Now they had to work harder, pushing through crowds that were mostly streaming ahead the way they were going.
“I’m getting winded,” Mardina said. “What is it we’re going to see?”
“Why, it’s the procession of the Inca himself. You’re lucky to have arrived on such a day, to see it in your very first hour here. Once a month he travels around Cuzco—I’m surprised you haven’t heard of this even out in the antisuyu.”
Mardina glanced at Clodia. “I think most people out in the country gossip about who stole whose potato, rather than goings-on at court.”
“Well, that’s their loss. And this particular month, every year, the Sapa Inca comes to the Hall of the Gaping Mouth.”
“What’s that?”
Cura smiled. “You’ll see.”
She led them through one last entrance—huge doors flung open—into a hall containing another three-dimensional crowd, more colorful, gorgeous people flying weightlessly everywhere, and axis warriors aloft, eyeing the populace suspiciously. The hall in some ways was like any other they’d passed through, brilliantly lit by vast fluorescent lanterns, the walls glittering with colored tiles.
But the floor here was different, for it was panelled with vast windows that showed the blackness of space below—a scattering of stars, a brighter point that might be a planet, the whole panorama slowly rotating as seen from this axis of the habitat.
Mardina was entranced. The vacuum itself was only a pace or two away. “We must be at the lowest level of the palace—the outer hull. What a sight…”
“Look, Mardina,” Clodia said.
“Makes me almost nostalgic—”
“Look. Above the windows, farther down the hall…”
Mardina looked up, drifting into the air to see over the crowd. Now she saw that to the floor’s central window panes were attached upright glass tubes, a dozen of them. And in each of the tubes was a person—young, fourteen or fifteen or sixteen years old maybe, six boys and six girls. Their clothes looked expensive, their faces gleamed with oils, and each wore a dazzling headband studded with precious stones. All drifted weightless in their bottles. And each passively looked out with an empty expression, confused, even baffled, Mardina thought, as if they had no idea what was happening to them.
Clodia’s observation was terse. “They look fat.”
Cura said, “Well, of course they do. They have enjoyed the Inca’s hospitality—oh, for a month or more, since their selection for this procession. And of course only one will be chosen.”
“For what?”
But before Cura could answer there was a blast of horns. The people swarming in the chamber pressed back against the walls and ceiling as best they could.
And through this living archway a procession advanced.
First came a party of men and women dressed in brightly colored tunics in identical chessboard patterns. They moved in as stately a way as possible, Mardina thought, given they needed to use ropes and guide rails to advance. They glared at anybody in the way; they physically pushed people back or had the warriors remove them. They even swept bits of debris out of the air.
“Every one of them, even performing those menial tasks,” Cura breathed, “is a noble, a highborn…”
Next came a troop of noisy musicians, drummers and singers and players of horns and panpipes, and dancers who wriggled and swam in the air.
Following them came warriors, dressed in armor of heavy plates and with crowns of gold and silver on their heads. The armor, in fact, looked too cumbersome to wear in combat, and it took the soldiers a visible effort to propel their bulk through the air.
And then came a kind of litter, pulled through the hall by dozens of men and women in bright blue uniforms. The man carried in the litter looked almost lost in a heap of cushions to which he was strapped by a loose harness. His clothes were even more dazzling than his attendants’; it looked to Mardina as if his jacket had been woven of the feathers of gaudy rain forest birds. He wore a gold crown, and a necklace of huge emeralds, and a headband from which hung a delicate fringe, over his forehead, of scarlet wool and fine golden tubes. He was younger than Mardina had expected, slim, and not very strong-looking; perhaps the family faction he had behind him was tougher than he was.
Still, he was the Sapa Inca.
Cura pushed Mardina’s head down. “You don’t look him in the eye,” she said. “Nobody looks him in the eye unless he acknowledges them.”
From her peripheral vision, Mardina saw the Sapa Inca throw something out of his carriage. They were birds, she saw, a dozen small songbirds perhaps, but they were unable to fly in the lack of weight, unable to orient; flapping and tweeting, they spun pitifully.
Then one exploded, burst in a shower of feathers.
“One,” said Cura breathless. “They dose their feed with explosive pellets. It’s quite random—”
Another rattling explosion, a gasp from the crowd.
“Two!”
And another. The tiny feathers hailed down close to Mardina’s face this time.
“Three!”
And then a pause—a pause that lengthened, and Mardina seemed to sense, under the noise of the music, a vast collective sigh, as the remaining birds struggled in the air.
“That’s it! Just three of twelve! The selection is made—number three it is. Look, Mardina, Clodia, the third compartment along…”
Mardina saw the one Cura meant. Standing on the window, above the vacuum, the third bottle contained a girl, slightly younger-looking than the rest, but just as bewildered. Just for a heartbeat she seemed to be aware that everybody in the hall, including the Sapa Inca, was looking at her. Fear creased her soft face.
Then a hatch opened beneath her. The puff of air in her bottle expelled her in a shower of crystals—frost, Mardina realized, condensing from the vapor in the warm air. Already falling into space, the girl looked up, her mouth open. Just for an instant she seemed not to have been harmed. Then she tried to take a breath. She clutched her throat, struggling in the air like a stranded fish, and blood spewed from her mouth.
All this just a few Roman feet from Mardina. People crowded so they could see her through the windows. They laughed and pointed, and some imitated the girl’s helpless, hopeless struggle, as she receded from the window.
“You are not of our culture,” Cura whispered in the ears of Mardina and Clodia. “But can you see why this is done? Yupanquisuyu seems strong, solid. Yet just an arm’s length beyond this window lies death—the Gaping Mouth. The Sapa Inca reminds us all of what will become of us if we fail to maintain the integrity of the habitat, even just for an instant. And it is just as the gods hover, angry, cruel, vengeful, an arm’s length in any direction from our world. It is only the Sapa Inca and the order he imposes that excludes them from the human world. Do you see? Do you see?” She stroked Clodia’s head. “And do you begin to see, now, child, why it is that you must die?”
The ejected girl had stopped struggling, to Mardina’s relief. She drifted slowly away from the habitat, and then, as she fell out of the structure’s huge shadow, she flared with sunlight, briefly beautiful.
55
Quintus Fabius walked to the crest of the ridge with Inguill the quipucamayoc, Michael the medicus, and a handful of his men: Titus Valerius, Scorpus, Orgilius the aquilifer with his standard, and Rutilius Fuscus, the century’s trumpeter.
Once more, in the light of the new day, Quintus inspected his position. They were close to the hub here, having completed, with Inguill’s help, their surreptitious journey from the western coast of the ocean by train and other Inca transports. They were in the foothills that characterized this part of the habitat—but just here they were in a relative lowland, a wide valley cut by a river fed by glacial melt. And beyond, the hub mountains rose up, clinging to the steel face of the hub itself.