Ultima (31 page)

•   •   •

Quintus didn't hesitate to remind the Romans all 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 someday, if they chose—or maybe to knock the Sapa Inca off his throne someday, 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 after leaving Terra—was good for her. But the longer she stayed, the more embedded she felt in this strange but stable society.

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 swath of countryside in the region of the habitat opposite the damaged window. Crops failed, and rain forest 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 organization, 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.

But she also glimpsed what happened when things went wrong. In this empire of occupation and exploitation, the most common “crime” was an attempt to evade the
mit'a
tax obligations. It was a chill moment when the tax assessors came, and worked through their records, manipulating their
quipus
with one hand. Some, it was said, could work the stringed gadgets with their toes. They saw all and recorded all. And the perpetrators of crime, after arbitrary hearings before the
tocrico apu
, could be taken away from the
ayllu
for punishment, out of sight.

Observing all this, in the camp Quintus Fabius enacted his own regime of discipline and punishment, intending not to let a single one of his legionaries fall foul of the Inca authorities.

Worse yet, however, for many families was the forcible recruitment of the young. There was a kind of ongoing recruitment drive for off-habitat workers, who would man the asteroid mines or crew kernel-powered freighters. But there was a demand for recruits for service at the Cuzcos, or at another of the great imperial establishments—and the servants chosen were always the prettiest children, those with the sweetest nature. This service was compulsory, not volunteered like other professions.

This was an empire in which everything, including
you
, was owned by the Sapa Inca. In fundamental ways it was far less free than even the Roman Empire had been, back on Terra.

Even so, Mardina could see how the great machinery of state worked to sustain its citizens. She wouldn't hesitate to grab back her own freedom if she ever got the chance. But no doubt there had been worse empires in human history—worse times and places to be alive, even if you weren't the Sapa Inca himself.

And then there was the sheer wonder of living here, in this tremendous building in space.

There was weather. There could be days more brilliant than any summer's day she had known in Brikanti—hotter than Rome, said Quintus Fabius, even before it was a hole in the ground. Or there could be rain, even storms. The
tocrico apu
claimed that these were all under the control of vast engines commanded by the Sapa Inca's advisers, but the locals, salvaging their ruined crops after one sudden hailstorm, were skeptical about that.

On warm, clear nights, Mardina liked to sleep outside, if she could, sometimes with Clodia at her side, safe within the walls of a community that was slowly taking on the look of an Inca village embedded in a Roman marching camp. And they would look up at the “sky.” Of course, there were no stars to be seen here. There were very few aircraft, even. The only craft operating above the ground were the government-controlled “Condors” that passed along the axis region of the habitat, in the vacuum.

But the tremendous metal shell above was an inverted world, hanging above them, crowded with endlessly fascinating detail—even if the seeing through this lowland air was poor compared to how it had been on the high
puna
. The Inti windows glowed like pale linear moons, and Mardina could make out the blackness of forest, the pale silver of rivers and lakes. All this was cut through by the sharp lines of rail tracks and roads, connecting communities that glowed almost starlike against the background.

And sometimes, she and Clodia thought, they could make out shapes framed by those tangled lines. They were like figures traced out of the dense
antisuyu
forest up there by some tremendous scalpel. There was a bird, there was a spider, there a crouching human. Maybe it was just Mardina's eyes seeking patterns where none existed, the way the ancients had always seen animals and gods among the meaningless scatter of the stars of the night sky. Or maybe it was deliberate, a touch of uncharacteristic artistry in the huge functional architecture of this artificial world.

And if that was true, maybe there were similar etchings on her side of the world, great portraits hundreds of miles in extent, yet meticulously planned. Maybe from the point of view of some witness sleeping in the open on the other side of the world, lying there pinned by the spin of the cylinder, she was a speck lost in the eye of a spider, or the claw of a bird. Somehow it was a comforting thought to be so enclosed by humanity. Sometimes Mardina wondered if she would eventually forget the wildness of the outside, of the stars.

But there was wildness enough inside the habitat, in the dense green of the rain forest jungle that circled the
ayllu
village. The deep
hacha hacha
, where the
antis
lived.

Mardina and Clodia had their first encounter with the
antis
on the day the strange
mit'a
tax assessment party came to call.

Unusually this was led by Ruminavi,
tocrico apu
, the Deputy Prefect himself. He arrived with the various inspectors and assessors with their
quipus
, and the tax collectors with their hand-drawn carts for the produce and samples they would take away—and a larger than usual contingent of soldiers in their woollen tunics and plumed helmets of steel-reinforced cane, and their armor of quilted cotton over steel plate, all decorated with scraps of gold and silver. Their only weapons were blades, whips, slings; just as in the space-going ships of the lost Roman Empire, projectile weapons and explosives were excluded from the interior of the habitat.

Mardina and Clodia, coming in from the field, recognized none of these men. Almost all the Inca soldiers, the
awka kamayuq
, were part-timers raised from the provinces, from
ayllus
like Mardina's own community, with only a very small core standing army of specialists. But it was the practice to deploy soldiers from one province in operations in others, not their own homeland.

And Mardina noticed, as she had before, a kind of edginess in the way the soldiers walked, a sharp glitter in their eyes. The ColU speculated that this was the product of more drugs, of active agents to boost metabolism, muscle strength, even intelligence and cognition.

As this party made its way through the village, even going into some of the houses, the folk of the
ayllu
avoided looking into the eyes of these men, and the Roman legionaries speculated how it would be to fight these Inca soldiers.

Ruminavi, spotting Mardina and Clodia, came hurrying over to the two of them. He was dressed grandly, presumably to impress the taxpayers, in beaded and embroidered clothes and feathered armbands, and his thinning black hair braided. Even his sandals had silver studs. As almost everybody carried, he had a bag of coca at his waist.

Mardina watched him approach warily. “Do you want something of us,
tocrico apu
?”

“Yes, I do.” He glanced back at the party he was leading. “This is a special
mit'a
collection. I need you two to go find some wild coca for me.”

“
Wild
coca . . .”

“A particularly potent and valuable strain has been reported in this area.” He waved a hand vaguely at the green of the encroaching forest. “Go take a look, the two of you—you'll know it when you see it.”

Mardina and Clodia exchanged a suspicious look. Mardina said, “With respect,
apu
—why us? We aren't native to this place. The
ayllu
must be full of people who know more about coca than we ever will—”

“Do as I say,” he snapped. “Look, Mardina—I know you don't trust me.” He gave her a forced smile. “But, believe me, I mean you no harm. Nor you, Clodia Valeria. I'm just a man, and a weak one at that, and I like to
look
 . . . But I am here to protect you. You
must
go to the forest, now. And stay there until the
mit'a
party has left your
ayllu
. Now, girls, go!” And he shoved them away, before hurrying back to the soldiers and inspectors.

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 farther 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 colored 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 . . . Oh, come on.” 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.

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 re-created wilderness here in Yupanquisuyu, and allowed them to live out their lives much as they had since 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 farther 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 farther 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 artifact 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 center 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.

As the
anti
girl brought the two strangers to the edge of the village, some of the people looked around, scowled, and spoke sharply to their guide. But she replied just as sharply—and she made an alarming cutthroat gesture with one finger. Grudgingly, the adults nodded and turned away. A couple of children, naked and wide-eyed, would have come wandering out to inspect the newcomers, but they were called back sharply by the adults.

The girl turned to Mardina and Clodia, held up her hands to stop them coming any farther, and mimed that they should sit in the dirt. Then she ran into the village and returned with a couple of wooden mugs, and a handful of coca leaves that she set before them, before nodding and hurrying off.

The mugs contained what tasted like diluted beer. Mardina and Clodia drank deeply and gratefully. They both ignored the coca leaves.

Clodia groaned, “I wish they'd spare some of that roast. The smell is killing me.”

“Hopefully we'll be out of here before we die of hunger, Clodia.”

“Maybe if I make a prayer to Jesu loudly enough, they'll offer me His charity.”

“What do you mean?”

Clodia looked at her. “Didn't you see that ornament around our guide's neck?”

“Well, it looked like a cross, but—”

“And look over there.” Clodia pointed beyond the village, to the clearing's far side, where a crude wooden cross stood, a larger version of the girl's pendant. A kind of dummy figure made of rolled-up bales of straw hung from the cross, fixed by outspread arms, legs strapped together.

“Jesu,” Clodia said triumphantly.

“You're right,” Mardina breathed, astonished. The cross was a double symbol of Jesu's career, shared by Romans and Brikanti alike: of the crucifix on which the Romans had shamefully put Him to death, and of the Hammer, the carpenter's weapon with which the Savior had led a rebellion against the forces that had oppressed His people. “A figure of Jesu, here in the forest. So we live in a world now where the technological city-dwelling empire builders are pagans, and the savages in the jungle follow Christ—”

The girl who'd brought them here came running up again now, holding her fingers to her lips to hush them. Mardina saw that the villagers were growing agitated too.

Beckoning, the girl summoned the visitors to their feet. She led them quickly back into the jungle, a good way away from the place they had come in. Once back in the forest the girl moved silent as a shadow, and Mardina and Clodia followed as best they could. Mardina judged they were heading back to the edge of the forest, and the
ayllu.

And as they walked, Mardina glimpsed soldiers passing through the shadows of the trees. Led by the
tocrico apu
, they were heading for the
anti
village. No wonder the villagers were growing nervous. If Ruminavi was aware of the presence of the girls, he showed no sign of it.

The
anti
girl left them at the edge of the forest, and hurried away into the shadows before either of them could try to thank her, or say goodbye.

•   •   •

Ruminavi did not return to the
ayllu
that day, and Mardina had no way to question him about the whole strange incident, the reason they had needed to be hidden.

Not until the next time he returned.