Brian D'Amato - The Sacrifice Game

So maybe in some ways we really were too different. At least she didn’t have self-esteem problems, I thought. No hesitation in asserting authority. She was a textbook illustration of how, no matter how patriarchal the society, a few of the very smartest women always manage to get themselves put in charge of things. Even if she had to get hitched to a weirdo like me.

But she and I couldn’t spend much time getting more acquainted. There were still problems. On the day of the ball game 9 Fanged Hummingbird had been counting on the fact that whatever happened with 2 Jeweled Skull, the Puma coalition under Severed Right Hand was only eighteen or nineteen days away. Now-that is, now at the time of the wedding-he’d camped north of the later Palenque, only four days away, undoubtedly trying to find out if Koh was solidly enough in charge to get a defense together. At least she’d entrenched her position enough to force Severed Right Hand to be careful. And if she stayed on top of things and shored up her defenses, he might be reluctant to attack the city at all. Supposedly his troops were feeling the water shortage and the distance from home. But it wasn’t anything to get flip about. Anyway, one way or another, I let her get everything together and here we were.

Koh looked up. My “father” 14 Wounded crossed to her and took the end of her k’inil wal, her fan, in his right hand. She inclined her head and said the equivalent of “Yours” or “At your service,” calling him “Father” for the first time. He handed the fan to her own “father,” 1 Gila, and she saluted him in the same way, and then she greeted her mother, and finally my so-called mother took her fan and helped her up. An attendant folded up the door cloth and let in about twenty other relatives, or I guess you’d say guests, Alligator Root and Koh’s other advisers, and Hun Xoc and 14 Black Gila, and basically the whole gang. Koh and her party took their mats on the right side of the door, facing the so-called parents. I was in the middle, facing the screen in the back, sort of linking the two sides. Sometimes at these things there was another big screen down the center of the room to keep even the closest-related women separate, but in Ixian society, at least when I was there, it was considered classier for the women just not to look at the men and be sure to eat a course after the men were done with it. The whole thing was who could look at whom, the married parents could look at each other, the toastmaster could more or less look at everybody, the thralls couldn’t look at anybody, Koh and I could look at each other, a cat could look at a queen, whatever.

I suppose all the ceremony sounds pretty silly to us modrin folk. But when you were living it, it was different, it was obvious how crucial it was. It wasn’t just bearing, it was an attitude. It kept everything together, it made life bearable, it was like you could make every gesture a work of art, like life was danced, and the main virtue was to be a great dancer. When it worked, you got what everyone wanted most from the world-applause. It was like everyone got the chance to be an actor in this grand, ornate drama of church, state, and media all in one.

We could hear sounds of a crowd outside, families from our dependent clans who’d heard about the procession over the bridge and had followed and been allowed onto the peninsula. It sounded like it was mainly kids asking for handouts. The guards had orders to keep them quiet but to hand out honey tamales to everyone, and then to everyone again and again. So the throng would probably triple by the end of the meal. Some of the cantor’s apprentices were addressing the crowd, repeating his version of what was happening in the forbidden court.

Each set of parents sat and saluted the Toastmaster again, one by one and in order. 14 Black Gila ordered his servitors to bring in the marriage table. It was large and low, like a Japanese tea table, newly built for this occasion and scheduled to be destroyed immediately afterward. Waiters brought out miniature canoes full of fresh water and poured them into tripedal basins.

“Now take the basin, wash each other’s mouth,

Each other’s hands,” the cantor said, “and taste,

But not too greedily, not to excess.”

Oh, please, I thought. Enough with Big Nanny. But of course I did exactly as he said.

That was basically what I did here now, go along with things. Uncomplainingly. The head brewer set a huge tub of balche in the center, bristling with long drinking reeds, and all of us-I mean all the men-crowded around and sucked the pot down to the bottom, like the visual cliche of a nineteen-fifties teenage couple drinking out of the same milkshake with two straws. A pourer refilled the pot with a weaker dilution and the women did the same. Next they handed me a pot of smoking tubes, thin reeds filled with ground tobacco and orchid aromatics, and a stack of tube-rest dishes, like ashtrays. I wobbled up, put the pot under my right arm, and passed them out to the men in order, starting with 1 Gila, handing the tube from my left hand to the recipient’s right hand, like it was a spear. Next I handed out the ashtrays, from my right hand to their left ones this time, like they were shields. I sat down and we puffed as the food came in. It had all been transported here from the Harpy House, right behind the gifts, in big braziers.

The first dish was a roast giant peccary ornamented with arching bay branches, a gift from my father to Koh’s father. They went through the whole presentation and acceptance thing. 1 Gila sent it back to his storehouse, presumably for later consumption. The next dish was a roast stag, with the same garnish, a gift from my father to the toastmaster. Nobody ate any of that either. On The Left gave it a puff of blessing smoke and sent it off to his house. Finally they brought in the real dinner, all in individual casseroles, one of each item for each guest serving the flesh foods clockwise. There was kind of a choked disturbance at the far end of the room, near the screen, and for a beat I thought the Snuffler Clan really had gotten someone in here to bust up the party, but as I stood up I could see the head bearer had whopped one of his underlings. The servers had to carry the dishes in the palms of their hands, never by the rims, no matter how hot they were, and the guy who was on the floor and crawling out of the room had evidently gotten his thumb in the gravy. I reminded myself to tell Hun Xoc-who was acting as my first lieutenant-not to let them kill him.

Everyone ate pretty discreetly, almost furtively, in a way. Like On The Left said, it wasn’t good to make noise or seem to be eating too greedily. Certainly we all had better table manners than most people in, say, the U.S. in the early twenty-first century, although that’s not saying a lot. We also had to keep quiet while Koh’s mother and so-called father asked the toastmaster to explain our marital duties to us, and then we all had to listen to his speech. It went on forever in spite of Koh’s instructions to cut it short. Come on, come on, I thought, it was nearly noon and there was much more serious stuff to take care of, even before the end of the sun. And then we still had to get everybody ready and announce the human-piece version of the Sacrifice Game. It was going to be a long day’s journey into night.

Back on Meet Your Ex-Leg day, Koh’d said that the hundred and twenty days I would spend recovering from my poison-illness and various “sacred wounds” was just enough time for her to make me into a nine-stone adder. She’d asked me about the visions I’d had, that is, the dreams, and she’d interpreted them and said I was on the right track. And she’d taught me the necessary things about the basic Sacrifice Game, all the things my mother never taught me, things that had taken six hundred years to forget, how to count without looking at the pieces, how to read ahead without looking at the board, how to count yourself down into a divination state without using any drugs, how to listen to your blood and feel its lightning striking different parts of your body, how to lay your body out over the board and the world so that the lightning would really mean something, a location, a time, an event. She said I’d been good when she played the first Game with me and now I was getting great, that I was a natural even though I was learning so late, all that stuff. But she also said she didn’t think I’d ever get more than a few k’atunob ahead. “You have to have it pressed into your skull when it’s still forming, like your forehead-board,” she said. She’d had Lady Creosote Bush sit with me and teach me when Koh was away. CB was her superior in the Orb Weaver Sorority and a higher nine-skull adder than Koh, although I suspected not so naturally talented. She was eighty-four solar years old, certainly the oldest person I’d run into around here, and she’d witnessed the great city-wide version of the Sacrifice Game they played at Teotihuacan in 604, sixty years ago.