The Light of Machu Picchu

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

  They became covered in sweat in the endless frenzy of their passion, and their sweat’s salty taste made them thirsty. The breeze picked up, the breeze died down, and the cold night reached them. But they didn’t care: they stretched out the limits of the night, they smashed together like two stones, they flowed like rivers, they scratched each other’s flesh like animals – they loved one another like a man and woman.

  And even when, exhausted at last, they slipped into sleep, their love followed them.

  They were lying at the Sacred Double’s feet, their hands on one another’s thighs, and with Gabriel’s shoulder in the hollow of Anamaya’s neck. Their mouths were open, smiling.

  They were happy and, because of it, they were beautiful.

  The first rays of dawn crept over the mountain ridges, waking Gabriel. He tightened his embrace around Anamaya. Together, they sat up and watched as the world was reborn for another day: the fury of the waters flowing down the Willkamayo at the point where they were funneled through a narrow gorge; the narrow summit of the Wakay Willca.

  As it emerged from night’s shadows, Gabriel noticed the enormous shape in the side of the mountain facing them. He turned to Anamaya, a quizzical look on his face. She looked back at him, without replying. But he felt the heat and even the light emanating from her, and without quite knowing why he sensed that there was some link between her and the monumental and mysterious figure in the rock.

  He drew her closer still, and she surrendered to him. But all the while she kept her gaze fixed on Huayna Capac’s face, for his words continued to reverberate through her mind like the rumble of the Patacancha river.

  She spoke the first words that had passed between them since they had been reunited.

  * * *

  ‘Gabriel…’

  The three syllables slipped from Anamaya’s lips as softly as a breath. Her soul was a seething cauldron: there was so much that she wanted to tell him, and she didn’t know where to begin, unsure of what he was allowed to hear. But then she succumbed to the urgency of her emotions: just as the light was now flooding through the valley and across the mountains, so she had to feel her soul filled by his voice as her innermost physical depths had been filled by his manhood.

  ‘Tell me everything, Puma…’

  Gabriel described to her those appalling days when he had come to believe that the war separating them would never end, when he had given in to despair and had wanted only two things: to rid the world of Gonzalo and his henchmen, and then to die. Anamaya smiled when he told her about the three Indians who had come to kill him in his cell, only to be thwarted by Sebastian’s timely appearance. She displayed no emotion as she listened to his account of the battle for Sacsayhuaman, of Juan’s death, of the strange feeling of invincibility that had risen up in him and that, along with his profound despair, had driven him to accomplish the most unimaginable and even absurd exploits.

  ‘I didn’t understand it then,’ murmured Gabriel, ‘and I still don’t. I felt as though I was giving off light, and as though I was surrounded by it. I’d heard silly talk of magic, you know, but I dismissed it: stories of arrows bouncing off soldiers, of sling stones changing direction before they could hit them and then rolling harmlessly into the rocks. I don’t believe those things any more than I believe in Don Francisco’s beloved Sacred Virgin. And yet, I had to suffer it: for although I myself didn’t believe it, my companions, those few brave men, did, as much as the rabble. They looked upon me not as a hero – which is something I know about and which is in the end only a very human sentiment, in which admiration and jealousy are mixed – but with a fear of the supernatural. But don’t think that it made me proud. No, it only increased my indifference, if such a thing is possible. When I flung my armor off the top of the tower, I felt as though I was freeing myself. If I could have thrown my skin with it, I would have.’ Gabriel paused for a moment. Anamaya let his words echo through her without yet trying to fathom their meaning.

  ‘And then, in a dream, I had the strangest impression of actually seeing you.’

  Anamaya gave a start.

  ‘It was as though I knew ahead of time what I was going to do, as though some messenger from nowhere showed me clear, lifelike images of what was to come. That rope hanging from the top of the first tower – I saw it well before I took it in my hands. And when I did grab it, I was already in some place beyond fear or courage, beyond doubt or duty: I was only doing what had to be done.’

  ‘You are arriving, drawing nearer… you are almost here…’

  ‘By leading the assault against your people?’

  ‘You are here to save us.’

  ‘The night before, or even the same morning as the assault, I saw Inguill. She said those very same words…’

  ‘Accept them…’

  Gabriel shook his head.

  ‘Everything is still too new for me, for my mind. Sometimes I feel as though I’m separated from myself by a wall, a wall even thicker than those of the towers we took.’

  ‘You will pass through the wall.’

  Gabriel sighed.

  ‘Well, for the moment, I’ve given up trying to understand more.’

  ‘What happened after you took the tower?’

  ‘When your people took me prisoner, they captured a dazed man, his spirit broken, who didn’t resist at all. Why didn’t they kill me? To this day, I don’t know, just as I still have no idea why they kept me in that shack up in the mountains for an entire month, feeding me those damned shriveled-up old papas. You call them chuños, right? I’ll never forget that taste of moldy earth. And can you tell me why, one fine morning four days ago now, they finally decided to tear me away from that delicacy and bring me here?’

  Gabriel sighed again, then said with a laugh:

  ‘Well now, Princess-who-knows-all-the-secrets, can’t you tell me?’

  Anamaya hesitated and started gathering up their scattered clothes.

  ‘It happened two moons ago, right?’ she said eventually. ‘During those two moons, I often dreamed that if I saw you again, I would spend the entire night with you. And now I’ve had that night…’

  She stopped, leaving her sentence unfinished. But the time of his painful impatience was over. Bartholomew, Gabriel thought to himself. If you could see me now, you might well call me wise…

  ‘I want to tell you everything I have learned,’ Anamaya said at last, ‘because you are part of what I’ve learned. You might even be the most beautiful part of what I’ve learned. But you must first pass through each stage, as I did.’

  ‘I feel as though I’ve already passed through more than a few stages,’ replied Gabriel with strained good humor.

  ‘I know, my love, I know. But there is still so much you have to learn…’

  ‘One terrible night many years ago we were standing by your Emperor Atahualpa’s corpse. You allowed me a glimpse into that world then, didn’t you?’

  ‘I was very proud after I’d been nominated Coya Camaquen. I was proud that the Powerful Lords called upon me to transmit the secrets of which I was myself unaware. I was so confused! But yes, you’re right. I wanted to show you then that there was another world behind our love, another world beyond the war…’

  ‘Do you think I came near it?’ asked Gabriel in a tone so beseeching that Anamaya couldn’t help but laugh.

  ‘My Puma is sometimes such a child,’ she said, taking his hand and holding it between hers, as though to temper the jest of her words. ‘But yes, of course you did: you drew near in great, furious bounds, without knowing where you were going, but always with your generous heart to buoy your spirit.’

  ‘I’m with you now, right? We’re together now?’

  ‘Although separated, you will be united as one…’ She had searched for those words fruitlessly for so long. And now that she had them, she almost regretted knowing them, for they left her tongue-tied. She was no longer the little girl under Villa Oma’s tutelage who knew nothing, she was no longer the proud Coya Camaq
uen, nor even the woman in love. But as this thought passed through her mind, her heart rebelled: yes, she was still that woman in love, and no matter what secrets were revealed or what prophecies still lay hidden, she had to make her love live, she had to live it, gorge herself on it.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘you’re with me.’

  Gabriel calmed down. He looked out over the magnificent landscape that was being revealed by the rising sun. The face in the mountainside drew his gaze more than anything else, more than the eternal snows on the peaks, or the emerald rainforests below them. The face was only just visible in the weak light of dawn, but it was so extraordinary that it was impossible not to look at it. Anamaya watched it with him.

  ‘Who is he?’ whispered Gabriel timidly.

  ‘He’s the one who brought us together.’

  CHAPTER 10

  Ollantaytambo, early July 1536

  From the top of the great stairway that rose through the sacred terraces, Gabriel looked down upon an amazing sight. The canchas at the bottom of the valley had been built long ago. But Manco had decided to make Ollantaytambo his principal bastion, and all the narrow terraces overlooking it had been transformed into an enormous building site. Gabriel had never before witnessed the Herculean efforts that went into erecting an Inca city, and, Manco having granted him a supervised freedom of movement, he returned to this spot day after day, enthralled by the progress of the construction.

  In the Chachicata quarry in the distance, hundreds of tiny silhouettes worked busily on all sizes of blocks of stone that had broken away from the Black Mountain. The valley was filled with the rhythmic pounding of hammers and chisels, made of hard-stone or bronze, with which the tireless workers hewed the rock.

  The valley was filled with people, from the foot of the mountain to the river bank. Thousands of men, each one with a specific task, began work at dawn. Some chipped away at the boulders that had rolled to the bottom of the valley. First they chiseled them into a rough, unfinished shape, thus ridding them of unnecessary weight, before transporting them by raft from one river bank to the other.

  Others made rope or trimmed logs with which to haul and roll the rocks up the opposite slope, to the summit of Ollantaytambo. Hundreds of men pushed and pulled for hours on end. They levered the blocks up each section of terrain with enormous timbers, a slow, complicated system that took great effort but that allowed the boulders to be taken up safely and surely.

  A great number of people were gathered at the end of the ramp along which the blocks were transported from the river to the construction site. Here, the work required more skill; using only stone or bronze tools, working in a cloud of white dust, men smoothed and polished the enormous stones so that they fitted perfectly together. Gabriel watched, enthralled, as a group of men flocked around a boulder three times taller than any of them that rested on a platform of logs and was secured by a web of rope.

  Katari was in charge of this vast construction site. Gabriel occasionally caught sight of him supervising the alignment of a temple, or the building of a wall, or the shaping of a rock, in his own quietly efficient manner.

  Gabriel never once doubted that Katari’s efforts complied with a set of precise rules. But they were unlike any of those in his own, admittedly very limited, knowledge of the architect’s art. Katari never had a plan in his hand, for instance, and he seemed to select the most unlikely and difficult locations on which to place his buildings. He could have expanded the town in the area between the two rivers in the valley, where there were only springs. But ‘expanding the town’ was clearly not his objective. Nothing being built was designed to be lived in.

  And none of the new buildings mystified Gabriel more than the temple halfway up the slope, set on a vast esplanade that had been cleared to make room for a number of blocks already prepared. Only one of its walls had been erected so far, from four enormous blocks of rose-colored rock fitted together. This type of stone displayed an astonishing range of iridescence as the angle of the sunlight falling on it shifted throughout the day. Between each rock was what looked to the unknowing eye like a long stone reed.

  As with all of the Incas’ most magnificent buildings, no mortar held the huge trimmed stones together. Each block was simply hewn to fit perfectly with its neighbor, and the walls rose up majestically, mysterious and indestructible. Drawing closer, Gabriel saw that three of the rocks were decorated with stylized knurls. He tried to guess their purpose.

  ‘Do you find them beautiful?’

  Katari was sweating, but his almond eyes above his prominent cheekbones were smiling. His torso was bare, like those of all his workers. Gabriel admired his strong physique; his broad hands were covered in fine rock dust and looked strong enough to snap a man’s back with little effort. A bronze key hung from a small gold chain around his neck.

  Gabriel didn’t try to hide his admiration.

  ‘It’s magnificent, Katari. I’ve never seen anything like it. I doubt even our best architects are capable of working such wonders.’

  ‘We are not trying to build wonders.’

  ‘What are you trying to do?’

  ‘You already know that, better than you think.’

  Gabriel was taken aback.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  Katari’s smile widened.

  ‘Don’t the shapes of these stones remind you of something?’

  Gabriel narrowed his eyes and stared at the enormous blocks. Slowly, a shape formed in his mind. It was a blurred shape and an ancient one, one associated with forgotten miseries…

  ‘Taypikala!’ he cried. ‘There were stones like these there!’

  Katari nodded.

  ‘There’s more. Come closer.’

  Gabriel came up close to the rocks. It was midday, and their shadows were short. He saw that strange designs had been carved on their surfaces. He thought that he recognized the geometry of a double staircase. The upper flight rose up in the normal way, but the bottom one led down, inverted like the reflection of a mountain on a lake’s surface. On another block set on its plinth, Gabriel brushed his hands over a relief cut in the form of a T-shaped key.

  ‘I’ve seen this before,’ he exclaimed, turning to Katari.

  ‘In the same place,’ said the Master of the Stone. ‘Are you surprised?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Gabriel frankly. ‘I don’t know what it means.’

  ‘I could tell you that these hollows, cut with bronze keys like this one around my neck, are designed to help us set the stones in position, and that these knurls are used to secure the stones to transport them here, but…’

  Katari fell silent, his gaze wandering to the northern horizon.

  ‘But?’

  ‘…It would be true. But that wouldn’t be all there was to it. There’s something else.’

  Gabriel’s curiosity was piqued: not only his curiosity, but also a desire to enter another world, one that he had skirted around for so long without suspecting it.

  ‘Do you see the town down there,’ said Katari, ‘with its canchas and their courtyards and the rooms coming off them? The alleys are laid out according to a plan. Their lines are designed to cross. I’ve never seen one of your towns, Stranger, but ours no doubt didn’t surprise you. But this one, on the other hand…’

  Katari waved his arm all around him and looked at Gabriel.

  ‘…Here, we want to pay homage to the gods with every building, every stone, every rock. We want to pay homage to the gods around us: our Father the Sun, of course, but also the Moon, Illapa the Lightning Bolt, and all those mountain peaks. Look at those terraces…’

  All around were small terraces full of tall corn, as though the temple was embedded in them.

  ‘As you can see, they aren’t arranged in a haphazard way. They surround this temple like the sides of a jewel box. As for the temple itself, our astronomers have been watching the sky for a long time, observing the movements of the stars and the planets to determine its position, as well as the o
rientation of each of its walls. For us, both shadow and light are a form of homage to the gods…’

  Gabriel thought fleetingly of the ancient abbeys and churches of his own country. His mind made a tenuous connection between the Christian cathedral masons and the Incas. But he was too absorbed by Katari’s tale to dwell upon it.

  ‘…What I’m telling you is no great secret,’ continued Katari almost flippantly. ‘All Incas know it. But what they don’t know is that by approaching the stone, by looking at it and touching it, they can learn the most occult secrets of our history. They can travel back to the most ancient times, when even the Incas didn’t exist.’

  ‘You mean that the Incas haven’t always been masters of this land?’ Gabriel asked, surprised.

  Katari burst out laughing.

  ‘The Incas are only a very few generations of men, excellent but not invincible warriors, as both you and I now know…’

  Katari glanced at Gabriel before continuing:

  ‘They came after other civilizations of great spiritual strength. These remain mysterious even for us, and a whole lifetime is needed to understand even one glimmer of their history.’

  ‘He who is on Lake Titicaca is already on the road leading home,’ murmured Gabriel.

  ‘You see, you know far more than you imagine! Yes, one must take the Taypikala road and the one to the Lake of Origin. The secret is in the stone and the water, in the mountain peaks forever reflected off Lake Titicaca. I was born near that lake. My father took up soldiering as a career. But my uncle, Apu Poma Chuca, the man who convinced the Inca Tupac Yupanqui to return the Sanctuaries of the Sun of Lake Titicaca to their original splendor, initiated me into the art of stones. But enough of all that: I want to show you something. Come here.’