On the Ocelot side, Emerald Feral Dog-the coach-was going to start Emerald Immanent-a giant, who must have been at least five six-and Emerald Howler-the one we called “Fat Monkey-Bitch”-as strikers. Their starting zonekeeper was going to be Emerald Snapper-“Fatter Monkey-Bitch”-and Emerald Screecher and Emerald Jog were the bench. Emerald Immanent was making not-quite obscene gestures up at the Harpy stands. I’m going to pop you, you fat fuck, I thought. Up in the stands the drivers were chasing away a vendor hung with gourds of hot honeyed and salted pine-tea and sweet cacao. A couple of independent bookies hopped acrobatically through the stands taking last-minute side bets on individual players. I checked my personal inventory, the same little pre-ball-game ritual I always did. I felt the weasel-gut cords holding my knee- and elbow-padding. I untied my main torso harness, loosened it slightly, and retied it. If it was too tight it could cut you. An insei came by with a charger full of rosin and ashes and I dipped my hands in it and spread it over my arms while he rosined my feet. From here I could see most of the Ocelots’ emerald mul past their end zone, and beyond that a bit of the eastward curve to the mainland, and above that and to the right a glimpse of the wall-and-platform complex that surrounded the Ocelots’ sacred Great Cistern.
Maybe it really could be done, I thought. Stranger things had happened. It’d be totally unexpected. Surprise. Surprise, like that Ana Vergara said. Surprise is your copilot I noticed everything had gone completely silent.
9 Fanged Hummingbird’s music started, a single giant flute, getting nearer and nearer. The crowd in the Ocelot stands parted and a tetrahedral box floated into the center of the stands on the shoulders of dwarf bearers. The box was covered with iridescent emerald-green hummingbird feathers, like something that had dropped from a Platonic heaven onto the shoulders of 9FH’s two attendants. He could see clearly through the screen, but to us on the sunlit side it looked as opaque as enameled metal. As they set the box on the mat-throne at the highest riser the shrill cheer-chord rose again, each side repeating its chorus over and over, off-rhythm with the other side, trying to drown them out: the Harpies chanting, “ Ch’ uchu’ b’aj, jab k’eseic k’uul, ch’ uchu’ b’aj, jab k’eseic k’uul, ” We shine up high, we tear off your jaws, we shine up high, we tear off your jaws, we shine up high, we tear off your jaws, and the Ocelots chanting, Chupa’yal bak, chuyu’baj tox, We flash bright-dark, we chew on your hearts. Down on the court we saluted him:
“You far over us,
Lord of the Razor,
You far over us,
Lord of the Javelin,
You far over us,
Closest to One Hurricane,
You far over us,
Dearest to Iztam Na,
You far over us,
Ruby-browed Captor of Eleven Wind of Motul,
You far over us,
Sun-eyed Captor of Sideways Coatimundi of Caracol,
You far over us,
Avenger of the capture of Sixteen Ocelot,
You far over us,
Retriever of the skull of Four Ocelot,
You far over us,
Captor of eighteen times four hundred bloods and sixty-one bloods,
You far over us,
Subjugator of twenty times twenty cities,
You far over us,
Lord of the Twice Four Hundred Cities,
You far over us,
Overlord of four hundred times four hundred towns,
You far over us,
Nine-Fold King of Sacrifices,
You far over us,
You out of range of our offerings,
You far over us,
You over the four hundred times four hundred times four hundred thralls under us,
You far over us,
You far over all those over us,
You far over us,
Earthquake-born, whose real name no one can guess,
You far over us,
Whose manifest name is 9 Fanged Hummingbird,
Deign you to look down over us,
Grant us your clear sight extending far, far over us, protecting us,
You, far over us,
Overlord,
9 Fanged Hummingbird.”
Then, as slowly as sufi dervishes, we spun around and around to salute the four directions, the two competing ahauob, the five great houses of Ix, all these visiting indignitaries, Lady Koh, the lords of the dawns and the lords of the dusks, and other notable guests from as far away as what’s now the southern shore of Lake Nicaragua. As Hun Xoc used to say, we practically saluted our own asses.
There was a blast from a tree-horn. The temple precinct sank into silence like debris settling after an explosion. The cantor launched into his megaphoned spiel,
“Now twenty, fifty-two, two-hundred sixty,” running through the litany of great exploits his generation of the greathouses of Ix had endured on this court, and encouraging the young players of today to try to match the skill and stony resolve of the players of old even though they’d be bound to fail and everything, on and on. I was only smoggily aware of it. The referees entered in their long feather robes, one from each corner of the court, censing the trench with their big twisted cigars. Their decisions were final and could be capricious, but they were all over seventy years old, without children, and serious about the hipball game as a sacrament. And they were all from a single presumably nonaffiliated monastic clan, and it would be almost but not quite unheard of for them to slant the calls toward one side, since their order’s survival had traditionally been dependent on its impartiality. Still, a corrupted individual could always have been planted a long time ago The cantor had finished his recitation. While you could still hear the outlying criers had finished repeating it the Master of Hipball-or Magister Ludi as we Glasperlenspiel fans might translate his title-announced the stakes.
“Four hundred score dependents each,” he said.
The main bet was always supposed to be chunchumuk, even money, but it was bartered out in a complicated and, I think, kind of artificial way. While he talked, punters and bookies in the audience were already holding up fingers asking for nine-to-two odds against the Harpies, which even I thought was on the long side. I remembered I’d forgotten to get my own bet in and then decided it wasn’t important. The Magister Ludi was about to finish when 2 Jeweled Skull’s herald’s drum sounded. The chanter let the herald take the floor.
The herald said that the Harpies asked to raise the stakes by wagering One Harpy. He meant our first mul and the temple-including the support or family membership or loyalty or service or whatever you’d call it-of One Harpy himself, the founder who’d brought such wealth to our clan over the last nine hundred and fifty-eight solar years. Basically everything we had, including our name.
The side betting stopped. There were a few murmurs in the silence. A crow cawed an alarm far off to the east. Bad sign.
The Ocelots took a few score beats to respond. When they did, their crier said they’d see the bet, but he didn’t stake the Ocelots’ mul and founder. Instead he put up what you could roughly call the equivalent, in loyalty, real estate, hunting and fishing rights, salt works, and slaves. It took forever to list everything, but it didn’t sound fair to me. Still, we accepted it.
There were another eighty beats of expectant silence. I couldn’t see 2 Jeweled Skull but he was probably conferring with his in-house bookies. Finally, he accepted.
The side odds went to seven to four and there was a whole new spate of what they called “hero bets,” durations and spreads on individual players. I figured that about half of the city’s entire year’s economy was going to redistribute based on this one match.
Two pairs of untouchables entered the trench. Each lifted a round-bottomed cylindrical jar of powdered pigment on long tongs and balanced it on the top head-plate of each of the square target pegs.
There were some very complicated rules to hipball, kind of like international ice hockey rules, with a lot of checks and balances in the scoring, but basically a hit on the other side’s target peg was worth a point, and a ball that came up over the top of the peg and either broke the pot or knocked pigment out of the pot scored four points. There weren’t any ring goals on this court, or for that matter on any other that I ever saw in the old days, although they eventually became famous because of the much later court at Chichen Itza, which of course became a tourist attraction in the twentieth century. Which supposedly they gave James Naismith the idea for basketball. Sometimes players practiced by knocking the ball through a big wooden hoop that they rolled on the ground. But using rings in the ball game itself must have started later. Anyway, the first side to score nineteen points won. But-weirdly, but maybe not coincidentally, almost like in modern Ping-Pong or tennis-you had to win by three points. And just like in those games you could go back to “deuce” indefinitely. If you faulted the ball over your own rear goal line, a point went to the other side. You didn’t switch sides. Each team had two substitute players, but that was it, and if more players got knocked out of the ball game it came down to last-man-standing.