The Light of Machu Picchu

by [Incas 03] The Light of Machu Picchu (retail) (epub)

  ‘Fucking hell, are you going to tell me what this is all about?’

  ‘You know very well,’ murmured Sebastian, turning toward the horses.

  ‘I know nothing!’

  ‘People are saying all kinds of odd things about last night,’ said Bartholomew softly.

  ‘Such as what?’

  ‘That you rode Itza through the hail of stones and arrows with impunity, whilst others fell.’

  ‘What of it? We were lucky, very lucky – that’s all.’

  ‘No, that’s not all,’ said Sebastian.

  ‘Sebastian, you’re wounded. You were frightened, and you allowed free rein to your imagination. It’s only natural.’

  ‘Protest all you want, Gabriel, I know what I saw, and there was nothing natural about it. Itza returned without a scratch, whereas I have just spent the last hour seeing to Pongo’s wounds.’

  ‘Would you like to hear the rumor that was spread this morning?’ interrupted Bartholomew. ‘Gonzalo is telling anyone who’ll listen that both the Devil and the Incas are with you. Those who were with you last night swear that they saw Saint James himself rise from you. Some even claim that the Sacred Virgin cleared you a passage.’

  ‘Well, I didn’t notice any saints,’ said Gabriel with ill humor. ‘And now I hear this rot… all that happened last night was a fight in which too many people died – and that’s it.’

  ‘No. Even the Inca warriors saw it,’ Sebastian maintained. ‘That’s why they let us go. In any case, you know it very well: you drove them back with your sword without even touching them.’

  ‘Sebastian’s not the only one to have seen what happened, Gabriel,’ continued Bartholomew. ‘I’ve spoken with the cavalrymen whom you saved as well as with the Canaries. They all agree: the flaming arrows and the stones spared you as though by a miracle. Are you protected by God? Or is it… is it thanks to your friends among the Incas?’

  ‘Brother Bartholomew, with all due respect, you have lost your mind! I know how susceptible the Inca warriors are during combat to anything that smells of magic. All I did was play on that susceptibility! I pretended that I feared neither their stones nor their fire. And it worked. Furthermore…’

  But Gabriel’s voice lacked conviction: his tone was unnatural. He could see both the doubt and the incomprehension in his friends’ eyes.

  ‘…Furthermore, I was lucky. It was luck, that’s all…’

  In truth, he wasn’t so convinced himself. Sebastian was right: Gabriel had felt something strange happen to him during the battle. He had felt as though he had been empowered with a strength beyond any limits. But how could he admit such a thing without appearing mad?

  ‘You must believe me,’ he repeated in a muted voice. ‘It’s true that I don’t care whether I die or live. But there was no miracle, and no magic, last night.’

  ‘In your eyes, maybe so. But for those suffering here who don’t want to die, it’s not so simple,’ replied Bartholomew. ‘They are not so proud that they consider meeting Death a fine moment, Gabriel Montelucar.’

  ‘What do you want me to do to convince you, Brother Bartholomew? Shall I go out into the alleys of Cuzco unarmed and prove that the Incas can slay me as easily as they can any other man?’

  Bartholomew answered by raising his fused fingers to his face and deliberately making the sign of the cross before admonishing Gabriel:

  ‘We don’t ask so much of you. God will decide what path you take! But until He does, have the humility to behave like anyone else, and lie low. Don Hernando has forbidden any further action by his forces. That goes for you, too.’

  They left him, and Gabriel remained lying on the ground. He gazed over at the massive stones of the unbreachable fortress and then beyond, up at the mountains. He laughed privately at his so-called luck, or his divine protection. ‘Where is she?’ he murmured to himself. ‘Where is she?’

  But the gods who had spared his life the previous night now refused him the answer that would have restored to him his taste for it.

  * * *

  Over the following five days and five nights, Cuzco became a maelstrom of pandemonium, death, and suffering.

  The Inca warriors had learned from the Spanish attack during the first night: they not only rebuilt the barricades so that they prevented any more cavalry charges, but they dug more hidden ditches in front of them and posted guards over them day and night. Furthermore, in order to terrorize the Spaniards and deny them any rest, they maintained an incessant cacophony made up of the doleful wails of their horns and the sinister sound of drumming, alternating with the shrill, raucous chants and jeers of their warriors. Day and night, the archers and sling wielders on the high walls of the Sacsayhuaman fortress took turns bombarding the great square and the last cancha in which the besieged Spaniards remained holed up like rats.

  Hunger, thirst, and the complete impossibility of rest – the endless din made unthinkable even the notion of sleep – sent many of the men temporarily mad. Some shrieked deliriously with their eyes closed, others sobbed like children. Some took to praying so incessantly and with such vehemence that Bartholomew didn’t dare accompany them in their expressions of piety. Others remembered desperate methods of assuaging the craving for food and drink adopted during Governor Don Francisco Pizarro’s earliest campaigns, and took to roasting earthworms and swallowing their own urine, even begging others for theirs.

  On the fourth day, realizing that he wouldn’t be able to restrain the demented, bloodthirsty men much longer, Don Hernando agreed to his brothers Juan and Gonzalo’s request to lead twenty foot soldiers in a charge to retake Gonzalo’s house on the other side of the great square, where they hoped to find a few of the pigs that they had brought from Cajamarca, along with some beans and perhaps even some cornflour. Gonzalo forbade Gabriel to join the attack, so Gabriel, along with a few others, formed a squad to protect Gonzalo’s men from any flanking manoeuvre by the Incas.

  It was only after four hours of fighting that Juan and Gonzalo’s horses, trampling over Inca corpses, managed at last to enter the building. But the only pigs they found were dead ones – the animals’ carcasses had become infested with maggots and had been left to rot. In the cellar the Spaniards found only one cask of flour that had been overlooked by the Incas. However, the discovery of a stone basin full of fresh water and fed by some invisible source, a fountain like the one in Sebastian’s house, caused them to cry out with joy.

  That night, this victory, slight though it was, restored some hope to the Spaniards. The Incas could no longer pound all of the Aucaypata, the great square, with stones. Men were ordered to fetch from Gonzalo’s house every sheet, tablecloth and carpet that they could find. And the house was as full of fabric as a Cadiz warehouse.

  They worked feverishly throughout the night, and their exertions made them forget about the clamor from the hills, their hunger, and their fear. While cavalrymen took turns keeping the great square out of Manco’s troops’ hands, foot soldiers, their thick-fingered hands more used to the sword or lance, sewed together the various fabrics, while others wove rope, raised stockades, or pulled free from the charred roofs those few beams that were still usable.

  Hernando’s modest success had made him bold, and now he was trying to break the noose that was strangling them. He sent his cavalry into skirmishes further and further away from the great square. But these actions soon proved more costly than useful, and threatened to weaken what little strength the Spaniards had left.

  The same thing happened at each skirmish. Horses fell into the traps that the Incas had dug even in the terraces to the west of the square. Their riders were thrown to the ground and were immediately assaulted by dozens of Inca warriors, or else literally buried beneath a hail of stones.

  On the evening of the fifth day, Juan Pizarro was brought in and placed on one of the cots in Bartholomew’s makeshift infirmary. A sling stone had shattered his jaw and, despite his courage, he moaned with pain as the monk dressed his wound as best he
could.

  Bartholomew got Gabriel to help hold Juan still while he pulled at the wounded man’s jaw so that the broken bones wouldn’t overlap. Bandages and splints had been hastily prepared. By the time Don Hernando and Gonzalo had rushed to his bedside, Juan had fainted. Gabriel was astonished to see Gonzalo kneel by his brother’s cot and stroke Juan’s forehead as one would a child’s. Tears welled up in his eyes, and his muttered words of comfort were indistinct as they left his trembling lips.

  ‘Don’t worry too much, Don Gonzalo,’ said Bartholomew in a low voice. ‘It’s a painful wound, but not a fatal one. Your brother is as hardy as he is brave. He will be on his feet tomorrow, although he’ll still be a little feverish.’

  ‘On his feet to do what, by the blood of Christ!’ cried Hernando, clenching his wrist.

  His eyes met Gabriel’s. For once, they seemed to be imploring him for help.

  They all looked at the gap between the canvas stretched above them and the cancha’s wall. Those in the Sacsayhuaman fortress had already prepared for night, and a hundred torches glowed from atop its walls. In the dusk’s failing light, the fortress’s towers looked like a flame-colored dragon’s head.

  ‘It’s up there that we have to go,’ murmured Gabriel.

  ‘Up there? You know that’s impossible.’

  ‘We must attack and take the fortress,’ repeated Gabriel. ‘It’s all we can do.’

  ‘You go too far! Nothing is better guarded than those towers. The roads leading to it are so steep that the horses slip and move too slowly to charge. We wouldn’t cover a hundred paces before being massacred. The towers’ walls are so high that we couldn’t scale them even with ladders. We would have to take the fortress from behind. But before we could do that, we’d have to make it out of the city in one piece!’

  ‘Don Hernando, you know as well as I do: there’s no other solution. We must take Sacsayhuaman, at whatever cost.’

  ‘Another one of your follies, like your attempt to destroy the barricades.’

  ‘If we make it,’ continued Gabriel, not listening, ‘we will gain control of the noose with which they are choking us: we will turn it against them. Look at your brother, Don Hernando. How has his ordeal served us? There are only fifty cavalrymen left. It’s our last chance.’

  Don Hernando had a grave look in his eye. His doubts and his hostility to Gabriel were at odds with his hope.

  ‘Let us first look after my brother,’ he muttered. ‘Then we’ll think about it.’

  ‘Yes, look after your brother,’ said Gabriel. ‘We need every brave man we have.’

  For the first time, Gabriel detected in Hernando’s glance something other than hatred and distrust. He thought he saw something like respect.

  Gabriel looked into Gonzalo’s red, tear-laden eyes, surprised by how affected he was. But then the angel-faced younger brother turned to him and spat:

  ‘You’re the one who should die, not him!’

  But Gabriel sensed how terribly the youngest Pizarro brother was suffering, and he said nothing.

  CHAPTER 5

  Ollantaytambo, May 1536

  The sun’s disk was huge. It rested on the air still separating it from the peaks of the western mountains like a huge, magnificent golden bubble, one that could at any moment burst open and engulf This World as a father embraces a son returned from a long journey.

  Anamaya stood facing it, wide-eyed on the steep steps in the royal city of Ollantaytambo. She felt its heat on her face, on her chest and belly. She felt the sun’s breath enter her.

  ‘Inti, O Inti, shine Your light into our night.’

  The closer the sun came to the mountains on the other side of the valley, the larger it grew. Anamaya could hear the priests behind her, standing on narrow terraces so steep that they seemed to have been built directly above one another. They stood facing the sun amid tall stalks of ceremonial corn, the corn still green except for those replicas scattered among it that were made of gold, and chanted:

  O Inti,

  O Powerful Father,

  You have travelled the Universe and made the day burn.

  O Inti,

  O Compassionate Father,

  You turn red, You become blood,

  O Inti,

  May Quilla renew your blood,

  May She embrace You and relieve You of Your weariness

  In the Shadows of the Other World.

  And we shall close our eyes,

  We shall tremble like the stars until daybreak.

  O Inti,

  We shall tremble in the darkness and weep

  Until You have rested,

  Until dawn returns in the fire of Your gold.

  O Inti.

  Anamaya chanted the prayer with them as the sun seemed to grow heavier, floating gently down onto the mountains and then beyond, into the realm of the unseeable, leaving behind it a crimson glow as red as a heart cut open with a tumi.

  The warmth within Anamaya’s chest abruptly disappeared. A gentle but cold breeze came up from the mountains. The heavy stones of the buildings glowed red in the gloaming, and for a moment their surfaces seemed as supple and light as a child’s skin.

  And then an enormous shadow spread through the depths of the great Sacred Valley. The river’s surface lost its shimmer amid the soft green terraces and became a giant black snake as cold as the eastern sky, which had already turned dark between the high peaks of the mountains. The narrow valley running down from them, ragged with sharp contrasts of light and shade, yawned open like a mouth, slowly swallowing the silent darkness creeping up it, a darkness that was also engulfing the city’s streets, streets as neatly laid out as the pattern on a manta.

  The canchas’ roofs were already gray. The smoke from the braziers in their courtyards rose up straight, also gray. The silence in the city’s narrow streets was gray, as were the terraces that fell away to the rivers, and the mountainsides disappeared into the same gray. And so the light faded until only one cliff face in the Sacred Valley remained illuminated with golden rays, as though Inti was applying one final polish to its stone with his red light.

  For a few fleeting seconds Anamaya felt exalted, as though she was floating above everyone, borne up by a pair of wings. She saw the darkened valley with bird’s eyes – the slopes of the now pale and foreshortened mountains, the houses of Ollantaytambo, which looked like wooden toys carved for children.

  And then, at a single stroke, the sun disappeared, and even the sky turned gray and flat.

  ‘O Inti,’ she murmured, ‘do not abandon us.’

  Silence lingered on for a moment, as though everything in the world was falling under the same evening veil of sadness. Then she heard voices from the bottom of the steps. She looked down and recognized the man arguing with the guards to let him through. Her heart began to beat wildly.

  Anamaya almost set off down the steps to meet them before recollecting herself. She tightened all her muscles in an effort to hide her trembling. She yanked her manta tightly, too tightly, around her shoulders, and waited for the man to come to her. He was the young officer who had once escorted her to meet Manco at Rimac Tambo and who had helped her save Gabriel before the battle of Vilcaconga.

  He had gained confidence in himself since then, and the features of his face and the set of his body had grown heavier, battle-weary. But even before he had reached her, she knew, merely watching him climb the steps as steep as a cliff-face path, with his mouth slightly open and his shoulders drooping, that he was bringing her bad news.

  When he arrived at a point still five steps beneath her, he kneeled and bowed his head.

  ‘I am at your service, Coya Camaquen,’ he said, still catching his breath.

  ‘Please stand, Titu Cuyuchi,’ she replied a little nervously.

  What she saw in his expression confirmed her fears.

  ‘So?’ she asked.

  ‘May you forgive me my failure, Coya Camaquen, but we were unable to do it.’

  Anamaya forced he
rself to take a few deep breaths to still her beating heart, then asked:

  ‘Do you at least know if he’s still alive?’

  ‘He was when we last saw him. But that was five days ago.’

  ‘Why didn’t you succeed, Titu Cuyuchi?’

  The officer waved his hand despondently.

  ‘I had two men with me. As soon as the roofs of Cuzco had stopped burning, I waited until the darkest moment of the night before running along the walls until we reached the cancha that you had pointed out to me. You were right, the Stranger was there. We recognized him by his clothing, a peasant’s tunic from Titicaca. He was tied to the wall with a chain—’

  ‘A chain?’

  ‘Yes. That was what confused us. We stood there a moment, wondering how to free him. Then one of my soldiers was hit by an arrow and died. All we saw was a black shadow. It was a very confused moment…’

  ‘Did he say anything to you?’

  ‘He said that he was your friend, Coya Camaquen, and that we shouldn’t kill him. He hadn’t understood that we had come to free him.’

  Anamaya said nothing. She turned her gaze away from the horizon, the last faint red tint still lingering in the west.

  ‘We had to flee,’ continued Titu Cuyuchi. ‘We didn’t even see the faces of those who attacked us.’

  ‘You didn’t try again?’

  ‘No, Coya Camaquen…’

  There was a reticence in Titu Cuyuchi’s tone. Anamaya looked at him closely.

  ‘Have no fear. Speak freely,’ she ordered him in a flat voice.

  ‘The following night, the Strangers, with help from the Canaries, set fire to our barricades. They killed many of our warriors. I fought on the last barricade, where we managed to repel their attack. I saw him there. He was on a horse, and wearing Stranger’s clothes, and…’

  ‘And?’

  But Titu Cuyuchi hesitated again before replying. His gaze strayed to Anamaya’s shoulder, and then up, past it. As she turned around, she heard the Master of the Stone’s soft step as he approached them. She was almost relieved that he was there. She repeated her order in a harsh voice, and loud enough for Katari to hear: