Anyway, Koh eventually agreed and 1 Gila’s plan carried the day. At one point Hun Xoc took me aside and said he was a little nervous that 1 Gila would just take off and not make it to Ix at all, but after kicking it around for a while we decided that really they had nowhere else to go. They were marked outcasts far from their now-nonexistent homes, and at this point they’d either get to Ix in a hurry or get eaten. And some of them would get through. We worked out routes that would get both of us into Ix at the same time: The big army would take the direct route to Ix, marching in daylight, and we’d have to hustle around the long way at night.

I functioned. I sat on the strategy committee. I advised Koh. I played a running hipball game whenever the army passed a usable court, and then, as I slept, my bearers ran me to the next court. And I got some of my skills back, nothing like what I’d been as Chacal, but still not bad. But it happened in this smog of despair, that feeling like you’ve suddenly realized that the world is constructed entirely out of damp corrugated cardboard, and of no further interest because, no matter how elaborately and even artistically you cut, fold, paint, and arrange it, damp cardboard is still just damp cardboard. Only, this time it wasn’t just in my mind, it was really the case, the world was going to wink out just as it would be getting interesting. Even though I was way back here, that is, “back” here, in 664, it felt as though the end was going to come tomorrow, later today, in an hour, in a minute, before the end of this sentence, now-and really, in terms of historical time, let alone geological time, it was only an instant away. Oh hell, oh hell, oh hell, oh hell.

Weirdly, though, Koh seemed to understand. She kept surprising me that way. I mean, with what she could understand. And even though the end of the thirteenth b’aktun would be so long after her own time, when everyone she knew would be lucky even to be bones and not just dust, she still wanted the world to continue. Although I think she mainly thought of it in terms of wanting her descendants to continue, but even so… anyway, just after the birth of the next sun we were slogging along on the south bank of the Rio Coatzacoalcos, and I was curled up in my palanquin cursing the day I was born and all other days and all others who had been born, and she had my bearers bring me alongside her and, as we jogged along, she started a conversation-almost a modern-style conversation between equal and skeptical people and not an Olde Mayaland-style formal court exchange.

“Writing it all down wouldn’t be good enough anyway,” Koh said. As far as she was concerned, the Game was such a subtle and physical art that only directly transmitted skill was worth anything. “You have to show your eagle a way to your b’aktun”-by my eagle she meant my primary uay, like my self, or as we’d say, my brain-“and you need to be there yourself to ask Star Rattler to sacrifice another thirteen of the segments of his body, to give your world another thirteen b’aktuns.”

“I can’t say I see a likely route,” I said.

“We’ll plan the route together, at the human game,” she said. “ K’ek’wa’r. ” That is, “Double strength,” or, roughly, “Courage.”

I signed a thank-you-next-to-me.

I have something to show you, she signed back.

Koh had her wickerworkers weave us a temporary ramada and set us just off the towpath alongside the Atoyac River. The day was steamy but it was cool under the cypresses and you could smell the tannin and hear the brown noise of the rushing brown water. Four of her deafened guards set out jars and baskets of drinking water, set up four wide rush screens around us, and took up their positions crouching with their backs to us, watching. Hun Xoc and a few other bloods sat at a distance, between us and the river. Armadillo Shit sat behind me and Koh’s dwarf sat on her shoulder. It was the smallest number of people Koh and I had had around us since before we’d left Teotihuacan, and there wasn’t any chance of our being seen or overheard, but even so, Koh looked around for a minute, listening, before she took something out of her bundle.

It was a polished deer rib. She dipped it in one of the little jars and then stirred the rib around in a second water jar. She said something to her dwarf in their personal code. The dwarf slid down, held her breath, covered the first jar, picked it up, carried it ten steps away to a little channel that ran to the river. Delicately-to her it was a respected living thing-she poured the water into the channel and then, not delicately, she dropped the pot and lid down in after it, shattering them.

I looked down into the drinking-water-pot. Cripes, I thought. What I’m getting is that this is some potent-ass shit. Koh took a dried marigold out of her little kit, picked a single tiny petal off it with a pair of horn almost-chopsticks, dipped the petal into the jar, stuck the tweezers into the mat like a double mast with a single wet flag at the top, and covered the jar. She moved a little myrtle torch closer to the petal, dried it, took it off the tweezers with her fingers, and tore it in half like it was a tab of LSD. She popped one of the halves in her mouth and gave me the other. I could practically hear Grateful Dead music playing in the background. I put the petal on my tongue.

“Boiling this doesn’t much hurt its power,” she said,

“They’d have to steam-distill their drinking water.”

The exact word meant “steamed onto cloth,” but it meant distill. Which no one would do anyway. With only clay or wood or leather or whatever vessels it was hard to boil water in big quantities, and people were in the habit of relying on mountain-spring water diverted or fetched directly to their homes. In Ix the drinking-water system was separate from the irrigation systems, which in turn were separate from the water in the artificial lake and the canal system, which was much more tannic and saline. Supposedly all the “sacred original” water, that is, the pure water, came from the Never-Empty Font of Waterlily Ocelot, the central reservoir of Ix. The huge cistern was fed directly from two cold underground streams that burst out the side of the hill. It was the heart of the city and the umbilical cord of the world, the Tree of 400 ^ 4 Branches, woven when the Earthtoad was a soft-shelled egg. Water was more holy the more upstreamness it had, and when it came out of the earth and for some time thereafter it was under the direct control of the Ahau, the Lord of the Fertilizing Waters, and it fed the cities’ twelve drinking-water fountains and then, farther down the line of impurity, the whole system of floodgates that let the ahauob program the city’s irrigation cycles. The Ocelots had always owned the water, and it fed hundreds of little fountains through the city, both on the Ocelots’ peninsula and on the surrounding mainland. It had been one of the foundations of the Ocelots’ power since the beginning of the city as a tiny irrigation society over a thousand years ago.

“On the court you’ll face their garden,” she said, pointing at the spot,

“Their goal’s three hundred paces from the well

On their great-mul’s female side. Run for the mainland,

Pretend to drown yourself, and release the bag,

And hold out till the Ocelots’ eyes fog over.”

Sure, I thought. I bought an unction of a mountebank. I said it all sounded a little wacky, although of course I didn’t put it that way, I said it as well as possible in the high-equals language we were still using with each other. Even if all that went exactly according to plan, the minute people started freaking out from the usual water, the Ocelots would switch to some other source.

We lit cigars.

And how long do you think it will take them to feel it? she asked. Do you feel anything?