Brian D'Amato - The Sacrifice Game

There were only two more presents to go. The first was my own idea, one I’d had made so that she could be surprised by at least one thing, not that gifts around here were supposed to be surprises. I unrolled its case and laid it next to the hearth-fire stones myself. It looked like an ordinary ironwood hand flute, but it was actually chromatic, with six-hole transverse fingering and pitched to D, instead of to the double-pentatonic minor scale they used around here. I’d started the project a hundred and twenty-six days ago, the day Koh introduced me to my severed leg, and it had taken until now to get it tuned and to the flautist to play it. I’d adapted the fingering to the Teotihuacanob style, so she could deal with it, but it would still put out scales no one here had ever heard before.

The last item was definitely a not-least. With an air of finality, the head bearer laid three accordion-folding tribute books across the cold hearth-fire stones. Each book was bound in plucked eagle skin and filled with tribute lists and coded maps representing rights to a hundred and eighteen villages and thousands of acres of Harpy farmlands. They were the only really serious part of the bride-price.

Enough, already, I thought. I’d been thinking of throwing in twelve bloods a-blooding, eleven dwarves a-dwarving, fifty-four other items, and a vulture in a prickly-pear tree. In fact-even though I know it sounds like some conspicuous-consumption event a la the Duc de Berry or the Miller Sisters-this wasn’t even the most elaborate royal wedding. Supposedly, seven hundred and twenty days ago, at the wedding of 1 Chocolate of Caracol, the eight-year-old groom had had four hundred thralls killed just for spectacle, without even offering them to any particular immortal. Of course, he might have been another victim of bad publicity.

The so-called in-laws looked everything over. If only Marcel Mauss could see this, I thought. Finally the room servants started gathering up the loot and 1 Gila said it was okay for me to enter the fucking house.

The room was big, maybe about the size and shape of the Oval Office-which isn’t that big-and except for an opaque screen of state at the back it was totally empty. Not for long, I thought. The two sets of parents and godparents sat on mats at the right side of the door. Teentsy Bear and I sat and faced them from the other side. The girls and the other female relations crowded behind the screen. It was rare for women ever to see men eating, but Koh was making an exception for her mother and my surrogate mother and the various godmothers. 1 Gila sent a “runner” to go get the High Midwife, who was probably watching everything through a hole in the wall anyway. A bearer brought him a basket and he took out a long halach wex, that is, your basic loincloth but very fancy with tiny scales, that is, beads, showing my glyphs and dubious accomplishments. More than a couple seamstresses must have gone blind getting the thing ready in just twenty days. He presented it to me with a presentation speech and I accepted it with an accepting speech. Before I was done everyone snapped into a respectful attitude. The high midwife crouched in.

She was an old Rattler greatfather-mother and besides being a midwife she was also what you might call the Rattler Society’s head. In a way, in the context of this one ceremony, she was the most important person here.

She saluted my father, Koh’s father, my mother, and Koh’s mother.

The toastmaster did the same. The bridal family struck “welcome” poses and saluted everybody else, in order of precedence, by name, with me last. Then the toastmaster saluted everyone again, with me last. I saluted back. Finally the midwife launched into her spiel to Koh’s parents. She said I obviously wasn’t good enough for their daughter, but since I’d worked so hard maybe they should go against their better judgment and let Koh come out of the gynaeceum. Finally, Koh’s parents gave in. One of the girls ran to get her. I counted two hundred and ninety-three beats before Koh appeared in the door. The strata of encrusted ornament seemed to grow out of her flesh, even the smiling jaws of the giant nurturing snake around her head didn’t so much seem to be a separate creature swallowing her as another part of a compound animal, antennae coiling in, under, around, and through her in stitches too complex to follow, fangs curling over her cheeks and around her neck down to her male-Rattler-adder pectoral insignia-and the two shrunken heads looking up from the sides of her wide belt set with eighteen Mixtec crystals, each of which was carved, in intaglio, with her portrait glyph:

She was all backlit by the morning sunlight and looked new-hatched just for display, like the mouthless imago of a male tiger moth on a milkweed, drying its wings. The four parents rose. I turned my head so I could see her with my right eye, even though it was gauche for me to move. My right eye-I mean, the one that wasn’t there-had developed this kind of nondarkness, this absence, like the part behind your head where you can’t see. It’s not dark, it’s just nothing, like death. At first it had just looked dark over there, like it was shut, but now I was this visually lopsided person.

Koh squatted at the threshold, morpho scales and quetzal and macaw plumes fluttering like she’d just flown down for a beat from her gemstone forest on the surface of the sun and she was still shaking off drops of thermoluminescent liquids that deliquesced in the air, leaving flakes of spiced copper-leaf floating to the floor. She held a long k’inil wal in her dark hand, sort of a long combination fan and fly whisk, basically a bunch of thin cloth streamers and strings of flower-petals on the end of a rod, with a perfume sachet at the base, like a Japanese hare stick. Her face would have seemed blank if there hadn’t been a hint that something was unbearable to her. The effect was childlike or even frightened, and I almost thought that through everything I could make out some emotion, maybe even that same old bittersweet song twitching at the curved border between dark and light that ran just left of her left eye.

I still wish I could say Koh decided to marry me because she was crazy about me, but I don’t think that was the way it was. I think she found me intriguing. Or at best fun in a liberating way. More than once during my convalescence-that is, when she had a free minute to drop in, and wasn’t busy booting up her new empire-she said she owed me for my silence. She used the words “ makik uchi,” “meritorious silence under torture.”

I hadn’t spilled the beans on the earthstar stuff, I hadn’t sold her out to 2JS, and so she was going to honor her promise to force the five Ixian clans to make me ahau of Ix for the remainder of my section of the cycle. But like I say, that wasn’t the main reason either. What she really needed to do was to legitimate her name. As a first step I’d already been installed in absentia as head of the Harpy House of Ix, that is, I had to take 2 Jeweled Skull’s former position and titles. I got the feeling from her-as much as I could get out of her, in my little room, with her monkey secretaries there, and the sounds of construction outside-that legitimating me had been one of her trickier behind-the-scenes manipulations, and even though her army was in control of Ix it had taken more than a few little assassinations and exiles. But Koh was never one to say anything had been difficult. It was always fait accompli, no prob. I could hardly even get her to talk about how she’d gotten away from Ix and back to her army after the first battle, or ten thousand other things, although I did get a notion of what had gone on that I figured was close to accurate. Evidently Koh had let herself be “protected,” or really captured, by the Ocelots. Then, when 2 Jeweled Skull had taken over, she’d bought her freedom by giving him the tzam lic drugs and apparatus and three captives that he thought were the Scorpion-adders from the Puma House of Tamonat. The trade probably helped make 2JS overconfident, and certainly it gave the Ocelots of Ix fewer bargaining chips. But at some point after Koh had rejoined 1 Gila, 2JS probably found out the Scorpion-adders were impostors. At any rate he sent people after Koh to kill her anyway. After that Koh had managed to stay ahead of the hit squad-who killed two of her doubles-until they got the gossip about the bad situation in Ix and gave up.