Finally one of the this-meeting-has-to-end votes carried. The bigwigs crouched backward away from the circle and went back to their own families. Hun Xoc stayed. Coati rolled up the Game board, the attendents folded the wicker covering over the four of us, and Koh and I got to speak almost in private.
She said that while I was away on my burial excursion she’d sent four runners forward to 2 Jeweled Skull, my adopted father and the ahau of the Harpy Clan. They were going to-wait, maybe I should mention a few other things about old 2JS. When I’d received Jed 1 ’s mind up on the Ocelots’ mul, 2JS had unexpectedly been in the same tiny room with me, and he’d gotten a bit of scatter, enough of my memories to speak English and Spanish and understand quite a bit of what I was up to. But he hadn’t gotten enough of me to, say, understand that the images he had of airplanes weren’t a species of friendly condor, or that the computers he remembered me using weren’t silent marimbas with captive souls inside. And he was still very much himself. There wasn’t enough of me in there to confuse him about who he was, the way I’d been confused at first about whether I was me or Chacal, the ballplayer whose brain I was, shall we say, staying in as a guest. Luckily for me, Chacal’s sense of self had faded away pretty quickly. But 2 Jeweled Skull had never become me. And knowing so much about me hadn’t exactly seemed to help him empathize with me or my plight. He’d been angry. And I guess he’d had a legitimate beef. But he’d tortured me pretty badly to get me to pull myself out of his mind, and then, when I’d finally convinced him I couldn’t do that, he’d gradually figured out a way to turn the situation to his advantage. He’d sent me to Teotihuacan to break the Teotihuacanian monopoly on tsam lic, the Sacrifice Game enabling drugs, and now here I was.
Anyway, Koh’s runners were going to repeat to 2 Jeweled Skull-in a Harpy House code language that they themselves didn’t understand-the message that I and the other Harpy bloods who’d survived from the team he’d sent, along with Lady Koh and a small Rattler-blood escort, would be sempiternally honored to attend the great-hipball game in Ix on Ixlahun Chuwen, Bolonlahun Yaxk’in, that is 13 Howler, 19 Redness, or July 14, forty-nine days from now. But they weren’t going to mention the great migration. He will have heard about it anyway by now, she said. Calling attention to it would just raise the issue of what we intended to do with them. What if Koh didn’t manage to found her shining-city-on-a-hill and we turned up in Ix leading a hungry multitude?
I moved back to one of the long, narrow Ball Brethren sleeping toboggans-for some reason they had a team of four watchdogs pulling it today, instead of the usual pairs of thralls-and crashed between two of my teammates. It was male-on-male cozy in a way that would have weirded me out as fagophobic old Jed. We trudged on through the night. What I thought were low stars behind the smoke turned out to be bonfires up in the hills that loomed invisibly on both sides of the trail. Just before the next dawn an alarm went down the line. There were always hairless dogs barking, arfing, and yipping, but some of us could distinguish the voices of the actual watchdogs, and when their pitch went up, it meant we were under attack. The Teotihuacanians were ahead of us, just like Lady Koh had said, but somehow they’d managed to ambush two veintenas of our forerunnners and they were closer than we’d allowed for. Ahead of me Koh gave the first of her coded commands. Armadillo Shit stripped off my wristlets and anklets and other rank signifiers and wrapped me up like I was a low-clan elder. My manto looked normal, but it was made of quilted cotton filled with sand, which pretty effectively stopped most thrown darts. Naturally, Koh had prohibited me from fighting. But for some reason-maybe it was emotion carrying over from Chacal-I realized that, irrationally, I really, really wanted to get my hands bloody.
Well, resist that impulse. It didn’t matter. Right? Why should it? I shouldn’t care about these people. Those I fight I do not hate, I thought. Those I guard I do not love. Except maybe I did. Already I could hear the moan of long bull-roarers and the grunts and occasional screams from up ahead. Then there was another hoarse sound, children screaming through megaphones. It’s a pretty hard sound to describe, like cats in traps, maybe, but more sort of bagpipish, so much so that I wondered whether bagpipes had first been invented to imitate it. Severed Right Hand was torturing some of his youngest captives. Then there were the ringing sparks of flint points in the last dark, like little stone bells, and the barely audible click of darts leaving the spear-throwers, and the hisses and sizzles as the first of the flaming spears came in. The line started to smell like a giant pit latrine, as all battles do, plus vomit, and with the addition of chili smoke. Jaguar-Scorpion battle-cries welled up and the Rattler bloods started screeching coded instructions to each other-we did have war cries, by the way, but I never heard any that were like that whoo-whoo-whoo thing the Plains tribes do in old movies-and at the same time one of the Harpy bloods who was shielding me put his hand up to his face and picked a thin blowgun-dart out of one eye, like a long flowered thorn stretching out forever. Even in the firelight reflected off the smog-roof I could see the point was wrapped in the black-and-yellow-striped skin of a harlequin creeper. I suppressed a flinch. You couldn’t let anything faze you in front of these people. But if you could just suck it up, you were almost home.
We crouched with our shields up and backed into the crowd of Rattler bloods behind us. The blood who’d been hit broke from the group, turned around with his bloody wink, and saluted us-our salute was generally more of a casual “Hey, bro,” than a military deal-and ran wobblingly off to charge the Jaguars while he was still alive. While that was happening and before it was over a runner came through from Hun Xoc and led us farther back into a narrow pass. Koh’s entourage was already in the center. They set guards at each end so that if it looked like we might get cut off on one side we’d get ready to break on the other. I listened, trying to separate the code-calls from the screeches and the whirs of whistle-spears, but couldn’t get anything. It was still too dim to see detail. Someone was pushing through to us. It was Hun Xoc. He said the outrunners didn’t think Koh had been singled out yet, so neither had I. We should just dig in. In the meantime 1 Gila had taken a division south and was going to come back in from the east with noise like there were a whole lot more of us.
Well, the plan sounds-oh, wait. Who the hell is 1 Gila? Okay. The largest Teotihuacanian war clan that was solidly bonded to Koh and her Star Rattler Cult-and so were declared enemies of Severed Right Hand-were the Lineage of the Acaltetepon, that is, Heloderma horridum, the Mexican beaded lizard. 1 Gila wasn’t the patriarch of the clan-that was his much older uncle-but he was their war leader, and he was probably Lady Koh’s most powerful supporter.
Okay.
Well, the plan sounds great, I thought. Yup. You’ve got my blessing. I asked about our second-largest battle-ready group, 3 Talon’s contingent and the rest of his Mexican Eagle Clan. Or let’s be correcter and say “Caracara Clan.” Hun Xoc said they were fighting other feline clans themselves, but that as far as he could tell they’d already split off. Just before we needed them. The spies said they were going to consolidate in a fortified Caracara town about four jornadas west of the Valley. We didn’t know what they’d do after that. Probably they’d try to start another Teotihuacan-like city nearby with themselves in charge, although we knew from history that it wouldn’t be such a big deal. Anyway, they didn’t want to tell us much or make commitments, but since they were in shit with the cat clans they wanted peace, if not necessarily union, with the Rattlers. Nobody wants to fight on two fronts, except for crazies like late-period Hitler.