Brian D'Amato - The Sacrifice Game

In the center of the bridge we met the spy. He came within twenty steps of us, wheeled around, and ran back to the Rattler House to warn Koh’s relatives. He was an expected part of the act. We stepped down off the bridge and up the steps to a small zocalo that led around the corner of the high council house and into an approach to the fresh serpent-headed wall of Koh’s new compound. There were squeals. Fifteen or so young girls-either Koh’s unmarried female relations or Rattler neophytes taking the part of them or some combination-blocked the entrance to the front court and started throwing pebbles at us, yelling that they weren’t going to let us in, they knew what we were up to, and they weren’t going to let me take Koh away from them even if we chopped them into little bits. I held my left hand over my last eye. The stones got larger and we backed away. Teentsy Bear must have actually gotten a painful hit because he yelped, a real rarity for him, and seemed about to start cursing the girls back. Of course, the little altercation was just another hoary ritual, but Teentsy had zero sense of humor and tended to take things too seriously. On The Left nudged him from behind, telling him to chill out. Sports types never knew how to behave.

“Blue-green daughters here, four breaths, please, four, jade daughters,” the cantor said, appearing from behind us.

The girls eased up on the damn rocks. The cantor walked up to them like Gandhi walking up to a line of British troops.

“A red blood begs for rest beside your hearth,” he said.

The gals calmed down and let him through. He entered the compound. We waited. After four hundred beats-about six minutes and fifteen seconds-the cantor appeared again, made the sign for “patience” at us, and went back in. We stood for another eight hundred beats. The deal was that he was supposed to be begging Koh’s parents to let us inside. I wobbled a bit on my snake-foot.

The cantor came out and gestured for my sponsors and the girls to follow him in. Still, I stood for another twelve hundred beats. The dressers touched up my face paint and dusted me with a sort of blue-clay talcum powder. The beater kept thumping. How did he stand it? I wondered. He was just a human clock. He must be crazy. Come to think of it, professional beaters did tend to act a little odd. The girls gawked at us while, at the same time, trying not to look interested. Finally the cantor came out a third time and gestured for me to come in. I told one of my dressers to run and get the gifts, although if they were on the ball the porters would have already followed us here. I blood-walked alone through the gate into the little courtyard. The first person I recognized was 3 Talon, the Caracara father-mother and aerial-clan patriarch, whom I’d last seen on the burning mul at Teotihuacan. Since he was Koh’s godfather he stood to the left of the single door to the house. 1 Gila, who was taking the part of Koh’s “father,” stood on the right. Lady Vanilla Orchid, Koh’s mother-her real, biological mother, by the way, brought with On The Left, at some risk and expense from Kaminaljuyu-stood way to the left, near the girls, between the charmingly named Lady Creosote Bush, Koh’s sort of mother superior from the Caracara Clan’s Orb Weaver Sorority, and Lady Sourdough, who had kind of the same relationship to Koh in the Rattler Society. Two Rattler monkey scribes crouched on a single mat next to the north wall, ready to take down everything anyone said. The giggle of girls crowded against the south wall with their backs to us, which was considered their most respectful position. I have to admit, purdah systems do have a certain eroticism. When women seem like a totally different and inaccessible species they’re maybe more violently attractive.

There was a pair of Rattler-blood guards at each corner of the yard, and a lookout crouching on each corner of the wall above them. One of Koh’s hunchbacks unrolled a reed trading mat, about one rope-length square, and I squatted on its eastern threshold side, with my back to the gate to show that I didn’t have any enemies. I saluted everyone in order, first 1 Gila-calling him “father”-and then my own so-called father, 4 Wren, and then this wife of his who was playing my mother, and finally Koh’s mother. I’m using the word salute, but really there were dozens of different sign-greetings, everything from banging your nose on the ground and licking the dirt to just stiffening up a little, and which one to use depended on who you were and whom you were talking to. Then there was a little interminable speech I had to say and a triply interminable speech back from each of them. Basically I just said, “Hi, my name’s 9 Wax, I’m not worthy,” and they said, “Hi, yeah, we know.”

My porters trooped in behind me ahead of cue. One of them stood behind me, holding a tall capped jar with my preserved leg inside, just to show that no enemy had gotten it and I was still, officially, a whole person. The head bearer laid three big balls of fresh highland jade, all ready to be worked, in the center of the mat. She stepped back as the other porters started laying baskets around the stones in radial arms, and then followed after them, counterclockwise around the mat, lifting off the close-woven lids. She started with the dishes in front of me, clusters of popped amaranth seeds held together by bright red achiote syrup and molded into Chak figurines, coiled strings of an especially rare kind of tiny chili pepper that supposedly made you bear male children, red manioc wafers and roasted mamey sapote, sweet potato meat sculpted into rabbits and parrots like baroque marzipan, and finally a vat of powdered cochineal extracted from what I figured must have been around two and a half billion cactus-scale Dactylopiae.

The server moved right, counterclockwise, and opened dishes of transparent-white luxury cornflower cakes like communion wafers, stacks of creamy-looking squash-seed pralines, and a set of four twenty-pound blocks of pure highland-spring salt carved into statuettes of the dwarf year-bearers, and, in a big bundle with claws and a head, the skin of a pure white bear from God knows how far north. Meanwhile the toastmaster launched into his speech on my behalf. It was a set form personalized for the occasion. First he went through all the work I’d supposedly done for Koh’s “parents.” Ordinarily, if you were from, say, a middle caste, you might have to help them with stuff for years, if you wanted to get a desirable wife out of them. But I’d basically gotten all that waived based on the heroic services I’d performed, “rescuing” her from Teotihuacan and winning the ball game and everything. Next he went into a spiel about how great I was, and finally he pointed out some salient features of the gigantic bride-price I was paying. Which I guess wasn’t a total sham-after all, a lot of Harpy land was going to Rattler immigrants-but of course Koh had really done all the negotiating and banking and gifts and everything herself. Anyway, I guess all weddings are at least a bit of a sham. While he was talking the server moved to the western quadrant, directly across the stones from me-practically at 1 Gila’s feet-and started revealing trays of long black vanilla beans, strings of savory dried black water-bugs from what’s now the Lago de Nicaragua, which supposedly made you immune to skin diseases, jars of sinister-looking black mushrooms, inky rolls of cured sharkskin, and finally twenty bricks of preservative linden leaves each wrapped around twenty smaller bundles of anise-scented avocado leaves, each of which contained two hundred and fifty-six sinkhole-grown cacao beans, roasted and ready for grinding. The last quadrant, on my left, started with baskets of papaya and pineapple strips from the islands crystallized in squash-flower honey. Next there were baskets of preserved marigolds, what they call Mexican tarragon, from Choula, and calabashes filled with orchid honey from the cloud forests, and last an item from Panama, still a recent novelty: a nine-string beaded breast-necklace of four hundred turquoise-eyed hummingbirds sculpted in hammered gold. Then the human gifts trooped in and squatted around the borders of the overflowing mat, two master carvers to work the jade, four dyers to handle the cochineal, and ten female chocolate mixers-who’d had been specially raised just to process and prepare chocolate drinks-each with her own clay grinding board and wood roller and her set of tall jars. The trickiest move they did was pouring the hot chocolate-infused liquid from one of the tall jars to the other, over and over, to raise the foam on it. The bigger the head of foam on your chocolate, the hotter shit you were. Anyway all sixteen servants were going to work for Koh’s household for the rest of their lives.