The Gold Eaters (19 page)

“His house!” Almagro shouts. “Is that what he calls this place? Look at it. Is this my consolation prize, Pizarro: a burnt city with no citizens? No doubt you think this walleyed Indian's godforsaken fief is enough for a one-eyed fool.”

“Don Diego, you know very well I did my best for you in Spain. I was your loudest advocate for joint command. Ask any who were there. It was the King himself insisted I be sole Commander. He thought it would avoid disputes. Let's be sure it does. We are two hundred in a land that still has millions. We must think of our lives, not titles.” He smiles wolfishly. “Peru is big enough for both of us.
And His Catholic Majesty is very far away. We must obey, but we needn't comply. In due course—when we know what we've found—you and I will come to an arrangement of our own.”

Almagro turns aside, his face a bludgeon.

Governor Chillimasa has watched this exchange closely. He asks Waman what the barbarians know of the troubles in his province.

“Only what they've seen today, my lord.”

“What's that?” Pizarro grasps Waman's ear. “Every word, Felipillo. Upon your life. He—and you—must tell everything.”

After the Great Death waned, the young Governor offers warily, it was his task to oversee resettlement of Tumbes. But just as things were returning to normal, war broke out between two of the late Emperor's sons, sons by different mothers: Waskhar, ruling most of the Empire from Cusco; and Atawallpa, based in the northern highlands, at Tumipampa in Quito Province. The Tumbes garrison was ordered to the mountains. Raiders from beyond the Empire—wild men from the hotlands—took advantage of this. It was they who sacked the city, only two months ago.

“Is the war between the brothers over?” Almagro cuts in. “If so, which one has it? And which side is this Indian on?”

Chillimasa is evasive on both points, saying only that the war is a dynastic matter for highlanders to resolve. His priority is to bring order to his province, to mop up any raiders he can find. To this end, he is willing to work with the bearded ones. He will reward them well with land, houses, servants, gold. And women, naturally, since they seem to have none of their own.

“The Lord God must first be served, Don Francisco.” A lean man with sallow cheeks and a fixed expression of displeasure has trundled silently into the room as if without the use of feet. In the white habit and black cloak of a Dominican, Friar Vicente Valverde is the one
chosen by King Charles to be Protector of Indians and Bishop of Peru. “This Indian must agree to let our churchmen preach here. His people must be taught the Holy Faith.”

“One thing at a time, Father. You won't get much preaching done if they kill us in our beds tonight.” Pizarro turns back to Waman. “Ask about Molina.”

The Governor's divergent eyes cast about as if following two wasps. Then: “Just before my mother died, she did mention a barbarian had stayed behind. Some say he died in the pestilence. Others that he fled the city. I think there was also a tale he was killed in a fight. Perhaps over a woman.”

“That sounds like Molina, all right.” Candía laughs. Pizarro shuts him up with a glare.

—

Weeks go by, armed Christians riding out with the Governor's small force. Meanwhile the hanging bridge is rebuilt with new cables. Llama trains come and go, bringing food, wares, wooden beams, cane for roofing. From the port comes the crunch of piles being driven into mud. Bustle and chatter slowly return to the streets.

The horses are hobbled and set to graze, objects of curiosity to local farmers. Objects of outrage, too, when they trample and eat the crops. The Christians' hogs—a drove of several dozen—wallow in ditches and uproot sweet potatoes. And the war-hounds, the great spotted, half-crazed mastiffs, are another curse, chasing down the citizens' own dogs, their livestock, even their children.

Pizarro stations most of his men in the fortress, keeping a guard of fifty at the Governor's palace.

With Chillimasa's reluctant assent—or acquiescence—Valverde's friars take over the temple, drafting men to re-roof the hall of the Sun. It is soon whitewashed and adorned with a pair of painted
statues: the Mother of God; and the father of war, Santiago Matamoros, Slayer of Moors.

On the wall where the golden sun-wheel greeted the dawn there now hangs a crucifix, given to Pizarro by Queen Isabel. Some argued it should hang on the east wall, not the west, but Valverde overruled them. “Our Lord must take the place of
their
lord. From this day forth, Christ is the Sun who shines on Peru.”

11

A
tawallpa gazes on a bleached afternoon framed by the dark stonework of his bedroom window. His hand absently strokes a favourite trophy: a dried head, the brow glossy as fine leather from his frequent attentions. It is the head of Hanku, his brother Waskhar's general. Waskhar's best.

Only months ago the Cusco army overran Tumipampa and imprisoned Atawallpa here in his own quarters. But loyal servants made his jailers drunk on beer spiked with vision juice. He could hear them outside the door, singing, raving, puking. Soon they were sleeping like snakes in winter, and he slipped away. Once free, he routed his brother's troops and returned in triumph.

Atawallpa smiles at the recent throws of fate. If no Great Death, no dead father. And no dead heir. If no dead father and heir, no opportunity. If no opportunity, no war. If no war, no victory. And no victory if Waskhar had been wiser and killed him when he had the chance.

Atawallpa takes up a silver mirror and interrogates his face, as he does more than once every day. An overnight tarnish from the breath of a volcano gilds his youthful looks agreeably. He juts his chin, pulls a face, wags his head slowly side to side. Good: the scarred earlobe, spliced roughly years ago, stays hidden behind its golden spool and screen of straight black hair. He sets the mirror down and fondles
the trophy again, ruffling its short brush cut, the latest style in the capital. Ugly. And no good for hiding torn earlobes. Again he smiles.

The news could hardly be better. Atawallpa's generals—formerly his father's generals—have taken city after city on their southward march along the Empire's highland backbone. They have reached the Cusco valley, are poised to take the capital at last.

Best, it is Waskhar who's the prisoner now.

Soon Atawallpa will make his way to Cusco—slowly and in splendour, sweeping all doubt and disorder before him as inexorably as a mountain glacier—and there be crowned with his father's crimson fringe across his brow. Then he will become by law what he already is in deed: Sapa Inka, Only King, supreme ruler of the World.

If nothing goes wrong.

But what can? Waskhar is caged like a puma in the army base at Huanuco. He has no sympathizers there. The only thing left to decide is when to kill him. And how.

Atawallpa toys with the idea of turning his brother's hide into a man-drum. The other day some of his troops made rather a good one, the belly stretched over a wooden frame, the dried forearms still attached by their sinews to serve as drumsticks. Amusing. But unfortunately he can't do that to a fellow Inca. Man-drums are for rebels and barbarians.

Waskhar is certainly no barbarian—much too effete. And if there's a rebel in the family, he thinks, it's a moot point which of us it is. My brother attacked me first. Though admittedly that was after I refused to pay him fealty in Cusco. But why should I?

—

Before beginning his long progress to the south, Atawallpa deems it wise to make offerings at the finest temple in Quito Province. No better place to don the mantle of a Sunchild than at the solar
monument his father built near Tumipampa. Though not as grand as the temples of Cusco, this one is unique in its design. All others in the Empire have a curved wall on one side to represent the sun's path through the year. But this alone has a curve at both ends—facing north and south. His father's surveyors determined that through this building runs the midline of the Earth. From here the sun travels in each direction half a year.

Atawallpa recalls his father explaining these cosmic mysteries when they went to see the building work. He was still a boy then, and the occasion was the arrival of the temple's main gate from Cusco, where it had been cut and fitted by the Empire's master masons: many tons of polished stone, the lintel alone weighing ten, brought north on sleds and rollers, a task that took two thousand men six months.

They were standing on a hilltop, watching work teams unload the porphyry blocks, take off the packing straw, set them out in order on the ground like pieces of a puzzle. Wouldn't it have been easier, the boy asked, to bring the masons north and make the gate here?

His father answered that the point was not ease, but difficulty. Our power, he said, is proclaimed in two things: in people and in stone. In our command of stone—our great buildings, bridges, waterworks, farming terraces—and in the work-tax we raise by turns throughout Tawantinsuyu, labour which grows ever more abundant as the people thrive. So I have to build more each year. And since each new city is another Cusco, it must contain a wonder from the first.

“Do you see the meaning of this place?” the Emperor added, before supplying the answer. “This is the Sun's favoured haunt on Earth. I can see why, can't you? So much warmer than the capital. Lusher. More trees. More flowers. I've grown to like it better here myself.”

“And because I'm here!” Atawallpa put in quickly—too quickly—wishing his father had said it. “And Mother . . . You love us more than anyone in Cusco, don't you?”

The Emperor Wayna Qhapaq, then in his thirties—about the age Atawallpa is now—laughed heartily and hugged the boy. But there were courtiers within earshot and he didn't say a word. So many sons; too many to count. Atawallpa, born to a lesser wife, a lady of Quito, would not be in the running to succeed him. Some years later the Only King named his ablest son by the Qoya, his sister-queen in Cusco, to be the heir. At the time this had seemed a mere formality, for the Inca was in his prime.

As he still was until the Great Death fell upon the World.

So many of his children gone, yet
I
survive, thinks Atawallpa, offering corn and beer in the stillness of his father's monument. So many rivals dead. Though not all.

Waskhar is no longer a threat. The half brothers who most worry him now are Manku and Pawllu. Only in their teens, mere nits. But nits become lice. Atawallpa sends the order to his generals at Cusco: occupy the city without delay; search house-to-house until every potential rival has been purged.

Those half brothers are weaklings, sapped by the capital's soft life, its endless feasts and pageants. Atawallpa's duty, his destiny, is to finish the plague's work: to kill them all and cleanse the World.

—

The Inca orders his army and court to prepare for the triumphal march to Cusco, a journey of a thousand miles by the great highland road. But only a week or two before everything is ready, a runner arrives, his sweat steaming the dawn air. He brings news from the coast: the hairy barbarians seen in Tumbes five years ago have come back.

Atawallpa refuses to receive the messenger until he has had breakfast and composed himself. He is not an early riser.

“The bearded ones from overseas are back, Sapa Inka,” the runner says on his knees. “And in much greater numbers than before. Two ships. Two hundred men. Sixty or seventy strange animals, like big llamas, on which some of them ride. Their leader has been warmly received by Chillimasa, who became Governor of Tumbes after his mother's death.”

Atawallpa recalls how that province took Waskhar's side in the war. They will not love him there.

Still. Only two hundred. Such a tiny force can be nothing more than a nuisance. Why lose time on this distraction now? The affairs of Tumbes can be dealt with later, after he is crowned in Cusco.

At dinner that evening he is approached by his high council of five advisers—headed by Wayta Yupanki, a white-haired uncle who served his father well for many years. This august figure reminds him how the old Emperor had these strangers closely watched, gathering intelligence of their behaviour at every port they touched. How he warned against them, ordering that the one left behind in Tumbes be arrested and interrogated.

“Your father's orders came to nothing with his tragic and untimely death,” Wayta Yupanki adds. “But he was wise in this matter, as in all things. The strangers are few. But they may be more dangerous than they seem. First ten. Then thirteen. Now two hundred. Many more could be lurking in the hotlands. Also, let us not forget that others—much like these—raided Qollasuyu eight years ago, coming up rivers from the Other Sea—”

“My father stopped those easily enough,” Atawallpa snaps. “I shall stop these when I please.”

Inwardly the uncle frowns. He has never much liked this nephew, and trusts him less. Why did the spotted death pass over
him
—he
with a broken earlobe, which all know is unlucky? Moreover, he's a sot, the kind who drinks alone and can't hold it. Unlike his father, who could outdrink anyone yet never become drunk. And such a liar. A bad liar too, which is worse, because it shows failure to judge others' wits.

Wayta Yupanki has not forgotten the day when Atawallpa, then eighteen or so, appeared in his father's dining hall with a bloody bandage on his ear, claiming a boil had burst, breaking the stretched ring of flesh. But the truth was already out: the young prince had forced himself on a girl; in the struggle she'd hooked a finger in his lobe and snapped it. It is this that gives him his air of gravity, for he sits very still, head to one side, making sure his hair drapes the shameful scar and the rubber band that bears the weight of his earspool.

The uncle allows none of these disagreeable thoughts to show. We're all stuck with Atawallpa now, he thinks. Our duty is to serve him as we served his father, if only for his father's sake. And ours.

“Of course, Only King. In good time, as you say. But with respect, we think this time should be sooner, not later. As you know, these strangers may well have brought the Great Death that killed your father—my dear brother—and so many millions. Who knows what evils they may carry with them now?”

The Inca goes on eating without a word, taking food and drink from the slim hands of two young women who kneel on either side of his cushioned stool. A possible link between the barbarians and the plague does not worry him. If the strangers brought the Great Death, then it is they who set off the upheaval that shook the World and made him King.

“
Who knows . . . who knows . . .”
the Inca, mouth full, mocks his uncle. “What exactly
do
you know?”

“Only the reports we gathered five years ago—and in the last few
weeks. We have gone over this information thoroughly. Although some of it may be garbled, arising from the fear and credulity of simple lowlanders, much of it seems useful.”

Atawallpa has just begun the soup course when the spoon slips in his hand. A few drops fall on the velvet-like fabric of his robe, a favourite one, sewn as if seamlessly from the skins of vampire bats. He leaps to his feet and hurries from the room.

“That was made for his father, you know,” Wayta Yupanki remarks to his fellow advisers while the Inca is changing. “He used to order a new one every year—his way of getting the forest folk to thin those pests.”

The Inca returns in a clean tunic of white vicuña. Once he seems calm, his advisers summarize their information. The barbarians vary widely in appearance. Their skins are of every shade from white to black. Some have dark hair, others have red or yellow. Their faces are covered in wool, showing only the eyes, also of many colours. They wear tight clothing they seldom take off, even to sleep. They crawl with lice and smell like corpses. Over their own hands they wear other hands of leather—possibly the hands of men they have skinned.

“This we think broadly reliable,” says Wayta Yupanki. “It comes from several sources. Then there are those who say the intruders are sorcerers, that they can hurl thunder and lightning, that they
eat
silver and gold. But we think these are the tales of simple folk frightened by the strange beasts and fire-shooters. The latter appear to be the same as an iron blowpipe the late Emperor's men took from the bearded ones who raided Qollasuyu. The All-Seer of Tumbes—a good servant of the Empire—sent your father a full report on the weapon brought ashore by the barbarians last time they came.”

“Very well,” says Atawallpa absently. He is tired of hearing how wise his father was. “Let me know if more arrive. And if they make any move beyond where they are now.”