For a while things didn’t look good. 1 Gila’s people, who knew the area, could tell which different vendetta squads had taken advantage of the collapse of government in the region and come through ahead of us just from the number of headless bodies tied up in trees. The number of white buzzards overhead seemed to double every fifty-score beats and it started to really bug me, I couldn’t stop thinking about how hot and sour they must feel even way up in the air, all these fat suckers with their little heads like barbed penises, just slacking around in these high, agonizingly slow interlocking spirals, the most patient birds in the world. But by the end of the day-the day that was already being called the first Grandfather Heat of the fifth family of suns, “the Grandfathers of Heat to be born after the end of the earthly paradise”-it became clear that in this case bad for others was good for us. At noon we met the main body of Koh’s Rattler Newborn, or converts, which was listed at fourteen thousand but was obviously triple that if you counted women and children and thralls. About a third of Koh’s followers from the zocalo, that is, the plaza, had been killed by the Jaguars or by the fires, but the ones who had gotten away credited her with saving them. Most of them had picked up their extended families in the suburbs-who knew her prophecy already-and packed up whatever they had left to follow Koh to the Promised Land. Of course, they didn’t know she hadn’t yet decided where that would be.
And Koh’s k’ab’eyob — “rumorers,” rumor spreaders, or I guess we can call them advance men-had also done their job. More and bigger towns joined us every day, and more and more clan leaders pledged themselves and their dependents to Koh. Her runners ran up and down organizing them, adding the blue-green band to their colors, having them swear impromptu oaths, setting marching and foraging orders, whatever. She’d brought cases of cosmetics along-as always, first things first-and her dressers worked on everyone, from Koh on down, making us look more like a real royal entourage and not a messed-up gang of escapees.
By the old age of the first Grandfather Heat, the sun, as we headed into what would later be Puebla, our line stretched out so far that someone could go off-road and take a nap at the head of the first file, get woken up two- or three-hundred-score beats later as the last stragglers passed, and then, if they could afford bearers, have themselves run up to the front of the line again. Koh’s clowns ran up and down the sides of the line, under the direction of her favorite Porcupine Jester, and entertained the marchers with lampoons on the Pumas.
Finally, just as the same Grandfather Heat died, another round of messages went up and down the line between Koh, Hun Xoc, 1 Gila, 14 Wounded, and me. Without meeting in person we reached a consensus that we-“we” meaning us greathouse leaders and our core bloods-couldn’t afford to camp. We didn’t have enough guards to resist a full assault from the Pumas, so we’d have to stay on the move or they’d have time to set up an ambush somewhere. We had only fifteen suns left to get back to Ix before the big great-hipball game, barely enough for an ambassador with staged porters, let alone an army. So the Rattler Fathermothers and 14 Wounded’s posse and the Harpy bloods and me and the other hotshots kept going through the night, carried in stages by bearers who’d collapse exhausted at the end of their stint and sleep in the side-scrub until the trail sweepers in the rear guard prodded them. The heralds ran ahead to tell potential converts to wait for us so they could help carry the leaders. Mao had the Long March, but if this one got that kind of press it was going to be known as the Fast March. Or the Scatterbrained Dash, or something.
But, incongruously, it had a festive side. Since there was no question of secrecy, Koh had dancers with royal blue-flame myrtle-berry torches swirling in snake-coils ahead and behind her three palanquins, so that from a distance we must have looked like a long trail of glowworms with a single turquoise-tinted chemical mutant in the center. I thought it was silly of her to mark her position. But Koh was surrounding herself more and more with the trappings of divinity in other ways too. She asked for her pledged followers to get special perks and rationing, as opposed to other people we had in our train, and after some hemming and hawing even 14 Wounded said okay. Up and down the line and up and down the social scale she was the main subject of conversation, people repeating themes she’d started herself. She’d used old stories about One Ocelot’s daughter to make herself seem like the fulfillment of a prophecy, the same way that, much later, the nations that Cortez co-opted would spread rumors that he was “fulfilling” a prophecy that hadn’t existed before.
From what I could tell, she played the rest of the Star-Rattler Society pretty well too. Each of the high-ranked members of her order, including the nine-skull epicene adders, of which Koh was one of nine, advised and took care of a troop of dependents, generally lesser clans and villages that had converted, but also some individuals and smaller families. And Koh never made an overt statement against any of them. She cultivated her seniors in the Sorority-only three of whom were with us anyway-and played down her separatism. She had to get a coalition together but also position herself as a new dispensation, a kind of popular outreach. Forty days ago, before the Last Fourth Sun, the majority of the Rattlers’ children hadn’t specifically been Koh’s own followers, or even much aware of her. But now, after the Pumas had attacked all of the Rattlers indiscriminately, Koh made it look like she was in charge of the resistance, and thousands more had come over to our side. Or her side.
Embarrassingly, I still hadn’t learned that much about the Star-Rattler’s children, who were a secretive lot, and even though I was considered adopted into it I hadn’t seen any of its rituals. When they’d appeared on their mul during the vigil it was as spectators of the Jaguar-Scorpions’ procedure, not as participants. But the religion, if you can call it that, really was an improvement on the old ancestor cults. It had a certain glorification of poverty and austerity, and not in the same way as the flesh-piercing tortures of the old ruling class. Although there was still plenty of that. It was more meditative and Theravada-ish, the kind of thing that would become the New Age bullshit I generally love to hate, but as I saw more of it I realized it was just another kind of human technology that drew on people’s fatalism in a different way, maybe even in a needed way. In the old clan hierarchies, someone from a dependent family would kill himself if his greatfathermother said to, because otherwise he and his children would be doomed to nearly everlasting agony. But people under the sign of the Rattler seemed more stoic, happier with the austerities of life and death, I guess because at least they got a smidgeon of respect and a better deal in the afterlives-not pie in the sky yet, but a promise of, at least, some goddamn rest.
Very few of the new lower-lineage converts ever saw Koh personally, but some of their leaders did, and from what I could tell they were impressed. They’d talk about how the Rattler’s Children foresaw things that other people couldn’t, how the great serpent’s venom could wash the cataracts out of their eyes. In order to keep the blood of their lineages alive through coming generations, each of the new apostles had a special charge to follow Lady Koh into the realms of the next suns. Her intimates had become a fanatically loyal core, and no matter how many more she wanted to attract, she followed Lenin’s dictum in advance, that a handful of committed souls is better than an army of unmotivated mercenaries.