Eight hundred beats later we reemerged from the house dressed as the joint heads of our united clans. We could hear a crowd outside the gate, mainly kids and festivalgoers from the dependent clans-that is, the closest thing to a middle class-getting free food from the overflow of the wedding. They were giggling and everything but a little awed to be on the peninsula. The whole holy district was off-limits most of the time, but welcoming now.
We formed up in the courtyard, getting ourselves together, Koh and I in the center of the wedding party, with all of us surrounded by Rattler guards with big round shields of iridescent blue-green trogon feathers. The attendants moved the food aside and started packing it up for incineration. We listened. These guys had better be on cue, I thought, but before I’d finished the thought, I picked out that unique roar far away. A nonet of Ocelot musicians, playing the Ixian peace song on long boxwood horns, were coming up on the crowd from the southwest, from the direction of the great zocalo.
On The Left stepped out through the gate, leading two porters carrying the oracle box. It was an arm-span square and pearl-white, woven out of the stripped shafts of egret feathers. The person inside it was, supposedly, a hundred and sixty years old. But of course that was hype.
We heard the guards on the outside making a space for him in the center of the crowd. The horns came around the council house. Plaster walls buzzed in the roar. I imagined the crowds drawing back and doing their varieties of dirt-eating moves as the Ocelot procession came through.
Our band blasted out our entrance chord. The cantor gave his little speech of welcome and the screen of guards fell back, and the twenty of us, Koh and Hun Xoc and the Gilas and our flanking retainers, were all suddenly visible to all these people, real people, like, let’s meet the public.
Na’at ba’al, the cantor said, relayed through his megaphones. The crowd yelled back its welcoming response, somewhere between a reedy cheer and a chant.
I felt all exposed. It had been a while. On The Left asked the crowd if they were ready and they answered that they were. The tone of the expression was something like “Yes, thank you, what are you going to do for us next?”
I tried to listen for signs of trouble in the chord but I couldn’t get any. Koh had had thousands of Rattler families adopted by other clans, so they were interspersed through the crowd, and the others were going along. And at least half the remaining clans really were crazy about us, they thought I was literally the gods’ gift. It was really only the Macaws and Snufflers we had to worry about. And any recidivist Ocelots. Well, at least, no matter how resentful any of them were, they weren’t showing it. They were going along with the shills.
What was our danger quotient on this? Like they used to say, oaths sworn at spearpoint were always worth a little less. I wished we could have controlled better who was coming into the temple district. Normally only people belonging to one of the clan temples on the peninsula would think of coming here. And every family had its spot, so you sort of knew who you were getting. Any group of infiltrators would have been spotted by the people they were trying to stand with.
And Koh’s guards and their guides-that is, local people who helped them recognize other local people-had been out around the clock, ever since the battle, turning the place into a police state. But still, you couldn’t search everybody, or even recognize everybody. The main thing to do with something like this was just for us to keep isolated, stay out of any conceivable kind of projectile range, and then get the hell out before people got too drunk.
The chief herald blew his special trumpet for the first time. It was a long whine like a giant router with a two-inch bit, air raid, ground raid, water raid, ascending into a long squeak like an ulna whistle, and then there was nothing.
(55)
Just a few more little tests, I thought. Testlets. Testes. Just quizes, really. Before the Human Game, anyway. That would be the real test.
I waited. The crowd waited. And I was sure the sun waited, and that the semidomesticated flock of scarlet macaws that had been circling around their nest niches on the Macaw clan’s mul were now hanging motionless in the air, but of course that was one of those chronopathological brain spikes I’d been getting lately. The silence before had been really a rustling, breathy silence, but this silence was nearly absolute, just a hint of breeze and the eternal beat pulsing in my syncopated ears. Then there was a static apogee moment when the silence maybe sounds like rustlings that might just be ancient sounds, from long-gone b’aktuns, still echoing through the canyons, and then a point when that suspicion of sound had definitely become rustlings and making-readies, something dressing itself over a subacoustic drone. The drone sank into the subsonic hum of long, long approaches, something getting bigger and bigger until you can’t believe its size, Plutonian barges and giant coal-burning trains dopplering through perpetual fog.
At first it was obviously coming out of the citadel at the top of the mul, but it was picked up and echoed and reechoed above and below, the echoes anticipating each other too fast for sound, either too clearly from too far away or too diffuse from much too close, the space way out of joint, and then it all petered out into a crackle of gibbering from the oracle in the box.
There was still a test I had to pass before I could play the human-piece Sacrifice Game. Get ready, I thought. I’d trained for this to the point where I was sure I could do it backward, but even so Cancel that. Don’t think fail thoughts. Just don’t screw up.
“One Ocelot may show himself, he says,” the interpreter said,
“When he learns what happened to the bloods who came
And fed him over this k’atun, who claimed
His rights and titles. Where have they all gone?”
On The Left answered:
“Those bloods abandoned him,” he said. “They lied
When they said 9 Fanged Hummingbird would be here now;
They ran off under thorn trees, under bushes.
Tell Ocelot, ‘Look down on us and see
What’s happened,’ and we’ll show him, and we’ll wait
For his response, his judgment, we attend.”
There was a crash on a rack of clay bells as the clowns entered out of the council house and poured down the steps, pretending to slip and fall and roll in their padded parodies of the bacabs’ vestments. The crowd broke into a sea of relieved laughter. At least they did laugh a lot around here, I thought, whatever else they did. Koh’s Porcupine Clown, the one I’d seen in Teotihuacan, bounced out of the ahauob’s entrance and tumbled down the stairs in a ball, crashing into a table of ale pots and coming up out of the splinters and foam with one of them on his head like a top hat. He rolled a long way in his ball, his feather suit collapsing, and then sprang up and staggered around, blindly bumping into people, blinking under his bandit-banded makeup. People were collapsing from laughing. By this time the invisibles had cleared a Sacrifice Game-gridded square in the center of the zocalo, and the actor personifying me spun out into the green center uncoiling a long geranium-flowered umbilical ribbon. He was covered in red wrappings with down tufts to show that he was still a baby, and his big mask was a 3-D version of my head glyph, or what you might call the logogram of my name, not anything that resembled me personally. Actors strutted out personifying 9 Fanged Hummingbird and 4 Orange Skull-that is, 9 Fanged Hummingbird’s elder brother, who died in the fifteenth yellow k’atun, AD 726, before 9 Fanged Hummingbird took the mat. They all paraded once around the square. The 9 Fanged Hummingbird giant crept up on 4 Orange Skull from behind and chopped off his lime-gessoed wicker head. Can’t he just do something classy, like drizzle poison in his ear? I wondered.