around with your bare flesh was like playing hackysack with a cannonball, and if you got off balance the ball could maim or kill you.
The untouchables scurried out of the court. The referees stepped behind the end-zone line. The rope unraveled faster and faster and just as the ball began to free itself the Magister Ludi called out “PIIITTZOOOHHM PAAYYEEEE EEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!” which I guess the closest thing to in English would be “PLLL- AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAY BALL!!!!!
(34)
The knot unraveled, but the ball seemed not to fall but to hover for more than a moment and then to sink reluctantly into the thick air, slowly accelerating down into the round central marker, building up to real speed in the last arm of its fall, and then there was a hollow CHUHN!!! the sound marking the exact demarcation between yesterday and today for all Ixian historical time.
“Chun,” the cantor called almost simultaneously with the sound. In ball language chun was the word for base or “trunk” or “root,” since the markers were sections of branches of the tree path to Xibalba. So the cantor’s play- by-play was kind of like Yoruba talking pressure-drums, it both imitated the sounds of the ball game and gave out names and moves and positions, and the whole rap radiated out from the court in a widening circle. Listening to the city was like hearing hundreds of big antique radios picking up a broadcast through some thick medium that slowed it down to much less than the speed of sound.
Before you could see the black sphere rise off the marker the right-hand strikers had already closed in, Hun Xoc from our side and Emerald Immanent from the west. The ball drooped down again into their double blur and you heard flesh slapping on flesh and then the crisp hollow sound of the ball on a hollow yoke. The head cantor shouted, “ Bok!” the ball word for “yoke,” or “bone” or “horn.” The word was so close to the actual sound that it seemed like one of the echoes off the sloping banks, as the batteries of criers relayed the call out into the suburbs and hamlets and out the roads far through the hinterlands. Village adders memorized it at the first hearing. Troupes of hipball-adders interpreted it based on where the hit came from, by whom, on what beat, and a hundred other considerations, and the human reverberations rippled through signal- and runner-relays out through IX and Ix’s four hundred towns and beyond, out to the corners of the four quarters and up and down to the buds and roots of the Big Tree, the Tree of Four Hundred Times Four Hundred Branches. But of course here the ball-time was moving on ahead, and before the echo had gotten to the second relay circle, beyond the court district, the ball had angled up and hit the Harpies’ goal peg, and there was a wide liquid clap on the huge clay-cylinder scoring drum. The cantor shouted, “ T’un!” which imitated the sound of the ball on the hollow peg but was also the word for “point.”
The referees signed that it was legal. A big whooshing spitty whistley hiss rose out of the Ocelots and their partisans, the equivalent of applause, all breaking against a tide of stamping feet on the Harpy side, the more satisfying Maya equivalent of boos.
“T’un Bolom, kam-chen Bolomob,” the first chanter sang, that is,
“Goal, Ocelot, one-zero, Ocelots.”
The circles criers repeated the call, “T’un Bolom, kam-chen Bolomob.”
At the goal the players retreated behind their end-zone lines. A pair of untouchables ran in and caught the ball together with their gloved hands. One of them stood on the central marker, holding the ball, while the other purified it with a dusting of blood ashes out of a pouch. If the invisibles were like stagehands, the untouchables were a bit more like ballboys. But since they touched the court surface and the blood and the dead and most of all the ball, they were irrevocably polluted.
“Li’skuba ka.” Ready for Ball Two. I was getting that racehorse-at-the-gate feeling that I’d burst if I didn’t get out on the court. The first invisible faced west and threw the ball underhanded up into the air, expertly dropping it down on the Ocelots’ emerald-green rear marker.
“Chun,” the chanter called again. Emerald Immanent got the tip again and yoke-bounced the ball upward, controlling it-“ Bok” — and passed it gently off his shoulder arm.
“P’uchik,” the chanter called. The word both meant a hit on the body and imitated the sound of a ball hitting flesh and then snap-disengaging from oiled skin. Emerald Howler, the other Ocelot striker, caught the pass on the side of his yoke, “bok,” and knocked it ahead and right, angling it off the sloped masonry wall like in old-fashioned court tennis.
“Pak,” the cantor called, imitating the crisp solid sound. It was also the word for “wall.” Emerald Immanent had already run downcourt and positioned himself under the dropping ball for a shot at the target. The crowd noise fell to near silence and all you could hear was the warbling play-by-play chants and the players’ grunts and the squeaks and cracks of their sandals. It wasn’t that spectators weren’t allowed to talk, but that the game absorbed your total attention, even if you couldn’t see it happening. The crowd was so fascinated they actually shut up and let the intensity build until it was released in the paroxysm of applause at the end of a tense play, or a goal, or a death.
5-5 came up fast and blocked Emerald Immanent’s shot, but Immanent shifted, faded back, shoulder-passed back off the wall to Emerald Howler-“ P’uchik pak ”-who yoked it up perfectly up into the underside of the Harpy goal: “ Bok… t’un!”
“T’un Bolom,” the score-adder called, “wasak-chen Bolomob.”
“Goal, Ocelot, two-zero, Ocelots.”
Whistling blasted out of the crowd. It was two hundred beats later before the players settled into their positions and the head invisible served out the third ball. Emerald Immanent got it again and tried the same run- and-feint and back-pass to Emerald Howler, but this time Hun Xoc was there and he intercepted it, pulling the ball out of the air with his wrist-guard and sending it south to Red Beak. It was a signature move of the Harpy School. In most courts around here hipball was more like soccer, because you couldn’t touch the ball with your feet or your hands. But Ixian rules were a bit different, and we each wore a lizard-skin-wrapped wooden extension on the underside of our wrists, extending up into the palms, and you could bat or deflect the ball with those. Even so, the ball was so heavy you couldn’t get much force on it with your arms. And of course you weren’t allowed to catch it, not that you’d want to. Really, it was too heavy to launch seriously with anything but the braced weight of most of your body, and if it had any major momentum behind it you’d have to add some of your own as well. In your big yoke, which came nearly to the nipple level, and the roll of cotton padding peeking up over it, you felt gravity siphoning up through you, and as you received and launched the ball it felt like you were negotiating between a good-sized satellite and the pulling power of the earth. Sometimes you’d have to use your shoulder or calf or even upper arm, but you wouldn’t want to and no matter how hard you were you flinched against the weight. So the idea was to shoot with your hip-yoke whenever possible-which let you get your full weight behind the impact-and then to use your calf, shoulder, thigh, upper arm, and finally the palm guard, in that order of preference. Using your head would be a bad idea.
Red Beak kneed the ball south, low into the red expanse of the Harpy wall. Hun Xoc dove after it falling on his knees, blocking its rebound with the top angle of his ornate yoke. The ball settled down into the groove, reverberating between the wall and his yoke like a pinball caught between electric bumpers, the criers imitating the accelerating beat, “ pak, bok, pak, bok, pak-bok, pak-bok, pak-bok pak-bok pak-bok pakbok pakbok pakbokpakbok pakbokpakbokpakbokpakbok,” into a blur of sound. Hipball was a dignified game, a stolid ritual, an act of worship. But it was also a much faster game even than basketball, at least as fast as jai-alai or Ping-Pong.
Emerald Immanent recovered but Red Beak backed away from him into the Harpies’ end zone. The main territorial rule was that neither team was allowed into the other’s end zone, which in our case was the left half of the east half of the court, a red area shaped like a backward L. So in this match that meant the Ocelots couldn’t step on red and the Harpy clan couldn’t step on emerald. Each side’s blocker couldn’t leave the zone but the strikers could go anywhere but the enemy’s home quadrant. You couldn’t keep the ball in your zone for more than four bank- or body-bounces, though, and if the ball hit the level floor on your half of the court, it was out and you had to turn it over to the other team, but this hardly ever happened. The ball was too bouncy and the players were too good. Any one of these people could have body-juggled a cinder block and kept it in the air for scores of scores of scores of beats.
Red Beak waited for Hun Xoc to get between him and Emerald Immanent, and then took a slow run up
