The Light of Machu Picchu

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

  ‘I thought I was master,’ he sniggered to himself, ‘when in fact I was nothing but a miserable slave.’

  But still he never looked away, not even for a moment, from the unceasing spectacle of men dying.

  * * *

  That evening, Hernando Pizarro gave the order for the attack against the last of the fortress’s towers to begin. It was the largest, but it had been built hastily, and its stonework was less than perfect.

  When Pizarro’s men were halfway up the ladders, the Inca general in charge of the defence of Sacsayhuaman stood alone on the little wall at the top of the tower. Broad gold disks glinted from his ears, marks of his high rank.

  Gabriel watched, appalled, as the general rubbed dirt into his cheeks so hard that he abraded his skin. The Inca warrior picked up yet more dirt from between the tower’s stones and rubbed it into the wounds he had just opened, until his face was unrecognizable.

  Every Spaniard now stood stock-still, their eyes fixed on him.

  The Inca soldiers stood just as still. It was as though an icy wind had frozen everyone in their places.

  Then the general stuffed dirt into his mouth, wrapped his long cape around himself, and threw himself into the void.

  There wasn’t a sound until his body smashed into a pile of sling stones.

  Only then did Gabriel hear someone cry out from behind him. He turned around and found ten Inca warriors staring at him. He saw the hesitation in their eyes and the rope in their hands. One of them raised his long, bronze club, ready to strike him.

  Gabriel shook his head.

  ‘No,’ he said in Quechua. ‘Don’t bother.’

  He slowly drew his sword from its scabbard and flung it over the little wall.

  ‘I won’t fight anymore,’ he said. ‘It’s over.’

  The warriors bound him and led him into the night. As they went, Gabriel listened to his Spanish comrades’ drunken cries of victory floating on the breeze.

  He had wanted to die.

  He had wanted to live.

  Now, he wanted nothing at all.

  PART 2

  CHAPTER 7

  Ollantaytambo, June 1536

  In the canchas out on the plain, in the fork between the two rivers, and on the slopes where the terraces and temples stood stepped one above the other, hundreds of fires burned. But there was no singing or sound of drums, no cries of joy, no drunkenness. The only sound was the murmuring of water, a haunting lament, filled with sadness, that permeated Anamaya’s soul.

  The Inca warriors crossed the bridge, moving at the pace of the defeated. They went one by one, wordlessly, their faces impassive but their heads bowed. By the hoary light of the full moon, their faces looked like tarnished silver. Deep lines of exhaustion furrowed their foreheads and cheeks like so many wounds. Their unkus were torn to shreds and covered in blood and mud. Their limbs were weary, and their weapons dangled from the ends of their arms like useless toys. Even those carrying swords or those few leading horses taken from the Spaniards looked deeply ashamed. They had lost.

  When they caught sight of Manco and Villa Oma on the other side of the bridge, their shoulders slumped further, as if the weight of their defeat had become too great to bear. But still Manco encouraged them with a small gesture or a few proud words as they passed. Then they disappeared into the night. But, despite their exhaustion, they found little rest in it.

  Anamaya watched Villa Oma. The piercing gaze of the man she called the Sage was lost in the distance, traveling along the length of the Sacred Valley to the hills above Cuzco, as though he was reliving the battle they should have won but hadn’t. His face was taut with silent rage.

  For once, Manco was not standing in defiance of him. His proud profile revealed only sympathy and encouragement for his defeated warriors. Anamaya was surprised by this expression of gentleness, a gentleness that had until now remained masked by the violence that had been corrupting Manco’s heart ever since he had been humiliated by the Spaniards – or even, perhaps, since the day he’d been born.

  Anamaya had hardly slept since Titu Cuyuchi had brought her the news of Gabriel’s disappearance. Whenever she felt herself about to fall asleep, she saw a vision of the Puma pass before her mind’s eye. And during the day, she was tormented by chimeras of its shadow. She continued playing the role of Coya Camaquen, maintaining appearances and saying the right things, and everyone – including the priests and soothsayers, who had come to respect her – continued to look to the Coya Camaquen for consolation or inspiration. But in the most private corner of her soul, she was a woman tormented by concern for her beloved.

  And in this hour of defeat – a defeat made worse because it had been snatched from the jaws of victory – her concern for the man she loved was more powerful than any other feeling she had and she was almost ashamed of it.

  ‘Come with me.’

  Katari’s voice was so low that it was practically a whisper, no louder than a bat flapping its wings in the night, and she wasn’t sure that she had heard him right. She turned toward him. The young man tilted his head slightly, his long hair billowing down to his shoulders.

  He didn’t repeat himself, but motioned to her to follow him. She banished her preoccupations about Manco and Villa Oma.

  The two young people walked beside the river, listening to its rumbling. They followed the low wall that ran alongside the flow, its carefully fitted stones indicating the water’s sacred nature. Moonlight lit the path rising before them toward the city. There, they could see the fires burning in hearths of the houses and temples, looking like distant stars belonging to another world.

  Anamaya’s beating heart slowed a little.

  Now she could hear the water gurgling in the canals that fed the fountains from the mountains above, and its music added lighter grace notes above the deep rumble of the Willkamayo River.

  Katari suddenly stopped in his tracks. Anamaya stared at his broad shoulders for a moment before following his gaze toward the western mountains, above which Quilla’s perfectly round disk hung suspended.

  The black silhouette of a condor emerged from the night.

  It was a gargantuan bird, a bird-mountain, and it was watching them. A rock jutting out was its beak, and above it another that was its head, its eye wide open, its ruff retracted between its two powerful wings. Motionless, it looked as though it was pointing down the Sacred Valley, protecting it, threatening anyone tempted to defile it.

  After a long moment, Katari turned to Anamaya.

  ‘It’s time,’ he said simply.

  Once again, Anamaya found herself admiring the young man’s calm disposition and the radiant wisdom emanating from him, from his broad, muscled body, and from his slender eyes, as elongated as a flaw in a huaca.

  She didn’t immediately notice that sections of the rock in front of them had been worked. Channels had been cut for water, and countless nicks marked its base, a sign that men had been coming here for innumerable seasons to commune with the gods.

  They passed into the condor’s shadow and were hidden from the moon. Anamaya followed Katari confidently, despite the darkness, stepping where he had stepped.

  They walked around an enormous flat shale-stone set in the ground. Its shape seemed familiar to Anamaya. Embers glowed red in a small cavity carved out at its center, and Katari had little trouble using them to get a fresh fire burning. Anamaya looked up and scrutinized four small niches carved into the rock. She felt that she recognized the place.

  As she stood there, getting her breath back from the walk, she was overcome by a strange feeling. Katari was communicating with her without speaking. She was almost frightened by the ease with which she instinctively surrendered to the power.

  ‘There’s nothing to fear,’ he said gently.

  ‘You were listening to my thoughts?’

  Katari’s laugh tinkled in the night.

  ‘You should know that I listen to you even when I’m not at your side…’

  She remembered
Gabriel lost in the Salar desert. Her unease left her, and she smiled back at him.

  ‘You said that you could help me…’

  ‘I can. But first, all your fear must leave you. Also…’

  Katari had already spread out his manta in front of him.

  ‘Also?’

  ‘We must be one to make the voyage.’

  ‘One? But I need you to make it. What do you mean, Katari? I don’t understand.’

  ‘There is water, and there is stone,’ said Katari. ‘There is this world and there is the Under World, there is the Willkamayo and there is the Way in the stars, there is Inti and Quilla, there is silver and there is gold. Everything in the universe has its twin… but we can only see the one hidden in the heart of things if we know how to look.’

  Anamaya’s heart had leaped as soon as he had started talking. In her mind, she added: There are Incas and there are Strangers. But she didn’t dare say it out loud.

  ‘I still don’t understand,’ she murmured.

  Katari glanced at her.

  ‘You understand better than you say you do… but I can’t explain it to you now. Simply remember that nothing you discover will be hidden from me. Do you trust me enough to do that?’

  She watched him pull out a bundle of leaves from his manta. They had come from a forest plant, not a mountain one. He flung them onto the flames. A strong, acrid smoke rose up from the fire.

  ‘You trust me enough to take me there,’ said Anamaya. ‘Let me give you what I—’

  ‘I shall guide you, Anamaya, and yet you will be the one taking me there.’

  She stared at the four niches and at the incredible outlines of the rock in which they were encased. She smiled. She knew what voyage he was talking about.

  Katari looked away from her. He closed his eyes and swung his head from side to side, using his long hair to fan the smoke in Anamaya’s direction. He began singing a monotonous chant in a language that Anamaya didn’t recognize. The smoke entered her nostrils and soon it and the song filled her head, even her entire body. She felt both heavy with sleep and alert, almost incapable of moving yet utterly weightless. She saw him rise.

  He sat next to her, holding in his hands a magnificent kero, a wooden vase incised with minute geometric patterns, the details of which she could make out with astonishing – even supernatural – clarity. A small amount of dark green liquid lay in its depths.

  Katari pulled out two smaller, undecorated keros. They were made of raw, unhewn wood, still holding the shape of the branches of which they had once been part. Only the cavities within them had been worked by the hand of man.

  He filled the two wooden goblets and handed one to Anamaya. They drank slowly, letting the liquid’s soft flavor, something like that of unripe corn, infuse their palates and throats.

  Katari’s chanting had begun softly, like the distant murmur of a mountain stream; his voice had risen now, so that it almost drowned out the sound of the water coursing through the rock channels. Anamaya’s entire body, from the buzzing in her ears to the dull thud of her heart, became entranced by the chant’s rhythm. To her, the song seemed to emanate not from Katari’s throat, but from the rocks and water around them, and from the mountain itself.

  She heard a more high-pitched voice rise above Katari’s monotonous chant. Suddenly, she succumbed to a violent spasm, as though a lightning charge had started on the nape of her neck, shuddered down her back and flooded each of her limbs. It happened again and again, and each time she surrendered to the sensation as though it was an amorous embrace. It was in fact pleasurable, and her pleasure took the form of a delicious sensuous explosion as wave after seething wave of feelings passed through her. Her belly felt hot, almost burning. Her happiness was so complete and so intense that she didn’t register its duration.

  The silence returned.

  Blots of brilliantly intense glowing colors danced before her eyes.

  The song had ended. All that remained was the sound of water: water streaming into the channels, flowing in the canal that ran along the Condor huaca, and rumbling in the river down below. But in the fraction of a second in which nature was suspended and all was calm, Anamaya’s powers of perception became so sharp that she could see, hear, feel, and taste everything in the hollow night. Her ears heard every fluctuation of the wind, from the slightest breeze to strong gusts. She felt it caressing her skin, and she opened her mouth and nostrils wide to gorge herself on it. Suddenly, a bird’s cry echoed through the air: the cry of a bird that she hadn’t heard since she had been a little girl living in the middle of the forest. She inhaled the smells of the earth, the scents of its humus and dense vegetation loaded with nocturnal moisture.

  Anamaya heard a shuffling on the stones nearby and opened her eyes. She saw Katari staring at the four niches in front of them. She looked at them, unable to see how deep they were. He reached for her hand, and she gave it to him without fear.

  As they approached the rock face on their knees, a weak, milk-colored glow lit up one of the niches. It was as though the light was coming from the rock itself. They lowered themselves still further until they were crawling, and again until their bodies were pressed against the rock. The white light from the niche now engulfed them completely. Anamaya felt a continuous tremor in the rock. She couldn’t tell whether the niche had expanded to allow them to enter or whether they had shrunk to its size. It didn’t matter.

  At one point, without Anamaya being able to tell when, the feel of the rock on her skin turned from a scraping friction to a smooth caress, and she felt as though all the weight and anxieties of her body had given way to a very soft mantle, as though her flesh and the matter surrounding it had fused. She heard distant voices echoing within her, telling her that it was thus, once, that men had been born. But her rapture didn’t allow her time to listen closely: limb by limb, her body was absorbed by the mountain, and the last human sensation she felt was Katari’s hand wrapped around hers. She saw her fear off in the distance, a ball of flames traveling through the night, a ball of suffering in her mind, and the very great weight of the mountain brought her an unimaginable sense of lightness, as though one enormous mass had been canceled by another even greater, one that would absorb it piece by piece, fiber by fiber.

  She was stone. She was the mountain itself.

  The strangest part was that she had retained an unequivocal consciousness of herself. She was still Anamaya, but now an Anamaya suddenly enriched by an entire universe of sensations, one in which all things and all nature’s aspects were combined. Before she had time to delight in it once again, all the fibers of her being began pulsing like a thousand drums, a thousand trumpets, a thousand rivers, or a thousand stars hurtling towards a colossal explosion. And at the center of this sensation of abundance, she felt her being shrink into a tiny ball, the only purpose of which was to make the immense effort of extricating itself from the rock – as though, finding herself ingrained in the utterly immovable stone, she wanted above all to avoid dissolving into it and disappearing.

  She heard Katari speaking to her in a very low yet clear voice that came from within her: ‘Come, Anamaya. It is time.’

  She entered the other side.

  * * *

  Air.

  The vibrations Anamaya felt were all that held her up – a gliding sensation, a lightness.

  She was flying.

  For the moment, she felt nothing other than the delight of it, a sense of power coupled with one of absolute and infinite freedom. It seemed to her that she no longer had eyes to see, nor ears to hear, and that her body had become a fragile thing, like a balsa drifting on a river of wind.

  You are the Condor.

  For a moment, after the thought had occurred to her, she was struck by the strangeness of it. Then she realized that Katari was no longer beside her, holding her hand, but that he was with her in her flight – that he had become the Condor with her and for her.

  She let herself go completely, feeling no fear or reti
cence.

  Anamaya realized then that she had passed through the night and that she was watching the sun rise; that currents of air were carrying her higher into the sky. The world lay unfurled beneath her wings in all its magnificence; the winding river lay at the bottom of the valley, silver-scaled like the snake Amaru, the god of wisdom, who had come to her so often. He was everywhere in the valley, coiled around himself, nestling in the emerald bower of the forest.

  She gazed at the distant mountains. She was as high as they. Salcantay’s snowbound summit and all the Apus of the Andes in their majesty offered themselves to her by the light of the rising sun. She heard Katari chanting joyful incantations within her: ‘Hamp’u! Hamp’u!’ And it was as though the mountains scintillated in the light by way of reply.

  She recognized them, of course: the young mountain and the old one watching over the city whose name must never be spoken aloud where the young girl she had once been had been admitted many years earlier. She glided over the stepped terraces of harvest-ready corn and over the buildings of the city itself, where the tiny forms of priests and astronomers, soothsayers and architects, were beginning to emerge to begin the daily ritual of saluting Inti’s return.

  Anamaya could sense the gazes of the men below looking up at the condor high in the sky, and she felt pleased by their fear and respect.

  ‘It’s here,’ she said to Katari, ‘that the Empire’s secret of all secrets is hidden. The place that must exist beyond time is to be found here.’

  Katari said nothing, but she felt his joy, and she flapped her massive wings to carry them higher into the sky.

  ‘Villa Oma took me there when he was still the one known as the Sage and could communicate with the gods. But he has lost his way and forgotten how to go there, and will never find it again.’

  ‘Look at the Sun triumph,’ said Katari.

  They were above a ceremonial stone in the heart of the secret city. The sun’s rays were hooked in it, as they were every day before they spread to illuminate the world and divide time. The stone had been hewn in ancient times to acknowledge the eternal momentum of the Young Mountain, Huayna Picchu.