because I was afraid we’d lose.
“Xejintic ub’aj,” I said. It meant “Vomit on yourself” but it was like saying “Bullshit.” I didn’t have any voice left, so I kind of stage-whispered it.
“Lothic ah tabay,” he said. “You were beat.”
“ You were beat,” I said. “Beat, beat, beat.”
I let go and bolted for the well. Someone had gotten ahead of me. I butted into him and twisted around him to the side of the cistern. My hands grabbed relief-work starfish-glyphs and I could feel the firm resonance of the hundreds of cubic tons of water on the other side. It was streaming fast despite the drought, still more than enough to serve the whole city. The rim was only at chest height. Just get over it, I thought. The guy grabbed my pigtail but it was still two-thirds fake and the extension pulled off in his hand. More people grabbed at me. I edged back and rolled up onto the wide lip, trying to look like I was panicking. The octagonal opening was only a rope-length across. I could feel negative ions blasting up out of it and I was all refreshed all of a sudden, somehow thinking clearly even though my body was a firecracker string of unbearable pain. They were dragging me down off the rim. You’ve got to act more, I thought. Otherwise you’ll be giving it away. It’s not enough to just dress up, you have to act. I wrenched up and back, shifting my weight to pull at least one person up with me. The blood got his elbow around my throat as I edged us off-balance and we tipped back into cold.
(41)
People used to tell me I remember everything, but of course there is too much of everything for anyone to remember. It’s really just that the type of things I do remember are different, like I might be able to quote the script of a movie I’ve seen, but I wouldn’t be able to say whom I saw it with. Movies and other things tend to exist in a sort of limbo memory space. And for a while after we tipped back into the Great Cistern, events for me shifted into that unmarked class of sliding space-time. Maybe in another way it’s like if you’re listening to something or watching a movie on a disk and you’ve hit the REPEAT button and then fall asleep in your chair while it loops over and over. You might remember the scenes perfectly clearly, but not how they fit together or which repeat you saw them on. It was like an in-and-out dozy state when you might be sort of remembering a dream while you’re dreaming it, or getting ready to dream it again and sort of seeing it coming and getting ready to remember it. It never quite seems to be happening at the time. Instead it’s like you’re visualizing what’s going to happen or trying to make sense out of what’s happened already, and even though the events are all clear enough they’re not correlated against any clocks, internal or external. I certainly remember that feeling of knowing we were irrevocably off-balance. I don’t remember falling or hitting the water. I think my heart stopped for a beat and a half. I realized the blood I’d pulled in with me was still choking me, and I remember reaching over with my right hand and finding a shard of obsidian that was still stuck in my left one. I got it out, tightened my fingers around it, twisted my arm back, found the protuberances of the blood’s left floating ribs, felt up the costal arch, and cut through under the base of the sternum. He reacted but his grip didn’t relax and I could tell I didn’t have much consciousness time left. I got the feeling we were still sinking instead of floating up, maybe because of all his quilted padding and heavy spondylus shell wrist cuffs and ankle cuffs and everything. I dug the knife in again, got the tips of four fingers inside his skin, finger-crawled up under his xiphoid process, and cut through the diaphragm up into his hot pericardial cavity. I was in the wrong position to get all the way up to his heart but I found the inferior lobe of his left lung instead and grabbed it. It felt like a wet sea sponge. I yanked on it and it mushed and collapsed, but it must have triggered some real alarm because the blood’s whole body spasmed so that I could push clear of him. I gasped at the release and a croquet ball of water forced itself down into my throat. It was about halfway pleasant because I really did need a drink but more pressed into my lungs and I got a blast of preconscious reptile panic.
Last thing, I thought. I dug the bag of earthstar powder out of my crotch and fumbled with the knots. I couldn’t get it open with my shredded hands. Some of the shard was still stuck in the metacarpals of my right hand, though, and I stabbed the side of the little bag, twisted a hole in it, and punched the bag inside out though the hole, releasing trails of numbing death through the water. I even managed to cut the bag off its thong and let it sink, although consciously speaking I’d forgotten that it had been weighted with pebbles. I floated.
And that was basically it for a while. I don’t remember being wet, although being underwater doesn’t feel wet anyway. I do remember gazing at the circle of faint sky-blue below me, the opening of the well-although it was really above me-and considering whether to blow the rest of my carbonized air supply out through my lungs and die in one of the most pleasant ways possible, in the center of a jade sphere in the hands of the well gods, listening to the resonance of the water, room, womb, tomb, flume, shroom, plume, room, whoomb, boom, twroooowmb, twoooooommmmmmm.
TWO
Figurine of a Diety Impersonator in a Duck-Billed Mask
Found Downstream of the Ruins of Ixnichi Sotz
Curious Antiquities of British Honduras
By Subscription Lambeth • 1831
(42)
There’s no memory in there of my being grabbed. But there was a moment somewhere when my numb wet head seemed to swell to mul-size in air that felt like dry heat. Grab air. Nose full. INHALE, no, hard chunk. Spit it out. Spoot it eett, GET IT OUT!!! and there was this sensation of swallowing myself, like the way if you put a dragonfly’s tail in its mouth it’ll eat until it dies. At some point I realized that someone stuffed my left hand into my own mouth, the embedded shards of flint cutting through my upper lip. I blew my nose and opened one nostril and managed to breathe through that.
I think after that there’s a longer period that I don’t remember at all. And in a way that’s sad because the moment of your capture is one of the most important in your life. It’s a sacrament. But I don’t remember hearing my captors’ speeches, or my saying any of the little poems of submission, or anything. I do remember wearing ceremonial bindings, like the ones I’d been wearing on the mul, and I remember being in total dark smelling dead people near me. They smelled like they’d been beheaded, maybe, or eviscerated, which lets them drain a bit so they don’t get quite so smelly as people who die from disease. You don’t usually smell in dreams, I thought. Does that mean I’m awake? My swollen tongue scraped against cakes of blood on my inner cheeks. My leg was cold and big but when I finally got my bonds twisted around so I could reach down and feel it, it didn’t seem to be around. There was something fleshy there, according to my hand, but it was utterly numb, like I was touching someone else’s leg, and it seemed swollen like I had elephantiasis. Before, after, or during that whole dark period I remember being prodded and surrounded. I reached out and felt their fur leggings. They were made of baby-ocelot skin, the kind only 9 Fanged Hummingbird’s personal guards got to wear. What’s happening with the earthstar compound? I wondered again. Is it working? If it’s working, some people should be acting strange by now. They should be acting too happy, anyway. Right? Or maybe they’re onto it. Maybe they’re being smart, they’re only drinking water they’ve held on to for a while. Hell, hell, hell.
Ow. Someone kicked me. I think someone ordered me to get up and walk and I think I tried to tell them I couldn’t. I also don’t remember being dragged or carried, but at some point I was in a different, fresh-air space, probably a treaty tent. I was with four other high-ranking Harpy bloods. We were all gagged, but from what we could grunt out in tonal language it seemed like none of us knew anything about the outcome of the battle. I was pretty sure none of them were major homies of mine. My messed-up right hand felt all big and fun and floppy where
