“Yes,” the interpreter says faintly, withdrawing his hasty pawn, advancing a knight.
“Yes what?”
“Arí, Sapa Inka. Yes, Only King.”
“Do not forget, Waman. This . . . all this”—Atawallpa sweeps his hand around the room, a hand soft as a woman’s, with long, buffed nails which tap the pondered chessmen with a dry clacking that at times makes Waman want to scream—“all this will change. I shall get out of here. Out of these . . .” The Inca gestures at his shackled feet. “The World will then be as it was. So you’d be wise to treat me with respect. In your words and in your games. Play straight with me and I shall make you a great man.”
Waman cannot help pitying the fallen Inca—his Empire shrunk to this board, these tiny men, tiny castles. He guesses that Atawallpa dislikes him. Why wouldn’t he? But he likes the game. Moreover, despite Pizarro’s precautions (there is always a Spaniard who has some Quechua within earshot), the Inca uses the games to learn of Spanish ways, Spanish plans, and the land of Spain from which his troubles flow.
As agreed with Pizarro, the Inca’s prison is also his treasury, his strongrooms for the gold and silver. The heap of gold has nearly reached the line—the dark painted band that rings all the great halls of the Incas, running through the niches at the height of a man’s eye. But the ransom is taking longer to gather than Atawallpa expected, for as the hoard grows—vessels, jewellery, architectural plates and finials, a dozen life-size statues of the dynasty’s queens—Pizarro has everything hollow pounded flat.
The Inca is wearing his velvety robe of bat skins, sewn into a single fabric like the night. A cloud of spice surrounds him and at his forehead hangs the crimson fringe. He still has the trappings of kingship, perhaps even of divinity. He is allowed wives and concubines, his blind musicians, his dwarves and jugglers, his personal staff—the women who dress and feed him. But no men save the young postmen who bring delicacies: smoked fowl and rare fruit from the jungle, seafood from the coast. More dangerously, they also bring the Inca reports and carry away his orders, though these are always vetted by Pizarro, using a captive knotkeeper and Waman. This risk must be run, for only through the Inca can the Spaniard wield his brittle power.
Rings within rings. In the middle, Atawallpa. Around him the barbarians. Around them the Empire, little of which they have seen, much less of which they understand. Peru is frozen. And so is the conquest of Peru. It did not end on that bloody afternoon in the plaza. It has only begun.
Atawallpa’s armies could still overwhelm the invaders, but if he orders an attack the Old One will burn him alive. The Inca dreads fire above all deaths, and not only for the pain. A Sapa Inka’s afterlife is lived in Cusco, where—like all previous kings and queens enthroned in their palaces—he presides, embalmed, over his royal house forever. The Inca can save his kingdom or himself.
Atawallpa’s dilemma, it seems to Waman, is like their Christ’s. He must give his life to save his World.
The Inca’s broad face lifts from the chessboard to the piled gold and the light—the face of a man much older than his thirty years. For a long time he sits like a royal mummy, regal yet lifeless, gazing on things to come. Then his hand lifts to his cheek as if to brush aside a hair. The hand falls wet.
“Your move,” he says at last.
“With respect, Sapa Inka, I believe it may be yours. My horse . . .”
“Such shame . . .” the Inca mutters, regarding the youth with sudden revulsion, as if surprised to find him here.
Atawallpa overthrows the board.
—
One morning the Old One visits the Inca after breakfast and blithely orders him to send for his imprisoned brother Waskhar and have him brought from Huanuco right away. A good move, the Inca admits to himself. I would do the same thing if I were Pizarro. Waskhar will welcome the bearded ones as his deliverers. The Old One will then kill me like a bug and march in triumph to the capital.
He calls for his women to bring beer and coca. He must think.
—
Waskhar is coming, everyone hears. But shortly before he is expected in Cajamarca they hear that he is dead, slain on the road. How did Atawallpa do it? Waman wonders. How did he send out word for Waskhar to be murdered?
The Spaniards do not understand the quipus and pay less attention to them than they should. But the Commander’s own knotkeeper inspected the orders sent to Huanuco, reading them out to Waman, who followed the man’s fingers playing slowly over every knot and thread.
Pizarro burns with rage for days, accusing the interpreter of incompetence, even collusion. Again Waman feels the Old One’s blows, his hand twisting his ear. “You’re much luckier than you deserve, boy.” He hisses, a vein in his neck pulsing and writhing like a snake. “Lucky I have need of you. There’ll be no visits to the Inca except when I want you there. I should have you flogged to death in the stocks. The knotkeeper too. I’ll brook no treason. One more slip and you die.”
Alone in his room, Waman soothes his anger as he often does—by thinking of the Spaniard he felled on Gallo Island years ago. If he could do it then, he can do it again now. The fire in his mind lights up the different ways: a sling, a bludgeon, a stolen knife or sword, poison, fire. If the Old One thinks me a traitor, I shall be one. If he plans to kill me, I shall kill him first.
—
The pack trains of gold arrive less often now, and the pieces they bring are less fine. Fear, boredom, and rumour take root in the Spanish camp. Why is the flow of treasure faltering? Has Peru been stripped of its best? Or are the highways choked with soldiers, massing for attack?
“You must be joking,” Atawallpa says when the Old One confronts him with these accusations. “Why are you always making fun of me? Look at me here! How can I and my people be any threat to you?” He gestures theatrically at his new cell, smaller and darker than the last. His punishment for Waskhar’s death is separation from his ransom. No longer can he see what is added—and what spirited away. “If you think I’m assembling troops, send out scouts to look. If you think I’m running out of gold and silver, send men to the capital. Let them see the metal in Cusco. Let them oversee its transport here. What’s stopping you?”
“There’s no time for that. I know how long it would take. A month each way.”
“Doubtless you need every man you have to guard me,” the Inca taunts. “You have so few. But why not send two or three by hammock? What harm in that? If something happens to them, your loss is small. And it will be fast—faster than your horses.” Twenty runners, he explains, go with each hammock, taking turns on the pole day and night. “They’ll get there almost as quickly as the post. They could be back in a week.”
The Commander lifts a doubting eyebrow, runs a fingernail through prawn-like whiskers.
“A week?”
“Our week. Ten days. Five each way.”
—
The stalemate draws on. The tension grows. Pizarro sends three men to Cusco as Atawallpa suggested. One comes back right away to say all is quiet. The others linger in the capital, protected by Atawallpa’s occupying army while they sack the Empire’s richest temple, Qorikancha, the Golden Court. This they have to do themselves, with ladders and crowbars, for no Peruvian will raise a hand against the Sun’s greatest house on Earth.
It takes three hundred llamas to carry the metal to Cajamarca.
Atawallpa’s ransom is now fulfilled.
But as the Cusco gold arrives in Cajamarca, so does Pizarro’s partner. Almagro marches into the city at the head of a fresh army, more than doubling the occupiers’ strength. The Spaniards rejoice wildly. Waman watches with foreboding as One-Eye reins up in the square, doffs his helmet, exposes his bald scalp and ice-blue stare.
Pizarro gives the order for the melting to begin. Llama trains come from the jungle, unloading mounds of charcoal. Smiths brought from the Empire’s mines and workshops bui
ld furnaces on a hillside, placed to catch the wind.
The furnaces burn round the clock for weeks, lighting the cold, clear nights of the Andean winter like fiery volcanoes. Day by day, the goldsmiths reduce their lives’ work to ingots. Pizarro and Almagro oversee everything together, united by mistrust as much as partnership. At the end there are seven tons of gold and thirteen tons of silver, each bar weighed and stamped by the royal taxman who assays the whole and levies King Charles’s fifth. More than once the taxman shakes his head in disbelief: Atawallpa’s ransom is worth more than all the treasuries in Christendom.
The Inca himself is half forgotten, his value leaking away as the hot metal of his bargain runs into the moulds. The tension now is between the Old One and Almagro, who argue daily over how much each partner and his men should get. Waman hears their anger rumbling like thunder in the palace halls. The men, too, are uneasy, dissecting each rumour of what a horseman, a foot soldier, an armourer—even a tailor—will receive.
At last the distribution is made. From dawn until dusk in the palace courtyard, men file past a table where the royal taxman and his notaries sit behind ledgers and pots of ink. Waman watches from the shadows for a while. It is hard to read faces behind beards, but the eyes say much: alight with anticipation, greed, impatience. As each man signs or makes his rough mark, chests of wood and rawhide are brought out and handed over.
Each footman receives a man’s weight in precious metal: ninety pounds of silver, forty-five pounds of gold. Horsemen get a double share, and officers more according to their rank. The Old One awards himself thirteen. On top of that he claims a “gift”—the Inca’s palanquin—worth another two shares or more. The beggar’s prophecy has come true: Francisco Pizarro is the richest conqueror on Earth.
That night Waman and Candía climb to the summit of the usnu. They sit side by side in its twin seats high above the torchlit crowd in the square, where men are gambling at dice and cards, paying losses on the spot with bars of gold.
“Already it glides from their hands,” Waman remarks. The sight disgusts him.
Candía pours cups of beer from a jug. “Cheer up, my friend,” he says, wagging his great beard. “To health and wealth.”
“And time to enjoy them.”
“Time to go where we can spend it! We’re like men without arseholes at a feast.” The gunner reveals he earned a horseman’s share, and a bit extra for his guns. “But what can I do with it here? The more gold we have, the less it buys. I just saw a horse change hands for the cost of a castle in Spain.”
“I don’t have to worry about that,” Waman says. “The Old One gave me nothing, not even a tailor’s share.”
“You’re not the only one he bilked. Almagro and his men got nothing too! Only repayment for their outlay in coming here and more promises: whatever treasure may lie far ahead in the south. Pizarro can get away with cheating you, Felipe. But he’s mad to cheat Almagro.
“Because I’m a gunner,” the Greek adds after a silence, “people think I’m deaf. But I’m not too deaf to hear angry soldiers. Almagro’s lot want revenge. They want a fight.”
The jug is empty. The night deepens as the torches below them die one by one and Pizarro’s delirious men drift away to beds and women. Waman hears a metallic chime on the arm of the stone seat. “Take this, Felipe,” Candía says softly, sliding an ingot against his hand. Waman slides it back, unsure whether he does so from pride or because the metal is made of blood.
“Go on, Felipe, take it. Are you wary of Greeks bearing gifts?”
“No,” says the interpreter, missing the joke.
“Take it,” Candía insists. “Now that Peru’s awash with gold, anyone without it will starve. Like they do in every other land I’ve seen. One day that little bar might save your life. Anyway, I’m rich as Croesus. I have a hundred more.”
Again he says no, but the Greek will not be refused. Candía tucks the bar into Waman’s jerkin, holds it there with a firm hand.
“If you won’t keep it for yourself, Felipe, then keep it for me. So I don’t gamble it away.”
Trusted again (or allowed, at least) to visit Atawallpa now the Spaniards’ fortunes have brightened so dramatically, Waman resumes his chess games with the prisoner. One afternoon he finds the Inca cross-legged on the floor, bent over a square of red cloth with coca leaves arrayed in patterns. In his right palm are other leaves, on which he blows a prayer then casts like dice.
Beside him is a young woman who gathers up each throw and prepares a new fan of leaves for Atawallpa’s hand. She is young, slim, like the girls who served beer at the Inca’s baths on the night before the slaughter. Months ago now, and they feel like years. The light is low, the windows screened. He can’t see her face well. Yet she seems familiar. Maybe she was one of those at the baths. Or one who came in and gathered up the pieces when Atawallpa overthrew the chessboard.
Her poise, her straight back as she kneels, reminds him of Tika. But then so does every woman of her age and build. Often he has seen her—in doorways and fields; in shops, markets; crossing streets—the wishful foolishness of a lover whose love is lost, his cousin dissolving into a stranger whenever he gets near. He thinks of how his people all seemed alike when he came back from Spain. Same skin, same hair, same almond eyes. If, one day, he does see Tika, would he know her? And would she know him, especially now, his face a ruin? I believe the girl you mentioned may be alive. He clings to this, spoken haltingly by that woman he questioned in Little River. Yet more than half the World has died. And there must be scores of cities like Cajamarca. Scores of Chosen Houses. Tika could be in any of them. Or none. The odds are against him; against her.
He has seen coca leaves read before, but never by the Inca. He should not be intruding on this ritual. It seems Atawallpa has not yet felt his presence, and Waman begins to catfoot from the room. The girl glances up, lowers her eyes quickly, makes a patting motion with a hand. He gets the impression that to slink out would be unwise, riskier than to stay. Besides, what can Atawallpa do to him—to anybody—now that One-Eye and his men are here?
He sinks to the floor behind them, catching some of the Inca’s whispered words: Mama Kuka, kuka kintu, kananchiktapas yachanki . . . Lady Coca, choice coca, you know the destiny of all . . .
While Atawallpa scries the leaves, the girl stretches an arm behind her towards Waman, beckoning him with fluttered fingers. He approaches softly, crouching, until their fingers touch. She pushes something into his palm. She folds his hand shut and pats it away. Now he should go.
He walks briskly down the street, hears the brass-bound door slammed shut by Pizarro’s sentries. As soon as he’s out of their sight, he opens his fist and looks. A thread. No knots, no encoded words. Only a plain blue thread plucked from the hem of her dress. A message; yet no message. Like a blank scrap of paper.
That night he can’t sleep, the afternoon at the Inca’s prison circling in his mind. She must be Tika. Who else would do such a thing, take such a risk? Or is it simply that the girl is desperate, seeking a new protector in case something happens to Atawallpa. As well it may.
The next morning goes by with agonising slowness. He paces in his room, wanders courtyards and halls, walks the city streets for miles, mind roiling, hardly aware where he is or where he’s been. He returns to Atawallpa’s quarters when the sun, well past the zenith, is touching a certain stone on the curved wall of the temple, the usual time for their games. The girl is not there. Only the Inca. And Pizarro’s guards at the door.
Atawallpa takes the first game. Soon after they begin a second—a rapid slaughter of pawns—the same girl comes in with cups and a jug. She waits in a corner. Waman feels her gaze upon him. He tries to return it sidelong, when the Inca’s eyes are on the board, but again she’s in shadow and he can’t see clearly. Just the glint of a silver brooch pinning her shawl.
“You have my permission to look at me, Waman,”
Atawallpa says coldly, studying the chessboard. “But that does not extend to making eyes at my women. Luckily for you, things are not normal now. But soon they will be. Reflect on what I’ve said before. I can make you a great man. Or I can squash you. As for her”—Atawallpa nods at the girl—“she has no guardian but me. You risk her life with your eyes.”
Before Waman can recover and beg forgiveness, the Inca changes the subject to Pizarro and Almagro.
“I hear,” he says in a probing tone, “that the Machu Apu and One-Eye are fighting. So far only with words. But will it come to war between them, I ask myself, as it did with Waskhar and me? You know those men, Waman. What do you say?”
“I can’t say, Only King.”
“Can’t or won’t?”
“I hear nothing beyond what everyone hears. Since Waskhar’s death I’ve been mistrusted, kept away from weighty matters.”
“Then tell me what ‘everyone’ is hearing.”
“Just what you know. That the two have fallen out over the metal.”
“What else?”
Waman’s mind is on the girl, who must be Tika. He is certain now. But how to reach her?
He struggles to recall any news or gossip for the Inca. “Some say the Old One has persuaded Almagro that there’s more gold in Cusco—much more than was brought here. Also, Hernando Pizarro is getting ready to leave for Spain.”
“He alone? Why not all?”
“I don’t know, Sapa Inka.”
“What are they saying about me?”
“Most say you have fulfilled your promise and should be freed. Some say you can’t be released safely until all the Christians reach their ships.”
“Do any want me dead?”
“I . . . I have heard one or two say this. Only a few.”
The Gold Eaters Page 21
