Clodia glanced around for her father, but Titus Valerius was nowhere to be seen. She looked up at Mardina. She muttered, ‘That man is like a worm.’
‘He is.’
‘But I have the feeling that we should trust him, just this once.’
‘So do I. Come on!’
The two of them lifted their Inca-style smocks, and ran in their Roman-style sandals to the edge of the forest where Ruminavi had indicated. There they looked back at the soldiers assiduously searching the ayllu’s village, glanced at each other, and then held hands and walked into the hacha hacha.
They were plunged into darkness, as if being swallowed.
The slim trunks of the trees towered over them, like pillars in some huge temple, and the canopy of green far above was almost solid. Their ears were filled with the cries of monkeys and macaws, screeches and whistles that echoed as if they were indeed inside some tremendous building. At least the ground was fairly clear, for undergrowth could not prosper in this shade, but in the few slivers of light flowers grew, bright and vibrant, and vines wrapped around the trunks of the trees. And as the girls’ eyes adapted to the dark they glimpsed snakes and scorpions and swarming ants.
But they had come only a few paces into the shade of the trees.
When Mardina looked back, she saw a party of soldiers coming their way. Clodia’s pale Roman skin seemed to shine in the residual light, easily visible. Mardina whispered, ‘There’s no coca here. I’m sure Ruminavi meant us to hide from the soldiers. We must go further in.’
‘I know. I don’t dare.’
‘Nor me. But we have to try, I think. And—’
And that was when they saw the anti girl.
Mardina’s heart hammered, and she clutched Clodia’s hand.
She was standing in the shadows, a little way deeper into the forest. Dressed only in strips of woven fabric around her chest and waist, she looked no older than Clodia. She wore a headband over pulled-back hair into which were stuffed brilliantly coloured feathers. From her neck hung a pendant, pieces of tied wood that looked oddly like the Hammer-Cross of Jesu, in Mardina’s own timeline. She had a small bow with a quiver of arrows tucked on straps at her back, but her hands were open and empty, Mardina saw, in a gesture of friendship.
It was her face that was terrifying. Her skin was dyed a brilliant blue, with brighter stripes sweeping back from her nose like the whiskers of a jaguar, a monster of local myth. Feathers seemed to sprout from the skin around her nose and mouth.
She looked calm, Mardina thought, calm as a snake about to strike. Mardina herself was anything but calm.
‘We should go back,’ she muttered to Clodia. ‘This isn’t our world.’
‘Are you sure? Mardina, the ayllu isn’t our world either. None of it is …’ Clodia took a bold step forward.
The anti girl smiled, and beckoned with her hands, an unmistakable gesture.
Clodia looked back over her shoulder. ‘See? I think she’s telling us to come deeper in. I think we should trust her. Oh, come on, Mardina, for curiosity’s sake if nothing else.’
So Mardina gave in and took one step after another, in pursuit of Clodia, who followed the anti girl.
CHAPTER 46
The Romans had learned that the Incas called these people antis, the inhabitants of the forest. Sometimes you saw them, shadowy figures running between the great trunks at the forest’s burned edge – a face scowling out of the green, with a sense of the utterly alien. The folk of the ayllus ignored them, but were careful not to probe too far into the forest, into their territory, and, probably, vice versa applied too. It was as if two entirely different worlds had been jammed into one huge container, Mardina thought.
Yet details of the antis were known. They belonged to peoples with names like Manosuyus, Chunchos, Opataris. They traded with the folk of the ayllus, providing from the depths of their deadly jungle hardwood, feathers, jaguar skins, turtle oil, and exotic plants. One of the most prized plants, the Romans learned, was a hallucinogen called ayahuasca, ‘the vine of the gods’, which the Incas used to make particularly potent ritual beverages. In return the antis took as payment steel axes and knives, even salt gathered from the shore of the distant ocean.
The original antisuyu had in fact been the great forest that had once swathed much of the continent of Valhalla Inferior, surrounding the river the Roman conquerors had called the New Nile, and the UN-China Culture had called the Amazon. In the histories of all three cultures, including the Inca, the forest had eventually been mostly lost, to logging and mineral exploration. But the Incas, it seemed, as a kind of gesture to their own deep past, had transported survivors of the forest cultures into a recreated wilderness here in Yupanquisuyu, and allowed them to live out their lives much as they had long before there were such things as empires and cities on the face of the world.
After all, Mardina learned in scraps of conversation, the antisuyu was the first barbaric land the Incas had conquered, when they pushed eastward from their stronghold on the mountainous spine to the west of Valhalla Inferior. Then, with the jungle pinned down under a network of roads and pukaras – and with the experience of such conquest behind them – they had been ready to strike out further east across the ocean, with ships built using techniques brought to them by the probing Xin, who had made their own ocean crossings from the far west. When they had landed in Europa – the ColU thought somewhere in Iberia – the Incas seemed to have fallen upon a Roman Empire wrecked by plague, famine, civil breakdown, perhaps afflicted by some other calamity yet to be identified. And then an expansion south into Africa had begun, and then further east still into Asia, where the Xin empire lay waiting, and the final battle for the planet had begun …
Through all this, however, the Incas had always preserved scraps of the forest where the original antis had still clung on. And in the end the descendants of those antis, no doubt utterly bewildered, had been scooped up and transported to the Incas’ new empire in the sky. This wasn’t unprecedented; the Incas had similarly taken up samples of many of the peoples that had comprised the land-based empire. It was said that over a hundred and sixty languages had been spoken in the empire, even before its expansion beyond Valhalla Inferior to a global power.
Now, so it was said, the antis prospered in the forest as well as they had ever, and – some in the ayllu whispered cattily – most of them didn’t even know they were in some great human-made artefact in the sky.
The anti girl led them in a straight line, more or less, and Mardina tried to keep track of their route. But there were no landmarks – the trees all looked the same to her – and in the jumbled shadows she even had trouble telling which direction was which. If she could only get a glimpse of the sky, of the mirror landscape above, she’d reorient and then just walk out of this place.
Then, without warning, they broke into the light.
The clearing was perhaps a hundred paces across, and evidently created by fire, for on the ground Mardina saw the evidence of burning, blackened fallen trunks and scorched branches and a scatter of ash through which green saplings poked eagerly into the light. The air was humid and very hot. But the sky above, fringed with the green of the forest canopy, revealed a textured upside-down landscape that Mardina never would have believed could be such a reassuring sight.
In the centre of the clearing was a village. Huts built of what looked like long grass stems, or maybe bamboo, were set up in a rough circle around open, trampled ground. A fire burned on a rough hearth of stones, with what looked like a large guinea pig roasting on a crude spit. Villagers sat around, poking at the fire, mending baskets, skinning another animal, talking. A handful of children dozed in the afternoon heat.