“Gladly,” said Castino in Spanish, catching the sword and marching quickly over to the altar stone.
“Cut their hands off first,” said Hernando judiciously. “I would like to hear them scream before they die.”
Our two executioners nodded as two more conquistadors pulled Renco and myself into position—yanking on our bonds so that our arms were stretched out across the wide altar. Our wrists were now totally exposed, our hands ready to be excised from our bodies.
“Alberto,” said Renco softly.
“Yes.”
“My friend, before we die, I would like you to know that it has been an honor and a joy to have known you. What you have done for my people will be remembered for generations. For that I thank you.”
“My brave friend,” I replied, “if the circumstances were to repeat themselves, I would do it all again. May God look after you in heaven.”
“And you too,” said Renco. “And you too.”
“Gentlemen,” said Hernando to our executioners. “Remove their hands.”
The sergeant and the Chanca raised their glistening swords at the same time, raised them high above their heads.
“Wait!” someone called suddenly.
At that moment, one of the other conquistadors hurried over to the altar. He appeared older than his fellow soldiers—more grizzled—a wily old fox of a man. He ran directly over to Renco.
He had spied the emerald pendant looped around my companion’ s neck.
The old conquistador quickly lifted the leather necklace over Renco’s head, smiling greedily at him as he did so.
“Thank you, savage,” he sneered as he placed the emerald pendant around his own neck and scurried back to his position over by the temple’s portal.
Our two executioners looked over to Hernando for the signal.
But strangely, Hernando wasn’t watching them anymore. In fact he wasn’t even looking at Renco or myself either. He was just staring off to our right—at the temple—his mouth agape.
I spun to see what it was he was looking at.
“Oh, my Lord . . .” I breathed.
One of the rapas was standing in the half-opened mouth of the portal, peering curiously at the assembled mass of humanity before it.
It loomed large in the doorway—its powerful forelimbs splayed wide, its shoulders bunched with muscle—but its appearance at that moment was oddly comical, chiefly be-cause it was holding something in its mouth.
It was the idol.
The real idol.
The great black cat—previously so terrifying and vicious—now looked like a humble retriever bringing a stick back to its owner. Indeed, the rapa just held the idol dumbly in its mouth, as if it were looking for someone who might wet it again and thus make it sing.
Hernando just gazed at the cat—or rather, at the idol that it held between its mighty jaws. And then, all of a sudden, his eyes swept from the rapa and the idol in its mouth to the idol that he held in his own hands, and from it to Renco and myself, a wash of understanding spreading across his face.
He knew.
He knew that he had been deceived.
The big Spaniard’s face went red with fury as he glared at Renco and me.
“Kill them!” he roared to our executioners. “Kill them now!”
It was at that exact moment that a myriad of things happened at once.
Our executioners raised their swords again—re-aimed at our necks now—and had just begun to bring their blades down in two great swinging arcs when abruptly a sharp whistling sound cut through the air above my head.
Not a moment later, with a powerful thud, an arrow lodged itself in the nose of my executioner, sending a garish fountain of blood exploding from his face and hurling him clear off his feet.
For its part the rapa in the portal—after seeing the crowd of people standing in the clearing before it and sensing another tasty human meal—immediately dropped the idol from its mouth and leapt ferociously at the nearest Spaniard, not a moment before the eleven other rapas rushed out from within the temple—one after the other after the other—and commenced their own attack on the crowd of conquistadors.
Castino had seen the other executioner drop to the ground beside him, struck by the arrow, and had momentarily halted his lunge at Renco’s neck, a look of stunned incomprehension on his face.
I knew what he was thinking.
Who had fired the arrow? And from where?
Castino obviously decided he would answer these questions later, after he had killed Renco.
He quickly raised his blade again and brought it down with tremendous force—
—when another arrow slammed into his sword’s hilt and sent it flying from his grasp.
Not a moment later, a third arrow whistled down from somewhere above us and struck the rope binding Renco’s hands together, cutting it cleanly in two, releasing him.
Renco immediately leapt to his feet, just as Castino—now swordless—swung at him with one of his gigantic fists. Renco quickly yanked the conquistador who had been holding him to the altar in between himself and the oncoming blow, and Castino’s mighty knuckles hit the conquistador square in the face, shattering his nose in an instant, pummeling it into the back of his skull, killing him with a single blow!
Just then another conquistador leveled his musket at Renco and fired at exactly the same time as Renco pivoted on the spot—bringing the dead conquistador around in front of him, using him as a shield—and the musket’s shot opened up a ragged red hole in the center of the dead soldier’s chest.
As Renco went off to join the fight, the conquistador holding my wrists across the altar drew his sword and glared at me with evil intent.
But then—faster than a man can blink—an arrowhead exploded out from the center of his face and the conquistador flopped down onto the altar stone in front of me, face-down, an arrow sticking out from the back of his head.
I looked up into the darkness beyond him, searching for the source of the arrows.
And I saw him.
Saw the figure of a man positioned up on the rim of the canyon.
He was silhouetted against the moon, crouched on one knee with a longbow extended in the firing position and an arrow drawn back to his ear.
It was Bassario!
I gave a cheer, and then I immediately set about unraveling my bonds.
It cannot be understated the carnage that was going on around me at this time. It was mayhem. Pure and utter mayhem. The clearing in front of the temple had become a battlefield—a ferocious, bloody battlefield.
Fighting went on everywhere, in about a dozen separate battles.
Over by the temple, the rapas had already killed five of the conquistadors, and now they were attacking four more Spaniards and their three Chanca trackers.
Elsewhere in the clearing, the seven Incan warriors—avoided by the rapas due to the monkey urine that covered their bodies—fought with the remaining Spaniards. Some of them fell as the conquistadors fired their muskets into them, others hacked into their Spanish foes with rocks or stones or whatever weapons they could lay their hands on. Despite all the murder and bloodshed that I had seen on my travels throughout New Spain, this was indeed the most brutal and primal example of combat that I had ever witnessed.
Beside me, Renco and Castino had both picked up swords and were now engaged in the most ferocious of swordfights.
Castino, taller than my brave companion by at least two heads, held his sword two-handed and unleashed upon Renco a rain of powerful blows.
But Renco parried well—one-handed, just as I had taught him—dancing backward in the mud like a classical Spanish fencer, maintaining his balance as he retreated toward the foliage.
As I finally released the rope from my left wrist and stood, I realized just what a keen student Renco had been. It was clear to me now that the pupil by far outclassed the teacher.
His swordsmanship was dazzling.
For every mighty blow that Castino threw
at him, Renco would quickly bring up his sword—just in time to stop it
The two men’s swords clashed with ferocious intensity.
Castino swung, Renco parried. Castino lunged, Renco danced.
And then Castino unleashed a devilish blow, a blow so hard and swift that it would have taken the head off any ordinary man.
But not Renco.
His reflexes were too quick. He ducked under the blow and in the fleeting instant that followed, he leapt forward, up onto a low rock and launched himself into the air, negating the height difference between himself and Castino, his blade cutting through the air so swiftly it whistled, and before I even knew what was happening, I saw his sword embedded horizontally in the tree trunk behind Castino’s neck.
Castino just stood there, his mouth hanging open, his eyes wide. A moment later, his sword dropped out of his hand.
And then abruptly his entire body just dropped away from beneath his ugly head.
Renco had cut his head clean off his shoulders!
I almost cheered.
Which is to say I would have cheered, had I not had other things with which to deal.
I spun to survey the battlefield around me.
Small battles were still being waged all over the clearing—but the only obvious victors seemed to be the rapas.
It was then that I saw the idol.
The real idol.
It lay on the threshold of the portal, tilted over onto its side, at the exact spot where it had fallen from the rapa’s mouth earlier.
With the length of rope still tied to my right wrist—it was about two paces long—I grabbed a sword and a torch from the ground beside me and ran for the temple, through the clashing of blades and the screams of the ravaged conquistadors.
I reached the portal and fell to the ground next to the idol, grabbed it—
—just as one of the Spanish soldiers rammed into me from behind, bowling both of us in through the portal and into the temple!
The two of us tumbled down a set of wide stone steps, down into the darkness of the temple, a tangled mix of arms, legs, idol and torch.
We hit the bottom of the stairs and fell apart. We were inside a dark stone-walled tunnel of some sort.
My foe clambered to his feet first so that he now stood against the wall, in front of a small alcove set into it. I was still sprawled out on the floor, flat on my behind, with the idol sitting in my lap.
As the Spanish soldier stood over me, I saw the emerald necklace looped around his neck and I recognized him instantly. He was the wily older soldier who had relieved Renco of his priceless pendant earlier.
The old fox drew his sword, raised it high. I was defenseless, completely exposed.
At that moment with an obscenely loud roar, something very large leapt over my head from behind and rammed into the conquistador at frightening speed.
A rapa.
The cat hit the Spaniard with such colossal force that he was thrown back into the alcove behind him. His head struck the wall with the most sickening of sounds and just exploded, cracking like an egg, a foul spray of blood and brains shooting out from the hole that was instantaneously created in the back of his skull.
The wily old soldier collapsed into the alcove, but he was well and truly dead by the time he reached the floor.
The cat began to ravage him on the spot, its tall licking back and forth behind its body as it did so.
I seized the moment grabbed hold of the idol and charged back up the stairs, out of the temple.
I burst out into the night, thankful to have escaped death once again.
But my revelry was short-lived. No sooner was I out of the portal than I heard a sharp click-click from somewhere behind me, followed quickly by a coarse shout of “Monk!”
I spun.
And saw Hernando Pizarro standing before me with a pistol in his hand, leveled right at my chest.
Then, before I could so much as move, I saw a flash of fire flare out from the end of the pistol, heard its loud report echo out all around me, and almost immediately I felt a tremendous weight slam into my chest and I was thrown backward.
I collapsed to the ground instantly, after which I saw nothing but clouds—dark storm clouds rolling across the starry night sky above me—and it was at that moment that I realized to my extreme horror that I had just been shot.
I lay on my back, my teeth clenched in agony, looking up at the cloud-strewn sky, a searing, burning pain shooting through my chest.
Hernando bent over me and took the idol from my loose grasp. As he did so, he slapped me lustily across the face and said, “Die slowly, monk.” Then he was gone.
I lay on the stone steps in front of the temple, waiting for the life to drain out of me, waiting for the pain to become unbearable.
But then for some reason that was beyond my ken, my strength, rather than fading, began to return.
The searing pain in my chest subsided and I sat up instantly and patted my chest at the point where the bullet had created a hole in my cloak.
I felt something there.
Something soft and thick and square. I extracted it from my cloak.
It was my Bible.
My three-hundred-page, handwritten, leather-bound Bible. In the center of it was a tattered round hole that looked like the burrow of a worm. At the farthest extremity of the burrow I saw a warped sphere of dull gray lead.
Hernando’s bullet.
My Bible had stopped his bullet!
Praised be the Word of the Lord.
I leapt to my feet, exhilarated in the moment. I looked for my sword, couldn’t find it anywhere, gazed out over the clearing.
I saw Renco on the far side of the clearing, fighting with two swords against two saber-wielding conquistadors.
Two Incan warriors grappled with a pair of Spaniards not far from where I stood—they seemed to be the only other men left alive on the rock tower.
And then I saw Hernando—with the idol in his hands—hurrying away into the foliage to my right, dashing down the stone stairway there.
My eyes went wide.
He was going for the rope bridge.
If he got there, he would almost certainly cut the bridge and leave us stranded on the tower, stranded with the rapas.
I hurried after him, bounding across the clearing, hurdling a rapa as it lay on the ground tearing into the body of a dead conquistador.
I flew down the stone steps two at a time, my heart racing, my legs pounding, chasing after Hernando. As I rounded a bend in the stairs, I saw him about ten paces in front of me, stepping out onto the rope bridge.
Hernando was large and muscular, and he moved as such. I was smaller, more nimble, faster. I gained on him quickly and dashed out onto the bridge after him, at which moment, with absolutely nothing else to call on, I hurled myself—swordless—at his back.
I collided with him most heavily and we fell together onto the thin floorboards of the rope bridge, high above the canyon floor.
But such was the weight of our landing that the floorboards beneath us shattered like twigs and to my utter horror we fell straight through them, down into the abyss . . .
But our fall was brief.
With a sudden, jarring jolt the two of us came to an abrupt halt. In the terror of our fall, Hernando had reached out for a handhold, had grasped for anything that would stop his fall.
What he had found was the free end of the rope that was still tied to my right wrist. Now the rope lay stretched over a lone floorboard on the rope bridge, with Hernando and myself dangling from both of its extremities!
And so we hung there like counterweights hanging from a pulley, at different ends of the same rope, with dangling cords of the partially broken rope bridge hanging down all around us.
Through force of luck—bad luck in my case—I hung below Hernando, my head down near his dangling knees. Hernando hung up higher, just below the remaining floorboards of the bridge.
I saw that he had the idol in his left
hand, while he held onto my rope with his right. He reached up with his left hand, trying desperately to loop the idol over the rope bridge’s surviving floorboards and garner a handhold.
Once he succeeded in doing that, I realized, he would be safe to let me fall. At present, my weight—small though it was compared to his—was the only thing holding him up.
I had to do something. And quickly.
“Why are you doing this, monk!” Hernando roared as he reached for his salvation, so close now. “What do you care about this idol! I would kill for it!”
As he raged, I saw one of the thin cords dangling down from the rope bridge above us—one of the cords that had previously held up the bridge’s handrail.
If I could just . . .
“You would kill for it, would you, Hernando?” said I, trying to distract him as I endeavored to untie the length of rope that was tied around my right wrist—the rope that connected me to Hernando. “That means nothing to me!”
“No?” he shouted. It was a race now, a race to see who would get to his objective first—Hernando to the floorboard above us, me to untie the rope that joined us together.
“No!” I called back—just as I succeeded in releasing myself from the length of rope.
“Why, monk?”
“Because, Hernando, I would the for it.”
And with that, having now freed myself from the rope tied to my wrist, I reached out for the thin cord dangling down from the bridge above me and grabbed hold of it—while at exactly the same moment I released my grip on the length of rope connecting me to Hernando.
The response was instantaneous.
With the counterweight at the other end of his rope now gone, Hernando fell. Straight down.
He fell past me, his body a streaking blur of screaming humanity, and as a fitting final insult, as he whistled by in front of me, I reached out and plucked the idol from his grasp.
“Noooooo!” Hernando screamed as he fell.
And as I hung there above the abyss—dangling one-handed from the rope bridge’s cord, holding the sacred idol in my free hand—I watched the look of absolute terror on his face get smaller and smaller until, finally, it disappeared into the dark abyss beneath me and soon all I could hear was his screaming.
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