Flood

50

In Nathan’s plane, Lily was lifted into the sky above Cusco.

She looked down at the old town, with its domes, cupolas and bell towers pushing out of a sea of red-tiled roofs. Beyond the fortified fence that circled the whole city she saw the brown smear of the shantytown, and the belt of agricultural land beyond, with its rough walls, banks of poplar trees, bright yellow fields, and dark scattered dots that were cows and llamas patiently feeding. Further out still, the dome of the spanking new nuclear reactor shone brightly in the sun.

But as she rose higher yet the town nestling in its basin was lost in the detail of a crumpled landscape of peaks and table mountains, draped with low cloudlike puffs of smoke. This was the Andes, a mountain range second only in scale and extent to the Himalayas, its grandeur unconquered by the flood. As they crossed the sierra they flew over a quilt of cultivation, neat fields of barley and maize with walls of tall eucalyptus and prickly-pear cacti. This high ground had first been terraced and farmed by the Incas six hundred years ago, and was still worked today, with crops of potatoes, and with herds of llamas and alpacas loping freely.

But peering east she thought she could see the sea of cloud that covered the new Amazonian ocean, a rainforest now submerged and rotting under a salt sea only a few years old.

Piers Michaelmas sat ahead of Lily. She could see the back of his head, the precisely shaven hair as he sat bolt upright in his seat. He had decided he was coming along with Lily to “sort this out,” as he put it, and she hadn’t been able to find a way to talk him out of it.

“Amazing what the Incas did up here,” Nathan murmured. Sitting next to Lily, he looked over her shoulder. “I mean, their empire lasted only a few decades. But the Incas built fast and big, and left a mark. Just like the Romans.”

“And just like you, Nathan?”

“Oh, don’t push your luck, Brooke. Yes, like me. Some of us have a gaze that pierces centuries. I think that was a phrase of Churchill’s.” He gazed out at his domain, and the brilliant sunlight of the high air silhouetted his fleshy face.

The plane landed, businesslike, near the shore of Titicaca, on the outskirts of an ugly, functional town called Puno, once a base for silver mining and now the administrative capital of the altiplano. Lily and Piers clambered down under a sky of even deeper blue.

The lake water was calm today, turquoise and flat, stretching away. The light of the descending sun caught the yellow of the reed beds. On the horizon Lily saw a serration of glaciated peaks, and clouds bubbled up from the lower ground, cumulus clouds created below this body of water. It was a sight she always found astonishing, a whole lake seven hundred kilometers long complete with islands and fishing boats, suspended three kilometers up in the sky. But even here refugees had drifted. Even here there was a kind of fringe shantytown around the shore, people squatting in crude huts of reed or overturned boats, living on the fish they caught, or the potatoes that they grew on scrubby patches of cleared ground-and, perhaps, there was a little alpaca rustling going on.

Nathan stretched his legs for five minutes, and then got back aboard his plane with Villegas and his people, and took off for his confrontation with the intrusive British in their aircraft carrier. A few minutes later a company car arrived for Piers and Lily, a dawdling cell-powered buggy.

The last known location of Kristie Caistor was on the Islas de los Uros. The car took them to the place on the shore where they had to catch a boat to get to the islands themselves, another AxysCorp vessel with the planet-cradling corporate logo plastered to its hull.

The “islands” were artificial, just mats of reeds. On the largest was a kind of village of neat-looking huts of reed. Rowing boats were pulled up on the island’s soggy littoral. There was a faint smell of rot, and a stronger stink of the fish that hung on lines in rows, drying in the afternoon sun. AxysCorp’s modern plastic-hulled boat looked entirely alien.

Kristie stood on her island home waiting for her aunt. Twenty years old, deeply tanned, she wore a tunic of brightly dyed wool and a black bowler hat. A young man stood beside her, shorter than she was, his skin a deep brown, his eyes black, wearing similarly colorful woolen clothes. Like Benj, Kristie was much changed from her Fulham days. But Fulham was vanished now, a name nobody need ever speak again; this was the reality, this eyrie lake, and this was what Kristie had become.

As the boat drew in Kristie ran forward. “Hi, Lily! Let me help you. It’s a bit tricky to cross until you get used to it.”

She was right. It was awkward to step from the bobbing boat onto the island, where the reeds gave way under Lily’s feet, making the footing uncertain. Lily had a flashback to when she had clambered aboard the Trieste with Thandie Jones, all of eight years ago.

Piers followed, impatiently refusing help. Despite his insistence on coming along, he looked deeply unhappy to be here.

Kristie’s young man held out a hand.“So you are Aunt Lily. Come, let me show you our home. We don’t get many visitors!” His English was good, with the trace accent she remembered.

“Ollantay, isn’t it?” Lily said. “We did meet once, in Cusco.”

He looked at her, his eyes empty, his smile faint.“ Qosqo,” he said.“We call it Qosqo. Closer to the true Inca pronunciation.”

“The town’s name,” Piers said stiffly,“isn’t Qosqo or Cusco but Project City.”

Ollantay turned to him, his bland smile unchanging. They shook hands, but Piers’s expression was hostile.

They walked to a shack, bundles of reed heaped up for walls with more reeds spread in a rough thatch over a roof of corrugated iron. Birds had evidently been nesting in the thatch, and a small satellite dish sat on the roof.

Inside, the space was surprisingly roomy and clean, with blankets hanging on the walls, and a kind of woolen carpet spread over the floor. There were boxes and trunks, and nods to modernity like nylon sleeping bags rolled up in one corner. Lily saw traces of Kristie’s old identity: the handheld computer on which she’d once done her homework and compiled her scrapbook, her old pink backpack hanging from one wall, even her battered teddy bear stuck in a corner. And Lily smelled cooking, roast meat. She suspected it was guinea pig.

They all sat on the floor, cross-legged. Ollantay prepared a kettle to boil over a camping stove.

“So this is your home,” Lily said.

Ollantay said,“Actually it’s my parents’.” In my culture it’s the custom for partners to stay in the home of one set of parents or the other before marriage.”

Kris cast an uncertain smile at Lily. “And it’s not exactly practical to stay with my mother, is it?”

Piers said, “You should bloody well make it practical. That’s why we’re here.”

“Piers,” Lily said gently. She said to Ollantay, “Well, thank you for making us welcome.”

Kris said mildly, “He is being a good host actually. The usual rule is that Quechua is the language spoken here.” The tongue of the Incas.

Ollantay said, “The true language of Peru, before it was Peru.” He poured boiling water into a pot, and set out cups, filling them with a green tea.

Piers snapped, “But you aren’t a full Quechua yourself, are you?”

“Oh, everybody’s mixed up here nowadays,” Kris said with an effort at brightness. “Like everywhere, I suppose. You have the fisher folk who’ve been here generations. But now we have an influx of lowlanders, coming up from the coast. And there are barbaros too.”

These were Amerinds from the Amazon forests, some of whom had managed to keep their distance from western culture through the long centuries of colonialism and industrial exploitation. They had tribal names like Mascho Piro and Awa and Korubo. But now the flood was lapping at the foothills of the Andes, and they were driven out at last, forced to ascend through the cloud forest to this unwelcoming plateau. Along with them came other inhabitants of the forest, birds and snakes and monkeys; few of these were permitted to survive by the human inhabitants, and the mountains witnessed the tip of an extinction event.

“Funny lot, they are,” Kris said. “The barbaros. No idea of money or other languages. They don’t even know what country they’re in.”

Lily nodded.“Nathan sends ethnographers and anthropologists. Even their languages are unknown, in some cases. And there’s a danger of infection; colds can be lethal to them.”

“It’s all a great big flushing out, isn’t it?” Kris said. “Forest Amerinds mixing with people from the cities who might have been lawyers or accountants or computer programmers a year or two ago.. ”

Such stabs of insight, Lily thought, made her sound like her brother-and made her seem wasted up here, by this beautiful, lonely lake.

But Piers was still angry. “None of which,” he said, jabbing a finger, “makes him the genuine article. Ollantay. The name you were born with was Jose Jesus de la Mar.”

Ollantay shrugged. “That’s not the name I choose to die with.”

“But what kind of name is Ollantay? Do you know, Kris?”

“Yes, I-”

“Ollantay was the great general who built the Inca empire for Pachacutec. Not exactly a subtle choice, is it, Jose? And is that what you dream of, taking back the land for the Incas?”

Ollantay smiled. Lily thought he was actually enjoying Piers’s clumsy attacks.“Well, would we not be better off if the Europeans had never come? Or if the Incas had butchered Pizarro and his holy thugs? Would we now be huddled in shantytowns while you grow oil crops to drive your cars, and the world drowns because of centuries of your industrial excess?”

“Enough,” Lily snapped. “For heaven’s sake, Piers, what’s got into you?”

Piers stood. “I am not the problem. He is. This addle-brained boy hero who’s caught Kris like a fish on a line.”

Now Kris blazed at him. “Don’t you speak about us like that, you dried-up old fool. Who do you think you are, my father?”

Piers looked astonishingly hurt. But before he could reply Lily stood, grabbed his shoulder and dragged him away. “Out.”

“I’m not done-”

“Oh yes you are. Look-wait for me outside.”

Still he glared at Ollantay. Then, abruptly, something seemed to break. He turned and pushed his way out of the hut.

Lily sat again and blew out her cheeks. “I’m sorry about that.”

“You shouldn’t have brought him,” Kris said, subdued.

“I could hardly stop him.”

“You shouldn’t have come either.” Kris was visibly angry, the blood flushed in her cheeks, under her black hat. “I’ve had all I can take from my mother about this. Can’t you just accept that this is how I’ve chosen to live my life?”

Well, she had a point. But then Lily looked again at Ollantay, who was regarding her coldly.

She dug a cellphone out of her pocket and gave it to Kristie. “Take this. You’ve not been answering your old phone.”

Kris smiled. “It’s at the bottom of the lake.”

“Please. You don’t need to use it. Just have it. Let Amanda text you… It’s a terribly hard punishment, Kris, to cut her off altogether. And besides, shit happens, love. There will be times when you need to speak to us, believe me.”

Kris hesitated, for long seconds. Then she reached out, took the phone and tucked it inside her pink backpack.

Lily saw Ollantay watching this, and wondered if Kris would be allowed to keep the phone, if it had been he who had thrown the old one into the lake.

Kris said,“Actually I suppose I don’t have a choice. If I don’t take the phone Piers will probably arrest me and haul me back in plastic cuffs. That man is so controlling.” She bunched her fists.“So meddling. I feel as if he’s been there all my life. I wish he’d just leave me alone.”

“Oh, he can’t do that,” Ollantay said. “Not ever. He can’t help what he does.”

Kris looked at him, surprised. “Why do you say that?”

Ollantay smiled. “Because he loves you. Can’t you see that?”

Kris laughed. But the laugh died, and her face softened in astonishment.

And Benj saw it too, Lily realized. That was what he had been hinting at, in P-ville. But Lily had never realized it. She felt a deep, cold, savage surprise, and a sense of betrayal that thrust into her belly.

Piers pushed his way back into the hut, his phone in his hand.

Lily said, “My God, Piers, you pick your moments.”

Piers looked at her blankly, and at Kris who wouldn’t look back at him, and at his phone. “I’m sorry,” he said.

“What for?”

“Nathan is sending the plane back. It will take you home. You too, Kris, if-”

“Leave me alone,” Kris flared.

Lily was growing alarmed. “Piers. Tell me what’s happened.”

“It’s Benj,” Piers said reluctantly. “There was an incident. Another attack on a biofuel crop. The police opened fire-he tried to intervene-”

And Lily understood. She’d managed to save Benj from his conscience at least twice before, in Greenwich and then Dartmoor. But she hadn’t been there for him this time.

“Is he dead?” Kris ran up to Piers. “Is he dead?”