“Then let’s get moving.” Matt stood up. “I think we should get off this island. You’ve got a boat. We can take it.”
“Where?”
“There are five of us, Pedro. That’s what this is all about. We have to find the other three.”
The two of them went over to the boat and dragged it off the shingle. Matt climbed in and Pedro pushed off. Suddenly, the mainland looked a long way away. Matt looked up. The sky, still black, was clear. The huge swan hadn’t returned.
The swan. Salamanda had been talking about it in his dining room.
The silver swan must be in position five days from now…
That was what Salamanda had said, but what did he mean? Did he have the power to enter this dream world? Was the swan in some way controlled by him?
Matt shivered. Pedro leapt in, water dripping from his ankles and feet. The boat seemed to have a life of its own. Almost at once it turned away from the island and, picking up speed, it carried them out to sea.
Matt jolted awake again.
The bus had stopped at a crossroads with a few ramshackle buildings and stalls selling food and drink. The old woman who had been sitting next to him got off and Pedro, carrying two bottles of water and some more rolls, was able to join him. As the doors hissed shut and they set off again, Matt remembered the piece of paper that they had found in Salamanda’s study and took it out again.
It had been photocopied from the diary. He was sure of it. The entire page was covered in lines, some of them forming shapes. There was a sort of rectangle that narrowed at one end. A drawing of what looked like an elaborate spider. And there was writing everywhere, going in every direction, some of it so tiny that it would have been unreadable even if it had been in English. There were four lines in the very centre of the page. They looked like a verse from a poem. And in the bottom, left-hand corner, a blazing sun and two words in capital letters:
Was that Spanish? Somehow it didn’t sound like it. What did the page mean and why had Salamanda felt the need to photocopy it? Matt folded the paper away. He would solve the mystery later, once he had found Richard.
They drove on.
The countryside was changing. It was much more mountainous, covered in dense green vegetation. The road, which had been straight before, now continued in a series of hairpin bends as the bus climbed ever higher. Matt remembered what Pedro had said and sniffed the air cautiously. It was definitely getting thinner. Even the colour of the sky was different; a harder, more electric blue. There were farmhouses, thrown onto the upper slopes as if by chance, and strange fortresses, small and circular, built of solid stone. It would be impossible to grow anything here, or so Matt thought. But then they turned another corner and he saw that someone -the local Indians or some civilization before them – had carved fantastic terraces into the sides of the hills, shoring them up with boulders and then planting them with crops. It must have been the labour of hundreds of years.
They passed through villages and then towns. Everything was strange here, quite different from the other side of Peru… more ancient and spectacular. The mountains were huge, enclosing everything. And then the bus reached the top of a valley and Matt saw the city of Cuzco spread out in front of him. It was like nothing he had ever seen in his life.
It really wasn’t like a city at all. That was his first thought. There were no skyscrapers, no office blocks, no main roads, no traffic lights nor even very much traffic. Cuzco was like something out of a storybook, and one written a long time ago. Looking out of the bus window, Matt saw a central square dominated by two Spanish cathedrals and all around, neat, white-fronted houses with terracotta roofs that continued in a sprawl for what looked like several miles, to the foothills on the other side.
But it was only when they had left the bus and begun to make their way on foot towards the centre that Matt was able to get the measure of the place. Cuzco was a beautiful city of archways and verandas, wrought-iron lamps, cobbled streets and pavements so highly polished that they could have been inside a museum or a palace. Every building seemed to be either a restaurant, an Internet cafe or a shop piled high with textiles, jewellery and souvenirs. There was poverty here too. Matt saw a tiny boy, barefoot and dirty, asleep in a doorway. Old women sat in the street, blinking in the sunlight. Shoeshine boys looked for trade around the churches. But the poverty seemed almost picturesque here – just something else for the tourists to photograph.
And there were tourists and backpackers everywhere. As they entered the main square, Matt heard English voices and his immediate instinct was to throw himself into the arms of the first person he met. He needed help. A rich English tourist was the perfect answer. At the very least, they would help him reach a British embassy and they, in turn, would arrange his flight home.
But even as he started forward, he knew he couldn’t do it. First of all there was Richard. He couldn’t just abandon his friend, and if Matt left the country, he might well be condemning the journalist to death. After all, he was the one they wanted. Not Richard.
And then there was Pedro. Whatever had happened to Matt, and however much he hated being here, he had managed to find one of the Five. They were meant to stay together. Running away wouldn’t help anyone, and Matt knew he had to see this through.
He stood back and watched as a group walked past, following a woman waving an umbrella. He fell in with them. At least it gave him a little comfort to hear his own language.
“Cuzco has always been known as the holy city,” she was saying. “It was certainly holy to the Incas, who made this the centre of their empire. They were ruling here in 1533 when the Spanish conquistadors, led by Francisco Pizarro, invaded. The Spanish destroyed much of the city and built their own palaces and cathedrals on what was left, but even today you will see a great deal of Inca influence. In particular, you should look at the amazing walls, fitted together without the use of cement. We’ll have plenty of chance to examine Inca building methods this afternoon, when we visit the temple of Coricancha…”
Coricancha. That was where Matt had been told to go. He was tempted to stick with this woman – but there was no point. He had imagined something small and hard to find but it seemed that the temple was a major tourist attraction. And anyway, he was meant to be there on Friday evening at sunset. What day was it now? Matt had no real idea. He had just spent an entire night on a bus. That would make it Wednesday or Thursday. He hardly knew where he was and he had no idea when he’d arrived. In a way, he was just like Pedro: desplazado. Utterly displaced.
The woman with the umbrella moved off. The tourists obediently followed. Matt turned to Pedro, who was standing in the square looking lost. Of course, he had barely been out of Lima in his life and in many ways the city of Cuzco must have been as strange to him as it was to Matt.
“We need to find somewhere to stay,” he said.
Pedro looked blank.
“A hotel…” Matt added. He knew they couldn’t afford one, but it was the only word that Pedro would understand.
Pedro shook his head. He looked doubtful.
Matt rubbed a finger and thumb together. The well-known gesture for money. “Somewhere cheap,” he said.
They walked together out of the square and along a straight, narrow street with a wall about five metres high on one side. It must have been built by the people that the tour guide had been talking about – the Incas. It could have been made as long ago as a thousand years, when they were in command of the city. The stones were huge. Each one must have weighed a ton. But at the same time they were all irregular in shape, with seven or eight edges. Somehow they had all been locked together without mortar. There were tourists taking photographs of each other against the wall. Street sellers were hawking pictures of it on cards.