Brian D'Amato - The Sacrifice Game

I’d be appearing in women’s clothes-and Lady Koh would be in male clothes-because we were going to be a sun-telling couple. That is, we were both father-mothers. I guess the cross-dressing sounds a little odd for a wedding, but actually you could still sometimes see Maya shamans wearing women’s clothes at harvest festivals in the twenty-first century. Anyway, like a lot of things, it had to be done this way. One thing I could be sure of was that Koh had checked every detail.

Lady Koh needed to marry me. Or, rather, she needed to marry the Ahau and K’alomte of Ix. The Classic Maya world wasn’t so gynophobic as, say, Islamic society, but women who wanted to run things still had to do it through their menfolk. Or, at best, in the Yaxchilanian and Ixian and other traditions, they had to be widows of the ahau. Which was what she’d be in a few months. I’d be as canned as Charlie the Tuna and she’d still be corking along. And if she conceived a male child with me, that would be even better for her. She could reign until he was blooded, at fifteen or sixteen, and then, undoubtedly, keep him tied to the huipil strings. Or if she didn’t, she could either adopt an Ocelot baby or even fake a pregnancy and just pick up some kid from the slave market. So I was a convenient choice. And, as the miraculously revivified Chacal, the semidivine hipball legend who’d predicted the San Martin eruption, I was, especially with Koh’s spin-doctoring, even a popular choice with a large slice of the public. Of course, a lot of folks still viewed me with extreme suspicion. But things had changed a lot in Ix, and throughout Mesoamerica, over the last tun, and people had come to accept events that, before the destruction of Teotihuacan, would have seemed upside down.

Even so, though, I was lucky. Koh could have set up somebody else, probably one of the younger Ocelot bloods. So I was pretty sure that Koh’s real motivation was that she really wanted me to get back to the thirteenth b’aktun. I still wasn’t a hundred percent sure why. But I wasn’t ruling out sheer goodwill, or, let’s say, sheer sense of duty. She saw her role as a protector of her lineage, and if she could protect their descendants long after her death, her uays would remain powerful long b’aktuns from now. They might even grow more powerful. After all, despite everything she’d learned from me about astronomy and physics and even twenty-first-century thought in general, she was still a believer.

And, also, she had 2 Jeweled Skull in her custody.

I hadn’t seen it happen. Koh’s men had surrounded him during the Earthstar riots and, amazingly, had taken him alive. Now she had him in a basket in what had been the Ocelots torture pavilion, with two guards watching him at all times so that he couldn’t commit suicide in some clever way like, say, biting a chunk out of the inside of his cheek and swallowing his own blood until he bled to death-something that had, in fact, been done more than once by twenty-year captives.

On the other hand, a lot of the Ball Brethren and the other Harpies were still loyal to 2 Jeweled Skull, so we had to treat him well and keep up the polite fiction, which of course nobody believed, that I was taking over the Harpy House at his request. And, I suspected, Koh was cagily holding him in reserve. If I got out of line she could always reinstate him and get rid of me. Just one more reason I had to watch it.

My two dressers stood me up. My stump sank into the wicker cone of my shell-inlaid leg-which was made from the femur of someone larger than I’d been, and carved as a snake with its head straining forward where my foot would be-and they wove it onto my knee with gut straps. It still hurt a bit inside despite all the analgesic salves. They combed my hair with a brush like a whisk broom and oiled it, scented it, corded it, beaded it, bound it, tasseled it, and attached the extensions. They wrapped me in a long red skirt with obsidian-mirror stars and sewed me into a sort of feather-woven tunic. My new valet fastened wide neon-orange spiny-oyster shell cuffs around my upper arms and jade ones just above my wrists. Another back-sash went around my waist and they draped a white-jade beaded sort of poncholike thing over my shoulders. My hairdresser coiled all the complicated hair into a bun and set it into what was kind of like a spangled turban with a stuffed muan bird on the top, a combination critter made of several other birds with the head of a baby caiman and the beak of a condor. Then they dusted me off.

The cantor crouched out through the tiny door first. He was a famous neutral-clan professional adder from Kaminaljuyu, whose poetic name was On The Left, and who I guess you could also call the toastmaster or the master of ceremonies. He was serving as the head of my marriage-sponsor party. The dressers half picked me up and handed me out to him. The little room had gotten full of hot and sour breath and carbon di- and monoxide, like we were inside a big smokers’ lung, and now the fresh air sucked on me.

We were in the same inner courtyard of the Harpy House where 2 Jeweled Skull had stored me in a scavenger’s-daughter body basket a billion psychological years and 244 days ago. The square of sky looked like an old chalkboard with Eos’s talons scraping on the eastern side. My two marriage-sponsors stood at the west side of the court: 24 Pine, that is, Coach Teentsy Bear, who was taking the part of my halach ayadoj, that is, the equivalent of my godfather-and an elder Harpy named 4 Wren, whom I’d adopted as my surrogate father. I’d sent for Teentsy when I heard he hadn’t quite been killed during the battle, and he and I had gotten pretty close again-again, that is, in that he’d been close to Chacal. I was less crazy about 4 Wren. But Koh had been adamant that dynastically and politically speaking he was the only real choice. Our main problem now was legitimization. Anyway, the sponsors’ roles were just ceremonial. Elders had to be brought in as go-betweens and surrogate parents in the marriage negotiations, which were supposedly kept secret from the bride and groom-although of course in this case Koh was running everything.

The six of us left the compound through the west door, headed through an alley between high fretted walls, and went down a swept and red feather-strewn stepped walkway toward the ghatlike steps leading down into the canalized lake. Guards in black night-raid paint kept pace with us on either side, with more ahead and behind, part of a rotating squad of sixty full-blood Rattler guards. Since they weren’t part of the official entourage they had to protect us from a slight distance, but we’d kept them on high alert. The Snuffler and Macaw clans and their dependents were as resentful as ever, and what was left of the Ocelot dependents were obviously still in a murderous rage, no matter what cessation oaths they’d sworn. Well, what fricking ever, I thought, we’re going to take care of all that tonight. And if they didn’t like it they were in for yet another little purge. I was becoming a big believer in the Seven Habits of Highly Effective Stalinists. And Habit number 1 was “Kill First, Interview Later.”

The Rattlers had repaired the floating bridge to the occupied Ocelot compounds and the court precinct. Ten of our dark guards crossed and stationed themselves along the bridge before we even stepped onto the rustling wood. We went single-file, first the so-called godfather, then the so-called father, then me, then my two dressers, then On The Left, the cantor, and finally a beater striking a muffled water drum, so softly you could barely hear it-since the procession to the bride’s family’s house was supposedly a secret, even though, again, everybody in town knew about it. From here you couldn’t see the peninsula that connected Ix’s temple district to the mountains behind, and the encrustation of muls dotted with watch fires in the cold mist looked ageless and aloof, like the island of Mont Saint-Michel. At the far end of the bridge we could just see the newly enlarged Rattler House, which had been built on Ocelot grounds just north of the council palace. The sky and its reflection had shifted to transparent Prussian blues with strings of Swainson’s hawks, coming through right on schedule, uncoiling across them. An osprey stooped down into the water on our left and disappeared with barely a splash. I was afraid it wouldn’t come up, but finally it resurfaced with a big catfish writhing in its talons and made its way heavily shoreward. If the fish had dragged it down everybody would probably have thought it was such a bad omen they would have called the whole thing off. Yesterday one of Koh’s spies had said that some bloods from the Snuffler clan had heard about the wedding and were going to try to stop it. They’d been behind more than a few “little disturbances,” or what you might call civil unrest or gang squabbles, over the last ten days, and they were getting more belligerent despite or because of Koh’s death squads. So everyone was a little edgy.