Fury

The younger man snorts suddenly and points at Ryan, who is still struggling to get air into his body. ‘And this gringo? He is like Ayar Awqa, too? The man can barely stand, let alone fly. He has soroche, the sickness all the gringos get. Look at him.’

The man searches out the oldest child with his eyes and beckons her forward. ‘Flor,’ he says sternly, ‘you were not raised to lie. Nor should you ever bring the gringos,’ the word is said with disgust, ‘into our home. We are not exhibits. How we live is not for them to see.’

‘But, Papi,’ she says quietly, ‘we are not lying.’

She takes his hand, and he gets to his feet reluctantly and allows her to tug him in Uriel’s direction.

‘Look at the man and the woman, not the gringo,’ she says. ‘Then look at us — at me, Luis and Cesar, Ana, Gabriela, Maria.’

She takes her hat off and wrings the rain out of it onto the floor.

The man — compact, tanned, clean-shaven, his short black hair oiled back neatly — approaches us. He scrutinises Uriel, who stands there calmly in his designer-look clothing without hat, umbrella or baggage. The man looks up sharply into his face, reaches out to touch the skin of his cheek, then quickly withdraws his hand. He does not look at me, but his body language, his thoughts, are no longer unfriendly, only confused.

‘It must be some trick,’ he mutters, looking back at the older man seated at the table.

‘It’s no trick,’ the older man pipes up. ‘If the children say he is Ayar Awqa, and that one is the sister of Ayar Awqa, then who are we to deny it? They are our children, and they are good children. But that one is certainly a gringo, and if we do not get him some coca tea, he will be a dead gringo before he has even climbed Dead Gringo Pass.’ The old man throws back his head and laughs with his toothless mouth.

The young woman sweeps out of the kitchen, looking down shyly as she passes us, and hurries out the open door of the apartment and down the stairs.

When her footsteps have disappeared, the old man shouts in Quechua, ‘Welcome! Welcome! Siblings of the Great Owl. Pull up a chair and tell us what it is that you want with us, and we will do everything in our power to help you.’

‘A moment,’ Uriel tells the old man politely, then he turns to me and says in a fierce whisper, ‘As good- hearted as these people undoubtedly are, “pulling up a chair” is the last thing I have time for. I need to reach Machu Picchu now. Anything could have become of Gabriel in my absence. Let the mortals nurse Ryan back to health before he heads for home, but you and I cannot remain here drinking their tea. If it’s indeed true what Ryan said, that you slew those demons single-handed,’ I hear a disbelief in his voice that he’s unable to hide, ‘then I would welcome your aid in locating Gabriel. We fly in there, we take the place apart and we get out. Then you leave Gabriel and me to find the others.’

Ryan straightens slowly, pale-faced and holding his head. ‘Uh, wouldn’t they be expecting that?’ he wheezes.

‘Speak plainly,’ Uriel snaps, his dark eyes flashing.

‘They’ll be expecting you to, um, approach Machu Picchu — shit, in Peru, we’re in Peru?’ He sees Uriel’s face and continues huskily: ‘They’ll be expecting you to go in in full celestial regalia with, uh, swords blazing. It’s what you guys do best. But it’s too … obvious, isn’t it?’

He turns slowly, wincing, his eyes struggling to focus on the local man standing beside us. ‘You trek to Machu Picchu, right?’ he says in English, the only language he knows. ‘I remember reading about it once. How long does it take, sir?’

The man looks Ryan up and down with his jet black eyes. ‘The Camino Inca takes many forms,’ he says in heavily accented English. ‘The Mollepata is the longest and hardest route. It would not suit everyone,’ he adds diplomatically. ‘But there is a trek that can take four days, and a trek that can take one. My cousin’s son is a guide. He can better answer you.’ He turns and says to his father in Quechua, ‘Go and fetch Mateo.’

The toothless old man snorts. ‘You go and fetch Mateo, if Mayu has not already brought every one of our friends and relatives back with her. See, she returns now.’

More people spill into the room: handsome, black-eyed women, pretty children in colourful dress, work- worn men and older folk, until we are ringed around by their energy, by their curious faces. Several people touch their hands to Uriel’s briefly, almost reverently, and I hear someone exclaim, ‘How beautiful he is!’

Uriel smiles and accepts their greetings politely, but in my head his voice is blunt and impatient. We need to move. Now. We cannot waste another moment in idle talk.

I disagree, I reply, nodding and bowing in all directions as he is doing. Ryan is right: the only way to combat Luc is not to behave as he would expect. It would probably never occur to him that the great Uriel would approach on foot. We will infiltrate the site as human trekkers — it will be slower, but may tip the odds in our favour.

‘What are you two up to?’ Ryan rasps suspiciously, looking from Uriel to me, intercepting the silent exchanges we make with our eyes.

Abruptly, the room, the building, begins to shake: a long, low tremor that shivers the dust from the ceiling, rattles the light fixtures and the bright ornaments and colourfully painted pottery on the wooden shelves. I almost expect Luc to hit me with all he has; to burst into my head and hold my consciousness hostage while he tears the knowledge of my whereabouts from inside me.

But the shaking suddenly stops, and Ryan staggers, almost falling over. A giggling woman in a brightly striped shawl pushes at him with her hands to steady him.

‘Earthquake,’ Uriel says, shooting me a worried glance.

I’m so relieved it’s just an earthquake that I almost shrug.

The man whose home we’re in says quietly, ‘For three days it has rained. The guides speak of landslides near Llaqtapata, heavy fog and tremors on the mountain, injuries, cancellations. If you wish to trek, as the gringo says, there are permits. We can get them for you, no passports, no waiting, if that is what you want.’

The whole room suddenly seems to be watching Uriel to see how he will respond.

‘Don’t do that thing with your eyes again,’ Ryan finally says, exasperated, looking from Uri to me. ‘My advice is that you go in on foot and get the flaming swords out only when you need to. But I’m just the half-dead gringo,’ his voice is bitter, ‘so what would I know?’

Our host pushes a new man forward — younger, moustachioed, fit-looking, dressed in khaki and rubber slides. ‘I am Mateo,’ he says, studying the three of us keenly. ‘My uncle tells me you need a guide and permits?’

‘Please,’ I urge Uriel quietly. ‘Let’s do this the way Ryan suggests. He’s done as Michael commanded — he’s kept me alive in more ways than you would ever understand. None of you has ever had someone like Ryan on point guard. None of you would even consider taking direction from anyone remotely like him. To be cast adrift in this sea and still find someone to anchor me like he has — you couldn’t even begin to calculate odds like those. You’d do a lot worse than to listen to him, Uri. We can reassess the terrain once we’re there.’

Uriel regards Ryan silently for a moment before nodding tightly. One day, he says grimly in my head. We do it in one day, or we don’t do it at all.

Then he smiles at the people gathered about him and it’s like the sun coming out. The women all around us, young and old, clasp their hands together and sigh.

‘Sit, sit,’ our host tells us, and a path is immediately cleared for us to the round table in the corner of the room, now groaning with platters of food people have brought from their own homes.

Ryan leans on me a little as he shuffles along like an old guy. ‘Can you hear that sound?’ he whispers, as I help him into one of the bentwood chairs.

A middle-aged man in a dark shirt and black woollen waistcoat places a warm glass of milky-green liquid with leaves floating in it into Ryan’s hand, closing his fingers around it. Ryan’s still sweating heavily as he takes a sip and grimaces.

‘What sound?’ I reply curiously.

The air is alive with sounds, both exterior and interior to all the people here. There’s a clock ticking somewhere, voices on the radio, the sound of female laughter coming from the room behind us. People are shoving furniture to one side of the room as an older man tunes a guitar.