Thousands, and thousands, and thousands, I thought. And more thousands. Poor bastards. Well, bless ’em. Even before this latest apocalypse, I’d estimated that suicide was at least the second main cause of death around here-second to starvation, that is, not counting deaths in childbirth-and now it was obviously a strong number one. And it probably would be for the fore Oops, I thought. If there’s one cliche I of all people really ought to give up, it’s “the foreseeable future.” Let’s just say the self-immolations would go on for a good long time. Thousands, and hundreds of thousands. In the seventh century-that is, now-Central Mexico had the largest and densest concentration of people in the New World and one of the densest in the world. There were thousands of villages and scores and scores of-hmm, I said scores, so I guess I’ve already been here long enough to start thinking in base 20-and dozens and dozens of full-scale hundred-thousand-plus-population cities. Corn was simply a hugely efficient, labor-unintensive crop, and a corn economy left people enough time to build purely ceremonial buildings, craft meticulous luxury goods, maintain troops of full-time athletes and entertainers, squander food in potlatch orgies, and kill, capture, torture, and sacrifice each other not out of any necessity but just for the sheer kicks. According to Michael Weiner, the Warren Group’s resident Mayanist, population here would have doubled in the last forty years, and in the next forty, despite the dip of the last few days, it would double again. Still, right around here, settlement was patchy. The populous river valleys were separated by wide swaths of near-desert, and up here we were in a high area without aquifers, on crappy soil that would never be cultivated. So it was on the Chocula team’s map of good areas to bury the gear. Although the gang would be amazed that I’d come this far from Ix. They Jeg jeg jeg jeg jegjedjwhzzeeew?

It was the long guggle of a nightjar.

Jeg jeg jeg jeg jegjegjegjedjwhzzzeeeew?

To almost anyone, even to a Mesoamerican who wasn’t a member of our sixty-two-man column, it would have sounded natural. But it came from one of our front-runners, or I guess we can call them recon men. They were fanned out about forty rope-lengths, or ten minutes’ walking, ahead of us.

Jeg jeg jeg jeg jegjegjedjwhzzeew?

Jeg jeg jeg jeg jegjegjegjedjwhzzzeeeew?

The call itself meant that there was a crossroads four hundred paces ahead of us, and repeating it four times meant all-clear in all four directions. Good.

A red deer darted across the path ahead, redward, that is, eastward, running away from the fires. One of the guards behind me must have looked like he was going to throw a javelin at it, because I heard Hun Xoc give a let-it-go whistle. We weren’t here to hunt. Anyway there were still so many animal refugees running in front of the fires you could net almost anything you wanted, field rats, jumping mice, hares, rabbits, armadillos, ocellated turkeys, quail, and even Mexican silver grizzlies. You’d have thought the villagers around here would have trapped and eaten them already, but I guess they believed they wouldn’t need food. After all, the world was still ending.

There was-were? — was a handful of skeptics, of course, master manipulators like Lady Koh or my adoptive stepfather, 2 Jeweled Skull. Or even Hun Xoc, who was pretty sharp. Or myself, who doesn’t count. But the bulk of the public had either been reborn-like Koh’s trail of eighteen thousand or so followers-or raptured, like the millions who had killed themselves or died in the fires or who were now starving to death or dying in interpolity raids.

Step. Step. Steppedystepstepstep. The pines gave way to ocatillo and prickly pear. Every so often we passed giant century plants, some of them two stories tall, like frozen land-mine explosions, with sawtoothed leaves that were so thick and wide you could walk out on them and bounce up and down like you were on a diving board. There Huh. I saw something.

Stop, I touched on Hun Xoc’s back. He touched the blood in front of him and the order to halt traveled through the three bloods ahead of him. Around here-I mean in Mesoamerica-the ranking hotshot usually came last. But on this job, the senior blood, Hun Xoc, was breaking protocol by marching near the head of the file, and he kept me behind him. Oh, by the way, “blood” is a literal translation, but it does work in English. Or Elizabethan English, anyway, like “young blood.” “As many and as well-borne bloods as those,” as I guess King Philip says. In Ixian it could mean any warrior-age male from one of the “great houses,” that is, from the ruling class.

The halt rippled back down our column, through fifty-seven other men all the way to the rearmost, the last of the four sweepers raking over our trail. I signed to Hun Xoc that I was going on alone. He edged aside, reluctantly, and tilted his head, asking me to be more careful. The bloods in the vanguard closed around me, but I pushed through them. Did they not see anything? I widened my eyes into the unnatural dusk.

A figure sat at the crossroads, a hundred paces ahead of us. A man. A man with a cigar. It wasn’t as though he materialized, and in fact he looked like he’d been lounging there a long time, but I’d just looked there a few beats before-when you’re marching, you develop a rhythm of looking at your feet, and then look around, and then look ahead of you, and then repeat-and I hadn’t seen him. And none of our forerunners had noticed him or they would have given us an owl screech.

I turned and signed to the sitz’, the fourteen-year-old boy, behind me. His provisional, preadulthood name was Armadillo Shit, and he was my k’ur chu’, my “fellator,” or I guess if we want to be delicate we can call him my squire. Or if we want to be indelicate we could call him my bitch. Every blood had at least one. It was kind of a Spartan erastes — and- eromenos system. The k’ur chu’ob who survived all the hazing-about forty percent, I figured-would, eventually, get admitted into whatever society it was, in this case the Harpy Ball Brethren Society. Like jonokuchi Sumo wrestlers, they did everything for us, including, shall we say, wiping.

He came up alongside me and spat drinking water into my eyes. I rubbed my face dry on his manto and looked again. The figure was still there. He wore a long orange-and-black-striped manto and a wide straw traveling-trader’s hat, almost a sombrero, that gave him an incongruous nineteenth-century-European-peasant look.

I walked forward, alone. The gentleman readjusted his hindquarters on the dessicated and defanged barrel cactus, took a deep drag on his cigar-it was a green Palenque-style stogie as thick as a Churchill-and studied me.

Hmm. He looked familiar.

I switched my gait to the deferential Ixian halt-step and then stopped four paces from him.

He let out a snake of blue smoke. I squatted, and touched the ashy ground. He didn’t speak, so I did.

“Salud, Caballero Maximon,” I said, and then, remembering when we were, I saluted him again with his older name: “X’taca, halach ahau Mam.”

He answered in Spanish, though. “Hola, cabron. Estas que Cholano gringo de San C.”

I clicked yes. His Spanish was rustic but awfully good for someone who, technically, probably hadn’t spoken it regularly for twelve hundred years.

“Estan buenas Piramides. ”

“?Perdon?” I asked. Oh, right, the cigars I’d given him back in San Cristobal Verapaz. Back in the twenty-first century. “Ah, cierto. Claro, yo soy…”

“Maybe you can score me some more of those sometime.”

“Oh, seguramente. I’ll go by the Great House humidor in BC.”

“Buen reparto,” he drawled, after largely resolidifying. The way he talked about it, it sounded like it had happened yesterday, not thirteen hundred and forty-eight years in the future. Although that’s how it is with guys like that, time just-or I guess you could call him a deity, although the English word doesn’t get the flavor, and anyway in the old days, to be polite, we just called them “smokers”-the deal is, with beings like that, time just rolls off them like scandal off Reagan. He took a long drag and blew out a plume of smoke that uncoiled as slowly as a satiate python.