Exodus Code (3 page)

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 swel ed in waves of cobalt blue, a fishing trawler bouncing on the horizon.

She squinted against the sun, and then with a raised fist she signal ed 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 wal s 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 wal s.

Isela’s
abuela
used to tel 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 yel ow 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 wal 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 dwel ings into the rock face of la Madre Montâna so as not to disturb the tree’s far-reaching roots and yet stil be close enough to the mother of al things.

Antonio nudged his cowboy hat off his forehead and stretched across the tree’s limb. Four years her senior, Antonio was wel 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 pul ed 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 smal 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, al floating in her line of vision in ribbons of blues and yel ows. 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 wal s 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 stil 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

Southern Coast of Peru, 1930

‘EL CÓNDOR! EL Cóndor!
’ yel ed a child, sprinting down the steep canyon path and into the vil age, sure-footed despite the loose rocks and dust she was kicking up. ‘A man with enormous wings has fal en from the heavens.’

The tiny pueblo vil age sat near the flat top of la Madre Montâna in the Sacred Val ey 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 rebel ion, 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 val ey. On occasion a dogged slave runner, an intrepid missionary, or a curious university scholar had ventured unaware into their vil age. They tended to leave just as quickly, never quite sure of what they’d seen or done or discovered. The vil age gradual y became a myth, a Peruvian Shangri-La, fragmented stories making their way back along the trail to Cuzco and Pisco and Lima and beyond. Eventual y, any remaining curiosity about the hidden secrets of this mysterious place faded in comparison to the al 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 vil age and the whereabouts of the Cuari tribe became forgotten.

Now no one spoke of this sacred place, and the Cuari did al 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 vil age’s younger women were crouching over a large fire pit, pounding maize on huge flat stones and rol ing tortil as 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 smel ed 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 fel . 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 al she had done was to gather up the belongings that had fal en 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 wil 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 fal en into the mountain and the world was born.

The old matriarch had spoken to traders at the lowland vil ages, 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 vil age. 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 fal 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 pul ed it over her head. At her door, she slipped her feet into leather sandals and stepped outside. A smal grouping of vil agers, who had gathered in front of her hut when they heard the girl’s yel ing, 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 pul ed aside the heavy screen and stepped inside the temple of the Star Guide.

The Priestess careful y dropped the curtain behind her, aware of every crackle and rustle as she did so. She remained in a smal outer chamber whose wal s 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 wal s and draped the ceiling. The ground was carpeted in alpaca skins, softened and dyed to match the colour of the wal s. The colour red tasted like sweet paprika to Gaia and, in her solitude, when she wil ed it, the colour brought her contentment and a deep sensual pleasure.

A fire was burning in a centre pit, its basin-shaped lid fil ed with water, a myriad of holes funnel ing the smoke up through the opening in the stepped roof. Under the netting, almost every brick was covered with bril iantly 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 yel ow reeds had been unrol ed 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 tal and slender, her breasts and her hips already ful 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 wel 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.