In the Courts of the Sun (70 page)

Somehow, though, Koh had pushed through the formation, and with her guards flanking her, she picked her way over the bodies on the zero step, the lowest step, and then up onto step number one and step number two. The steps were high, and she had to step up to each flat with one leg and then follow it with the other, and then take two steps across the flat of the stair, and then do it again. But she did it with style. On the third step she wobbled a bit, but her left-hand guard only had to support her for a second before she got it together. Meanwhile, Puma bloods whooped behind us, and a javelin flew overhead and hit the steps five arms to her right. She took another step.
Maybe even Koh wouldn’t have done it ten days ago. Maybe it was only since she’d met me that she’d become a skeptic. Or maybe she would have. Anyway, sometimes it only takes one person to defy an authority, and everybody follows. When they saw Koh climbing that thing, standing tall, not wobbling, not hesitating, our whole troop, the Rattler acolytes, the Gilas, even our own Harpy bloods, seemed to decide that her protector was with her, that Star Rattler had won the battle in heaven, and they swarmed up after her, shouting their battle whoops as though the day’s action was just starting. At that moment they probably wouldn’t have been surprised to see Lady Koh walk on water, or grow into a hundred-arm giant, or transform into the Rattler itself and swallow the city and the stars. At any rate, the Gilas charged forward and up the stairs, the Rattler bloods and acolytes followed them, and my own little entourage of Harpies went along. I got all excited and almost scampered up the first steps, over a little hill of luxuriously appointed corpses. It was like climbing a waterfall of Jell-O. By the eighth step I’d slowed down. Come on, Jed. Move. Yuck. Move. Finally I felt the sticky plaster of an actual stair under my hand. I crawled up onto the next one. Hah. We were on the stairs. Up. Onward, blistered shoulders. Up.
Up. Come on. Step. Up. Come on. Step.
Up. Tired. Come on.
One more step. Well, three hundred sixty-two more. No problem. Up.
I noticed that I’d dropped my shield and that I was on all fours. Whatever. Hup. Hup. Come on. You don’t have to worry about where you get your strength from, just where it will take you. Up. Hup. Up.
The Harpy bloods prodded the Puma elders out of her way only two steps ahead, sparks flew around us, dogs howled, booms and crashes thundered through from collapsing roofs in the compounds, a jade-scaled corpse clattered down the stairs from high above and gooshed to a stop. I was having some trouble knuckle-walking with my right hand, since it was still holding on to my mace. I took a second to pull the mace off with my other hand, but my fist seemed to be stuck closed around it. I pulled at the cords with my teeth and got them undone, but the thing still wouldn’t come out of my hand. Fuck it. Ouch. The breeze shifted a bit and a wave of hot air from the fires rolled over us. I made it over another eight steps. Above me I heard 12 Cayman telling Koh to stay back a bit. She stopped in the center of the staircase, and Hun Xoc and I passed her on the right. I could have reached out and touched her as I went by, but now her guards had scampered after her and surrounded her with their blue quilts. I moved on. Onward and upward. Fourteen steps. Eight steps.
Oof.
I pressed my hands into the sticky surfaces of the stair and tried to pull my feet up without lacerating my shins on the honed edge.
Four steps.
Come on.
Two steps. Oof. You’re messed up, bro, I thought. If Chacal were here he’d be majorly ticked off. He’d had the best body in the league, but a few days of abuse had turned him into a ninety-eight-pound weakling.
One more step.
I made it. One more.
Made it. Okay.
Whoo.
If you’ve visited the site, you know it takes a long time to climb up that pyramid, even if you’re not weighted down with armor and weapons and exhausted from combat and blood loss and also fighting off the people who are up there already. I might mention that the risers of the steps were actually higher than the ones the reconstruction put in later. The steps were taller, we were smaller, and we were exhausted.
Okay, come on. One more step.
These stairs weren’t made for climbing. They were built for intimidation.
One more.
I made it.
One more. Step. Good. One more. Step. Oof.
Step.
Uf.
Ni modo.
Come on. Step.
I tried it again. No go. My chest pressed into the sharp angle. I slid back and pressed my knees into the crotch of the stair.
Can’t go any farther. Just lemme hang out here a minute. What was going on, anyway? I snuck a look uphill.
The stairs were wide enough for twenty people, and we’d had to spread out to cover its whole width, so our front line, with 12 Cayman and his vanguard troops, was only three steps above me. The people who’d already been on the pyramid, and who had been trying to get off before we’d rushed it, were jabbing at our bloods with their parade spears and trying to push them back off the stairs. But the Pumas were mainly old folks, and they were encumbered by heavy festival regalia and giant headdresses, which, oddly, they hadn’t taken off. They were only five or six steps deep—say, a hundred and twenty of them—and above them the stairs stretched nearly naked up to the teocalli.
As I watched, 12 Cayman barked a new batch of commands to his captains, and they relayed them to the bloods. Slowly, they rearranged themselves. From where I was cowering it looked like 12 Cayman had positioned the best fighters on the left side of the stairs, that is, to the north, and the weaker ones on the right. Then he had the left flank charge up a few steps, while the bloods on the right, southern side retreated a bit, and as they retreated they shifted some of their men toward the middle. Then, the whole line pushed up two steps, with their shoulders on their shields, ramming into the more disorderly line of Puma elders. A few of the Pumas fell off the right side of the stairs. There were only soft thuds as they hit the sea of bodies in the plaza below.
12 Cayman ordered another charge. Our line moved up another two steps, and a few more Pumas fell, or were pushed, off the right edge of the steps. And I realized that 12 Cayman had done a very clever thing. He’d formed his vanguard into an angle—that is, our formation was about eight steps higher on the left side of the stairs than we were on the right side. And if the bloods in our front line just kept their shields up and moved forward, and if they kept the angle consistent, they’d sweep the Pumas off the staircase, dislodging them from one side, pummeling or dribbling them southward along the row, and ejecting them on the other. It was like how a plane angles into a plank and extrudes a curl of wood out the top.
Damn, I thought. Maybe we’ll make it. We moved up another two steps.
What’s happening down below? I wondered.
I knew better than to look around, but I did anyway. Mistake.
Even though I was less than a third up the staircase, the space pulled my head forward and I felt I was sliding out, way out over the stairs, and all I had to do was relax and go with the gravity and everything would be easy and all right. I dug my still largely artificial fingernails into the bloody stucco.
There were worrisome-sounding grunts from above. The Puma elders had moved farther back up the stairs and were rolling rocks and dead bodies down on us. A big chunk of something bounced down, took out one of the bloods in our front line, and smeared to a stop two steps above me. Dang. If we lost our grip and started rolling back, that was it. One person could dislodge many. The bloods in the front line absorbed their crushed comrade and got their shields down closer to the stairs. 12 Cayman told them to angle the shields more to the south. They did, and the rocks and bodies started to glance off better. Our formation moved up, first two steps at a charge, and then four, and then eight. Gila bloods tromped around me. They probably thought I’d been hit. Once or twice one of them tried to help me up and I waved him off. It’s okay, dude. I’m just chilling here for a second.
I put my forehead down on the edge of the stair. Ahh. I noticed my mace had fallen off, somehow. My right hand was still in a fist, though, and wouldn’t open on its own. I got it flattened out with my left hand and pressed it against the warm plaster. Aaaahhhh. Bliss. Just one more second. Rattler bloods trudged past me on either side. I watched their cone-shell ankle bracelets jiggling like tambourine bells. Where was Hun Xoc? I wondered. Where was Armadillo Shit? Well, I’ll find them in a minute.
I closed my eyes. Damn. I was still getting these stupid Timothy Leary flashes of psychedelic orange from the spilled drug powder. I lapped up some air. There was a whiff of burning fat in it now, that devil’s-barbecue smell. It triggered an animal knowledge that this was a place of death that you had to escape immediately. Still, there was real air up here. At least we were getting up out of the fumes. Get the critters up here, I thought. Amphibians are sensitive. They can’t breathe smoke and last.
A hand closed over my wrist. I opened one eye and looked up.
Armadillo Shit and two Gila bloods had come back down and found me. They picked me up by the arms and carried me up toward the sanctuary. I tried to help, but really my feet were just flopping on the steps, doing nothing. One of the Gilas held up a shield wrapped in a wet manta to screen me from the heat. Move aside, I thought. VIP comin’ thru. We got onto the platform of the snout, that is, the flat-topped pyramid that projected out from the main one, and pushed forward.
A medium-sized Puma corpse bounced sluggishly down at us, like a boulder rolling down an undersea trenchside. Armadillo Shit braced himself in a hipball player’s receiving stance, blocked it, and shunted the body off to the right with two kicks. Well done, I thought. Get that kid a contract. He yanked me forward and up.
I think I may even have fallen asleep for a few seconds. You’d think it would be tough to fall asleep in the middle of a battle, but actually it happens to soldiers all the time. Their adrenaline gives out and poof, they’re draped over their rifles, snoring away.
At some point Armadillo Shit put me down.
It felt almost cool here. I got both eyes open.
I was on all fours, looking down at a floor tiled with silver shells. There were gleaming gold shards scattered over the silver, and as I raised my head I saw there were tens of thousands of them, in big drifts. I guessed that they were polished pyrite, pieces of the Pumas’ giant concave mirror. They must have smashed the thing before we got here so we couldn’t take it captive.
I realized we’d made it.
This is it, I thought. Top of the world, Ma.
If you believed the hype of the empire, we were now directly over the heart, navel, and womb of the universe. The four-lobed cave under the mul was the original omphalos, where the smokers took counsel at the end of the last sun, when Scab Boy jumped into the fire and became the sun that had just now died.
Eventually I even got my head up. I looked around.
They’d set me near the edge of the temple porch, about twenty arms north of the top of the stairs, so that I’d be less exposed to attacks from below. I was also shielded from the direct heat of the fires, and even though the day was still calm, we were high enough to catch a little breeze. Maybe we’ll live, I thought. At least for a while.
I crept to the edge of the platform and peered down over it. Whoa. Dizziness. Moving from that packed, half-underground world, up to this height . . . it felt like I suppose it would feel to transform from a three-dimensional being into a four-dimensional one. Below me the inner plazas and private courts were all laid open, like a patient etherized, sectioned, dissected, dyed, and plastinated on a table. On my left the great staircase angled down into the Puma’s courtyard. It seethed with heads. The bonfire was in a ring of blackened bodies, but then beyond that ring, at about the point, I figured, where the heat was down to around 140 degrees, at least twelve thousand people were jammed into the space, caught between the heat of the bonfire pagoda and the high walls. They were far away, and it took a minute to get my tipsy eyes focused. But when I did get a clear picture of them, I could see that the people were dancing in the heat, or dancing from the heat, bouncing and bopping in a giant disco of pain.
Gusanos,
that is, agave worms, are a delicacy in Latin America, and one time when I was about three or four—it’s one of the earliest things I can remember—I was in my grandmother’s
ripio
and she was frying something, and I looked down into the pan. It was filled with what looked to me like white eyeless babies writhing in the sizzling grease, a mass of writhing death, and I think I cried, or screamed, or something, and Tío Generoso laughed at me. Of course, later I got to love the little suckers. But now I got a flash of that first moment with them, when I’d picked up on their pain through preverbal empathy, and it was like all the stuff in between that moment and this one was utterly trivial. The only important thing was that these and about a quadrillion other beings were or would be getting cosmically screwed, and that therefore the entirety of creation was just a mistake.
Killing one or two people can feel odd at first, but killing a whole lot feels odd in a different way. Especially when you see it happening. I didn’t mean it, I thought. Or at least it was for a reason. Right. The same stupid phrases kept looping in my head, I didn’t particularly want them to get killed, I didn’t want them to get killed, there were no other options, no other options, nother noptions. Stop it, I thought. You’re tripping on guilt in order to make yourself think you’re a nice person. You’re not a nice person. You’re shit.
Still, we’d done it. We said “Take the mul,” and we had. How’d we manage that?
Thanks to the salve and the rehearsed buddy system where we licked each other’s eyes, most of us could see. And a lot of other people couldn’t. Also, plain surprise probably counted for a lot. A little organization, planning, and just being ready for what’s going to happen goes a long way.
And then, to top it all off, the Pumas down in the plaza had been too awed by the holy mulob’ to climb up where they weren’t allowed, even when they were burning up. Really, the main thing was just that I didn’t believe, and Koh—well, she might still believe in that stuff a bit, but not so much as before she met me. Superstition may be the world’s most powerful weapon, but doubt can be a pretty good second-most-powerful one. Cortés didn’t believe, and it sure worked for him. Come to think of it, when he got cut off and surrounded in Tenochtitlan, he and his men did the same thing we were doing. They rode it out on top of the mul of Huitzilopochtli. Maybe the locals just would’t go after them up there—