Page 74 of The Children of Eve (Charlie Parker #22)

CHAPTER LXXIV

They had no names, for their names were not recorded. Three girls, one boy: the girls aged approximately six, eight, and eleven, the boy fourteen. They were children not of the poor but of nobles, each selected for their beauty; the offerings had to be as close to perfection as human frailty allowed. They would have been brought to the Incan capital, Cusco, along with tens, even hundreds of others, from there to be dispatched across Tawantinsuyu, the empire, all destined to end their lives in a pit.

Sometime in the late fifteenth century, these four were sent to the southern reaches of Tawantinsuyu, near the volcano called Nevados Casiri, or Paugarani, close to what is now the Peruvian-Chilean border. There they were dressed in finery, their hair braided, and their faces marked with pigment. In a cave within sight of the volcano, on high arid ground, they were fed corn alcohol, or chicha , to put them to sleep, and their mouths were stuffed with coca leaves before their bodies were placed in the ground—though not covered. The winds passing through the chamber desiccated their skin and internal organs, the cold slowed bacterial decay, and thus a process of natural preservation occurred.

The children were not sacrifices. A sacrifice would not have been treated so tenderly, but would instead have been burned, beheaded, pierced with arrows, and their heart torn out. These children were mediators, destined to act as intermediaries between men and gods—or a god, for the Andean cave in which they were discovered contained, along with some food, fabrics, and small items of gold and silver, likenesses of only one deity: Supay, the god of death, ruler of Ukhu Pacha, the underworld.

Before the Inca, the Wari and Tiwanaku had also journeyed to that place to leave their offerings. It was not a cave but a gateway, and Supay had many cognomens. What mattered was that the children were not alone in the dark.

They had a mother.