And Koh naturally took to statecraft. She sent emissaries to all the main Orb Weaver and Caracara families, to some nonaffiliated clans, and even a few to disaffected cat families. Apparently her literacy had been a big deal in Teotihuacan, and one of her businesses had been having her scribes keep records and accounts for the less literate Teotihuacanob ruling families. She’d even been part of a project that was writing down Teotihuacanob history-which had been kept in picture and textile writing with oral supplementation and whatever-in the Teotihuacanob language written with a system of Chol characters, and she’d hung on to some of the manuscripts. Other rulers had already sent messengers asking for copies, and she had a whole three monkey clans-that is, calligraphers, who, impressively, were able to write with a tiny brush while they were swinging in sedan baskets-and she kept them all busy every day. In fact, since the histories had been rewritten to make Koh look good, I suppose you could even say that she was grinding out paper propaganda.
And maybe it would have an effect, I thought. Maybe things were less desperate than they felt. Maybe enough of the lowland clans would support us that we-except, wait a second, who were we? If “we” meant the leaders of the Rattler’s Children, maybe “we”’d do all right. But if “we” meant the Ball Brethren and the other traveling contingents of the Harpy clan-well, then “we” were going from being Koh’s saviors to being her guests. And around here it was a short step from “guest” to “hostage.” But that would change when we got to Ix, right? Maybe. Anyway, when we did get back, it wouldn’t hurt for me to have some pull with the Muhammadess of Mesoamerica. If we got back. If the Ixian Ocelots didn’t pick us off first. If Koh hadn’t gotten too uppity by then. If the Lord be willing and the cricks don’t rise. If, if, ifffff.
At the birth of the next sun there were still some fights going on ahead and behind the safeish central area reserved for us VIPs and the captive Scorpion-adders, who were trussed up in padded sleds. At least every twenty-score beats or so some gang from some third-rate cat family would rush one of the straggling groups in our train, like a cougar picking the sickest-looking bison out of the herd, and a few of our bloods would have to run forward or back to help drive them off. But we headed south on the main Caracara road, through the later Texcoco along the east edge of the great lake, passing thousands of other refugees, south and up into the highlands, toward what would later be Ciudad Oaxaca and was now called the Citadel of the Valley of Clouds and Steam.
(20)
What? Whoa. Off balance. And awake. I was awake.
My bearers were having trouble keeping me level. Rock me gently, for Chrissake, I thought.
I uncovered my eyes and squinted up at the rusty sky. There weren’t any stars or obvious change but somehow you could tell it was near dawn. I sat up. Someone was coming up alongside us. A runner.
“You over me, my elder brother 10 Red Skink Lizard?” my flanking guard asked, using my numbered code name. “Five Score and Two is coming, my elder brother.”
I rolled onto my side, steadying myself on the edge of the wicker pallet, and the guard nearly looked me in the eye and looked down. He wasn’t supposed to stare at VIPs. It was another beige dawn already and the wind was picking up. We were in a wide valley between five-rope-lengths-high mesas, bristling with tall hardwoods all recently killed by the changing water table. When a breeze came through, yellow leaves dropped off their branches as fast as those cards flying up when you’ve solved a hand of Freecell Solitaire.
Hun Xoc’s palanquin came back alongside the file and settled next to me, his bearers expertly turning in place and reversing direction so that he was running alongside. He looked princely reclining under his quilt. Fiddle-dee-dee, I thought. Wonder what the poor people are doing today.
“The whistlers have come back with word from our sun-eyed venerand, the quick of speech, our greatfather 2 Jeweled Skull,” he said in the Harpy House code-language. The “whistlers” were a Kaminaljyob mountain tribe with a tonal language that could be whistled or even played on flutes, and we used them as code talkers. They’d said that 18 Jog, 2JS’s nephew, was going to meet us in one of the last towns before the Third-Sunfolks’ Boneyard, as they called the Tehuantepecan salt flats. I asked how many suns away the flats were and he said three or four. 10 Red Skink Lizard will be painted and ready, I said. I didn’t even ask whether it was possible that the message was a fake from the Pumas or their relatives in Ix, the Ocelots. Communications was one thing the Harpy House did have their act together on. Before we’d left, Hun Xoc had memorized thousands of columns of word substitutions, and he and 2JS used each pair only once, so that a given word never meant the same thing again, kind of like a one-time pad. Every important message from us to 2JS and from 2JS to us was carried by at least four teams of covert runners, each on a different route, and one or two had probably been intercepted and interrogated. But no one could make anything out of a string of nonsense words, not even an NSA mainframe and certainly not the Ocelots, no matter how psychic they were.
Since that was the end of the formal conference Hun Xoc asked how I was and I said fine. Maybe you and I can kick a ball around sometime today, I said. He said that sounded fun. He had to go back and pass the news to 14 Wounded, who was leading the rear guard. He reversed his porters again and disappeared.
Well, this is still tapirshit, I thought. If any of these guys had their act even remotely together they’d get together and swear out a treaty and go back to peacefully exploiting their thralls. In fact, Koh and I had even discussed trying to reach some understanding with the feline clans-the Ixan Ocelots and Severed Right Hand’s Pumas and the Caracolian Jaguars and all the rest of them. Realitywise, there wasn’t any reason why they couldn’t.
Except that they just wouldn’t. All over Mesoamerica, the avian and feline lineages had always been at daggers. And they always would be. And the other clans-the Rattler’s pledges and the other families with totems that weren’t birds or cats-would always be making an alliance with one side and then with the other. These people were like any other mafias, they thrived on vendettas. It was part of their soup. They counted on fresh booty to keep them solvent. It was like Israel and the Muslim states, even their gods hated each other, despite their being the same.
And now, after the fall of Teotihuacan, both sides had absolutely nailed their colors to the masts. And as far as the independent parties went-I mean the Rattler’s pledges-well, even though both the feline and avian sides saw the Star Rattler cult as a threat to their hegemony, the Rattlers had been in bed with the Harpies for more than a b’aktun, and now there was just too much bad blood for us to even approach the felines. Koh had to support the Harpies right up through the moment the Harpies-gods willing-took control of Ix. And even then the Harpies wouldn’t kick the Ocelots out. Instead they’d blood themselves to the clan and become Ocelots themselves. The whole thing was cray-cray.
Still, if I wanted to get back to 2012, I’d have to go along with it. It was going to be up to me to build a whole tomb for myself, and set up the sarcophagus and mix up the jelly and lay out another set of lodestones and a hundred other things, and there wouldn’t be any way to do that on Harpy territory while the Harpies were under constant attack. Even if the Chocula team found my tomb in one of the Harpy catacombs instead of in the main Ocelot one where we’d planned to put it. Which I couldn’t count on. No, no, no. We simply had to take over the whole place. Even if it didn’t feel possible.