by Alex Archer
Her minder reached out and grabbed her arm again, indicating that sightseeing time was over. The group made their way down the cavern wall by means of a long series of switchbacks. At the bottom of the wall, the cat handlers and their charges separated from the group and went in a different direction while Cuzco led the rest of them into the city proper.
The city was truly beautiful. It was built entirely of cut stone and the Incas’ reputation for being master stoneworkers was clearly evident in every single building they passed. From homes to schools to official-looking buildings, each and every one of them had been constructed with the same level of care and attention to detail. An intricate system of aqueducts ran throughout the city, carrying water to and from the various buildings as well as the public gardens, which themselves were carefully tended and groomed.
It didn’t take them too long to arrive at the massive public square that was set in the city center, and as they approached Annja could see that word of their coming had traveled ahead of them. A huge crowd was waiting there to check them out. Annja guessed there had to be a couple of thousand, at least—all ages and walks of life, it seemed. Annja’s captors didn’t seem concerned, so Annja tried not to let their presence bother her, either, but if that many people suddenly decided she and her companions were a threat, there wouldn’t be much she or any of the rest of them would be able to do to stop them all.
Cuzco marched them right through the crowd and straight toward the pyramid rising in the center of the square. The crowd pressed close for a good look at the newcomers but kept their hands to themselves and made no attempt to impede their forward momentum. Cuzco led them up the stairs—Annja counted two hundred in all—and into the building at the top, which wasn’t the temple Annja had been expecting, but rather the king’s audience chamber.
That made the man sitting on the raised throne at the back of the room—a throne made entirely of gold, if Annja wasn’t mistaken—most likely the Incan king himself.
Guards stood on either side of the throne, protecting the king, and servant girls waved large palm fronds in fanlike motions to keep the king cool. Another servant stood on a small platform to the right of the throne, holding a tray of food and drink at shoulder level so the king could reach it without difficulty.
The king was a sharp-faced middle-aged man wearing a cloak of multicolored feathers around his bare shoulders, a pair of breeches made from some kind of soft and supple cloth, and leather sandals on his feet. He was busy talking with several nobles standing nearby but broke off as Cuzco and his charges approached.
Cuzco and his group stopped a few yards in front of the throne. As Cuzco bowed deeply, the prisoners were forced to their knees before the king. Annja didn’t like it, but she knew resisting would only end with her getting hurt, and she didn’t see the point in forcing a confrontation. She bowed her head, but didn’t avert her eyes.
The king eyed Cuzco up and down and then waved him forward.
Cuzco stepped up to the throne and began talking to the king in a low voice, gesturing several times back in the prisoners’ direction, no doubt informing the king of all that had taken place that morning.
Seeing the two of them together made the familial link between them obvious. Father and son, perhaps? Older and younger cousins? She couldn’t be sure, but there was no doubt that the two men were related.
Cuzco bowed to the king a second time when he was finished explaining and then stepped back.
Annja kept her gaze fixed firmly on the king, ready to leap to her feet and draw her sword if it looked as if things were about to end for them right here and now.
The king bent over the side of his throne and said something in the ear of an elderly man waiting there. The man disappeared into the crowd before returning with an Incan woman in tow.
The newcomer was older than the king by at least twenty years and needed to be helped into the room, but there was nothing wrong with her steely gaze or the strength in her voice as she addressed herself to Annja.
“Why have you come here?” she asked in perfectly passable English.
Annja was so surprised that she couldn’t speak. The question of where this Incan woman learned such excellent English bounced around in Annja’s head while she struggled to force out an answer.
“We mean no trespass,” Annja managed to stammer out. Annja’s voice steadied and grew stronger as she continued, “We are searching for our friends who came to the island before us and then vanished.”
“So you admit to invading the territory of Inca Amaru Tupac without provocation?”
Annja shook her head. “No, we did not invade Inca Tupac’s territory,” she said. Knowing the Incan word inca meant “king” allowed her to determine the king’s name from what the woman had said. Inca Amaru Tupac. King Tupac.
“Inca Tupac did not give you permission to be in his territory, and yet here you are, with weapons in hand. Tell me, sword-bearer, how is this not an invasion?”
The woman had either been listening when Cuzco made his explanations to the king or else had received updates earlier when the group had first encountered the Inca several days ago. The use of the name sword-bearer had Annja concerned; clearly, someone had seen her with her blade, probably more than once.
Annja started to answer but was cut off by Claire.
“You can’t be serious!” she said, the indignation clear in her voice. “Since when do four people amount to—”
She didn’t get any further.
The king’s spokeswoman gestured once with her hand, and the guard behind Claire promptly bunched his fist and struck her in the side of the head, sending her facedown on the stone floor. Since her hands were still tied behind her back, she had no way of stopping herself and barely managed to turn her head to the side before she struck the floor.
Annja winced; Claire was going to be a mass of bruises come morning.
The king said something sharply to the interpreter in his native tongue and she in turn addressed the guard. “If she speaks again, cut out her tongue,” she said calmly.
The guard dragged Claire upright. Blood spilled from her nose but she wisely kept her mouth shut and didn’t say anything to rile the king, the woman or the guard any further.
Annja didn’t miss the look in Claire’s eyes, though.
Someone is going to pay for that later.
The woman turned to face Annja again and calmly waited for an answer as if nothing had happened.
Annja thought quickly. “Invasion requires intent,” she said. “We had no intent, as we did not know that you claimed this territory. It was a simple accident, nothing more.”
The interpreter considered her words, frowned and then turned and spoke to the king for several minutes. The king turned his gaze on Annja about midway through the interpreter’s explanation, and Annja did her best to look as unthreatening as possible. It was difficult; being meek was never one of Annja’s virtues.
The king stared at Annja; she did her best not to fidget. Finally, the king turned to Cuzco, said a few words and then waved his hand in dismissal.
The guards dragged them to their feet as Cuzco walked toward them.
Beside her, Annja heard Hugo whisper, “Are they gonna let us live?” but she didn’t have an answer for him and could only shrug.
Cuzco issued a terse set of instructions to the guards and then the group turned about and left the audience chamber, their prisoners once more in tow.
They were directed back down the steps of the pyramid and over to one side, where a wheeled cart that looked like a prison cell on wheels waited for them. Annja smiled in delight when she saw the cart, prompting a remark from Marcos.
“Something about being stuck in a cage funny to you?” he asked with a snarl as the guards forced him inside.
“Not at all,” she answered coolly, climbing up into the cart on her own without giving the guards a fight. After all, it hadn’t gotten Marcos anywhere. “I was smiling at the fact that they are using whe
els. The Inca, or at least those on the mainland, never invented them. A cart like this would have been something like magic to their ancestors!”
It was almost magic to Annja herself. To see an ancient culture brought to life in the twenty-first century, to walk among them like this, was an archaeologist’s dream. It didn’t matter that she was a prisoner; the opportunity she had here was priceless. She had to force herself to keep her attention on the problem at hand—namely, finding Knowles and getting everyone out of here, with or without the treasure—rather than lose herself in observing the Inca around her.
Once they were all inside the cart and seated on benches that ran along either side, facing inward, the door was secured behind them and the cart got under way. It traveled through the city at a slow pace, allowing them to take in the sights.
Gold was everywhere; the Inca used it to decorate everything, from the walls of the temples scattered about the city to the jewelry worn by many of the people they passed on the street. Annja wondered if the modern Inca thought of gold as the sweat of the sun god, Inti, as their ancestors had; they certainly seemed to attach as much importance to it.
Hugo noticed the abundance of the precious metal as well and wondered aloud where it all came from. As it turned out, they were about to get a firsthand look at the answer to that very question.
31
The gold mine
City of the Sun
It took them nearly half an hour to reach their destination, what appeared to be a mining camp on the outskirts of the city limits near the edge of the cavern wall. Men in little more than loincloths and sandals streamed out of several tunnels carved into the cliff face, carrying baskets full of overburden, or the waste rock left over when digging out a mine. Judging from the size of the pile, it looked as if they had been here for some time.
There were several guards standing around watching the miners, but they didn’t seem too focused on what was going on. The miners appeared to be doing their work, and the guards appeared to be leaving them alone. Annja had the sense the guards were there more to give them something to do rather than to be on alert for any miners who would suddenly stop working and make a run for it.
Since their hands were still tied, Annja and the others were helped down out of the cart one at a time. They were pulled into a rough line, with Marcos and Hugo in front, followed by Claire and then Annja. Satisfied that they were under control, Cuzco led them up a winding path that after several minutes brought them to the opening of another tunnel Annja hadn’t noticed before. Instead of leading to a mining tunnel, this particular entrance led into an oval-shaped cavern whose interior was lit by the fires burning in several braziers situated around the room.
A series of cave mouths were visible in the cavern wall to Annja’s left, their openings covered by doors constructed the same way the jailer’s cart had been, with saplings lashed together in a grid to form cell doors. Given the guards standing by several of the doors, Annja assumed they’d reached what passed for the city jail.
Cuzco and their guards marched them deeper into the cavern. As they drew closer, Annja caught a glimpse of several people standing just inside the doors, watching them approach, but then the guards noticed them as well and used the butts of their spears to force them away from the doors, so Annja couldn’t see who they might be. Angry chatter erupted in the wake of the guards’ actions, however, and while Annja might not be able to understand Quechua, there was no mistaking the language she was hearing. Whoever was in the cells, it was not Dr. Knowles and his team.
They continued deeper into the cavern and suddenly Marcos gave a long, low whistle to catch their attention and then indicated something to their left with a nod of his head. The action earned him a smack but accomplished his purpose; Annja and the rest of them looked in that direction as they moved past.
The first thing she noticed was the life-size statue of the Virgin Mary and the baby Jesus, cast from solid gold, that stood in the center of the room. Dumped haphazardly around it were several sea chests, some of which had burst open to show their contents. Contents that included gold and silver coins, gemstones, jewelry of all shapes and sizes and more, all of which told Annja what she was looking at.
After more than two hundred years, the Treasure of Lima had at last been found!
In a surprising twist, it was also in the hands of the people who had provided most of it in the first place, the Inca, a situation Annja found rather ironic and amusing.
At the back of the room were two cells that faced each other at a forty-five-degree angle. The cells must have been occupied already, for the guards shouted some orders through the door, most likely telling those inside to move back. Marcos, Hugo and Claire were pushed forward into the first cell, but when Annja moved to join them, a guard took her by the arm and pushed her into the second cell, away from the others.
A tall, wiry, bald-headed man with a grizzled salt-and-pepper beard stepped forward to catch Annja as she stumbled. He steadied her and asked, “Are you all right?”
Annja watched the guards secure the door and walk away. She nodded and stepped back, uncomfortable with being that close to a stranger. She noticed that there were a handful of other people in the cell with them, arrayed in a semicircle behind their leader. She went to thank him and was struck with the recognition of who he was.
“Dr. Knowles?” she asked, a hopeful tone in her voice.
Warily, he replied, “Yes. Do I know you? You look familiar.”
“No, but I know you,” Annja told him. “In fact, I was hired to find you. My name’s Annja Creed.”
Now it was Knowles who smiled with unexpected delight. “You’re the host of that Chasing History’s Monsters show. I knew you looked familiar!”
He stuck out his hand and they shook.
“It’s a pleasure to meet you. I’m a big fan!”
Annja was surprised. “You are?”
“Oh, yes. Anything that popularizes archaeology and therefore helps to bring in funding when it’s time to launch a new expedition somewhere is a very good thing in my book. I could do without some of the supernatural silliness,” he said with a wink, “but you do what you have to in order to keep ratings high, I’m sure.”
If you only knew.
“Are you and your team all right?”
“Fair enough. They’ve had us working in the mines, but we’re getting proper food and water and so far no one has been subjected to any kind of discipline. They even treated Gregor’s fractured wrist.” He pointed to a younger man with a splint on his right arm. “You said you were hired to find me?”
Annja could have kicked herself. How could she be so stupid?
“Yes. I’m sorry, I should have said something right away. When you stopped reporting in, your wife put together a small expedition to search for you. We found the camp you’d set up and the cave you’d been excavating, but by the time we—”
“Excuse me,” Knowles said a little forcefully as he cut into her comments. “Did you say my wife?”
Annja let her comment trail off, puzzled by his reaction. “Yes. Your wife, Claire.”
A cloud seemed to pass over Dr. Knowles’s face. He reached out and grabbed her arm, his anger now evident.
“Is this some kind of joke, Miss Creed? Because if it is, I’m not finding it funny.”
Annja was nonplussed and wasn’t sure what to say. She made no move to pull free, worried about antagonizing him further. She caught his gaze with her own and said carefully, “I’m not joking, Dr. Knowles. I was hired by your wife, Claire, to help find you. She’s across the hall, in the opposite cell.”
Knowles stiffened. “I don’t know who is in that other cell, Miss Creed, but I can assure you it is not my wife. Claire suffered a near-fatal car accident six months ago and has been in a coma ever since due to a traumatic brain injury. Even if she were to regain consciousness, which the doctors tell me isn’t likely, she wouldn’t have the mental capabilities of a five-year-old.”
His voice shook with pain as he said, “I don’t know who you’ve got with you in that other cell, but one thing’s for certain—whoever she is, she isn’t my wife!”
32
Annja couldn’t make heads or tails of what Dr. Knowles was saying. She understood the words, but what they meant was so far outside of what she’d expected him to say that they just weren’t coming together with any type of cohesion.
That was when the clapping started.
Slow, measured claps from the cell across the way.
Annja and Dr. Knowles turned at the same time and stared across the space between them to where Claire stood at the door to the other cell, her hands between the bars and clapping together mockingly. Knowles’s loud voice had apparently carried that far.
Claire stopped clapping and looked at Knowles with what could only be described as derision. “You always were such a dramatist, Richard.”
Knowles stared, his mouth hanging open in surprise.
“That’s her,” Annja said to him softly, so that Claire wouldn’t hear her. “The woman who claims to be your wife.” Annja hadn’t missed the look of recognition that had crossed Knowles’s face a moment ago. “Do you know her?”
“Yes, I know her,” he said through gritted teeth.