Guide us northeasterly through the bone-dust whirlwinds,
And even northwest, through the soot-black dunes of dying.”
Jed:
“So that in ages far beyond our dying
Our daughters can still pour offerings in your cistern,
Our sons can still feed blood-smoke to your whirlwinds,
Our thralls will always tend your altar fires,
Pouring you chocolate from brimful basins
Through all the days undawned but now soon dawning.”
Ahau-na Koh:
“Dawning we bake our bodies and smash them dying.”
Jed:
“We shatter our basins and drown them in your cistern,
And snuff our last fires to steam, to slake you, Whirlwind.”
Koh scattered the seeds and whispered their position to the cantor. He called them out and the human pieces took their places. She waited five beats.
She made her first move.
(61)
“One death, one wind, four thought, sixteen, nineteen,”
Koh said, immediately giving the last date from the Teotihuacan City Game. She’d basically just skipped ahead about four hundred solar years, to Gregorian 1225. I’d thought she’d guide the adders to it, ease them into it a bit, but maybe she wanted to see if they knew what they were doing. The nine clumps of adders broke up and shifted somehow and for a beat the plaza seemed like just a jumble, like the human crystals had just dissolved in solution, and then they coalesced into a new octalinear pattern, and melted again and lined up again. Even though I was expecting something like it I was totally taken aback. It was definitely like something. Not anything biological, something from physics or technology, I don’t know what, maybe like hundreds of those Pac-Mannish magnetic polarities coursing through the domains of a synthetic-garnet bubble-memory chip. What was actually happening was each adder was walking forward, on the beat, out onto the lines separating the points of the grid, the interstices interspersed between the intersections, earth-marching from his old position to a new one determined by his individual count of the days and cycles, which in turn were all different because each person represented a different cycle that he counted on his sticks or his drum, and each person’s cycle was a unique mathematical progression that ignored some beats and, say, triple-counted others, and then redirected his progression based on the people he intersected in his nonrandom walk. On a human scale the movements had similarities to reconstructions I’d seen of Renaissance minuets, and there was a flavor of Gujarat stick-dancing, or like I said, the morris dance. But even if it was dancelike it was so obviously not just for effect, they were all really doing something. Or building something. They stopped.
Two evaders had been taken out in the shuffle-that is, intersected with and caught by a catcher- but they didn’t kill them since it wasn’t necessary yet, they still weren’t really counting ahead. The pair just slunk off don’t- notice-me-ishly through the forest of erect catchers, as neatly arranged in their staggered ranks as North Korean parade soldiers.
“Now wait,” Koh said, her herald repeating. “Now
He goes on seething, now she’s resting, breathing.”
She meant they were supposed to hang out where they were for a beat. The catchers looked impatient, gesturing at the remaining evaders like they were trying to grab them from a distance. I would have thought it was insubordinate, but it really meant they were already trancing into their roles. Koh’s attendant set her Game board on the table, and positioned a close-weave basket and little brazier on the mat just upstage of it. Koh undid the knots and uncovered the board. From where we were sitting the cleared Game-zone in the zocalo below us and the board in front of us both seemed about the same size, like if you had two eyes you could look at one out of each eye and focus them together to get a stereo view. The attendants descended onto the apron beneath us and spread out to the edges, so that no one would be so high as Koh and I. Unless you counted the old trog-in-the-box.
Alligator Root must have signaled the drummers at the first sight of the flame, because in unison they launched into double time.
“First runner, move to fourteen Night,” Koh said.
I moved it. My role in this thing was actually pretty mechanical. I was just supposed to translate the positions of the human pieces onto Koh’s board and wait for her move. “You can’t keep track of all the strains,” Koh had said at some point, I forget when. “You need someone to hold them down.”
Alligator Root called the move out to the zocalo. The runner with the red streamer walked circuitously to his new position. The colors were going Disney on me, like the ninestrips of Technicolor they used in the Bahia sequence in The Three Caballeros. About thirty-one thousand, four hundred and twenty people on the peninsula, I thought, and then I realized I’d guessed the number by counting the people in a small section of zocalo and multiplying it out, and it had taken me less than a beat. I felt like I could count a swarm of a million-plus bats coming out of a cave. Not even. I could instantly count a swarm of midges floating up out of a dead whale by counting the legs and dividing by six. Just for the hell of it I made up a couple of integrations, did them in my head, and checked them. Right on. My Jedman powers were coming back. I could see the parabolas like they were giant intersecting towers of Lego bricks, warm colors for even numbers, cold for odd, metallic for prime.
The blue of Koh’s face was seeping into the regular flesh tone, and vice versa. I sniffled so I wouldn’t have to wipe my runny nose. Gods didn’t do stuff like that. I ran through a few distribution tables, 0.5040, 0.5438, 0.5832, 0.6271. I let a tear or two fall out of my eye and socket. I was feeling a little restless and weak and everything. I can handle this, I thought. I reached into the jars, counted out a red corn-skull for each runner and a blue one for each catcher, and reset the position on the world-board around us. It’s hard to describe, but it seemed to me like the mul we were on was just the central peak of an unimaginably vast plateaued landscape. Koh thought for twenty beats and twenty more.
“Two entering, twelve striking, northward eight,” she said.
Her herald repeated it and the catchers and quarries shuffled again, separating and weaving together like threads on an invisible Jacquard loom, multiple warps coming up through the weft, heddles and treadles and shuttles and lams. There was a moment of near-stasis as the lead runner moved upward through suns of the same name again and again, days from the past turning up in the future, and then the catchers and quarries added up their combined and respective totals, each called out his result, and then each moved again, that much farther forward on the basis of the others, blasting through progressions it would take Encyclopaedia Mathematicas — full of tables to even hint at, and then they’d melt into a different rhythm, like gears on a Pascal adding machine, the Quarries spiraling away from the meshing circles, stately, microscopic, and terrified, until one of the Quarries was caught between two catchers, and they all stopped while the nacom walked out and strangled him with a red-and- blue ribbon.
Invisibles carried the body off the court.
The idea here, briefly, and to put it in a way Koh wouldn’t have, was that the closer you are to death, the more of your own event cone you’re able to see. Not many of the human pieces would survive the Game. But their counts would be preternaturally insightful. It was cruel but effective.
It was already dark. No twilight in the courts of the sun. Who said that? Damn. Forgetting things. The Usher Gods had lit torches inside tall vertical cylinders of oiled rushwork, almost like giant paper lanterns, and the rows of them glowed in lavender and deep sea-snail purples. Two skeletons flopped up the stairs of the mul, only a hundred and ten steps below us. They weren’t really supposed to be on the mul, but this was kind of like an anything-goes Mardi Gras where all the roles are reversed, one of those masters-wait-on-the-servants kind of things, and I guessed it was okay as long as they couldn’t get up here or see the board or whatever. I looked at Koh but she was way too out there to get distracted. I could probably have leaned over and kissed her and gotten zero reaction. Koh’s Porcupine Clown flop-danced up after the skeletons, staggering and reeling on the edges of the steps like
