Mardina and Clodia, coming in from the field, recognised none of these men. Almost all the Incas’ soldiers, the awka kamayuq, were part-timers raised from the provinces, from ayllus like Mardina’s own community, with only a very small core standing army of specialists. But it was the practice to deploy soldiers from one province in operations in others, not their own homeland.

And Mardina noticed, as she had before, a kind of edginess in the way the soldiers walked, a sharp glitter in their eyes. The ColU speculated that this was the product of more drugs, of active agents to boost metabolism, muscle strength, even intelligence and cognition.

As this party made its way through the village, even going into some of the houses, the folk of the ayllu avoided looking into the eyes of these men, and the Roman legionaries speculated how it would be to fight these Inca soldiers.

Ruminavi, spotting Mardina and Clodia, came hurrying over to the two of them. He was dressed grandly, presumably to impress the taxpayers, in beaded and embroidered clothes and feathered armbands, and his thinning black hair braided. Even his sandals had silver studs. As almost everybody carried, he had a bag of coca at his waist.

Mardina watched him approach warily. ‘Do you want something of us, tocrico apu?’

‘Yes, I do.’ He glanced back at the party he was leading. ‘This is a special mit’a collection. I need you two to go and find some wild coca for me.’

‘Wild coca …’

‘A particularly potent and valuable strain has been reported in this area.’ He waved a hand vaguely at the green of the encroaching forest. ‘Go and take a look, the two of you – you’ll know it when you see it.’

Mardina and Clodia exchanged a suspicious look. Mardina said, ‘With respect, apu – why us? We aren’t native to this place. The ayllu must be full of people who know more about coca than we ever will—’

‘Do as I say,’ he snapped. ‘Look, Mardina – I know you don’t trust me.’ He gave her a forced smile. ‘But, believe me, I mean you no harm. Nor you, Clodia Valeria. I’m just a man, and a weak one at that, and I like to look … But I am here to protect you. You must go to the forest, now. And stay there until the mit’a party has left your ayllu. Now, girls, go!’ And he shoved them away, before hurrying back to the soldiers and inspectors.

Clodia glanced around for her father, but Titus Valerius was nowhere to be seen. She looked up at Mardina. She muttered, ‘That man is like a worm.’

‘He is.’

‘But I have the feeling that we should trust him, just this once.’

‘So do I. Come on!’

The two of them lifted their Inca-style smocks, and ran in their Roman-style sandals to the edge of the forest where Ruminavi had indicated. There they looked back at the soldiers assiduously searching the ayllu’s village, glanced at each other, and then held hands and walked into the hacha hacha.

They were plunged into darkness, as if being swallowed.

The slim trunks of the trees towered over them, like pillars in some huge temple, and the canopy of green far above was almost solid. Their ears were filled with the cries of monkeys and macaws, screeches and whistles that echoed as if they were indeed inside some tremendous building. At least the ground was fairly clear, for undergrowth could not prosper in this shade, but in the few slivers of light flowers grew, bright and vibrant, and vines wrapped around the trunks of the trees. And as the girls’ eyes adapted to the dark they glimpsed snakes and scorpions and swarming ants.

But they had come only a few paces into the shade of the trees.

When Mardina looked back, she saw a party of soldiers coming their way. Clodia’s pale Roman skin seemed to shine in the residual light, easily visible. Mardina whispered, ‘There’s no coca here. I’m sure Ruminavi meant us to hide from the soldiers. We must go further in.’

‘I know. I don’t dare.’

‘Nor me. But we have to try, I think. And—’

And that was when they saw the anti girl.

Mardina’s heart hammered, and she clutched Clodia’s hand.

She was standing in the shadows, a little way deeper into the forest. Dressed only in strips of woven fabric around her chest and waist, she looked no older than Clodia. She wore a headband over pulled-back hair into which were stuffed brilliantly coloured feathers. From her neck hung a pendant, pieces of tied wood that looked oddly like the Hammer-Cross of Jesu, in Mardina’s own timeline. She had a small bow with a quiver of arrows tucked on straps at her back, but her hands were open and empty, Mardina saw, in a gesture of friendship.

It was her face that was terrifying. Her skin was dyed a brilliant blue, with brighter stripes sweeping back from her nose like the whiskers of a jaguar, a monster of local myth. Feathers seemed to sprout from the skin around her nose and mouth.

She looked calm, Mardina thought, calm as a snake about to strike. Mardina herself was anything but calm.

‘We should go back,’ she muttered to Clodia. ‘This isn’t our world.’

‘Are you sure? Mardina, the ayllu isn’t our world either. None of it is …’ Clodia took a bold step forward.

The anti girl smiled, and beckoned with her hands, an unmistakable gesture.

Clodia looked back over her shoulder. ‘See? I think she’s telling us to come deeper in. I think we should trust her. Oh, come on, Mardina, for curiosity’s sake if nothing else.’

So Mardina gave in and took one step after another, in pursuit of Clodia, who followed the anti girl.

CHAPTER 46

The Romans had learned that the Incas called these people antis, the inhabitants of the forest. Sometimes you saw them, shadowy figures running between the great trunks at the forest’s burned edge – a face scowling out of the green, with a sense of the utterly alien. The folk of the ayllus ignored them, but were careful not to probe too far into the forest, into their territory, and, probably, vice versa applied too. It was as if two entirely different worlds had been jammed into one huge container, Mardina thought.

Yet details of the antis were known. They belonged to peoples with names like Manosuyus, Chunchos, Opataris. They traded with the folk of the ayllus, providing from the depths of their deadly jungle hardwood, feathers, jaguar skins, turtle oil, and exotic plants. One of the most prized plants, the Romans learned, was a hallucinogen called ayahuasca, ‘the vine of the gods’, which the Incas used to make particularly potent ritual beverages. In return the antis took as payment steel axes and knives, even salt gathered from the shore of the distant ocean.

The original antisuyu had in fact been the great forest that had once swathed much of the continent of Valhalla Inferior, surrounding the river the Roman conquerors had called the New Nile, and the UN-China Culture had called the Amazon. In the histories of all three cultures, including the Inca, the forest had eventually been mostly lost, to logging and mineral exploration. But the Incas, it seemed, as a kind of gesture to their own deep past, had transported survivors of the forest cultures into a recreated wilderness here in Yupanquisuyu, and allowed them to live out their lives much as they had long before there were such things as empires and cities on the face of the world.

After all, Mardina learned in scraps of conversation, the antisuyu was the first barbaric land the Incas had conquered, when they pushed eastward from their stronghold on the mountainous spine to the west of Valhalla Inferior. Then, with the jungle pinned down under a network of roads and pukaras – and with the experience of such conquest behind them – they had been ready to strike out further east across the ocean, with ships built using techniques brought to them by the probing Xin, who had made their own ocean crossings from the far west. When they had landed in Europa – the ColU thought somewhere in Iberia – the Incas seemed to have fallen upon a Roman Empire wrecked by plague, famine, civil breakdown, perhaps afflicted by some other calamity yet to be identified. And then an expansion south into Africa had begun, and then further east still into Asia, where the Xin empire lay waiting, and the final battle for the planet had begun …