As I think I mentioned, as far as anyone knew, this was going to be the first City Game since the one played in Teotihuacan k’atuns before. And given the way the art was dying out, this might turn out to be the last one anywhere. This Game was supposed to be a public demonstration of my ability to read the future, but it would really be Lady Koh who was doing the seeing, and she and I would be playing for our own reasons. And, if all went well, nobody else would find out the farthest-off or the most important things we’d see. We’d throw them a few solid predictions about the next few k’atuns, and keep the rest to ourselves.
Koh lit one of her green cigars-the kind with chili and chocolate threaded through the tobacco-took a hit, and passed it to me. I puffed. She started the invocation. As I think I started to say at some point and then lost track of, it was in the old heavily metaphorical adders’ dialect, and-especially in a heavily accented language like English-it’s hard to get a sense of the swing, which it don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got. So I’ll make this a bit closer than a paraphrase, but less than a translation. Okay, Jedketeers? Right. Here we go:
Koh:
“You, Hurricane, who sparked Lord Heat’s first dawning,
You over us who foreknows his final dying,
You, sun-eyed coiler of the blue-green basin,
You, jade-skinned carver of the turquoise cistern,
You, there, whose hissing javelins strike wildfires,
Deign to respond to us from out your whirlwind.”
Koh looked up, not at my eyes, but at the emerald-green mask of One Ocelot on my pectoral sash. I hesitated, cleared my throat, and launched into my first response.
Jed:
“We who are only dust motes in the whirlwind,
We, born at sun’s fall and gone before its dawning,
Who will be waiting for us by the hearth fire?
Whose hands will polish our bones beyond our dying?
Will our skulls just bounce on the floor of the fresh-sea cistern?
Will the potters rebake the shards of our shattered basins?”
Ahau-na Koh:
“You, Cyclone, grant us a perch below the basin
But over the clouds, above the wrecking whirlwinds:
An overlook above the fourfold cistern
Where we can scatter the seeds of coming dawnings
Where we can count their growings and their dyings
Where we can spot young floods and fresh-sparked fires.”
Jed:
“Where we can warn our heirs of nearing fires,
Where we can feel the first cracks in the basin
And cradle our lineage and forestall its dying,
Where we can hear them crying in the whirlwind,
Where the entire talley of their dawnings
Reads full and clear, above the yawning cistern.”
Ahau-na Koh:
“You at the center of the turquoise cistern
Show us the gold southwest fires,
Let us see redward, through the sierra of dawning,
Southeast to where the horizon meets the basin.
Guide us northeasterly through the bone-dust whirlwinds,
And even northwest, through the soot-black dunes of dying.”
Jed:
“So that in ages far beyond our dying
Our daughters can still pour offerings in your cistern,
Our sons can still feed blood-smoke to your whirlwinds,
Our thralls will always tend your altar fires,
Pouring you chocolate from brimful basins
Through all the days undawned but now soon dawning.”
Ahau-na Koh:
“Dawning we bake our bodies and smash them dying.”
Jed:
“We shatter our basins and drown them in your cistern,
And snuff our last fires to steam, to slake you, Whirlwind.”
Koh scattered the seeds and whispered their position to the cantor. He called them out and the human pieces took their places. She waited five beats.
She made her first move.
(61)
“One death, one wind, four thought, sixteen, nineteen,”
Koh said, immediately giving the last date from the Teotihuacan City Game. She’d basically just skipped ahead about four hundred solar years, to Gregorian 1225. I’d thought she’d guide the adders to it, ease them into it a bit, but maybe she wanted to see if they knew what they were doing. The nine clumps of adders broke up and shifted somehow and for a beat the plaza seemed like just a jumble, like the human crystals had just dissolved in solution, and then they coalesced into a new octalinear pattern, and melted again and lined up again. Even though I was expecting something like it I was totally taken aback. It was definitely like something. Not anything biological, something from physics or technology, I don’t know what, maybe like hundreds of those Pac-Mannish magnetic polarities coursing through the domains of a synthetic-garnet bubble-memory chip. What was actually happening was each adder was walking forward, on the beat, out onto the lines separating the points of the grid, the interstices interspersed between the intersections, earth-marching from his old position to a new one determined by his individual count of the days and cycles, which in turn were all different because each person represented a different cycle that he counted on his sticks or his drum, and each person’s cycle was a unique mathematical progression that ignored some beats and, say, triple-counted others, and then redirected his progression based on the people he intersected in his nonrandom walk. On a human scale the movements had similarities to reconstructions I’d seen of Renaissance minuets, and there was a flavor of Gujarat stick-dancing, or like I said, the morris dance. But even if it was dancelike it was so obviously not just for effect, they were all really doing something. Or building something. They stopped.
Two evaders had been taken out in the shuffle-that is, intersected with and caught by a catcher- but they didn’t kill them since it wasn’t necessary yet, they still weren’t really counting ahead. The pair just slunk off don’t-notice-me-ishly through the forest of erect catchers, as neatly arranged in their staggered ranks as North Korean parade soldiers.
“Now wait,” Koh said, her herald repeating. “Now
He goes on seething, now she’s resting, breathing.”
She meant they were supposed to hang out where they were for a beat. The catchers looked impatient, gesturing at the remaining evaders like they were trying to grab them from a distance. I would have thought it was insubordinate, but it really meant they were already trancing into their roles. Koh’s attendant set her Game board on the table, and positioned a close-weave basket and little brazier on the mat just upstage of it. Koh undid the knots and uncovered the board. From where we were sitting the cleared Game-zone in the zocalo below us and the board in front of us both seemed about the same size, like if you had two eyes you could look at one out of each eye and focus them together to get a stereo view. The attendants descended onto the apron beneath us and spread out to the edges, so that no one would be so high as Koh and I. Unless you counted the old trog-in-the-box.
Alligator Root must have signaled the drummers at the first sight of the flame, because in unison they launched into double time.
“First runner, move to fourteen Night,” Koh said.
I moved it. My role in this thing was actually pretty mechanical. I was just supposed to translate the positions of the human pieces onto Koh’s board and wait for her move. “You can’t keep track of all the strains,” Koh had said at some point, I forget when. “You need someone to hold them down.”
Alligator Root called the move out to the zocalo. The runner with the red streamer walked circuitously to his new position. The colors were going Disney on me, like the ninestrips of Technicolor they used in the Bahia sequence in The Three Caballeros. About thirty-one thousand, four hundred and twenty people on the peninsula, I thought, and then I realized I’d guessed the number by counting the people in a small section of zocalo and multiplying it out, and it had taken me less than a beat. I felt like I could count a swarm of a million-plus bats coming out of a cave. Not even. I could instantly count a swarm of midges floating up out of a dead whale by counting the legs and dividing by six. Just for the hell of it I made up a couple of integrations, did them in my head, and checked them. Right on. My Jedman powers were coming back. I could see the parabolas like they were giant intersecting towers of Lego bricks, warm colors for even numbers, cold for odd, metallic for prime.