Now the shelf Mardina had noticed earlier outside the window began to move, a platform that rose up before the row of slackly gazing children and the excited courtiers behind them. One of the priests began to declaim in the courtly, antiquated version of Quechua that seemed to be reserved for moments like this, a dialect Mardina found impossible to understand, even after months of studying the language in the ayllu.

Cura murmured, ‘He is describing the terrible glory of Inti, and of the creator gods who give us life, and can take it away. These children are privileged because they will live for ever in the eye of Inti, never ageing as we will, never growing ill or frail – never dying—’

The anti girl screamed. It was a shrill, terrible sound that cut through the fog of words, Mardina’s own confusion.

And now she saw why the girl had screamed, what she had seen beyond the window. That lifting platform bore, not dolls or dummies as she had imagined – it was a row of children, all around sixteen years old, all richly dressed, with elaborately painted faces and coiffed hair. They lay on their backs, their hands clasped on their bellies. In fact they looked as if they were asleep, their beautiful faces relaxed, at peace.

Mardina, stunned, leaned forward and stared through the window, from side to side. She saw hundreds of children, hundreds of beautiful corpses, stacked on a very long platform. Bodies in vacuum.

Cura whispered, ‘The artistry is great, as you can see. The children are put to sleep with the utmost gentleness, and the work of the mummification begins immediately. The greatest skill is in delivering faces to look so natural, so peaceful … Then the malquis are lodged outside the hull, outside the air, so that no corruption can ever taint them. Thus they begin their second life, undying and preserved for ever in the vacuum.’

‘You’ve forgotten why we’re here,’ Mardina muttered.

Cura glanced at her, and something of the worshipful radiance left her face. ‘You’re right, of course …’

The anti girl started to struggle against the harness that restrained her. The priests tried to calm her, but some of the other children were stirring now, becoming disturbed. One slightly younger boy started to cry. The disturbance was spreading out through the wider circle of courtiers, Mardina saw.

‘Now or never,’ she murmured to Cura.

Cura nodded. Stealthily, while the attendants were distracted, she began to loosen Clodia’s harness.

And Mardina pulled a headband from Clodia’s brow. She had patiently rehearsed this with Quintus and Michael, over and over before they had come here, and rehearsed it in her head daily ever since. The band, a gift from the Romans’ anti allies, was an array of brilliant blue feathers taken from rainforest birds, the whole contained within a near-transparent cast-off snakeskin. Now she held the band at one end with thumb and forefinger, and carefully slipped off the transparent skin with her other hand, being sure not to touch any of the feathers.

Then, almost casually, she cracked the band in the air, like a miniature whip.

All the feathers came loose and flew away, a linear cloud that quickly dispersed, heading into the crowd of courtiers, in the general direction of the Sapa Inca in his litter. In the weightless conditions the feathers flew in dead-straight lines, but quite slowly, resisted by the air. Even now the priest spoke, his voice like the ringing of a bell, and the attendants tried to calm the children.

It seemed to take an age before the first of the feathers brushed the hand of one of the children’s doctors. The instant it touched him he spasmed, his eyes rolled, foam erupted from his mouth – and he drifted, unconscious.

The feathers were coated in a forest toxin that, Mardina had been assured, was potent in the short term, harmless in the long term. And it evidently worked.

Nobody in the wider crowd seemed to notice at first. But when two more courtiers succumbed, and then four, and eight, and people called out, crowded back, yelled in alarm. And still the feathers, almost unseen, drifted among the people with their powerful touch.

In the enclosed space of the windowed hall the panic started quickly. People screamed and pushed for the exits. From nowhere, it seemed, axis warriors flew out of the air and plastered their bodies over the litter of the Sapa Inca, protecting him with their own flesh, and Mardina saw that some kind of armour, like blinds of steel plate, snapped closed around the litter. Meanwhile the bearers positioned themselves to get the litter out of this place of sudden confusion and dread.

And Mardina, with a passive Clodia clasped in her arms, followed Cura out of the chamber, entirely unseen.

Outside Inguill was waiting for them. ‘Come. Your father is waiting, child.’ She hurried them away.

CHAPTER 57

Quintus Fabius, gladio in hand, walked along the front line of his century. He grinned fiercely, and let the men joke with him, nodding their heads in their heavy helmets – those who had helmets at all. Keep them alert during this period of waiting, keep them relaxed, that was the trick.

And check their position and formation.

This ridge, wider than it was long, was deep enough for four ranks. Below the front rank was a respectable slope, up which the Incas were going to have to advance before they even got to the Romans. The legionaries were in an open formation, as they had long drilled, with the ranks offset so the men were standing in an alternating pattern that Quintus thought of as like a chessboard, all the men standing on imaginary black squares and leaving the white clear, so they had room around their bodies to deploy their weapons and support each other.

Some were sitting, and Quintus didn’t blame them for that – save your energy, as long as you responded smartly when the trumpet blast came. Others were eating, hunks of meat or forest fruit. And the men grinned and made hushing gestures, fingers to lips, as Quintus approached one man, Marcus Vinius, a tough fighter when the battle got going but known throughout the century for his laziness around the camp. Now Marcus was sitting cross-legged on the ground, his wooden shield resting on one shoulder, his pilum spear propped on the other, his big bearded head resting in one hand – fast asleep. His neighbour raised his own pilum, as if to clatter it against his shield.

‘No,’ Quintus murmured. ‘Leave him be. If a man can fall asleep in a situation like this, he’s braver than all of us. He has to give up his pilum, though. And you, Octavio. You know the rules – no pila today. Because the pila kill, and we’re not here to kill if we can avoid it. Understood?’

‘Yes, sir.’

The centurion walked on to the rear of the century to find Scorpus, hastily installed in the role of optio, stalking the back line, a bristling example of Roman discipline waiting to pounce on miscreants. Meanwhile the medicus, Michael, had set up a kind of open-air hospital further back from the line. He stood ready with blankets and bandages and his surgeon’s kit of tools, as well as a rack of vials of potent painkiller drugs, extracted from the flowers of the anti forest. He had assistants, a couple of injured legionaries invalided out of the fight, and some of the soldiers’ wives. Quintus nodded to him, and the Greek nodded back. Michael was no coward, Quintus knew, and he was no opponent of the military, which he had grown up seeing impose order throughout a sprawling Empire. But no medicus, having taken an oath to at minimum do no harm, could relish such a moment as this.

And still the Incas did not come.

Quintus stalked back to the left of his front line, to where Orgilius the aquilifer stood with his standard at the appropriate place. Quintus had a small farwatcher tucked in his belt; he lifted the leather tube now to look down on the ranks of Inca warriors, and their commanders at the rear. The soldiers in their units, drawn up in a reasonably orderly way, all looked much the same to him, in their woollen tunics, their helmets of steel with wooden overlays, their armour of quilted cotton with sewn-in metal panels. Their helmets especially glittered with silver and gold decorations. The commanders at the rear were gathered around a table on which rested some kind of model. The senior officers wore red and white tunics with discs of gold glittering on their chests.