Fury

there’s the sound of something else, something elemental, that’s growing in power. Then I round a corner, and see a ruined city of light grey stone clinging to the cliff face, spilling down the side of the mountain in graceful, concave terraces, punctuated by ancient fountains and watercourses. Behind and above it, across a ravine, is a raging, tumbling waterfall — glorious, eternal, uncaring, vastly swollen by the interminable rain.

I turn automatically to share what I’m seeing with Ryan, but, of course, he’s not there.

Mateo shouts down to me from the pathway above: ‘Winay Wayna!’

And I know that the name of the place means ‘forever young’, but it is young as we are young. It endures, like we do, because we were made to.

I see him turn to Uriel and gesture. I can tell that he’s suggesting a break, but Uriel shakes his head. Mateo argues, and points down to Ryan, who is still struggling below me on the stairs, every line of his body telegraphing his sheer exhaustion and misery.

‘Ryan? Break?’ Mateo calls to him anxiously.

Ryan looks up and shakes his head, proudly, bitterly, before looking back down at his boots. So we don’t stop for a break because no one’s asking to stop, and Mateo has no choice but to agree.

We pass the mysterious, curving terraces of Winay Wayna in the driving, dismal rain, and keep walking, keep moving upwards.

When we finally begin to descend through a cloud forest of twisted tree trunks, ferns, orchids and lush, dark green leafy plants, my internal clock tells me it’s just before midday. It’s warmer now, and the thick cover overhead shields us from the worst of the rain. Green hummingbirds and butterflies dart amongst the foliage.

Mateo overrules Uriel at last, insisting upon a rest break. He hurries back along the paved Incan roadway to fetch Ryan.

Uriel shrugs off the pack of supplies and studies our surroundings with barely concealed impatience. ‘Ryan’s holding us up,’ he says bluntly. ‘Remind me again how he’s supposed to be useful?’

‘He’s committed,’ I say tautly. ‘He can hardly turn around and go back now. Like I said, he’s with me, and you don’t have to like it, you just have to deal with it.’

Mateo and Ryan stagger into view, and I hurry down the path to meet them, shocked at Ryan’s pallor, how badly he’s shaking.

‘He’s hallucinating,’ Mateo says worriedly as I take Ryan’s other arm over my shoulder, curve an arm around his waist. ‘He keeps saying he’s seen the Devil and the Devil looks just like him.’

‘I wish he was hallucinating,’ I mutter.

We spread out the rain ponchos Mateo brought along and lie Ryan on them. I hold him until his core temperature rises and his breathing evens out and his anger returns.

He sits up finally. ‘I’m fine,’ he snaps hoarsely, trying to fight his way out of my embrace.

But he’s exhausted, and I just lock my arms more tightly around him, refusing to let him go. Suddenly it’s a battle of wills, an all-out wrestling match on the grassy embankment, and we’re sliding around on mud, getting tangled in the plastic of the rain ponchos, until Uriel drags us off each other, still cursing.

‘This is the way you show love towards one another?’ he says incredulously.

‘No,’ Ryan rasps, splattered with dirt, his hard expression suddenly dissolving. ‘I usually say it with flowers. But flowers are too subtle for someone as pigheaded as she is.’ He turns to me and says warily, ‘Friends?’

‘You know I’d always take a round of Greco-Roman wrestling over flowers, so no hard feelings,’ I shoot back.

Ryan laughs out loud, and some of that horrible edginess that’s been plaguing me all day, like my own personal black cloud, dissipates at the sound.

We smile at each other, and Uriel says disgustedly, ‘I don’t understand you.’

Mateo approaches hesitantly, handing us each a bottle of water and a plastic plate loaded with food from the pack: slices of fresh bread topped with torn pieces of a soft, white cheese, with a side of some colourful- looking salad involving potato and cucumber, sliced onion, beetroot and mayo. I see him take in Ryan’s forlorn appearance, before his eyes slide uncomfortably away from me, from Uri — completely dry and neat as two new pins.

Uriel and I exchange glances of our own.

‘The food looks lovely, Mateo,’ I say casually, ‘but how about you and Ryan take a little more of ours? Uri and I are still working off breakfast.’

Mateo looks down sharply at what’s left on my plate, on Uri’s, after we’ve redistributed most of our food to the two of them. But though he’s clearly dying to point out that we must have worked up some kind of appetite after hiking for almost three hours straight without stopping, he doesn’t. Perhaps out of a natural sense of tact, or to maintain the growing fiction that there’s nothing remotely screwy about either Uriel or myself.

When the two men are done eating, Uriel rises immediately and his voice is commanding as he says, ‘When we reach Machu Picchu, Mateo, leave us. Take as many of the other guides and porters and tourists with you as you can. Make directly for the car park you talked of last night, the buses to Aguas Calientes. Do not linger.’ Uriel doesn’t actually add: If you want to live. But it’s in his voice.

Mateo nods, looking troubled as he stows the remains of our meal in the pack. ‘There will be hardly anyone on the mountain today. It should be easy, what you ask for.’

‘A good day, then, for us to pay a visit,’ Uriel replies calmly, hoisting the pack onto his broad shoulders. He turns and looks at Ryan for a moment. ‘As for you, do as your “will” dictates. Just keep yourself alive, or there will be no living with this one,’ he indicates me brusquely, ‘ever again. Got that?’

Then he turns and walks away swiftly, silently.

20

For a time, our route through the forest is meandering, almost easy. But then the paved roadway transforms back into a steep staircase that’s exposed once more to the elements. We find ourselves battling uphill through a curtain of rain upon a slick and infinitely more treacherous surface: Mateo in the lead, followed by Uriel, then Ryan and I, side by side, because to be any other way, we’ve come to realise, feels wrong.

‘I don’t even know what day it is today,’ Ryan mutters, his hands balled into fists in his pockets in a vain attempt to keep his fingers warm.

‘Friday,’ I say unerringly.

‘Friday in Peru,’ he mumbles in disbelief.

I hear him give a gasp as the forest to our right suddenly falls away into thin air and we’re staring down a huge cliff face into absolute space. Then we enter more ruins — like standing stones situated upon the crest of a ridge — and Mateo calls out from just beyond them, ‘Inti Punku! The Gateway of the Sun!’ and we look left through the gate, and down, and we see it at last.

A sprawling complex of ruined stone buildings that lies across the saddle between two mountains, a sheer drop on two sides into deep valleys, a towering mountain peak at its back. The city of Machu Picchu.

As we look down in awe, the rain abruptly stops. The absence of sound is almost disorientating, the silence so intense it feels as if I’ve momentarily lost my hearing. The heavy pall of cloud that hangs low over the mountain peak framing the city seems suddenly lit up from within, as if the sun is trying desperately to break through.

The cloudy sky is steel grey shot through with silver as we begin our descent down a narrow walkway paved with large flagstones. The zigzagging scar of some modern roadway defaces the steep hillside to our right, a bus — tiny from this distance — travelling back down it. We begin to pass outlying walls and buildings, and it’s around 1 pm when we hit the heart of the city. There are stone structures in almost every direction, situated along wide plazas or separated by a multitude of walkways, fountains, ramparts, lookouts, dividing walls, most open to the sky. It’s impossible to get a feel for things, or to know what we’re even looking at, but I understand what Uriel meant when he said the place reeked of blood and power. The city fell silent centuries ago, but if I listen hard enough, I can almost hear ritual and violence emanating from the stone itself.

The path seems to end at a great three-sided structure, and as Ryan and I reach Uriel and Mateo, I glimpse