Civilizations

by Laurent Binet

  There was a whistling sound then and an arrow landed in the neck of Charles Quint’s horse. Another sound followed immediately – deeper, vibrating – and the horse was hit in its head by an iron ball barely any bigger than the width of a finger. Soon the sky was criss-crossed with projectiles, all concentrated on the horsemen. The snipers, hidden on the rooftops, had been instructed to kill the horses first. They aimed at the chamfers with their bows and their catapults. One after another, the animals collapsed, whinnying tragically. Men yelled: ‘Salva el Rey!’ And the guards formed a defensive square around Charles. That was their first mistake.

  The second was made by the arquebusiers, who aimed at the snipers on the rooftops but, thanks to their position and the angle, could not hit any of them.

  Then the doors of the church opened and the cavalry burst out, led by Atahualpa. The Quitonians’ ancient equestrian traditions had made them exceptional horsemen. The timing of the attack was determined by their tactical instincts and the boldness they had forged during their odyssey. The horses’ hooves rang out on the cobblestones while they encircled the massed ranks of Levantines, who in their surprise withdrew even closer, so that the arquebusiers no longer had enough space to reload their firearms. All of them were shoved uncomfortably together, entangled in corpses and horses, and since the royal guards who formed the outside line lowered their lances to protect themselves and to guard against any incursions, the whole thing looked like a gigantic epileptic hedgehog.

  The horsemen had to keep riding around the Levantine soldiers to stifle any attempt to break the circle. As soon as a lancer tried to harpoon a horse to clear a way out, the next horseman had to swing a sabre at his neck. The arrows and the steel balls kept raining down on soldiers without shields, striking at the heart of the hedgehog. ‘Dios salve al Rey!’ Charles Quint’s generals surrounded him, protecting him with their bodies.

  The Quitonians were winning, but they were running low on ammunition. The Spaniards who were still standing blew into horns taken from the corpses of their comrades to call for help. The army on the plain began to move. The situation had to be resolved, or the Quitonians were done for. They had to put an end to this quickly. So Ruminahui whipped his horse and galloped towards the lances, then launched himself over them in an extraordinary, impossible leap, landing behind the line of long blades, and the horse trampled on enemy soldiers while Ruminahui swung his huge hammer right and left, pounding the men in their armour like a chef tenderising meat.

  A breach opened up and the others rushed into it. In that instant, the Quitonians were like demons, possessed by the thirst for blood. With axes they dug out a human trench that led straight to the king. They had not forgotten that he was their objective, but – in the homicidal frenzy that drove them onwards – could anyone swear that he remembered the instruction to take the Spanish monarch alive?

  So Atahualpa rushed over, and his horse, like the others, trampled the living and the dead. He rode into the melee, where he could just make out the king’s black armour, still shining in the hot sun but sinking under axe blows, and Atahualpa in turn began slashing at everyone he saw – Levantines, Quitonians, it didn’t matter any more – because he knew that his life and those of his men depended on keeping Charles Quint alive.

  Charles fought bravely and the Duke of Alba fought and died beside him under a storm of swords, and the Duke of Milan fought and fell under a hail of axes, and the poet Garcilaso de la Vega died trying to protect his king from the blades that whipped the air, probing for chinks in Spanish armour, and Charles too was about to die because he fell in turn and the weight of his armour prevented him from getting to his feet again, like an overturned tortoise, so the Quitonians threw themselves at him to tear him to pieces like dogs fighting over a carcass and they chopped chunks off his armoured shell as if they were trophies. But Charles struggled – he wasn’t dead yet – and he squirmed like a wounded animal and his attackers found it hard to finish him off.

  At last Atahualpa was in their midst, but by that point emperors had ceased to exist, on both sides, and his men didn’t listen when he yelled at them to stop, so he had to strike at them with his axe and urge his horse forward and, when he finally reached the king, he spun around and jumped off his horse and helped Charles to his feet.

  The king had wounds to his cheek and his hand – the blood dripping from under his glove – and his clothes had been torn off so he was half-naked, but Atahualpa’s hand on his shoulder protected him like a magic spell: suddenly the soldiers were jolted out of their murderous fury, their avenging arms frozen in flight. The battle ended. The sun was still beating down on the square. On the dial of the tower, the big hand had returned to its starting point.

  17. The Incades, Book I, Verse 11

  Nor conquests fabulous nor actions vain,

  The Muse’s pastime, here adorn the strain:

  Orlando’s fury, and Rugero’s rage,

  And all the heroes of th’ Aonian page,

  The dreams of bards surpass’d the world shall view,

  And own their boldest fictions may be true;

  Surpass’d and dimm’d by the superior blaze

  Of Atahualpa’s deeds, which Truth displays.

  18. Granada

  Some claim that in laying this ambush, Atahualpa was guilty of great treachery, but one should consider the threats that Charles Quint had made before the Inca emissaries about the Toledo massacre. Furthermore, the Quitonians had been able to observe how the devotees of the nailed god treated those who did not share their beliefs in every detail, and this subject was so close to their hearts that submission to their fables was the first thing that the priest demanded of Higuénamota when they met in the square at Salamanca.

  In any case, his capture plunged the king of Spain into the deepest dejection, and the New World into a state of stunned disbelief.

  Atahualpa knew that the Quitonians’ survival was linked inexorably to the life of their hostage. He decided to leave Salamanca for a better fortified place.

  The Quitonian procession crossed through Spain, escorted by Charles’s army, which encircled it, a hostile shadow. Atahualpa and his people were like a little cuy followed by a huge puma, eager to devour it. They had to foil several escape attempts engineered from without, but were helped in this regard by the melancholic mood into which the king had sunk, depriving him of all hope and initiative.

  When they came to the end of their journey, they moved into a red palace built in another age on a rocky spur by the representatives of a rival religion, who had lived there for a long time before being expelled quite recently. The Alhambra in Granada now became their Sacsayhuaman fortress.

  Inside the edifice, behind the walls, was a palace that had been built especially for Charles, but where he had never yet set foot. Although construction was not complete, Atahualpa rectified this anomaly by installing the king there, along with his servants, his courtiers, his dog, and all the facilities due to his rank. His wife and his two children left Toledo and came to join him. Little by little, he shrugged off his torpor and the monarch re-emerged from beneath the shell of the broken man. To assist this process, Atahualpa offered him all the trappings of power and kept him busy with the affairs of his empire. The king was allowed to receive emissaries from all over the New World, who came to enquire about this extraordinary new situation and the political consequences it would undoubtedly provoke. Once they had seen the king, these emissaries were taken to meet the Inca. In this way, Atahualpa was able to sketch the political map of the continent, with the reigning sovereign at the centre, in his power.

  Charles Quint’s empire seemed almost as vast as Tawantinsuyu, if more fragmented: in the south-west there was Spain, in the north the Netherlands and Germany, in the east Austria, Bohemia, Hungary and Croatia, menaced by Suleiman, a formidable conqueror who reigned over another distant empire. In the south, close to Spain but separated from it by the sea, was a region that seemed coveted by all: Italy, a land of pe
rpetual warfare, where the chief of the shaved men lived, the earthly representative of the nailed god. Charles’s great rival for supremacy in the New World was the king of a country that cut his empire in two: France, a land whose own territory was threatened by an island to the north called England. A small confederation in the heart of the continent, Switzerland, provided soldiers for armies everywhere. Spain’s neighbour Portugal was a kingdom of explorers, who sailed over the seas in search of other worlds.

  At the south-west tip of Spain, a strait named the Pillars of Hercules opened towards the Ocean Sea, which the Quitonians had crossed. On the other side of this strait lay the northern edge of the land of the Moors, whom the kings had expelled from Spain forty harvests before. (Higuénamota calculated that this coincided with the Spaniards’ arrival at her island.) Some of these Moors had remained in Granada, even after the defeat of their chiefs; they were called Moriscos. They lived on a hill that faced the Alhambra – Albaicín, which meant, in their language: ‘the miserable’.

  Outside Granada, the imperial army had set up camp in a fortified town called Santa Fe, where the Spanish court had gathered to try to settle on a strategy to deal with the crisis caused by the capture of their king.

  Assembled there were the most powerful people in the kingdom, other than the king himself: the mummy-headed adviser Juan Pardo Tavera; old Nicolas Perrenot de Granvelle, who had led Chalco Chimac and Quizquiz to meet Charles Quint in his tent; Francisco de los Cobos y Molina, his secretary of state, who wore a large red cross around his neck inlaid with an enormous ruby; Antonio de Leyva, the Duke of Terranova and Prince of Ascoli, who had survived the massacre of San Martin but who had lost the use of his legs in the battle, where he’d been left for dead. Antonio de Leyva pleaded the case for an immediate assault, but the others considered the Alhambra to be impregnable, at least while the emperor was held hostage there.

  It was true that the Salamanca ambush had enabled the Quitonians to escape a seemingly hopeless situation, but it remained one of the greatest uncertainty. Atahualpa gloried in his victory and the prestige it had brought him, but he knew that its benefits would be fleeting if they were not consolidated. Soon, the element of surprise would no longer be enough, since the imbalance in the rival forces remained problematic: they were still just a handful of people against the rest of the world.

  Atahualpa was reassured by the deference emissaries from all over the continent showed his prisoner: with the king of Spain at his mercy, he knew he held a precious asset. Charles himself reinforced this idea when he suggested that the Quitonians keep his two children as hostages – little Prince Philip, the heir to the empire, who was five years old, and his sister, Marie, one year his junior – in exchange for his freedom. That proposal made Atahualpa laugh. Charles, embarrassed, laughed too, while glancing uneasily at his wife.

  Whenever Charles received a visitor in his half-built palace, the visitor would be led to the adjoining palace, that of the former kings, where Atahualpa had taken up residence. The visitor walked through dark rooms where the motto of Charles Quint, King of Spain and Holy Roman Emperor, had been engraved in the design of a white pillar inlaid with blue ceramic: Plus ultra, which, in the language of the amautas of this world, meant ‘further beyond’, and which Atahualpa decided to adopt for his own use. Then the visitor passed in front of a long pool bordered by hedges, its water reflecting the building’s arches like upside-down boats, guarded by a solid red stone tower in the shape of a crenellated cube, until finally he entered the ambassadors’ suite, plunged in almost total darkness. At the end of this room, three alcoves had been dug into the wall, opening on to the plain and the snow-covered mountains of Granada, but the windows were partially obscured by blinds. Atahualpa sat in the embrasure of the central window. To his right stood the giant Ruminahui. To his left, Princess Higuénamota lay on some cushions.

  After leaving the sun-drenched courtyard, the visitor would blink, dazzled by the rays of sunlight that filtered through the holes pierced in the windows, barely able to distinguish the backlit figures of the monarch and his two advisers, who appeared to him as asymmetric shadows. Above his head, a beautifully worked wooden ceiling represented the starry sky, making him feel even smaller.

  Upon first seeing this room, where his ancestors had accepted the surrender of those former kings in days gone by, Charles Quint had exclaimed: ‘How sad they must have been, to lose such beauty.’ He had spent a wonderful time here with the queen after their wedding, their intimacy cut short by affairs of state, and he had never returned since. When he heard that phrase, Atahualpa said to Charles: ‘How sad must be he who, privileged to enjoy such beauty, did not do so when he had the chance.’ And he consoled him for his misfortune by showing the king that, thanks to him, Charles could savour the splendours of the palace conquered by his ancestors.

  One of the first visitors was the former master of Granada, Boabdil, expelled from the palace forty harvests before, who came on the off chance that he might be able to claim something; but the old man in the turban was given nothing and he returned to his exile, to die soon after. Shaken by this visit, Charles said to his entourage (and his words were reported to his host): ‘I am the Unfortunate One.’

  Atahualpa received a very young man from Florence, the city of the amauta Machiavelli, whose works he had studied in Salamanca. The young man’s name was Lorenzino and he was a member of a great family, the Medicis. He seemed full of a strange passion when he exclaimed: ‘Ah, if only republicans were men…!’ Neither Higuénamota nor Pedro Pizarro had any idea what this meant, but Lorenzino spoke to the Inca of tremendous palaces and remarkable treasures to lure him into complicated wars. Above all, he wanted his aid to overthrow his cousin, the king of Florence, a depraved man who tyrannised his people. Intrigued by the descriptions of this fabulous land, Quizquiz dreamed of going off to discover it, but Atahualpa – who was less than enthused by the idea of a political regime based on a sort of lordly collegiality whose authority came from the people rather than the Sun – would only agree to grant asylum and protection to the young Florentine.

  A man from a German city called Augsburg had been sent by a family, the Fuggers, who were not exactly lords or curacas but who were at the head of a sort of ayllu. They were merchants who traded in gold and silver. The envoy was clothed very simply, and Charles treated him with disdain. Nevertheless, the Quitonians had noticed an odd imbalance: in Levantine society, gold and silver were not used only for ornamentation or as signs of nobility, but conferred considerable power on whomever possessed them by enabling – through the use of little round pieces of those metals – the acquisition and exchange of all sorts of goods. The Fuggers’ envoy was pressing the emperor to keep certain promises that had been written on talking sheets, which were used as quipus, and explaining to him that his supply of gold and silver would be cut off if he did not keep those promises. This prospect seemed to put Charles in a very difficult position. As for Atahualpa, he smiled as he daydreamed of his Andes mountains, which were stuffed full of those metals.

  An amauta, also from Augsburg, came to talk to him about the ‘real’ presence of the nailed god during religious ceremonies that involved drinking the black drink and eating bread. His name was Philip Melanchthon and he wore a flat hat made of black cloth. Atahualpa pretended to listen attentively because he had noticed that Charles did not like this man or his ideas and yet the king had spent a long time with him and appeared, if not exactly worried (because he had other things to worry about, given his current predicament), at least strangely preoccupied by these questions. Melanchthon was the envoy of a man whom Charles considered a demon: the infamous Luther, who had fomented a religious revolt because he wanted to reform aspects of the Christian cult and challenge certain points of doctrine, the importance of which the Quitonians found it hard to understand.

  A shaved man arrived from Paris, where he had gone to study, to speak with him about the best way of countering Luther’s growing influence. Th
e new situation created by the sudden entrance of Atahualpa had somewhat altered the continent’s political priorities; yet, in the eyes of the representatives of the local religion – whose fervent defender the king of Spain considered himself to be – defeating these rebel reformers in the north remained an urgent issue. Atahualpa listened with interest to the shaved man, whose name was Iñigo López de Loyola. He was a small man with a lively gaze that seemed to mingle cunning and goodness. He liked to speak about his beliefs and he did so with a clarity that helped the Quitonians increase their knowledge of the New World’s legends.

  The Levantines believed in a family of gods comprising a father, a mother and their son. The father lived in the sky and he sent his son to earth to save men but, after many adventures and misunderstandings, the father let his son be nailed to a cross by the men he was trying to help because they didn’t recognise him. Then the son returned from the underworld and joined his father in the sky. Since that day, mortified by their mistake, the Levantines had been waiting and hoping for the son to return to earth. At the same time, they constantly prayed for and venerated the mother, who had the strange and unique gift of remaining a virgin after the father had fertilised her. There also existed a secondary divinity known as the Holy Spirit, who was sometimes confused with the father, sometimes with the son, sometimes with both. The sign that Christians made with their hands at every opportunity represented the cross on which the son had been nailed. Thus, all their actions were supposedly dictated by the desire to make up for the ingratitude that their ancestors had shown to their god when they tortured him and nailed him to a wooden cross at the top of a mountain in a distant land. The Christians had long ago been expelled from that land, but they dreamed of one day reconquering it.