The lack of alcohol was one enduring problem. It seemed to Mardina that the local people didn’t drink, in favour of taking drugs and potions of various kinds. Chicha, the local maize beer, was officially used only in religious ceremonies. After a time Quintus turned a blind eye to the illicit brewing of beer.
As for the drugs, the most common was coca, the production of which was part of the mit’a obligation. But you could grow it anywhere, it grew wild in the forest, and everybody seemed to chew it, from quite young children up to toothless grandmothers. Some of the legionaries tried it, taking it in bundles of pressed leaves with lime, and a few took to it; they said it made them feel stronger, sharper, more alert, and even immune to pain. Medicus Michael officially disapproved, saying that the coca was making your brain lie to you about the state of your body.
With time, the villagers started to invite the Romans to join in feasts to celebrate their various baffling divinities. The adults passed around the coca, smoked or drank various other exotic substances, played their noisy pan pipes, and danced what Mardina, who did not partake, was assured were expressions of expanded inner sensation, but looked like a drunken shambles to her. The children would hang lanterns in the trees, and everybody would sing through the night, and other communities would join in until it seemed as if the whole habitat was echoing to the sound of human voices.
The local people would always look strange to a Roman or Brikanti eye, Mardina supposed. The men wore brilliantly coloured blanket-like tunics, and the women skirts and striped shawls and much treasured silver medallions. But they grew tall and healthy. Sickness was rare here. The medicus opined that most diseases had been deliberately excluded when the habitat was built, and it was kept that way by quarantine procedures of the kind the legionaries had had to submit to on arrival. And, if you ignored the forest-bird feathers that habitually adorned the black hair of the men, and the peculiar black felt hats with wide brims that the women sported, the people could be very attractive, with almost a Roman look to their strong features.
On the other hand, Mardina supposed, to these legionaries exiled by a jonbar hinge from their wives and families and all they knew, almost any woman would be attractive.
One by one, the legionaries began to form relationships with the women of the village. The Sapa Inca’s own clan was polygamous – although it was said that the true heirs to the empire were always born of the closest family of all, of the Inca marrying a favoured sister – but the villagers, at least here in the wilds of the antisuyu, were ferociously monogamous. Quintus said only that he was pleased how few of these new loves were already married, and how few passion-fuelled disputes he was having to resolve.
But he did have to mediate conversations with the legionaries and the local leaders about birth control. Contraceptives were free at the tambos, and so were abortions, though Mardina got the sense that the operations could be risky, such was the state of medicine here. Your choice about having children was up to you, but the population size was carefully monitored by the imperial authorities, and if the average birth rate of an ayllu went above two children per couple without the appropriate licences, there would be, it seemed, penalties to pay.
Even though many of the younger local men watched Mardina, or spoke to her, or tried to bring her into the narcotics-fuelled dances, she kept herself to herself. Some attention she got wasn’t so welcome, such as from the tocrico apu Ruminavi. She soon learned from local gossip that he was a married man with kids as old as she was, but he didn’t seem able to keep his eyes off her, and Clodia, when she visited.
For now she kept everybody at bay.
‘I’m just not ready for it,’ she confided once to Clodia, daughter of Titus Valerius, as they patiently weeded their way through a field of maize. Clodia was still just fifteen, but she and Mardina were closest in age in the Roman party, and the only two young women.
Clodia was more wide-eyed about the local boys. ‘What about that Quizo?’
‘The one who always wears the hummingbird feathers?’
‘That’s the one. I’d be ready for him any day of the week …’
Mardina playfully ruffled her hair. ‘Sure you would, and in a few years you’ll eat him alive. But for now – it’s different for you, Clodia. At least you’ve still got your father here.’
‘Ha! The big boss of me. Well, you can keep him …’
Mardina said patiently, ‘It’s just that we’ve all been through so much. We passed through the jonbar hinge. We lost everything we knew. And even before that, I knew that my own mother was from another world again, from before another jonbar hinge, and how strange is that? Now here we are in this strange place where nobody speaks Brikanti or Latin, and nobody’s heard of Jesu or Julius Caesar …’
‘Well, I like it here,’ Clodia said defiantly. ‘I always liked living in camp when we were at Romulus, and I wanted to train as a legionary. Now there’s nobody to tell me I can’t.’
Mardina grinned. ‘Good for you. For me, it’s just that I need to find myself here first, that’s all. Before getting lost in Quizo.’
‘Very wise,’ Clodia said gravely. ‘You take your time. But can we talk a bit more about his eyes first?’
Quintus didn’t hesitate to remind all the Romans of their true purpose here: to survive, to remember their comrades still aboard the Malleus Jesu, and to amass stores to enable them to escape, if they chose – or maybe to knock the Sapa Inca off his throne, so the men dreamed over their beer.
And, though they had had to give up any weapons at the entry hub, Quintus began quietly to have the men make their own: spears of fire-hardened wood, clubs. He negotiated with local artisans, metalworkers, for spear points. Soon there was quiet talk of getting hold of bladed weapons, swords and knives. All this was paid for in kind, usually with a squad of legionaries carrying out some brute-force task – and all beneath the notice, hopefully, of the tax assessors.
But for all the long-term scheming of Quintus Fabius and his senior men, for all the mutterings of the ColU about Earthshine and Hatches and jonbar hinges, the longer Mardina stayed here, and the more she got used to the rhythms of Inca life, the more settled she felt. The more secure. Maybe the sheer fact of getting back a routine, some basic order in her life, after that chaotic period since leaving Terra was good for her.
All the Roman party saw the benefit of the Inca system about fifty days after their arrival in the antisuyu. There was a crisis; one of the big Inti windows was scarred by a meteorite strike, and had to be covered over with a tremendous steel lid while repairs were effected. That meant that a kind of night fell over a swathe of countryside in the region of the habitat opposite the damaged window. Crops failed, and rainforest trees quickly started to die back. The state system, however, swung into action, and some of the legionaries, recruited for the effort, described what they saw. From all around the local area the tambos were opened, and mit’a workers, supervised by the military, rushed to bring relief to the stricken province.
This was where the system of constantly storing excess produce paid off: this was the point of all the organisation, Mardina started to see. In a way it was a distillation of the Roman system in her own history, the bargain an empire made with the nations and populations it subdued: submit to me, and I will keep you safe. Under the Incas’ almost obsessively tight control, you might have little freedom of movement, freedom of choice. But you never went hungry, thirsty, you never went cold, there was medical care when you needed it. And when disaster struck at one part of the imperial body, the rest rushed to help it recover.