Of course, the subtext of all this was that 2JS was really asking us to relieve him, and hoping to win the battle with our help. 20 Blue Snail-a duckbill-mask-wearing underling who was 2JS’s best Sacrifice Game player, but who wasn’t even in Koh’s league, or even mine, lately-took some time comparing long lists of bloods and auxiliaries on both sides, but the gist was that 2JS and his pledged allies would have about forty percent the strength of 9 Fanged Hummingbird and the Ocelots. If our convoy got back to Ix in time, Koh’s forces would easily tip the balance. Then the other Raptor clans would step in and help 2JS, and the Ocelots would be recent history. 2JS would become at least the de facto k’alomte of Ix, maybe keeping 9 Fanged Hummingbird on as a puppet ruler. Maybe he’d even take over completely, although since the k’alomte always had to be a cat, to do that 2JS would have to get himself adopted into a feline clan.
At any rate, the Ixian branch of the Star Rattler cult would become Ix’s most powerful non-clan-based organization. Koh would set up shop near the Star-Rattler’s mul-which was in a good location in Ix, “downtown,” I guess you could say, but which currently wasn’t large and wasn’t very well funded-and 2JS would have to keep her and her followers happy. And one of her conditions would be that the ruling coalition would have to build my tomb, to my specifications. And if that got done in time, I could get the gel mixed up, get buried per the ROC specifications, and the next thing I knew I’d be back in the merrie olde twenty-first century with a headful of Sacrifice Game expertise and a revitalized Will to Power.
20 Blue Snail said even though the Ocelots had gotten the gossip from Teotihuacan about our role in wrecking the place, they still couldn’t disinvite us. We’d be welcome as clansmen of the Harpies. Delegates from both cat and raptor clans were coming from all the important cities of the highlands and lowlands. Even Severed Right Hand was officially invited, although since he was still only at Ka’an, near the coast, he’d be too far away. And for every official guest there’d be at least ten peripheral people arriving in Ix over the next few days, vendors, traders, smart oddsmakers and destitute addict gamblers, prostitutes, clowns, wandering families, whatever.
Finally, 20 Blue Snail said the buzz was that Koh’s Star-Rattler’s cult was growing “in four directions,” that is, all over the world, and that 2JS was interested in helping serve Star Rattler. Koh was impassive, of course. I couldn’t tell whether he was just flattering her. Then, as though it was an afterthought, he mentioned that the date of the ball game had been moved up two suns. He said it was for some astronomical reasons, but also that the Ocelots were behind it. Anyway, it gave us only eleven days to get to Ix.
There’s no way, I thought. The fastest marching rate for the whole army-even discounting the elders, the women, children, the sick, the dead, and the inessential baggage-couldn’t possibly be over a jornada, that is, about thirty miles per day, and we had over three hundred miles to go in eleven days. We could do it if we forced four or maybe even just three extra marches, but the line would get strung out and even the bloods would be exhausted when they entered Ix. I looked at Hun Xoc and Koh and could tell they were doing the same calculations. As far as I knew no group this size had ever moved that fast. We’d have to set a record.
Hun Xoc asked permission of the rest of the circle to speak in house code.
Everyone signaled that it was all right.
“The Lady Koh’s four hundred clans won’t make it,” Hun Xoc said.
“They’ll have to seek asylum somewhere else.”
Not true, 20 Blue Snail answered in the same language, Koh’s children can’t stay outcasts for much longer.
What he meant was that the main thing Koh needed was to stabilize her base. She might be able to afford to keep the cat clans as enemies for a while, but to do that she’d need to reach some sort of stable rapprochement with as many of the other international (to use the word loosely) ruling families as possible. As of now, she could count only the Fog lineage and the rest of 3 Talon’s aerial clans, and maybe the Ixian Harpies, as friends. Settling respectably in Ix as an invited clan leader-at least temporarily-would be her best chance.
I looked at him. You couldn’t read anything under the duckbill mask. I couldn’t stop thinking about how much he looked like one of the plates in this nineteenth-century book on the Maya by Stepanwald. I pretended to ease myself back and used the motion to sneak a look at Koh. I had the feeling she understood what 20 Blue Snail was saying, and that he was right.
They passed the speaking cup to Lady Koh.
She asked when we’d have our meeting with 2JS. I guess she didn’t want to deal with anyone but him and you couldn’t blame her.
He can’t come outside Ix to meet you, Hun Xoc said. From the way he said it I got the feeling 2JS was under polite house arrest. 20 Blue Snail said we wouldn’t all be able to talk when we got near the city, either, we’d be in a ceremonial procession and under constant observation. It was going to be like an inauguration or royal ball. For now, all we could do was accept the invitation and get there.
Then we need to get a few beats alone with him just before the hipball game, Koh said.
20 Blue Snail said he’d try. And if a fight breaks out, what then? he asked.
The Rattler’s children will support their host, Koh said.
The Ocelots won’t let all of your followers into the court district, Hun Xoc said. At most they’ll let in two or four hundred of the highest bloods. The rest will have to stay as close as possible outside and wait for our signal.
Koh signed that was good enough. We voted “agreed.”
(23)
You could have individual conversations in the “smoke,” the after part of the mat circle, when you were all just hanging around, not necessarily at your own position, and it was even considered polite to doze off. Sleeping’s a big part of bonding. It’s hard to describe the cozy factor of the huge foster family and my growing place in it. The clan definined who and what you were so strongly and so completely that, as naturally as F = ma, you’d be willing to die for it in a beat. It, and not you, was you. Anyway, at the southwest end of the round room, Hun Xoc, 1 Gila, and 2 Hand were getting their knee calluses massaged and drinking out of the balche pot through long bullrush straws. On the white side, I mean, the northeast side, near the little door, the two Rattler greatmothers were still sitting bolt up on their backrests and chatting together, smoking and weaving elaborate shrouds on little hip-strap looms. Coati was stirring the fire. The emissaries had already done their big leave-taking, so they wouldn’t have to go through it again, and Zero Porcupine Clown had taken them off to their own over-storm house with a bunch of the Rattler Clan’s sex workers and gamblers, a few of whom were also trained listeners and mnemonists, just in case they said anything. Koh had told the gamblers to let them win. Most of them would escort us to Ix, but a couple of runners were going to rush back to 2JS as soon as the storm let up. I was reclining on top of my two dressers and pets, and the younger brother was rubbing oil into my feet and ankles, which were still scabby from volcanic ash. I guess maybe that sounds a little odd. But it wasn’t in a sexual way. In fact, none of us were supposed to do any sex on the trip, even though the local chicks and dicks all wanted to service us godlings, because the adders said our semen trail would make it easier for Severed Right Hand’s hit squads to track us. I was just leaning on them because they were used to it and it was cold and I was entitled to the service. There was more touching in general around here, although if you touched someone you weren’t supposed to that was it for you. Supposedly Shang emperors used to sleep on mounds of people. Anyway I was just calming down enough to close my eyes when Koh kneed over to me. Her big quilted turquoise-blue manto was tied a little like a giant stiff bathrobe. My dressers propped me up into a more formal attitude. Koh settled into her position on the mat and unrolled another world-map version of the Sacrifice Game board, a less elaborate traveling model. On this one the central circle represented our own army or migration or whatever, and she piled stones in it representing how many different types of people we had, 62-score full bloods, 9-score sick or wounded bloods, 410-score scouts, dressers, and calligraphers, about 700-score converted men and roughly 1,202 score converted women and children, 812-score porters, 2,108-score thralls and captives, and over 3,500-score stragglers who really didn’t have any reason to be with us. Of course, the Star Rattler societies in other cities were revitalized by Koh’s success, and they were pledging tens of thousands of new converts, but until her chickens got here she wasn’t counting them.