turquoise pebbles, stretching diagonally from the center of the white quadrant to the upper corner of the black one, represented our caravan. The clusters of pink quartz that approached it on its north side were Severed Right Hand’s army, and it looked to me like they were color-coded like in an old Kriegspiel layout, darkening as they became increasingly hypothetical. But beyond that I couldn’t read what she was up to. There was at least an equal number of other stones, mainly black and yellow, distributed in other zones of the board, and aside from the fact that they had more to do with time than space I couldn’t tell what they represented. For all I knew, some of them were just there to confuse the other members of the council.
Well, if so, it was working. They were all stone-cold killers and word-is-law patriarchs, and now they were sitting patiently, waiting, speaking in hushed mutters, and casting apprehensive looks at her as we jogged along. Either they all believed she was getting her orders from a higher authority, or they figured enough of the others believed that none of them wanted to question her.
When I — Ow. Damn. One of the scareflies had gotten a hair into my eye. I glared at him. He quaked in terror, almost literally. And I almost felt guilty, but I got over it. I watched Koh. She moved two of the black stones. She was as unhurried as though no one else was there.
Hmm. When I know more of tactics than a novice in a nunnery, I was going to say. Well, our own nunnery novice had certainly convinced these cats that she knew something. Just two tuns ago-I would have said “short tuns” if they hadn’t seemed longer than python turds-Koh had been just one of the more promising young members of the Orb Weaver Sorority. It was an elite group of epicene veneratoresses to Star Rattler, high-stone sun- adderesses who usually wore men’s clothing so that they could operate in male spaces. Although now she was wearing bits of both male and female clothing. And as far as I knew, this was her own idea. She was becoming all things to all people.
Geez Belize, I thought, I’ve created a monsteress. I gave this girl her start. I mean, I was the one who’d contacted her in the first place, because there was a picture of her in the Codex Nuremberg. But the Codex wouldn’t be written until long after this, sometime in the 1100s. And it wasn’t clear from the Codex whether she’d still be alive or not after she became a big deal. She could end up like Jesus and be dead for a hundred years before the franchise really got going. And if she turned into a martyr, most likely she’d take me down with her. Well, don’t worry about it. I was still pretty useful to her. Wasn’t I? I mean, I knew stuff nobody around here knew, not even her. I could even still mix up some gunpowder if she wanted me to, although of course I didn’t want to call that much attention to myself. Somebody’d say I was a dangerous scab-caster-like a warlock-and every other ambitious blood would be looking to off me.
The mumbling stopped. Lady Koh raised her eyes, and they met mine, and, without actually moving a single muscle of her face, somehow she conveyed a smile.
(19)
After that, Lady Koh made eye contact with each member of the council in turn and then, instead of speaking, took her hands out of the folds of her manto and signed in Ixian hunting language. Every once in a while, when there was a name that didn’t translate, she spoke a syllable or two to fill in. “He’ll march ahead of us, at least to the oxbow,” she signed. “Then he’ll retrace his route and wait for a west wind dawn.” She moved the largest and brightest of the pink quartz pebbles southeast of our position and then back alongside us, illustrating the maneuver. The idea was that Severed Right Hand would want to come at us with the sun rising behind his men and the wind in front so we wouldn’t smell him. It sounded reasonable. “So we need to have iik and coals ready.” That is, when they attacked, we’d be ready to run baskets full of burning chili peppers upwind, to try and blind them.
“Smoke is for first-time-menstruating nongreathouse second-born girl daughters,” 14 Wounded said. Needless to say, but I’ll say it anyway, the expression sounded better in Mayan. Anyway, it meant that smoke screens were a cowardly tactic.
There was a pause. Cowardly is good, I thought, but I didn’t want to start definding myself on the point, so I just kept walking. Set a good example, I thought. Quiet, uncomplaining, impervious to pain, stoic- ow. Sticklet in my left sandal. Damn. Ow, ow, ow. Why me? Ow, ow, ow, ow, ow. I shook it out. Okay. The trail went over a dry gulch and the platform swayed like a jet in a pocket of low pressure. You could hear thousands of callused and/or sandaled feet padding on gravel.
Finally Coati held up a hand with the thumb and first two fingers touching, which meant basically, “Insignificant as I am, may I yet please speak?” The members of the popol clicked their tongues for “yes.”
They looked at Koh. She signed “yes.”
“All great-alliances collapse from stomach parasites, not predators,” Coati said. It was a well-known line from some old masque, but 14 Wounded didn’t say anything more.
Koh and her privy council spent some time working on the new set of signals they’d give for advances and retreats. She stipulated that after the battle-which, I guess, they all figured couldn’t be avoided-her followers would regather in a village called Place of the Ticks, on a defensible bluff two jornadas to the southwest. From there the migration would bear due south for two days, and then turn east along the Atoyac River to a site on the coast just south of what would later be called Veracruz. She’d resettle them there, she said, and reseat the Star Rattler’s mul — that is, very generally, “pyramid.” And after that, Koh and I would go on to Ix by the inland water route, with a small escort of two hundred and forty Orb Weaver bloods and a hundred and ten nonblood supporting families, meaning about another two thousand people.
The council lasted for two-thirteenths of the day, that is, about three hours. No one could leave until everyone agreed it was over. And in fact, unless one of us drastically changed rank, whenever any combination of us sat together again, it would be in the same relative positions and oriented toward the same directions. There were also twelve people who were allowed in the room but had to sit outside the circle: four servers, two of Koh’s monkey-masked clerks, a silent guy in a striped outfit who was named 0 Porcupine Clown, and who seemed to be kind of Koh’s court jester, 1 Gila’s accountant and two guards, and our own two calligraphers. And, because tonight would belong to Serpigo, who was the most dangerous of the lords of the dusks, there were four censers pacing counterclockwise around the perimeter of the circle, trailing clouds of geranium incense out of their hand burners.
Finally one of the this-meeting-has-to-end votes carried. The bigwigs crouched backward away from the circle and went back to their own families. Hun Xoc stayed. Coati rolled up the Game board, the attendents folded the wicker covering over the four of us, and Koh and I got to speak almost in private.
She said that while I was away on my burial excursion she’d sent four runners forward to 2 Jeweled Skull, my adopted father and the ahau of the Harpy Clan. They were going to-wait, maybe I should mention a few other things about old 2JS. When I’d received Jed 1 ’s mind up on the Ocelots’ mul, 2JS had unexpectedly been in the same tiny room with me, and he’d gotten a bit of scatter, enough of my memories to speak English and Spanish and understand quite a bit of what I was up to. But he hadn’t gotten enough of me to, say, understand that the images he had of airplanes weren’t a species of friendly condor, or that the computers he remembered me using weren’t silent marimbas with captive souls inside. And he was still very much himself. There wasn’t enough of me in there to confuse him about who he was, the way I’d been confused at first about whether I was me or Chacal, the ballplayer whose brain I was, shall we say, staying in as a guest. Luckily for me, Chacal’s sense of self had faded away pretty quickly. But 2 Jeweled Skull had never become me. And knowing so much about me hadn’t exactly seemed to help him empathize with me or my plight. He’d been angry. And I guess he’d had a legitimate beef. But he’d tortured me pretty badly to get me to pull myself out of his mind, and then, when I’d finally convinced him I couldn’t do that, he’d gradually figured out a way to turn the situation to his advantage. He’d sent me to Teotihuacan to break the Teotihuacanian monopoly on tsam lic, the Sacrifice Game enabling drugs, and now here I was.
Anyway, Koh’s runners were going to repeat to 2 Jeweled Skull-in a Harpy House code language that they themselves didn’t understand-the message that I and the other Harpy bloods who’d survived from the team he’d sent, along with Lady Koh and a small Rattler-blood escort, would be sempiternally honored to attend the great- hipball game in Ix on Ixlahun Chuwen, Bolonlahun Yaxk’in, that is 13 Howler, 19 Redness, or July 14, forty-nine days from now. But they weren’t going to mention the great migration. He will have heard about it anyway by now, she said. Calling attention to it would just raise the issue of what we intended to do with them. What if Koh didn’t
