party even bigger and wilder than the last one so that it would put them under more of an obligation to us. In Kaminaljuyu and some of the other cities the royals were more blatant about it, begging the public to help them out of debt and even sending out collection boxes. Koh and I had tried to be more circumspect. We’d be making offerings in the name of all the clans and their dependents, and then the clans would show how grateful they were by sending their adders to play in the city-wide Sacrifice Game, as a wedding- and seating-gift to us. And then we’d reciprocate by seeding the k’atun. Which meant reading the game, using it to divine what the weather would be and where to settle people and how to lay out the fields and everything else, and, incidentally, reaffirming or redistributing the various clans’ rights and privileges-hunting rights, shares in the irrigation systems, hereditary dress and regalia, client villages, clans of thralls, and much more besides. On my own end, the offerings had to go down right or I’d lose a lot of popular confidence. To put it mildly. I had to show I could do the job.
The central zocalo had filled up since the masque but now a troupe of twenty terror-clowns whirled out into it and cleared the spectators away with a jerky choosing dance, creeping up on a spectator as though if they caught him they’d offer him as a sacrifice, and then as he got away turning and leaping at another. The bacabs’ oblationers followed them out into the floor, four of them from each of the five clans, each team trailing a long blue rope. They were elect elders, unmasked but weighted down with ornament, and they stomped out in converging spirals, sucking energy out of the earth with a sort of springy flat-footedness. Rigid white fabric wings extended from their thighs, like dragonflies’ wings, and as the spirals contracted into spins the centrifugal force pulled blood out of cuts in their hips until the white had all gone red. It was a pretty showy way to make a blood offering. They clustered in a circle in the center of the zocalo, crushing their limp red wings between them, and reeled the ropes in after them. Meanwhile the Porcupine Clown had worked his way into the line like the fool in a morris dance, dancing along with them and then suddenly braking and disrupting their rhythm. He grabbed the lead oblationer’s position and led the line off its course, like Charlie Chaplin with that parade in Modern Times. The crowd loved it. Porcupine was the only real clown allowed in the zocalo during the gifts or the City Game. Koh had ordered him not to actually mess up anything, but just to relieve some of the tension for the spectators.
Finally the old men got their act together and brought the first gift to the base of the mul. It was from the Snuffler House, who had backed 9 Fanged Hummingbird before all the unpleasantness and so owed me the first gift. And more. Big-time. I’ll deal with you guys later, I thought. They unwrapped the gold cloth and presented him to me. From what I could see from way up here he was an appropriately beautiful full-blood boy just heading into puberty. The ocelot-ancestor personifiers did this thing where they made these big “surprise” reactions, like they were noticing him for the first time, and then closed in around the teenager and started dancing around him like “We’re going to eat you, we’re going to eat you,” or whatever, and then they sprang at him and covered him up, twitching their tails above them in slow increments, mimicking cats nibbling their live food. Next there was a blast from a clay kazoo and my nacom walked out and into the orange-and-black tangle. The ocelots turned and backed off, like they were relinquishing their food to the leader of the pride, and the nacom took the prisoner’s rope and led him to the stairs. Four invisibles fell into line after them and the little procession started up toward me. The chant was segueing into a sort of fugue, as familiar to us as “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” is to American preschool classes, but it had a sort of haunting expectant interrogatory half-melody. Which I guess isn’t very specific, but it’s tough to describe music anyway. And now there were teasers prodding screamer captives too-different captives- somewhere I couldn’t see, and the screams made it more like a burning than any kind of singing. But they gave it a completeness, like you needed the pain at the edge of the chord.
(59)
When the nacom reached the lower apron of the adoratory, I stepped back into the shelter of its mouth, just behind a wide brazier. The attendants laid the kid down on the plain stone table. The nacom bent over him, purified the boy and then his long-handled flint knife with his cigar, slit the kid’s stomach horizontally with a single motion, palmed a smaller knife, reached in and up, worked for a moment inside the abdominal cavity, severing the heart from the aorta and vena cavae-and then pulled out the little red muscle. An attendant held up a dish. The nacom set the heart in the dish, slit it longitudinally, opened it up like a book, and studied it. He turned upstage to me, let an attendant wipe the blood off his arms, and then signaled that the signs were good. I signed the go-ahead, and the attendant ran up past me and tipped the heart into the brazier. I listened to it sizzle and breathed in the sausagey smoke. The different sections of the crowd-orchestras reacted, hitting high notes of relief on a long, slow melody that overlaid the bass line, while the kid’s body rolled down the stairs to the holy chefs. One down, I thought.
The kid had behaved really well and didn’t even seem drugged. It reflected well on the Snufflers. And on me, too, I supposed. Sometimes you’d be happier if you could get your captive to scream, because you just wanted to humiliate him, but a lot of the time you’d be happy if the victim took it like a mensch, since you wanted to show how hard you were by capturing somebody that tough in the first place. This was more in the second category. Also, there were some occasions when you wanted your adders to divine from their screams, but at a time like this if they freaked out it would just help spoil the invocation.
The Macaw Clan’s oblationers unwrapped their gift. It was a little boy on his first public-name-date anniversary, which meant he was nearly four years old. They led him to the base and the invisibles mimed hoisting him up to me on his flowery-strung blue ribbon, actually lifting him up, placing him on each step, and lifting him onto the next. The Macaw boy wasn’t too heavily drugged, either, and by the third step you could see that he really was terrified, he’d realized in some way what was actually going on, and he slid into something between a whimper and a screech.
I guess all this is going to make me completely unsympathetic. Right? I’d made my peace with what was going to happen earlier, when I was going through the wedding rehearsals with Koh’s stand-ins-but I suppose I was still just a fuck to go along with it. Of course, I didn’t see any other way. I was just following orders.
And remember, this was a big ceremony and we still only did nine or ten people, which isn’t exactly a holocaust, right? I mean, it’s not great, but at least we didn’t do those big wholesale blowout sacrifices like the Aztecs supposedly did later. They’d go through ten times that many people on just a regular day, probably before breakfast. Although on the other hand, I’d recommend getting captured by the Aztecs, instead of the Maya. Since we-I mean the Maya-were a lot more creative torture-wise. At least the Aztecs just killed you.
And anyway, consider the context, right? We-I mean we like us Ixob dudes again-we were emulating God by being as mean as possible. God obviously enjoys killing little kids, right? At least we didn’t pretend that God doesn’t enjoy torturing innocent people, or pretend not to notice.
And anyway, I did feel queasy, I did feel sorry. But where do I get off mentioning it anyway? Sorry doesn’t muck the custard.
Down in the zocalo my own Harpy clan was unswaddling their gift. It was a former foster brother of all of theirs, now disinherited: 18 Jog, 2 Jeweled Skull’s favorite nephew. He’d been sewn into the 2 Jeweled Skull costume from the masque, but he wasn’t the one who’d actually danced 2 Jeweled Skull. We hadn’t trusted him to go through the motions. I focused across the plaza at the central room of the Council House, where 2 Jeweled Skull was being forced to watch from his cage, but it was too dark in there to see him.
The invisibles stripped off 18 Jog’s regalia and unwrapped his team of five dwarves. They were so fattened they looked table-ready, like kids in turkey costumes in a school Thanksgiving play. But they weren’t official sacrifices, either, and weren’t going into the communion pot. They were just there because 18 Jog was still a greathouse, captive or not, and still deserved attendants to keep him amused on the road out of this level. Dwarves always work. The invisibles led them up, 18 Jog walking stiffly-he was twenty-three solar years old and, from what I could tell, not so quick or forceful as his famous uncle-and the dwarves followed, struggling up the high steps, trailing veils of tinkling laughter from the crowds. To me they didn’t look very aesthetic, more like Grock, Loopy, Scuzzy, Sullen, and Retarded, only without the beards, but really they were matched and trained and must have cost a lot. Anyway the audience had been waiting for a finale.
They came to the threshold. 18 Jog just stood there like Jesus until they stretched him over the table. I could hear a couple of his joints popping. Maybe Koh’s people wanted to make him scream. But really it wasn’t a good idea. Anyway since he was a full-blood captive there wasn’t much chance of it. At most you’d get a little unconscious vocalization at the instant of death.
