‘I know,’ Jack replied, rubbing his temples. Now he felt really sick. This was definitely much worse than a bad burrito.
‘So what are you going to do about it?’ Renso asked.
Jack’s head weighed a ton on his neck, his eyes wouldn’t stop watering, and every nerve in his skin was on fire. Was he dreaming? Even his hair seemed to hurt. ‘I’ll do… some… some investigating, Renso. I’ll return when I know more.’
‘I don’t know, amigo,’ said Renso, glancing at Jack, holding his stare for a beat. ‘Perhaps this isn’t a place you should ever return to.’
‘Why not?’
‘You look like shit.’
Jack forced a smile. ‘Ah, thanks. It’s the altitude or something I ate.’
‘Ha, very funny, my friend. When has flying ever bothered you? I’m taking us back to Castenado.’
‘Good, but then I want a closer look, Renso. I need to get into that mountain. I need to examine those rings.’
‘Not on my watch, Jack.’
‘Why not?’
‘Cause, my friend, your eyes are bleeding.’
‘What?’ Jack wiped the back of his hand across his eyes, his tears pink against his pale skin. Before he had time to process what was happening to him, adrenalin shot up his spine, spiked across his limbs, and exploded into his brain. Jack’s back arched, his legs stiffened, and his entire body convulsed, rocking the tiny biplane. He couldn’t control his limbs, but he was aware of every violent flailing movement. It was as if someone had wired an electric current to his brain and was making his body dance.
‘¿Qué diablos?’ yelled Renso.
Horrified, Jack watched the words spew from Renso’s mouth in waves of green and yellow, but the only sound Jack could hear was a woman’s shrill pitch. And her voice tasted like ginger.
And then as if a switch was flipped inside Jack’s brain, every sound around him became painfully amplified – the howl of the wind, the roar of the propellers, even the scratching of his coat against his neck. And that stench. What was that smell? It was like trench mud and rotting corpses, mountains of them, suffocating him. Jack gagged. He bit down on his tongue. His blood tasted like… like death.
What the hell was happening to him?
Jack lifted his hand to his face, forgetting he was still holding his notebook. It flew from his fingers. Instinctively, Renso reached up to catch it.
‘Man, what the hell was that?’ Renso yelped, yanking his hand back. The notebook swooped up into the air and out of reach. Renso screamed, and the sound felt like a knife had plunged into Jack’s leg. He pressed his hand to his thigh, but there was no wound. Slowly, he pulled himself upright, the convulsions finally abating.
Jack stared in horror at Renso’s right hand. His fingers looked as if a hammer was crushing them one by one.
‘Oh Jesus, what’s happening? Do something, Jack!’
At first Jack was too stunned to move. Renso’s hand seemed to have a life of its own, bone and cartilage pushing through Renso’s shredding skin.
Renso howled. Jack loosened his harness and at the same time Renso’s wrist snapped in half, arterial blood spraying across the cockpit. Jack scrambled from his seat. The Hornet plummeted towards the mountain.
‘¡Madre mía!’ Renso whimpered, his face draining of colour, his head lolling against the Hornet’s controls as he fought to keep the plane in the air with his other hand.
‘Stay with me, Renso,’ Jack yelled, ‘Stay with me.’
Jack tore his scarf from his neck, but when he tried to stabilise himself in the cramped space the Hornet bucked and he was thrown back into his seat.
Renso was bleeding out. No doubt in Jack’s mind. He was watching his friend bleed to death in front of his eyes. Jack climbed up on his seat, doubled over because of the wing, and hooked his arm over the frame above him. He stretched as far forward as he could in the tilting, tumbling plane, trying desperately to get the scarf around the ragged bloody stump that moments ago had been Renso’s hand. The screaming in his head was getting louder, the taste in his mouth sickening.
The Hornet lurched against Jack’s shifting weight, his clumsy movements wedging Renso tighter in the tiny cockpit. Renso’s head knocked the throttle forward as he fell into unconsciousness. The Hornet pitched into a spiralling dive, once again plunging towards the mountain.
The Hornet tossed Jack into the air like a rag doll. Windmilling frantically, Jack lunged for the first thing he could, his fingers reaching, slipping then grasping the edge of the wheel-base, his legs flying out behind him. The plane shrieked towards the ground, the wind tearing into Jack’s flesh as he hung by his fingertips from the Hornet’s side.
Jack hooked his arm over the wheelbase and swung his legs, hoping to reach the cockpit. The Hornet flipped, trying to shake him off. Jack’s body slammed hard into the side of the plane, knocking the wind from him. Jack gasped and lost his grip.
The screeching violins, the strident voices, the tragic laments of hopelessness fell silent inside Jack’s head.
With his coat billowing out behind him like enormous wings, Jack plummeted towards the face of la Madre Montâna, the plane spiralling next to him.
‘This,’ thought Jack before losing consciousness, ‘is really gonna hurt.’
Isela
4
Southern Coast of Peru, Hacienda del Castenado, present day
ISELA WAS PREPARING to shoot someone. From her position on the north side of the Hacienda del Castenado’s chapel belfry, the 14-year-old had a clear view of the Pacific to her left, the high desert tables of the Andes to her right, and the narrow canyon through la Madre Montâna in front of her. She was hot and bored and tired of always being the sniper in the tower.
In the 1640s, a Spanish Viceroy had erected Hacienda del Castenado to enclose (and strangle) the ancient Inca village of Isela’s ancestors, the Cuari. The terraces of the hacienda were now a tourist gem carved into the west face of the mountain. To solidify his power, the Spanish Viceroy, Alphonsa Castenado the Great (or the Despised depending on the colour of your skin) had constructed the chapel as the hacienda’s focal point. It stood on the ruins of a native temple that had lasted for thousands of years until it was torn down by the Conquistadors.
Centuries later, Isela, a direct descendant of Alphonsa and his Cuari concubine, lurked here, an automatic rifle resting at her side.
Isela’s mother like most of the population of the surrounding villages was a devoted follower of the region’s religious cocktail of Catholic rituals and native rites. She believed that the chapel’s position on top of the ancient temple meant the hacienda and all who lived within its pink-washed adobe walls were doubly blessed. As far as Isela was concerned, the place was continually serving a crushing blow to her dreams to say nothing of her spirit, which Isela’s mother and her abuela, her grandmother, insisted was the reincarnation of a Cuari goddess.
Despite the strange dreams she’d been having all her life, and her uncanny ability to see clearly in the dark, Isela wasn’t sure she bought their explanation, but tourists did and so she was forced to dress and act the part during the Cuari Festival of the Goddess every Sunday afternoon at 4 p.m. in the piazza. Not this week. This week the festival would have to find another deity. Isela planned to be long gone by Sunday.
Isela swatted a fly from her face and spat grime onto the cobbled stone of the belfry. She cursed her mother for the hundredth time that morning. If not for her mother, Isela might have had a chance to escape this oppressive existence before today. If not for her mother, Isela might have had a chance to put her talents, and she had plenty beyond her skills with a rifle, to more legitimate uses. If not for her mother, Isela might have killed her stepbrother, Antonio Castenado, years ago.
In the cobbled piazza in front of the chapel, Isela watched the local artisans setting up their stalls round the shaded arched perimeter. Every morning these men and women readied their wares for the influx of tourists arriving from Ica and Lima and regions further no
rth. A river of buses would stream one by one through the narrow canyon, until the hacienda and the outlying area were swarming with people.
Isela watched the men and women uncover their carts filled with shiny glazed pots, wooden crosses with brown Jesuses etched on them, and bright tapestries stitched with Inca designs, likely made in Mexico, Isela figured.
For a few seconds, Isela kept her eye on a couple of men and two women she’d never seen before who were struggling to steady their carts on the cobbled stones.
Isela picked up her rifle. She sighted at a cart layered with T-shirts stamped with everything from the pop image of Che Guevara to the silhouetted outline of Zorro. Tourists were such dicks, she thought.
Staring at those two men and women for a few beats, she guessed they must have been running the carts for a family member, someone who’d been taken ill perhaps. Then Isela mouthed the sound of a shot, letting her imagination invent the chaos she could cause in the piazza if she fired at them.
All hell would break loose. She couldn’t wait.
Despite the early hour, the businesses around the square bustled with life. Each corner housed a bar or a café with barrels of the region’s famous pisco brandy sweating on stone slabs outside every establishment. Most of the umbrella tables were already occupied with the wealthy tourists staying at the hacienda’s luxury spa hotel, which sat at the opposite side of the colonial piazza.
From her angle, Isela didn’t have a clear view of the chapel’s steps directly beneath her, but she knew they’d be filling with Indian women wrapped in multicoloured shawls with baskets balanced on their heads. She could, though, see a group of four or five boys beginning a football game on the airstrip, a dusty field with a prefabricated concrete shed built just outside the hacienda’s walls. Two mangy llamas were munching sagebrush near the makeshift goal, the boys’ kicks erupting in clouds of dirt.
Before she set her gun down, Isela spotted two of the food vendors rolling their steaming carts to either side of the hotel’s carved wooden gates.
Where had they come from?
Her father would not be happy with their position directly in front of his expensive but incredibly garish entrance and that made Isela smile. Perhaps the day held more promise than she’d first thought.
Lifting her binoculars, Isela scanned the canyon road running north to the highway and beyond that to Lima. Paradise.
God, she couldn’t wait to escape this place. She searched the far horizon, noting the clear line where the brush of the desert became the lush green rows of olive trees. To her left, the ocean swelled in waves of cobalt blue, a fishing trawler bouncing on the horizon.
She squinted against the sun, and then with a raised fist she signalled down to Antonio. Her stepbrother was slouching across a massive white limb of the huarango tree, his cigarette smoke pluming through its broad canopy, his spurred boots cutting into its thick bark.
Inside the walls of the hacienda, the huarango tree dominated the apron of the chapel, its roots creating a fault line that ran unevenly under the entire church, some thought for fifty kilometres beyond the adobe walls.
Isela’s abuela used to tell her stories about how the tree gave life to the region, its leaves absorbing the fog and the dew from the ocean drawing water to the aquifer beneath them, its yellow bean pods nourishing the landscape and its canopy sheltering the goddess who lived far beneath it deciding the fate of mankind.
According to the story, when the world came to an end the tree would stretch its limbs, crack open the earth, and walk into the mountain.
Glancing over the wall of the belfry, Isela stared at Antonio and the tree. Every story her abuela and her mother told about her ancestors involved the tree and the mountain in some way, which was one of the reasons why, her mother explained, the Inca terraced their dwellings into the rock face of la Madre Montâna so as not to disturb the tree’s far-reaching roots and yet still be close enough to the mother of all things.
Antonio nudged his cowboy hat off his forehead and stretched across the tree’s limb. Four years her senior, Antonio was well practised in the art of machismo, his olive skin, slim muscular frame and the thick blond hair he had inherited from his California surfer mother simply reinforced his beliefs about the world and his place in it, including the notion that running this godforsaken region was a right he had earned, instead of the fact that he was the spoiled bastard son of a spoiled bastard son.
He caught a glimpse of Isela staring down at him from the belfry. He cocked his finger at her. She raised her middle one at him.
¡Que huevón! What a dick.
Reaching into the pocket of her denim shorts, Isela pulled out her grandfather’s journal, quickly turning to the pages where she had left off the night before. The journal was wrapped in a tattered square of cloth, its edges folded neatly around the small book. Unwrapping it, she prepared herself for the rush of emotion she felt when she had first flipped through its pages, as if the sensations that her grandfather was experiencing as he wrote in this journal remained trapped in its pages. She hadn’t told anyone that she had found it, so she couldn’t ask anyone for help deciphering its sketches and notes, only one or two of which she recognised.
The drawings, the equations and the notes made no sense to her, but the letters tucked into the tiny pocket in the back cover were something else entirely. She had glanced at those only once, folding them back in their place, embarrassed and confused by their content, undelivered love letters to a man.
The sounds of the market rose up to Isela in waves of colour, snippets of conversations, snatches of melodies, animal cries, children’s shouts, a truck backfiring, all floating in her line of vision in ribbons of blues and yellows. Then a click. Click. Click. A series of chirping sounds from the piazza below.
She tasted sour milk.
Lifting her binoculars again, she turned to face the hotel bordering the opposite side of the square. Its salmon-coloured walls glowed in the morning sun, its white shutters closed against the encroaching heat. The hacienda might no longer be run from Spain, but it was still a colony. Because history has a sense of irony, the land was once again in the hands of a usurper – her father, Asiro Castenado. He was her mother’s second husband; the bankruptcy and death of the first had meant the hotel would have to be sold. Isela’s father had married her mother just hours before the bank could close a deal with a North American corporation. Isela’s mother had welcomed the purchase because it meant she’d never have to leave the mountain. Isela did not want the same fate.
The wooden doors into the hacienda’s tropical courtyard were slowly opening, the hotel’s armed security guards settling into their positions for the arrival of today’s influential mark. The guards were dressed in what her father believed was authentic uniforms of the Spanish Conquistadors.
¡Que huevón!
The sooner she could escape this place the better.
Gaia
5
Southern Coast of Peru, 1930
‘EL CÓNDOR! EL Cóndor!’ yelled a child, sprinting down the steep canyon path and into the village, sure-footed despite the loose rocks and dust she was kicking up. ‘A man with enormous wings has fallen from the heavens.’
The tiny pueblo village sat near the flat top of la Madre Montâna in the Sacred Valley of the Andes, nestled against the cliffs on its highest plateau and one of the holy places in the coastal plains that the Conquistadors had failed to discover when they marched their armies across Peru. During Manco Inca’s great final rebellion, the Cuari had carried their belongings and their secrets higher into the mountain to this sacred spot where they had survived, secluded and protected, ever since.
For centuries, the Cuari had little contact with civilisation beyond the immediate valley. On occasion a dogged slave runner, an intrepid missionary, or a curious university scholar had ventured unaware into their village. They tended to leave just as quickly, never quite sure of what they’d seen or done or discovered. The village gradually be
came a myth, a Peruvian Shangri-La, fragmented stories making their way back along the trail to Cuzco and Pisco and Lima and beyond. Eventually, any remaining curiosity about the hidden secrets of this mysterious place faded in comparison to the all too tangible draw of the stunning cairn temple ruins at Machu Picchu and the discoveries of the nearby Nazca lines. As time passed, the stories about the village and the whereabouts of the Cuari tribe became forgotten.
Now no one spoke of this sacred place, and the Cuari did all that they could to keep it that way. When the time came, the universe would know of their existence.
The Cuari’s High Priestess and medicine woman ducked out from her hut. Her skin was as pocked as the side of the mountain, her white hair knotted in a thin braid, her layers of skirts revealing thick calves and bare feet. Most of the village’s younger women were crouching over a large fire pit, pounding maize on huge flat stones and rolling tortillas in their nimble fingers. One or two of the women had sleeping babies wrapped tight to their backs. They looked up as the girl skidded, breathless, to a stop in front of the Priestess.
‘It’s him,’ the child exclaimed, bouncing with excitement. ‘I saw him. He came down with the flying machine.’ The girl pointed to a funnel of thick dark smoke pluming to the heavens from the crashed Hornet.
‘Where are your animals?’ the High Priestess asked her. Together, they crossed the clearing to a stone temple, a round cairn with a stepped roof reaching a pyramid point, built before the conquest beneath the canopy of two huarango trees. Their monstrous roots ran below the surface of the plateau like giant claws holding the mountain in their grip. The Cuari believed that they did.
‘Grazing with Rojas. She is capable.’ The girl’s voice dropped to a whisper as they got closer to the round stone temple. She hated the goats, and she wasn’t that fond of Rojas either. They both smelled badly, which is why she had wandered off to explore when she heard the mechanical bird flying overhead. Her heart was thumping in her chest. ‘We should go quickly. I know where he fell. The mountain didn’t take him yet.’
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