The Gold Eaters (25 page)

Waman makes a weak move, though he has seen a way to slip from the Inca's check.

“Don't humour me, Waman . . . Pilipi . . . whichever you call yourself today. Take that back and think again. Play like a man. Like an Inca!” Atawallpa lets out a bitter laugh.

The Inca is clever, for all that he made one great mistake. He calls the game
taptana
, which means ambush, and has named the chessmen:
inka
for king,
qoya
for queen,
pukara
for castle,
runa
for pawn,
willaq
for bishop, after the head priests in Cusco. For the knights he says
hatun llama
, big llama, or sometimes
kawallu
, his pronunciation of the Spanish word for horse. He is learning his captors' language
quickly. Others, meanwhile, are picking up a bit of Quechua. If things drag on too long the Inca won't need him, Waman fears. And neither will Pizarro. What then?

“Yes,” the interpreter says faintly, withdrawing his hasty pawn, advancing a knight.

“Yes what?”

“
Arí, Sapa Inka.
Yes, Only King.”

“Do not forget, Waman. This . . . all this”—Atawallpa sweeps his hand around the room, a hand soft as a woman's, with long, buffed nails which tap the pondered chessmen with a dry clacking that at times makes Waman want to scream—“all this will change. I shall get out of here. Out of these . . .” The Inca gestures at his shackled feet. “The World will then be as it was. So you'd be wise to treat me with respect. In your words and in your games. Play straight with me and I shall make you a great man.”

Waman cannot help pitying the fallen Inca—his Empire shrunk to this board, these tiny men, tiny castles. He guesses that Atawallpa dislikes him. Why wouldn't he? But he likes the game. Moreover, despite Pizarro's precautions (there is always a Spaniard who has some Quechua within earshot), the Inca uses the games to learn of Spanish ways, Spanish plans, and the land of Spain from which his troubles flow.

As agreed with Pizarro, the Inca's prison is also his treasury, his strongrooms for the gold and silver. The heap of gold has nearly reached the line—the dark painted band that rings all the great halls of the Incas, running through the niches at the height of a man's eye. But the ransom is taking longer to gather than Atawallpa expected, for as the hoard grows—vessels, jewellery, architectural plates and finials, a dozen life-size statues of the dynasty's queens—Pizarro has everything hollow pounded flat.

The Inca is wearing his velvety robe of bat skins, sewn into a
single fabric like the night. A cloud of spice surrounds him and at his forehead hangs the crimson fringe. He still has the trappings of kingship, perhaps even of divinity. He is allowed wives and concubines, his blind musicians, his dwarves and jugglers, his personal staff—the women who dress and feed him. But no men save the young postmen who bring delicacies: smoked fowl and rare fruit from the jungle, seafood from the coast. More dangerously, they also bring the Inca reports and carry away his orders, though these are always vetted by Pizarro, using a captive knotkeeper and Waman. This risk must be run, for only through the Inca can the Spaniard wield his brittle power.

Rings within rings. In the middle, Atawallpa. Around him the barbarians. Around them the Empire, little of which they have seen, much less of which they understand. Peru is frozen. And so is the conquest of Peru. It did not end on that bloody afternoon in the plaza. It has only begun.

Atawallpa's armies could still overwhelm the invaders, but if he orders an attack the Old One will burn him alive. The Inca dreads fire above all deaths, and not only for the pain. A Sapa Inka's afterlife is lived in Cusco, where—like all previous kings and queens enthroned in their palaces—he presides, embalmed, over his royal house forever. The Inca can save his kingdom or himself.

Atawallpa's dilemma, it seems to Waman, is like their Christ's. He must give his life to save his World.

The Inca's broad face lifts from the chessboard to the piled gold and the light—the face of a man much older than his thirty years. For a long time he sits like a royal mummy, regal yet lifeless, gazing on things to come. Then his hand lifts to his cheek as if to brush aside a hair. The hand falls wet.

“Your move,” he says at last.

“With respect, Sapa Inka, I believe it may be yours. My horse . . .”

“Such shame . . .” the Inca mutters, regarding the youth with sudden revulsion, as if surprised to find him here.

Atawallpa overthrows the board.

—

One morning the Old One visits the Inca after breakfast and blithely orders him to send for his imprisoned brother Waskhar and have him brought from Huanuco right away. A good move, the Inca admits to himself. I would do the same thing if I were Pizarro. Waskhar will welcome the bearded ones as his deliverers. The Old One will then kill me like a bug and march in triumph to the capital.

He calls for his women to bring beer and coca. He must think.

—

Waskhar is coming, everyone hears. But shortly before he is expected in Cajamarca they hear that he is dead, slain on the road. How did Atawallpa do it? Waman wonders. How did he send out word for Waskhar to be murdered?

The Spaniards do not understand the quipus and pay less attention to them than they should. But the Commander's own knotkeeper inspected the orders sent to Huanuco, reading them out to Waman, who followed the man's fingers playing slowly over every knot and thread.

Pizarro burns with rage for days, accusing the interpreter of incompetence, even collusion. Again Waman feels the Old One's blows, his hand twisting his ear. “You're much luckier than you deserve, boy.” He hisses, a vein in his neck pulsing and writhing like a snake. “Lucky I have need of you. There'll be no visits to the Inca except when I want you there. I should have you flogged to death in the stocks. The knotkeeper too. I'll brook no treason. One more slip and you die.”

Alone in his room, Waman soothes his anger as he often does—by thinking of the Spaniard he felled on Gallo Island years ago. If he could do it then, he can do it again now. The fire in his mind lights up the different ways: a sling, a bludgeon, a stolen knife or sword, poison, fire. If the Old One thinks me a traitor, I shall be one. If he plans to kill me, I shall kill him first.

—

The pack trains of gold arrive less often now, and the pieces they bring are less fine. Fear, boredom, and rumour take root in the Spanish camp. Why is the flow of treasure faltering? Has Peru been stripped of its best? Or are the highways choked with soldiers, massing for attack?

“You must be joking,” Atawallpa says when the Old One confronts him with these accusations. “Why are you always making fun of me? Look at me here! How can I and my people be any threat to you?” He gestures theatrically at his new cell, smaller and darker than the last. His punishment for Waskhar's death is separation from his ransom. No longer can he see what is added—and what spirited away. “If you think I'm assembling troops, send out scouts to look. If you think I'm running out of gold and silver, send men to the capital. Let them see the metal in Cusco. Let them oversee its transport here. What's stopping you?”

“There's no time for that. I know how long it would take. A month each way.”

“Doubtless you need every man you have to guard me,” the Inca taunts. “You have so few. But why not send two or three by hammock? What harm in that? If something happens to them, your loss is small. And it will be fast—faster than your horses.” Twenty runners, he explains, go with each hammock, taking turns on the pole
day and night. “They'll get there almost as quickly as the post. They could be back in a week.”

The Commander lifts a doubting eyebrow, runs a fingernail through prawn-like whiskers.

“A week?”

“Our week. Ten days. Five each way.”

—

The stalemate draws on. The tension grows. Pizarro sends three men to Cusco as Atawallpa suggested. One comes back right away to say all is quiet. The others linger in the capital, protected by Atawallpa's occupying army while they sack the Empire's richest temple, Qorikancha, the Golden Court. This they have to do themselves, with ladders and crowbars, for no Peruvian will raise a hand against the Sun's greatest house on Earth.

It takes three hundred llamas to carry the metal to Cajamarca.

Atawallpa's ransom is now fulfilled.

But as the Cusco gold arrives in Cajamarca, so does Pizarro's partner. Almagro marches into the city at the head of a fresh army, more than doubling the occupiers' strength. The Spaniards rejoice wildly. Waman watches with foreboding as One-Eye reins up in the square, doffs his helmet, exposes his bald scalp and ice-blue stare.

Pizarro gives
the order for the melting to begin. Llama trains come from the jungle, unloading mounds of charcoal. Smiths brought from the Empire's mines and workshops build furnaces on a hillside, placed to catch the wind.

The furnaces burn round the clock for weeks, lighting the cold,
clear nights of the Andean winter like fiery volcanoes. Day by day, the goldsmiths reduce their lives' work to ingots. Pizarro and Almagro oversee everything together, united by mistrust as much as partnership. At the end there are seven tons of gold and thirteen tons of silver, each bar weighed and stamped by the royal taxman who assays the whole and levies King Charles's fifth. More than once the taxman shakes his head in disbelief: Atawallpa's ransom is worth more than all the treasuries in Christendom.

The Inca himself is half forgotten, his value leaking away as the hot metal of his bargain runs into the moulds. The tension now is between the Old One and Almagro, who argue daily over how much each partner and his men should get. Waman hears their anger rumbling like thunder in the palace halls. The men, too, are uneasy, dissecting each rumour of what a horseman, a foot soldier, an armourer—even a tailor—will receive.

At last the distribution is made. From dawn until dusk in the palace courtyard, men file past a table where the royal taxman and his notaries sit behind ledgers and pots of ink. Waman watches from the shadows for a while. It is hard to read faces behind beards, but the eyes say much: alight with anticipation, greed, impatience. As each man signs or makes his rough mark, chests of wood and rawhide are brought out and handed over.

Each footman receives a man's weight in precious metal: ninety pounds of silver, forty-five pounds of gold. Horsemen get a double share, and officers more according to their rank. The Old One awards himself thirteen. On top of that he claims a “gift”—the Inca's palanquin—worth another two shares or more. The beggar's prophecy has come true: Francisco Pizarro is the richest conqueror on Earth.

That night Waman and Candía climb to the summit of the usnu. They sit side by side in its twin seats high above the torchlit crowd
in the square, where men are gambling at dice and cards, paying losses on the spot with bars of gold.

“Already it glides from their hands,” Waman remarks. The sight disgusts him.

Candía pours cups of beer from a jug. “Cheer up, my friend,” he says, wagging his great beard. “To health and wealth.”

“And time to enjoy them.”

“Time to go where we can spend it! We're like men without arseholes at a feast.” The gunner reveals he earned a horseman's share, and a bit extra for his guns. “But what can I do with it here? The more gold we have, the less it buys. I just saw a horse change hands for the cost of a castle in Spain.”

“I don't have to worry about that,” Waman says. “The Old One gave me nothing, not even a tailor's share.”

“You're not the only one he bilked. Almagro and his men got nothing too! Only repayment for their outlay in coming here and more promises: whatever treasure may lie far ahead in the south. Pizarro can get away with cheating you, Felipe. But he's mad to cheat Almagro.

“Because I'm a gunner,” the Greek adds after a silence, “people think I'm deaf. But I'm not too deaf to hear angry soldiers. Almagro's lot want revenge. They want a fight.”

The jug is empty. The night deepens as the torches below them die one by one and Pizarro's delirious men drift away to beds and women. Waman hears a metallic chime on the arm of the stone seat. “Take this, Felipe,” Candía says softly, sliding an ingot against his hand. Waman slides it back, unsure whether he does so from pride or because the metal is made of blood.

“Go on, Felipe, take it. Are you wary of Greeks bearing gifts?”

“No,” says the interpreter, missing the joke.

“Take it,” Candía insists. “Now that Peru's awash with gold,
anyone without it will starve. Like they do in every other land I've seen. One day that little bar might save your life. Anyway, I'm rich as Croesus. I have a hundred more.”

Again he says no, but the Greek will not be refused. Candía tucks the bar into Waman's jerkin, holds it there with a firm hand.