Foolishly, I looked up. It was only a few four-hundred-beats after noon, and, to boot, the sky was still overcast with smoke from the wildfire, but even so I thought I could see the Rattler’s body, the Ecliptic, sidewinding across the sky’s ninth shell.
Everybody’s probably heard the folk unwisdom about how you can tell how many years old a rattlesnake is by counting its rattles. And most folks now probably know that of course this isn’t true, because although they do gain, roughly, one rattle each time they slough their skin, the little suckers don’t necessarily shed only once a year. Anyway, the tzab, that is, the Rattler’s rattles, were the seven stars of the Pleiades cluster. Koh meant it would gain a new rattle, a new star, just before the end date.
It sounded unlikely. From what I could recall, there were a few possible protostars in the nebulae surrounding the formation, but nothing that made astronomers think there’d be an eighth Pleiade any time soon. Or, rather, that one would have been born around, say, AD 1500, when the light that would strike the Earth in 2012 left the cluster. As to the two heads parting destines, I had no idea what she meant by that. Sometimes Star Rattler was depicted with two heads, not like that poor two-headed fer-de-lance they’d had at the Hogle Zoo, but with at one on each end. That’s the way it was on the double-headed serpent scepter, the one 9 Fanged Hummingbird carried on state occasions. Maybe she just meant there’d be a big saddle point on that day, something to make a decision about. But we knew that already. There had to be more to it than that. I started to ask her to clarify, but she waved me off. “That’s all,” she said. She stretched out her bare light arm and swept the stones off the board. Game over.
“Thanks to you over me,” I said. “And-”
“One more thing,” she said. “It’s someone you know of, but whose face you’ve never seen.”
(25)
That was all.
Well, fine. Now, what the bleeding hell did she mean?
We tried again and again, of course, and then, when the tsam lic had worn off, we went over and over the game. Night fell, or maybe just happened. Koh’s shall-we-say praetorian guard prowled around us with increasing impatience and eventually with real alarm, begging us to rejoin the army. Finally she got me to admit that I accepted it, that is, that I accepted the fact that everything I’d done up until now had been useless, that the notes and the jars of tsam lic and the Lodestone Cross burial and all that I’d been so pathetically proud of wouldn’t stop the real doomster, and that if we wanted to work out who the doomster was, or how to stop him, or anything more specific than what we’d just seen, we’d have to play the Sacrifice Game on a vastly larger scale. A human game, specifically. And if that didn’t work I’d have to get my brain back to the twenty-first century in relatively good condition. Either way, we’d have to get back to Ix.
Sometimes-at times like this, I’d say, especially-one might as well just go with the cliche: I was crushed. Yes, it’d be nice to come up with a more clever word than crushed, but really, why bother? Crushed pretty well does the job.
What surprised even me, though, was how much I wasn’t crushed just because I was a lazy slob and I’d thought I could relax. It was that I-even I-was rather annoyed, in fact more than annoyed, in fact, let’s say again, crushed-that the world was still doomed. And I even realized that I cared about it in the general sense, not just personally, that even if I died back here from my neuroblastomas or in a ball game or by the flint dagger or the wooden sword or whatever, even if I didn’t get back to the thirteenth b’aktun to see Marena and the gang and catch the next season of Game of Thrones, I still wanted the good old crazy ratty loathsome ridiculous old world to keep rolling on.
Okay. Look. We can do this, I thought. We’re young, we still have a lot of our health left, we’re capable, we know more stuff than anybody else in the whole world. Just go with the best bet. Get to Ix and help 2JS get put in charge of the place. And in return he’ll help us get together a human game. No sweat. Right?
Wrong. Oh, God are we fucked. We are so very fucked. Royally fucked we fucking very are Cancel that. Buck up. Man up. Gird your loins into the sticking place. Forward, crawl.
At the Isthmus of Tehuantepec we turned yelloward off the commercial track and onto a single-file path through what they called the Protectorship of the Brown Ants. It was the floor of a Devonian sea, coarse calcium sand made of diatoms and crinoid stems and the scales of ancient armored fish. The dunes gave evidence of nocturnal use, musky ropes of fox scat and the parallel-gash tracks of sidewinders, but daylight was dead. Sometimes we’d pass a lump of armadillos, poking around like big sow bugs and licking ants off crumbled lobes of brain coral. Supposedly some of the convert-bloods behind us complained that we were leading them into Kikilbaj, what the Aztecs would later call Miclantechutli, the desert graveyard at the zeroth world’s ragged edge. They kept flipping out about the celestial Puma and Jaguars who were supposedly spying on us, and they were constantly doing all sorts of pathetic little rituals, combinations of bribes, apologies, foster adoptions, and threats. In the unfashionable rear of the now seemingly endless procession, families were offering their younger children to the lords of their hearth fires, making them swallow ashes or ramming hot stones into their eyes.
Another Puma band hit us again that night and we lost four bloods, fifty porters, and three or four hundred thralls. It was only the worst in a long and repetitious string of attacks. Things weren’t going well. At dawn Hun Xoc, speaking for Lady Koh, called a war session. There weren’t many good ideas. Finally 1 Gila suggested we split the forces in two. 1 Gila would take the main body-Koh’s “Four Hundred families” of converts-and would continue southeast along this route. They’d take our palanquins and standards and some of our dressers, so that they could put together look-alikes of me and Hun Xoc. The rest of us, the Harpy bloods, 14 Wounded’s group, and Koh’s officers, greatmothers, and “capturing bloods,” would get rid of our markings and detour southwest, heading the long way down the coast in a much smaller elite unit. Hun Xoc and his squad would stay with us to escort us to Ix, and the other ten emissaries and runners would go with the Four Hundred families. Severed Right Hand’s men would almost certainly follow the bigger group.
It sounded like the right thing tactically but it was a cold move. The untrained converts would be way out in the breeze drawing fire. Koh might be sacrificing half her converts. On the other hand, there were a hundred and sixty score of them now. Even if only eighty thousand made it to Ix they’d be enough to tip the scale of the battle in 2JS’s favor.
Anyway, Koh eventually agreed and 1 Gila’s plan carried the day. At one point Hun Xoc took me aside and said he was a little nervous that 1 Gila would just take off and not make it to Ix at all, but after kicking it around for a while we decided that really they had nowhere else to go. They were marked outcasts far from their now-nonexistent homes, and at this point they’d either get to Ix in a hurry or get eaten. And some of them would get through. We worked out routes that would get both of us into Ix at the same time: The big army would take the direct route to Ix, marching in daylight, and we’d have to hustle around the long way at night.
I functioned. I sat on the strategy committee. I advised Koh. I played a running hipball game whenever the army passed a usable court, and then, as I slept, my bearers ran me to the next court. And I got some of my skills back, nothing like what I’d been as Chacal, but still not bad. But it happened in this smog of despair, that feeling like you’ve suddenly realized that the world is constructed entirely out of damp corrugated cardboard, and of no further interest because, no matter how elaborately and even artistically you cut, fold, paint, and arrange it, damp cardboard is still just damp cardboard. Only, this time it wasn’t just in my mind, it was really the case, the world was going to wink out just as it would be getting interesting. Even though I was way back here, that is, “back” here, in 664, it felt as though the end was going to come tomorrow, later today, in an hour, in a minute, before the end of this sentence, now-and really, in terms of historical time, let alone geological time, it was only an instant away. Oh hell, oh hell, oh hell, oh hell.