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  In the Courts of the Sun

  BRIAN D’AMATO

  Penguin Group USA

  Table of Contents

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  ZERO

  [Ř]

  ONE

  [1]

  [2]

  [3]

  [4]

  [5]

  [6]

  [7]

  [8]

  [9]

  [10]

  [11]

  [12]

  [13]

  [14]

  [15]

  [16]

  [17]

  [18]

  [19]

  [20]

  [21]

  [22]

  [23]

  [24]

  [25]

  [26]

  TWO

  [27]

  [28]

  [29]

  [30]

  [31]

  [32]

  [33]

  [34]

  [35]

  [36]

  [37]

  [38]

  [39]

  [40]

  [41]

  [42]

  [43]

  [44]

  THREE

  [45]

  [46]

  [47]

  [48]

  [49]

  [50]

  [51]

  [52]

  [53]

  [54]

  [55]

  [56]

  [57]

  [58]

  [59]

  [60]

  [61]

  [62]

  FOUR

  [63]

  [64]

  [65]

  [66]

  [67]

  [68]

  [69]

  [70]

  [71]

  [0]

  GLOSSARY

  Acknowledgements

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ALSO BY BRIAN D’AMATO

  Beauty

  DUTTON

  Published by Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division

  of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.); Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England; Penguin Ireland,

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  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Published by Dutton, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  First printing, March 2009

  Copyright Š 2009 by Brian D’Amato

  All illustrations, maps, glyph renderings, and other graphics are by Brian D’Amato.

  All rights reserved

  REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REGISTRADA

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  D’Amato, Brian.

  In the courts of the sun / Brian D’Amato.

  p. cm.

  eISBN : 978-1-101-02663-2

  I. Title.

  PS3554.A467515 2009

  813’.54—dc22 2008020986

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product

  of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons,

  living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced,

  stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic,

  mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the

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  The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means

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  http://us.penguingroup.com

  Dedicated to Anthony D’Amato,

  author of Jurisprudence: A Descriptive and Normative Analysis of Law

  and many other writings in law and philosophy

  and composer of RSVP Broadway

  and many other musical works

  A percentage of the author’s after-tax profits

  from this series is donated to various Maya-related

  educational, social, and environmental projects.

  For more information please see

  www.briandamato.com

  A NOTE ON PRONUNCIATION

  Most Mayan words in this book are spelled according to the current orthography adopted by the Academía de Lenguas Mayas in Guatemala. However, I’ve retained older spellings for a few words—for instance, the text uses uay instead of the now-preferred way in order to distinguish the word from the English way. Specialists may also notice that some words are spelled to be pronounced in Ch’olan, which usually means a ch takes the place of a k. I’ve italicized Mayan and most Spanish words on the first use and dropped the italics after that.

  Vowels in Mayan languages are pronounced roughly like those in Spanish. Ay in Maya, uay etc., is pronounced like the I in “I am.” J is pronounced like the Spanish j, that is, a guttural h with the tongue farther back than in English. X is like the English sh. Tz is like the English ts in “pots.” Otherwise, consonants are pronounced as in English. An apostrophe indicates a glottal stop, which is like the tt in the Scottish or Brooklynese pronunciation of “bottle.” All Mayan words are stressed on the last syllable, but Mayan languages are less stressed than English. Mayan is somewhat tonal, and its prosody tends to emphasize short couplets. There’s a certain lilt to it which in some places I’ve tried to convey with dactyls, although readers may differ on whether this is successful.

  Words in the language of Teotihuacan are stressed, like the name of the city, on the penultimate syllable.

  MESOAMERICA

  ZERO

  [Ř]

  The first thing I saw was a red dot on a turquoise field. Then another dot appeared above it and to the left, and a third bloomed close below that one, and then there was another and another, five and then nine and then thirteen. The dots grew and spread, and where they touched they merged and flowed together, and I realized they were drops of my own blood, falling out of my tongue onto blue offering paper.

  It worked, I thought. Holy mierditas.

  It isn’t 2012. It’s 664. And it’s March 20. Or in Maya reckoning, it’s 3 Earth Rattler, 5 Rainfrog, in the eleventh uinal of the eleventh tun of the eleventh k’atun of the tenth b’ak’tun. And it’s about 4:48 A.M. Sunday.

  Hmm.

  I guess it was like any other big life-mode change; you can only comprehend it after a drawn-out, unfunny double-take, like, oh my God, I’m actually being arrested, I’ve been stabbed, I’m getting married, I have a child, I’m really having a triple bypass, those buildings are really collapsing—and each time it feels like not
hing remotely this serious has ever happened to you or to anyone else. Hijo de puta, I thought. I looked up and focused through the tiny trapezoidal doorway. The sky was violet now but somehow I could still see more stars than I ever had before, drifts and spatters of stars down to the fourth magnitude. They’d shifted, of course, but Taro had timed the download so that the tip of One Ocelot’s cigar—Algenib, in Pegasus—was nearly in the same position in the trapezoid as before, framed just right of center. There was a new star to its left, halfway to Homam, that would have been bright enough to be listed as Gamma Andromedae. It must be within a hundred years or so of flaming out. Otherwise al-Khawarzimi would have named it.

  Unbefarfreakingoutlieveable, I thought. They actually got it right. New bat time, same bat place. Not that I was actually in the same place in the universe, of course, if that even means anything. The solar system moves a lot in 1,347 years. But I was in the same spot on earth. I was still in a tiny room near the apex of the tallest pyramid in the city of Ix, in what would later be called Alta Verapaz, in central Guatemala. But now the sanctuary was orange with torchlight, and the columns of scarabesque glyphs on the walls were smooth and unpitted and polychromed in black, blue, and cochineal carmine. And now the city was alive. I could hear the crowds outside, or maybe, rather, I could feel their chanting through the stone. The point is that from my POV, I hadn’t moved in space. But I had—

  Hmm. I almost said I’d been sent back in time. But I wouldn’t want to start out by dumbing down.

  The sad fact is that time travel is impossible. Into the past, that is. If you want to go faster into the future you can just freeze yourself. But going backward is absolutely, unequivocally, and forever unworkable, for a number of well-known reasons. One is the grandfather paradox, meaning you could always go back in time and kill your grandfather, and then you’d presumably never have existed in the first place. Another is that even if you went back and did nothing, you’d almost certainly have some of the same molecules your younger self had been using incorporated into your body. And so the same molecule would be in two different places at once. And that can’t happen. The third reason is just a mechanical problem. The only way into the past that anyone knows of is the famous wormhole route. But putting matter through a wormhole is like putting a Meissen vase through a pasta machine. Anything going through it is going to come out the other end crushed and scrambled and no good for anything.

  But—but, but, but—there is a workaround.

  The Warren Lab’s insight was that even if you can’t send matter into the past, that still doesn’t rule out every possibility. If you can’t send anything, that should mean that you can send nothing. And nothing, roughly speaking, includes electromagnetism. They developed a way to send bursts of energy through a tiny, artificially created Krasnikovian tube. They figured the pattern of energy bursts might be able to carry some information. In fact, it could carry a lot of information. The signal they sent back encoded a lifetime of distilled memories, basically everything that creates the illusion called a sense of self. In this case my self.

  Of course, the next problem is that there has to be a receiver and storage on the other end. And in the era we were interested in, there weren’t any radar dishes or disk drives or silicon chips or IF antennas or even a crystal radio. Circa 664 there was only one existing object that could receive and store that much information. A brain.

  I began to be able to move my eyeballs. I started to make out how my right hand, the one holding the thorn rope, was broad and beefy and heavily callused on the palm heel. Its nails were long and sharpened and inlaid with T-shaped carnelian studs, and the fingers were tattooed with red and black bands like coral snakes’. A jade-scale bracelet stretched from the wrist almost to the elbow. Like the section I could see of my naked chest and my cauliflowerish left knee, it was crusted with bright blue clay.

  Score one for the Freaky Friday Team, I thought. I really was in another person’s body. Specifically, I was in the brain of someone named 9 Fanged Hummingbird.

  We—that is, we at the Warren Project—knew a little about him. He was the patriarch of the Ocelot Clan and the ahau—that is, the king or overlord or warlord—of the city of Ix and of the roughly two thousand towns and villages in Ix’s orbit. He was the son of the twelfth ahau, 22 Burning Forest, and Lady Cyclone. Today he was forty-eight years and sixty-one days old. He’d been sitting in here, fasting, for about forty-two straight hours. And he was about to emerge, at dawn, to be reenthroned for a second twenty-year period as the ahau.

  There was a bowl of hot embers five inches to the north of my left knee, and without thinking about it I peeled the rectangle of blood-soaked paper off the reed mat and held it over the heat. For a moment the light of the coals glowed through the sheet and I could see glyphs on the other side, the phrase Watch over us, protect us, and then the profile of an eagle:

  More specifically, it was a harpy eagle, Thrasyaetus harpyia. In Spanish it was arpía and in Mayan it was hunk’uk, “gold ripper.” And the Aztecs called it the Wolf with Wings. It was the emblem of a clan, my clan—that is, the clan of the person whose brain I’d commandeered. The paper was a letter, my clan’s petition to One Ocelot, at the womb of the sky. Automatically, I folded the sticky sheet into a triangular bundle—it was a complicated set of motions, like making an origami crane, but I, or rather my body’s previous owner, must have rehearsed it a hundred times—and set the paper down in the bowl. It must have been soaked in some kind of copper salts, because it sizzled and then sputtered into green flame.

  My tongue throbbed. I pulled it in—no, wait. I pulled—

  Huh. Nothing happened.

  I tried to swallow and then just to close my mouth over my tongue. It was like my face was frozen. Nothing moved.

  M’AX ECHE? I thought, in Ch’olan Mayan. Who are you?

  No, wait.

  I hadn’t thought it. It was from somewhere else.

  It was as though I’d heard a voice, but I knew I hadn’t actually heard anything except the hum of the throng in the plaza below and the swallowed booms of cedar-trunk slit-drums, throbbing in an odd 5/4 beat. Maybe it was more like I’d read it, on some kind of news crawl across my eyes. And even though it was silent it was as though it was loud, or rather forceful, as though it was written in upper case. It was like I’d thought it, but without think—

  M’AX ECHE?

  Oh, hell.

  I wasn’t alone in this body.

  I was alone in the room, but not in my brain.

  Oh, cońo Dios.

  The thing is, the first part of the Freaky Friday process had been supposed to erase the target’s memories, to give my consciousness a clean slate to work on, as it were. But evidently that part hadn’t worked, or at least not very well. He still thought he was him.

  M’AX ECHE?

  My name is Jed DeLanda, I thought back.

  B’A’AX UKA’AJ CHOK B’OLECH TEN? Roughly, “WHY HAVE YOU PO-SESSED ME?”

  I’m not possessing you, I thought. That is, I’m inside, I mean, my consciousness is inside you because, because we sent it into you—

  T’ECHE HUN BALAMAC? ARE YOU ONE OCELOT?

  No, I thought back, too quickly. I mean—

  Damn it. Stupid.

  Come on, Jed, I thought. It’s like Winston says, when somebody asks if you’re a god, you say yes. Got it? Okay.

  Here goes.

  Yes! I thought at him, more consciously. I am One Ocelot. Ocelot the Ocetarian. I am Ocelot, the great and power—

  MA-I’IJ TEC. NO, YOU ARE NOT.

  No, I am, I thought, I—oh, demonio. It’s not easy to lie to this guy. And no wonder. He’s hearing everything I think. And even though he only spoke old Ch’olan and I was thinking in my usual mix of Spanish, English, and late, degenerate Ch’olan, we still understood each other completely. In fact, it felt less like talking with someone else than it felt like arguing with yourself, thinking, Jed, maybe you should do this, and no, Jed, you should do that, except that one side of the internal dialogue was effortless and self
-assured, and the other side—my side—was having trouble getting its points together.