Brian D'Amato - The Sacrifice Game

It sounds like I’m bragging but in spite of everything else that had gone on in Mayaland or anywhere else, and no matter what else I’ve ever dealt with, walking up those stairs in that condition was the single most extreme thing I’ve ever forced myself to do. It still feels like it took longer than my entire life before and since. I remember the unique ache of each and every step, so that every number between one and two hundred and fifty-five has an indelible association. The only thing I want to really crow about, ever, is finishing that climb, because I went on for a long time after I’d made up my mind to give up and die.

So anyway, I made it but it was like I’d never do anything again, and I don’t think I really remembered who I was. There was a vibration of relief in the air behind me, but nothing I could hear over my blood-roar. The top level of the mul really had four sublevels, the scarlet level of the floor of the sanctuary, a black step leading up to that, a wide turquoise apron-step below that, and a second narrower black apron-step before you got on to the stairs proper. I got my peg into its hole in the lip of the threshold stone and looked up into the mul’s throat. It was ringed with nacreous barbs like the grinding mouthparts of a lamprey eel. I wavered on my flesh leg, the void behind me sucking on my back, pulling me into the big easy. Watch it. That was exactly how I’d blow it, I thought. I always screwed stuff up that way. I’d finally get through everything and get back here with the drugs and the girl and get it all set up great and then I’d just wipe out at the very last beat. I found my center of balance and let the roaring fade until there was silence everywhere.

“Ahan Bolom,” I said. “Wake Ocelot,

White North, black West, yellow South, red East, and turquoise

Here and near offer you our corn, our children.”

There was an intake of breath that faded into another purr and then into a rumble of compression like the Ross Ice Shelf getting ready to calve, and then it drew itself out into a long rattle and a crack, like lava rolling off Mount Erebus into the volumes of layered ice. I knew it was the orchestras around me cutting the scaffolding out from under their tree drums and letting them collapse and smash onto the flagstones, but even so at the last snap it seemed to me that One Ocelot appeared against the hemorrhaging sun and called me into the citadel. Fire flared up in his mouth and eyes and light flashed out in irregular rays through the smoke, flickering with a greenish aurora-borealis tinge. The flares had been rolled from refined wax-myrtle berries and mixed with whale oil and the whole thing was brighter than any artificial light anyone had seen since the seating of 9 Fanged Hummingbird. The crowds below went weirdly silent. I stepped forward, up onto the second apron, forward, up the two steps, and into the hole in the sky. It seemed bigger than outdoors, even though there were all these cat people-most of them mask-enhanced mummies but a few with living bodies inside-around me and all this heat and light, the fire reflecting and rereflecting off walls mosaicked with polished pyrite, the flames not regressing infinitely like they would with a smooth glass mirror but jumbling together in a kind of metallic fog like a whirlwind of gold watch springs. The oracle came up behind me and led me into the adoratory, the holy of holies, the Kodesh Hakodashim as we Hebrew buffs would call it. It was all full of jars and vases and big pots on hot braziers. I knelt down on a hot mat. In front of me, 6 Murmuring, a captive tortoishell jaguar lay prone, unbound but heavily narcotized on a wide, slightly concave altar. The hierophant squatted on her left and set a short table between us, with five little tamales on it, each the color of its direction. The blue one in the center was bigger than the others. Each of the four outer tamales was studded with tiny sea-urchin spines, and each spine was wound with that same black-and-yellow skin from poison-dart frogs. The oracle backed out and headed down the steps.

I looked around. The shapes around me looked so unsavory that I closed my eyes again. I wobbled, a little still dazzled from the smoke and the fresh darkness. A voice cawed:

“Now still you aren’t our flesh.”

There was no one else in the room. Blood drained out of my head. Hallucination? No. Hidden somewhere. Speaking tube. Yes. The stone god in front of me probably sat on a vertical pipe that went down to the tombs and the caves. Really, those things were pretty common, I remembered, there are spirit tubes in pyramids all over Central America. It’s just that the archaeologists all had said they were just spirit things. Like, nonfunctional. But not in this case, the hierophant really was down there. Maybe there were other adders down in the caves with him. Did 2JS know they were still alive down there? I’d have to ask him, if I could convince Lady Koh to let me near his cage for more than a minute. Did Koh know? Did the sitting oracle know where they were, and how to get in there? The oracle had called him with the beat. Did that mean you could ring them up anytime the same way, or did you have to set up an appointment “As when I felt you first you still trail death,” the sandstone voice said in old court language.

I didn’t know what to say, so I mumbled some line from On The Left to the effect of how the inevitable is also the necessary.

“You want to read your own k’atun,” he said.

He meant the future. I said yes.

“Then tell me what I’m going to do with these,” he said,

“And if you’re right, I’ll give you one of them,

And if you’re wrong, you don’t get anything.”

I had to get him to give me the blue one, which was baked with the blood of Ocelot and would make me speak for him in the zero level. Otherwise they’d force one of the others into my mouth and I’d be dead. Or, like he said, he wouldn’t give me anything. In which case I’d also flunk. And he’d give a sign, and when I came out one of the offerers would execute me with a blowgun, and in a few minutes they’d be rolling my corpse down the stairs.

Fine, I thought. All very Matrix avant la lettre. Whatevs. I love riddles. Give me a beat.

“You’re going to keep the yellow tamale, the red,

And the black and the white one,” I said. “You won’t give me those.”

There was a ten-beat pause.

Gotcha. This statement is false, you bastard.

“Then take and eat,” he said.

I took the blue tamale and put it through the mask’s mouth and into my real one. I chewed it up. It was fine. Earth felt the wound. I swallowed-ow.

Blue liquid sprayed over me. The baby ocelots or cubs or whatever they were-of course they were people, but not only hadn’t I heard them come in, but I was losing track of what things looked like-were blowing ink into the cuts in my genitals. Sizzling sounds rose up in the little room. Outside I could hear giant birch-bark kazoos imitating the gurgling sounds of birth. One of my ears popped, and suddenly my head was filled with a luscious comforting smell, like movies and sleepovers. A stone bell tolled twice, the signal for me to slit open Six Murmuring’s abdomen. I did. Someone handed me a smaller flint scalpel and I reached in and up, far, far in, and finally found her heart, and, with difficulty, cut it out.

They lifted me up and spun me around and around, rubbing ashes in over the ink, cutting off my costume and weaving me into a new one, strapping wide ribbons around my ankles and wrists, uncording and combing and re-cording my hair. And change the oil, too, I thought. Finally they draped Six Murmuring’s skin over my shoulders. Somehow, while time had raced around me, she’d been sacrified, flayed, hastily tanned, and cut and sewn into a crude manto. A hand fed me a tamale with part of her ground heart inside, and as I swallowed it the uay of a hero, the grandson of One Ocelot, raised his head inside me, shook the ichor out of his hair in a cloud of garnet beads, and looked around. There was another pop and another and then more all around. It wasn’t my ears, I thought, maybe it was the stone rending itself asunder molecule by molecule or something, and then I realized it was corn popping, pouring out of the heated pots. I faced the mouth-door. Some of the cubs had ball scoops and were shoveling the blue-white molecules out through the opening like snow, down the steps and into the breeze. From below it would have looked like the mul’s cat-head was foaming at the mouth. Cool air coiled around me. I stepped outside, into the big blue-green room of the zero level, and even though I kept telling myself not to get carried away, that it was just an act, I really felt that I was being born out of a wound in the pericardium of the sky.