‘Or,’ the ColU murmured from its pack, ‘perhaps they are the result of genetic tinkering. We have spoken of this, medicus. Your culture knew nothing of this, but we could have done it—’
‘Before the last jonbar hinge but one,’ the medicus said drily.
‘Be interesting to fight them, then,’ Quintus said thoughtfully. ‘But not yet. And hush, Collius; that clerk is looking suspicious.’
The lead official looked up at them now from her knotted strings, her scowl deepening, and she inspected them one by one. Fifty-something she might be, but, Mardina thought, like the soldiers with her, she was handsome. Under black hair streaked with grey she had dark eyes, copper-brown skin, high cheekbones and a nose a Roman might have been proud of.
The official pulled herself up into the air, so she could look down on the disorderly group of Romans. ‘Inguill sutiymi – quipucamayoc. Maymanta kanki? Romaoi? Hapinkichu? Runasimi rimankichu?’
Inguill was not having a good day, and when the strangers muttered disrespectfully among themselves before her, her disquiet and irritation quickly deepened.
Inguill’s formal title was senior quipucamayoc, keeper of the quipus. She was one of a dozen of her rank who, on behalf of the Sapa Inca and through a hierarchy of record-keepers beneath her, effectively governed all of Yupanquisuyu, this great habitat, both cuntisuyu and antisuyu, from Hurin Cuzco at the eastern hub to Hanan Cuzco, palace of the Inca himself, at this western hub. It was a role that, it was said, had had a place in Inca culture since the days before the empire’s conquest of the lands of the first antisuyu, the passage across the eastern ocean, and the move out into the sky.
And it was a role dedicated to the primary function of control: the essence of the imperial system of the Intip Churi, the Children of the Sun.
That fact had become apparent to Inguill at a very young age, when the teachers at her ayllu had first picked her out as an exceptional talent and had put her forward for training at the Cuzco colleges. Inguill had risen up the ranks of the imperial administration smoothly – shedding her family and her ties to her ayllu, shunning personal relationships in favour of the endless fascination of the work.
She had always been able to grasp the key importance of maintaining control, in the empire of the Sapa Inca. Especially in a habitat like this, huge yet finite and fragile, where you had to control the people in order to ensure the maintenance of the complex, interlocked systems that kept them all alive. And in the theology of the Intip Churi you had to control the gods, too, endlessly placating, and excluding the wilful divine anger that could break into the world if chaos and disorder were allowed to reign, even briefly. Of course this great box of a habitat – a box from which there was no possibility of escape, under constant and total surveillance from Hanan Cuzco at the hub, from the Condor craft that continually patrolled the axis, and from operatives dispersed on the ground – lent itself to such control.
It soon became apparent too that camayocs like herself, endowed with that kind of intuitive perception about the need for unsleeping and unrelenting control, were rare indeed, and prized. So she had found herself plucked out for promotion ahead of many of her age-group cadre – even the privileged sort, the sons and daughters of the rich of the Cuzcos who could afford the finest pharmaceutical enhancements, the most refined extracts from plants and animals bred for the purpose over generations, to sharpen their intellects to a degree of brilliance. Even such an expensively shaped mind was of little use to the state if beneath the glitter and the quick-talk was a lack of basic perception, a lack of understanding of the challenges of existence. And that was the understanding that Inguill enjoyed, and cultivated in herself.
Not that it did her career much good. She had proven to be so good at her job that she was given a kind of roaming brief, sent to manage, not the orderly, everyday problems of Yupanquisuyu, but the disorder, the unusual, the out of the ordinary, wherever it might crop up – either within the habitat or coming from without, like this bunch of Romaoi. The paradox was that as a result she spent much of her working life in a state of frustration, even anxiety, and certainly irritation. For the unusual, the disorderly, the chaotic, the very stuff it was her job to deal with, annoyed her profoundly until she could master it and clean it up. And all the while her rivals, over whom she had in theory been promoted, were busily worming their way into comfortable niches in the vast hierarchy of the Cuzcos.
Nothing in recent times had annoyed her more than these mysterious Romaoi, with their bulging muscles and sullen expressions. Ice moon farmers? Hah! Not likely … But where there was novelty, she reminded herself, where there was strangeness, there was always opportunity – for herself, if not the empire.
Now she faced the big man with the gaudy cloak who looked to be the leader.
‘My name is Inguill – I am a quipucamayoc. Where are you from? Are you Roman? Do you understand? Do you speak runasimi?’
The ColU’s earpieces had been given to Quintus, Michael, Mardina and a few others. Now Mardina heard the strange device whisper its translation in her ear – a translation from Quechua, which the official called runasimi, into Latin, by an artificial being whose own first language was a kind of bastardised German. Just when it seemed her life couldn’t have got any stranger …
Quintus grunted. ‘I will never be able to speak this tongue of theirs! It sounds like squabbling birds.’
‘Allichu, huq kuti rimaway!’
‘That was, “Say that again,” ’ the ColU whispered. ‘Apologise, Centurion. And wait for me to translate.’
‘I am sorry.’
‘Pampachaykuway …’
‘My name is Quintus Fabius. I am the leader of this group. We are grateful for your shelter.’
‘Well, you haven’t been granted it yet.’ The quipucamayoc glared at Quintus and his men, suspicion bristling as visibly as feathers on a predatory bird, Mardina thought. ‘Tell me again where you claim to come from.’
‘We lived on an ice moon, far from the sun. I apologise; I do not know the names of these bodies as they are known in your mighty empire … (Collius, I’m not comfortable with all this lying …)’
(‘Be humble, Centurion. Guile, remember? You can display your strengths later.’)
‘We were there for many generations. Our fathers and mothers, our grandfathers and grandmothers worked the ice, living off the thin sunlight. We farmed—’
‘You were there so long you forgot most of your Quechua, it seems. Ha! Five centuries after Tiso Inca stomped Rome flat, you refugees still cling to your primitive tongue. Oh, never mind. So you farmed. Why are you here now?’
Mardina could hear the tension in Quintus Fabius’s voice as he swallowed these insults and responded. She was glad Titus Valerius and the rest could not understand what was said.
‘There was a calamity, quipucamayoc. Another body, a fast-moving rogue, hit our home. We, most of the men, were away, investigating another moon that seemed mineral-rich. We had not detected the rogue, there was no time – our home was destroyed, most of the women and children. All we had built over generations. We who survived came here in the last of our ships, to throw yourselves on your mercy.’
She peered into his face. ‘Well, at least you’re sticking to your story. But you don’t betray much grief. That’s either a sign that you’re strong, which is admirable, or you’re lying, which is less so.’ She pulled herself along a guide rope and inspected the legionaries. ‘Also you don’t look like no-weight farmers to me. You’re too solid. Too muscular.’