‘Shut up, Guaypar! Shut up! You cannot speak to my husband the Emperor like that!’
Curi Ocllo tried to cover Guaypar’s mouth with her bloodied hands. But Manco signaled with a glance to a soldier who grabbed Curi Ocllo by the arms and dragged her away.
‘Anamaya is my prisoner,’ growled Guaypar, still looking at the ground. ‘She will lead me to the Sacred Double. It’s over, Manco! The Powerful Ancestors are with me now!’
Manco stepped forward and drew his sword from its scabbard in one smooth movement. Curi Ocllo’s wails grew louder.
‘Anamaya no longer has your father Huayna Capac’s support,’ Guaypar continued. ‘But the Strangers have made me a promise. If you end the war and return to Vilcabamba, they will let you live.’
Manco waved his men away with his sword. He smiled and said:
‘Stand.’
Guaypar rose, letting the stone fall from his shoulders. Manco’s menacing smile grew broader.
‘Poor Guaypar. You still haven’t learned the lesson I gave you all those years ago at the huarachiku. Look here.’
Manco stepped away from him. The ranks opened and allowed Anamaya and Gabriel to pass through.
‘Poor Guaypar,’ mocked Manco, still wearing that sinister smile. ‘Your words echo through the jungle, as loud and as terrifying as a parrot’s squawk!’
At that moment a trumpet sounded a long wail. An officer ran up and shouted:
‘There are Strangers approaching, my Lord! They are only a hundred sling throws away.’
As Manco raised his sword above his head, Curi Ocllo rushed forward and collapsed at his feet, crying:
‘Don’t kill my brother! Oh Manco, spare him, spare him out of love for me!’
‘You should never have brought him here, Coya,’ growled Manco. ‘It is better that I cut off his head than that he should relieve me of mine. Your brother is fond of the Strangers’ steel: well then, let him swallow it!’
The blade of Manco’s sword whistled as it described a wide arc through the air. Guaypar’s head shook strangely. He had a surprised look in his eyes as his head fell from his shoulders and a gusher of blood fountained from the stump of his neck.
Curi Ocllo let out a horrified, animalistic cry. She clasped her brother’s convulsing body to her, his jetting blood covering her face and chest.
Anamaya and Gabriel rushed to her. Manco was already telling his generals to order the men to scatter into the jungle. Utter confusion reigned for a few short minutes as the thousands of warriors broke their silence and their perfectly formed ranks and bolted toward the north.
‘Come with us,’ begged Anamaya, shaking Curi Ocllo by the shoulders. But the young woman remained huddled over Guaypar’s body. ‘Don’t stay here. The Strangers will take you prisoner. Come with us…’
But Curi Ocllo had buried her face in her brother’s chest, and she remained there, shaking her head and uttering little cries like a badly wounded animal.
‘She can’t hear you,’ said Gabriel, unable to prise Curi Ocllo’s fingers from their grip on Guaypar’s corpse.
They heard arquebuses being fired in the jungle.
‘Come on, Anamaya!’ cried Gabriel, taking her around the waist and wrenching her away from Curi Ocllo. ‘We must go or else they’ll take us too!’
And as they ran to the north with the tail-end of Manco’s troops, Gabriel turned around one last time and saw Curi Ocllo, her hair drenched with blood, still with her arms wrapped tightly around Guaypar’s headless body, as though she wanted to slip with him into the abyss.
PART 4
CHAPTER 28
Chuquichaca, March 1540
The afternoon light filtered down through the thick canopy of treetops whose leaves and branches hid the blue of the slowly darkening sky. Animal cries and birdsong echoed through the jungle’s immensity, presaging the coming dusk and plunging Anamaya back into the world of her childhood.
She sat on the bank and watched the river run by. She thought about her mother.
The rumble of the rapids upstream carried her into her dream. She became almost unaware of Gabriel to her right. They were sitting on a narrow stretch of sand amid a tangle of long-dead branches polished smooth by the current. She saw herself running barefoot toward her mother’s open arms. It was a recurring dream, and it usually ended as a nightmare: the memory of the sling stone striking her mother’s forehead, and of her mother’s body suddenly becoming a dead weight in her arms. Anamaya would wake in a cold sweat, overwhelmed by her loneliness.
‘Where are you?’
Gabriel’s voice was like a cool breeze off the water, drawing her gently out of the daydream of her childhood. Since leaving Curi Ocllo to her despair and her brother’s corpse, Anamaya and Gabriel had traveled for six moons by themselves in the jungle, far from Manco and far from the war. Their understanding of one another had grown deeper with every dawn and every dusk. They had reached a point where they could even dispense with words to realize the fullness of their love, remaining simply and perfectly in one another’s company, silent yet communicating on a level far deeper than that of mere speech. A mere glance or a slight brush of the hand was enough to fill either of them with happiness.
‘I was taking a long trip…’
‘Was I there?’
Anamaya smiled.
‘No. I was with my mother.’
The sun disappeared behind a cloud and a shadow fell upon their faces.
‘You’ve often mentioned your mother,’ said Gabriel, ‘and I know that you meet her sometimes in the Other World. But why don’t you ever see your father?’
Gabriel had never before asked her that question so directly, and Anamaya’s throat grew dry.
‘I don’t know. His face remains indistinct in the night.’
‘Anamaya…’
Gabriel reached for her hand, and she surrendered it to him before continuing:
‘It’s as though my mother’s death has erased everything that I lived through before. What’s left is very hazy…’
‘“Only one secret will remain hidden within you. You will have to live with it.” Isn’t that what Emperor Huayna Capac told you?’
‘Yes. You remember his words well.’
‘To me, they’re your words. And perhaps that’s the secret. Or perhaps it’s something else: while I was waiting for you at Titicaca, I tried to reach you on the spirit plane. I asked the Daughters of Quilla to help me. One of them spoke of you as “the girl with the eyes the color of the lake.” She said, “There’s no great mystery. Our Mother the Moon dropped water from the lake into her eyes because the one you seek unifies the beginning and the end of time. She carries the Origin in her eyes. And as for you, you’re going to have to learn to see if you want to find her!”’
Gabriel chuckled at the memory of the priestess’s displeasure with him. A fragile smile lit Anamaya’s face as a quail called from nearby.
* * *
They had taken off their unku and añaco and were bathing in the river. The silt-laden water felt pleasant against their skin in the warmth of the sun. Two turtles sat on a branch that stuck out of the water, their heads extended far out of their shells toward the sun, absorbing as much heat as they could. Six little turtles sat beside them, completely immobile.
The blue streak of a kingfisher passing overhead sometimes flashed across the river’s surface, and the occasional catfish slapped the water with its tail. Butterflies pirouetted above a pool of water on the river bank and filled the air with color.
Anamaya and Gabriel took turns diving under the water, their laughter mingling with the splashes they made. They wrapped themselves around one another like two water snakes coupling as the trail of foam that they left behind them was carried away by the current.
They saw a dugout canoe approaching from downstream, making use of the counter-current that ran alongside the river bank. The two men standing one at each end of the canoe, each of them holding a long pole, often had to duck to avoid t
he overhanging branches hindering their progress. When they were level with Anamaya and Gabriel, they looked briefly at the couple in the water and nodded before carrying on. They steered in toward the bank, where they would disembark and carry their pirogue beyond the rapids.
Gabriel stretched out on the sand. Anamaya leaned over him and rubbed his back and shoulders with some leaves that gave off an odor both sweet and peppered, and which induced a mild light-headedness. Gabriel surrendered to her long, gentle massage that was as gentle as a caress. Anamaya had taught him that his body was more than just a mass of bones and nerves, a powerful instrument eager to conquer; she had shown him that it was also a source of gentleness and tenderness as well as of potent desire.
Evening brought with it a cool breeze, and Anamaya pulled her manta up over them both. She brought her knees up to her chest and cuddled up against Gabriel. He put his lean arms around her, his muscles as finely honed as blades of Toledo steel.
‘I feel that the time is coming,’ she whispered.
‘How do you know?’
‘Everywhere, everything is fading. It’s the time of signs. I’m frightened and I’m happy. I’m so eager to take you there.’
‘Where?’
‘Over there.’
‘You can’t leave Manco yet. You have to stay with him.’
‘He’s the one who’s leaving us, Gabriel. He’s the one who’s leaving and going into the jungle with all his rage. Guaypar is dead, of course, and Gonzalo has returned to Cuzco. But others will come, and then others after them. We don’t know what’s happened to Villa Oma, but we know that his war is leading him nowhere. Illac Topa is still resisting, but he’s alone, and he spends most of his time on the run. Manco has ruled over nothing but shadows for many moons now. The Empire of the Four Cardinal Directions no longer exists. Vilcabamba is a capital without a country – the Incas have no more peoples to subjugate, no more lands to conquer. They are far from their mountains, far from the land first turned by Manco Capac and Mama Occlo’s mattock.’
‘But it can’t just disappear without a trace!’ protested Gabriel.
Anamaya nodded.
‘Oh, there’ll be a trace. We must wait for Katari,’ she said. ‘It was he who advised us to leave Vitcos for a while, and it will be Katari who will call us when the time has come. We must trust him.’
Suddenly they were interrupted by cries. They sat up to look and saw children holding sticks and running toward them along the river bank from a hundred paces upstream. They were chasing a wooden object that was floating gently along, following the caprices of the current. Every now and then one of the children would jump into the water and direct the object back toward the bank before another would strike it with his stick, sending it back out into the middle of the river. It occasionally disappeared into an eddy before reappearing and continuing its slow progress.
‘It’s a basket!’ exclaimed Anamaya.
‘Let them play…’
‘Wait – there’s something in it.’
When the basket was level with them, some of the children dived into the water. Encouraged by the laughter and urgings of those who had remained on the bank, they grabbed the sides of the basket and dragged it out onto the stretch of sand. Curious and smiling, Anamaya went up to it.
The basket was unusually large and its cover firmly secured with an agave rope. As Gabriel joined them, the overexcited children pulled at the lid with all their strength.
The cover snapped open with a loud crack. Anamaya screamed in horror before the children had even realized what they were looking at.
CHAPTER 29
Vitcos, March 1540
Anamaya shuddered when she saw the elegant lines of the Vitcos palace atop its rocky outcrop. She remembered only too well the empty fortress and Guaypar’s terrible surprise attack, her capture, and Gonzalo’s threats. Her body remembered the cold touch of his steel dagger on her skin. Gabriel, as though he had sensed her unease, wrapped his arm around her shoulder and shared his warmth and strength with her.
‘I refuse to be apart from you ever again,’ Gabriel had said to Anamaya when he had set her free. Since then, the full meaning of those few words had become only clearer to her – along with a horrible visual memory that haunted her and that she couldn’t get out of her mind: that of Curi Ocllo’s crumpled skin in the basket, flayed from her corpse and bunched up in the foetal position, looking as though she had been trampled to death. Her face had been intact despite the river water that had found its way into the macabre vessel in which they had found her floating. What had been most sickening was the echo of the beauty that had once been hers that lingered in her profaned skin.
They had set the vile basket on a litter of branches and reeds and had set off for Vitcos, escorted by a few warriors.
What had happened for Manco’s adored wife to be so atrociously mutilated? Who had had the sinister idea of sending her flayed hide floating down the river in the absurd if ultimately successful hope that the terrible thing would be discovered and taken to Manco?
Manco! Even just thinking about his suffering wrenched Anamaya’s heart. Despite all her efforts, she hadn’t been able to protect the Inca from this horror, and it was impossible to know what its consequences would be.
Despite the great physical and emotional toll that the jungle exacted from those traveling through it, they had made sure, every evening, to submit offerings to Curi Ocllo’s soul as it wandered through the Other World. They had burned coca leaves and beseeched Mama Quilla to support her during her difficult journey to the Under World. Once, Anamaya discovered Gabriel with his hands clasped, his eyes closed, and his face tilted up towards the jungle’s thick canopy.
‘What are you doing?’
‘I’m praying to a god in whom I don’t believe.’
‘If you’re actually praying, doesn’t that mean that you do believe?’
‘I’m praying for her, for her soul to find peace.’
Anamaya didn’t press him. But she could see a light in the darkness of his grief, and she knew that the Puma and she were closer than ever. Neither the war nor the gods would separate them again.
As they drew nearer the palace, with its fifteen doorways holding up their white granite lintels, Anamaya saw a group of soldiers, spears in hand, coming to welcome them. They had recognized the Coya Camaquen.
They passed through the narrow door that led to the top of the hill where the palace and the fourteen buildings attached to it were assembled in a single cancha. The soldiers led them in silence, their faces impassive, to where Manco was sitting on a large patio.
As they’d passed through the palace, Anamaya had instinctively tightened her grip on Gabriel’s hand.
‘Where have you been?’
Manco’s voice thundered through the courtyard that was bedecked with orchids, their dizzying perfume permeating the air. A young puma, captured in the jungle, grew restless in its bamboo cage set in an enormous recess in the wall.
Manco ignored the porters as they set the basket at his feet. His eyes, sunken deep into their cavities, stared fixedly at Gabriel and Anamaya. All present – Manco’s servants and soldiers, lords and concubines – lowered their heads and held their tongues. Fear seemed to rise from the very stones.
‘We were where the Willkamayo and the Vilcabamba meet,’ replied Anamaya.
There was an infinite calm in her voice that troubled Manco. He looked away and considered the basket at his feet.
‘What have you brought me?’ he asked.
Bowing with the submission that every Inca subject owed his or her Emperor, Anamaya approached him. She didn’t say a word as she raised the wicker cover.
Manco froze, his mouth agape, as though all the air was rushing from his lungs. He fell to his knees and grabbed the edges of the basket.
A howl tore through the air.
It wasn’t a human cry. It was wordless, the scream of a wounded animal spewing out the pain that was tormenting its guts. Everyone
present in the courtyard bent almost double, as though trying to disappear into themselves. They often had cause, in these troubled times, to fear their Emperor’s ire or distress. But what they were listening to now was unlike anything that they had yet witnessed.
When Manco at last recovered his breath, his whole body succumbed to a series of spasms. He grabbed Curi Ocllo’s face and raised it above him, the flaccid hide of what had once been his wife’s magnificent body – the joy of his nights – hanging below it. He screamed again.
Anamaya reached out to him. She brushed his neck and felt the tension in it. But just as her fingers stroked his skin, he jerked away from her as though her touch had burned him.
‘Manco…’ she whispered to herself.
He didn’t weep. He was like a storm that rumbles through the night, shredding the darkness with bolts of lightning, causing the world to tremble to its very foundations.
‘No! No!’
Those were the first words in a human language that came from his mouth. But they brought him no relief, no balm, and they were as inhuman as the involuntary cries that had first burst from his throat.
‘No! No!’
All Manco’s defiance was concentrated into those words: his refusal to submit, his refusal to lose, his refusal to be taken prisoner, his refusal to give up, his refusal to accept that life could be so cruel. But despite all this he remained like a hunted animal beset by a scraggy horde of predators. He was a mass of flesh and bone still attached to life only by the fiber of his unequalled and atrocious rage.
His people slipped out of the courtyard one by one, going as quietly as possible in the cowardly hope that he wouldn’t notice them, sticking close to the walls as they headed for the doors, their faces covered in the sweat of fear.
Only Anamaya remained squatting in front of Manco, who kneeled on the ground still screaming, but less loudly now.
Gabriel brushed his hand over Anamaya’s back and left as well. She glanced at him tenderly before looking back at Manco.
The Light of Machu Picchu Page 30
