Quintus grinned. “The moment approaches, then.” He clasped Inguill’s hand. “You must go. Goodbye, then, quipucamayoc—I appreciate all you’ve done for us.”
She pursed her lips. “I don’t see it as a betrayal of the Sapa Inca emperor, you know, as much as a challenge to these history-eating monsters we all face.”
“I understand that. And so we’re on the same side. Go now—you too, Titus Valerius, and make sure you tell that daughter of yours what a fine Roman I believe she has grown up to be. Now let’s get the century drawn up. Don’t want them thinking it’s a Saturnalia, do we? Give them a blast of the horn, Rutilius Fuscus…”
56
There were a dozen, in all, Mardina had slowly learned, as their days had passed in chambers of unimaginable luxury. A dozen victims of the planned sacrifice. Or, depending how you looked at it, a dozen children privileged to have been selected for the capacocha ceremony, selected for the glory of living forever, in the unblinking gaze of Inti.
And today was the first time they had all been brought together. Today, the day on which their young lives would be ended—mercifully enough, Cura had assured her, they would never know, never feel anything. “Why, what with the drugs and drink and rich food, some of them have been barely conscious for days…”
Mardina struggled for self-control.
The ceremony was to take place in the temple called the Qoricancha. This was a pyramid of bloodred stone, topped by layers of green, sky blue, and a chapel of some pink stone at the very top.
Mardina, with Clodia and the other sacrificial victims, were led hand in hand through a courtyard filled with sculptures of gold: trees, flowers, hummingbirds frozen in flight, even a llama with a shepherd, as if a garden had in an instant been dipped in the liquid metal. The victims, floating in the air, many already drug-addled, stared at all this as if they could not believe their eyes.
Then they were taken inside the pyramid, and into a grand chamber whose walls were lined with gold and silver plates and crowded with shrines to the gods, and niches where, it appeared, the corpses of more dead Incas resided. Over their head was a roof set with stars and lightning bolts wrought in silver. For a moment they were left alone, staring at the latest wonders.
Then a solemn young woman led them all down through an open door set into the richly carpeted floor—and then down, down through tunnels lined with precious metals and lit by oil lamps. They were brought at last to yet another room set in the basement of Hanan Cuzco, another chamber with vast windows offering a view of space. Beyond the window this time Mardina could see detail, shelves of some kind splashed with bright sunlight and fixed with scraps of faded color—human figures, like dolls, perhaps; the details were hard to make out.
It was here that the ceremony would be performed, and everybody who counted would want to be here, and finely dressed people were already pouring in. The place was soon crowded. But the twelve children with the priests and doctors who attended them were guided to the heart of the ornate mob, along with the personal companions they had been allowed to bring into Cuzco—in Clodia’s case, that was Mardina, and Mardina in turn clung to Cura.
And with the children in place, here came the Sapa Inca himself, once more borne on his enormous litter, and his orderly bands of attendants and bearers, all highborn themselves—and wherever the Inca went, a mob of courtiers followed, colorful, swooping through the weightless environment of the axis, each of them striving to catch the eye of the Inca or one of his senior wives or sons. As ever, grim blue-faced axis warriors, their long limbs like knotted rope, slid through the crowds, watching, listening.
In all this, however, the twelve children were the focus of attention, as they had been for days.
Attendants now gently led them forward to a row of elaborate seats, almost like thrones themselves, into which they were loosely strapped by embroidered harnesses. The children had been brought here from all over the habitat, Mardina knew, and represented many of the ethnicities controlled by the empire. There was even an anti girl, the tattoos on her face still livid, a child who had been even more baffled and disoriented than the rest, so alien was the city environment to her, let alone the details of this exotic ritual.
And yet, seeing them side by side, there was a sameness about all the children now, even the anti girl—even Clodia Valeria, who had come here from another reality entirely, from beyond the jonbar hinges. For days—if not weeks or months in some cases—the children had been fêted here in Hanan Cuzco, just like those other blessed children in their bottles, and treated with alcohol, maize corn, expensive meats and seafood, even exotic drugs, all of which luxuries, Cura said with some envy, were usually reserved for the most senior of the elite. As a result they had all put on weight, their skin had taken on a kind of glossy sheen, and the drugs had made them passive, dull-witted, hard to scare and easy to manipulate.
Now the shelf Mardina had noticed earlier outside the window began to move, a platform that rose up before the row of slackly gazing children and the excited courtiers behind them. One of the priests began to declaim in the courtly, antiquated version of Quechua that seemed to be reserved for moments like this, a dialect Mardina found impossible to understand, even after months of studying the language in the ayllu.
Cura murmured, “He is describing the terrible glory of Inti, and of the creator gods who give us life, and can take it away. These children are privileged because they will live forever in the eye of Inti, never aging as we will, never growing ill or frail—never dying—”
The anti girl screamed. It was a shrill, terrible sound that cut through the fog of words, Mardina’s own confusion.
And now she saw why the girl had screamed, what she had seen beyond the window. That lifting platform bore, not dolls or dummies as she had imagined—it was a row of children, all around sixteen years old, all richly dressed, with elaborately painted faces and coiffed hair. They lay on their backs, their hands clasped on their bellies. In fact they looked as if they were asleep, their beautiful faces relaxed, at peace.
Mardina, stunned, leaned forward and stared through the window, from side to side. She saw hundreds of children, hundreds of beautiful corpses, stacked on a very long platform. Bodies in vacuum.
Cura whispered, “The artistry is great, as you can see. The children are put to sleep with the utmost gentleness, and the work of the mummification begins immediately. The greatest skill is in delivering faces to look so natural, so peaceful… Then the malquis are lodged outside the hull, outside the air, so that no corruption can ever taint them. Thus they begin their second life, undying and preserved forever in the vacuum.”
“You’ve forgotten why we’re here,” Mardina muttered.
Cura glanced at her, and something of the worshipful radiance left her face. “You’re right, of course…”
The anti girl started to struggle against the harness that restrained her. The priests tried to calm her, but some of the other children were stirring now, becoming disturbed. One slightly younger boy started to cry. The disturbance was spreading out through the wider circle of courtiers, Mardina saw.
“Now or never,” she murmured to Cura.
Cura nodded. Stealthily, while the attendants were distracted, she began to loosen Clodia’s harness.
And Mardina pulled a headband from Clodia’s brow. She had patiently rehearsed this with Quintus and Michael, over and over before they had come here, and rehearsed it in her head daily ever since. The band, a gift from the Romans’ anti allies, was an array of brilliant blue feathers taken from rain forest birds, the whole contained within a near-transparent cast-off snakeskin. Now she held the band at one end with thumb and forefinger, and carefully slipped off the transparent skin with her other hand, being sure not to touch any of the feathers.