Civilizations

by Laurent Binet

  Queen Isabella did not share this opinion because she wanted her husband to return. She asked the Suprema, and Valverde in particular, to stop importuning her guests. This request was made with great grace, but the Suprema seemed unwilling to accede to it. The questions continued: on the number of sacraments and the celibacy of priests. Atahualpa replied that in his country, matters related to the gods were left to the priestesses. Selected women were devoted to the cult of the Sun and the service of the emperor. The entire council violently protested. In an attempt to mollify them, Atahualpa sent them a very fervent priestess from his retinue to explain how the cult worked, because they seemed extremely interested in this. They refused to receive her.

  Soon, Quizquiz’s men reported rumours that were spreading through the town: it was said that the visitors were, in reality, Moros or Turcos. The word hereticos kept turning up, and Quizquiz could tell that it was not a compliment.

  One evening, an old woman came to warn Higuénamota that the Suprema had decided to arrest them all, the next day at dawn, following which they would be judged and burned as conversos. She was an old Jew who had seen members of her own family perish in the flames. She had only one son left.

  Higuénamota rushed to pass on the old woman’s warning to Atahualpa. They gathered with the generals and Coya Asarpay to decide on a plan of action. The Quitonians realised that something serious was going on around the different groups of believers, the Jews and the conversos, the Moorish Mohammedans, the Lutherans, the old and new Christians. They were not exactly sure what was at play behind these stories about the nailed god and cooking with lard, but they knew that the Levantines took all of it very seriously, as the ceremony with the pyres had amply proved.

  A plan of action was drawn up. The Suprema had to be neutralised. So did the guards. And the queen’s escort, and Tavera’s. And all the soldiers in the town. In fact, they had to neutralise all the inhabitants of the town, whose reactions were impossible to predict, although the reports from Quizquiz’s scouts were not particularly encouraging.

  Higuénamota objected that not everyone was guilty. In addition to the old Jewish woman who had warned her about the arrest, the town’s inhabitants also included potential future victims of the Suprema.

  Coya Asarpay replied that since these people would be victims sooner or later, there was no point trying to save them. In fact, killing them now would be an act of mercy, if it spared them the pyres.

  But Chalco Chimac remarked that these people – conversos, Moors, witches, bigamists, fanatics and Lutherans, whatever those names might actually mean – were also the Quitonians’ only potential allies in this hostile land.

  In that case, Quizquiz said, how do we recognise those who should be spared?

  Higuénamota saw one simple means: only Christians made the sign of moving their hand over their face and chest. They did it all the time, at any opportunity, and based on what she remembered of the Spaniards she had known when she was a child, they would do it even more when they saw death approaching. Now, the people who were liable to be burned at the stake were precisely those who were accused of not being good Christians …

  In that case, said Ruminahui, they just had to spare the ones who didn’t make the sign – and kill all the others.

  Atahualpa decided that they should follow this rule, as far as possible.

  They distributed arms and shoed the horses in secret. All of them, including the nobility, women, and children old enough to hold an axe, prepared for combat. They hadn’t come all this way, they hadn’t escaped Huascar’s vengeance, they hadn’t survived storms and earthquakes, just to end up grilled like cuys on a skewer, or strangled by hairy savages.

  Just before dawn, Quizquiz gave the signal.

  First they overpowered the grooms in the stables, then they killed the palace guards, and locked up the priests and caciques. The queen was confined to her room. They launched a surprise attack on the soldiers and killed a large number of them before it had even occurred to the Spaniards to defend themselves. They took the fire sticks from the corpses. Then, with all the yelling having brought the town’s inhabitants out of their homes, the Quitonians charged through the streets on horseback.

  It was carnage. The swords from Toledo and the axes from Lambayeque slashed and chopped without any care for profession, age or sex. They slit people’s throats in their homes. Anyone who attempted to defend himself was scythed down like the others. Some took refuge in their temple, which they called a cathedral; Quizquiz set fire to it. Their nailed god was no help at all.

  The shy young man who’d advised Higuénamota was caught in the attack. He sought refuge in doorways, hoping to find a hiding place in an inner courtyard, but a group of furious Quitonians flushed him out. He fled along the rooftops but slipped and fell to the ground. He could sense death just behind him, could hear the terrifying war cries. He found himself face to face with Puka Amaru, who smashed his shoulder with a star-headed club. But the wounded young man, driven by the urge to live, managed to clamber to his feet and run away again, a hunted animal.

  While the massacres continued, Atahualpa searched out the members of the Suprema. He asked them why they had planned to destroy him and his people, and they screeched and squawked while pointing to an effigy of their nailed god that hung on the wall. Some fell to their knees, as if struck down, and their bodies convulsed.

  He wanted to explain to them that any god who demands that men be burned alive, whatever they might have done, was a bad god, because the bodies of the dead must be preserved in order that they might continue living after death, and that any such god did not deserve to be worshipped.

  But as Higuénamota wasn’t with him at that moment to translate, he decided it was simpler just to execute them. He would exhibit their heads as an example to others. The priest Valverde died uttering curses that nobody could understand.

  The Cuban princess went out to make sure that the old woman who had warned her wasn’t harmed. She lived with her son in a neighbourhood spared the worst of the violence, since the Quitonians had noticed that the people there didn’t make that sign with their hand.

  However, Higuénamota heard cries and the sound of a stampede. A bloodied figure threw himself at her feet, pursued by a pack of Quitonians led by the red-haired blacksmith. She recognised the shy young man and ordered his hunters to spare him. Puka Amaru, who objected to taking orders from a foreign princess, said that their instructions had been clear and that they had to execute them. But Higuénamota advanced towards him until her breast was pressed against the point of his sword. To touch her was death, he knew. Reluctantly, the assailants turned around and left.

  Higuénamota leaned over the young man, who was still breathing. She asked him: ‘Como te llamas?’ He whispered: ‘Pedro Pizarro.’ She decided that if he survived his injuries he would be her page.

  In two hours, they killed more than three thousand people.

  On her way back to the palace, Higuénamota was summoned by Atahualpa to serve as his translator once again. He also summoned the queen and the caciques that he’d had imprisoned, and asked them why they’d wanted to kill him; they said it wasn’t them, but the inquisitors of the Suprema who had dragged them into this affair; that the Holy Inquisition was beyond their authority, and that had he been informed King Charles would never have approved such a crime.

  After reproaching them for their perfidy, he set them free, and the next day, the town was full of women and children again, as if nothing extraordinary had happened.

  For the two weeks that they spent in Toledo, a profound sense of peace reigned over the town and its environs; there was so much bustle in the streets that nobody would ever have guessed anyone was missing; business went on as usual. Only the heads of the priests, exhibited in the main square, served as a reminder of the recent events.

  However, Atahualpa, who was responsible for his people – even if there were fewer than two hundred of them now – had to decide how to proceed.
He ordered the burning of the green cross that had accompanied the inquisitors’ ceremony, but thought it more prudent, for now, not to demand the removal of the innumerable effigies of the nailed god.

  He reiterated to the queen and her minister Tavera his wish to meet King Charles. The queen told him that her husband had gone to defend a large eastern city threatened by the rival Turkish empire, but that messengers informing him of their presence had already been sent.

  So they had to wait. But waiting, as Atahualpa knew, is a cruel mother that saps soldiers’ morale, all the more so when it is linked to inaction.

  Chalco Chimac remarked that it might be better not to remain in a city where they had just massacred three thousand of its inhabitants.

  Quizquiz suggested that they go to meet Charles, but Ruminahui objected that while they had been able to take advantage of the earthquake in Lisbon and the disorder it had created at the time of their arrival, marching blindly into a war about which they knew nothing – neither the size of the armies in the field nor the terrain itself – and whose finer details they didn’t grasp at all, held far too many dangers and uncertainties, all the more so as their group consisted mostly of civilians, albeit civilians hardened by more than a year of fighting for their lives.

  So it was that they presented themselves before the queen. They had agreed beforehand that she would receive them, since they had not wanted to strip her of the outward manifestations of her royal authority until they had a better idea of how to behave in this strange land. Atahualpa wore a golden shield over one pectoral and was draped in a long white alpaga cape, an outfit that made a powerful impression on the Levantine audience, but he decided not to speak. So Higuénamota said that they had come to ask for a safe-conduct.

  ‘Adonde?’ asked the queen.

  ‘Salamanca,’ replied the Cuban princess.

  The queen shot an anxious glance at her mummy-faced minister. Cardinal Tavera asked why they had chosen that destination. Higuénamota replied that, while they waited for King Charles to return, they wished to make use of their time to study the history and customs of the kingdom of Castile, and those of the New World in general.

  ‘Barbari student!’ exclaimed Tavera, rolling his eyes.

  But in truth the Levantines were in no position to argue. The safe-conduct was delivered, with letters of recommendation ad-dressed to the most eminent theologians in Salamanca.

  The old woman who had warned Higuénamota came to find her again. She wanted to join the Quitonians, with her son, but also with twenty other people. She kept repeating ‘Cubanos! Cubanos!’ Atahualpa, who listened to this uncomprehendingly, realised that – in the eyes of the old woman, and probably most of the Levantines they had met, including the queen and the cardinal – they were all Cubans, just like his translator. He wanted to know why these people wished to go with them. The old woman told Higuénamota that after they had left, other inquisitors would arrive, and that people like her would continue to be persecuted.

  So Atahualpa received his first reinforcements, in the form of a few desperate converso families, a handful of pale-skinned and probably crazy heretics, and the half-dead young Pedro Pizarro.

  13. Maqueda

  Yet again the young sovereign had found, if not a goal that would make them forget themselves, at least a destination, a direction, an impetus that would unite his troops and give them the momentum and strength needed to prevent this impossible, inconceivable voyage – which had first taken them to the gates of Cuzco only to drive them far away, allowed them to touch the navel of the world before sending them to its outer edges – from tipping over completely into mere wandering, or at least to prevent the band of Quitonians from fully realising it. Because if they ever did, they would probably suspect, one after another, that they had washed up on the shores of insanity. Pachacuti’s blood flowed through Atahualpa’s veins, and that, perhaps more than anything else, had guided his decisions up to this point, because he had not yet studied the political philosophy of a certain Levantine from Florence, whose words would only confirm the gifts for government bequeathed to him by his famous great-grandfather, known as the Reformer.

  On the way to Salamanca, they stopped at the gates of a village called Maqueda. Suspecting that rumours of the massacre in Toledo must have spread throughout the region, Atahualpa set up camp outside the village and sent two emissaries: Quizquiz, for his skills as a scout, and Higuénamota, for her knowledge of the language.

  The villagers had gathered in their temple. Quizquiz and Higuénamota, who had hidden her nudity under a cape, slipped inside and witnessed a strange scene. A shaved man was giving a speech from inside a wooden box to a somewhat unruly audience. The two visitors were treated to a very different spectacle from the solemn ceremony that had led to the pyres in Toledo; this one was lacking in both pomp and gravitas.

  But suddenly, a man wearing a sword on his belt interrupted the shaved man’s speech and heaped him with insults. Although she couldn’t follow all the details, Higuénamota understood that the man with the sword was accusing the shaved man of not being what he claimed. The two men started hurling abuse at each other until the shaved man fell to his knees inside his hut and, joining his hands and staring up at the ceiling, prayed to his god to intercede on his behalf.

  Immediately, as if struck by lightning, the man with the sword collapsed on the floor. He started convulsing and foaming at the mouth. All the Levantines present were seized with terror and began yelling confusedly, begging the shaved man to lift his magic spell. He agreed to come out of his hut and he walked through the crowd to where the man’s body lay jerking in spasms. Leaning down over him, the shaved man put a sort of roll of paper on his head and uttered a few words. Their meaning was obscure, but the convulsions ceased immediately.

  The man with the sword, having regained his senses, hastily pledged his allegiance and then withdrew. The immediate consequence of this episode was that the crowd rushed towards the shaved man, handing him little round pieces of copper and silver. They repeated a word that the Cuban princess did not know: ‘indulgencia’.

  Quizquiz and Higuénamota were impressed by the powers of the nailed god (if it really was, as they supposed, Jesus whom the shaved man had invoked to punish his detractor). They went back to report this episode to Atahualpa, who, as usual, did not look remotely concerned. All the same, he decided it would be wise to assess this threat. The morale of his troops was precarious; the last thing he needed was for it to be dented any further by potentially hostile supernatural forces. But how could he find out the truth of the matter? After the affair in Toledo, Atahualpa wished to keep a low profile, so he was reluctant to order the abduction of the shaved sorcerer. For now, he preferred to limit his contacts with the locals. Then they remembered that some Levantines had joined their group.

  Young Pedro Pizarro, saved from the massacre by Higuénamota, was recovering from his wounds. In the evenings, he would tell stories about his country, which she translated for Atahualpa’s wives and sisters. She went to see him and described the scene she had witnessed in the temple of Maqueda, then asked him about the source of the shaved man’s powers. After listening attentively to his protector’s account, Pedro Pizarro laughed softly.

  ‘What you saw,’ he said, ‘is not magic. It’s just two knaves who came up with a trick to con the villagers out of their money. The priest is selling indulgences. In other words, he demands money in return for bulls that he writes himself, probably in dog Latin, which supposedly allow the buyer to redeem his sins and save his soul. I’m certain that the alguazil who pretended to argue with him will get a share of the profits.’

  Higuénamota translated this without understanding it. But what the Quitonians were interested in was the power of defeating one’s enemies at a distance, which the shaved man seemed to take from his nailed god, and how he made the god do what he wanted. So Pedro Pizarro, who was young but not stupid, painted them a more explicit picture: ‘If you go back to the village to
night, after the sun has set, you will probably see your priest in his lodging, sharing a drink with his accomplice, the two of them toasting the health of the gullible public who gave them money after witnessing their ridiculous farce.’ And young Pizarro, exhausted by his injuries, added one more thing before turning over in his bed and going back to sleep: ‘How many similar tricks have been played by charlatans like that on the poor simple people of this land!’

  This was their first lesson about the New World.

  14. Salamanca

  Escalona, Almorox, Cebreros, Avila … They passed through other villages, encountered other people. It was a parade of stray dogs, beggars, men on horseback, processions of wooden crosses. By the sides of the roads, as in Tawantinsuyu, peasants working the fields raised their heads to watch them pass.

  In the evenings, Pedro Pizarro regaled them with tales from Orlando Furioso: stories of Roland and Angelica, of Renaud on his faithful Bayard, of Bradamante and the hippogriff, and Roger, and Ferragus searching for his helmet, and Olympia grappling with Cimosco, the king of Friesland.

  He told how Gradasso, King of Sericana, came to capture the Emperor Charlemagne himself, but was then defeated by Aistulf, armed with an enchanted lance: Atahualpa, who remembered his own capture by Huascar’s men, then his escape, at the very start of the civil war, listened closely to this passage. Likewise, he made Pedro Pizarro repeat the descriptions of arquebuses in the story of Olympia. He wanted to know everything there was to know about culverins, falconets, bombards, because these weapons were not chimeras; the shy young man assured him that, unlike the random vengeances of the nailed god, the devastation wreaked by these machines could be controlled and timed, once you had learned how to use them. Even Pizarro himself, young as he was, had received some basic military training from his uncles and cousins. During rests, when the others in the group set up camp, he would instruct Atahualpa’s soldiers in the use of the fire sticks. Quizquiz considered them more noisy than effective.