Torchwood: Exodus Code

maize on huge flat stones and rolling tortillas in their nimble fingers. One or two of the women had sleeping babies wrapped tight to their backs. They looked up as the girl skidded, breathless, to a stop in front of the Priestess.
    ‘It’s him,’ the child exclaimed, bouncing with excitement. ‘I saw him. He came down with the flying machine.’ The girl pointed to a funnel of thick dark smoke pluming to the heavens from the crashed Hornet.
    ‘Where are your animals?’ the High Priestess asked her. Together, they crossed the clearing to a stone temple, a round cairn with a stepped roof reaching a pyramid point, built before the conquest beneath the canopy of two huarango trees. Their monstrous roots ran below the surface of the plateau like giant claws holding the mountain in their grip. The Cuari believed that they did.
    ‘Grazing with Rojas. She is capable.’ The girl’s voice dropped to a whisper as they got closer to the round stone temple. She hated the goats, and she wasn’t that fond of Rojas either. They both smelled badly, which is why she had wandered off to explore when she heard the mechanical bird flying overhead. Her heart was thumping in her chest. ‘We should go quickly. I know where he fell. The mountain didn’t take him yet.’
    The Priestess frowned at the girl. ‘Did you touch him?’
    ‘No!’ she said, looking at the ground, scuffing her bare toes into the dirt, ashamed that the Priestess would even think her capable of such dishonour. The girl knew that she was not worthy of looking upon a deity, and so all she had done was to gather up the belongings that had fallen from the sky and scattered across the plateau, avoiding the smouldering flying machine as she did. The giant bird frightened her, the noises of the wood snapping and crackling in the flames like an angry night lion.
    ‘Good,’ the Priestess replied, tousling the girl’s curly black hair and accepting the belongings that she had wrapped in her striped poncho. Behind the Priestess, the heavy curtain of reeds covering the entrance to the sacred cairn rustled.
    The Priestess dropped to her knees. The girl fled.
    Two hands wrapped in wide strips of red gauze reached out from behind the screen, palms up. The Priestess hooked the poncho over the gauze, making sure the fabric did not touch any skin. The poncho disappeared inside.
    ‘The time of the prophecies is at hand,’ said the High Priestess in the ancient tongue of her ancestors. ‘I will prepare myself to enter.’
    ‘I am ready,’ said a low, sultry female voice.
    The Priestess was the Cuari’s
amautas
, the keeper of their historical narrative, the protector of the tales of their ancestors, tales told and retold from the times aeons before El Diablo Pizarro – from the time when the stars had fallen into the mountain and the world was born.
    The old matriarch had spoken to traders at the lowland villages, and to the archaeologists who were now digging at a temple ruin on the other side of the mountain. She knew from them that the gods were using men to wage battles in the world beyond their village. But as always the Cuari had been spared the encroaching violence because they had an ancient prophecy to fulfil and the mountain to protect them.
    Back inside her hut, the Priestess undressed, letting her skirts fall in a bundle near the door. She stood in an iron tub and bathed, scrubbing her skin until every sharp angle and soft sagging spot was rubbed raw. She let the warm moist air in the hut dry her mottled skin before she unfolded a clean grey tunic and pulled it over her head. At her door, she slipped her feet into leather sandals and stepped outside. A small grouping of villagers, who had gathered in front of her hut when they heard the girl’s yelling, backed away quickly to let the Priestess pass.
    At the entrance to the temple, she stopped and knelt, making sure her knee did not touch the ground.
    ‘May the gods protect you, Gaia.’
    Then she pulled aside the heavy screen and stepped inside the temple of the Star Guide.
    The Priestess carefully dropped the curtain behind her, aware of every crackle and rustle as she did so. She remained in a small outer chamber whose walls were draped in red and black embroidered fabrics, waiting until Gaia adjusted to her presence and summoned her forward. When she did, the Priestess lifted the final curtain of heavy draping on another arched entry and stepped through into the main chamber of the temple.
    In this