Contents
Cover
About the Book
About the Authors
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Part One
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Part Two
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Part Three
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Part Four
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
Chapter 69
Chapter 70
Chapter 71
Chapter 72
Chapter 73
Acknowledgements
Copyright
For all the Woodies in the world and beyond.
About the Book
From Torchwood star John Barrowman, and Carole Barrowman, an epic thriller that finds Captain Jack and Gwen in a race to save humanity itself.
It starts with a series of unexplained events. Earth tremors across the globe. Women being driven insane by their heightened and scrambled senses. And the world is starting to notice – the number one Twitter trend is #realfemmefatales.
Governments and scientists are bewildered and silent. The world needs Torchwood, but there’s not much of Torchwood left.
Captain Jack has tracked the problem to its source: a village in Peru, where he’s uncovered evidence of alien involvement. In Cardiff, Gwen Cooper has discovered something alien and somehow connected to Jack. If the world is to be restored, she has to warn him – but she’s quickly becoming a victim of the madness too...
About the Authors
John and Carole Barrowman have been science fiction fans since the third Doctor. They’ve collaborated on two volumes of John’s autobiography, a comic strip adventure with Captain Jack in the official Torchwood magazine, and a fantasy children’s novel, Hollow Earth.
John became Captain Jack Harkness in Doctor Who in May 2006 and appeared in eleven episodes of the hit show before taking the lead role in Torchwood. John has had starring roles on the stage and on television, including his popular BBC entertainment show Tonight’s The Night.
Carole is Professor of English and Director of Creative Studies in Writing at Alverno College in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. She writes a monthly crime fiction column and regular reviews and features for newspapers. She contributed a chapter to the Hugo-award winning non-fiction anthology Chicks Dig Time Lords.
‘He may be above;
He may be below;
or, perchance, abroad in space.’
Inca prayer
‘Time moves in one direction, memory in another.’
William Gibson
Part One
1
Southern Coast of Peru, 1930
A HAWKER HORNET banked out over the Pacific, cut a tight circle, and swooped inland over the red cliffs of the southern Peruvian coastline.
‘It’s about to get rough, my friend,’ said the pilot.
His passenger secured his goggles over his eyes then adjusted the straps of his shoulder harness. A dense morning mist wrapped around the top of la Madre Montâna, reducing the pilot’s visibility to inches and the temperature in the open cockpit to bloody freezing. The wind gnawed at the passenger’s face and neck. Shivering, he slid down in the seat, turning up the collar on his coat, but it wasn’t enough to warm him or shrug off the uneasiness that had been swelling in his gut since they’d taken off minutes ago from the airstrip at Castenado. The feeling wasn’t dread so much as discomfort, a sharp piercing pain in Captain Jack Harkness’s gut.
The Hornet’s wooden frame bucked in the air currents of the southern Pacific. Jack’s stomach flipped. A sudden drop lifted him off his seat, thumping his head on the cross bar of the wings.
‘What is it you want to show me that’s worth this?’ Jack yelled over the noise of the propellers.
‘I promised you amazing, didn’t I?’
Jack grinned at the handsome pilot. ‘Renso, we already were.’
Shifting forward, Renso guided the Hornet towards the jagged cliffs that to Jack looked like the gaping maw of a brooding monster. He’d seen far too many of those in his time. Jack sighed, slouching down in the rickety bucket seat.
‘Ready?’ Renso asked.
‘Does it matter if I’m not?’
Renso laughed, flying the Hornet straight into the cloud of mist. Almost immediately the small bi-plane was shrouded in a damp cloak of grey. Jack shivered again and the sensation that earlier he couldn’t name uncoiled itself from his stomach, crawled into his chest, up into his throat, settling painfully behind his eyes. Jack put his head down and moaned.
Food poisoning, he thought. Had to be.
‘All right back there, amigo?’
Cold sweat was beading on Jack’s forehead, and a burning sensation was knotting the muscles at the base of his neck. His eyes were stinging.
‘Fine. I’m fine.’ But Jack was far from it. In fact, he hadn’t been feeling anywhere close to fine since he arrived on the South American coast at Renso’s request two days ago.
Seconds later, the plane shot out the other side of the fog into a shocking blue sky. The scene displayed beneath Jack jolted him from his reverie, and he stared down into the basin of the mountain.
‘What the hell is that?’
‘You mean you don’t know?’ said Renso. ‘I thought if anyone would, it’d be you.’
2
JACK GAZED IN astonishment at three vast glowing rings of igneous rock pulsing deep inside the bowels of the mountain. He knew there’d been an eruption back in January and, at first, he thought the rings were smouldering magma from that. But the closer the Hornet dipped, the more clearly he could see that each ring was seething, spinning, shifting in and out of the other. He could hear their syncopated rhythm in his head. It sounded as if the mountain had a heartbeat. The effect was mesmerising.
‘Can you get me down there?’ he asked, forcing his attention from the rings.
‘No place to land,’ said Renso. ‘It’d be a long hike to get up here from the nearest canyon. But I can manage closer.’
Renso pulled back on the stick, the propellers whined, the engines coughed and the Hornet lurched violently. For a beat, Jack thought the plane had died, but then Renso corrected his manoeuvre, punching the Hornet into a vertical climb.
‘What’re you doing?’
‘Trust me, Jack. This will get you closer.’
‘Not now, Renso. I don’t think I can take any more of your tricks.’
‘You love my tricks,’ grinned Renso. ‘Brace yourself!’
With all the skills of the best WWI dogfighter Renso had once been and the crop-dusting pilot he now was, he flipped the Hornet, cut its engines, and sent them into free fall. The plane spiralled dangerously towards the face of the plateau and the spinning rock.
‘Stop showing off. Bring her up, now!’
‘Don’t be such a backseat flyer, Jack,’ laughed Renso, pulling back on the stick. The Hornet nosed up, inches before its wings strafed the pitted plateau.
‘Better?’
‘Not much,’ whispered Jack, his breathing laboured. Every exhalation was squeezing his chest. It was the air, he realised; it was even thinner up this high than he’d reckoned. Dropping his goggles around his neck, Jack wiped his eyes with his coat sleeve. Leaning out of his seat, he peered down inside the basin of the mountain. He pulled a notebook from his coat’s inside pocket and began to sketch the rings. As he sketched, each stroke of his pencil set off a chime in his head, like the distant notes of a half-remembered tune. Jack frowned, the drawing dancing before his eyes. The closer he looked, the faster the rings appeared to spin through each other. Cautiously, Jack touched the paper with the point of his pencil, feeling it contort like India rubber, sending the rings dancing from the page into the air before settling down. Jack’s vision cleared as he stared at the pattern.
‘They look like hieroglyphs,’ said Jack, scribbling intently. ‘Kind of familiar. My ancient Egyptian isn’t so hot these days.’
Renso raised an eyebrow. Like a lot of things Jack said, he didn’t know if it was an outrageous lie, or an even more outrageous truth. He glanced down at the pattern smouldering in the landscape beneath them. ‘Egyptian? Given the land we’re flying over, it’s more likely to be Incan.’
‘Yeah,’ agreed Jack. ‘Could be.’ As he talked, his hand sketched on, every movement of the pencil playing out more of that tune in his head. Despite the buffeting wind and the jostling of the plane, Jack drew on.
Renso glanced back. Jack’s notebook pages were filling with words, geometric shapes, drawings of what looked to Renso like a series of odd lines and circles and lines of musical notes. It looked as if someone else was controlling his hands; they were moving furiously across the pages. Renso knew Jack well enough not to question his capabilities, but still something was not quite right about Jack’s demeanour.
When Renso looked into the maw all he could see was an odd smouldering rock formation. No movement. No pulsing and certainly not forming any of the shapes that Jack was sketching. Keeping the Hornet as tight to the basin as he could, he asked, ‘Jack, are you sure of what you’re seeing?’
‘If you’re asking do I know what this is and what it means, then no,’ said Jack. ‘Not yet. I’ve seen all sorts of things, met all kinds of life. Don’t think I’ve ever met anyone that could carve something like that out of the inside of a mountain, though.’
As he spoke, Jack realised that that was exactly what he was looking at.
‘One thing I do know, though – whatever it is, whatever it means, it’s been in that mountain for a very a long time.’
‘How do you reckon that?’ Renso’s voice sounded odd to Jack, distant and confused. Jack swallowed, tasting vanilla and cinnamon when he did.
Renso pulled the plane above the basin, trying to present Jack with as many angles as possible.
‘The Spanish Conquistadors destroyed most of the temples and the holy sites that were part of this landscape when they came to the Americas. They stripped the surface of these mountains searching for gold and silver centuries ago. See that dark line running through the centre of the plateau?’ Jack nudged Renso’s shoulder and pointed up ahead. Renso nodded, pulling the Hornet higher, the line Jack was pointing to stretching out more clearly in front of them. ‘That’s a vein of ore and that’s not something you’d normally find at the surface of a mountain. You’d find it under its surface.’
‘So these rings have been hidden until now,’ said Renso. ‘That’s what I thought.’
‘I really need to get into that basin, to get a closer—’ Jack’s throat tightened. He choked out ‘look.’
‘Jack? Are you sure you’re all right?’ asked Renso, turning the Hornet to approach the basin from yet another angle.
‘Fine,’ croaked Jack, ignoring the lone voice in his head, his voice he was sure, that kept saying, ‘No you’re not, Jack. Something really bad is happening to you.’
Jack shook his head to clear the solo voice that in a heartbeat became two voices and then three and before Jack could shut them out, a chorus of voices all sounding like his were taunting him about how bad he was feeling, how awful flying was, how loud his heart was beating, how breathless he felt, and how things were only going to get worse.
Worse, Jack – much, much worse.
Renso seemed to be oblivious to his passenger’s growing anguish and panic. Jack forced himself to concentrate on what the pilot was saying.
‘All I’m sayin’ is that if these rings had been visible for a while, I’d’ve noticed them sooner because I’ve been flying this route at least once a month since winter.’
The stabbing pain behind Jack’s eyes was worsening as the voices were getting louder, and then they stopped, at least until Renso banked the plane into another turn and came over the basin and the rings from the south. When the Hornet swooped over the mountain once again, Jack could swear he was hearing music deep inside his head. A thin violin melody. Jack leaned back in his seat, and squeezed his eyes closed. The music was a lament of some kind. It sounded familiar, he was sure of it, but he couldn’t place where he’d heard it before. And then the deep chords of the strings dropped behind a voice, a woman’s, melodic and rich, cut into the strings, harmonising with the music. The sultry crooning was enthralling.
When Jack glanced at Renso, the man was concentrating, silently, on the Hornet’s controls. The music and the woman’s voice ascending together in Jack’s head, beautiful, heartbreakingly so. Jack’s mother’s image danced in front of him. Squeezing his eyes closed against her memory, he could feel her pain and her suffering in every bone of his body. When the Hornet swooped across the plateau once again Jack felt enveloped in anguish for everything he’d ever done. Hopelessness squeezed his throat closed. He was choking, his breath labouring again. Then the music in his head swelled to its crescendo, its beauty washing over Jack in ribbons of blue directly above Renso’s head.
With all his energy, Jack forced the music and the voices to the back of his consciousness. Sweat dripped down his spine. He put his hand on Renso’s shoulder, squeezing, feeling some relief from the contact, the warmth of his friend’s body.
‘One more turn, Jack?’ Renso hoped he’d say no. His friend did not look at all well back there.
‘Fine, Renso. Then I think I’ve seen enough for now.’
Renso took the Hornet up again, the wind whistled through the open cockpit. With his binoculars, Jack scanned the horizon and thought he could see more glyphs, drawings the size of football pitches etched out across the dusty plateaus. One looked like a bird, the other a monkey, a candelabra. Renso turned and the plane came back over the basin and the rings from the north east.
Jack leaned over the side of the plane, staring into a clearing on the plateau below, an oasis on the mountain, a pueblo village circled by huarango tress, their roots like veins pulsing beneath the surface of the soil.
Jack watched as one by one the trees pulled their roots from the ground and began dragging themselves towards the mountain.
3
THE HORNET DIPPED, jolting Jack from his seat. When the plane evened out, Jack looked down at the mountain’s meseta. The oasis beneath him was lush and edenic, the trees unmoving.
That was weird.
‘Renso, when did you discover this was here?’
‘Has to be right after the eruption in January. Right before Lent began,’ replied Renso. ‘I do an occasional, um, favour, transport work, for the locals,’ he grinned back at Jack again. ‘Keeps me in pisco and out of trouble. I think I’d’ve noticed if these rings were inside the mountain before that.’
Jack forced himself to focus on Renso’s words – the voices and the music fading, but the pain in his head, the tightening in his chest, they were getting worse. ‘The volcanic eruption must have cracked the top off the mountain – I’ve seen that happen before.’
Leaning back in his seat, Jack squeezed his eyes shut, hoping to push the pain away while Renso forced the Hornet higher, banking into its final turn.
The beauty of the Andes, the southern tip of the Gran Tablazo de Icas, spread beneath them like a canvas, the lush green lowlands, the highland peaks drizzled with snow, the canyons like ribbons winding between them, the plateaus dotted with sagebrush and the pyramids of sand lining the coastline. The landscape reminded Jack of Boeshane, with its giant pyramids of rock and mountainous sand dunes erupting from the ground like golden obelisks.
‘Do you feel that?’ asked Jack.
‘Feel what?’
‘The air? Suddenly it feels heavy. Oppressive. Shouldn’t be so dense this high… and it tastes like—’
‘Tastes?’ Renso laughed and wagged his finger. He was really worried now, but replied lightly. ‘I suggest no more tequila for you tonight, amigo.’
Jack’s heart was racing, a bitter taste filling his mouth. And that smell? Like oil of vitriol… and fear.
His.
‘You realise this isn’t something we’re going to be able to keep to ourselves for much longer,’ said Renso, flying the Hornet low enough for Jack to get one more look. ‘Soon I’m not going to be the only one who owns a plane in this part of the world.’
‘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 north. 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 became 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.’
The Priestess frowned at the girl. ‘Did you touch him?’
‘No!’ she said, looking at the ground, scuffing her bare toes into the dirt, ashamed that the Priestess would even think her capable of such dishonour. The girl knew that she was not worthy of looking upon a deity, and so all she had done was to gather up the belongings that had fallen from the sky and scattered across the plateau, avoiding the smouldering flying machine as she did. The giant bird frightened her, the noises of the wood snapping and crackling in the flames like an angry night lion.
‘Good,’ the Priestess replied, tousling the girl’s curly black hair and accepting the belongings that she had wrapped in her striped poncho. Behind the Priestess, the heavy curtain of reeds covering the entrance to the sacred cairn rustled.
The Priestess dropped to her knees. The girl fled.
Two hands wrapped in wide strips of red gauze reached out from behind the screen, palms up. The Priestess hooked the poncho over the gauze, making sure the fabric did not touch any skin. The poncho disappeared inside.
‘The time of the prophecies is at hand,’ said the High Priestess in the ancient tongue of her ancestors. ‘I will prepare myself to enter.’
‘I am ready,’ said a low, sultry female voice.
The Priestess was the Cuari’s amautas, the keeper of their historical narrative, the protector of the tales of their ancestors, tales told and retold from the times aeons before El Diablo Pizarro – from the time when the stars had fallen into the mountain and the world was born.
The old matriarch had spoken to traders at the lowland villages, and to the archaeologists who were now digging at a temple ruin on the other side of the mountain. She knew from them that the gods were using men to wage battles in the world beyond their village. But as always the Cuari had been spared the encroaching violence because they had an ancient prophecy to fulfil and the mountain to protect them.
Back inside her hut, the Priestess undressed, letting her skirts fall in a bundle near the door. She stood in an iron tub and bathed, scrubbing her skin until every sharp angle and soft sagging spot was rubbed raw. She let the warm moist air in the hut dry her mottled skin before she unfolded a clean grey tunic and pulled it over her head. At her door, she slipped her feet into leather sandals and stepped outside. A small grouping of villagers, who had gathered in front of her hut when they heard the girl’s yelling, backed away quickly to let the Priestess pass.
At the entrance to the temple, she stopped and knelt, making sure her knee did not touch the ground.
‘May the gods protect you, Gaia.’
Then she pulled aside the heavy screen and stepped inside the temple of the Star Guide.
The Priestess carefully dropped the curtain behind her, aware of every crackle and rustle as she did so. She remained in a small outer chamber whose walls were draped in red and black embroidered fabrics, waiting until Gaia adjusted to her presence and summoned her forward. When she did, the Priestess lifted the final curtain of heavy draping on another arched entry and stepped through into the main chamber of the temple.
In this chamber the sunlight was muted, its beams filtering through the slits in the stone and diffusing across lush red fabric that dressed the walls and draped the ceiling. The ground was carpeted in alpaca skins, softened and dyed to match the colour of the walls. The colour red tasted like sweet paprika to Gaia and, in her solitude, when she willed it, the colour brought her contentment and a deep sensual pleasure.
A fire was burning in a centre pit, its basin-shaped lid filled with water, a myriad of holes funnelling the smoke up through the opening in the stepped roof. Under the netting, almost every brick was covered with brilliantly coloured glyphs, describing the story of the Cuari and the history of the mountain.
A thick cushioned mat piled with embroidered blankets stood against the far corner while a second mat of yellow reeds had been unrolled next to the fire, a single row of decorated clay pots set at its head. The air in the hut was dense, humid, but cool and scented with eucalyptus and balsam, the only oils for which Gaia’s senses had developed a tolerance.
Gaia stood at the other side of the chamber, naked, staring at the Priestess, a look of such agony on her face it brought tears to the old woman’s eyes. Gaia’s skin was the colour of cinnamon, her eyes shining like black polished stones, her hair cascading over her shoulders like soft velvet. She was tall and slender, her breasts and her hips already full and round, and every few seconds she bobbed up on her toes, inhaling and exhaling in sharp short breaths, the intensity of the Priestess’s presence an assault on Gaia’s senses no matter how well the old woman had scrubbed.
When the pain eased and Gaia had managed the cacophony of sounds in her head, she waived the Priestess further into the chamber, where she stopped and dipped her hands into a pot warming on the fire. She cleansed her hands one more time, a ritual the Priestess had been carrying out every day for over seventeen seasons, since Gaia had moved from her wet nurse to the temple. After a few more minutes, Gaia would be able to tolerate the Priestess standing almost at her side.
‘You will need to climb the mountain,’ the Priestess whispered, her quiet voice filling Gaia’s mouth with the taste of lemons. ‘In sunlight.’
‘I know,’ said Gaia. She had never ventured outside in daylight – her body had no capacity to filter the light and the noises of the village. Some day, she had prayed. And some day had come.
‘I’m prepared,’ she whispered. ‘I have been for ever.’
The Priestess nodded, glancing at a garment draped across a mahogany trunk that resembled chainmail in its design and its weave, the kind of protective garment the Conquistadors may have worn beneath their suits of armour. With the help of three Cuari weavers, Gaia had fashioned her suit from the softest cotton, layering the outside with black suede from animal pelts, the stitching glimmering with silver threads.
The priestess picked up the garment and helped Gaia dress, carefully slipping the suit over her head, lifting the young woman’s sleek hair over her cowl, fastening the delicate silver claps on the breastplate, lacing the supple leather skins to her feet and legs. When the Priestess finished dressing Gaia, she stepped back.
‘You are your night self,’ said the Priestess.
And she was. Gaia looked like a sleek black puma.
Isela
6
Southern Coast of Peru, minibus from Lima, present day
JUAN CORTEZ WAS a man of diverse talents, but only a few passions. Unfortunately, he had fallen victim to one of his passions for the last time. Cards, cockfights, football games, weather patterns, anything where he could wager what little money his talents as a driver earned him, which wasn’t much. That was why for the past three months he had been driving the route from Lima to the Hacienda del Castenado four times a day.
Juan owed money to his bookie and that meant he owed money to Asiro Castenado. He had no choice as to how his debts were to be paid off. Juan was a quick study and he had learned the routine necessary for these special runs, and so far he had not encountered any glitches. He was glad of the work, especially since his wife was expecting their third child. And this trip would be his last one. He’d been promised his debts would be paid, his freedom bought.
Juan glanced in his mirror, checking out the passengers behind him. This group was smaller than most of these usual private charters, especially one with the day’s mark on board. The two youngest passengers were asleep, their bodies draped across each other – a man and woman in their mid-twenties, probably university students, their backpacks stuffed into the overhead bins.
A handsome middle-aged man who looked like an ex-rugby player sat alone at the rear of the bus with headphones on and his computer open on his lap. Of all the passengers, he looked the least like a tourist in his tan summer suit and blue shirt open at the collar. But his manner was relaxed, and Juan was sure he would not be a threat when the time came.
Juan guessed this was a man who’d been on this trip before because he was paying no heed to the spectacular sea views as the minibus climbed up the mountain to the mesa. Perhaps, Juan figured, the man was a tour planner, checking out arrangements for a future group.
Too bad the tour wasn’t going to end the way his travel books predicted.
A man and woman in their early thirties were each reading guides to the Inca trails that Juan’s brother-in-law had sold them at the terminal before they boarded the bus. They seemed like an odd match. The man, who looked like he’d never left the beaten path a day in his life, was dressed from head to toe in hiking gear from an upscale outdoor catalogue; everything matched and fitted perfectly. The woman had long dark hair, a face of freckles and the palest white skin Juan had ever seen. She’d been sleeping on and off since they boarded. They had different accents, although one was as thick as the other’s. Juan thought the man might have been from Louisiana. He’d been to the casino once in New Orleans. The woman, he thought she might be Irish or Scottish. He wasn’t sure. Those accents sounded the same to him.
Sitting directly in front of the couple was the morning’s mark, the one at the centre of today’s events, a middle-aged Brazilian male, trim and fit, the CEO of an international liquor distribution company and a man with close ties to power of all kinds. He was travelling with his third wife, also Brazilian, athletic, bronzed and beautifully enhanced, and she, Juan knew, was fronting the morning’s enterprise.
She caught Juan’s gaze; he averted his eyes.
The last passenger Juan considered was the one sitting directly behind him, a good-looking man, hard to peg his age, military grooming, dressed in desert combat fatigues, the insignia of a United Nations security force stitched on his shirt. Gazing out of the window, he was lost in his thoughts. He’d spoken to Juan in Spanish when he’d boarded the minibus at the last minute, squeezing through the closing doors as Juan was pulling away, making it impossible for Juan to insist he wait for the next one, which he should have.
A soldier in the mix was not something Juan was comfortable factoring in to the carefully crafted plan. The soldier’s grey eyes had a lot going on behind them, Juan decided. He’d have to watch him closely when the time came.
Two hours south of Lima, the van turned off the Pan-American highway and onto the narrower canyon road that began the climb to the Hacienda del Castenado. The dramatic change in the landscape perked up the sleeping passengers and the odd couple. The man in the back closed his laptop, popping out his external drive and slipping it into his pocket.
onto