“I came to plant a message in the Earthtoadess,” I said.
“You mean for your n’aax caan ”-the expression meant something like “favorite dominatrix” or “pussy-whipper prostitute”-“in the thirteenth b’aktun.”
Uh, right, I grunted. Should I offer him something? I wondered. What did we have with us? We’d brought jade celts worth about six hundred adolescent male slaves, just in case we had to trade our way out of something, but I didn’t think he’d want them.
“That Marena of yours, tia buena, ” he said, smacking his lips once.
I just nodded. How did he know about that? I wondered. Well, I guess he knows a lot. Not everything, like Jehova would, but still a lot. You’ve got to watch this guy around the ladies. I remembered something my mother had told me when I was six or so, how in her hometown in Honduras, back when her grandfather was young, one day all the men went off to fight the Spanish and left Maximon at home to protect the women, and then when the men came back, the women were all pregnant. So the men flayed Maximon alive, and hung his skin on a monkey-puzzle tree. But the women were so devastated that they made the men set up his effigy in the church. And then he didn’t stay dead for long anyway.
“So you need to find a quiet spot,” Maximon said.
“Yes. Exactly.”
“Quiet for how long?
“Like, four b’aktuns,” I said. About fourteen hundred years.
He raised his head and, leisurely-ly, looked over his left shoulder, toward the west. You could just see a low orange smudge, not the sun but the reflection of Coixtlahuaca, the nearest of the hundreds of cities burning in sympathy with the destroyed capital, Teotihuacan. Lady Koh’s caravan was between us and the city, back almost half a k’intaak- that is, a jornada, a day’s journey. We couldn’t go much farther if we were going to come back and meet up with them before dawn. And we couldn’t be walking around like this in daylight, even if the daylight was going to be as dim as twilight. Some village bumpkins would still be alive somewhere, and they’d spot us, and the word would get back to one of the Puma Clan’s hit squads, and that would be it. They’d have our guts for G strings. On the other hand, if the gear was going to keep for thirteen centuries before Marena dug it up, it would have to be pretty damn out in the boonies. Dang, darn, damn.
“Lllll,” Maximon went. He took another drag and blew a smoke snake that read, with the formal, archaic voice of written Mayan, “I would try up yonder.” He pointed northeast with his lip toward a pair of twin mesas. “No one ventures there.” He used a continuing indefinite tense that meant not now, not before now, and not ever. “Even our grandfather Rucan 400 Shrieks”-that is, the east-going Whirlwind-“refuses to dance there.” I almost didn’t get the last part because as soon as I was reading each word, it would start dissolving.
“Okay, buen consejo. Thank you, senor.”
“No problemo,” he said. He said it orally this time, and in Spanish. And the abruptness suggested that the interview was over, but I hesitated.
“Yes?” he asked, a little impatiently.
“Oh, I was, I was just wondering if you over me might have noticed anything farther down the road.”
“You mean the road to Ix?”
“Well…” I said.
I was getting the feeling that he knew the answer already, and was asking me just to see how honest I was, or how I’d justify what I was doing.
“… yes,” I finished. It was supposed to be a secret-that is, when we got into the lowlands we were going to lead the people to Ix and not toward Palenque like Lady Koh had given out.
“You’d better watch out for the Pumas and the rest of the pack,” he said.
I know that, I thought. But I just clicked-an Ixian gesture that meant “yes”-and then, redundantly, nodded.
By pack he’d meant, like, “pack of cats.” That is, the remnants-numerous remnants, I should say-of the feline clans of Teotihucan and its hundreds of satellite cities. They’d regrouped after the unpleasantness and were out gunning for Lady Koh and anyone connected with her.
“We’ll manage it,” I said. Be confident. Chicks and gods dig confidence. And it was true, right now I was ahead of the game. Especially with this Lady Koh thing. I knew a star when I saw one. She already had her eighty thousand-plus people under her little blue thumb. And she was just getting started. And for whatever reason of her own, to the extent that she understood my plans to preserve the Sacrifice Game and get myself back to the last b’aktun, she approved of them. “And I’m going to get the hell back too.”
This time he didn’t ask “Back to where?” and I was sure he understood that I meant back to the twenty-first century. If one can use the word understand in this context.
“You’re not worried about Severed Right Hand?” Maximon asked.
Zing. Maybe I’d sounded a little too flip there. Watch it.
Hmm. Severed Right Hand’s name had come up around Koh’s council mat, but he was kind of a shadowy figure. Supposedly he’d been a junior member of the synod of the red moiety of Teotihuacanian, that is, the war clans, and he owned only two bundles of pink reeds-that is, he was only eighteen years old. Yesterday, according to Lady Koh’s G2, he-well, of course we didn’t call them G2, we called them b’acanob, “whisperers”-hmm, let’s say, according to our intelligence units, he’d already killed the remaining patriarchs of his own Swallowtail Clan, and had captured the next two Puma duarchs and most of the surviving synodsmen.
“Maybe I should be much more worried,” I said.
“Severed Right Hand is quite energetic,” Maximon said. “And he’s just adopted another twenty-eight thousand bloods.”
I clicked three times, respectfully, meaning, “Please go on.”
Maximon said that Severed Right Hand was now commanding at least four thousand veintenas, that is, platoons of twenty. About fourteen thousand of those were full bloods from the Puma clans. They were experts with the javelin launcher, the Teotihuacanian signature weapon, and they’d be the hardest to fend off if there was a direct battle. He’d set up his mobile headquarters at Tehuacan-which, despite the similar name, was not the same as, or even a satellite town of, Teotihuacan. It was two jornadas due whitewards, north, of us. He’d brought along what was left of the city’s council of four hundred, which he now dominated. And he’d sworn to capture all the Rattler’s Children and give their heads and skins to the Green Hag, a sort of fresh-water elemental who’d been the elder patroness of Teotihuacan.
Severed Right Hand was claiming that Koh-or, as she was now styling herself, the Great-Elderess of All Star Rattler’s Children-hadn’t just foretold the city’s destruction, but had caused it. The claim had the advantage of being basically the truth, although this hadn’t seemed to have hurt Koh’s standing with her own followers. Even our cleverer clan leaders, the ones who’d gotten the gossip about her machinations, seemed more loyal to her than ever. So even though the official motive for the now-unavoidable civil war was, as always, revenge, it was revenge in the Maya sense of capturing Koh’s uays.
More specifically, Teotihuacan had been like the Lourdes, Jerusalem, Rome, and Mecca of Mesoamerica, and anyone who could have destroyed it was vastly powerful. If Severed Right Hand captured Koh and, through torture, annexed her uays-her most active souls-her powers of prophecy and domination would accrue to him. Her former followers would be constrained to obey him, since his uays would hold hers within his skin. He would become both the avenger of the destruction of Teotihucan and its prime beneficiary.