Koh had thoughtfully traded Hun Xoc out of captivity too. He hung out with me a lot. His arms had healed, although you could see the crescent cross-sections of bone in the center of the cauterized crust at the stumps, and exposed bone is painful, especially in cold weather. He’d had fake arms made of human skin stretched over wicker, with stylized hands like flowers, that fastened onto studs in his stumps. But when he was hanging out with me he’d have them taken off and let one of my male nurses massage him with oil. Of course I kept asking him and everyone about the battle. He said that before we’d even gotten to Ix, Koh had told 1 Gila and her main body of troops to stall for another two days after first being sighted by 2 Jeweled Skull. Koh had made sure that the Ocelots and Harpies would fight each other as long as possible, so that when her own troops came in, the Ixob would be exhausted as well as drugged.

I’d gotten the earthstar compound into the well a bit before midnight, and it wasn’t until the evening of the next day that the first Harpy bloods who’d drunk from the water system started to feel unusually happy. Of course most people attributed the elation to their great victory, and what with the fog of the aftermath of the battle and all the balche drinking and premature feasting and raping and pillaging and whatever that went on after the Ocelots’ military structure fell apart, the drugged water had spread through most of the city and especially most of the Harpy clan before more than a couple non-judgment-impaired people had realized what was going on. Best of all, it had taken out five of 2 Jeweled Skull’s eight commanders along with their troops. It hadn’t gotten 2 Jeweled Skull or 9 Fanged Hummingbird. They probably drank only rainwater. Certainly their food was tasted, stored, cooked, retasted, and then selected at random. Anyway, it had been plenty.

From what the dressers said I gathered that Koh had let 2 Jeweled Skull think she’d retreated northeast, and then kept moving her band of converts around the perimeter of the Harpy Clan’s scouting range. Supposedly she’d even let a couple of her doubles get captured just to throw the Harpies off. And then, when the earthstar drug hit, she’d moved in her big old ragtag horde in the confusion. Supposedly the short siege had been more like a bunch of parades converging on a riot. She’d pushed through to the lake in less than half a day and then used her numbers to block the bridges and cut off the peninsula and the temple district. By late that evening the holdout Harpy bloods had collapsed most of the Ocelot compound around themselves. And by now-I mean by 13 Motion-there wasn’t any real fighting still going on, just a few fires still burning in the north and west where Ocelot-allied clans had torched their granaries.

I still didn’t really know what the hell was going on, though. Had Koh really won? Was she really in charge? Had 2 Jeweled Skull really lost? What had happened to 9 Fanged Hummingbird? How had Koh gotten away to begin with? Hadn’t she been sitting in the middle of all these Ocelot bloods at the hipball game? All of whom had been primed to capture her?

I closed my eye. Don’t even try to understand right now, I thought. The answers to these questions and more…

“Now the Southeastern peak breathes blood,” the Wedding Symposiarch sang,

“So now unfurl the newborn warlord, peacelord,

Sun-eyed avenger, Lord of Morning Twilight,

One Turquoise Ocelot. And now face Coldwards

And now to Whitewards, now to Knownwards, now

Enthrall to him and face the Unrevealed.”

And in fact the orange steam all around me was so fierce that when they lifted me out I did feel newborn, in fact prematurely born, and as I began scraping the extruded sebum flesh-worms off my open-pored swollen skin with cockleshells it felt like they were carving me out of a protostellar cloud. This second room was like a tepidarium, cooler and lighter than the sweat bath, with a slatey predawn glow dripping through the oculus. The beat was clearer out here, although I didn’t need to hear it at all anymore since I was sure my heart had been permanently tuned to it. At this point it was like the world ticking on forever. Or at least until 4 Ahau, 2012. My dressers rubbed a base coat of harpy-eagle oil into my spongy white flesh and began clothing me, or rather wrapping me, tying my long red cotton wex with a complicated female-style knot like a pillow in my lower back, a knot that was only used at weddings. You’re always getting dressed or undressed around here, I thought. It’s all before and after, you’re always getting ready to make an offering or coming back from making an offering and getting ready to make another offering, and the actual thing was usually over in a beat. They inserted a new plug in my lip, a female one, and fresh spondylus shell spools in my ears, and an embroidered anesthetic herbal ball in my empty eye socket to soak up the tears.

I’d be appearing in women’s clothes-and Lady Koh would be in male clothes-because we were going to be a sun-telling couple. That is, we were both father-mothers. I guess the cross-dressing sounds a little odd for a wedding, but actually you could still sometimes see Maya shamans wearing women’s clothes at harvest festivals in the twenty-first century. Anyway, like a lot of things, it had to be done this way. One thing I could be sure of was that Koh had checked every detail.

Lady Koh needed to marry me. Or, rather, she needed to marry the Ahau and K’alomte of Ix. The Classic Maya world wasn’t so gynophobic as, say, Islamic society, but women who wanted to run things still had to do it through their menfolk. Or, at best, in the Yaxchilanian and Ixian and other traditions, they had to be widows of the ahau. Which was what she’d be in a few months. I’d be as canned as Charlie the Tuna and she’d still be corking along. And if she conceived a male child with me, that would be even better for her. She could reign until he was blooded, at fifteen or sixteen, and then, undoubtedly, keep him tied to the huipil strings. Or if she didn’t, she could either adopt an Ocelot baby or even fake a pregnancy and just pick up some kid from the slave market. So I was a convenient choice. And, as the miraculously revivified Chacal, the semidivine hipball legend who’d predicted the San Martin eruption, I was, especially with Koh’s spin-doctoring, even a popular choice with a large slice of the public. Of course, a lot of folks still viewed me with extreme suspicion. But things had changed a lot in Ix, and throughout Mesoamerica, over the last tun, and people had come to accept events that, before the destruction of Teotihuacan, would have seemed upside down.

Even so, though, I was lucky. Koh could have set up somebody else, probably one of the younger Ocelot bloods. So I was pretty sure that Koh’s real motivation was that she really wanted me to get back to the thirteenth b’aktun. I still wasn’t a hundred percent sure why. But I wasn’t ruling out sheer goodwill, or, let’s say, sheer sense of duty. She saw her role as a protector of her lineage, and if she could protect their descendants long after her death, her uays would remain powerful long b’aktuns from now. They might even grow more powerful. After all, despite everything she’d learned from me about astronomy and physics and even twenty-first-century thought in general, she was still a believer.

And, also, she had 2 Jeweled Skull in her custody.

I hadn’t seen it happen. Koh’s men had surrounded him during the Earthstar riots and, amazingly, had taken him alive. Now she had him in a basket in what had been the Ocelots torture pavilion, with two guards watching him at all times so that he couldn’t commit suicide in some clever way like, say, biting a chunk out of the inside of his cheek and swallowing his own blood until he bled to death-something that had, in fact, been done more than once by twenty-year captives.