“I’m just on my way to see her about my work. I’m sure she'll understand that her husband must be in his best condition before the visitors arrive.”
“You may send her a message if you like, once you're where you're supposed to be," the man said, “but you're late already and everyone else is waiting for you, so you will come with us right now.” He beckoned, and two guards emerged from nearby shadows.
On either side of her, holding her elbows, the guards marched her toward a waiting cart, big enough to hold two people and a driver, one of the rare ones with a team of two llamas. A second large cart and team sat behind the first. The guards split, one to each vehicle, with Ilyapa in the first and the procession director in the second. It was an ostentatious display of wealth and force.
The Coya doesn’t want the Sapa Inca to be fixed, Ilyapa thought. But why not?
The wives were sequestered in possibly the most austere building Ilyapa had ever seen. It was certainly modern, with the high ceilings and echoing spaces of the newest buildings in Cuyochitampu. It was so new that it lacked furnishings, decorations, and all forms of charm. The wives were to sleep on the cold stone floors, naked, exposing themselves to the gods for judgment. Ilyapa began to perceive a calculating, punishing hatred in the Coya’s design for the night’s activities.
But before the sleep, there would be intensive bathing, grooming, and rituals. After the first ritual, Ilyapa was assigned to a group of twenty-five women. “Go through that passage to the baths," their leader told them. “Leave your clothes in the dressing room, and make sure to submerge yourselves completely and cross to the other side of the pool.”
They filed through, entering the water one at a time. Not a single one of the women failed to gasp at its temperature. The man-made waterfall filling it drew from an icy spring: refreshing if wanted, intolerable if not. Painful cold shocked Ilyapa’s skin and sank into her bones as she sloshed through the pool, moving as quickly as she could against the chest-height water’s resistance and saving full immersion for the moment before she could climb out on the other side.
They were ushered into a cool underground room where they sat, shivering, and waited as a few women at a time had their hair twisted into hundreds of tiny braids, so that they would all look as similar as possible.
The intensive schedule of activities went on late into the night, including a long practice for the morning’s procession, and all the while Ilyapa’s stomach burned and raged with hunger. Finally, they were arranged in rows to rest for a few hours, but she couldn’t allow herself to sleep.
It didn’t matter why the Coya wanted her to fail. She simply refused to do so.
The cold, hard floor worked in her favor, but Ilyapa still had to dig her fingernails into her palms and bite the insides of her cheeks to stay awake. She had not slept well for the past several nights due to the stress of her job. Exhaustion fought with rage over her ill-treatment. She had never felt any ambition to marry a dead body, but after being forced into this bizarre position, she was now kept from her work and tortured, for what? The Coya’s jealousy? The unfairness tore at her, adding to her array of discomforts.
Finally, the silence indicated that everyone was asleep, including her group’s leader. Ilyapa rolled over silently, rising to her hands and knees and then to her feet. She crept down the corridor between the splayed bodies of her co-wives, gritting her teeth, so tense that she thought she might lose control of herself and scream.
But she didn’t. She passed silently behind the guards as they joked around the fire. Around a corner, she stole a torch from a sconce and found her way down to the bathing pool, where she held the flame above her head as she crossed through the water, which seemed even icier than before. Her clothes and jewelry were where she had left them. No one was watching the building’s entrance; all of the guards were stationed inside.
Once outside, she had to choose between risking a witness to her absence and taking too long to get back to her workshop, so she hired a small llama-pulled cart, handing its sleepy driver one of her silver bracelets.
At her work building, Ilyapa circled around toward a back entrance. Off the main walkways, the distance between torches scared her. In the darkness she ran her left hand nervously against the building’s stone wall as she walked, flinching with every change in the surface’s texture. She imagined spiders lurking on it, waiting to creep across her skin. The small portal she wanted was also dark, but once inside she found that enough low fires had been left glowing to let her navigate to Khuno’s workroom.
She wanted her pliers.
The area was shockingly unguarded. Was this really the same place she'd been warned out of earlier in the day? Maybe their project is finished now, she thought. But then why did they block my repair of the Sapa Inca?
She took a torch from the wall closest to Khuno’s private space, and slipped into the room. It was a risk to have the light, but there was no other way to find her pliers. At first, she couldn’t take in the specifics of the cluttered space, but as she sought the work ledges where tools would most likely be left, reflections flickered from a large, shiny thing at the room’s center.
The project? She couldn’t tell what it was. Lifting the torch, she stepped forward and looked down at the thing, which had legs, a torso, a head…It was a giant metal man, twice the height and width of an ordinary man. A device, clearly meant to move and function. The impressive llama armor she had seen earlier would look like the work of clumsy children next to the grandeur of the metal man’s lavish decorations, so ornate as to stop just short of gaudiness. Every surface glittered with inlays of amethyst, mother of pearl, lapis lazuli, citrine, and more, the abundant gemstones made into patterns in the device’s gold exterior. Ilyapa wished desperately to examine it—to open it up and see the inner workings and deduce what it could do. Clearly this was the project, but to leave it alone here? Unbelievable. She had to be missing something. A trap of some kind? Hidden guards?
Then she heard voices nearby, a man and a woman laughing in sensual tones. The voices sounded familiar. Khuno and…? She knew the woman’s voice.
She ran to the nearest workbench, crouching behind it. If they came into the room, they would see her light. The only way to put it out would be to take off her ascu and smother the fire, leaving her naked and the room full of burnt wool smoke. She didn’t know where they were, so running away would be difficult. Rising to a half-crouch, she looked for possible exits. There was the door she had entered, and another door on the side, closed with a hanging reed mat, which, she now realized, had a slight glow around the edges. She crouched again.
I am an idiot.
With her heart stuttering, she considered her options. Khuno clearly felt secure enough to leave the Coya’s project here with no one watching it. Why? Why would he take even the slightest risk of displeasing the Coya by neglecting the project for sex?
Another burst of laughter from the next room answered her question, as she recognized the woman’s voice.
The Coya was in there with him.
Ilyapa had to leave immediately. She stood, taking a breath to prepare herself for the escape and trek to her workshop, and saw that a leather tray sat on the ledge by her right hand. Her tools. If she took the whole tray it might be missed, but by the gods she would have her pliers. She snatched them up and left, trying not to picture what Khuno and the Coya were doing to each other behind the reed mat.
Supay was dozing in Ilyapa’s workshop, loyal enough to stay despite her broken promise to return soon. Ilyapa hated to wake him, but there was too much to do and discuss, and she had only a few hours left before someone might find that she was missing. She shook him.