It wasn’t logical, but the average Mesoamerican still seemed to think that the world needed some help ending itself, and there’d been a thousand orgies of self-immolation all the way from the Sonoran Desert to what would be Costa Rica. We’d seen whole families staked out alive on the ground for the insects and vampire bats, kids peeling strips of loose arm skin off exhausted but conscious oldsters and eating it like it was Fruit Roll-Ups, mothers killing their toddlers by forcing pink-hot pebbles down their throats, a thousand things you wish you could unsee. And by now, except for the animals on the run, there was basically nothing left. Fuck Severed Right Hand, I thought. He won’t be able to feed his troops around here. Ten more days and he’ll lose interest. Why was he so determined? It can’t be because of the tsam lic. According to Koh’s informers he had his own sun-adders and they were rebuilding the pharmacopeia in Choula.

There’s got to be something else going on that I don’t know about. Maybe I should confront Koh about it? Except, in general around here you didn’t get very far with direct questions. Just watch her, I thought. Watch and deduce. Then when she gets the people to wherever they’re going-hmm. Well, I needed to get back to Ix for my last act. That is, the entombment. But the refugees-well, even if the Maya lowland zones hadn’t been agriculturally exhausted yet, the way they would be in two hundred years, there still wouldn’t be enough unclaimed farmland in Ix’s orbit. If they could even learn how to do that kind of bog-reclamation planting, which I doubted they would. People don’t learn. Lately, Lady Koh had been saying that the Rattler had shown her the site of a new city, in the coastal flats on the farthest marches of the Harpy Clan’s red territory-that is, somewhere on the Quintana Roo coast. The current deal was that 2 Jeweled Skull would provide an escort for safe conduct to the site and give her lineage the area in perpetuity. But it sounded vague to me. And most of these people wouldn’t get nearly that far anyway. We had food for another forty days or so, but once we were into the dry season, it was… hell. It was depressing.

Don’t think about it. Anyway, you did the main thing, right? Maybe the Lodestone Cross bit was going to be enough. Maybe I’d already just become the biggest hero since Hercules. Since Jesus, for that matter. Maybe I was done here. Maybe I can just relax. Except not. Still ought to go through with the backup plan. Get back to Ix. Get the ol’ memories back to Marena. Do the full meal deal.

The light faded to a more delicate shade of scab. 4 Screaming’s second-in-command came up and signed that they’d sniffed a large crowd of strangers to the northeast. They couldn’t tell yet if they were the Teotihuacanian soldiers, but we picked up speed. They asked to carry me again and I said no. Oddly, despite everything, I felt pretty good.

At the end of this Grandfather Heat’s youth-about ten A.M. -the breeze shifted up and we smelled our caravan. It was basically that same aroma as when a really hard-core homeless person shuffles onto the subway and everybody risks a ticket to cross between the moving cars rather than stay even fifteen beats in the presence of the indescribable hell stench. But what was odd about it now was that to me, coming in from the cold as it were, it smelled reassuring, or even pleasant, like home. I guess it really is all context. Hun Xoc touched my arm and pointed ahead at ten o’clock. At first I couldn’t see anything and then I made out a human figure against the brown sky, levitating two rope-lengths over the scrub. As we got closer I could see it was a lookout, or as I’ve said, a sniff-out, one of our shortest, scrawniest, and sharpest-eyed bloods, wobbling in a sort of a crow’s-nest on the top of a tower woven of weeping bamboo. It looked so flimsy you wouldn’t think it could support a squirrel. He signed down to us that things were clear. Another came into view behind him, and then another and another, so that as we got close to our line of march there was a whole troop of them, like a thin reflection of the dust-wreathed caravan below. You could squint and just imagine that it was a camel train on the Silk Road, headed toward Samarkand. Nights in the Garden of Allah. Song of the Sheikh. Midnight at the Oasis. Ah, zee Englishwoman is a thoroughbred which no man has yet dared to ride. Bring her to my tents, Hasan. Have zee serving girls anoint her with essences of oud and Ubar and drape her in the finest Murshidabadian silks and suchlike. I will school her in the ways of the Rif. Blue heaven, and you, and I, and sand, kissing the moonlit sky… the desert breeze, whisp’ring a lullaby…

I was used to it by now, but I suppose to the twenty-first-century eye one of the odder things about this place-I mean Mesoamerica, or for that matter the entire New World-was that everything was single file. Even if you had a hundred thousand people on the move, there were never even two of them abreast. The thin human snake just slid on forever, curving over both horizons. 2 Hand-Hun Xoc’s younger brother and, unofficially, something like my second mate-came out with a veintena of men to meet us and said that the number of Koh’s followers had gone up by a fifth-again-just while we were away, so despite our adjustments we’d still come in about four thousand marchers behind the great woman and her entourage. 2 Hand called her “the Elderess,” which made me wonder whether he was starting to believe some of her hype. Bad sign. We cut through the line and jogged ahead on its southern side, with what they called the Iguana River, a sad yellow trickle at the low point of the long Nochixtlan Valley, on our right hand. It was light enough to see faces now, although today’s sun wouldn’t show itself. I passed-or to be socially correct I should say “my bearer, my scarefly, my weapons valet, my faithful fellator Armadillo Shit,” and I passed-a delicate-looking fourteen-year-oldish girl who was pulling her family’s big ratty old travois single-handedly, or I guess I should say single-headedly, since it was drawn by a tumpline that cut deep into her forehead. There was a mole a half inch below the right of her hornet-stung lips, just like the one on, hmm, some actress, who was it-oh, yeah, Claudine Auger, the girl who played Domino in Thunderball. Her mother and sisters were walking in front of her, and her father, a brother, and four other male relatives sat in the sled, taking it easy. Patriarchal fucks, I thought, although I should mention that the four male relatives were deceased, just masked mummy bundles sitting as stiffly upright as Quaker ministers, so they were probably pretty light. But then there were also three big hearthstones on the sled, and one of those big wooden Teotihuacanian host statues, the kind that have all the little statues inside them, and a bunch of other bundles that I guessed were just more garbage, and I was on the verge of going up and shaking the paterfamilias and screaming, “You fuck, first, you get out and pull the sled, and second, you toss those dead guys and the other crap right now and fill up every waterskin you’ve got, and beg, borrow, or steal as much rock salt as you can possibly drag, and then maybe you all have a chance of lasting another twenty days, you FUCKHEAD,” but of course you’d have to tell everybody the same thing and the important thing was to keep a low profile and get yourself and the tsam lic critters back to Ix, and anyway you couldn’t argue with these people. Or any people. Then there were three loners, each dragging a fresh or-let’s say “still unprepared”-corpse. There just weren’t enough defleshers to go around, even though they were working day and night, stuffed with extra rations and sitting in unaccustomed luxury on special sleds as they picked over the bodies with their inch-long fingernails. And they were hurrying. It was lousy mojo-obviously-if the dogs got any of you, but even so a big scurfy pack of them seemed to be making its whole living following the catafalques. When the bones finally dried out, an engraver would carve their owners new names-that is, their postholocaust, Koh-given names-into the ulnas and tibias. Although you’d think there wouldn’t be time for such niceties. But even with fire, starvation, bandits, disease, and troops of more novel apocalyptic horsemen, everybody found the leisure to give themselves new names, brands, tattoos, tooth decor, and whatever else. Craziness.