Dreamer glanced at the strange charts on the wall. “Look, they made us promise not to tell any of you about—well, certain matters, before the Inca deem you ready. But there’s something here I do want to show you.” He led her across the room to the globe.
That blue shape was undoubtedly the Mediterranean. “It’s the world,” she breathed.
“Yes.” He smiled. “The Inca have marked what they know of the European empires. Look, here is Grand Bretagne.”
“Why, even Europe is only a peninsula dangling from the carcass of Asia.”
“You know, your sense of wonder is the most attractive thing about you.”
She snorted. “Really? More than my eyes and teeth and neck, and the other bits of me you’ve been praising? I’ll believe that when a second sun rises in the sky. Show me where you come from—and the Inca.”
Passing his hand over the globe, he made the world spin and dip.
He showed her what lay beyond the Ottoman empire, the solemn Islamic unity that had blocked Christendom from the east for centuries: the vast expanses of Asia, India, the sprawling empire of China, Nippon, the Spice Islands. And he showed how Africa extended far beyond the arid northern regions held by the Ottomans, a great pendulous continent in its own right that sprawled, thrillingly, right across the equator.
“You can in fact reach India and the east by sailing south around the cape of southern Africa,” Dreamer said. “Without losing sight of land, even. A man called Columbus was the first to attempt this in 1492. But he lacked the courage to cross the equator. Columbus went back to the family business of trouser-making, and Christian Europe stayed locked in.”
Now he spun the globe to show her even stranger sights: a double continent, far to the west of Europe across the ocean, lands wholly unknown to any European. The Inca had come from a high country that ran north to south along the spine of the southernmost of the twin continents. “It is a place of mountains and coast, of long, long roads, and bridges centuries old, woven from vines, still in use …”
Around the year 1500, according to the Christian calendar, the Inca’s greatest emperor Huayna Capac I, had emerged from a savage succession dispute to take sole control of the mountain empire. And under him, as the Inca consolidated, the great expansion called the Sunrise had begun. At first the Inca had used their woollen-sailed ships for trade and military expeditions up and down their long coastlines. But gradually they crept away from the shore.
At last, on an island that turned out to be the tip of a grand volcanic mountain that stuck out of the sea, they found people. “These were a primitive sort, who sailed the oceans in canoes dug out of logs. Nevertheless, they had come out of the southeast of Asia and sailed right to the middle of the ocean, colonizing island chains as they went.” The Inca, emboldened by the geographical knowledge they took from their new island subjects, set off west once more, following island chains until they reached southeast Asia. All this sparked intellectual ferment, as exploration and conquest led to a revolution in sky watching, mathematics, and the sciences of life and language.
The Inca, probing westward, at last reached Africa. And when in the early twentieth century they acquired lodestone compasses from Chinese traders, they found the courage to venture north.
Jenny stared at the South Land. There was no real detail, just a few Inca towns dotted around the coast, an interior like a blank red canvas. “Tell me about your home.”
He brushed the image of the island continent with his fingertips. “It is a harsh country, I suppose. Rust-red, worn flat by time. But there is much beauty and strangeness. Animals that jump rather than run, and carry their young in pouches on their bellies. Don’t laugh, it’s true! My people have lived there for sixty thousand years. That’s what the Inca scholars say, though how they can tell that from bits of bone and shards of stone tools I don’t know. My people are called the Bininj-Mungguy, and we live in the north, up here, in a land we call Kakadu.”
Jenny’s imagination raced, and his strange words fascinated her. She drew closer to him, almost unconsciously, watching his mouth.
“We have six seasons,” he said, “for our weather is not like yours. There is Gunumeleng, which is the season before the great rains, and then Gudjewg, when the rain comes, and then Banggerreng—”
She stopped up his mouth with hers.
After a week’s sailing the Viracocha crossed the equator. Atahualpa ordered a feast to be laid for his senior officers and guests. They were brought to a stateroom that, Jenny suspected from the stairs she had to climb, lay just under the deck itself. Tonight, Atahualpa promised, his passengers would be allowed on deck for the first time since Londres, and the great secret that the Incas had been hiding would be revealed.
But by now Dreamer and Jenny had shared so many secrets that she scarcely cared.
While the Inca crew wore their customary llama-wool and cotton uniforms, George Darwin wore his clerical finery, Alphonse the powdered wig and face powder of his father’s court, and Jenny a simple shift, her Sunday best. Dreamer was just one of the many representatives of provinces of the Inca’s ocean-spanning empire aboard ship. They wore elaborate costumes of cloth and feather, so that they looked like a row of exotic birds, Jenny thought, sitting there in a row at the commander’s table.
In some ways Dreamer’s own garb was the most extraordinary. He was stripped naked save for a loin-cloth, his face-spiral tattoo was picked out in some yellow dye, and he had finger-painted designs on his body in chalk-white, a sprawling lizard, an outstretched hand. Jenny was jealously aware that she wasn’t the only woman who kept glancing at Dreamer’s muscled torso—and a few men did too.
The Inca went through their own equator-crossing ritual. This involved taking a live chicken, slitting its belly and pulling out its entrails, right there on the dinner table, while muttering antique-sounding prayers.
Bishop Darwin tried to watch this with calm appreciation. “Evidently an element of animism and the superstitious has survived in our hosts’ theology,” he murmured.
Alphonse didn’t bother to hide his disgust. “I’ve had enough of these savages.”
“Hush,” Jenny murmured. “If you assume none of them can speak Frankish, you’re a fool.”
He glared defiantly, but he switched to Anglais. “Well, I’ve never heard any of them utter a single word. And they assume I know a lot less Quechua than I’ve learned, thanks to your bare-chested friend over there. They say things in front of me that they think I won’t understand—but I do.”
He was only sixteen, as Jenny was; he sounded absurd, self-important. But he was a prince who had grown up in the atmosphere of the most conspiratorial and backstabbing court in all Christendom. He was attuned to detecting lies and power plays. She asked, “What sort of things?”
“About the ‘problem’ we pose them. We Europeans. We aren’t like Dreamer’s folk of the South Land, hairy-arsed savages in the desert. We have great cities; we have armies. We may not have their silver ships and flying machines, but we could put up a fight. That’s the problem.”
She frowned. “It’s a problem only if the Inca come looking for war.”
He scoffed. “Oh, come, Jenny, even an Anglais can’t be so näve. All this friendship-across-the-sea stuff is just a smoke screen. Everything they’ve done has been in the manner of an opening salvo: the donation of farspeakers to every palace in Europe, the planting of their Orbs of the Unblinking Eye in every city. What I can’t figure out is what they intend by all this.”
“Maybe Inca warriors will jump out of the Orbs and run off with the altar silver.”
“You’re a fool,” he murmured without malice.
“Like all Anglais. You and desert boy over there deserve each other. Well, I’ve had enough of Atahualpa’s droning voice. While they’re all busy here, I’m going to see what I can find out.” He stood.