Brian D'Amato - The Sacrifice Game

We were going to try to duplicate it here in Ix. The human game would need at least two hundred trained adders. We’d requisitioned two hundred and forty from the towns in Ix’s orbit, and another fifty-one had come, as gifts, from other city-states as far away as Motul. Most of them would be only at the one- or two-stone level but a few would be more advanced. Most of them wouldn’t survive.

I was relieved, of course-well, relieved seems like a weak word-that Koh was alive and in charge. But I was still totally dependent on her for the success of my ultimate goal, and I didn’t want to blow it. It seemed that she’d been working on the Game, learning how to dose the scorpion drugs and everything, but she certainly hadn’t shown me anything about that level of it and hadn’t even hinted at what sort of move would get us past the next cycle. I was still pretty nervous about the whole thing. It was getting late in the trip and I still hadn’t learned anything about what was going to happen in 2012. And what made my position even more touchy was that before he was recaptured, 2 Jeweled Skull had supposedly killed the remaining Scorpion-Puma adders, the ones Koh had traded for me. So Koh-and possibly Lady Creosote Bush-were the only people in Ix who could still play the nine-stone version of the Sacrifice Game. Any other players of her level anywhere in the area would be with the old Ocelots, allied with Severed Right Hand, and totally out to get us. Koh said she was going to support my project and make sure I was entombed correctly. But she wasn’t going to tell me anything about the highest level of the Game until after we were married. And I hadn’t been in a position to object. So despite things seemingly going my way at the moment, I was still feeling some random perturbation. Calmate, Jedderina, I thought. Prenez une gelule de chill.

The toastmaster finished and we heard the rataplan of five kinds of popcorn in the courtyard outside, meaning we were getting to the wind-up phase, which wasn’t exactly dessert but was more like snack foods. Koh and I didn’t eat anything anyway, we spent the whole time serving each other’s families, which in our exalted case didn’t mean running around replacing cups but redundantly badgering the servants to do it. There were nine kinds of starchy-liquid drinks to keep track of, thick manioc beer, goo drinks made of tiny mucilaginous salvia seeds like thin Jell-O, soured posolli dough like sickroom gruel, corn mush like Cream of Wheat flavored with cacao butter and colored with cinnamony Tagetes lucida marigold pollen, all these things that I guess sound gross but actually you get into them after a little while. It’s reassuring stuff. Soul food. For the last course the mixers I’d just given them formed up around the table and poured the achiote-dyed chocolate back and forth, over and over, raising high blood-red froth heads, sprinkling a few drops each time to each of the four directions. The women couldn’t drink the chocolate either. Not fair, I thought A little death-scream came from behind the blue featherwork screen at the far end. I jumped up. There was a shout from a guard:

“Ch’aatol!”

Assassin.

The feather screen had canted over but the Rattler guards had already converged on the sound, closing off the view. The toastmaster stopped his spiel. Hun Xoc got to me and he made me sit down, his mock hand pressing dryly on my shoulder. I sat. I caught Koh’s eyes. Ignore them, they said. She gestured to the toastmaster to go on and he started again. She looked back down at her dish in that demure bridal way. I listened. One of the girls was still making noise but it seemed like the guards were already calming down after the first shock. Someone had made his way in and nearly gotten to the main wedding party, which wasn’t good. They probably weren’t assassins, though. More likely just outcasts who’d been liquored up and sent in to slow us down.

I looked around the table. Some of the celebrants looked uncomfortable, but they did the right thing, which was the cool thing, which was to go on with what they were doing like nothing was out of the ordinary. I could hear more screaming outside. One of Koh’s men was already whispering to her, telling her what had happened. I made what-the-hell-is-going-on? gestures behind my back until one of the guards got into whispering position behind my shoulder.

“Yellows,” he said, meaning the Snuffler Clan. I clicked “Understood” and asked if anyone had been hurt in here. He said he didn’t know, but that the intruder had been taken. I looked back at Koh, but she wouldn’t look at me. It’s getting too late in the day to deal with this, I thought. Had she left enough time for everything? It’s frustrating when there’s just no way you can ask.

Finally, by the time the speech ended, everything had quieted down, inside and outside. Well, that was efficient, I thought. Shrugged that one off pretty fast. Part of the job. No sweat. I could still hear my heart beating, but I hoped nobody else could. I knew Koh and Hun Xoc could see my nostrils flaring, but they wouldn’t hold it against me. They knew I’d brought twenty-first-century cowardice along with me, and by now they thought of it as one of my charming flaws. I caught Koh’s eyes again. She didn’t look worried. The servers cleared the dishes and table and took them out to the bonfire. We all drank and smoked again, and washed our hands again, and Koh and I stood up. On The Left signed for us to stand together and we walked tentatively toward each other like two red-footed boobies gearing up for a mating dance. He stood behind us and tied the long corner of Koh’s embroidered half-cape to the tail of my huipil. He held up a plate of tiny milk-white honey tamales. Koh picked one up. I picked one up. She fed hers to me. I fed mine to her. That was it. The guests stood up and we all trooped out, still in order, out the little throat-door. The courtyard and walls were crawling with Rattler guards. Someone had definitely tried something, but this wasn’t the time to ask about it. We all paraded sunward around the serving room under an arch and into another larger courtyard, covering what had been a whole section of the second council zocalo. Its new walls were festooned with orchid-strings and the floor was invisible under drifts of pink geranium petals. At the far end the freshly built windowless bridal house looked like a pink sugar cube with a door in it. The sky overhead was settling into that too-blue afternoon color. We led the procession as slowly as possible to the door, kicking up little pink dust-devils. Koh stooped through the entrance cloths first. I followed. My valet, dresser, hairdresser, and flautist followed me in. Koh’s maid, dresser, hairdresser, and head vocalist followed her in. Finally On The Left stooped through the door, stood in front of it with his legs apart and his arms on his staff, and watched.

The house had two rooms. The first was just a cubical chamber with a tiny oculus and a brazier in each corner casting mottled red ember-light over walls encrusted with stars of red conch shells. There was a high raised sleeping shelf in the back with four big bat-skin cushions and four hammocks. In the center there was a low stone altar table and a small hearth with a little white-jade corn-grinding stone and cylindrical metate. The second room was a sweathouse, opening off to the right. It didn’t have any furniture, just mats and jars and a hearth in the center. I was feeling a little twitchy and getting an exuberant erection. The musicians had come into the courtyard outside. They slowed the downbeat to one out of four and took the drone chord up a third. Koh led her three attendants into the sweathouse and strewed geranium and bay-tree leaves over the floor while the girls poured resined water over the hot stones. My attendants unplugged my jewelry, unwound all my stuff, and untied my leg, storing it all on a wicker mannequin. The four women crouched out of the steaming door, their clothes dripping, and I crouched in. My valet undressed and followed me. I sat and sweated for four hundred beats. My hairdresser undid the big football of female hair from the top of my head. It was hard to sit still. I looked down at my tattooed glans poking out of the foreskin like the head of a killer whale through an ice floe. Whoa, that’s really something, I thought. I guess it sounds like I’m bragging. But it was Chacal’s body. My valet scraped me down. Since this morning I’d already developed another coat of sweat-goo. But it was cleaner goo. Finally they moved me back out into the main room and stood me up, balancing me on my meat leg. Cool air whisked over me. Koh was standing next to the sleeping shelf, facing me and Flipper the Self-Willed Dick. My dresser rubbed male-manatee oil into me and dusted me with metallic-green beetle-shell flakes. I watched the maids peel off Koh’s last layer of fabric. Her body was proportioned differently from the western canon, maybe something like one of Maillol’s young nudes. Or of course you can see a bit of the feeling of it in Classic Maya statues, like there’s a figurine of a weaving woman from Jaina Island-which was a sort of Isle of the Dead off the Yucatan, like the San Michele in Venice-in the Griffin collection at the Princeton Art Museum that has that same boneless strength. Koh was a bit taller and more willowy than the average Maya, and it made me feel a little runtish. I’d thought it was because she had Teotihuacanob ancestors but now I guessed it might be related to her polydactylity thing, chromosomal trisomy 13 or whatever it was. She had two smaller vestigial nipples, each about four finger-widths below her regular ones, and two more little moles each three finger-widths below those, each set of three strung on a subtle hint of a seam like the lateral lines on a fish. The dark patch on the right side of her face continued down her neck and over her right clavicle, slanting left over her left breast, leaving her stomach and hips light, and then looped back around over her right thigh and slanted left again, leaving her right leg light to just above her knee and throwing her entire left leg into darkness. On her right side the three dark nipples popped out of the light ground. It was like she was a spiral-extruded soft ice cream cone imperfectly dipped in chocolate coating. I guess it sounds maybe grotesque but it was incredibly beautiful, with her perfect wide face and perfectly rounded limbs. Her genitals appeared to be normal, although of course they were hairless like most Maya’s, with chocolate-dark labia peering out of her light pubis. Her dressers started oiling her with a mixture presumably from a female manatee.