The Sacrifice Game

I swung again, much harder, and I nearly jumped or rather hopped, it was like I’d dropped a shipping container of lead ore into a water drum the size of a grain elevator, but I got it together and finished the phrase with two more cracks lower down. Like Mask had said, the melody came out, that interrogatory theme without a reply. So far. It was like the stone organ was naturally tuned to a five-note scale. I was shivering a little at the end, no matter what I told myself I couldn’t help feeling I was stirring up larger sounds somewhere else, it was all just that impending Doric strapping-on-the-armor feeling. We waited but the sound didn’t end, multivalent echoes came back upside down and self-amplifying cobalt-purple waves reverberated through the Toad’s sinuses and it was just really bumming me out, actually, and then I realized Mask was chanting again:

“We are the white snake wriggling in the swampfire,

We are the red snake throbbing in the fart place…”

It was like a whisper gallery down here, all he had to do was speak normally and it came back like Paul Robeson singing Odin.

“He dives into our fathermother’s womb,

Accept him into your own hall, your court,

Your root, your time, your garden, your own skin-”

I walked forward with my hand on Hun Xoc’s shoulder. My meat toe felt glacial water and recoiled. I could sense it was flowing west. They laid my mat and I sat down, my bags of offerings at my sides. Behind me the Adders had gotten the doped-up jaguar and the fourteen-year-old blood out of their swaddles and were trying to revive them. I just sat and looked out over the water. My mental color-wheel had shifted again, past the normal spectrum into other wavelengths where I could see an extra band of heat past infrared and two of ultra-ultra-ultraviolets, which is the definition of something indescribable, I guess, since each different color is something more irreducibly different from any other than any other two things are different from each other. I could see new veins in the rocks and clouds of fear rising off the attendants. I could see infection smoldering in Hun Xoc’s pruned arms and EEG fields rippling around his brain. I could see the pressure of the air on the stone like electric potentials, with the zero lines ru

Starts

Kiiiiiii-cking in…

On one level I was aware that behind me they were purifying the two offerings, killing them, and laying them out, but it all seemed like it was happening in some other time, on video, maybe. I felt a sear of pain in my groin. Alligator Root had gotten a bone spike and bladder and was injecting me with a solution of Lady Koh’s blood so that I’d be able to find her. Mask of Jaguar Night and Alligator Root touched me silently on the chest. Hun Xoc’s hands opened my offering-box of fifty-two of my best mountain cigars and lit one for me. Pineapple light flooded the shore and vanished. Hun Xoc touched me on the breast with his forehead and the entire team hurried off, crimson footsteps skritching away on the tactile trail, leaving the dead boy and the cat behind me. I blew a puff of smoke out over the lake.

Of course, I couldn’t see anything but the little dying sun at the end of my cigar, but I felt I could feel everything, the thousands of tons of pressure through the stone above me, the temperature of the water (six degrees Celsius), the magma oozing through the veins of the old volcano behind us, the layers of lithospheres and asthenospheres and mantles of silicates and molten iron and nickel down 3,180 miles to the crystal toad-stone at the earth’s core.

I waited and waited and shifted my half-leg and waited some more. 2 Jeweled Skull’s skin tightened over me, merging with mine. I could still hear the ringing of the stone bells, maybe just in my mind but I thought also in my ears. I finished the cigar and fa

(72)

There were nine Scullers in the black shell. I recognized Spine in the prow, just like his portrait glyph with his one-eyed silver vulture face and the lancet through his beak. Next there were Serpigo-a hunchback with badger claws sprouting spine-grass like a Chia Pet-and Scald, a bloated corpse with big black-steaming egg-eyes, and then Scab, with ribbons of flesh flapping over his carbuncles. Snatchbat sat on the thwart, squinting and sniffing around with his gnarly flat-nosed-face, and then there was Yaw, known in Mesoamerica as, particularly, the scourge of the lowland forests, all spider-sucked and shriveled. Sarcoma sat in the rear, covered with clusters of tumerous masslets, and then there was Scurf, not just a disembodied head now the way he was represented in codices and on monuments, but a tall full figure with the tentacled face of a star-nosed mole, and last there was the old steersman, Skitters, the fanged rabbit, so much clearer than his profile on the moon, holding the tiller. It was the whole notorious gang, the netherworld’s bosomfoes working tooth and nail overtime in earthveins, toadcavities, chessganglions, saltklesters, underfed, nagging firenibblers knocking…