In the Courts of the Sun (53 page)

She was born, or rather named, on 1 Ben, 11 Chen, 9.10.13.13.13, in a place called Rotten Cane, which is a small city in B’aakal, in the orbit of Lakamha, Palenque. She was a member of the ruling family there, who were avian rather than feline and descended from 2JS’s maternal grandmother. When she was five, she showed signs and a female adder of the Lakamha Rattler Society taught her the Game. She was especially apt and six years later the Society sent her to Teotihuacan to study with the Orb Weavers, a sort of convent of adderesses in the service of the Rattler cult there.
Even if it makes things seem more complicated, I guess I should mention that the Orb Weavers—they were named after the giant orb weaver spider,
Nephila clavipes
—were part of the Aura, or Vulture, or White, or Peacetime, moiety and Synod of Teotihuacan.
This was probably to help solidify ties between Lakamha and Teotihuacan. Even though Koh had to ceremonially renounce her biological family to become part of the Rattler order, the connection would still help her family politically, especially if she came back. 2JS mentioned that when Lady Koh left her family, the leaders of all the avian clans in the area sent gifts. 2JS gave her an especially talented contortionist named 0 Porcupine, who was still supposedly her favorite jester. In Teotihuacan she was one of a few young adderesses to become a nine-skull, an adept who knows how to use, and maybe formulate, the Game drugs. People say she talks to flies and sheds her skin every peace season. Like a few other Maya members of her order, Koh has either decided not to return to the Maya area or been prevented from leaving because of tensions between the Rattler’s children and the ruling clans. People say that her clothes are woven by spiders, that she remembers being in her mother’s womb, and that she can shed her skin. The cult she belongs to, the Star Rattler Society of Teotihuacan, was founded by a transplanted Maya ahau named 11 Xc’ux Tsuc (Coral Snake), who settled his lineage in the city on August 9, AD 106. It grew steadily over the centuries. Meanwhile, the two councils were dominated by the Aura (Turkey Vulture) House and the Swallowtail House. But starting about eighty years ago the two greathouses and their affiliated lineages moved to reassert the dominance of their own protectors, especially Hurricane, or the Wizened Man, and Koatalatcacalanako, a fanged water woman they call the Jade Hag. The Rattler Society was subjugated and forced to build a wall that blocks the view of the Rattler’s pyramid from Teotihuacan’s fetish-market square, which it had previously dominated. So maybe the Orb Weavers are getting squeezed somehow, and maybe they’ll be willing to cut a deal with me to get out of a bad spot. Well, we’ll see.
I’m at a loss for a better strategy. I have to admit that I’ve thought about sneaking off somehow and trying to pull a Lord Jim. Maybe I could take over some remote-ass village and then, when their archery was in shape, just march back to Ix and roll over the place. But that could take time I don’t have.
I also wonder whether there is some other way to take care of the Game and the Game drugs. Wasn’t there some other nine-skull sun adder closer to Ix whom we could capture and get to spill the beans?
But when I mentioned that to 2JS, he had three good objections. For one thing, any of the feline-clan sun adders would rather die than get captured. Dying was nothing for them, they’d off themselves if you just looked at them funny. And even if you could capture one of them and keep him under suicide watch, there was still no way he’d actually tell you anything. There’s a myth that no one holds out forever under skillful torture, but it isn’t quite true, at least not around here. According to 2JS, you could keep some people screaming 24/7 for twenty years and they still wouldn’t give you the time of day. Second, the adders in this part of the world would only have small stocks of the prepared drugs. What 2JS really wanted was the whole recipe, and the actual plants or whatever, if I could bring ’em back alive.
Incidentally, he had reasons we couldn’t steal the Ocelots’ stash either. As we saw on the radar, a whole network of caves branches out into the mountains behind the Ocelots’ mul. Right now, they’re supposedly digging 9 Fanged Hummingbird’s tomb in one of them. They say there’s a whole little colony of sucklers down there who hardly ever come out. And they hang on to the drugs. Even if we found where the stuff was, they’d swallow it and kill themselves before letting us get it. You have to realize that bribes don’t often work with greathouses. These people are absolutely incorruptible.
Forty years ago the Ocelots had assassinated the last of the other lineages’ best sun adders. 2JS is only a four-skull and even so he’s now the senior sun adder of the Harpy House as well as its ahau. His own eight-skull adder died years ago, and now the only adder of more than four skulls left in Ix is 0 Whirling, who belongs to the Ocelots. At this point, as far as anyone knows, all the nine-skull players outside of Teotihuacan are pledged to jaguarian lineages.
Whether these have been overridden by newer allegiances, and how persuadable she is, remain unknown quantities.
There also seems to be some conflict between female and male adders. There’s a story that in the old days, most adders were women, and that some male adders had themselves castrated to improve their level of play. Some people say the female sun adders are more accurate but that they’re being squeezed out by the men. Koh’s group, apparently, gets around the problem by, effectively, becoming men. Supposedly Koh and the other female Rattler adders even have wives, that is, female wives, or concubines or whatever. Although maybe this is just a salacious rumor.
2JS says that if I come back with the package as planned, he intends to give away doses of the drugs to the heads of the non-Ocelot Ixian lineages, claiming that his ability to make them is evidence that he and not 9FH is the person who One Ocelot, the mythical founder of Ix, wants to have ruling the city. This might weaken the Ocelots enough for 2JS to get the support of the other Ixian greathouses. When they definitely were on his side, he’d find some excuse to call off the Game. Ideally, the other greathouses would force the Ocelots out of power and elect 2JS as ahau. Then, if 2JS lived long enough, he’d leave Ix and found his own city somewhere to the east. For all we can tell archaeologically, 2JS’s family could survive in power in some other city for at least another two hundred years.
2JS pledged to me that if I brought Koh or some other ninth-level player, along with some way to produce the drugs, he’ll make sure I was put into an unmarked tomb, with the lodestones in the right pattern, and all the chemicals and information. Of course, I realize this is assuming a lot. How sincere is he? Well, of course I’m going to have to watch him on the back end. But I guess I could say that during our few furtive conferences, 2JS and I actually became almost close, despite everything. We understood each other. And as far as I can tell, he hasn’t yet lied to me.
I’m enclosing fifty-six pages on what I’ve learned about the Game so far. You’ll see that in the short time we had before I left town, 2JS taught me masses of “new” (to us) rules and strategies. He also drilled me on points of etiquette that he said would allow me to play with any Maya sun adder.
You’ll probably be wondering whether 2JS taught me as much about the Game as he could. Well, I wonder about that myself. For one thing, I know enough about games to be able to tell that even if I were to study with 2 Jeweled Skull for ten years, I’d be lucky to get to the stage of playing with six stones. And of course, that’s still nothing next to nine. I could probably spend years playing and never be able to read more than a single k’atun ahead into the unrevealed, let alone eighty. So either I’ve got to get a nine-stone adder working on this thing, or LEON will have to improve very fast, or the drug will have to do a lot of the work for us, or we’re screwed. But whether 2JS was keeping anything from me, whether he had his adder flub that Game on purpose—well, I can’t say. I don’t think so. But as you know, I was never very good at reading people.
2JS has promised that if these notes return from this trip without me, he’ll try to entomb them and any other Sacrifice Game material he can find, with the lodestone pattern as we discussed, as near as possible to the target zone. Although I’m also not too optimistic about 2JS’s chances after the hipball game . . . however, I am feeling good about getting to Teotihuacan on time and starting what may be a more fruitful phase of this operation. Thanks again for your confidence—
All best,
JDL
Encls.

[43]

T
hey called the Nacouitan waterfalls “Xcaracanat,” “Afterbirth Place,” because the Earthtoadess had been mutilated there at the creation, when her eyes became wells and springs and caves, and the ocean became the pool of blood she’s dying in. 18 Dead Rain said she had mouths at her knees, elbows, wrists, and a lot of other joints, and any eruption was just her screaming again for enough flesh and blood to keep her alive despite her wounds. He gave the sacrificers there a porter we weren’t happy with. The bloods sat and waited at a travelers’ ramada, haggling with vendors. Hun Xoc came back from the road and squatted beside me.
“We’ve taken on eighteen two-leg turtles,” he said. He meant we’d ended up having to buy slaves, who weren’t likely to be good porters.
I clicked, “Right.”
It wasn’t just to save money, he said. There were just too few professional carriers. It would be better to run an inexperienced slave crew ragged, sell them or just leave them by the side of the road, and hire replacements on the way.
I clicked, “Sure.” That is, I clicked, “Right” twice, for emphasis. It was still two hundred forty miles to the Lakes of Wings, nearly due west. If we traveled twenty hours a day we might just make it before the Big Curfew. But the roads were filling up.
Hun Xoc looked at me. I looked back.
“Am I speaking to Chacal or to 10 Skink?” he asked. It was kind of out of nowhere, but he had a way of catching you off-guard.
“Chacal is gone,” I said. “My real name is Jed DeLanda.”
“Jed DeLanda?” he asked.
“That is right,” I said. He’d pronouned it exactly the way I had. He was a hunter, and he was always practicing mimicked animal calls.
“And so, Jed next to me, where do you really come from?”
“I come from near Ix,” I said.
“When do you come from?”
“I came from the thirteenth b’ak’tun,” I said.
“I suppose 2 Jeweled Skull over us doesn’t feel we have to know that.”
“No.”
“Eeeh.” There was an instant contact and he looked forward again. “What is it like there?”
“Well, we know a lot of things,” I said. “And people built a lot of things, cities even bigger than Teotihuacan . . . in the thirteenth b’ak’tun we wouldn’t be walking here, we’d be gliding along in a sort of big sled on rollers. Except they carry their rollers with them so you don’t need to keep replacing them. And we’d be going much faster than this.”
“Eeee. So have you been to the Razor City before this?”
“Yes, but in the thirteenth it’s all just empty stone.”
“And you close to me know what is really northwest of Teotihuacan?”
“Yes.”
“What is there?”
I said that there was a lot more land up there, and then oceans, and then more land on the other side of the world, which was round like a ball. I said that people and things don’t fall off the bottom because the ball attracts them, the way a lodestone attracts another lodestone. I mentioned that the earth rolls around the sun, which is actually a much bigger ball on fire.
“But the zeroth skin is also on fire,” he said.
I said, yes, the earth was hot in the center.
“Is that under Xib’alb’a?” he asked.
“There is no Xib’alb’a,” I said. Maybe I was feeling a little testy.
“I know there is,” he said. “I’ve seen it.”
Richard Halliburton, who’d been everywhere and back twice, said that people were surprised when they asked him what the most beautiful country he’d seen was, and he said Mexico. And even though it’s been well and truly trashed since he saw it, it’s not a surprise to people from there or from near there. And a lot of people would claim that the old road from Veracruz into Puebla is the most gorgeous route in Mexico. Still, when one’s trying to set a land-speed record, one is not in a touristic mood. We just pushed and slogged.
The road tended uphill. We passed so many no-place towns that I lost count after 455. Just imagine the phrase
village after village
with a bar over it to mean it goes on forever. Each had its own pathetic little mul or two in the center of a ring of huts. Swirls of malnourished kids and gangs of lowlifes tried to rip off the more helpless-looking wayfarers. At one point in the late afternoon we were jogging along—or rather our bearers were jogging and we were jostling—between low gray hills, out of sight of any other caravans, and I heard a flock of birds coming up at us out of the north. What was odd about it was that from the calls it seemed to be composed of all different birds, gulls and starlings and crows and oilbirds all mixed together, which would never happen, and then as it came up over us I saw it was a flock of hundreds of scarlet macaws, huge red, blue, black, white, and yellow things, like flying chimpanzees in clown costumes but with long fat tails. Hun Xoc, who was just a few paces in front of me, jumped off his porter’s back, stepped out of the line, cupped his hands around his mouth, and sang up to them:
“Ah yan, yan tepalob’ ah ten Ix tz’am!
Ah ten popop u me’enob nojol . . .”
“All you macaws, all you proud things, go tell them in Ix,
In our southlands,
Go tell our grandfathers, go tell our children,
Our brothers, our women,
Sing in our gardens, our dooryards,
To wait for us patiently, bravely,
Wait for us, wait for us, wait for us, wait for us, wait for us . . .”
The flock expanded and constricted and seemed to turn inside out as the birds half circled over us, wings in lockstep. The blizzard of color made it seem like the white of the sky had shattered into its component primaries. A couple of droppings angled down, missing me. One hit Armadillo Shit on the chest. Well, that’s what he’s there for, I thought. The birds picked up Hun Xoc’s song and sang it back in a thousand raucous but very passable imitations of his voice, repeating it over and over, fading away as they trailed into the south: “
T’u men, t’u men,
wait for us, wait for us . . .”
That night, 12 Cayman switched the pace to a walk so we could all stretch our legs without really working. It was like how Boy Scouts used to do thirty paces of walking and thirty paces of running, except the installments were closer to ten thousand paces. At 31 Hands, which was somewhere near Córdoba, Chtlaltépetl came into view. It was and is the largest volcano in Mexico. Its Spanish name would be Orizaba, and 12 Cayman called it “Where Scab Man Jumped into the Hearthfire.” There was a wisp of something trailing from its peak, but I figured it was just a cloud. From what I could recall it had last erupted two thousand or so years before now and wouldn’t have another big one until 1687.
A shadow fell across the road, and I thought for a second it was the storm, or maybe a pyroclastic plume from some nearby eruption, but then I could see it was birds, or rather doves, and then as a few swooped close to us I had trouble keying them down in my head because they had these pewtery breasts tending to that warm sort of no-name red, and then I realized they were passenger pigeons. All at once they shifted direction and the entire sky had the feeling of a forest of poplars or aspens, the way when they’re hit by a sudden wind they turn up the silver undersides of their leaves, and then the whole continent-spanning sentient wave streamed off to the west, toward Nacananomacob, the Lakes of Wings. An hour later some of the stragglers were still going by. It was unbelievable that they’d ever be extinct, but in a way it was even more incredible that there’d be a time when there was only one left, and that that one would die at 12:30 p.M. on September 1, 1914. At noon we had to stop absolutely short at Topacanoc, that is, “Hill of the Nose,” because of a directional taboo. Or maybe instead of “directional” I should say “vectoral.” That is, if you were walking in a given direction, you were presenting yourself to a certain protecting deity, in a certain mountain, and you had to respect it. In this case Hun Zotz, that is, One Bat, who lives in the west, was indisposed until dark. They didn’t want to tell me what the problem was, but I got a feeling that maybe he was a she and had gotten her celestial period. It was insanely frustrating. Don’t freak, I thought. It’s not important how far away your goal is—just that you’re moving toward it. This is the granola that gets you there.
In the fifth ninth of the night the Red Chewer attacked. That is, there was a partial umbral lunar eclipse. Supposedly the Chewer’s eye was like an owl’s and could spot motion in the dark. And he favored the Ocelots. So we had to stop and camp where we were, in a weedy fallow field too near the highway. Shrieks rose up around us, most of them far away, but some nearer than we would have liked, as people tried to scare away the shadow. There were old voices croaking an ancient form of whatever gibberish they spoke around here, and the outlandish dialects of the travelers and refugees who were quartered in Choula, and then even dogs and pet squirrel monkeys and wildcats got in on the act, barking and yeeking and spitting. I got up on Armadillo Shit’s shoulders and looked back over the tall grasses at the rotting town. The fifty-two niches on the visible side of the anthillish old mul glowed as the sucklers stoked their fires.
The rusty shadow reached the Mare Vaporum. There was a ghastly seventh chord from what Chacal’s ears knew were long, thin Mexican requiem trumpets. It was the first time we’d heard them on this trip, and they touched off an automatic shiver. Eight hundred and fifty-four years from now the Aztecs would play them to try to scare off Cortés. The mul blazed and smoked like a volcano. Finally the Chewer’s red shadow fell away—right on schedule, as I would like to have told them, but I was trying to keep a low profile—and there were hissing cheers that finally died down into four or five competing versions of the same sort of skirling hymn, tirelessly repeated in a meterless fugue. The Rabbitess lighted on the peak of the coal-red mul and hesitated for a moment, like she was deciding which side to roll down. I didn’t really sleep anymore, but I dozed.
At dawn the outrunners came back and said there was some kind of riot at Where Their Grandmother Lived—that would be around San Martín Texmelucan—on the main route to the lake, so we decided to take the nearer southern route to the altiplano, over the Paseo Cortés. The road climbed hill after hill, like eroded giants’ stairs. We passed hundreds of acres of recently burned-off forest, dotted with smoking limekilns like giant beehives. Pretty soon even the few hardwood trees that had been left for religious reasons disappeared. Pinyons and savannah grass took over the slopes. The people here lived in cobblestone houses and grew tiny-eared black corn. Piles of obsidian chips sparkled between the boulders. Obsidian was for Teotihuacan what steel was for England or Germany during the Industrial Revolution. There was an inexhaustible need for it all over the world, and like steel, it seemed to be a vector for some virus of militarization. Road after road gathered into the main drag. The smell of cedar was all around, not from live trees but from crews bringing in lumber from the northeastern forests. At night the temperature went down to about forty and to us it seemed polar. Our dogs flushed grouse and snipe out of scrub junipers and, amazingly, 2 Hand killed a partridge with a hand-launched javelin. Just to punish him for breaking the pace, 12 Cayman made him give it to one of the locals. My knee was better and I tried to run, but as the peaks came into view I got winded like everyone else and slumped into a carrier seat. Let the proles take care of it. I was past trying to be PC.
By the peaks, of course, I mean Itzaccihuatl and Popocatépetl on our left and, far off to the right, Volcán Tláloc. Our names for them were One Hunahpu’s House, Seven Hunahpu’s House, and the Boiling Chac. Most of the cones around here had been dead since the Ice Age, but Popo was showing a little activity, maybe sympathetic with San Martín, and dust hung from his east slope. Still, I thought, it was a pretty minor eruption, maybe a 1.5 or so on the VEI scale. If this were 1345, 1945, or 1996 we’d be in trouble.
Our twentieth day out of Ix was sunny with scattered clouds driving east. At noon we crossed the high point of the pass. The Lakes of Wings, that is, the Lake of Mexico, spread out 4,770 vertical feet below us, cradled in the mandorla between the bows of two sierras. From here you could see that it was wide and waveless, that its shores were scalloped by volcanelli and buttes, and that it was minty-fresh green near its edges from all the rushes and duckweed but fading to open water as smooth and reflective as a pool of mercury. You could see that the farthest point on the far shore was about forty miles away, and you could see that the basin was inhabited, that the shores were studded with villages, and that the lake was scored with causeways and crowded with canoes and barges and giant circular rafts.
Well, I thought, at least I could stop wondering why the place was called Nacananomacob, the Lakes of Wings. Congregations of
bach haob’
and
halach bach haob’
, egrets and white ibis, and droves of
kuka’ob’
, tiger herons, waded in loops near the shore, and farther out in the green zone
bich ha
, that is, sandhill cranes, moved around stiffly in ranks and files like frost-covered Napoleonic infantries. A population of redwing blackbirds lifted off in lock-flap with the sound of all the barn doors in the Old Midwest swinging on their rusty hinges, and for a few seconds you could only see a few shreds of blue sky between the Hitchockian swarms before they changed their collective mind and settled down again. Nacananomacob, I thought. Nε
ϕ
ελoκoκκυα.
Nephelococcygia.
Cloud-Cuckoo-Land.
We descended into that different sort of air you get around high lakes, where it’s as humid as it can get but too thin to hold much water. From down here you could start to see just how urbanized the area was. The better islands had been built up until they were chockful of houses like Mont Saint-Michel. People had been forced to build their huts farther and farther out into the lake, on piles of rocks, on stilts, or, it seemed, nothing. Speaking of that, Greater Teotihuacan, like greater almost anywhere, was 95 percent shantytown. 12 Cayman said a lot of these people had been living on the dole, dependent on various clans and members of different relief societies. Supposedly the Rattler Dole was one of the biggest. They gave out long braided manioc cakes like churros, and they paid for it directly out of contributions and diviners’ fees. At about two hundred feet above lake level we passed an isobar and the air had a new sound. A
kos
, a laughing falcon, snapped at a leash of green teals, but they flapped and scrawnked and got away. Cliques of green kingfishers hassled the juveniles. An osprey splashed down, bubbled underwater for a minute, and came up empty. A pair of
halach pocob
, jabiru storks, with black heads, white bodies, and red collars, like Dominican nuns with slit throats, puttered through the rushes looking unconcerned, as though they knew the penalty for killing them was death by peotomy. There were enervations of Inca doves and triple redundancies of pigeons. There were things out there I knew I’d never seen a picture of, and they weren’t just juvies or breeding plumage or whatever. Basically it was enough to give David Allen Sibley a heart attack. Guess I can’t put these on my life list, I thought. The NAS won’t go for it. A crowd was shouting below us, and when we passed them it turned out that despite the tense atmosphere there was an amateur ball game going on. They were knocking a big wooden ball around with crooked sticks like hurleys. We passed the game and flowed downhill in the river of masked supplicants, around long looping ramps. Most of them carried bone baskets. That is, they were bringing their parents’ skeletons to add to the ossuaries in the eternal city so they could wait on the enshrined founders of their lineages. And still, the birds were everywhere. You’d think that it was impossible for anyone living here ever to be hungry. You could just reach out in any direction and pull dinner out of the air. And you’d think that for every thousand of whatever that you took, ten thousand would always come back.
At least, that seemed to be about what the human residents thought. We passed hundreds of open-air workshops in the courtyards of low white-plastered storehouses, and two out of three belonged to featherworkers. Trappers ripped live birds out of rolled nets, snapped their necks, and sorted them into piles while an accountant dropped a counter in one of several pots and kept an overall count on a knotted cord. A woman gutted and skinned them, and then other women plucked and washed and sorted. It was like a pre-Ford production line, with each person doing only a few operations. Some families specialized in plucking protected critters alive, and all you could hear when you passed them were herons and chachalacas shrieking in Dantean agony. We saw thousands of them staggering naked around the yards, pecking at dead fish and waste corn and flapping their featherless wingstalks like thalidomide arms. This was a civilization founded on feathers as much as England’s was founded on wool. And even so, I thought, we’d brought these people two sledsful of even more feathers. Although, come to think of it, all our bird skins were in shades they didn’t have. They had plenty of black, white, grays, browns, tans, light blues, pinks, and reds. We’d brought cloud-forest colors, purple, magenta, deep blue, turquoise, and golden green.
The mobs pressed in around us. Most of them were what I was starting to think of as
ma’ala’ ba’ob
, that is, people lower than the soles of your feet. As much as I tried to stay populist, racism was a virtue around here.
We kept pushing. Sometimes all I could see through the range of heads were folded miles of fishnets drying on high forked poles. Hun Xoc whispered to me that 14 Wounded should have come out to meet us on the other side of the lake, at least. They’d only learned we were coming four days ago, and only from our own couriers—we didn’t have homing pigeons, and even though there was a sort of watchfire semaphore system on the road from the coast, we hadn’t wanted to use it—but still, that should have given them enough time to get ready.
“14 is acting the part of 7 Macaw,” he said. It meant, basically, “He’s giving himself airs.”
“Hmm,” I clicked. I squinted ahead. There was a line of what looked like squat ceremonial archways separating the road from a wide white causeway that led two miles across a sort of estuary to the main body of water. From closer up the piers turned out to be skull racks. Damn, I thought. This makes us look like pikers. Us Maya, that is. Back home we only put up a few celebrities and the occasional miscreant. Around here it seemed like they’d whacked anyone who ever even looked at them funny, and then they’d held on to every single head like it was a big deal. The ones to the far west were so eroded you could hardly tell they were human. These guys have no couth, I thought.
We gifted or bribed our way through onto the causeway. At the next peninsula the shore peons loaded us onto two rafts, each with forty polers, that took us east and north to Tamoanatowacanac, that is, “Lake Port of Teotihuacan.” We passed an island that was a single giant saltwork, with short-haired slaves raising water out of the lake in counterweighted cranes like shadoofs and pouring it into acres of white-crusted tubs. A scarlet ibis stared at me like it knew more than I did. Thoth, I thought. And what god are you here?
The shore had been banked up and lined with a green-and-gray makeshift wall made of thousands of felled trees, all lined up with their branches toward the lake so that attackers would have to scramble over them. We landed at a gap in the wall and, with as much dignity as possible, which isn’t a lot when you’re getting off a boat, stepped into Babel.