Brian D'Amato - The Sacrifice Game

And seat him on the mat, or you’ll be slaughtered.”

The 9 Fanged Hummingbird character spun around frightenedly and ran off. I guess On The Left’s going to do all the voices himself, I thought. Is that supposed to make it more arty? Down on the battlefield the Ocelot bloods seemed to be getting the upper hand again. The 2 Jeweled Skull character ran back and forth, trying to show as clearly as possible that his side was in big trouble. Finally he ran up to the Chacal character, who was dispatching another Ocelot blood at the extreme southeastern corner of the court, just below the Star Rattler’s blue-green mul.

“My son, 9 Wax, help us kill the Ocelots,” the cantor said in an imitation of the voice of 2 Jeweled Skull.

“I can’t kill my own family,” “Chacal” said.

“Then stop the battle,” “2 Jeweled Skull” said. “Take

The Ocelot’s mat, and also take my mat,

The Harpy’s mat, and sew the two together,

Unite both great-greatfathers in one blood.”

Wow, this really is bullshit, I thought. That wasn’t at all the way things happened. Would the guests really believe it? Except don’t even think that way, I thought. Believing it doesn’t matter. It’s about whether the ones who know what actually happened can deny the truth. And of course they can. That’s what people are good at. It’s media, for God’s sake. Right? And everybody’ll go home and tell two friends about what they saw, and they’ll tell two friends, and by tomorrow afternoon it’ll be like it all really happened.

The Chacal character pointed his saw at the sun. The clashing warriors in the battle separated and froze into listening attitudes. There was a long, long hiss from orchestras of maracas, like shipyardsful of woodworkers running sharkskin over lignum vitae. Everyone-including guards and watchmen who were supposed to face their posts-turned and looked toward the Star Rattler’s mul. The low sun hit its facade flat-on and saturated it with light filtered to a pure spectrum-band of cadmium-orange deep through the still-omnipresent ash roof. I smelled that smell again, the one that followed Koh, more insistent now, and as smoke curled up like fangs out of the mouth of the high sanctuary something emerged and flowed down the stairs with the deceptive nonmotion of a lava flow and rolled coiling into the zocalo, sidewound forward, tasting the space, and then reversed itself and slithered up to the peak of the mul again, its head passing its tail at the top, and then as its tail thrashed it slid down again with horrible purposefulness and coiled in the zocalo’s blue-green central zone, scattering the warriors, and oriented itself to the invisible milky way. It paused, licking the air with jointed tongues-they were made like those novelty wooden snakes that bend sideways but not up and down-and then wriggled warily toward us across the court, its movement so perfectly snakelike or rather centipedal that it was hard to shake the sense that it was alive. It had that angular movement that isn’t really movement, where the thing just shifts mysteriously from one spot to another without seeming to be in between, without crawling or even sliding, more just sucking itself obliquely forward by torsion building and releasing and building, surfing on the liquid sine wave of the universe, and for a beat I realized it was lining its side-stars up with the earthstars of the mulob, remaking or mirroring the astronomical moment, Antares setting and Saturn in the Crab. It drew itself up at the apron of the Ocelots’ mul-which had been emerald and scarlet but was now black, scarlet, and Lady Koh’s signature blue-green-and reared back, flaring its ruff like a horned lizard and inflated its chest like a mating quail’s. It seemed to be about to speak and then it puffed its cheeks to bursting, like a frog’s, and extended its eyes on long stalks like a slug’s, feline-slitted pupils rolling round and around, inspecting us. It opened its mouth, and first nothing and then a sound came out, a gurgling of petrified glyptodonts bubbling up out of tar pits, a wheeze and release like sneezing out broken glass. A dark-green flood of writhing globules vomited out of its mouth, separated into lumps with legs and hands, and rolled blindly over the stones squealing in mock pain, dwarves dressed as toads covered with glistening thick oil that mimicked digestive juice. The dragon coughed, shook its head, unfolded and spread its thirteen pairs of wings, opened its jaws again, and spoke:

“Star Rattler calls One Ocelot: Show yourself.”

Everyone on the dais drew back from me so that I was exposed to the crowd. I teetered up four low steps to the next, smaller platform, the foot of the stairs of the pyramid, a half-rope-length above everyone else. I was alone except for a tall wrapped stele lying in the center of the landing, ready to be lifted and slid into the big hole under its base.

The crowd reacted, although it wasn’t anything you could hear. This was already the first stage in climbing the mul. It meant I was committed to respond to the oracle’s challenge. The whole thing was considered a test. Which I guess is obvious, except it wasn’t just testing me personally. If Ocelot accepted me and infused me with his uay I’d supposedly be strong enough to establish Ix as the seat of another thirteen-k’atun cycle, the way Teotihuacan had been the seat of the previous one, and then Ix would get a whole lot of goodies. Of course, now that the Teotihuacanob coalition had fallen apart, other cities would immediately contest the claim. But everyone was still taking it kind of seriously. Too many snafus from the ruling family and people would start losing confidence. Motivation, I thought. Human resources. Give ’em a leader. Ein Volk, ein Fuhrer. The Ocelot interpreter took out a half-calabash basin. It passed hand to hand like a collection plate, first through the great-bloods on the level below me and then through part of the crowd below them. Each person who got it unwrapped a single small green chili pepper, Capsicum frutescens, a variety so hot that it was used only for torture and poisoning fish-and dropped it into the gourd. The full basin came back to the interpreter. He mashed the chilis with a pestle- the vessel with the pestle has the brew that is true- I thought added a shot of balche, and stirred it up. An ordinand handed him a blue sacrificial cord with ocotillo thorns woven into it. He showed the rope to the crowd and coiled it into the basin, tamping it down with the pestle. He let it sit for a minute and then pulled it out to show how it was soaked with chili water and covered with little yellow seeds. There wasn’t going to be any possible question about it. Nothing up my sleeve.

I turned to the mul and gave it the son-to-father salute. Except for its staircase its entire bulk was draped with the twenty-seven original halach popob, cotton-and-feather weavings rippling over its nine blue-green courses in waves of gold, black, and scarcely believable unfaded Gobelin reds.

Thirteen of them hadn’t been unfolded since the seating of 4 Rabbit, in the first sun in the first tun of the eighth red hotun, 493 AD, at the last quadruple conjunction of Saturn, Venus, Mars, and Jupiter, two hundred and fifty-six years ago. The interpreter handed me the cord.

Okay. Right. No point waiting, I thought. Not everyone in the crowd could see everything, but the great-bloods on my left and right could see plenty.

Can’t fake this one. Nope. Come on, get it over with.

I unwrapped a fresh stingray spine, handling it gingerly like a communion wafer, and tied it to one end of the cord, like I was threading a needle.

Go for it. Goferit. Gfrt.

I untied my little loin-package and took out my penis. It was a little embarrassing, not because I was showing it off or anything but because it was looking kind of puny, pulling its turtle-head into its long foreskin. Shrinking violet. Shying away from the coming inevitable.