The Gold Eaters (40 page)

“Get the boy!” Méndez yells at Barba. “Finish the boy. I'll hold your horse.”

The lutenist, dagger in hand, runs after the wounded prince. Though limping and bloody, Titu Kusi reaches the square's open side and plunges down terracing into bushes below. By this time
Waman and Molina have armed themselves, Molina with the lance, the interpreter with stones. They throw them at the fleeing Almagrists. No hits, but at least they stop the hunt for Titu Kusi.

The assassins are soon away, galloping bareback down the step-road, clinging like ticks to their horses' necks.

Manku is on his side, the daggers left in his back for a healer to remove. His eyes are glassy. There is much blood on the ground and his clothing. He dressed in Inca cloth today. If only he had worn his armour, Waman thinks. But doubtless they'd have found a way. Most likely they'd have slit his throat.

“My son . . .” the Inca's voice is faint. Pink foam appears at a corner of his mouth. “Titu Kusi . . .”

“Safe, Only King,” Waman answers. “We saw him get away. The Mexican has gone to find him.”

Manku looks up at the interpreter unsteadily. His head slumps. A gasp from all who see. More wails from the women. At that moment the healer arrives. He plucks out the daggers one by one, applies dressings. He leans in and listens to the Inca's chest through a silver tube. The old man's competent manner reassures the crowd.
Sapa Inka kawsanmi,
is all he says. The Inca lives.

Against a wall is Barba's lute, its belly crushed to matchwood. The signal for attack. The weapons' hiding place.

As soon as
Titu Kusi limped out of the bush, the royal buildings were sealed. Nobody has entered or left the Inca's household for two days. There are rumours: that he is dead but a successor is not yet agreed; that he is sleeping in the Sun's House beside the mummy of Wayna Qhapaq, so that both his heavenly and earthly fathers heal
him; that he has already left Vitcos, flying like a condor in pursuit of his assailants.

On the third day, at mid-morning, conches sound and the gate of the compound is thrown open. Runners go down streets, calling people to the square. Three palanquins emerge. Side by side in the first sit the Inca and Qoya with their baby girl. The second holds Titu Kusi. The other princes, Sayri Tupa and Tupa Amaru, ride together in the last. All are carried gently up the usnu, where Manku is lifted out and seated in the great stone chair beneath a feather sunshade and a banner of the Empire. The Queen is beside him, her face drawn. The two small boys sit on stools to the right. Titu Kusi stays in his litter on the left, smiling and waving at the crowd, evidently much restored, though his thigh is tightly bandaged.

Manku is still. So still that Waman fears he may be dead, a fact easily hidden by a little makeup and the kingly fringe.

“All hear,” the herald calls. “Our Only King Manku Qhapaq Yupanki lives. He will address you himself in a few days.” Manku raises his right hand slowly, face taut with pain and determination. He does not look like a man who will be well enough to make a speech in a few days.

The herald continues with news. The bearded ones who attacked the Inca with such treachery have all been killed. Runners were sent over the secret passes to Pumasupa. The general turned from his march and intercepted the attackers. Two were dragged from their horses, others tried to barricade themselves inside a house. The house was set alight. Those who fled the blaze were shot as they emerged. The rest died in the flames.

A great shout of vengeance greets this news. Manku manages a shaky salute to the Sun with outstretched hand. The family is borne back into the palace.

—

On the evening of the fourth day Molina takes Waman to the Inca's bedside, telling him to bring pen and paper.

Manku is much worse, his breathing shallow and fast. His knees are drawn up to ease his belly, hideously swollen under the bedclothes. He is shivering, yet his face is dewy with sweat. The Qoya Kusi Warqay bends over him, fanning her husband with a goose wing. Behind the bed a priest holds up a silver staff topped by a golden sunburst. A knotkeeper sits beside the Inca on a stool.

The royal children and a small group of lords and ladies stand around the walls. General Pumasupa—just back from catching the attackers—comes up to Waman, grasping his arm, guiding him to a seat beside the knotkeeper. He hands him a board on which to rest his papers.

“The Inca wishes you to write his words,” he whispers. “You are to take them with you when you leave.”

“Take them to whom?” Waman asks, but the general hushes him.

“My children,” Manku begins. His voice is weak, with an odd clicking sound after each breath and a gurgling deep within. The Qoya protests. Her husband must rest, not speak. Others in the room murmur agreement. Some are weeping. The Inca silences them with a small wag of his head.

“My children. Brothers and sisters. All listen. I do not believe I shall escape from this. You see me in this state because, for the second time in my life, I trusted men from Spain. First the Old One and his brothers, with whom I made an alliance. And who betrayed me. Then those who murdered him. The same ones who have now struck me.

“Do not weep. If anyone weeps it should be me. For having
brought this end upon myself and all of you. Now note what I command. Never again have dealings of any kind with the bearded ones. Never again let them into this realm, no matter who they are. Or how sweet their words . . .” Manku's voice fades. The healer brings water to his lips.

The Sapa Inka struggles on. “I commend the people to your care. Never forget how they have followed us, helped us, stood by us in these dreadful times. It rests with you always to be fair, to be just and generous. That is the foundation of our power.

“I name Sayri Tupa my heir. General Pumasupa will rule through a council of regents until Sayri Tupa is of age. Titu Kusi shall sit on this council, and all lords present.

“That is all.”

T
hree people on a raft of logs on water red with silt. They are in the jungle lowlands now. The swollen river has slackened and widened like a sea, its shores indistinct: a green smudge far off where the water meets the sky. Nothing can touch them here but sun and rain and hunger. They have a little deckhouse of palm leaves, a fishing net, some food; an oar and a moon to steer by.

—

As soon as he had blotted Manku's words, Waman was sent back to his quarters with Molina. “Wait there. Be ready to leave at once,” Pumasupa told them. “If the Inca dies, the people will go mad with grief. No outsider will be safe.”

Molina paced the room for hours, opening the door, scanning the stars, listening. Neither slept.

After midnight a soldier came, bringing two teams of bearers with travelling hammocks slung from poles.

Waman asked where they were going. No reply. Only the jolt and tilt of the hammocks, and no way to see anything till dawn, when they were borne over a snowy pass and down step-roads into clouds and trees. About noon on the second day they came to the bank of a river in spate. The bearers, still unwilling to talk, began building a raft from logs kept in a shed.

Shortly before the raft was done, a third hammock arrived. In it was Tika.

She climbed out and stood still for a moment, blinking in the hard light of the clearing, lovely in the sky-blue dress of a Chosen. “Waman!” she called, seeing him running towards her from the shade.

They held each other until they felt the stares of the others upon them.

He introduced her to Molina. She was shy with him, even cool. Waman guessed she hadn't seen a man in years, except her bearers. She wouldn't say much until the three of them were aboard and the water was carrying them away between the forest walls.

“The Inca Manku has died,” Tika said then.

“Did you see him?”

“They didn't take me into Vitcos. But I knew. I could hear from the road. I've never heard such grief.”

“Where have you been living all these years?” Waman asked. “Can you say?”

“No. Not even if I knew. But I don't. There's a hidden city, in the clouds, between two mountains. They took us there from Cusco. All women. We travelled at night. Many nights. They said we'd be safe there forever, that they'd torn up the road behind. You would never have found me, Waman. Not without the Qoya's help.”

—

Later she asks if they know where they're going.

“No more than you do,” says Molina. “They put us on this raft without a word and shoved us off.”

“Well, I do know a little more than you. In a few days we must be sure to keep to the left bank. There's a riverside town called Red
Earth. From there a road runs up into the foothills of Lower Huanuco. They gave me this.”

She hands Waman a small quipu, sees his surprise.

“It's a safe-conduct—to show Manku's officials when we get there.”

—

It's as if they are standing still, for they move at the speed of the river, so wide and deep it seems not to flow at all.

Molina makes a notch in a timber each dawn. He is getting sunburnt, his lips cracked, the skin moulting from his shoulders.

Waman tells him to go into the palm-leaf deckhouse, but he doesn't move. Perhaps he is shy of Tika, who is dozing there.

“Now I'll tell you,” he says.

“Tell me what?”

“Where Chaska and I were living.”

“Puma Hill!” Tika's voice from the shelter. “Was it Puma Hill?”

“Yes,” he says. “It's been more than two years since I left. But I think she'll still be there. She and Atuq.”

They question Molina until the sun is fierce and he agrees to go into the shade.

In this emptiness, this heat, this seeming stillness—and this anticipation—a man might lose his mind. Waman withdraws to the stern, throws the net. The fishing is bad in the soupy water. Only three small fish in five days.

—

On the ninth day, about noon, they reach Red Earth.

“First we eat,” Tika says to Waman. “Then we walk. Up into the
mountains.”

The free Inca state lived on almost thirty years after Manku's death, ruled by his sons from a new capital nearer the jungle, less easily reached than Vitcos.

Meanwhile, Gonzalo Pizarro overthrew the Lima Viceroy and killed him in 1546. Gonzalo's conquistador regime, brutal even for its day, ended with his hanging by the Spanish Crown in 1548. But the revolt caused repeal of the benevolent New Laws, worsening the plight of Peruvians.

The quisling Pawllu died in 1549, perhaps of foul play, during negotiations with the Inca state. His son, Carlos Inca, married a Spanish noblewoman and presided over collaborationist Inca aristocrats in Cusco.

In the late 1550s, Sayri Tupa travelled to Lima and made a short-lived peace, building a palace near Cusco, where he was poisoned three years later. The Pope had approved Sayri Tupa's marriage to his sister Kusi Warqay, and their daughter later married into Jesuit nobility. Ironically, their granddaughter would marry a Borgia, kin to the pope who had given the New World to Spain and Portugal long before the mainland was invaded.

Titu Kusi now took over in Willkapampa, ruling until his death in 1571 (perhaps of natural causes). Shrewd and resourceful, he fended off Spanish attack with drawn-out negotiations while secretly continuing his father's policy of supporting uprisings in occupied Peru. Titu Kusi also became the author of an important history of the Spanish invasion and his father's resistance (see the Afterword). This he sent to Spain, hoping to convince King Philip II of the justice of the Inca cause.

He was succeeded by Manku's youngest son, Tupa Amaru (or Tupac Amaru), who ruled Willkapampa only a year. After yet another smallpox outbreak ravaged the independent state, the ruthless Viceroy Toledo pursued this last Sapa Inka into the jungle and, despite strong protest from both Incas and moderate Spaniards, beheaded him in Cusco.

With resistance crushed and the native population still collapsing—by the early 1600s it would fall to less than a tenth of what it had been in Wayna Qhapaq's day—Toledo felt secure enough to convert the old Inca work-tax into grinding slavery. Over the following two centuries, more than a million would die in the silver mines of Potosí and the toxic mercury workings at Huancavelica, used for refining silver and gold.

Even so, the history of the Incas did not end. The Spaniards had killed Tupa Amaru's son, but not his daughter. In 1780, by which time the population had begun to recover and nationalist feelings were stirring among the native aristocracy, a direct descendant proclaimed himself Inca Tupa Amaru II and came close to overthrowing Spanish rule. Joined by the Aymara under Tupac Katari, the convulsion shook the Andes. The second Tupa Amaru, like the first, was executed in Cusco's great square, but his rebellion exposed the weakness of the Spanish Empire, hastening its breakup in the 1820s.

Although the republics that replaced Spanish rule were founded by small white elites intent on exploiting indigenous people and erasing their culture, the ancient civilization of the Andes lives on in the twenty-first century. Quechua is the most widespread native language of the Americas, with some ten million speakers in Peru and other parts of the old Tawantinsuyu; Aymara is spoken by three million, mostly in Bolivia. Despite centuries of persecution, native religious traditions thrive both openly and under a Christian veneer. In recent years a political transformation has begun as white elites lose some of their power through the ballot box. Peru and Bolivia currently have presidents of indigenous background: Ollanta Humala and Evo Morales Ayma. Morales, who is Aymara, has been the more radical and effective, implementing policies to redress five hundred years of colonization.