Chapter 20
Intiraymi marks the winter solstice, and I feel the strength of the season when I wake up before sunrise. It will be the shortest day of the year tomorrow. Today we’re heading to Cusco. It will take us all day, but we should arrive before sundown with enough time to find lodging.
My first memory of Intiraymi feels like it takes place in a different world.
My mother still lived with us, but she made the trek to Cusco alone regardless of how much I wanted to go.
I remember her loading coca leaves onto her back.
She wore full traditional Andean clothes back then, a striking difference to the luxe tunics she wore in Lima.
Her lliklla was stunning. She hated weaving, but she excelled at it anyway, and her lliklla showed off that natural talent.
It wasn’t too colorful. Our original community is too high in the mountains to have an abundance of resources for dyes.
It had iconography of mountain peaks and the cosmos, our greatest joy being the sacred peaks surrounding us, and many community members working as shamans and diviners.
I remember the chaskas, variations of stars, most of all.
They were encased in red diamonds, and it’s the closest thing I’ve ever seen to the beauty of the night sky above our house.
My mother was never proud of being Andean, but that lliklla should have brought it out of her.
Now, I’m donning a lliklla I have no connection to.
It’s predominantly blue, black, and brown.
The colors come from a greater abundance of resources than I ever had at home.
The blue is beautiful. I can admit that, but nothing else about it stands out to me.
That’s the intention, but something pulls at my heart when I put it on.
I remember finding my mother’s old llikllas after she left and tying them around me like capes. She took only the bare necessities when she trekked to Lima, even though she knew back then she would never come back. We all knew.
Her llikllas were thick and long to protect from the cold, but I had the strength to hold them on my shoulders and the agility to never trip on them. That meant something to me back then, when I thought approval would be right around the corner.
Now, it actually is.
“We’re engaged,” the princess says, and that breaks through my memories. “Mare is your little brother, and we always planned to go to this year’s Intiraymi in Cusco to ask for good fortune before our union.”
I don’t know what expression is on my face, but Muna is chuckling behind his hand.
“Now, we’re going to offer our greatest treasure to pray for the Inka’s life. We’re from a mining community, and the muki’s horn has been helping us find metal veins to strike for decades,” the princess continues.
She can’t just be moving on from the engaged thing, can she? Except she is.
“Our parents are too old to take care of Mare alone. If they weren’t, he wouldn’t have come.”
“Wait, can we go back to the part where we’re getting married?”
Muna bursts into laughter. Asshole. This was probably his idea.
Though when I look at the princess’s satisfied face, I have a feeling it wasn’t.
“We’re not getting married yet. We need to wait for all this to be over,” the princess says, so factually it almost fools me.
Muna’s laughter gets louder and louder. I get it already.
“It’s what the lliklla says,” the princess continues. “Tula is engaged, and it shows it right here.”
She points to the whole heart iconography, the only icon in pure black, right at the center of the garment, where the two halves are stitched together.
I could bring up that Tula probably has garments from before her engagement, but nothing comes out of my mouth. How could I deny this? How could I say no?
That’s that.
I dress my wound again. We don our disguises, and we’re out a few minutes later.
Muna’s final words to me replay in my head hours after we leave.
She doesn’t try to pretend that you’re someone you’re not. Don’t let that make you worse.
At that moment, anger had flared deep in my gut, and I left without much of a goodbye. Now, it echoes in my ears like one of the Guardians.
The thing is, it’s so close to what he always said about Suyai that I can’t stop it from hurting. He called her an enabler every chance he got, and she told him he had a savior complex in return.
There’s something different about this time, though.
She doesn’t try to pretend that you’re someone you’re not.
Does he? Does Suyai? I know the answers, but I don’t let myself think about it.
We present our offering to the soldiers at the exit of Ollanta. They look at the horn with wonder. We wrap it up again, weary of wandering eyes. It’s an Intiraymi offering, but we’ve heard enough about the crime in the area since the Aya Runa took over to take chances with something so precious.
The first half of the trek to Cusco ends up passing by in silence, with the rare noise from others on the same path.
There’s much less celebration than I know is customary.
The people making the trek are more somber than festive.
It’s odd. The lead-up to Intiraymi is usually all chicha beer, coca, and music.
The most I hear here is a flute whose origin I can’t pinpoint, no matter how much I search.
We stop later than most people for lunch, choosing to chew some coca and avoid the higher traffic areas.
By the time we find a tambo, the sun is high in the sky, and I’m carrying Mare on my back.
It’s easy to hide the pain his weight causes my shoulder when Mare is distracted by the sparse festivities.
Tambos are resting places spaced out evenly along the chaski roads.
Chaski families tend to be the ones to run them, always looking over any travelers stopping by.
We won’t be able to take advantage of their hospitality.
We’re still paranoid of anyone looking too closely at the princess and finding a resemblance to the projection, no matter how much she damaged her face and cut her hair.
We find a secluded area next to a tambo with sacred springs. It’s my lucky day, since my shoulder is burning hot even after Muna stitched me up. I didn’t even get a chicha beer for my troubles. I’ve gotten spoiled by the quick healing of the army. The pain was worse, but this is more inconvenient.
“I’m telling Susu we saw Muna when we see her!” Mare says, like he’s been holding it in this whole time. From the upset look on his face, it seems like he has.
I sigh and rub at my eyes. I’ve been sleeping just fine, and yet I can’t shake this exhaustion.
“I mean it,” he continues. “He’s bad news.”
Mare sounds exactly like Suyai as he repeats her words from years ago, and it sends a pang through my heart.
Suyai is waiting for us in Lima. She doesn’t know when we’ll be back, but I know she believes we will be.
Suyai worries, but she has faith. We’ll be there soon.
There are only a few small things to do.
I just have to save the Inka, restore the princess’s power, and pass trials set up by our Sun god first.
I whisper a curse, and Mare’s frown breaks for a second as he giggles at the word. “Listen buddy, give me a chance to tell her first when we see her, okay?”
He squints at me in suspicion but eventually nods and runs off to play in the trees. Of course, he needs me to carry him when we’re walking down the path, but the moment there’s nature to explore, he’s bouncing off the walls again.
He’s so like me, it wipes the frown off my face.
“Suyai is that girl,” the princess says, and I wait for her to elaborate, but she doesn’t. It’s not like I don’t know what she means, but something in me wants her to say it.
“That girl?”
She hums. “Yes.” She raises one thin black eyebrow, intersected by a healing cut, and stares me down. She’s gorgeous like this. I almost tell her that, but then I remember her tone and Suyai, and I’m angry like I was at Muna all over again.
“That girl is my best friend. She’s everything to me–”
“That’s not true,” she interrupts with one definitive shake of her head. I roll my eyes and am about to answer when she continues. “Because I’m your princess.”
My cheeks flare at the way she says those words, slow and certain like it’s a fact of nature. Which, by the Guardians’ law, it is.
“Whatever you say, princess,” I hiss out, but I’m scared it comes out more breathless than angry. “I’m going to the fountains.”
I sit there waiting for a response, but all she does is blush and look away. Fine. I’m already stripping off my chumpi as I walk away.
I take off my clothes at the base of a tree until I’m just in my undergarments. I breathe a sigh of relief when I see my stitches are still closed. The blouses Muna lent us are white, and it’d be impossible to wash off any blood that gets on the material.
Plus, the pain of bursting them open would significantly hinder this trip. The throbbing I feel now is already annoying enough.
There are a few people at the tambo, but I manage to find one fountain at the base of the ceremonial platform that’s empty.
The tambo’s ceremonial structure is built on top of a high dais, and it’s inside this that an ancient Inka installed canals to direct the water from the snowcapped mountains to here. It’s most likely from Apu Veronika.
I look up and catch a glance at the respective mountain in the distance. It leaves me breathless. The Guardians are the ones who protect our empire, but the Gods are the ones who created the world it’s in.
Water spurts out of a hole in the platform with enough force to come out in a graceful arc.
There’s a small niche on either side meant to put your hands in, forcing you into a humble position to receive water from the sacred springs.
I do just that. I face the platform and place one hand in each niche.
Then, I lower my head, and ice-cold water pours down my back.
It’s agonizing and heavenly all at once.
In a distant part of my brain, I know I’m moaning, but I’m so lost in the sensations I couldn’t care less.
My muscles tense and release in cycles. My wavy hair gets heavier and turns completely straight over my shoulders with the water.
It’s nothing like the military wash I had in Ollanta, rushing and scrubbing myself raw.
No. This is the peace of the Ukhu Pacha flowing over me.
“Your skin,” I hear the princess from behind me, but I feel no need to turn around.
I came to terms with my body a long time ago. Nothing the princess says can change that.
That is, until I feel her warm touch on my naked back. It’s gone as soon as I noticed it.
“I–I’m sorry,” she stutters. “It’s just… your back.”
I know exactly what she’s talking about. On my back is a thick scar about two inches long with a bursting star of lighter skin in the middle.
“I got thrown back onto a sharp rock during training years ago. The soldier pushed me deeper onto it with his foot.”
“That sounds unnecessarily cruel.”
“It wasn’t. I wouldn’t concede the fight, so he had to keep going. He didn’t want to.”
I feel no phantom pain from it the way I used to. I’ve had worse injuries since then, one of them healing on my shoulder right now, but this is the one that festered the longest before it healed, leading to the scar.
“You must have put up a good fight, if the healers didn’t get to this in time for it not to scar. I know we keep Serpent mimics on hand for the soldiers during extreme cases.”
“I did.” I smile, and fresh water falls into my mouth. “I won.”
I bask in the cold until I can’t take it anymore, and then I still don’t move. “You can touch it if you want,” I say, like a woman possessed.
For a while, there’s nothing, and I wonder if I scared her away, the princess terrified of touch. Then comes the whisper of sensation. Her fingers graze over my skin like the wind from a summer storm, warm and all-encompassing.
“The nerves are most likely damaged,” she whispers, but I hear it for the question that it is. Can you feel this?
I respond by arching my back into her hand. Her surprised gasp is all I need to dive further into a relaxation I haven’t felt in so long, maybe years.
Then it’s gone.
I turn around and step out of the range of the water. The princess is looking down and breathing hard, as am I.
I’m the one who breaks the silence.
“I’ll just dry off, and we can head out.”
“Okay.”
Neither of us moves.
“This one,” the princess says, pointing to a slash at my abdomen, healed and below a new wound I got yesterday.
“Halberd.”
She points to another scar, an almost perfect circle next to my belly button.
“Waraka, throwing out copper projectiles,” I explain the slings we used to shoot small balls of copper, wood, or anything in between.
Then, a jagged line on my thigh.
“Talons. We helped some locals with a chullpas problem.”
Those were nasty. Human-looking creatures of the night coming from caves to try to seduce and steal human lives.
And, of course, she had to point to the one right above my left breast, over my heart.
One scar without a fun story behind it. It’s small but thick, looking permanently inflamed.
All my scars are a lighter color than my skin, but this one is the lightest of them all, as close to white as my skin tone could get. It’s my oldest.
“Rock dagger. My mother and I were sparring,” I say.
“Your mother doesn’t speak to you,” the princess counters.
“She used to.”
I see the realization slowly show on her face. She studied my history once I was chosen. I know that much. But there’s more to me than what the Inka know. Yet, I don’t like that. I want her to know. I want her to be able to read the map that is my body and tell me where it leads.
“I begged her to teach me, and my mom doesn’t believe in going easy. She’d knock me down in seconds and wouldn’t stop until I couldn’t get up. I tried to sneak up on her one day when she was training with daggers. She didn’t appreciate it,” I explain.
“The oldest you could have been was six years old. Before she left.”
I have nothing more to say, so I just nod.
“That’s not sparring,” the princess says.
Suyai had been furious. She had gone to my aunts, her tiny fists shaking. She always acted like an adult, and she spoke to my aunts like one, too. My aunts were equally as mad, but my mom and I knew the benefit. I learned my lesson.
I learned I needed to be faster.
I wait for the anger to overtake the princess’s face after her statement, but nothing happens. I wait and wait as she stays still as a rock.
I hold my breath when she lifts her hand and covers my scar with an open palm.
“You’re a warrior. You have a warrior’s body.”
I can’t tell if she’s disgusted by it. It’s normally so easy to tell. In Suyai, it’s her pinched face and teary eyes. In others, it’s a pitiful frown. The princess is blank-faced.
Until she smiles, a familiar look of recognition, like seeing an old friend, lights up her face.
“But you’re my champion now. No more scars unless it’s for me.”
When I get dressed, I'm in a daze.