The Light of Machu Picchu

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

  They glided above it, caught up in the harmony that emanated from it. They were moved by the synchronicity between Man’s wisdom and Nature’s order that was evident here. The stone looked as though it had been cut to receive light; the way it divided light from shadow was a prayer that echoed silently through the mountains. Its fragility was out of reach. Its beauty was memory itself.

  Anamaya felt all these sensations pass through Katari at the same time, as though he was gorging himself on some intoxicating liquid – every temple, every terrace, every stone summoned in him the legend of the origins of the world, its water, its stone, and its peoples.

  The sun warmed the muggy air slowly. All the perfect sounds of life, from pestles grinding in mortars to the crackling fires stoked by women, from the frantic chattering of squirrels to the unfolding of the blood-flowers of orchids, converged and were unified in this perfection.

  Anamaya soared over the terraces and made out the invisible vein that crossed the Old Summit. It was the way she had taken many years earlier, when a condor had interrupted the priests as they were about to sacrifice a young girl. She remembered the look in the girl’s eyes and the feel of her little hand clasping her own, and she remembered the childlike confidence and absolute trust that had been implicit in that grasp.

  As they approached the summit, their flight slowed and grew heavier. Her wings no longer carried her so well, and she felt suddenly very tired.

  She landed just above the huaca.

  She could hear nothing but breath – her own, Katari’s, and the wind’s.

  ‘Look,’ said Katari. ‘Look into the depths of your own heart.’

  Anamaya automatically looked at the Huayna Picchu, its slender profile rising up right in front of her. Her gaze fell into the abyss and was suspended facing the mountain, so that she could make out its every outcrop and bump. And then, a terrible and familiar form loomed up suddenly from it: the Puma.

  The mountain had become the Puma or else the Puma the mountain in the same way as Katari and she had become the Condor. The magic spectacle fueled her passions and she felt a river of all too human emotions flow through her. ‘Gabriel,’ she thought to herself, at first timidly, and then, with gathering conviction: ‘Gabriel!’

  ‘It is he. He is in front of you, and he is waiting for you,’ Katari said softly.

  Before she had time to understand or even think about it, she was overcome with joy: he was here, right in front of her, and all her fears evaporated with the breaking day.

  She hovered before the puma-mountain for a long time. She felt protected by its power. She understood now the meaning of Katari’s profound intuition: nothing could harm Gabriel. The Apus were protecting him.

  When the sun had reached its zenith, she unfurled her wings and set off again.

  * * *

  With a single wing-flap, Anamaya and Katari glided down towards the walkway in front of the temples. They hovered above it, invulnerable to the vertigo that seized ordinary men lost between the bed of the Willkamayo, rumbling far below, and the snow-capped peaks of the distant Vilcabamba Cordillera.

  A small ceremonial stone stood by itself at one of the walkways’s corners. It had been expertly hewn, marking the Four Directions.

  And it spoke.

  * * *

  The walkway was completely empty, but had anyone been on it, they would have seen the odd sight of a hovering condor facing the rock, absorbing the sun’s heat. At least, that was how it would have appeared to those who could not truly see.

  Only Katari knew that Anamaya had transformed once again into an innocent young girl, a pure and wounded child standing at the side of the great Huayna Capac who was in the twilight of his life. Katari saw her dressed in a white añaco held closed by a simple red sash, kneeling by the old rock-king, his gray-skinned body trembling, his ragged profile turned toward the snows, toward the Under World. He saw her leaning toward the king in perfect silence, listening to him speak.

  Katari could hear every word.

  You are with me, young girl with eyes the color of the lake.

  And I will never leave you while you watch over my Sacred Double.

  After which everything will disappear. He too will vanish.

  You will see the Puma; he will bound here from across the ocean.

  He will only come to you when he leaves you.

  Although separated, you will be united as one.

  And when everyone has left, you will remain, and the Puma will remain at your side.

  Together, like your ancestors Manco Capac and Mama Occlo, you will beget new life on earth.

  There will be wars just as there have always been wars.

  Separations just as there have always been separations.

  And the Strangers, in their triumph, will know misery.

  And we, the Incas, we shall have to know humiliation, we shall become slaves to our own shame before we understand the long journey that we have made, a journey that our panacas, driven by the lust for war alone and no longer inspired by Inti, have forgotten in their destructiveness and madness.

  But we shall not die.

  Anamaya was, somehow, actually in the old king’s breath as he spoke to her. Once again, she listened to him tell the story of the ancient times, of the creation of the world, of the confidence of the Incas born in the cradle of the mountains of Cuzco; she listened to him tell proudly of his military victories, and she listened to him despair over the war between his sons. He spoke about the ball of fire that had designated Atahualpa as Emperor and she remembered; he spoke of Manco, the first knot of the future, and she remembered.

  I wanted to turn to stone, just as the Ancients of my race did, and remain still on the soft, green grass of one of Cuzco’s mountain slopes.

  War chased me away. I found refuge in the Secret City.

  My stone opens to the Four Directions, just as I expanded the Empire of the Four Cardinal Directions; and yet it’s a humble stone, for it will be all that remains of the Empire; a stone to which the Sun will hitch itself.

  The Four Directions will remain in the heart of a pure man.

  Today, there is already war between brothers, although they don’t know it yet.

  And there will be more war.

  War visits the Sons of the Sun and war visits the Strangers. It is the sign.

  The brother’s blood and the friend’s blood are shed far more than the enemy’s. It is the sign.

  The stone and the waters vanish in the forest. It is the sign.

  The Stranger who worships a woman rather than his Ancestors is killed: it is the sign.

  No seer sees it; the priests are baffled; the Sun hides itself from the astronomers; betrayal insinuates itself as a friend of the people; the Ocean vomits Strangers on us, in ever-greater numbers. Soon it will be time for you to flee in order to preserve what has always been and what will always be.

  But you will heed the signs, and you will remain with our people until that moment when Inti has consumed the hatred dividing us, and only women singing their grief over all the spilt blood will remain.

  You will make no mistake.

  You will meet He-whose-stone-stops-time and he will stand in front of me like you. But he will go to the place of origins whereas you will take the road to the city whose name must never he spoken aloud.

  You will know what must not be spoken, and you will not speak it.

  You will say only what must be and will be, and when it has been then two fingers of one hand will unite you.

  You will be free.

  You will take my Sacred Double to the end of his way, and he too will be free.

  Only one secret will remain hidden within you. You will have to live with it.

  Never doubt me. Remain in my breath, and trust the Puma.

  Silence returned, save for the eternal speech of the wind and the river. Heavy black clouds filled the air and hid the sun.

  Anamaya remained as still as Huayna Capac. Her hand was resting on the d
ying old sovereign’s body. Her old pain was young once again, and the loneliness that she had done away with returned now to grip her heart. She kept her eyes closed. She shuddered. She sensed the presence leaving without actually moving, heading to another shore, and she ached from being unable to go with it and live with it.

  Katari put his hand on her shoulder and restrained her suffering.

  The entire valley filled with fog, and they could no longer see the summits. The golden corn on the terraces disappeared, the ripe quinua turned grey, and the temples looked as though they had been built from water stone. Shreds of clouds streamed around them, as if in a slow dance.

  Anamaya took her hand away from Huayna Capac’s corpse.

  She could see only the stone, but she wasn’t surprised.

  She could feel Katari’s broad palm still resting on her shoulder. She was still sad, but she felt that her friend had stopped her from embarking on a dangerous voyage.

  They both looked to the west, where a halo of light was still filtering through the clouds on the black horizon.

  Then the sky tore open as suddenly as it had closed. A rainbow had placed one base of its arch in the central opening of the temple of the three niches.

  ‘Come,’ said Katari.

  Together, they rose into the sky.

  * * *

  Night had fallen on Ollantaytambo.

  Katari and Anamaya were lying on the little wall that ran alongside the Willkamayo. Neither dared speak.

  The sky was clear and the moon full. The condor rock stood clearly illuminated by its light.

  ‘I had a dream. You were in it,’ said Anamaya eventually, sitting up.

  Katari didn’t move, his eyes wide open and staring at the immensity of the star-speckled sky.

  ‘I had the same dream,’ he said without looking at her.

  ‘How do you know?’

  Katari didn’t answer out loud, but Anamaya heard his voice echo from within her, and in a flash realized that the voyage that they had undertaken together had been real. Katari was right. She wanted to ask him if they had returned to their point of departure or if a day had passed. She looked at the moon but didn’t find the answer.

  ‘You will know what must not be spoken, and you will not speak it.’

  Anamaya let the words resonate within her, and she suddenly felt the full power of Huayna Capac’s speech. No, she was no longer the terrified little girl who forgot the past, the present, and the future; nor was she the Coya Camaquen who had to struggle continually to understand the mystery. The world was in place: that which had been revealed remained, and that which was secret remained so as well.

  They heard a dull rumbling sound from the north.

  Katari sat up.

  At first, they wondered if it was a convulsion of the earth, one that would shake the rock and lift the river out of its bed. But the rumbling grew louder and they both realized its source at the same moment. It was coming from the mountain facing them, the one that rose above both the rivers, the one that stood guard over the Sacred Valley.

  The mountain seemed to roar like a man racked by violent pain. They felt it tremble, they felt the breaking point of its tension, and they saw an enormous block break away from the rock face, leaving a gaping cavity.

  A thick cloud of black dust slowly rose up and invaded the night, and still the mountain shook sporadically. Another almighty cracking sound signaled the breaking away of an entire side of the mountain, and Katari and Anamaya watched it fall away as best they could through the thick cloud of dust. After that, the mountain gave two more agonized cries, howling against the wounds that it was inflicting on itself.

  They watched the spectacle with utter fascination, quickly forgetting their own fears. This upheaval of nature wasn’t the mark of some divine rage against Man. It came from even further away. Merely to watch it was to be part of the secret.

  The dust rose up, half blinding them. They were obliged to go to the channels cut into the rock and wash out their burning eyes. After, they remained by the water, waiting.

  When the mountain had become completely quiet, they turned around. The dust cloud was slowly settling, revealing a dramatically changed view.

  Anamaya cried out.

  She saw Huayna Capac’s face, clearly visible in the moonlight, disclosed in the newly exposed stone. It was his face as it had been in the hour of his death all those years ago, and as it had been during her dream – her flight – as a condor.

  He was carved into the side of the mountain, as though some gargantuan sculptor had chiseled him there. He was the man of stone, a hundred times – a thousand times – bigger than any men of flesh.

  His eyes lay deep in their sockets and his prominent nose accentuated the straight line of his forehead, a mark of his resolution. A long crack marked his mouth, and his chin was covered by a great beard of rocks. He was facing north, as though looking beyond the forest and toward the Secret City in its valley.

  Anamaya knew then that the knowledge was within her.

  CHAPTER 8

  Ollantaytambo, Choquana lock, 16 June 1536

  His hands tied behind his back, his feet hobbled with thick agave ropes that reduced the length of his stride considerably, and guarded by a dozen warriors day and night, Gabriel had been walking for three days.

  After his capture at the fortress of Sacsayhuaman he had been taken to a hamlet of wretched adobe houses beneath some arid mountain. He had been kept there for many months. The old woman who fed him didn’t answer his questions any more than did his guards. His questions became fewer as time passed, and after the blind exultation of battle he had gradually slipped into a state of apathetic despair. Gabriel had felt no more master of his own fate then than he had been before, and he had allowed himself to slide toward that fate without rancor, thinking that it could only be death. The thought had crossed his mind that it would have been better if his captors had killed him straight away. But he banished the notion as irrelevant.

  Three days earlier, they had come to fetch him at daybreak, and had told him that it was time to go. Gabriel had said nothing and since then he had barely exchanged three words with his guards, who looked at him with that indifference with which he was now so familiar. He knew that it actually hid a deep curiosity as well as, most probably, fear. At sundown, he heard them talking among themselves, but he was too exhausted to make the effort to understand them.

  He woke as though from a dream.

  For all those weeks, Gabriel had lived like a man possessed: surviving Gonzalo’s revenge, then the burning of his prison, then avoiding the Incas’ arrows and sling stones before taking the tower. In his mind he watched himself accomplish all these things, actions that had won him his companions’ admiration. But he couldn’t shake the feeling that he was watching a play being performed in the theatre of his mind in which a masked actor was playing himself. It was as though he, Gabriel, had been asleep throughout, as though he had slipped out of himself. When he found himself tied up once more, powerless, and being marched through this valley locked away in the mountains, it brought him – disagreeably – back to life.

  Gabriel could see in front of him only the backs of the porters’ bare legs, their muscled calves like polished knotted wood. They bore enormous sheaves of quinua, which made the broad Inca road ahead seem as though it had been transformed into a field that was being ruffled by a fickle wind. Gabriel exhaled all the air in his lungs: the sheaves shivered. He breathed out again: still they shivered. Suddenly and absurdly, he felt an irrepressible urge to laugh. ‘I am the master of quinua!’ he cried in Spanish. ‘I am the master of the corn!’ He exhaled as though his lungs were the fountainhead of the winds. The Indian soldiers looked at him and clutched their spears and sling tighter: had the prisoner gone mad? Gabriel laughed so hard that he broke out into a paroxysm of coughing, and then stopped suddenly.

  The river valley, which at first had been broad, became progressively narrower as they made their way up it. C
liffs, at the bases of which fortresses had been built, now rose up on both its sides. The river meandered from one cliff to the other, from one fort to the next. Hundreds, or perhaps even thousands of men wearing only their hauras were working to strengthen the forts. They had formed long lines to pass down enormous blocks of stone, while work teams built walls and put up wooden scaffolding.

  But it was only when the soldiers urged him to ford the river that Gabriel saw the magnificent spread of terraces rising up through the valley, and, up above, an imposing building with a commanding view over its entirety. This structure was no less fascinating for being unfinished. Whether it was a temple or a fortress, he couldn’t tell – and in any case, he knew that the Incas no longer made a distinction between the two.

  His breath was cut short.

  In that moment, the exhilarating and painful conviction came to him out of nowhere that he was going to see her.

  * * *

  Nightfall brought with it a cool breeze. Gabriel, passing through the straight streets, each one perfectly paved and lined by high, narrow doors leading into canchas under steep, thatched roofs, was struck by the bustling activity that filled the place.

  It was a city under construction, teeming with endless activity and people speaking to one another not only in Quechua, which he had mastered, but also in Jaki aru and Pukina, Kollasuyu languages of which Gabriel had learned just enough to distinguish between them. Many of the town’s peoples had never encountered a Stranger, and they struggled to hide their astonishment upon seeing him, with his long tangled blond hair and the beard that covered his face after weeks of imprisonment and, before that, combat. Upon entering the town, his guards had moved in closer around him, as though worried that he might try to escape, impossible though that would be, into the crowd.