The Light of Machu Picchu

by [Incas 03] The Light of Machu Picchu (retail) (epub)

  ‘This time, Montelucar, you won’t be able to count on Don Francisco to save your skin. I am master here now. My good brother the Governor was so happy to see me back from Spain that he very officially nominated me Lieutenant Governor. What’s more, the scales have at last fallen from his eyes concerning you. He has learned how you abandoned the mission with which he had entrusted you.’

  ‘It won’t help you,’ said Gabriel, leaning against the wall. ‘A grandiose title can never hide the true mediocrity of its bearer. Pig’s shit you are, and pig’s shit you will remain, Don Hernando.’

  Hernando slapped Gabriel hard in the face with his gloved hand, splitting his prisoner’s upper lip and knocking him back to the ground.

  ‘You’re in no position to be insolent, you whoreson dog!’ spat Hernando. ‘I could crush you like the insect that you are this very instant. I could leave your fate in the hands of Gonzalo, whose most fervent wish is to gut you with a spoon! But that would be too good for you. In Toledo they were particularly insistent on the importance of trials. Well then, I’ll give you a trial, my friend, in due and proper form! That way all of Spain shall know why we hung the bastard excrement of the Montelucar y Flores family. All of Spain shall learn the name of the Crown’s first traitor in the New World!’

  An odd snigger came from Gabriel’s bloody mouth.

  ‘You’ll have to hold your trial quickly, Hernando. Your charming brothers treated Manco and his people with such considerate courtesy that the Incas are now baying for blood. Manco and his generals have amassed tens of thousands of men in the valleys north of Cuzco. I saw them with my very own eyes. There are more than a hundred thousand of them! Tomorrow or the day after, they’ll number twice that, and then they’ll be here.’

  His words had the desired effect on Hernando’s men. They looked intently at one another, their stares hard and grave. And Hernando uttered a laugh a little too disdainful, too obviously defiant, as he said:

  ‘Well, that’s what I call news! If those wretches imagine that they’re going to take back their city with their sticks and stones, then they shall be cut to pieces once again. If I were you, Don Gabriel, I wouldn’t place too much faith in them. And since those savages can’t save you from your inevitable fate, I suggest you turn to prayer!’

  CHAPTER 2

  Cuzco, 3 May 1536

  Gabriel’s cell lacked even a straw mattress. The jailer had left him a jug of water and three ears of boiled corn in a corner. But he hardly touched them in two days. He opened his eyes slowly and saw a fat man coming to check if he was still alive.

  ‘Don Gabriel?’

  ‘I’m here, Kikeh. At least, what remains of me is here…’

  ‘I’m so sorry about…’

  Kikeh mimed the motion of a hammer missing its mark. Gabriel raised his hand languidly and gave a choked-sounding laugh.

  ‘I thought you were more dexterous than that. So, I assume you didn’t do it deliberately, then.’

  ‘Of course not, Don Gabriel, I promise you! I even went so far as to disobey Don Hernando’s orders by leaving you your…’

  The jailer pointed at Gabriel’s chuspa. Gabriel had chewed all the coca leaves it had contained to alleviate the pain radiating through his muscles. He had chewed so many leaves, in fact, that the bland paste they had formed in his mouth had swollen to the size of an egg.

  ‘Thank you, Kikeh,’ he said quietly. ‘Now please let me be.’

  But instead the fat man cradled Gabriel’s neck in his hand and poured water into his mouth. Gabriel could smell the tart stench of the jailer’s sweat and, in his extremely weakened state, this human closeness seemed so miraculous to him that tears welled up in his eyes.

  Then he was alone once more.

  His fatigue had diminished somewhat, but it had given way to a nausea that he couldn’t shake off, not even when he stretched out flat on the floor. Sudden bouts of fever left him shivering and curled up on himself at the foot of the wall, his fingers clenched around the links of his chain as though he was holding on to keep from falling into the void.

  He was frightened of falling asleep. Yet he nodded off frequently into dreadful nightmares. He witnessed a series of images so startlingly real that he could hardly believe they were only dreams.

  Gabriel had a lucid vision of himself on his horse, traveling across a salt pan whiter than bleached linen. He saw his bay’s legs snap as they broke through the salt crust into a hole. He had forgotten the name of the desert. Water gurgled between his horse’s hoofs and its broken legs. The animal looked at him imploringly with its big round eyes. He saw himself staying completely immobile for a long time, his arms wrapped around his animal’s head, the sun scorching them both. Then he saw his dagger suddenly piercing the horse’s throat.

  A deluge of blood – far more than the animal could have actually contained – streamed from it without coagulating in the sun, a flood of boiling gore engulfing everything.

  Now the sun was immense, so big that it seemed to swallow up the entire horizon of the earth so that no shadow remained. Gabriel wanted to protect himself from it by climbing into his horse’s carcass. But when he pared back its skin – like peeling a fruit – and opened its gut, he metamorphosed into an animal himself, into a powerful wildcat able to dodge death.

  The madness of Gabriel’s dream brought him intense pleasure. What he was now experiencing was no longer shackled to reality. The sun was once again distant and gentle. The desert had disappeared.

  Each time he made another catlike leap, he was overcome by the kind of extreme joy usually felt only by children. He looked at his own shadow, his own fabulous feline silhouette slinking along over the fields and dusty roads. His body was covered in a thick pelt, and he felt its fur brush past the leaves on the highest branches. Rocks felt soft and padded beneath his claws. He was carried like a bird by the breeze and the passion of his beloved.

  Gabriel glided above the endless blue of Lake Titicaca. He lay on his side on its shore and listened to the Master of the Stone’s lesson. He watched him play with a sling stone and fling it high into the air. He was astonished to see it remain suspended there, as though it was as light as a feather. The Master of the Stone grinned at him. It was a warm but sad smile, a smile in which Gabriel could discern a wish never uttered aloud.

  Then he heard a laugh.

  Anamaya appeared, clad entirely in white. She was clasping a gold statue that seemed alive, almost human. She extended her hand toward him and called to him.

  ‘Gabriel!’

  Her voice was gentle, musical, and he couldn’t resist it. The ferocious feline that Gabriel had become went to her.

  As he lay down beside her, he realized that the golden man had disappeared. Now Anamaya was naked, fragile and beautiful. She offered herself to him, and he burned with desire for her. She showed no sign of fear. She wrapped herself around his feline body and kissed his muzzle. He could have destroyed her with his fangs. She didn’t feel his claws when he put his paws on her body.

  For a while they were lost in a soothing happiness. Then Gabriel saw, over Anamaya’s shoulder, the golden man watching them from the shadows. He was shimmering like a star in the night.

  The statue spoke to Anamaya without moving his lips. She left Gabriel without a moment’s hesitation. She didn’t even turn around when he let out a raucous growl – the cry of a savage and fatally wounded animal – that echoed over the mountains.

  The violence of his own howl sundered his soul. Gabriel opened his eyes.

  His tattered clothes were stuck to his chest with his own sweat. He had a bitter, pasty taste in his mouth. The pain that had been throbbing in his head ever since he had been beaten and kicked in Gonzalo’s courtyard returned with a vengeance.

  Later, benumbed, he couldn’t tell if he had dreamed all this or if insanity was possessing him. Had he had the strength, he would have prayed to God to let him sleep until the end of time.

  * * *

  A bitterly cold dawn
brought a strong wind that woke Gabriel. The narrow dormer window was covered in frost, the harbinger of winter.

  By the frail light that preceded sunrise, Gabriel discovered what a wretched state he was in. His filthy tunic was torn to shreds, barely covering him. His body ached from head to toe. He felt his face with his fingertips. It was still swollen from all the blows he had taken. The skin around his ankle under the iron shackle was chafed raw. His nausea had faded, but his head felt as though a host of drummers had taken up residence in it and were beating a call to arms.

  He carefully brought the rim of a jug to his swollen lips and at last slaked his thirst. The ears of corn brought by the jailer two days before were shriveled now. But the hunger gripping him was too strong, and he devoured them feverishly.

  Only then did Gabriel realize that the pounding he could hear wasn’t coming from his own battered head or from his pain-racked body. Real drums were beating, their tempo increasing as the sound drew closer and closer.

  He swiftly recovered all his lucidity and strained to hear what was going on. He pulled his chain toward the window as far as it would reach and heard the first cries in Spanish from outside his cell:

  ‘The Incas! The Incas!’

  The narrowness of the dormer window limited Gabriel’s range of vision. At first he saw nothing. He could hear only an increasing number of panicked cries rising from the pre-dawn shadows around the town:

  ‘The Incas! The Incas!’

  Then a riotous cacophony of trumpets and human cries drew his attention to the eastern hills overlooking the town. What he saw chilled him more than the freezing wind whipping at his face.

  It looked like a forest of bushes or hedgerows being shaken by the wind. But in fact he could make out arms, spears and banners rising from its mass: he was looking at thousands of warriors silhouetted against the lightening sky.

  The vast Inca army had completely surrounded Cuzco, covering the crests of all the hills around the town like some giant, monstrous snake. It was as though the wind had whisked away the greenery from the hilltops during the night and had replaced it with this massive, multicolored crowd, now howling like madmen.

  The beating drums and the deep wail of horns and conch shells grew louder. Panicked Spaniards emerged onto the streets.

  After his initial shock had worn off, Gabriel found himself admiring this extraordinary spectacle. So: Anamaya and Manco had gone ahead with their plan. The bitter prospect of the Incas’ revenge warmed his heart. At first, he completely overlooked the fact that the army on the hill represented as grave a danger for him as it did for the few hundred other Spaniards in Cuzco.

  And, in fact, when he did eventually realize his situation, he knew that it mattered little to him if he perished during the attack – the justified attack. He actually preferred to die at the hands of warriors commanded by Anamaya than be butchered by Hernando and Gonzalo’s henchmen.

  He remained standing by his window for hours, waiting nervously for the attack to begin. He underestimated neither the Incas’ overwhelming force nor the power of their rage.

  * * *

  To Gabriel’s surprise, the great Inca army still hadn’t attacked the town by midday.

  By then, the ranks of warriors had swollen to the point where he could no longer differentiate one brightly colored tunic from the next – the Indians looked like a single compact mass. They hadn’t eased up on their deafening din. But Gabriel could no longer hear any cries from immediately around his jail – or, indeed, any movement at all. Cuzco seemed abandoned.

  Then he heard the bolt being drawn back on the other side of his cell door. He stood absolutely still, holding his chain in his hand.

  His pot-bellied jailer appeared, holding a large gourd in one hand and a manta containing cornbread and boiled potatoes in the other.

  ‘Kikeh!’

  ‘Don’t welcome me so warmly, Don Gabriel. I don’t deserve your gratitude.’

  ‘I would welcome the devil himself in these circumstances, my dear Kikeh. Never before have I understood so clearly how one’s own existence is affirmed by the presence of another.’

  ‘Please, no philosophizing, Don Gabriel. I never understand it at moments like these. Or at any other time, for that matter.’

  Gabriel noticed the fear distorting his jailer’s expression. Kikeh examined each corner of the room as though he expected to find an army of Indians there. He threw his load at Gabriel’s feet.

  ‘You’ll have to make do with this for the moment,’ he mumbled, ‘I’m sorry to say that it’s all I could lay my hands on.’

  ‘Ho!’ protested Gabriel. ‘I’m meant to be tried, not starved to death!’

  But his jailer’s laugh was joyless.

  ‘You must have heard them. Those savages out there, I mean. You should be grateful that I thought of you at all before I made myself scarce!’

  ‘You’re fleeing? Are the Spaniards abandoning Cuzco?’

  ‘Oh no! No one’s fleeing. It’s too late. But I’ve found myself somewhere to hole up in before those Indians cut me to pieces.’

  He approached the window and glanced at the hills.

  ‘You can’t see anything from here. They’re everywhere. They cover the southern mesa like ants. They’ve already captured two cavalrymen trying to get through. They cut off the horses’ feet and their riders’ heads.’

  So, thought Gabriel, Hernando’s pride and his disdain for the Incas has rebounded against him.

  ‘What’s odd,’ said the fat man sadly, ‘is that they haven’t attacked yet. I guess they have a reason. I don’t want to be around when they decide to reveal it.’

  ‘Something odd happened to me too, Kikeh.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Suddenly I don’t feel like dying anymore.’

  The jailer stared at him with a look of boundless surprise.

  ‘What do you expect me to do? I’ve given you all I have. But don’t worry: it’ll last you until they fall upon us. And when that happens, then being hungry will be the least of your worries.’

  ‘In that case, I thank you, Kikeh.’

  Gabriel’s calm resignation surprised the fat man once again, and his small black eyes grew wider.

  ‘Stop thanking me the whole time. It bothers me more than if you were haranguing me. Here, take this.’

  He drew a packet from his filthy doublet and handed it to Gabriel.

  It contained a thick slice of ham wrapped in pork rind. The smell of the fat stoked Gabriel’s hunger. He looked up at the jailer’s back as Kikeh headed toward the cell door.

  ‘You’re going to thank me again, aren’t you?’ the fat man grumbled.

  ‘No. I’m only going to pray that your life is spared.’

  Kikeh stopped short, still with his back to Gabriel.

  ‘I was told that you don’t believe in God, Don Gabriel.’

  ‘I believe in Him enough to pray for you, friend.’

  The door closed. Gabriel stayed still, transfixed.

  He felt the chill of fear pervading his limbs as he held the slice of ham between his hands and murmured something under his breath.

  Perhaps it was a prayer.

  CHAPTER 3

  Cuzco, 6 May 1536

  The jailer had got it wrong.

  The Inca warriors didn’t attack after all. Not that day, nor the next, nor the day after that.

  They remained on the slopes and hilltops. Their numbers swelled continually until they covered the entire plain to the south of the city. At night, the thousands of fires they lit ringed Cuzco like jewels in the night. But they had stopped their shouting, and their drums had fallen silent. And this silence, this waiting weighed perhaps even more heavily on the Spaniards than the cacophony that had preceded it. Every now and then Gabriel heard a demented shout from one of them who could no longer stand the tension.

  Indeed, after two days of this silence, he himself started to grow impatient for battle. But at least the pause had permitted him to recuperate a
nd gather his strength a little, despite the minimal amount of food that he cautiously allowed himself each day.

  Because he was worried that Gonzalo’s henchmen might profit from the general confusion and come and cut his throat on the sly, Gabriel slept only in short spells. He spent his time fashioning himself a crude weapon: he carefully broke the water jug, making sure to preserve a long, thick shard still attached to the handle. He spent hours mechanically sharpening it against the stone wall. But this repetitive, mechanical activity left his spirit empty, and his thoughts wandered constantly to Anamaya.

  He was no longer haunted by nightmares, but he still dreamed of his beloved’s face, of the unique scent of her skin. Anamaya’s musical laugh echoed around his mind like a song he couldn’t stop humming. He closed his eyes every now and then as he polished the increasingly sharp shard and imagined that he was in fact caressing the nape of his beloved’s neck, or else stroking the small of her back.

  How happy they might have been at this very moment, Gabriel thought, had she fled with him away from this chaos to the shores of Lake Titicaca.

  But, alas, as soon as he opened his eyes again his dream was chased away by the reality around him, by the irons bruising his leg, by the straw mattress rotting in the corner beneath the cold shaft of light passing through the window set in the thick walls of his prison.

  Anamaya was far away in the mountains. She was the living hope of a people among whom he, Gabriel Montelucar y Flores, a Stranger come from afar to steal their peace and their destiny, could never belong. The Incas’ very survival depended on their taking Cuzco, on their destroying all the Spaniards without exception and regaining the power that they had given away. Gabriel would have to die along with the rest of his compatriots. Soon he would be nothing more than a memory to her, one that Manco and the influential priest Villa Oma would gradually succeed in erasing from her mind.

  How had he ever been able to believe even for a moment that he could have done differently, that he could simply have held her hand as one does with an ordinary woman and, thus joined to her, pursued happiness?