all beginning to feel the domino effect of the continent-wide wave of depression that had started in Teotihuacan.
We’d abandoned thousands of the slower travelers when we’d doubled our pace, but the heralds were still going ahead, proselytizing villages and irrigation societies, making private visits to village cargo-bearers and promising them positions of power in return for the support of their war bloods, shrugging off threats from the greathouses, trying to overwhelm the old hierarchy by numbers, the same old story. By 16 Jaguar we barely had to do anything, we’d come up on a town and the people would hear the rattle-flutes and rush outside, strewing monkshood and fringed gentians in front of Koh’s train, and crouch by the side of the road, looking into the ground, chanting Koh-songs the heralds taught them as we walked through the middle of this weird audience that couldn’t see us. Then as they’d fall into lockstep behind us you could hear their travois poles scraping on the gravel in this unending hiss, and I could feel our bloods’ probably misguided optimism growing, especially when they came back from an audience with Koh. At least the girl had charisma. No matter how many people our outrunners said were chasing us, no matter what rationing and logistics and disease crises we had, no matter how panicked Hun Xoc and I were about getting the hell to Ix before the big hipball game before somebody could head us off, practically everybody seemed to treat the whole thing as a big holiday. Anyone close to Koh was a celebrity. The younger bloods gambled over who’d get to be in my third circle of “pets,” that is, guards/valets. That was outside, or on top of, the ten Rattler bloods who were assigned to protect me and my inner “sleeping circle” of three Harpy bloods. And I wasn’t even one of the major stars.
Before 24 Jaguar-the new incarnation of Grandfather Heat-rose behind the brown clouds, the whistlers said the Harpy emissaries were less than a sun away, and that there were only twenty-two of them. It was all about runners around here, like in a Greek tragedy, the way messengers keep coming in and saying “My King, I bear dreadful tidings from Paedophilopolis,” or whatever. Which maybe means those plays were more realistic than I’d thought. The king and the chorus and whoever were all hunkered in their bunker out of harm’s way, and all the dangerous stuff really did happen offstage. Anyway, before the sun’s midlife crisis we got hit by a rainless sandstorm called the Razor Wind. Ash sand burrowed into our leggings and rubberized sandals and our most tightly wound bandages and salved-together eyelids, and the skin painters covered us with salves and balms and ointments and shit, to the point where my testicles were frozen in this lake of goo, but it was either that or chafe city. No one could look ahead, you could only peek down once in a while at the trail in front of you, and most of us were holding on to some rope or rag dangling from the ass of the person in front, like circus elephants. After a quarter-sun Hun Xoc had to call it quits and sent word down the line for a noncombat halt. We were at a nothing old town called Coloa to triage the wounded bloods. A lot of them would have to kill themselves. The village wasn’t situated right to be much of a refuge, but 2 Hand spread our guest mats and set our backrests in the little mud council house. There were only two other decent buildings. We designated one for the emissaries and one for the captive Pumas. The bloods converted the square into a barracks and the converts overran the rest of the town, trying to find shelter, haggling with the locals, scrounging through garbage heaps for critters to munch on, crows, rats, anything that would normally be shooed away. Some of the converted families set up pathetic little offerings and started chanting. At first I thought they were praying for Koh, but as I listened more closely I could tell that as usual they were just praying to her.
14 Wounded ordered the porters to get the palanquins and sedan chairs together because he insisted that every and each blood had to ride into town just ahead of Lady Koh. Giving ourselves airs, I thought. It was like how people hire a limousine to take them to an event three blocks away because they need something to step out of. But then I didn’t say anything because it occurred to me that the idea might actually have come from Her Worshipfulship. Maybe Koh was a little insecure herself.
(22)
At our Grandfather Heat’s next birth we met three of the Harpy emissaries. They’d been among the bloods who’d adopted me in the cave, way back in the day, before we left for Teotihuacan. We exchanged cakes and did a whole “welcome, my brothers” trip. They kept making jokes about how 2Hand had lost weight during the trek, how his eyes had sunk so deep into his baby-fat face that they looked like two black pebbles in a bowl of dough. Actually, it really was like coming home, I felt a little cozy in spite of myself. Still, gloom hung over the situation like, I don’t know. I guess like gloom. Like, basically, a whole lot of hanging gloom. If the Harpies didn’t win the great- hipball game we’d lose everything, including the fillings in our teeth. Or at least the jade fillings. Maybe they’d let us keep any wooden ones.
And we wouldn’t win. The hipgall game would be worked. And the fix would be tight. If we won, it would be like getting a real upset in a World Wrestling Entertainment event. It couldn’t happen. If the Harpies persisted in trying to win anyway, the ball game would be called against them, the Harpies would object, and a fight would start, which the Ocelots were confident they would win. Then they could justifiably take all the Harpies’ possessions and probably a good chunk of them as captives. After that, the other raptor clans in the area would retrench and make deals with the Ocelots.
It was dark inside the audencia tent and the sand over the hide-covered smoke holes sounded like a cymbal brush on a floor tom. I kept thinking about the all the converts outside, huddled in their little camps, their exposed skin shredding away. We sat in an abbreviated version of our circle, with the three leaders of the Harpy delegation in their hereditary spot at the eastern point, and then Hun Xoc, 2 Hand, 1 Gila, 1 Gila’s eldest son, two of the old greatmothers from the Rattler House, Koh, Coati, and me. We could each have one attendant behind us and I’d picked Armadillo Shit. As I said, normally a woman wouldn’t be let anywhere near here, but just like Alligator Root was kind of a third sex and could go in the women’s courts, Koh and her greatmothers could come into ours. A couple of the town cargo-bearers scurried around setting out basins of fish oil and big wide-rimmed pots of rock- heated water. We were the biggest thing that had ever happened in town and they’d already all sworn sempiternal devotion.
2 Dead Coral-one of the ordinands under 20 Blue Snail, who was 2JS’s sort-of in-house heirophant-was the head of the delegation, and even though he was being friendly he gave me a touch of the creeps. He greeted us speaking as 2 Jeweled Skull, which took a while, since it was a ritual form, like telling you how to insert the metal fitting into the buckle and how items have tendency to shift during flight or something. When he got to the actual news from Ix it didn’t sound good. Like I may have said, 2 Jeweled Skull had been called out by 9 Fanged Hummingbird, the ahau of the ruling Ocelot House of Ix, to a hipball game, kind of like a trial by combat. In this case the stakes were the Ixian Harpy Clan’s stores and trading rights against the heads of the Ocelot Clan’s Emerald Brethren, that is, their hipball champions. Basically it was a way to scale down a civil war. But from what the emissaries said, this one wasn’t likely to scale it down too effectively. Most likely the ball game wouldn’t even get to the second half.
Of course, the subtext of all this was that 2JS was really asking us to relieve him, and hoping to win the battle with our help. 20 Blue Snail-a duckbill-mask-wearing underling who was 2JS’s best Sacrifice Game player, but who wasn’t even in Koh’s league, or even mine, lately-took some time comparing long lists of bloods and auxiliaries on both sides, but the gist was that 2JS and his pledged allies would have about forty percent the strength of 9 Fanged Hummingbird and the Ocelots. If our convoy got back to Ix in time, Koh’s forces would easily tip the balance. Then the other Raptor clans would step in and help 2JS, and the Ocelots would be recent history. 2JS would become at least the de facto k’alomte of Ix, maybe keeping 9 Fanged Hummingbird on as a puppet ruler. Maybe he’d even take over completely, although since the k’alomte always had to be a cat, to do that 2JS would have to get himself adopted into a feline clan.
At any rate, the Ixian branch of the Star Rattler cult would become Ix’s most powerful non-clan-based organization. Koh would set up shop near the Star-Rattler’s mul-which was in a good location in Ix, “downtown,” I guess you could say, but which currently wasn’t large and wasn’t very well funded-and 2JS would have to keep her and her followers happy. And one of her conditions would be that the ruling coalition would have to build my tomb, to my specifications. And if that got done in time, I could get the gel mixed up, get buried per the ROC specifications, and the next thing I knew I’d be back in the merrie olde twenty-first century with a headful of Sacrifice Game expertise and a revitalized Will to Power.
20 Blue Snail said even though the Ocelots had gotten the gossip from Teotihuacan about our role in
