Brian D'Amato - The Sacrifice Game

And that was basically it for a while. I don’t remember being wet, although being underwater doesn’t feel wet anyway. I do remember gazing at the circle of faint sky-blue below me, the opening of the well-although it was really above me-and considering whether to blow the rest of my carbonized air supply out through my lungs and die in one of the most pleasant ways possible, in the center of a jade sphere in the hands of the well gods, listening to the resonance of the water, room, womb, tomb, flume, shroom, plume, room, whoomb, boom, twroooowmb, twoooooommmmmmm.

Figurine of a Diety Impersonator in a Duck-Billed Mask

Found Downstream of the Ruins of Ixnichi Sotz

Curious Antiquities of British Honduras

By Subscription Lambeth • 1831

There’s no memory in there of my being grabbed. But there was a moment somewhere when my numb wet head seemed to swell to mul-size in air that felt like dry heat. Grab air. Nose full. INHALE, no, hard chunk. Spit it out. Spoot it eett, GET IT OUT!!! and there was this sensation of swallowing myself, like the way if you put a dragonfly’s tail in its mouth it’ll eat until it dies. At some point I realized that someone stuffed my left hand into my own mouth, the embedded shards of flint cutting through my upper lip. I blew my nose and opened one nostril and managed to breathe through that.

I think after that there’s a longer period that I don’t remember at all. And in a way that’s sad because the moment of your capture is one of the most important in your life. It’s a sacrament. But I don’t remember hearing my captors’ speeches, or my saying any of the little poems of submission, or anything. I do remember wearing ceremonial bindings, like the ones I’d been wearing on the mul, and I remember being in total dark smelling dead people near me. They smelled like they’d been beheaded, maybe, or eviscerated, which lets them drain a bit so they don’t get quite so smelly as people who die from disease. You don’t usually smell in dreams, I thought. Does that mean I’m awake? My swollen tongue scraped against cakes of blood on my inner cheeks. My leg was cold and big but when I finally got my bonds twisted around so I could reach down and feel it, it didn’t seem to be around. There was something fleshy there, according to my hand, but it was utterly numb, like I was touching someone else’s leg, and it seemed swollen like I had elephantiasis. Before, after, or during that whole dark period I remember being prodded and surrounded. I reached out and felt their fur leggings. They were made of baby-ocelot skin, the kind only 9 Fanged Hummingbird’s personal guards got to wear. What’s happening with the earthstar compound? I wondered again. Is it working? If it’s working, some people should be acting strange by now. They should be acting too happy, anyway. Right? Or maybe they’re onto it. Maybe they’re being smart, they’re only drinking water they’ve held on to for a while. Hell, hell, hell.

Ow. Someone kicked me. I think someone ordered me to get up and walk and I think I tried to tell them I couldn’t. I also don’t remember being dragged or carried, but at some point I was in a different, fresh-air space, probably a treaty tent. I was with four other high-ranking Harpy bloods. We were all gagged, but from what we could grunt out in tonal language it seemed like none of us knew anything about the outcome of the battle. I was pretty sure none of them were major homies of mine. My messed-up right hand felt all big and fun and floppy where it had contacted the earthstar powder.

I remember the neutral-zone weave of the big trading mat they set me on, all by myself, which meant they were doing a special deal for me. I automatically took the captive’s hunched position but I did get my head up long enough to check out what was being offered on the other side. You always want to know what you’re worth.

It was a tray with a set of four stuffed quetzals, symbols of safe conduct out of the area. There were glyphs burned into them but I couldn’t read who they were from or who they were for. Voices started up all around. I recognized one of them but couldn’t place it and then realized it belonged to 18 Jog, who was 2 Jeweled Skull’s favorite nephew. His name meant a critter halfway between a jaguar and a dog. Other voices haggled for a while in ambassadors’ dialect. Apparently this was a pretty big deal. I felt like a pricey prostitute. Finally heard enough to get that some of some of 9 Fanged Hummingbird’s commanders were buying their passage into exile-or maybe even 9 Fanged Hummingbird’s-with a number of captives, especially me.

Maybe we were getting somewhere. Maybe the earthstar stuff had worked. Maybe Lady Koh’s army had gotten the upper hand somehow. Hot spit. Maybe.

They struck a deal. An Ocelot guard took the birds and handed my leash over to Hun Xoc.

It took a minute to register. Four cheers for our side, I thought. We dun it. We grabbed the gold, won the battle, war, big bajoor, whatever. Victoria! I was getting something close to a flood of relief, but I was still too freaked to really latch on to it. Hun Xoc led me through a low door but as I got up I collapsed again and I remember only a little bit of getting brought into a small off-square Ocelot courtyard. The walls were frescoed with cat immortals. Some of the younger, less powerful ones had simply been canceled by gouging out their onyx eyes, but the main ones had been placated with flowers and smears of blood. If 2JS was going to take over, he’d have to get himself adopted into the Ocelots’ clan and start courting the Ocelots’ gods’ goodwill. To be in charge of Ix you really had to be an Ocelot. It was an Ocelot town. I guess it sounds silly, but everybody just knew that jaguars were the mightiest creatures and if you were on the very top, you were descended from jaguars. You couldn’t just change the title.

They took me to a round raised platform in the center of the courtyard. I checked out the sky, maybe for the last time. It was just a parallelogram of overcast and white smoke but I could tell it was sometime in the morning. I could hear a few far-off Harpy war shouts but none close by. Things still looked a little droopy and I wondered whether I was thinking clearly, even aside from exhaustion and blood loss and poison darts and whatever, and I thought maybe I wasn’t. I guessed I’d gotten a brush of that stuff during my little dip. They pushed me down on a convalescence mat and a couple of dressers started working on me, rubbing ashes and perfumes into my lacerations. They gave me soothing warm beverages and prechewed honey tortillas. At some point I heard shells and cabochons tinkling and saw 2 Jeweled Skull had come into the courtyard. I was so glad to see him I would have wet my breechclout if I hadn’t been emptied during my latest period of unconsciousness. He came over to where I was sprawled out on the mat, which was a big deal for him and a big honor for me. He was all decked out, the ultimate example of how you could be loaded down with ornament and still not look ridiculous. The blue circles tattooed around his orbitals made him look cool and mysterious, like you were seeing his eyes through sunglasses, and he had his black pyrite mirror on his forehead, like that third eye thing doctors used to wear.

“My son is a four-hundred-blood capturer,” 2 Jeweled Skull said to me. It meant I was going to be seated in the Harpy clan as an ahau. It was the highest promotion you could get besides becoming a bacab, like 2JS, or the ahau of ahauob, like 9 Fanged Hummingbird. I’ve arrived, I thought.

“Your game has been recorded as a win

For the Harpy House,” he said. Also a very big deal. I mumbled an unofficial thank-you and started one of the short speeches of congratulations on his “capture of the center of the world,” his taking Ix. He cut me off.