Trail of Feathers Read Online Free PDF

reaches of the empire. It has borne witness to battles, executions, mutinies and plagues, to great banquets, coronations and sacrificial rites. These days, virtually every central plaza in Peru is known as Plaza de Armas, in honour of those who died in the 1879 war with Chile.
    From the moment I set eyes on that great square, something stirred inside me. Along with the incessant stream of travellers, I realised at once that Cusco was different. Like them, I stopped dead in my tracks, put a hand to my mouth, and held my breath. It was as if I had been let into an extraordinary secret.
    Long shadows of the winter afternoon veiled the maze of terracotta-roofs. Cobbled passageways with sheer stone sides led off to the east and the west. Arched doorways hinted at the courtyards which lay behind. Whitewashed walls trimmed in bougainvillaea dazzled me as I explored the back-streets of what must be the most enchanting city on the Latin continent.
    At almost eleven thousand feet, the vanilla-scented air was frosty with cold. A gang of street-vendors bustled forward, wrapped up in their winter woollies, tilted bowlers pulled down tight. Every Cusque
ñ
ian seemed to be clutching a shallow basket of goods,- hand-woven Alpaca gloves, ponchos and raspy woollen socks;
quenas
, panpipes, under-ripe lemons, jars of honey and Inca brand cigarettes. For every tray of merchandise there were ten newly-arrived tourists with a little money to spend.
    Cusco is a city of bargains. The South American equivalent of Kathmandu, it’s saturated with impoverished adventurers who refuse to leave. Like me, they know that such precious destinations are hard to come by. Stroll down narrow alleys off the main square, and you find rows of shops, selling the effects of the desperate. Half-empty bottles of pink Pepto Bismol, goose-down sleeping bags, waterproof matches, limp loo paper and tubs of Nivea sun-cream.
    It was at the back of one such shop, which doubled as a café, beneath a rousing portrait of Ché Guevara, that I met Sven.
    He watched me carefully as I poked about in a display barrel of pawned accessories. I examined the blade of an Opinel pocket-knife, checked the sell-by-date on a slab of Kendal mint cake, flicked through a dog-eared, damaged copy of
West with the Night
.
    ‘Do you play chess?’ he asked with a lisp.
    ‘Badly’
    Before I could stop him, the hunched figure had pulled a board and pieces from his grubby satchel and laid them out. Male pattern baldness had robbed his head of hair, except for a long tuft at the front. His complexion was fair, his eyes an imperial blue, and his forehead was severed by lines. A much-darned grey pullover rolled up to his chin like an orthopaedic neck-brace.
    He thrust out a square hand.
    ‘Sven,’ he said, ‘from Bratislava.’
    I took a seat in the window alcove, adjacent.
    ‘What shall we play for?’ he asked.
    ‘I have no chance of winning, I’m hopeless at chess.’
    He pulled a yellow Sony Walkman from his satchel and placed it beside the board.
    ‘You can have it if you win,’ he said.
    My eyes widened with greed.
    ‘What happens if I lose?’
    Sven stretched over and tugged at my scarf.
    ‘Wool?’
    ‘Alpaca’,
I replied.
    The game lasted six moves. As my king fell on his sword, the Slovak reached over, unwound my scarf, and twirled it around his own neck.
    ‘It’s quite nice,’ he said.
    ‘I should hope so, it was a birthday present from my mother. Sven swept back the tuft of liquorice hair.
    ‘I have the advantage’ he said softly. ‘I assume you’ve never been banged up in a Slovak prison.’
    The chess-player wouldn’t say why he had done seven years in a high-security jail. But he did reveal, over a cup of
coca de maté
, that his friends called him Walkman. He was walking around the world in the name of peace and poetry.
    ‘The countries which pass beneath my feet’ he mumbled, staring out the window. ‘They are the future. Forget Europe, it’s