my head. He hit the peg dead on, but the vase didn’t move.
“19 Ocelots, 17 Harpies.”
Que el fuck? I thought, No wakal tunI? He fucking tipped the jar, what did they do, glue it on?
I looked up at the stupid little clay pot. It was just hanging out there, like, who, me? And he’d just sent a brotherfucking earthquake through its little fucking peg.
“The Harpies request inspection of the bowl,” I started to yell out in formal Chol, but Hun Xoc was already on top of me and he practically stuck his hand down my mouth.
Shut up, he said. He moved me back into the red. Emerald Howler and Emerald Immanent were on their feet and running in place at us, held back by a fog of invisibles.
Let’s go, Hun Xoc said. We teetered back to our markers along the north wall, leaving bloody handprints.
On the fifteenth serve, the Ocelots fouled us, for 19 to 18. Yay. The sixteenth ball made twenty-eight circuits-an unlucky number-but just as I thought we were getting a line on it Emerald Immanent’s lob shot grazed the peg, lightly but fair and square.
“Ocelot great-goal, 20 Ocelots, 18 Harpies.”
The Ocelot side whipped up into a cheer orgy. One point away. Bastards.
Finally everyone quieted down for the serve, and then there was a signal that 2 Jeweled Skull had asked to raise the stakes by what was basically the amount of his personal treasury. It was the signal for the Harpies to get ready for combat. I looked up into our Harpy stands. The three hundred or so war-age bloods were bouncing around and waving their baatob like innocent spectators, but if you were looking for it you could see, just from how still they were, that something was going on. They had a look like the nonexpression of a Japanese gymnast doing an iron cross on the hanging rings. They were dressing each other for combat under their mantos, popping the nuts off the points of their blowgun darts, untying the knots of their mantles and heavier ornaments so they could slip them off at a p’ip’il’ s notice-at a blink-tying obsidian knives and saw handles around their upper arms. It was slow going, you had to be careful not to cut yourself or the person you were dressing. Obsidian’s really nothing to screw around with. The edge of an obsidian blade is only one molecule wide, and it can part the molecules of your flesh like it was going through air, often nearly painlessly, so that it takes you longer to notice you’ve been cut. They still use-or I should say they were going to use-skin scalpels with obsidian edges in the twenty-first century. In any pitched battle with obsidian weapons, about half of the combatants were always hash in a flash, like they’d fallen through a stack of windows from the pre-safety-glass era.
Could the Ocelot spies see something was up? I wondered. Or was it so subtle that you had to know it was happening to catch it?
The signal came down that Fanged Hummingbird had seen the raise. There was another blast of commotion. I got Hun Xoc and Red Cord into a kind of a huddle and got my mouth onto Hun Xoc’s ear.
If this turns into a fight we have to head into the Ocelots’ compound, I said. West.
Why? he signed on my arm. He was planning to stay here and fight it out.
We have to get to the Ocelots’ tree, I said. There’s something I promised 2 Jeweled Skull I’d do. I didn’t want Red Cord-or even Hun Xoc, I guess-to know about the earthstar compound. Better they thought I wanted to ring or somehow poison the Ocelots’ celestial tree-which would be a reasonable goal, actually, ritually speaking. It would be like killing the clan.
Hun Xoc signed that he didn’t want to run.
I started to try to tell him the old thing about how we weren’t running, we were just advancing in a different direction, but I tripped over the words. It wasn’t that easy to translate an English phrase into Chol, or at least it wasn’t for me.
We’re not running anywhere, I said, I have to ajma-xoc. It meant “follow what our father says.” It was incontrovertible. Come on, I thought, switch hats. You’re not a ballplayer right now, you’re a commando.
He demurred again. I insisted. Finally he said “Agreed” by contracting his shoulder muscles.
It’ll just be the three of us and six of Koh’s guards, I said. Maybe not even that many. We can still make it, though.
Listen, something’s going on, Hun Xoc signed by tapping my yoke.
What? I asked, but I heard it.
“Kot Chuupol! Ile Kot Chuupol!” It was Emerald Immanent’s voice.
He’d recognized me.
(37)
“Kot Chuupol! Ile Kot Chuupol!”
His voice was like he was trying to throw up, except loud. You’re supposed to be silent like your stupid name, I thought. Ch’uupul was a Chol word for like gay or queer-not in the okay sense of a epicene, but in the sense of being a willing bottom-so the most popular insult-name for me was just something midway in sound between that and “Chacal.”
“Yan Kot Chacal!” he yelled. “It’s Harpy Chacal!”
Just ignore them, dear, I thought.
“Yan Chuupol Chacal! Yan Chuupol Chacal!”
I was sort of half-aware that a couple of people up in the Ocelot stands had heard Emerald Immanent identifying me, and they were having mixed reactions. Some of them were more than a little spooked and kept on rhubarbing about it. But I was too pumped to pay much attention. The chanter and Magister and beaters and everybody just went on with what they were doing, cruising through the protocol on inertia.
Anyway, the serve went out. Hun Xoc got it and passed to me. In the femtosecond I spent looking at him I could see he was too winded to make another goal run himself. In a normal ball game, with more bench players, he’d have dropped out already.
I passed back to Red Cord. Just get me a good shot, I signed to Hun Xoc. Red Cord passed back to me.
Okay. No point holding back now.
I scooped the ball out of the air and passed it back to Hun Xoc and fell back and turned, setting up my signature run. I mean Chacal’s signature run. It was like one of Lebron’s dunk-in-the-post, I’d perfected it over so many repetitions it was almost one motion and felt completed as soon as I swung into it. I built up speed and ran up the red wall, like Donald O’Connor in Singin’ in the Rain. I was giving myself away, but I was like, Fine, I don’t give a fuck, I’m doing my transcendent little dance and nothing’s gonna stop me cause I’m the Duke of Earl.
I turned like a skateboarder just above the lip of the wall and dashed down, building up momentum, and diagonally across the alley and up the Ocelots’ emerald-tinted wall. By the second step up I’d revisualized my path up the bank, felt my speed, yep, everything in place, THE TIME IS NOW!!!
I came to that moment of perfect equipoise where I was standing motionless like a fly at this crazy forty- five-degree angle. I felt the wind from Ocelot spectators’ fists as they swung at me, not quite connecting. The goal was only six arms ahead of me and three arms above. Hun Xoc yoked the ball up to me like he’d done a thousand times, and it came up just as I was falling, nearly right where I wanted it, so that I could gauge its stately spin by a pink spot of bloody chalk-dust, and I dug my wrist-guard into the black moon and just fed it right into the side of the vase. I could see the bloom of turquoise powder as I fell out of my equilibrium and as I rolled I could hear the chanters squealing above the cheers:
“20 Ocelots, 22 Harpies.” You could tell from the chanters’ voices that this wasn’t how it was supposed to go. They’d been sure the Ocelots had a lock. Well, choke on this, I thought. One more.
Hun Xoc got the eighteenth serve, set up, got a solid hit on it, and grazed the peg. Somebody’d checked me, and I’d fallen over. But as I hoisted myself up I could see a tiny but incontrovertible wisp of blue-green dust.
We did it, I thought, but as the chanters’ voice swelled into a chorus of “ Kax kot, kax Kot,” “Win, Harpies, win, Harpies,” I could hear, closer and louder, Emerald Immanent’s voice, and then Emerald Snapper’s, and then two, and four, and then what sounded like a hundred other voices, all screaming:
“Yan Kot Chacal!” “It’s Harpy Chacal!”
I staggered toward the central marker. There were Harpy bloods chanting back, “Kax! Kax! Kax!” “Victory!
