The Sacrifice Game

The cantor came out and gestured for my sponsors and the girls to follow him in. Still, I stood for another twelve hundred beats. The dressers touched up my face paint and dusted me with a sort of blue-clay talcum powder. The beater kept thumping. How did he stand it? I wondered. He was just a human clock. He must be crazy. Come to think of it, professional beaters did tend to act a little odd. The girls gawked at us while, at the same time, trying not to look interested. Finally the cantor came out a third time and gestured for me to come in. I told one of my dressers to run and get the gifts, although if they were on the ball the porters would have already followed us here. I blood-walked alone through the gate into the little courtyard. The first person I recognized was 3 Talon, the Caracara father-mother and aerial-clan patriarch, whom I’d last seen on the burning mul at Teotihuacan. Since he was Koh’s godfather he stood to the left of the single door to the house. 1 Gila, who was taking the part of Koh’s “father,” stood on the right. Lady Vanilla Orchid, Koh’s mother-her real, biological mother, by the way, brought with On The Left, at some risk and expense from Kaminaljuyu-stood way to the left, near the girls, between the charmingly named Lady Creosote Bush, Koh’s sort of mother superior from the Caracara Clan’s Orb Weaver Sorority, and Lady Sourdough, who had kind of the same relationship to Koh in the Rattler Society. Two Rattler monkey scribes crouched on a single mat next to the north wall, ready to take down everything anyone said. The giggle of girls crowded against the south wall with their backs to us, which was considered their most respectful position. I have to admit, purdah systems do have a certain eroticism. When women seem like a totally different and inaccessible species they’re maybe more violently attractive.

There was a pair of Rattler-blood guards at each corner of the yard, and a lookout crouching on each corner of the wall above them. One of Koh’s hunchbacks unrolled a reed trading mat, about one rope-length square, and I squatted on its eastern threshold side, with my back to the gate to show that I didn’t have any enemies. I saluted everyone in order, first 1 Gila-calling him “father”-and then my own so-called father, 4 Wren, and then this wife of his who was playing my mother, and finally Koh’s mother. I’m using the word salute, but really there were dozens of different sign-greetings, everything from banging your nose on the ground and licking the dirt to just stiffening up a little, and which one to use depended on who you were and whom you were talking to. Then there was a little interminable speech I had to say and a triply interminable speech back from each of them. Basically I just said, “Hi, my name’s 9 Wax, I’m not worthy,” and they said, “Hi, yeah, we know.”

My porters trooped in behind me ahead of cue. One of them stood behind me, holding a tall capped jar with my preserved leg inside, just to show that no enemy had gotten it and I was still, officially, a whole person. The head bearer laid three big balls of fresh highland jade, all ready to be worked, in the center of the mat. She stepped back as the other porters started laying baskets around the stones in radial arms, and then followed after them, counterclockwise around the mat, lifting off the close-woven lids. She started with the dishes in front of me, clusters of popped amaranth seeds held together by bright red achiote syrup and molded into Chak figurines, coiled strings of an especially rare kind of tiny chili pepper that supposedly made you bear male children, red manioc wafers and roasted mamey sapote, sweet potato meat sculpted into rabbits and parrots like baroque marzipan, and finally a vat of powdered cochineal extracted from what I figured must have been around two and a half billion cactus-scale Dactylopiae.

(50)

The server moved right, counterclockwise, and opened dishes of transparent-white luxury cornflower cakes like communion wafers, stacks of creamy-looking squash-seed pralines, and a set of four twenty-pound blocks of pure highland-spring salt carved into statuettes of the dwarf year-bearers, and, in a big bundle with claws and a head, the skin of a pure white bear from God knows how far north. Meanwhile the toastmaster launched into his speech on my behalf. It was a set form personalized for the occasion. First he went through all the work I’d supposedly done for Koh’s “parents.” Ordinarily, if you were from, say, a middle caste, you might have to help them with stuff for years, if you wanted to get a desirable wife out of them. But I’d basically gotten all that waived based on the heroic services I’d performed, “rescuing” her from Teotihuacan and wi

There were only two more presents to go. The first was my own idea, one I’d had made so that she could be surprised by at least one thing, not that gifts around here were supposed to be surprises. I unrolled its case and laid it next to the hearth-fire stones myself. It looked like an ordinary ironwood hand flute, but it was actually chromatic, with six-hole transverse fingering and pitched to D, instead of to the double-pentatonic minor scale they used around here. I’d started the project a hundred and twenty-six days ago, the day Koh introduced me to my severed leg, and it had taken until now to get it tuned and to the flautist to play it. I’d adapted the fingering to the Teotihuacanob style, so she could deal with it, but it would still put out scales no one here had ever heard before.

The last item was definitely a not-least. With an air of finality, the head bearer laid three accordion-folding tribute books across the cold hearth-fire stones. Each book was bound in plucked eagle skin and filled with tribute lists and coded maps representing rights to a hundred and eighteen villages and thousands of acres of Harpy farmlands. They were the only really serious part of the bride-price.