Koh sort of slid out from under me and I sank prone on the olingo-skin cushions and looked at her. We were more or less in bed together and more or less alone in the twilight steam.
She started giggling and tied my hair back out of my face. As a rule, I can’t say the Maya were very cuddly, but there was definitely affection there. Although she didn’t seem into oral stuff. We messed around a little more and I was trying to get her to come again when she said she appreciated how I had a lot of different ideas but she thought she still basically preferred sex with women. She lay back and played with my penis, pulling the foreskin over it and then pushing it back. She said it reminded her of the ovipositor of one of her wasps because of the way it was striped. I bent down and tried kissing her again but it just wasn’t one of her tropes of demonstrating affection. Mouths around here were more for biting and chewing and getting yours near someone was like an attack. I said it was like when she’d put the drugs into my mouth seventy-four suns ago, but she still wasn’t into it. Cuddling was different too. I’d see something as a sexual preliminary and she would see it as juvenilizing. Like the way some people like baby talk and some people can’t stand it. I stroked her, though, from one nipple down to the next and back up the other side, over and over and as lightly as possible so that I was really just gliding over her almost nonexistent body hair, and she did like that. She sat up and started checking out my stump. I blew air over her to cool her.
I’d been thinking for a while about maybe getting Koh to come back with me. Back to my old overripe turn-of-the-century hood. I imagined myself bringing her around to meet the folks. Hey, dudes, this is my main squeeze, the Dragon Princess.
I asked her.
She laughed in a you-idiot way. She had dynasties to found and enemies to plunder and everything. Despite her natural curiosity she wasn’t even remotely intrigued by the notion of coming to Florida like an e-mail-order bride and trading in her growing rack of shrunken heads for Prada suits and publicity agents and dinners at the Delano. She’d seen a bit of the future and had decided it wasn’t much.
Which you couldn’t argue with, I thought. I’d been getting all bittersweet and misty and now I was starting to chuckle a bit myself. Watch the mood swings, I thought. Anyway, she was right. Anyway, even if I did get her in my casket with me I didn’t really know if it was even possible to upload her consciousness or whatever on the other end. You should have asked about that, you dwurk, I thought. And anyway, who was I going to get for a donor? Was I going to run around like some murdering body-snatcher preying on the innocent to keep my vampire bride alive, like she was Jessica Harper in some Dario Argento movie? Had I lost every last shred of decency?
I changed the subject.
“So may I ask,” I asked, “do these fingers work as well as the others?”
“Yes,” she said.
“Are they weaker?”
“A little weaker than their aunties,” she said, meaning her pinkies. “And they do hurt sometimes. This one doesn’t have a nail.” She wobbled the artificial or rather commissioned nail. It was sewn on through a piercing in the flesh below. I stretched and looked at the ceiling and held her ear. We’d hit one of those great natural pauses like it could have been anytime, anywhere.
“Chocolate and deer is the gift of this sun,” she said. It meant it had been a good day.
“Utz-utz,” I said. “Very good.”
“It’s time, now, though,” she said, using the word that meant “this very instant.”
I asked what she meant.
“I have to light the cooking stones,” she said. “Female orb weavers always eat their mates.”
(54)
I was a little freaked out, to say the least. I just sat there for two beats, and then eight, wondering whether to run for it. Although of course there wasn’t anywhere to go. Get outside to Hun Xoc? No, they’d be holding him too. My eye darted to the doorway. Koh’s nacom, an old skin-blackened Rattler sacrificer, was crouching in it with a long-handled flint knife.
Lunge forward. Grab Koh’s neck. Try to hold her as a hostage.
No. Won’t work either. They’ll pry me off her in two p’ip’ilob. She owns this place, I thought. I’ve had it. Serves me right for dealing with these fucking headhunters.
I looked back at Koh. Her look said it was all all right. Thanks a lot, I thought. The nacom kneed toward us. Four Rattler assistants came in behind him, lifted me up, and laid me over the little stone altar table in the center of the room, holding my arms and legs lightly, so that my back wouldn’t break. The nacom sprinkled purifying balche over me, said his little invocation, and touched his flint knife to my Adam’s apple, like he was lighting a fire with a long match. I felt an ultrasharp stone hook catching a fold of my skin and then drawing a long, nearly painless line down my chest. The nacom put the knife aside, put his unclean hand over my abdomen-dangerously close, but not quite defiling my skin-and lifted up a bright-red achiote tamale, sculpted into a stylized heart. He handed it to Koh. Shockingly-I guess it was part of her New Deal religion, showing that she was immune to the pollution of death-she broke off a piece of the crust and swallowed it. Evidently the Orb Weaver Sorority had toned down this part a bit since the even badder older days, back between the time when the Oceans Drank Atlantis and the rise of the sons of Aryas. Novelty baked goods, I thought. Yet another example of Koh’s terrific sense of humor. You never knew where you were with this chick. I leaned back, listening to my sweat and urine dripping on the stone floor. Koh was giggling a little bit. Laugh it up, I thought. She was always pulling stuff like that, riddles, gags, infantile practical jokes. Gullible me. Yuk, yuk.
The rattler ordinands moved me down onto a bobcat-fur-covered pallet and started washing me in three kinds of water and four kinds of sand, purifying me after sex and death and whatever.
I’ve got to have a talk with Koh Babe about this shit, I thought, it’s not funny and it’s wearing me down. A couple more brilliant moments like that and I’ll be the only white-haired aborigine between here and Iceland.
I guess she’s just testing me again, to see how cool I can be. Well, the SATs are over, sweetheart. I’ve been cool enough. I raised my head up on one arm, even though it wasn’t a pose anybody seemed to use around here. Another four-kid Rattler troop had crawled in with a human-size tray. It had a full-size corn-paste figurine of me, very cleverly done, all dressed in the exact same ceremonial clothes and ornaments with the same tats. I watched Koh undress the figurine and bite into the right hand and the cornflour-cake doll-face. Thank God there wasn’t any fake blood inside or anything. She pushed her finger down in its chest cavity, replaced what was left of the heart loaf, poured balche over the open wound, and sent the whole thing back out to the Orb Weaver Sorority feast table. Go for it, I thought. Take, eat, barf, whatever.
I looked over at Koh but she was supervising the damn ritual washing of her private parts. I sat, watching, breathing hard. They finished wiping me and started dressing me, again, this time in male clothes. Koh let her team sew her into a plain white huipil-which only the highest muckamucks got to wear-and then kneed over to the hearth-fire stones. She uncovered a jar of water and a jar of blue corn, soaking in water and lime. Good morning to you, too, I thought. Well, so, that was fun, how about brunch?
I sat patiently, getting worked on, like an actor being made up for a monster role, listening to that krik, krik, krik of the grinding stones. That sound really is like nothing else, I thought. Koh’s having to make symbolic tortillas seemed a little demeaning to me. Here, honey, I’ll do that. I’m a sensitive hubby. Don’t get dishpan hands. Oh, well. It was probably the last time she’d ever make them herself anyway. She wouldn’t have to do it six hours a day every day of her life, like the rest of the gals in this hemisphere.