soldiers, but we picked up speed. They asked to carry me again and I said no. Oddly, despite everything, I felt pretty good.
At the end of this Grandfather Heat’s youth-about ten A.M. -the breeze shifted up and we smelled our caravan. It was basically that same aroma as when a really hard-core homeless person shuffles onto the subway and everybody risks a ticket to cross between the moving cars rather than stay even fifteen beats in the presence of the indescribable hell stench. But what was odd about it now was that to me, coming in from the cold as it were, it smelled reassuring, or even pleasant, like home. I guess it really is all context. Hun Xoc touched my arm and pointed ahead at ten o’clock. At first I couldn’t see anything and then I made out a human figure against the brown sky, levitating two rope-lengths over the scrub. As we got closer I could see it was a lookout, or as I’ve said, a sniff-out, one of our shortest, scrawniest, and sharpest-eyed bloods, wobbling in a sort of a crow’s-nest on the top of a tower woven of weeping bamboo. It looked so flimsy you wouldn’t think it could support a squirrel. He signed down to us that things were clear. Another came into view behind him, and then another and another, so that as we got close to our line of march there was a whole troop of them, like a thin reflection of the dust-wreathed caravan below. You could squint and just imagine that it was a camel train on the Silk Road, headed toward Samarkand. Nights in the Garden of Allah. Song of the Sheikh. Midnight at the Oasis. Ah, zee Englishwoman is a thoroughbred which no man has yet dared to ride. Bring her to my tents, Hasan. Have zee serving girls anoint her with essences of oud and Ubar and drape her in the finest Murshidabadian silks and suchlike. I will school her in the ways of the Rif. Blue heaven, and you, and I, and sand, kissing the moonlit sky… the desert breeze, whisp’ring a lullaby…
I was used to it by now, but I suppose to the twenty-first-century eye one of the odder things about this place-I mean Mesoamerica, or for that matter the entire New World-was that everything was single file. Even if you had a hundred thousand people on the move, there were never even two of them abreast. The thin human snake just slid on forever, curving over both horizons. 2 Hand-Hun Xoc’s younger brother and, unofficially, something like my second mate-came out with a veintena of men to meet us and said that the number of Koh’s followers had gone up by a fifth-again-just while we were away, so despite our adjustments we’d still come in about four thousand marchers behind the great woman and her entourage. 2 Hand called her “the Elderess,” which made me wonder whether he was starting to believe some of her hype. Bad sign. We cut through the line and jogged ahead on its southern side, with what they called the Iguana River, a sad yellow trickle at the low point of the long Nochixtlan Valley, on our right hand. It was light enough to see faces now, although today’s sun wouldn’t show itself. I passed-or to be socially correct I should say “my bearer, my scarefly, my weapons valet, my faithful fellator Armadillo Shit,” and I passed-a delicate-looking fourteen-year-oldish girl who was pulling her family’s big ratty old travois single-handedly, or I guess I should say single-headedly, since it was drawn by a tumpline that cut deep into her forehead. There was a mole a half inch below the right of her hornet-stung lips, just like the one on, hmm, some actress, who was it-oh, yeah, Claudine Auger, the girl who played Domino in Thunderball. Her mother and sisters were walking in front of her, and her father, a brother, and four other male relatives sat in the sled, taking it easy. Patriarchal fucks, I thought, although I should mention that the four male relatives were deceased, just masked mummy bundles sitting as stiffly upright as Quaker ministers, so they were probably pretty light. But then there were also three big hearthstones on the sled, and one of those big wooden Teotihuacanian host statues, the kind that have all the little statues inside them, and a bunch of other bundles that I guessed were just more garbage, and I was on the verge of going up and shaking the paterfamilias and screaming, “You fuck, first, you get out and pull the sled, and second, you toss those dead guys and the other crap right now and fill up every waterskin you’ve got, and beg, borrow, or steal as much rock salt as you can possibly drag, and then maybe you all have a chance of lasting another twenty days, you FUCKHEAD,” but of course you’d have to tell everybody the same thing and the important thing was to keep a low profile and get yourself and the tsam lic critters back to Ix, and anyway you couldn’t argue with these people. Or any people. Then there were three loners, each dragging a fresh or-let’s say “still unprepared”-corpse. There just weren’t enough defleshers to go around, even though they were working day and night, stuffed with extra rations and sitting in unaccustomed luxury on special sleds as they picked over the bodies with their inch-long fingernails. And they were hurrying. It was lousy mojo-obviously-if the dogs got any of you, but even so a big scurfy pack of them seemed to be making its whole living following the catafalques. When the bones finally dried out, an engraver would carve their owners new names-that is, their postholocaust, Koh-given names-into the ulnas and tibias. Although you’d think there wouldn’t be time for such niceties. But even with fire, starvation, bandits, disease, and troops of more novel apocalyptic horsemen, everybody found the leisure to give themselves new names, brands, tattoos, tooth decor, and whatever else. Craziness.
The next big group we passed was a clanlet of well-to-do Swallowtail-affiliated traders, about fifteen blood family members and two veintenas of thralls hauling them on eight extralong sleds. On the last sled, three eight- year-old girls, who looked like triplets, fanned the patriarch with huge chocho palm leaves that had recently been blanched and then dyed blue-green. Which, I guess, is getting into more detail than necessary, but I wanted to mention it while I’m thinking of since it became an issue later: all of Koh’s followers who could afford it wore or carried something in her signature turquoise-blue shade-there were vats of the indigofera dye on special sleds-so that from a distance the procession looked like it had been sprinkled with periwinkle blossoms. Something old, something new, I thought. Something borrowed, something askew. And something too nauseating even to name. Still, they all thought they were part of a larger being. And despite everything, there was an element of fun to it, or if not quite fun at least adventure. For most of them this was the first time they’d been away from their home ground. For that matter, some of the women probably hadn’t ever been two rope-lengths outside their hamlets. This was the primary event in their lives, and in their family’s lives, all the way back to their first ancestor at the first birth of this sun on 4 Lord, 8 Seed Maize, 0.0.0.0.0., that is, August 11, 3113 BC, and ahead to their last descendant, who, of course, would die on the last 4 Ahau of the last b’aktun, in AD 2012.
There were about three hundred big palanquins in the high-rent district of the line. They varied in size and opulence but they all had arrays of cushions and big round wicker roofs covered with embroidered cloth, so that they looked incogruously like psychedelicized Conestoga wagons. Lady Koh held court on the largest of the palanquins. It was only about eight arms wide-still wider than any of the others-but about forty long. Right now there were sixteen people sitting on it and forty carrying it. There was a breeze, but another gang of thralls carried a portable windbreak, and the feathers on the mat barely stirred. A squad of guards ran alongside on each hand. There was a strong smell of monarda-a kind of horsemint that upscale valets crushed and strewed around their masters-which didn’t much cover up the hellish odors, and under that a hint of what people said was the breath of Koh’s most secret uay, and what a modern person would call her signature scent. When I’d first smelled it I’d described it to myself as the opposite of the smell of cinnamon, and now, after what seemed like years, I still didn’t have a better description. But I did know, now, that its main component was enfleuraged from what I was pretty sure was a species of Brassia, the genus of orchids that mimics spiders, and that as far as anyone seemed to know, it was unique to her and her close followers.
Koh’s guards all knew Hun Xoc, but it still took a while to pass through their circles. I was already doing rage-abatement breathing by the time my bearer finally set me down on the edge of the platform. It rocked just a bit as it moved along, pleasantly boatlike. Koh sat in the turquoise center of a feather-cloth Sacrifice Game board two arm-lengths square. Her eyes were closed and she was mumbling to one of her uays in some animal language. There were eight members of the popol na — the mat house, that is, the council, up here, and they greeted me and went back to talking among themselves. They were all in expensive gear, but it was still a pretty motley crew. Crue. Whatever. The youngest of them, 14 Wounded, was eight tuns, that is, a little less than eight solar years, older than I was. He’d been the trade representative in Teotihuacan for my adoptive clan, the Harpies, who were the richest family in Ix besides the ruling clan, the Ocelots. Or they might now be even richer, because of the Ocelots’ gigantic debts, except it was harder to put a value on things here than it was back in the twenty-first. Anyway-oh, except there was one who was younger, Koh’s Steward of Invisible Things. His title meant he was something like a legal counsellor. His name was Coati, that is, kind of a raccoon. I’d barely met him back in Teotihuacan, but now he was with her every minute.
The group had started as a temporary meeting of the major greathouse ahaus, but now it had hardened into a government. Well, whatevs. The other seven people on the platform were attendants, fanning us and whisking away the screwflies. None of them looked at Koh. Ordinary folks who saw her face might get scorched by her captive lightning.
Hun Xoc manuevered next to me and squatted. I kneed to the edge of the Game cloth. It was strewn with jade and quartzite pebbles, and after a minute I could see that she was using it as a battle map. A long line of
