In the Courts of the Sun (57 page)

[47]

O
ne peculiarity of ours was that despite all the books, we didn’t really have a culture of letters. I mean, like, memos or epistles. You didn’t really send people written material, and the few times you did, it was always just ceremonial writing bundled together with something, like a card accompanying a gift. No one would ever just dash off a note to someone. For that we used remembrancers, people like 3 Returning Moth, who could speak ten languages, who were certified runners, who were practiced at standing up to torture, and who could listen to a long speech once and recite it back anytime in the future without losses or misprisions. I guess I was like that, back when I had my old brain. Except for the running and torture part. So what I was doing was already a bit of an innovation. Well, at this point, maybe we had to scrap the low-profile thing. Anything to get this woman’s attention. Even if it raises a few eyebrows.
12 Cayman asked if Hun Xoc or I had anything to add to the message 2JS had worked out. We said no. He recited the message. 3 Returning Moth repeated it back. It was both a request for the gift of an audience and a warning that we, as emissaries of part of Koh’s family, had an obligation to tell her about a threat. But we didn’t know how she’d receive it. Her loyalties might be divided.
12 Cayman said that on the way here he’d found out exactly where Lady Koh was. I wondered whether he’d been discreet enough with the inquiry. Well, he’s pretty cagey, I thought. It’s fine. I’m sure it’s fine. He told us she’d be in the east building of her convent. Then, surprising me, he said that we had to wait for two ninths and that he was sending two of 14 Wounded’s people along.
Local escort, I thought. Hell. So much for secrecy.
We waited in the antechamber of the sweat lodge with 14 Wounded and his fellator, a son of 14’s named Left Yucca. We got our hair done. You always had to look your best around here. I guess it’s like being a celebrity, a female celebrity anyway, with something to promote, you’re just going to one ghastly gala event after another, spending hours every day on hair and makeup when you could be learning Greek. Hun Xoc and I were having our hair redressed in the Teotihuacanob style, with thinner local oil and without beads or knots. Most Ixian would be too proud, or you might even say too patriotic, to do anything of the kind, but we wanted to be able to blend in if we had to. Blissfully, we’d taken out our nose bars.
The Teotihuacano were famously laconic, not chatty like the Ixob, and 14 Wounded and his little court had picked up the mannerism. But 12 Cayman had kind of cleverly drawn him out, and now 14 was telling us how at the moment there were at least a thousand native Maya living here—not that we had a concept like “Maya,” though, just the names of different city-states—and out of those, only about thirty were Ixob. Eighteen of those were from Harpy-dependant clans and lived in this house, and the others were from lineages allied with the Ocelots. Compared to the hundred or so Ti’kalan here it was a small community. And since lately 14 Wounded had had to avoid the Ocelots, I figured he probably felt pretty isolated.
12 Cayman asked where the Ocelots were centered. Of everyone in Teotihuacan they were the people we most had to avoid. “Luckily for us they have to live with the Pumas,” 14 said. “And the Pumas are becoming impossible.”
According to 14 the current situation in Teotihuacan couldn’t last much longer. Chalco, Zumpanco, and five other city-states in the huge Valley of Mexico economic zone—which had all been uncomplaining subordinates of Teotihuacan for centuries—were now defaulting on tribute. Most seriously, they weren’t sending more fuel wood to the metropolis Teotihuacan’s limekilns. 14 didn’t say any more about this, but my guess was that over the years the deforestation had caused the flooding, erosion, and mudslides we’d seen on the trek through the valley.
Even so, he said, more immigrants than ever, especially Too-Talls, were pouring into town. He said the Too-Talls were the biggest problem in Teotihuacan. There were “four hundred times four hundred times four hundred families of them,” which was an idiom for a whole lot. If all of them got together, he said they could overrun this whole place. They were descended from coyotes, which was why they were so smelly. They had to be wiped out.
The problem was that the city was obligated to host anyone who showed up. Now, just based on what I’d heard of their language, my guess about the Too-Talls was that they were the same people whose descendants, or close relatives, anyway, would be known as the Toltecs. So I was a little curious about them. But 14 said that the Too-Talls were low-clan “fog gravelers”—I didn’t know what that meant and didn’t get a chance to ask—who’d been kicked out of their own city and were overrunning the valley looking for things to steal. From what I could tell, their city was about a hundred miles due north of here. I couldn’t identify it as any site I knew about. 14 claimed that he’d been there and said it was a low, sprawling, stinking barbaric place where the children ate feces and packs of coyotes ran through the courtyards.
“The Pumas go out hunting for them in the hills,” he said. “But they can’t do that inside the valley.” There had been street fights and riots, and the Puma sentries had become insupportably overbearing. Over the last few peace seasons there had already been food shortages and “brown scabs”—some kind of plague—in the poorer sections of the city. Now, with the irregular rain, the coming harvest was expected to be the worst in seventy-one years.
And finally, he said, there was the growing tension between the Star Rattler Society and the synods of the two great moieties. The way he explained it, it sounded to me like there were parallels to Rome in the second century AD. The Star Rattler Cult was enjoying a resurgence, especially among the hearthless tribes and roundhousers, that is, the lower-caste clans who were constantly gravitating to the city. The Rattler Society was pledging more and more followers or converts every day, people affiliated with both the white and red moieties who were disgruntled with what you might call the stultification of Teotihuacano society. It sounded as though the Rattler Society offered a less hierarchical, less ancestor-based religion, with an overarching protector whose body wasn’t localized in any specific shrine on earth but was the Milky Way itself. 14 said many of these new converts had also “blooded” themselves in particular to the charismatic Lady Koh.
The Rattler Cult was something like a Protestant movement, like Akhenaton’s long before or Luther’s long after. Wherever you have a syndicate of priests operating for a long time, they accrue a huge amount of wealth and people start getting resentful. And right now the Rattlers were riding a trend of burgeoning popularity among the dispossessed. The Silence would start six days from today, which would be five days before the eclipse. During that time the city would be under blackout and all fires would be put out, even the great fires at the peaks of the mulob. Athough there was a regular Silence every fifty-two years, this was a specially decreed off-schedule one, which was even more frightening. Those five days wouldn’t be protected by any friendly smokers, or ancestors, or anyone, because they weren’t real, name-able days at all, just cosmic mistakes. The people would feel adrift in a nightmare flextime at the mercy of hearthless, malevolent uayob. A lot of people evidently hoped to make it through by “walking on the white back of the Rattler,” that is, asking it for protection when everyone else had abandoned them. At any rate, it was going to get harder each day to see Lady Koh. We’d have to move soon.
Still, with all this, 14 didn’t seem very worried. In fact, if anything he seemed blasé. Maybe he’d soaked up some of the myth of Teotihuacan’s eternality. Of course, it was true that the place had been more stable than the Maya cities. If a Maya ahau screwed up a couple years in a row, the whole administration would be apt to change, by abdication or by coup. Or the place could be seen as tainted and abandoned. Teotihuacan was different. But that didn’t mean it would last forever.
14 Wounded paused. 12 Cayman was silent. Neither he nor Hun Xoc nor I had mentioned Lady Koh. And we’d told 3 Returning Moth, the remembrancer, not to tell his escort where he was going.
Lately, 14 went on, the Puma sentries had been harassing Rattler converts on their way from the market to the Rattler’s Forum—the Ciudadela—and two days ago a family of converts had been killed. Relatives were demanding restitution from the Pumas, and people said the Swallowtails had broken their bargain with the rains.
So, with all this going on, the “chewing”—the solar eclipse coming up eight days from now—would be a dangerous moment.
Pause. 12 Cayman looked at Hun Xoc and then at me. He had that scary look of a commanding officer, but he didn’t say anything. We didn’t either.
“You next to me, have you offered to our greatfathers together with Lady Koh?” 12 Cayman asked. For all we knew, she might not just be under house arrest. 12 Cayman was trying to make sure she was still alive.
14 Wounded didn’t answer directly. Instead he said that he and the other Harpies in Teotihuacan used to see Lady Koh in Rattler processions, but lately she’d been missing from them. But he said that, like a few of the other Rattler’s sucklers, she was also said to be a top orator and that there was a rumor that lately she had been receiving pledges of personal service from many of the hundreds of people who were, every day, joining the Rattler Society.
“They say that four war seasons ago someone denounced her at the Puma Synod,” he said. “And that night a scorpion came into his house and stung him, and his eyeballs popped and he went blind.” He said she’d predicted the flood of three peace seasons ago, that she only saw the heads of a few of the top Rattler-pledged greathousers and wouldn’t take any more clients, that she had two wives, and that she could “read the unborn k’atun,” that is, that she could see twenty years into the future. “And she can talk to spiders and make them spin colored webs or weave ropes and banners.”
I looked at Hun Xoc. He looked down—a Maya shrug—meaning, “Well, it’s possible. Stranger things happen.”
“The Two Synods don’t trust her,” 14 said.
Apparently Lady Koh was near the top, but not at the top, of a society or order called the Children of the Orb Weaver. They were women who, for ritual reasons, could act and speak as men and wear men’s clothes. I guess we could call them cross-dressers, only that sounds like it’s just an act. Epicines? No, that sounds femmy. Hmm. They use the word “berdaches” in a lot of textbooks, but really that’s more specific to males from the Plains cultures. Maybe we should just call them “androgynes.” Although that sounds a little biological, but whatevs. Anyway, over the last two tunob, he said, Koh and the rest of the Orb Weavers, and also their corresponding order of biologically male Rattler sucklers, had practically become hostages. He didn’t put it this way, but to me it sounded as though the Puma sentries had put them under a kind of house arrest. It reminded me of this guy at the poker room in Commerce who used to wear sunglasses at the one-two table, like, “Ooh, I don’t want anyone to get a tell on me while I go for that big twenty-two-dollar pot.”
A messenger whistled. 12 Cayman whistled back, meaning, “ You have permission to come in.” He crouched over and whispered to 12 Cayman. 12 Cayman made his excuses and left. I followed him into the little passage. 12 Cayman turned and whispered to me that 3 Returning Moth had come back and said “the cedar stick had been broken”—that is, that Lady Koh wouldn’t see us.

[48]

12
Cayman, Hun Xoc, and I found 3 Returning Moth and took him and his guard into the storeroom, the one with the jars of salt, to clean him up. Given all the ups and downs of traveling in the city, he’d probably run about three miles each way and was sweating and trying not to pant. Sunlight slanted through the oculus at a low angle. It was already the equivalent of four p.M. Late. 3 Returning Moth said he was as sure as he could be that Lady Koh had personally gotten the message. She’d sent the feathers back with another nearly-as-large gift from her to us, so it wouldn’t be an insult. Her thresholders—that is, doormen—said all the Orb Weaver’s children “had already pledged this time to suckle the Chewer,” meaning they were fasting before the eclipse.
12 Cayman usually gave orders, but in this case he asked me what I wanted to do.
I said that we were going to go anyway. “We’ll send a danger gift of equal size,” I said. “Equal or greater.”
We’ll go right to the big guns. I sent Hun Xoc to get a few things out of the primary bundles.
“It’s crowded there,” 3 Returning Moth said. He told us that if we went back we should go south as close as possible to the main axis. They were clearing lower-caste people out of the teocalli district, he said, so there was less traffic. But it seemed that the upper-caste people were allowed to be there at least until sundown. 12 Cayman said he’d done a good job. Hun Xoc came back with a big armload of gear.
I’d settled on two items. The first was a green macaw-feather cape. It was worth a little more than two hundred and ten young male slaves, which meant it cost about as much as the rest of this trip so far. Well, if 2JS had to go into debt for this, that would be the least of his problems. We’d give it to the Rattler’s table, not to Lady Koh, so they’d have to take it and burn it on the altar. That would oblige her to thank us personally. The second was a small white jar filled with what looked like tiny dried leaves about the size of a Scott number-seventy-six five-cent Jefferson stamp. They were symmetrical and jagged-edged, bright pink with biomorphic black marks like Rorschach faces. They were the dried skins of a lethal variety of strawberry poison-dart tree frogs from the Ixian cloud forest. They signified danger—specifically, “Prepare yourself, make darts.”
I asked 12 Cayman whether the skins could look like a declaration of hostility. He said they wouldn’t. These things had pretty definite meanings, and he was an old soldier who’d seen all of them. We resealed the jar. It was a freshly made piece with a profile-glyphic representation of two of the ancestors 2JS and Lady Koh had in common. The implied message was that we were reminding Koh of her family obligations.
“I want to add a coda,” I said.
12 Cayman looked at me. I said the whole thing was serious enough for us to tip our hand a little bit.
I dictated:
4 Ahau: ajtonxa pochtal Tamoan . . .
In the tenth b’ak’tun, in the fourth k’atun, in the sixteenth tun, In the zeroth uinal [~August AD 530], White Eel [that is, Halley’s comet] burnt over us
In the tenth b’ak’tun, in the eighth k’atun, in the thirteenth tun, In the eleventh uinal [~February AD 607], White Eel Burnt over us again
In the tenth b’ak’tun, in the twelfth k’atun, in the eleventh tun, In the third uinal [~April AD 684], White Eel Burns over us again
Before the fourteenth uinal of the nineteenth tun of the twelfth k’atun
Of the tenth b’ak’tun [that is, sometime before January AD 692], Teotihuacan is thrown down, abandoned
Finished.
None of the dates were in the Codex Nurnberg or in any of the other Game records that I’d heard about from 2 Jeweled Skull. But they were all real events. 2JS had also told me everyone knew about Halley’s comet, naturally. But no one had been able to predict its reappearances exactly, not using the Game or any other way. I told him it was no wonder, since its periodicity is a long way from regular. You need modern instruments to get it within even two years, and they only really nailed it down in the 1960s. Koh would have to be intrigued. Right?
I made 3 Returning Moth repeat it. He had it right the first time. We sent him off.
“We won’t wait for a reply,” I said. “We’ll give her four thousand beats”—an idiom for about an hour—“and then we’ll simply be at her door.”
12 Cayman looked a bit askance at this, but it was my lookout, so he didn’t say anything.
Hun Xoc, Left Yucca—one of 14’s sons—and I left through a vacant courtyard. Other guests of 14’s household were already setting up to sleep on the roof terrace, but we stepped over them, climbed down into the narrow north alley, and headed east toward the main axis.
“Let’s keep quiet,” Hun Xoc said. He didn’t want anyone to hear us speaking Ixtob. I’d insisted that we wear light offering masks instead of the nosebar that was driving me rabid—there’s nothing worse than a bad piercing—and we had on local mantas with a gray-and-red scorpion beaded pattern that meant, simply, that we’d set aside our clan responsibilities for now and intended to make rain offerings for the whole city. So you couldn’t tell what lineage we were from. Still, we weren’t quite impersonating Teotihuacano. That could make for real trouble, if they caught us. I looked around. We seemed to have gotten a drop on the spies, if you can call them spies when they’re so much not a secret. I guess it was like in the last decades of the old Soviet Union, when people knew who all the watchers were, or most of them. Maybe they were being overworked by all the new crowds in the city. Confusion would work in our favor. Anyway, we weren’t doing anything subversive, were we? I mean, yet.
We turned right onto a dark lane like a Middle Eastern alameda. It was about five arms across and roughly the equivalent of a block away from the main axis, so that spatially speaking, it was similar to walking north on a (much narrower) upper Madison Avenue and at every corner getting a glimpse into Central Park. We were taking a different route from the one 3 Returning Moth had used. He would just be getting to the Orb Weavers’ house about now. Give her a little while to listen to him. Read him and weep, as it were. I noticed a big hooknose snake basking on the low wall. They were pretty scrupulous around here about not hassling
Squamata serpentes
. It was like in India with the temple monkeys or sacred cows. Side benefits included a low rat population and a relatively high number of deaths by snakebite, which were hyped as a good thing since they meant Star Rattler had personally sent one of his grandchildren to fetch your uay to the thirteenth shell.
Two “blocks” south we crossed a sort of invisible border into a native Teotihuacano area. The north-northwest section of the city, where we were coming from, housed some of the richest Maya embassies. But the houses were older and smaller, and the area had a Maya vibe. I guess it was like ethnic quarters in any city. To keep up the New York comparison, it was like walking down Mulberry Street in New York and crossing the Italo-Chinese boundary on Canal. A trio of clumsy Too-Talls, who were way off their own turf, appeared out of a side arcade. Hun Xoc darted between them and me. I looked at him through my mask, like, thanks.
Don’t mention it, he eyed back.
You know, I went on, I don’t trust this Left Yucca character.
Don’t worry, Hun Xoc looked. We won’t tell him anything. And I’ll watch him like a thief.
The houses were larger and newer here, all at least two stories, with stone and plaster below and lath and plaster above. Traders and pilgrims passed us with silent salutes, always in groups of three or more. They all had a certain furtiveness, as though they all had assignations as sensitive as ours. We passed a gang of night-soil collectors who stooped deferentially around us under their big stinking jars. Puma sentries strutted down the middle of the street in bands of five. Supposedly they liked to collar people or even barge into houses and confiscate any accessories that could be considered ostentatious.
The city had a singular sort of silence. In Maya towns somebody was always singing, but I guess here the songs only came at certain times. So you could hear footfalls, and the birds, and sometimes flint chipping and the moan of stone saws on wood, but not much else, and the thick walls gave everything a stony reverb that stewed those sounds together into a kind of liquid hum. It seemed like about half the people were wearing nosebars and the other half, maybe the more traditional types, wore veils or masks. Just as well, I thought. I’d been feeling that sort of travel fatigue you get from having seen too many human faces. They start looking mostly the same and not that interesting. The masks were all about the same, smooth impassive faces made of gessoed bark or the local sort of corn-paste papier-mâché, creamy white with almond eyes, just the blank essence of a face with no expression, no identifiable age, no sex, no ethnicity, not dead, but not quite alive. So, what with the masks, and the long mantas, and the quietness, and the lack of trees or grass, from street level the only natural thing you saw was the sky changing color overhead and the occasional little bridge over a canal.
When we were well south of the Hurricane mul we turned left, toward the main axis. There were five Puma guards standing at ease at the corner and 14’s nephew, Left Yucca, spoke Teotihuacano to them with no accent. They acknowledged him, barely, and watched us go by.
So, I wondered, where are all the chicks? Of course, this was a ceremonial space, so it was segregated. But even on the side streets you hardly saw any women, and not many children either. It was like a Muslim city in that the upscale women were considered too valuable to be let out of the house. Or at least that’s how they explained the segregation to themselves. This place is bugging me, I thought. Nope, wouldn’t want to live here.
The place was big but still unlike what a twenty-first-century person would think of as a city. It was more like a collection of villages. You could live here your whole life and never go into the part of town that was right next to yours. If you did, it would immediately be like walking into a stranger’s living room. And if you did it anyway, you’d have to spend some time with the first person you ran into, talking about who your relatives were and who his relatives were, and if you couldn’t find any relatives in common, he’d beat you up. There wasn’t any reason to go out either. There weren’t any restaurants—that was an unknown concept—and there weren’t any shops, just the different market squares. There were no theaters, unless you counted the religious dramas in the various plazas, and those were members-only. There was no entertainment, unless you counted visiting some relative’s house and listening to singers in his courtyard. Well, I guess you had to count that. But you know what I mean, you couldn’t just go out and go to a show. In fact, people didn’t really go out, not to speak of anyway. They didn’t go out for walks. They didn’t go out to the country to get fresh air on the weekends. They didn’t drop their kids off at school. Not that they worked all the time either. I figured mostly they took care of obligations, to the family, the lineage, the house, the moiety, the scores of patrons, the living, the unborn, and especially the dead. They did things that
we,
that is, we twenty-first-century folks, would call ceremonial. To them, though, they were practical. But the point is, the place just had an anhedonic vibe, a dutiful, holy-rollery mood, like in Jerusalem. Maybe it was just contagious piety from all the pilgrims. And like Jerusalem it was too crowded and too edgy. You could tell there were different cults in conflict with each other. And you could almost feel, if you weren’t afraid you were just projecting, that like a lot of other giant capitals, it had simply grown for too long, and its center was rotting. I hadn’t had a great time in Ix, but now I felt homesick for it. For all their hierarchicality Maya cities had a permanently festive quality, and somewhere you’d always hear people laughing. Despite all the teocallis and birds and flowers, this place was dour.
We pushed our way through to the middle of the plaza. For a second I felt transfixed by a line of force radiating from the Jade Hag’s mul and stopped as though I were dizzy. Hun Xoc touched me and I followed him south. The crowd was thick but moving. As usual, there were stairs in the road. They didn’t tire me out—I was past that stage—but the up and down did create a trancey feeling. Bands of dark and light color on the walls and pavement created a sort of op-art illusion, so that you couldn’t always see the difference in levels, or how close the walls were, or where the next step would be. It was like how if you paint horizontal stripes on stairs, people coming down them will trip and fall. Damn, Marena’d get a kick out of this place, I thought. Shoulda brung her—
Watch out, Hun Xoc signed to me. I was sort of striding forward, and there was a troop of Pumas coming up, and he wanted to give them a wide berth. We edged over to the right, toward the huge open fetish market—which I guess is the right translation for the place, since it was the designated place for trading things like figurines and drugs and slaves and blades and charms and whatever, that is, things with relatively powerful souls. Anyway, we didn’t have time to shop. We turned east and headed into the Ciudadela, the Rattler’s Court.
It was both imposing and welcoming, bigger and better finished than any of the other plazas, and raised well above the average level of the city, with twelve big lookout platforms and wide flights of thirty-one steps, each leading up from three sides. You could see why the Spanish had thought it was a fortress. On its east end the top third of the Rattler’s mul jutted up over a high incongruous wall. Supposedly the two Synods had threatened to raise taxes on the Rattlers unless they built the barrier. Apparently they’d thought that if the mul were less imposing, that would cut down the number of converts to the Rattler Society. But if anything it seemed to have had the opposite effect. The place was packed, obviously the most popular destination shrine in town. We pushed through, tacking south by southeast, toward where you could just see the crenellated roofs of the Rattler’s sacristies to the south of the mul. One of them would be the Orb Weavers’.
The first group we passed was another vingtaine of Puma guards. There seemed to be more of them here, keeping an eye on the Rattlers. The next was a bevy of old women. It was the first time I’d seen women without men out and about. Unlike the plazas to the north the court had a feeling of inclusive-ness, which meant a lot of raggedy characters. 14 Wounded had said that the Sky Eel’s children administered all their charity and judgments from here, but it had more of a feeling of a public square than a religious space. There were no stalls and no visible goods changing hands, but even without speaking the language I could tell there was a lot of business going on, barter brokers making deals, accountants with game-board abaci going over addition, and book-makers taking bets. Old cities really used their public spaces. To do business without money or telephones, you need a forum, you need agoras and piazzas. We passed younger people playing