever and it’s only five minutes later.

We’re going the wrong way, I signed on his chest. You down-this-way go. I up-that-way go.

I stuck one eye up over the curve of the slope, like it was on a stalk, and looked around 220 degrees. I got an impression of figures advancing on us without really seeing them.

I know what I’m doing, I signed. I’m ready.

We looked at each other. He made the sign for “accepted” and vaulted up out of the ditch, running through the south jotzol, parallel to the rise of the peak. I jumped out and headed at right angles to him uphill. The trees ahead were wilder and thicker. They’d been allowed to branch relatively naturally because the area of the Source was the house of Chac. It was like the way an ahau’s house was always just sealed up and never touched after his death, unless his heirs enlarged it or an enemy canceled it. Something made me look left. Below me Hun Xoc seemed to trip and fall, knocked back and then jerked forward off his feet like a roped steer. He’d probably been hit with a string club, kind of a big sharp yo-yo. I looked around. I still couldn’t see the attackers but I could hear them stomping through the bracken below him, not bothering to be quiet. It was one of those instant-decision moments. Go and charge the Ocelots and try to disentangle him? But if I stopped, there wasn’t any point anyway. I turned and kept going. There was a breaking-glass sound of Hun Xoc’s mace going through jewelry and skin and an exhalation of air. We were both going to get taken in less than a minute anyway, I thought. Complete the objective.