Well, don’t stress on it. Except should I really be taking Maximon’s advice? I mean, it was really my own advice, but if I was getting screwy…
Well, even so, if I’d learned one thing from these Olde Mayaland folks, it was that-well, actually, I’d learned a few things, but one of them was-it was that your brain isn’t one thing. The way they put it, you had sort of a stable of different souls. Some were human, some were animals, and some, like your ik’ar, your “wind,” or let’s say your breath, were practically mineral. And if you were clever, you let them talk to each other, and you made sure they all listened.
The crew and I struggled up the slope of crumbled sandstone. Finally we gave up on dignity and climbed on all fours, with our feet turned outward for extra grip. Still, I slid more than once, ripping cuts in my forearms. I kept looking around and seeing, with a reliable little chill, how small our troop looked against the cyclopean landscape. Like I said, I’d only brought twenty-two porters, four Harpy Clan bloods counting my adopting brother Hun Xoc, Six Ixian Rattler bloods, 7 Iguana-the Harpy sacrificer-and our head outrunner, 4 Screaming, with his own crew of nine, and a few other miscellaneous functionaries. It wasn’t enough to fight off even a single veintena of actual soldiers. If they found us.
The slope leveled out into a wide oval tableland that floated over the ash shroud around us, so that it felt like we were in a crater on some C-class asteroid. We posted lookouts at the rim and I marked three hundred and fifty paces to the nearer center of the oval and signed to Hun Xoc. He relayed the command to the porters and they set down their packs, put together their wooden shovels, and started digging. Hun Xoc and his two porters and I got out a forty-arm’s-length right-triangle surveyor’s cord and marked out the four smaller holes where we’d drop in the lodestones. In the twenty-first century, they’d be brazenly visible from any of Warren Communication’s microwave-sounder satellites. Before that was done, the crew hit rock, four arm-lengths down, but they changed their wood shovels for picks and kept at it. Hun Xoc, the other bloods, 7 Iguana, and I all sat on the piles of rubberized bags and watched. Greathouse bloods didn’t do dirt.
We waited. Maximon had been right about the wind. Lord Papagayo had been walking strong on the plain, but up here when you dropped dust out of your hand it fell straight down. Weird.
We’d brought six nearly identical terra-cotta round ovens, each about twenty finger-widths across. Each one was wrapped in rubberized deerskin so that it looked like a half-deflated yellow beach ball. Inside each of the vessels were two more nested terra-cotta bowls with a layer of wax between them. So each round oven had only about forty cubic inches of interior space. Still, one of these interior spaces held four duplicate screenfold books with my notes on the Game, copied, two tiny jadeite bottles of the refined tsam lic compounds, toads and other critters mummified six different ways, and two folded miniature feather-cloth Game boards, all packed in expensive Cholulan rock salt. I hoped it would give Marena and company enough information to stave off Armageddon. Still, I couldn’t just slack off. Even if they got the package-well, I was pretty sure they’d get it, but let’s say even after they got it-there’d be a chance that without the sort of specialized knowledge and skills I was picking up from Koh, they wouldn’t be able to use the Game effectively enough to stop all potential doomsters. If we wanted to be closer to certain, I’d have to get my working brain back, with all its precious cargo. Or most of it.
The other five round ovens held various counterfeit versions of the stuff, convincing enough, I hoped, to satisfy any treasure hunters who might get the gossip.
After four hundred times four hundred beats I strolled over and looked in. They’d gotten down another two arm-lengths. Good enough. We started them on the second hole, one rope-length-about twenty-one feet-west of this one. Again, we sat and watched. Armadillo Shit picked fleas out of my hair. The flint pick heads struck showerlets of sparks on the bedrock. Hun Xoc told them to speed it up.
He’s right, I thought. They’re working hard, but they don’t seem eager to finish.
They know.
Well, it can’t be helped.
After another hundred-score beats they’d finished fifteen holes. Enough to fill the Albert Hall, I thought. All right already. I signed to 7 Iguana to get ready, and he opened his pack and took out a short muffled mace, like a ball-peen hammer with its head wrapped in rubber tape.
(18)
We buried the rest of them, raked over the scars, and spread gravel and cinders over them as realistically as we could in the half-light. I didn’t even tell Hun Xoc which of the vessels was the important one, although he might have been able to guess from the pattern of the other nine holes. Each of these-the smaller holes-received a heavy rubberized deer-hide sack the size of a bowling-ball bag. Five of the bags were full of very ordinary rocks in a big wad of wax. The other four, the ones forming a perfect two-rope-length cross with the primary vessel at the center, were full of chunks of meteoric magnetite, which I’d bought thirty-one days ago at the fetish market in Teotihuacan, at a cost equal to about fifty good adolescent male slaves. The magnetite was also, of course, in a big wad of wax. I figured it was probably overkill, but why cut corners on your signature project? As the men filled in the holes I rotated them around a bit, hoping they’d get confused. Not that it would matter unless we got stopped unexpectedly Bdrdrdrdroododoodoot. We all froze.
A pygmy-owl hoot. Also just detectably artificial. It was the outrunners. Seventy beats later a silhouette materialized on the north ridge and held his hands over his head, palms down, signing “No danger, but wait.” A hundred and thirty beats later-a Maya beat was a little shorter than a second, so say about two minutes-4 Screaming, our chief outrunner, was standing next to us. His rubber-soled-sandaled feet hadn’t made even a slight crunch on the cinders and packed gravel. His name was 4 Screaming, but despite his name, he was silent and permanently furtive, and like all the outrunners-actually they were called k’antatalob, “sniffers,” because around here you usually smelled your enemies before you could see them-he was long-legged and wiry, with pocked skin smeared with deer feces.
“No Pumas,” he signed, “but there are tracks half a day north, and in Coixtlahuaca we counted about twice four hundred skinless bodies.” The Pumas-who’d been the leading war lineage of Teotihuacan, and whose remnants were following Severed Right Hand-routinely flayed their kills, animal and human. He started to go through the list of the towns and paths and milpas where they’d seen the biggest concentrations of corpses, but after a minute I just looked at Hun Xoc-who was senior to me and nominally the ranking captain but who was easygoing enough to be basically acting as my second-in-command-and flicked my eyes northeast. Hun Xoc signed for 4 Screaming to take his squad that way as far as possible for two-ninths of a night-about four hours-and then report back again.
4 Screaming took thirty beats to sign to his squad, and they all took off again without even asking for drinking water. God, I thought, these guys are tough as jackboots. Gluttons for punishment.