We can’t delay it, Hun Xoc said. If you weren’t there when the first ball fell, you lost.

Fine, I thought, anything you say, we’re fucked whatever we do. I asked what they thought would happen if we won incontrovertibly, even though I really knew the answer.

Hun Xoc said the Ocelots would start yelling that we cheated and start a fight anyway. So we were looking at a fight whatever we did. The best thing for us to do would be to keep ahead without actually winning. Until our troops were ready. But the Ocelots might pull little things during the game, bad calls or illegal traps. We’d need to be good enough to stay ahead on scoring even if they got away with some of that stuff. We’d need to score beyond what they could take away.

Maybe we need a ringer, I said. The phrase wasn’t really like “ringer,” of course, it was more like “one who has hidden his strength,” but it was the same idea. I said a good striker could keep the score nearly even until we got our act together.

All the good players are being watched, Hun Xoc said. It was probably true. There were only a few ballplayers in the world who were capable of going head-to-head against 20 Silence. And even though pitzom was a team sport, the outcome usually depended more on matching one-against-one than, say, basketball.

So maybe I should just go in and play, I said. I’d keep us ahead and drag the game out as long as possible.

Silence. I resisted looking at anyone’s face.

2 Jeweled Skull followed our team out of the marshaling area into our red home zone. The shrill not-quite-cheering crescendoed and then rose above itself again and again. It was more like an ecstatic whine than a roar, at least by the standards of twenty-first-century sports fans. The sound sloshed from side to side, rising in one ear and falling in the other, following the lead of our two houses’ mockers as they taunted each other across the no-man’s-land at the center of the court.

All of us Harpy Ball Brethren, like the Ocelots’ team and most of the other Maya ball societies, wore elaborate animal-themed helmets that totally covered our faces. Like with Mexican wrestlers in the twenty-first century, the designs were all in the same style, but each player’s was unique and presumably intimidating. Anyway, they were as good as masks. And my tattoos and scars had been altered right after my arrival-well, “arrival”-here in Olde Mayaland. So I wasn’t likely to get recognized. Just once, as they introduced me under my alias-“10 Red Skink Lizard”-I broke form and turned to look back at the council house. Harpies and Harpy partisans were crawling over every surface. Some adolescent bloods had climbed up the spirit poles to get a better view, which was considered idiotically disrespectful, although at least they were being careful not to cover the effigies’ eyes. I studied the Harpies. They’d brought in an armory-worth of taken-down hand weapons. But it wasn’t a hot day, and like everyone else they’d worn layers of feather cloaks-which would get thrown down to their favorite big scorers-and you couldn’t tell. Despite all the tension, the Ocelots had let us into their precinct without searching us. It just wasn’t done. That is, no one ever brought anything but nonfunctioning ceremonial arms into the ball courts. It wasn’t like the Old West around here, with people wearing guns around town, if even the Old West was ever really like that, which I kind of doubt. And it wasn’t like flying in the U.S. in the twenty-first century, dealing with brownshirts from the TSA. Anyway if the Ocelots got the drop on us and found the weapons, it would be more than enough justification for liquidating the entire house. I snapped my head back around, facing west, toward the ball court and the beyond it the high, steep-sloped emerald wedge of the Ocelots’ mul.

From overhead the ball court would have looked like a huge capital I, with east at the top, and with two symmetrical banks on either side of the vertical bar. The top of each bank was a flat platform, or reviewing stand, where the highest-ranked spectators stood. Each bank had a sloping apron that descended to the level channel of the playing field at a forty-two-degree angle, so the structures were like truncated and elongated pyramids with their flat tops about five vertical Ixian arms-twelve feet-above the playing surface. The two bars of the I were marked by low boundary walls but open to the ground level, so that the VIPs could get to us. Beyond these end zones crowds of less important spectators could watch from the grounds surrounding the court and from two main vantage points: On the east, the wide swell of steps leading up to the long facade of the council house, and on the west, from the scarlet-and-emerald dawnward stairs of the Ocelots’ mul, although the eighth level and the temple above it-where I’d first found myself in Chacal’s mind-were empty. Also there had been tiers of extra wooden stands built for this one occasion, fed by a whole network of steps and catwalks behind the official platforms. Greathouse bloods’ hipball games had always been restricted events and the courts weren’t designed for the public. There were no seats, since there wasn’t any point having them. People would just jump up from excitement anyway, the way no one ever really sits down at rock concerts. Even 9 Fanged Hummingbird stood up for hundred-scores of beats in the 105°F+ heat to watch a game. The playing trench between the platforms was brightly painted, divided into the four directional quadrants, with a long line east to west down the center of the trench and a short north to south line bisecting it at the center of the court, so that each color area was about the shape of a capital L, with a quarter-circular bite out of the top left corner where it intersected with the jade-green circle of the central face-off zone. The circle was about a half-rope-length in diameter, say, eleven feet, with an eight-fingers-wide round greenstone block inlaid in its center. There were also two other stone markers set into the playing surface, one at each point where the top of the lower bar of the L intersected with the east-west middle line. The actual goals were three pairs of pegs jutting out from the vertical risers at the top of the sloping banks. They faced each other across the trench, one pair at the center and a pair on each end, in line with the markers. Only the central pair of targets was really important. Each was roughly a ten-inch cube. But really you don’t need to know any of that to understand what was going on in the game. You get a notion of it if you think of it as body soccer with a bowling ball.

The Ocelots’ goal was carved as a defleshed sky-cat and stuck with emerald-green macaw down, just for this event. The Harpies’ goal was carved as an earthtoad and, more cheaply, painted Harpy red. I felt all fat and stiff and Megazoid in the padding, like a penis swollen with Viagra. The area beyond the court boundary-which I guess you could call the sidelines-was crowded with VIP punters and a few high-caste bookies, looking us over as though we were racehorses in the paddock. Our team started to strut around the end zone in roughly counterclockwise paths, sawing the air with our hand guards. Our wood-and-leather yokes-big horseshoe-shaped protective belts-bounced off each other like old-time bumper cars. The players who’d stayed here kept looking at me. They, but only they, all knew who I was, and supposedly they’d been briefed about what to do. But they were still freaked out that I was alive and with them. I was still playing as “Red Skink Lizard,” presumably an obscure relief player. My disguise, or new identity, was still holding up. It might not last once I started playing, though. Not if I used any of the old signature moves. I stopped pacing and tucked my head down under my helmet, like I was praying. 2JS came up next to me. He didn’t turn his ornament-swollen head, but he spoke to me in our house language and so low that no one could hear us over the shouting.