Muriel Gray - The Ancient

Fen let out a shriek, and raised his arms across his face, but not, thought Parren later, to protect himself from the blow. The die ceased its tremulous progress across the table top, once again becoming an innocent and inanimate object, and the men looked at Fen with horror.

The cadet and the steward had also leapt to their feet, and two of them grabbed Fen under the arms and brought him back upright.

‘Get some water,’ Parren barked to the two cooks standing dumb-struck in the hatch.

Water was fetched and duly administered, but even an hour later, the time when the men should have been laughing and reflecting on what must have been nothing more than a ugly prank, neither Fen nor his audience had recovered sufficiently to laugh at anything.

It was a matter of priorities. She’d washed all three of her T-shirts, her entire collection of underwear, which wasn’t much and depressingly utilitarian, and even her trusty sandals, which had begun to smell like an old carcass. Now, they were all hanging like puritan bunting over the plastic frame of the shower cubicle, or on the rail that ran around the cabin, and it meant only one thing. It was time to do some work.

Esther sat down heavily on her sofa, crossed her bare legs beneath her and gathered the pile of paper, notepads, the Dictaphone and red, hardbound book that she’d carried halfway across Peru, onto her lap, sighing as she started to sift through the confused mess. She grazed until she found what she wanted, the cream of the crop, the thing that she believed was going to make this whole project.

She’d come up with the dissertation idea in a response to a particularly politically correct lecture from a lanky objectionable English professor on a book promotion tour, who had come all the way to their college to present his lecture, bearing the same title as his book: Democracy: The Natural State of Man . Esther didn’t know why, but she’d hated him the moment he’d smoothed his sad academic beard with long fingers, smiled smugly at the audience, and said, ‘What has politics got to do with anthropology, you must be asking yourselves?’

Esther was in fact sighing, asking herself why this man was patronizing them with his opening sentence.

By the time he got to, ‘You know, you take it for granted that if I offend you, horrify you, or bore you, you have the power and the freedom to leave. Democracy, ladies and gentlemen. Voting with your feet. It is more natural, more immovably inbuilt into the fabric of humanity, from Piltdown man to a Wall Street broker, than any other form of known social behaviour,’ she desperately wanted to prove him wrong merely for the sake of it.

He went on to argue that dictatorships, however benevolent, held back humanity and halted progress, and at question time Esther put up her hand.

‘What about the Roman Empire?’ she asked without aggression.

He smiled again, a father to a child. ‘Ah yes, Fascism.’

Before he could begin a prepared response about that particularly abhorrent form of human politics, she interrupted. ‘I mean, specifically, how did it hold back humanity and halt progress?’

He had raised his eyebrows. ‘How about slavery, genocide and corruption?’ He was looking forward to humiliating her. She could tell he made a living out of it.

‘How about social order and justice for the majority, engineering and military advances of a type that have survived even until now, creativity in the arts equal if not superior to anything we enjoy today?’

‘No, no, no …’ He tried to stop by her shaking his head with sympathy, but she was undeterred.

‘Oh yeah. And ice cream.’

The class burst out laughing. He laughed with them, but only with his mouth. His eyes were pinning her down, marking her out.

‘And Hitler? I trust you admired the fact the trains ran on time?’

‘Hitler was voted into power.’ She spoke the next word deliberately slowly to irritate him. ‘Democratically.’

She was starting to irritate him as much he annoyed her. She could tell.

‘I guess you must be a National Socialist, young lady.’ He smiled at his own joke.

‘I’m Jewish.’

His smile faded and he looked at her coldly, cleared his throat and gave his pat response to the rest of the class while Esther sat thinking. It wasn’t important to prove the point here. Of course she believed in the might of democracy. It had simply become interesting to her as a student to see if what the English jerk was saying was true or not, and more importantly, in the true naive spirit of the young, to try and ruin his experienced certainty.

That night she sat in the library and after three long hours chose the most successful ancient civilization she could find that was comparable to her own, and one that was not based on any form of democracy whatsoever. The Incas.

They were perfect. Haughty dictators who were so successful in building their empire that their people always had huge surpluses of food. They had plumbing they would be proud of in Idaho, irrigation engineering over thousands of miles that still defies modern understanding, and a hierarchy that by and large only slaughtered each other, leaving the man and woman in the well-paved streets unharmed. There was social welfare, free education and health care, little or no crime, and all with not a sniff of anything remotely approaching democracy.

Unfortunately there was also human sacrifice, but since church was not separate from state in the way it must always be in modern democracies, this would only help to further prove her point. So it was just what she needed. An enviable civilization destroyed not by its lack of democracy, but by an equally undemocratic horde of avaricious religious hypocrites from Europe. Now, thousands of years later, under the democratic rule of a bastardized Spanish civilization, was Peru more successful? No sirree. She was off, and her dissertation was born.

The paper she had created from the dross of notes and photos of temples and dig sites she’d had developed in Cuzcou included sketched diagrams and twenty-nine full pages of her writing. Because unbelievably she had chanced upon something she wasn’t expecting. Something that was so exciting she could hardly contain it. A three-week trip onto the high plateau with some shepherds she had befriended in a small village had led her to an extraordinary piece of living human archaeology, something she hoped she was the first to find, and when she wrote of it might just cause a stir.

The shepherds had told her of a small group of nomadic people, rarely seen, who moved and lived on the very edges of the eastern mountain range that divided the high Andean plateau from the Amazon jungle. What was remarkable about these people, apart from the fear they seemed to inspire in the otherwise hardy shepherds, was the fact that they were Incas. Esther had tried not to laugh. There were, of course, no Incas. All the research told her that in the days of the great empire there were in fact only forty thousand full-blooded nobles who called themselves by that name. The hundreds of thousands of people who lived peacefully under their rule were merely Inca subjects.

The pure-bred Incas were either slaughtered or interbred with the Spanish to create through countless generations the modern Peruvians. To suggest that some of the original royal Incas had survived thus far intact would be outrageous. But the normally reticent shepherds were adamant, insisting, as further proof, that these people were still sun-worshippers, that they had the power and dark practices of the ancient ones very much in their grasp. Not only that, but the shepherds spoke enigmatically, and Esther thought, somewhat fearfully, about the tribe being unusually active recently. One had said in a small anxious voice that some of them had been travelling to towns and cities, a thing previously unheard of.