Chaska gripped the hands of her companions as she moved to stand in front of the strange child, and could feel likewise their tightening grip on her own hands. The wind howled and swirled around them as Qasa danced and cackled, hopping and skipping from one foot to the next as he chanted and moved around them, thrusting his staff at the heavens above. Behind them Chaska heard the warriors move to form a row, could hear the snapping and crackling of their torches and see the occasional spark whipped away by the bitter wind.
Chaska glanced nervously at her companions. All of them wore the same expression, a combination of melancholy, regret and hope. Unlike the warriors, unlike the royal servants and Qasa, their skulls too were conical, extending far further back than was natural. Chaska recalled the years of pain in her youth, at odds with the immense pride of her family and the respectful gazes of all who crossed her path. Since she had been born she had been chosen for her beauty, and that beauty had been enhanced by the tribe when they had placed the wooden boards either side of her infant skull and forced it to grow into a conical shape that was unlike any of the other children in the village. She had spent most of her early years in pain, and only when those boards had been removed and the pressure eased on her weary skull had she begun to live what had passed for an ordinary life. Now, that distant pain was but a memory dulled by the chica that she had drunk.
Chaska knew that the girl who stood before them now had endured no deformation of her skull at the hands of the shamans. The girl before them had been born exactly as she was, and that was why she was so revered and likely raised in the palace of Macchu Picchu: she was a child of the gods, quite literally.
Karu and the other servants joined them upon the mountain peak as Qasa cackled and howled as though competing with the brisk gales assaulting the peak. With a sudden flourish of shouts and hollers at the endless vault of the heavens above, Qasa slammed his staff down onto the icy earth at their feet and then pointed at the warriors behind Chaska and her companions.
The warriors let out a deafening howl that sent a shiver of fear plunging through Chaska’s body as they ran around the outside of the ring trailing sparks from their flaming torches. They encircled the girls and in the blinding light of the sun she saw one of them move behind the strange girl in the centre, and in his hands was a strip of thickly knotted cord.
The warriors accelerated into a sprint as they roared their battle cries, their torches seeming to surround the girls with a ring of fire and sparks. Qasa howled and turned on the spot as he beat the rocky ground with his feet, and then he raised his staff with one final screech, his eyes shut tight as he slammed it one more time onto the ground and pointed at the girl in the centre of the ring.
A warrior’s club flicked with rapid movement and crashed down onto the strange girl’s elongated skull. Chaska thought she heard a dull thump as she saw the girl’s black eyes flare with surprise and then the light of life vanished from them. She crumpled beneath the blow to her knees and then toppled sideways onto the cold rocks, her wide dark eyes seeing no longer. Chaska glimpsed the warrior who had struck her reached down and whip the cord around her neck before twisting it tight.
Qasa raised his arms and staff to the bitterly cold skies in silence as Chaska heard more dull thumps all around her. In her confused state it did not cross her mind what would happen next until it was too late.
A brief vision of her parents flickered through Chaska’s mind and she gazed at the sun as though imploring for one last touch of her mother’s hand, one last caring word from her father, and then with sudden brutality the sunlight vanished into darkness.
II
‘How much further?’
The dense heat of the jungle clung to Hiram Bingham’s skin like a heavy blanket as he struggled up the rocky hillside. The foliage ahead was thick and rose up into a massive canopy that obscured the cloudy white sky above, only thin shafts of sunlight reaching the shadowy forest floor.
‘As far as is required,’ Hiram replied.
The high altitude air was thin and Hiram’s lungs felt as though they had shrunk with every meandering step he had taken up the mountain. Already high in the Andes before they began the trek, and suffering from headaches and nausea brought on by the thin air, most of Hiram’s team had fallen by the wayside thousands of feet below. Only a few hardy native trackers accompanied him, laden down beneath heavy burdens of supplies.
Hiram hacked with a machete at the dense foliage, the weapon heavier with every blow made to clear a path toward a peak that he could just see through the dense canopy. He raised his hand to deploy the weapon once more but then hesitated as he saw a gigantic spider clinging to the vines, its banded legs bright orange against black and its massive pulsing abdomen glistening with moisture. Hiram change the angle of the blade and brought it down on another vine nearby as he made his way around the dangerous arachnid and clambered over a rocky boulder blocking his path.
Hiram was not following a map, for where he was headed no maps existed. His only guide was the legends and stories of the people he had met at the foot of the mountains, their recollections and fables an unreliable and often disheartening promise of unspeakable wealth and untold discoveries awaiting in this most remote region of the world. He had heard about a mysterious lost city in the jungles high in the Peruvian Andes for years, but no one in Cusco had believed his stories because it was already believed that the last capital of the Incas was the city of Choquequirao.
‘That way.’
Hiram’s guide pointed between two massive tree trunks to where a shaft of bright sunlight beamed through the forest. Melchor Arteage was a peasant farmer recruited by Bingham in Mandor who claimed to know the location of the city, his native Quechua tongue translated by Sergeant Carrasco, the only member of Bingham’s team to make it this far, and a small boy named Pablito who claimed to have climbed to the city once before. Having crossed the Urabamba River some two thousand feet below them they had climbed for hours with little sign of the supposed citadel.
Hiram nodded and aimed towards the gap, his shirt drenched with sweat and the satchel slung over his shoulder weighty with the handful of stone trinkets he had discovered further down the hillside. Made of nothing more than the rock of the mountain upon which he climbed, to Hiram they could easily have been made of diamonds for their worth was equal in his mind.
Hiram scrambled over a damp boulder and slumped breathless as he turned and looked out over the densely forested gorge that plunged away beneath them through veils of ephemeral cloud. He reached into his satchel and pulled out a tiny carved figurine, one that likely depicted an ancient sun-god of Peruvian culture known as Inti. Hiram could not be sure if the figurine belonged to the Inca, but then he had never seen anything quite like it before from any culture of the Americas. It was this tiny figurine that had led him from the open plateau of Paracus to the soaring mountains of the Andes, all based upon the supposition of Melchor Arteage who insisted he had seen the image of the figurine once before.
Hiram leaned one elbow against the boulder and looked over his shoulder at the hillside to where the sunlight beamed between the two trees. For a moment he considered how much further up the hillside he had to climb, but then he realized something about the light. The lower edge of the shaft was dead straight, a perfectly horizontal line that did not appear in nature. Hiram squinted and shielded his eyes with one hand as he examined the line, and then he put the figurine back into his satchel and clambered further up the slope even as Melchor Arteage reached the boulder.