The Gold Eaters

by Ronald Wright

  Waman was disappointed to find the barbarian outpost to be nothing but a straggle of huts and muddy alleys between the foreshore and the jungle. A shipyard. A few hundred whites, a few dozen blacks, many Indian slaves and half-breed children, among them One-Eye’s small son by a woman of Panama. They were there about a month, he recalls, all four from the World kept in cells beside the church: the only building made of stone.

  One day the Old One came, fetched them out into steaming sunlight, had them chained behind a train of mules. Pizarro bade farewell to One-Eye with friendly words. But no warmth in his expression. Suspicion as usual in Almagro’s lonely eye.

  For days they followed a muddy track across the Isthmus, through a high forest to the Other Sea. There they boarded this ship bound for a place called Seville—the greatest city, Candía said, in Spain.

  But did they reach it?

  He hopes they did not.

  —

  Two faces in the blue square: one black, one brown. Tomás and Qoyllur, the haughty southern girl.

  “Welcome back, Waman.”

  Why is she here, speaking to him? “You live!” he says. “The others . . . where are—”

  “No talk. Drink.” She lifts his head, swabs his face with soft wet cotton. Tomás holds a cup of water to his lips. Fresh water, sweet and cool.

  “Have we gone back?” he asks.

  He counted thirty-three days on the Other Sea, tying them on a thread. Then he fell ill, sweating in his hammock, not knowing night from day, nor caring, wanting death. How small the ship. How vast the Ocean Sea. How little food. And what food. Stinking pork, weevily corn, water like saliva, cheese that walked the board on legs of worms.

  For every one of those days until he lost his wits, Waman yearned for the ship to turn back. Back from its mad fight with endless storms on an endless sea. Back to land, to life. He prayed for this to every god he knew, his and theirs. He swore he would run into the great woods the moment his feet touched the Isthmus of Panama, run all the way home to the World.

  “Did we go back?”

  “It’s over now. Rest. We’re there.”

  “Where?”

  “The Great River.” Tomás’s voice. “The Wad-al-Kibir. I can see the towers of Seville.”

  “Ispañapim kanchik!” Qoyllur’s voice. “We’re in Spain!”

  —

  Waman dozes and more faces come before him: the girl, her helpers. Where are those boys? And the llamas, his special charges, whose sufferings he tried to ease until he couldn’t leave his hammock.

  He remembers Tomás appearing like a spirit in the fires of delirium, making him swallow thin broth, stale water. And Candía, his great beard dull and wilted. And Pizarro, telling him to trust in God.

  Then a jaundiced priest with candle, book, and oil. And that was the last.

  Until now. This breath of wind, this box of sky.

  —

  Again he sleeps, waking to the dankness of a tidal river, to bells and cries, human voices, the tock of horseshoes. A sudden clatter of armed men coming aboard. One climbs down the ladder, casts around, holds a kerchief to his mouth, climbs back into the light.

  Waman does not see them arrest the Commander, but he hears of it soon enough. Francisco Pizarro has been taken to jail.

  Why? Because the Old One never put in at Tumbes for Molina? Pizarro blamed winds and currents, he recalls, but Candía did not believe him. Neither did others. They whispered that Molina was marooned by the Commander’s impatience, his drive to get to Panama and on to Spain, to lose no time in petitioning the King.

  Next morning the Greek comes down and tells Waman what he has learnt: Pizarro is being held for all the debts run up by Panama, because he served as the settlement’s mayor and is its first official to show his face in Spain. Debts? Waman asks himself. He knows the word, but has never quite grasped its implications. They put many things down to debt. Isn’t it some kind of ayni, a favour to be returned, reciprocated? How and when does it become a crime?

  They are kept on the ship several days, forbidden to go ashore. He hears feet and heavy sounds on the deck above. Tomás and Qoyllur visit him two or three times daily, bringing food and water. He sees how changed they are. The black’s skin is grey, the whites of his eyes yellow in a ravaged face. More teeth are gone. Qoyllur still has her teeth, but her mouth is a wound, her long hair dry and listless, her touch cracked and coarse on his brow.

  At last she tells him: all from the World are dead except he and she and three llamas.

  The llamas. Who would have cared for them after he fell ill? They are not in the hold, nor does he hear their tread on deck. The last thing he remembers is seeing them bound under nets during terrible storms, their knees and bellies rubbed raw by the reeling ship, each lying in a pool of blood and waste despite the straw he tried to spread beneath them. Fear in their soft eyes. He tried to soothe them, hugging their woolly necks, telling them one day this would be over and their feet would touch dry land. He went to the chaplain and brought them holy water, to make them Christians. Perhaps if they drank it they might survive this Christian ship. But each day the necks rose more weakly to greet him. One neck, then another, did not rise. Poor suffering beasts. Of the six, only three.

  And of the four of us, only Qoyllur and myself. Qoyllur, the grand one, humbled and changed. Until now she’d made it clear she deemed him beneath her. She was not a captive. She came of her own will and curiosity, or at the behest of her parents. Or perhaps of the Empire, as a spy. She came in style, well dressed, helpers carrying her belongings.

  We are the only two left. So that’s why Qoyllur’s being so good to me. She can talk to nobody else.

  —

  As soon as Seville’s authorities give permission to unload the ship, Waman is lodged at a wine merchant’s house, in servants’ quarters on a back patio, with Tomás to sleep across his door. For protection, Waman wonders, or to stop him stowing away on the next ship bound for the Indies as soon as he can walk? The building has high walls, no windows except on the inside, and a single door to the street, iron-bound. Qoyllur, less valuable to Pizarro and therefore freer, stays with a seamstress not far away, below the walls and towers of Seville.

  Little by little, fresh water, fresh air, fresh fruit—above all the miraculous orange, a great gift of the Christians’ god—rebuild his health. He sees it in Qoyllur too, her healed gums, the gloss returning to her hair.

  She treats him as a brother now, calling him tura, stroking his head, bringing food. As Tika used to do. Whenever Waman thinks of Tika and home he feels cloven in two like an avocado, and the hard stone that is his heart falls out.

  Echoed footsteps on flagstone. Getting nearer. The chime of heavy keys.

  “I piss on God!” Pizarro swears into the darkness. What a homecoming after twenty-seven years in the New World! Hauled away before Spain is steady beneath his feet. Thrown in a dungeon. And for other men’s debts—not even his own. For the debts of every fool in Panama, merely because some years ago he was its mayor.

  The door opens. A welcome glow. A lantern in the hand of a brute like a fairground bear.

  “Curse God all you like,” the jailer mutters, as if to himself, tossing some straw in a corner, setting a plate of old bread and mildewed olives on the floor. “He won’t hear you. He doesn’t listen to bores. Luckily for you.”

  “You speaking to me, man?”

  “Why would I do that? You debtors are all bores. Nobodies.” The jailer farts, following this with an odd, shrill giggle. “Give me a murderer. Give me a rapist. A heretic. A backsliding Jew. A Moor. Interesting work, squeezing out their lies. But scum like you . . . It’s not worth oiling a thumbscrew to hear what you have to say.” The jailer hawks and spits on the floor, inches from the food. He regards Pizarro, hand on hip. “Let me guess. You’re a drunk? You stink at cards? You throw money at every pa
ir of tits?

  “Good night, Lord Nobody. Until tomorrow. And tomorrow.” Another giggle, a slam, the old lock tumbling; echoed footfalls fading down a corridor.

  I’ll throw that whoreson to the dogs, Pizarro vows.

  But how? How, when a lifetime in the Indies ends in this? He curses that charlatan of a beggar by the church in Trujillo, preying on the dreamy youth he used to be. Nearly forty years ago now. Might things be different if he’d been more open-handed, given both coins, not one? Better he’d never left Spain at all, better he still wandered Trujillo’s hills behind a drove of swine.

  The Commander sighs, eats. Rotten food, fit only for rats and cockroaches, though no worse than what was left on the ship. Self-consolation slowly cools his rage. Most men of his years are long dead. Most men of his birth would be proud to have done what he has done. In the Caribbean with the great Columbus. Discovering the South Sea with Balboa. Founding Panama. That city’s mayor. Those aren’t the deeds of a nobody!

  But it’s never enough, is it? There’s a worm in him that gnaws. The worm speaks up: You call Panama a city? You call that enough? Enough, when you’ve glimpsed the golden cities of Peru?

  On the river not a mile from this cell he has the proof of it. Gold, silver, fine silks, strange beasts. A Peruvian boy and girl. Enough—despite the dead heaved over the side, the gold already mortgaged—to turn the heads of King and Queen and make him great. And enough, by God, to bleach the stain of bastardy. They still sting, those tales: left by his unwed mother on a doorstep; unschooled, unloved; a mere swineherd on the lands of a father who never acknowledged him. None of it true . . . well, some of it, God knows. All of it murmured in drinking dens and whorehouses, even by his own men. Sweet Christ!

  Pizarro kneels on the straw in the driest corner, crosses himself, asks God to forgive his blasphemous tongue. He feels better. Candía will get him out—just a matter of time, of bending the right ears, finding the right palms to grease.

  —

  “Good morning, Commander. Did Your Worship sleep well? Did the little angels send him a good night?” This not only sardonic but with a gloating tone. “Sold you short, didn’t I? A would-be conqueror, eh? Less boring than I thought.” A sigh of mock regret. “If only Seville wasn’t crawling with conquerors just now.”

  Pizarro has been here a fortnight, with no visitors but Candía (who came yesterday with oranges) and this loathsome jailer. When jailers are cheerful, the news is always bad. Is he condemned to the galleys, to die at an oar?

  “Such timing you have, my penniless friend.” The brute sets down bread and water, then gleefully relates the news. Hernán Cortés, Conqueror of Mexico, has just landed, returning in pomp with a treasure unseen since the triumphs of ancient Rome.

  “Your Worship staggers home from the Indies with a few long-necked sheep and not enough coin to pay a whore. And now comes this other man—younger than you, and a real conqueror, this one—with gold enough to buy Seville.”

  Hernán Cortés! The man Francisco Pizarro most wants to be. Cortés is a kinsman, a cousin of some kind, better born. But the blood tie is thin. And it’s twenty years since the two met, just once, on the island of Cuba. In a Santiago tavern, where they quarrelled and drew knives. Over what? Pizarro asks himself. A slight, a woman . . . Or was it cards? He can’t recall. He hopes Cortés, who was then a magistrate in Cuba, doesn’t remember that night.

  The jailer runs on, telling how everyone in Seville will turn out to watch the Conqueror ride a white stallion at the head of his parade tomorrow, followed by standard-bearers, slaves, women, Mexican lions and tigers, wagons piled high with gold and silver and strange idols.

  Pizarro has no trouble picturing the scene, embroidered by his envy. That should be me, he thinks. That shall be me. He curses his luck, the timing. At best, Cortés puts him in the shade. At worst, he’ll catch wind of Peru and take it for himself.

  The jailer gone, the Commander’s mood begins to lift, coaxed by a lick of sunshine from an arrow slit. He reflects that word of Peru is out already; that there’s no shortage of potential rivals, in both the Indies and in Spain. Cortés himself might be the least of his worries: a man at the peak of fortune, a man who has everything he could possibly want. Unless my cousin shares my worm.

  Why not send word to his lofty kinsman through Candía? The Greek will know how to charm the hero of Mexico. With smooth words and God’s help, he might enlist the Conqueror’s support.

  A gamble, yes. But merely the latest of a thousand.

  Strength is returning to Waman’s limbs, beginning with short walks around the wine merchant’s yard on the arm of Tomás or Qoyllur.

  Qoyllur turns up one morning in great excitement. She explains that a high lord has come back from the Indies, from the empire of Mexico, which he conquered a few years ago. Everyone is going to watch him parade through the streets.

  “They say he’s brought many Mexican things and people, even some lords and ladies. We must go!”

  “You know I can’t go. Tomás has orders not to let me step outside this house.”

  “That’s been settled. Candía is coming here to take us.” She doesn’t tell the boy, from kindness, that no one is worried, that he’s still far too weak to run away.

  Waman has never seen so many people, not even in Tumbes. And it is odd to see barbarians, whom he knows as fighting men, thronging the streets in all kinds: fit and lame, fat and thin, women, children, and blacks like Tomás holding sunshades over their owners’ heads. The noise is deafening, the Spaniards are not soft speakers and their little ones love to shriek. He smells cheese, sweat, unwashed bodies, rosewater, sewage, animal dung. Soldiers march up and down, cracking horsewhips to keep onlookers from blocking the way.

  The wait is long and hot. Waman feels light-headed. If nothing happens soon, he will have to go and rest.

  Then a trumpet blast. A hush. A shining form in the distance, coming slowly up the avenue of bright clothing and craned necks.

  It is a barbarian in full armour and plumed helmet on a great white horse. The Conqueror of Mexico himself, Waman gathers from the whispering around him. The rider waves at the crowd, occasionally doffing his helm and making small bows to grandees on balconies along his way. He is grizzled, though younger than the Old One; plumper, his beard trimmed, his face ruddy and full-fleshed, except below the eyes, where his cheeks sag like hammocks. Despite this, he looks too well to have come straight from the Ocean Sea; he and his retinue must have restored themselves somewhere.

  Standard-bearers follow on foot. And men with parrots on their shoulders, birds who can pray and curse in Castilian. Then a dozen garlanded wagons pulled by oxen, piled high with marvellous things. Shields of turquoise and gold. A golden sun-wheel, richly embossed. Coiled serpents of polished stone with rearing heads, some smooth or scaled, others feathered as if they were half bird. Statues as ornate and brightly painted as the Christians’ saints. A death god whose limbs are bones and whose head is a crystal skull. Mexican books, opened like fans, covered in images and symbols. Also weapons, fine pottery, robes of cotton and fur, obsidian mirrors.

  Behind the wagons come dancers, jugglers, contortionists, acrobats, naked except for body paint and knotted loincloths, some walking on their hands while their feet roll logs in the air. The sight of these fills Waman with homesickness, for they look like his own people.

  At a safe distance come two big cats, one plain and tawny, one boldly spotted—a puma and an uturunku, a lion and a tiger as Spaniards say. They are leashed with gold chains and pulled along by handlers wearing quilted cotton and rubber armour. Their hind legs are hobbled, their eyes filled with fury and fear.

  Last come twenty lords from Mexico, striding along in feathered cloaks and headdresses, their cheeks tattooed and pierced with jewels, their eyes held high and straight ahead, as if still fixed on their faraway land. On their shoulders they bear a palanquin,
a vehicle like those Waman used to see passing through Little River on the royal highway. The palanquin is shaded but open, so all can see the young lady and lord whose names are called out by a crier:

  ¡Doña Isabel Moctezuma!

  ¡Don Pedro Aculan Moctezuma!

  A gale of applause.

  “Who are they?” Waman asks Candía.

  “All Seville knows who they are,” the Greek says. “What you see there, Waman, are a son and daughter of the Emperor of the Mexicans.”

  Qoyllur speaks in Waman’s ear. “Their father is murdered and their country is called New Spain. What does that tell you?”

  “What the barbarians plan for us.”

  Waman feels patronized, a little hurt. He has known this much longer than she has, ever since he began to understand Castilian. Though it’s true he’s avoided discussing the implications.

  “I’m going to kill the Old One,” he blurts, trying to impress her, striving to believe his own boast. “I should have done it back on the island. It would have been easy then.” He nearly tells her about that man on Gallo, the fulfilling crunch of bone and revenge.

  “Think again, Brother. Think what might happen to you—and me.” Qoyllur frowns into his eyes. “I’d like to kill him too. But not yet. And certainly not here in Spain. Make sure you never speak like that to anyone. Let them think us harmless, cowed, mere children. Mere leaves blown by the wind.”

  The day after the parade Candía sends word to Cortés to arrange a meeting as the Commander has ordered. Meanwhile he oversees the building of a camp on a meadow beside the Guadalquivir, where the llamas have been put to graze. There, Pizarro’s men—those who have not drifted away since his arrest—are living like castaways in shanties of sticks, planks, old spars and sails. Soon the camp takes better shape, equipped with a cook tent, night watchmen, a strong armoury of oak timbers in which to keep the guns and the things from Peru—all save the gold and silver, locked in a vault beneath a banker’s house.