more important occupying her mind than his excursion to Bogotá. Her excitement was clear even through the door. He got dressed and went through to the lounge, finding Nina sitting at a table with Macy, Osterhagen, Kit and even Mac. ‘What’s this, a remake of The Breakfast Club?’
Nina hurriedly gulped a mouthful of toast, washing it down with a swig of coffee. ‘Mm, morning! Guess you slept well – you don’t normally get up this late.’
‘Well, yesterday was kind of knackering. Mornin’, all.’ He waved to the others, getting greetings in response. ‘Why didn’t you wake me?’
‘I thought you needed a lie-in. And you looked so sweet while you were asleep.’
‘Funny, I’ve seen Eddie when he’s asleep,’ said Mac, ‘and that’s not a word I would ever have used to describe him.’
‘Yeah, well, kipping with a bunch of sweaty, farting SAS blokes tends to make you scrunch your face up,’ Eddie retorted. He looked at the table, seeing the recovered khipu laid out on a long white board, and a jumble of notes in front of the three archaeologists. ‘So, have we got this thing figured out? Hope you’re going to wash your hands before you pick it up,’ he added to Nina, who was wolfing down another slice of buttered toast.
She waved to Macy for a napkin. ‘Yeah, Leonard thinks he’s got something.’
Eddie pulled up a chair and sat as Osterhagen, with deep bags under his eyes that suggested he had been working all night, held up a large photo of the map in Paititi. ‘We know the start point of the journey,’ the German explained. ‘Cuzco, of course, the centre of the Inca empire. And we know the end point – Paititi. What we needed were reference points along the way. If we could identify other known locations, it would allow us to work out the code shared between the map and the khipu - directions and distances.’
Eddie nodded. ‘So what’s you found?’
Osterhagen was about to speak when Macy enthusiastically cut in. ‘Only the biggest Inca landmark in the world,’ she said, waving at a blow-up of part of the painted wall. ‘Machu Picchu!’ She pointed out a small illustration amongst the markings, little more than a sketch: two rounded-off conical peaks, one large, one small, with lines presumably representing buildings at their bases. ‘It’s about seventy miles northwest of Cuzco, along a thing called the Inca Trail.’
‘I’ve travelled along it many times,’ said Osterhagen, trying to wrest back the discussion from the perky student. ‘I know the landmarks well. Now, the number of these markings here,’ he indicated part of the map, ‘correspond to the huacas along the Inca Trail between Cuzco and Machu Picchu.’
‘Huacas?’ said Eddie. ‘Sounds like an Inca puking.’
Those who knew him well either smiled or let his attempt at a joke pass without comment; Osterhagen, however, seemed mildly affronted. ‘No, they are sacred sites,’ he said. ‘The Incas believed that certain places were of spiritual importance. Some were natural features like springs or mountain peaks, some were places of historical importance, and others were burial sites for mummies. Not all of them survived the Spanish conquest, because the Conquistadors tried to eradicate everything associated with the existing religions.’
‘But it’s kinda hard to destroy an entire mountain,’ Macy added. ‘A lot of them survived.’
‘Got you,’ Eddie said, examining the photographs. ‘You know where these things are today, so we can work backwards and say this marking means a burial site, or whatever.’
‘And the other part,’ said Nina, having wiped her fingers, ‘is the khipu.’ She indicated the leftmost section of the collection of knotted strings. ‘This part is a record of the first stage of their journey, as far as Machu Picchu. The number of strings matches the number of huacas on the map.’
‘A lot of landmarks,’ noted Eddie.
‘It was a long journey. It’s over a thousand miles from Cuzco to Paititi, and that’s as the crow flies – the Incas took an even longer route. You see this?’
She pointed further along the Inca artefact’s woven spine. Although the strings were dirty and darkened by time, Eddie saw that the various strands were discernibly different. Those up to roughly two-thirds of the way along the khipu’s length were a variety of shades, mostly greys and browns and reds with greens and blues interspersed; beyond that point, they were almost entirely of the last two. ‘The colours change,’ he said. ‘What does that mean?’
‘We think,’ said Osterhagen, ‘the colours represent different types of terrain. This