Brian D'Amato - The Sacrifice Game

The dwarves set Koh down four arms away from me, facing me-that is, south-and slithered off, back into the sanctuary, keeping low so the crowd couldn’t see them. Down in the forum the invisibles were clearing everyone off the central square, an area about three rope-lengths on a side. It had been pumiced and buffed and freshly repainted in the color zones of the five directions with the full Sacrifice Game grid superimposed on it like a squared-off spiderweb. Finally, I thought. The Human Game. Let’s go.

Koh’s attendants snipped off her blue-green-goggle-eyed snake-jaw helmet and instantly started constructing an Ocelot queen’s coiffure and headdress in its place. She was pretty much giving up her old role as a sort of nun to Star Rattler. Still, marrying me was the safest plan for her. Later-not much later-before I entombed myself, I’d announce at the popol na that Koh was going to continue ruling, as the mouth of my uay, and then, eventually, as regent for her son, assuming we were going to have or secretly adopt one. And meanwhile, with me out of the picture, Koh would keep working to unify the Ocelot and Rattler factions until the situation was stable enough for her to relocate. And-at least until the twelfth b’aktun-that would be my contribution to posterity.

She and I saluted each other, but she didn’t say anything. An attendant set a covered Game-table between us.

Down in the forum the invisibles swept and oiled the Game grid. Alligator Root, Koh’s crier, sat two stairs below us, wearing a thin black mask, like a domino mask, fastened over his eyes with wax. At least she hadn’t had him blinded.

The first fifty-nine evaders-or poison oracles-walked out and stood at their posts at the center of the tetragon. Each one held a pair of sticks and they wore tall zero-masks. One of the leading one’s sticks was a big red-streamered staff, twice as tall as he was. Next the fifty-eight masked catchers took their places around them, seven at each of the eight star points and two in reserve outside the grid. Each of the catchers had a little drum on a stick. The hundred and seventeen players had all been chosen from four- or five-stone adders from trusted dependent clans, which meant they could all feel the blood-lightning and count like they had little abacus cashiers in their heads. But presumably it also meant that they wouldn’t know enough to direct a City Game on this scale, or to remember it and take the knowledge with them. They’d picked the thirteen evaders from among themselves, by cleromancy, and tattooed them and studded them with the patterns of the sidereal scorpion, and fed them on liver and deer’s blood to make them strong. And for the last ten days they’d all practiced every hour they were awake. Each one would be, in a way, playing his own separate game, and the totality of games would magnify the totality of the master game.

The Game beaters started on their clay water drums, in time with the beat of the universal festival, but more insistent.

Let’s go, I thought. Letsgoletsgoletsgo. I still couldn’t quite believe that the Human Game was really happening. It was like-well, I don’t know if it was like anything. But if it worked, I’d learn what I needed to know, what we all needed to know. And then, knowing… knowing…

“You know, at best I’ll only see the moves,” Koh reminded me. “You’ll have to interpret.”

I said I knew that, and I thanked her again. She smiled, like, Hey, no problem, we’re just hangin’ out anyway, right?

As I think I mentioned, as far as anyone knew, this was going to be the first City Game since the one played in Teotihuacan k’atuns before. And given the way the art was dying out, this might turn out to be the last one anywhere. This Game was supposed to be a public demonstration of my ability to read the future, but it would really be Lady Koh who was doing the seeing, and she and I would be playing for our own reasons. And, if all went well, nobody else would find out the farthest-off or the most important things we’d see. We’d throw them a few solid predictions about the next few k’atuns, and keep the rest to ourselves.

Koh lit one of her green cigars-the kind with chili and chocolate threaded through the tobacco-took a hit, and passed it to me. I puffed. She started the invocation. As I think I started to say at some point and then lost track of, it was in the old heavily metaphorical adders’ dialect, and-especially in a heavily accented language like English-it’s hard to get a sense of the swing, which it don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got. So I’ll make this a bit closer than a paraphrase, but less than a translation. Okay, Jedketeers? Right. Here we go:

Koh:

“You, Hurricane, who sparked Lord Heat’s first dawning,

You over us who foreknows his final dying,

You, sun-eyed coiler of the blue-green basin,

You, jade-skinned carver of the turquoise cistern,

You, there, whose hissing javelins strike wildfires,

Deign to respond to us from out your whirlwind.”

Koh looked up, not at my eyes, but at the emerald-green mask of One Ocelot on my pectoral sash. I hesitated, cleared my throat, and launched into my first response.

Jed:

“We who are only dust motes in the whirlwind,

We, born at sun’s fall and gone before its dawning,

Who will be waiting for us by the hearth fire?

Whose hands will polish our bones beyond our dying?

Will our skulls just bounce on the floor of the fresh-sea cistern?

Will the potters rebake the shards of our shattered basins?”

Ahau-na Koh:

“You, Cyclone, grant us a perch below the basin

But over the clouds, above the wrecking whirlwinds:

An overlook above the fourfold cistern

Where we can scatter the seeds of coming dawnings

Where we can count their growings and their dyings

Where we can spot young floods and fresh-sparked fires.”

Jed:

“Where we can warn our heirs of nearing fires,

Where we can feel the first cracks in the basin

And cradle our lineage and forestall its dying,

Where we can hear them crying in the whirlwind,

Where the entire talley of their dawnings

Reads full and clear, above the yawning cistern.”

Ahau-na Koh:

“You at the center of the turquoise cistern

Show us the gold southwest fires,

Let us see redward, through the sierra of dawning,

Southeast to where the horizon meets the basin.

Guide us northeasterly through the bone-dust whirlwinds,

And even northwest, through the soot-black dunes of dying.”

Jed:

“So that in ages far beyond our dying

Our daughters can still pour offerings in your cistern,

Our sons can still feed blood-smoke to your whirlwinds,

Our thralls will always tend your altar fires,

Pouring you chocolate from brimful basins

Through all the days undawned but now soon dawning.”

Ahau-na Koh:

“Dawning we bake our bodies and smash them dying.”

Jed:

“We shatter our basins and drown them in your cistern,

And snuff our last fires to steam, to slake you, Whirlwind.”

Koh scattered the seeds and whispered their position to the cantor. He called them out and the human pieces took their places. She waited five beats.

She made her first move.

“One death, one wind, four thought, sixteen, nineteen,”

Koh said, immediately giving the last date from the Teotihuacan City Game. She’d basically just skipped ahead about four hundred solar years, to Gregorian 1225. I’d thought she’d guide the adders to it, ease them into it a bit, but maybe she wanted to see if they knew what they were doing. The nine clumps of adders broke up and shifted somehow and for a beat the plaza seemed like just a jumble, like the human crystals had just dissolved in solution, and then they coalesced into a new octalinear pattern, and melted again and lined up again. Even though I was expecting something like it I was totally taken aback. It was definitely like something. Not anything biological, something from physics or technology, I don’t know what, maybe like hundreds of those Pac-Mannish magnetic polarities coursing through the domains of a synthetic-garnet bubble-memory chip. What was actually happening was each adder was walking forward, on the beat, out onto the lines separating the points of the grid, the interstices interspersed between the intersections, earth-marching from his old position to a new one determined by his individual count of the days and cycles, which in turn were all different because each person represented a different cycle that he counted on his sticks or his drum, and each person’s cycle was a unique mathematical progression that ignored some beats and, say, triple-counted others, and then redirected his progression based on the people he intersected in his nonrandom walk. On a human scale the movements had similarities to reconstructions I’d seen of Renaissance minuets, and there was a flavor of Gujarat stick-dancing, or like I said, the morris dance. But even if it was dancelike it was so obviously not just for effect, they were all really doing something. Or building something. They stopped.