Obelisk Page 15

  One free evening Dreamer took her to the navigation bay. The walls were covered with charts, curves that appeared to show the trajectory of the sun and moon across the sky, and other diagrams showing various aspects of a misty-gold spiral shape that meant nothing to Jenny. There was a globe that drew her eye; glowing, painted, it was covered with unfamiliar shapes, but one strip of blue looked just like a map of the Mediterranean.

  The most wondrous object in the room was a kind of loom, rank upon rank of knotted string that stretched from floor to ceiling and wall to wall – but unlike a loom it was extended in depth as well. As she peered into this array she saw metal fingers pluck blindly at the strings, making the knots slide this way and that.

  Dreamer watched her, as she watched the strings. He said, ‘I’m starting to think Alphonse is using the language classes as an excuse to keep me away from you. Perhaps the prince wants you for himself. Who wouldn’t desire such beauty?’

  Jenny pulled a face at this gross flattery. ‘Tell me what this loom is for.’

  ‘The Inca have always represented their numbers and words on quipus, bits of knotted string. Even after they learned writing from their Aztec neighbours, whom they encountered at the start of the Sunrise.’

  ‘The Sunrise?’

  ‘That is their modest name for their programme of expansion across the world. Jenny, this is a machine for figuring numbers. The Inca use it to calculate their journeys across the world oceans. But it can perform any sum you like.’

  ‘My father would like one of these to figure his tax return.’

  Dreamer laughed.

  She said, ‘But everybody knows that you can’t navigate at night, when the sun goes down, and the only beacons in the sky are the moon and planets, which career unpredictably all over the place. How, then, do the Inca find their way?’ For the Europeans this was the greatest mystery about the Inca. Even the greatest seamen of the past, the Vikings, had barely had the courage to probe away from the shore.

  Dreamer glanced at the strange charts on the wall. ‘Look, they made us promise not to tell any of you about – well, certain matters, before the Inca deem you ready. But there’s something here I do want to show you.’ He led her across the room to the globe.

  That blue shape was undoubtedly the Mediterranean. ‘It’s the world,’ she breathed.

  ‘Yes.’ He smiled. ‘The Inca have marked what they know of the European empires. Look, here is Grande-Bretagne. See how small it is!’

  ‘Why, even Europe is only a peninsula dangling from the carcass of Asia.’

  ‘You know, your sense of wonder is the most attractive thing about you.’

  She snorted. ‘Really? More than my eyes and teeth and neck, and the other bits of me you’ve been praising? I’ll believe that when a second sun rises in the sky. Show me where you come from – and the Inca.’

  Passing his hand over the globe, he made the world spin and dip.

  He showed her what lay beyond the Ottoman empire, the solemn Islamic unity that had blocked Christendom from the east for centuries: the vast expanses of Asia, India, the sprawling empire of China, Nippon, the Spice Islands. And he showed how Africa extended far beyond the arid northern regions held by the Ottomans, a great pendulous continent in its own right that stretched, thrillingly, right across the equator.

  ‘You can in fact reach India and the east by sailing south around the cape of southern Africa,’ Dreamer said. ‘Without losing sight of land, even. A man called Columbus was the first to attempt this in 1492. But he lacked the courage to cross the equator. Columbus went back to the family business of trouser-making, and Christian Europe stayed locked in …’

  Now he spun the globe to show her even stranger sights: a double continent, far to the west of Europe across the ocean, lands wholly unknown to any European. The Inca had come from a high country that ran north to south along the spine of the southernmost of those twin continents. ‘It is a place of mountains and coast, of long, long roads, and bridges centuries old, woven from vines, still in use …’

  Around the year 1500, according to the Christian calendar, the Inca’s greatest emperor Huayna Capac I had emerged from a savage succession dispute to take sole control of the mountain empire. And under him, as the Inca consolidated, the great expansion called the Sunrise had begun. At first the Inca had used their woollen-sailed ships for trade and military expeditions up and down their long coastlines. But gradually they crept away from the shore.

  At last, on an island in the ocean far to the west of the homeland, they found people. ‘These were a primitive sort, who sailed the sea in canoes dug out of logs. Nevertheless they had come out of the south-east of Asia and sailed right to the middle of the ocean, colonising island chains as they went. Thus humans from west and east met for the first time.’ The Inca, emboldened by the geographical knowledge they took from their new island subjects, went further, following island chains until they reached Asia. All this sparked intellectual ferment, as exploration and conquest led to a revolution in sky-watching, mathematics, and the sciences of life and language.

  But the Inca probed even further west. At last they reached Africa. And when in the early twentieth century they acquired lodestone compasses from Chinese traders, they found the courage to venture north, towards Europe.

  Jenny stared at the South Land. There was no real detail, just a few Inca towns dotted around the coast, an interior like a blank red canvas. ‘Tell me about your home.’

  He brushed the image of the island continent with his fingertips. ‘It is a harsh country, I suppose. Rust-red, worn flat by time. But there is much beauty, and strangeness. Animals that jump rather than run, and carry their young in pouches on their bellies. Don’t laugh, it’s true! My people have lived there for sixty thousand years. That’s what the Inca scholars say, though how they can tell that from bits of bone and shards of stone tools, I don’t know. My people are called the Bininj-Mungguy, and we live in the north, up here, in a land we call Kakadu.’

  Jenny’s imagination raced, and his strange words fascinated her. She drew closer to him, almost unconsciously, watching his mouth.

  ‘We have six seasons,’ he said, ‘for our weather is not like yours. There is Gunumeleng, which is the season before the great rains, and then Gudjewg, when the rain comes, and then Banggerreng—’

  She stopped up his mouth with hers.

  After a week’s sailing, the Viracocha crossed the equator. Atahualpa ordered a feast to be laid for his senior officers and guests. They were brought to a stateroom which, Jenny suspected from the stairs she had to climb, lay just under the deck itself. Tonight, Atahualpa promised, his passengers would be allowed on deck for the first time since Londres, and the great secret which the Incas had been hiding would be revealed.

  But by now Dreamer and Jenny shared so many secrets that she scarcely cared.

  For the dinner, while the Inca crew wore their customary llama-wool and cotton uniforms, George Darwin wore his clerical finery, Alphonse the powdered wig and face powder of his father’s court, and Jenny a simple shift, her Sunday best. Dreamer was just one of the many representatives of provinces of the Inca’s ocean-spanning empire aboard the ship. They wore elaborate costumes of cloth and feather, so that they looked like a row of exotic birds, Jenny thought, sitting there at the commander’s table.

  In some ways Dreamer’s own garb was the most extraordinary. He was stripped naked save for a loincloth, his face-spiral tattoo was picked out in yellow dye, and he had finger-painted designs on his body in chalk-white, a sprawling lizard, an outstretched hand.

  The Inca went through their own equator-crossing ritual. This involved taking a live chicken, slitting its belly and pulling out its entrails, right there on the dinner table, while muttering antique-sounding prayers.

  Bishop Darwin tried to watch this with calm appreciation. ‘Evidently an element of animism and the supers
titious has survived in our hosts’ theology,’ he murmured.

  Alphonse didn’t bother to hide his disgust. ‘I’ve had enough of these savages.’

  ‘Hush,’ Jenny murmured. ‘If you assume none of them can speak Frankish you’re a fool.’

  He glared defiantly, but he switched to Anglais. ‘Well, I’ve never heard any of them utter a single word. And they assume I know a lot less Quechua than I’ve learned, thanks to your bare-chested friend over there. They say things in front of me that they think I won’t understand – but I do.’

  He was only sixteen, as Jenny was; he sounded absurd, self-important. But he was a prince who had grown up in the most conspiratorial and back-stabbing court in all Christendom. He was attuned to detecting lies and power plays. So she asked, ‘What sort of things?’

  ‘About the “problem” we pose them. We Europeans. We aren’t like Dreamer’s folk of the South Land, who are hairy-arsed savages in the desert. We have great cities; we have armies. We may not have their silver ships and flying machines, but we could put up a fight. That’s the “problem”.’

  She frowned. ‘It’s a problem only if the Inca come looking for war.’

  He scoffed. ‘Oh, come, Jenny, even an Anglais can’t be so naïve. All this friendship-across-the-sea stuff is just a smoke screen. Everything they’ve done has been in the manner of an opening salvo: the donation of farspeakers to every palace in Europe, the planting of their Orbs of the Unblinking Eye in every city. What I can’t figure out is what they intend by all this.’

  ‘Maybe Inca warriors will jump out of the Orbs and run off with the altar silver.’

  ‘You’re a fool,’ he murmured without malice. ‘Like all Anglais. You and desert-boy over there deserve each other. Well, I’ve had enough of Atahualpa’s droning voice. While they’re all busy here I’m going to see what I can find out.’ He stood.

  She hissed. ‘Be careful.’

  He ignored her. He nodded to his host. Atahualpa waved him away, uncaring.

  Atahualpa had begun a conversation with Darwin on the supposed backwardness of European science and philosophy. Evidently it was a dialogue that had been developing during the voyage, as the Inca tutors got to know the minds of their students. ‘Here is the flaw in your history as I see it,’ Atahualpa said. ‘Unlike the Inca, you Europeans never mastered the science of the sky. To you all is chaos.’

  Jenny admired old Darwin’s stoicism. With resigned good humour he said, ‘Isn’t that obvious? All those planets swooping around the sky – only the sun is stable, the pivot of the universe.’

  But Atahualpa only smiled. ‘The point is that the motion of the planets is not chaotic, not if you look at it correctly.’ A bowl of the chicken’s blood had been set before him. He dipped his finger in this and sketched a solar system on the tabletop, sun at the centre, Earth’s orbit, the neat circles of the inner planets and the wildly swooping flights of the outer.

  Servants brought plates of food. There was the meat of roast rodent and duck, and heaps of maize, squash, tomatoes, peanuts, and plates of a white tuber, a root vegetable unknown to Europe but tasty and filling.

  ‘There,’ said Atahualpa, pointing at his diagram. ‘Now, look, you see. Each planet follows an ellipse, with the sun at one focus. These patterns are repeated and quite predictable, though the extreme eccentricity of the outer worlds’ orbits makes them hard to decipher. We managed it, though – although I grant you we always had one significant advantage over you, as you will learn tonight! Let me tell you how our science developed after that …’

  He listed Inca astronomers and mathematicians, names which meant nothing to Jenny. ‘After we mapped the planets’ elliptical trajectories, it was the genius of Huascar that he was able to show why the worlds followed such paths, because of a single, simple law: the planets are drawn to the sun with an attraction that falls off inversely with the square of distance.’

  Darwin said bravely, ‘I am sure our scholars in Paris and Damascus would welcome—’

  Atahualpa ignored him, digging into his food with blood-stained fingers. ‘But Huascar’s greatest legacy was the insight that the world is explicable: that simple, general laws can explain a range of particular instances. It is that core philosophy that we have applied to other disciplines.’ He gestured at the diffuse light that filled the room. ‘You cower from the light of the sun, and fear the lightning, and are baffled by the wandering of a lodestone. But we know that these are all aspects of a single underlying force, which we can manipulate to build the engines that drive this ship, and the farspeakers that enable the emperor’s voice to span continents. If your minds had been opened up, your science might be less of a hotchpotch. And your religion might not be so primitive.’

  Darwin flinched at that. ‘Well, it’s true there has been no serious Christian heresy since Martin Luther was burned by the Inquisition—’

  ‘If only you had not been so afraid of the sky! But then,’ he said, smiling, ‘our sky always did contain one treasure yours did not.’

  Jenny was growing annoyed with the Inca’s patronising treatment of Darwin, a decent man. She said now, ‘Commander, even before we sailed you dropped hints about some wonder in the sky we knew nothing about.’

  As his translator murmured in his ear, Atahualpa looked at her in surprise.

  Darwin murmured, ‘Mademoiselle Cook, please—’

  ‘If you’re so superior, maybe you should stop playing games, and show us this wonder – if it exists at all!’

  The officers were glaring at her.

  But Atahualpa held up an indulgent hand. ‘I will not punish bravery, Mademoiselle Cook, and you are brave, if foolish with it. We like to keep our great surprise from our European passengers – call it an experiment – your first reaction is always worth relishing. We were going to wait until the end of the meal, but – Pachacuti, will you see to the roof?’

  Wiping his lips on a cloth, one of the officers got up from the table and went to the wall, where a small panel of buttons had been fixed. With a whir of smooth motors the roof slid back. Fresh salt air, a little cold, billowed over the diners.

  Jenny looked up. In an otherwise black sky, a slim crescent moon hung directly over her head. She had the sense that the moon was tilted on its side – a measure of how far she had travelled around the curve of the world, in just a few days aboard this ship.

  Atahualpa smiled, curious, perhaps cruel. ‘Never mind the moon, Mademoiselle Cook. Look that way.’ He pointed south.

  She stood. And there, clearly visible over the lip of the roof, something was suspended in the sky. Not the sun or moon, not a planet – something entirely different. It was a disc of light, a swirl, with a brilliant point at its centre, and a ragged spiral glow all around it. It was the emblem she had observed on the navigational displays, but far more delicate – a sculpture of light, hanging in the sky.

  ‘Oh,’ she gasped, awed, terrified. ‘It’s beautiful.’

  Beside her, Archbishop Darwin muttered prayers and crossed himself.

  She felt Dreamer’s hand take hers. ‘I wanted to tell you,’ he murmured. ‘They forbade me …’

  Atahualpa watched them. ‘What do you think you are seeing?’

  Darwin said, ‘It looks like a hole in the sky. Into which all light is draining.’

  ‘No. In fact it’s quite the opposite. It is the source of all light.’

  ‘And that is how you navigate,’ Jenny said. ‘By the cloud – you could pick on the point of light at the centre, and measure your position on a curving Earth from that. This is your treasure – a beacon in the sky.’

  ‘You’re an insightful young woman. It is only recently, in fact, that with our far-seers – another technology you lack – we have been able to resolve those spiral streams to reveal their true nature.’

  ‘Which is?’

  ‘The cloud is a sea of suns, Mad
emoiselle. Suns upon suns, so far away they look like droplets in a mist.’

  The Inca sky-scientists believed that the cloud was in fact a kind of factory of suns – and that the sun and its planets couldn’t have formed in the black void across which they travelled, that the sun must have been born in that distant sea of light, long ago.

  ‘As to how we ended up here – some believe that it was a chance encounter between our sun and another. If they come close, you see, suns must attract each other, as they attract their planets. Our sun was flung out of that sea of light northwards, generally speaking, off into the void. The encounter damaged the system itself; the inner planets and Earth were left in their neat circles, but the outer planets were flung onto their looping orbits. All this is entirely explicable by the laws of motion developed by Huascar and others.’ Atahualpa lifted his finely chiselled face to the milky light of the spiral. ‘This was long ago, when the world was young. Just as well; life was too primitive to have been extinguished by the tides and earthquakes. But what a sight it would have been then, the sea of suns huge in the sky, receding majestically – if there had been eyes to see it!’

  There was a commotion outside the stateroom. ‘Let me go!’ somebody yelled in Frankish. ‘Let me go!’

  An officer went to the door. Alphonse was dragged in, with two burly Inca holding his arms. His nose was bloodied, his face powder smeared, his wig askew, but he was furious, defiant.

  Archbishop Darwin bustled to the side of his charge. ‘This is an outrage. He is a prince of the empire!’

  To a nod from the commander, Alphonse was released. He stood there massaging bruised arms. And he stared up at the spiral in the sky, open-mouthed.

  ‘Sir, we found him in the farspeaker room,’ said one of the guards. ‘He was tampering with the equipment.’ For the guests, this was slowly translated from the Quechua.

  But Alphonse interrupted the translation. He said in Frankish, ‘Yes, I was in your farspeaker room, Atahualpa. Yes, I understand Quechua better than you thought, don’t I? And I wasn’t “tampering” with the equipment. I was sending a message to my father. Even now, I imagine, his guards will be closing in on the Orb you planted in St Paul’s – and those elsewhere.’