Ultima

by Stephen Baxter

  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.

  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 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.

  47

  In the Roman camp, time was recorded, by order of Quintus Fabius. From the beginning, the Romans had counted the cycle of the habitat’s artificial days and nights, measuring the time they spent in this place.

  It was a month before Ruminavi came again to the village, this time alone, in his deputy-prefect finery but without his squad of soldiers. And he sought out Mardina, who was walking with Clodia with firewood from the edge of the forest.

  “You two,” he snapped. “Come with me. Now.” He headed out of the village, away from the line of the road, toward the largest of the local tambos. When they didn’t follow him immediately, he glanced back over his shoulder. “Look, you trusted me last time, and you were saved, weren’t you?”

  Mardina called, “Saved from what?”

  “Come on, hurry . . .”

  As they had before, they hesitated for a heartbeat. Then they dumped their armfuls of firewood and ran after him.

  They caught him up by the low fence that surrounded the tambo. The imperial storehouse was a sprawling structure that was the center of a complex of buildings, including an inn for travelers, a grander hotel for visiting imperial officials, and a small rail station. At the gate, in a wall of moon rock, Ruminavi produced documentation to prove his identity, vouched for the girls, and led them into the complex to the storehouse itself.

  Before the storehouse, in a shaded corner out of sight of the main complex, stood a kind of stone plinth, only a hand’s breadth high, its sides engraved with the faces of some fierce god. There were many such enigmatic structures dotted about this god-soaked artificial world, and Mardina would not have given this one much thought. But the prefect, she saw, was working a kind of key into a lock in the plinth’s surface, which he’d brushed clear of dust.

  Mardina repeated, “You saved us from what, apu?”

  He grinned. “Well, when I’ve saved your life again I’ll explain it all. The last sweep wasn’t satisfactory, you see, in terms of tributes for the particular mit’a we had been assigned to collect. So the Inca’s courtiers sent out the awka kamayuq parties again. And that’s what I’m saving you from . . .” At last the key turned. “Ha! Done it.” He got to his feet, breathless, and grasped a handle set into the surface of the plinth. “Help me, you two. Look, here are more handles, there and there.”

  Clodia asked, “Help you with what? What is this thing?”

  “A door in the world . . .”

  As the three of them heaved, the plinth toppled back—to reveal a steel-walled tunnel leading down into the ground, set with scuffed rungs. There was a smell of oil, the sharp tang of electricity.

  “The underbelly of the world,” Ruminavi said admiringly, and he rapped a rung with one knuckle. “Which we call the xibalba, the underworld. Two centuries old, and still as sound as when it was built. And there’s a lot of it, miles thick in some places. Down you go. I ne
ed to be last in, so I can lock us tight once more.”

  Again Clodia and Mardina hesitated. Again they gave in, and followed his lead.

  Mardina went first. “Just understand this, apu. I trust you only marginally more than I distrust you.”

  “Understood.”

  “And if any harm were to come to Clodia because of all this, her father will pull you apart like a spider in a condor’s beak.”

  “I don’t doubt it—down you go, Clodia; hurry, they are close!—but it is harm to Clodia especially that I am trying to avert. Are you at the bottom? The light dazzles up here . . . Good. I’m on my way.”

  He clambered briskly down the rungs, and pulled the lid closed. As the heavy plinth fell back in place, the lid slammed shut with an ominous clang. To seal it, Mardina saw that he turned a wheel rather than use his key—good, they had a way out of here, whatever Ruminavi did.

  At the bottom of the shaft, Mardina found herself standing in a corridor dimly lit by fluorescent tubes, many of which had failed, creating islands of darkness. There were piles of litter here and there, heaps of tools, scraps of paper, a few discarded bits of clothing. The walls themselves were scuffed, dented and scarred, scratched with graffiti. It was a dismal prospect.

  And the corridor seemed to run to infinity in either direction. Mardina felt Clodia’s hand slip into hers.

  Ruminavi heaved a sigh. “Well, we’re safe now. Come on, there’s a rest station just down here.” He led the way, his booted feet clattering on the bare metal floor, his voice echoing. “The troops and the assessors think I’ve gone to spy out the forest. I know how long they plan to be at this ayllu; I’ll bring you back out when they are safely gone.”

  They had to hurry to keep up with the apu. Mardina said, “Seems a good way to this rest station of yours.”