And that was about it. But I was already feeling the mute gods of the source animals were seeping into my mind and I was seeing through the toads’ eyes, remembering what they remembered, feeling myself metamorphose from a spore-speck-sized egg to a quarter-fingerwidth tadpole and then to a legged tadpole and to a complete, eye-lidded, fingered-and-toed toad the size of a water drop, and then to a toad two thousand times that size, looming over a pebble of red gravel that three days ago had been as big to me as El Capitan. I felt myself growing out of a near-zero-G world of surface tension and static and currents of honey-air into a thin-atmosphered high-gravity planet where the muscles in my body were all about springing against gravity, out of a wet world where I could easily grow and grow just by eating thousands of my hundreds of thousands of brothers and sisters, into this arid place where I had to pick off bony sharp flies as they zetsed away from me like little flying tamales “Now don your father-no-more,” Mask said, “and let the Lords
Take you for him, and capture you, and if
They recognize you, slip him off; and let them
Regurgitate you into Xibalba River
And swim for our nets, and let us fish you up.”
They unwrapped 2 Jeweled Skull’s body. It was all puffed up and jiggly. Mask opened the stomach with a Jester flint and took out the liver. There was a tumorized abscess on it in the same place his son’s had been, but it was bigger, a grapefruit-sized mass of dead flukes and black necroses like devilish sandwich spread. Mask started trying to tell me what a bad sign it was and that I should call the whole thing but I cut him off and said I knew it was bad and that we were going ahead.
So, reluctantly, he washed and flayed the body. Getting a skin off a person in one piece is a tricky thing, but an old person’s skin separates more easily, and 2JS had been force-fed corn mush under Koh-so that he’d taste better-and then recently, of course, he’d lost weight, so it didn’t take forever. When the skin was off and his acolytes were cleaning and sewing and soaking it, Mask cut off 2JS’s earlobes and filleted a strip of muscle off his right flank and dropped them in a pot of hot broth. The attendants finished oiling and spicing. Mask recited another litany in time with the chant and they fed me into the skin. It was all moist with lymph and fat inside and under the spices it smelled like fear-sweat and venom, but as I got into it, it got better, and even, oddly refreshing. Hun Xoc helped my bamboo leg over the hump of the knee down into the foot. By the time they closed the torso over my chest my own skin was expecting it with that tingling like first putting on clothes in the morning, and as they sewed it over me it felt like a big tongue coiling around me and then finally like a mouth holding me, a mother jaguar carrying her cub. Skin held the real essence. Everyone was about the same inside. Even animals were the same inside. But the skin was like a book, a bible-biography of the owner. They pulled his scalp up behind my neck and rolled the cowl of his face down over mine. It was all expertly done, with the nose still intact, remounted over cloth on the inside, and as I opened my eye and looked out through 2JS’s eyelids I thought I got a flash of memory of the ball game, except I was up on the reviewing stand, looking down at Chacal. I, or rather Chacal, looked vicious and insane. They rerobed me over the skin in a fresh plain white cape of the ahau of ahaus. And my bearers helped me off the altar and supported me, onward and downward.
They helped me crawl into the fifth passage, their hands slipping against my double skin, and squeezed after me one by one. We came out into a dry gallery at the old water table that opened laterally into a forest of pillars. I took over and led again, leaning on my halberd. Farther on the roof rose up. You couldn’t see much in the torchlight, but you could make out the columns separating into stalagmite/stalactite pairs, first just about to link and then thousands of years away from linking. The ridged path, cut centuries before, ran under clumps of helictites like twisty icicles just budding on the arches overhead and threaded between bulbous stalagmites sparkling pink and yellow in the bacterialess air. We were definitely out of amphibian territory and into the mineral world. No newts is good. We threaded through honeycombed bowels in almost four-dimensional convolutions of knotted tubes, impossible to visualize, over thousands of maimed stalactites lying in sections like logs in a jam. At some point I felt some kind of thrum filtering through the stone and my perspective kind of flipped, I realized the place wasn’t lifeless at all, we were almost lifeless by comparison.
The path sloped off again down an organ-pipe cliff and my bearers formed a chain and handed me down to a sediment bed near the current water table. A high wall of milky crystal bulged ahead of us like it was breathing, taking decades between breaths, and we edged behind it through a one-drip-at-a-time waterfall and out a narrow vertical fissure into a big space. My shadow grew in front of me and then shrunk again as the bearers came through. I turned and looked around, but the torchlight only lit an oval of the high fluted wall we’d come through and a half-circle in the silver sand around us, and everything else was black. I stood and waited. There was something unsettling about the sound of the cantors and pipers coming through. The echoes were coming back too late.
Evidently the room was a lot more huge than I’d thought it could be. We waited until finally everyone formed up. I signaled. The dirge slid into its ending stave and faded away. Finally the echoes faded too. I signaled again and the bearers stuck their torches headfirst in the sand and they sputtered out. Shedding more artificial light than you had to in the halls of the night was just begging for trouble. At first the darkness was total, like what I’d had in my blind eye, just before it became nothing at all. But we waited, and eventually we could at least see our silhouettes against the green chemoluminescence sweating from the walls.
Mask came up beside me and steered me down a long, long gentle slope, my foot feeling its way over the ridges and my snake-leg stumping along, and we twisted through narrownesses and vastnesses of spiraling alabaster walls. From the tone of our foot-scrunches the spaces seemed to be growing larger and larger, as though we were following the air tube of a chambered nautilus. Build me more stately mansions, O my soul.
Finally we edged into a dark cleft in the glow and out through into a deep vaulted sound-dissipating cavern like a black stadium, bigger than I would have thought any cave could be. The ridges vanished under rough sand but Mask kept steering me forward and down, toward a faint nebula of clear light-spicules, not quite moving but still different from stone somehow, and then the sparkles resolved themselves into reflections on liquid. Mask guided my hand to a treelike shadow and when I touched the smooth scalloped stone the procession stopped.