The Gold Eaters

by Ronald Wright

  The worst was done when he himself boarded the craft, though he found three swordsmen ploughing a woman—in truth a mere girl—on a bale in the deckhouse. Strange how the act of death spurs the act of love. How love—if for decency’s sake one may call it that—becomes a thing of war. Upon being freed, the young girl took to the sea, wild-eyed as a mad horse. And bleeding. The sharks ended her ordeal. Ruiz crosses himself. How easily Christians become savages.

  Alone in his cabin, the Pilot still smells the gore, still hears the screams. He’s seen his share of mayhem in the Indies. And in Spain. He has killed, but only when he had to. He is not among those who delight in it. Killing pains Our Lord. Even the killing of heathens. Ruiz crosses himself again. He shuts his eyes. But the scenes are not darkened. They play on in the theatre of his mind.

  The Pilot struggles with his conscience until the candle gutters. What of this day to set down in the log? From the other side of a thin partition in the sterncastle come rhythmic snores like the sound of sawyers ripping oak. Pizarro! How does such a man sleep soundly after that? The answer, Ruiz concludes, is because he is such a man.

  “Be sure to make a list of the loot,” the Commander told him before retiring. “Be sure to write it in your log, including the gold and silver. In broad terms only, mind. Don’t burden yourself with details like weight and purity. We can’t know what we have until it’s assayed.”

  As your grace commands, Ruiz said to himself. Let’s see you check my list! The Commander can’t read or write a word beyond his name. Though that doesn’t make him a fool. One-fifth of all treasure found in the Indies belongs to the King. Royal tax gatherers will be sure to inspect the ship’s hold—and the ship’s log—when the Santa Elena puts in at a Spanish settlement. No wonder Pizarro wants to keep things vague.

  It is the blood, not the gold, that worries the Pilot. What can be said? What must be left unsaid? On the advice of learned churchmen, His Catholic Majesty the King has forbidden his subjects from staining his royal soul with innocent blood. Even the blood of infidels. It is therefore unlawful to attack new-found peoples unless they first harm Christians. Unlawful, that is, without due warning. Before the boarding party was dispatched, Ruiz should have read the strangers the Requirement, offering the chance to yield in peace to King and Cross. A mere formality, perhaps—especially when there’s no interpreter. But the King’s law should have been followed to the letter.

  The Pilot allows himself a cup of vinegary wine from the last bottle in his sea-chest. Thus fortified, he concludes that all things are known to God. But not all need be known to men.

  December 16, 1526

  The Santa Elena

  Pilot Ruiz

  About the middle of the forenoon watch we spied a strange vessel carrying more than twenty souls and thirty tons of freight. The ship was of a size and quality never seen before among the natives of the Indies, having masts of fine woodwork and sails like our own.

  They were bringing goods for trade: mirrors, plates, and drinking cups of burnished silver; crowns, pendants, bracelets, armour, greaves, and breastplates, all made of gold; tweezers, bells, crystals, and boxes of small copper axe heads in three sizes like those the Indians of the Isthmus use for coin; many mantles of wool and cotton; shirts, tunics, and other clothing like that of the Moors—some fine as silk and everything richly coloured and adorned. And they had weights and scales for weighing gold, like those of Roman workmanship.

  They also carried much food and good water, cotton bales, strong ropes, bronze crowbars, and barrels of pitch (of which we are in great need against the shipworm).

  We were unable to learn where they had come from and where all these wonderful things were made. We took as much of the freight as we could stow aboard the Santa Elena. We also took fruit, vegetables, corn, potatoes, and other supplies. In return we left axes, pig iron, and glass beads. Lastly, we took on board a boy, that he may come with us to our camp and learn our tongue. In due course, if it pleases God, he will guide us to his home port and marvellous land.

  The Pilot stops writing and strokes his ear with the quill. He sighs. A long exhalation of guilt. He wipes his face with a kerchief. Nothing he has set down is untrue. And at least we left iron, he thinks. We were not thieves. Though iron is cheap to us, the natives of the Indies esteem it more highly than gold. He consoles himself that soon after the Santa Elena cast off and headed north for Gallo, he saw survivors climb back onto the drifting ship, freeing her captain from the mast.

  Pilot Ruiz shuts the log. He prays. He goes to his bunk.

  3

  Waman awakes in darkness. Is he awake? Or mired in that other world his spirit wanders while his body sleeps? His head feels thick. The air, too, is thick; close, yet also chilly and damp. He is panting and his tongue is dry. He must be in the deckhouse, surfacing from a bad dream. As his breathing becomes more regular he notices the smell: foul, smothering, with the fetor of turned meat, as if he were trying to catch a condor, lying in wait under a rotting deerskin, ready to seize the bird’s feet as it alights. Soreness, heaviness, about his ankle. Cold metal. It is he who has been caught. Shackled and chained.

  Now memory wells up, a flood of terror. Men like ghosts or fiends, bursting in, seizing him, a cadaverous hand at his throat. Waman begins to tremble. They are runa mikhuq, eaters of men, and they have thrown him in their larder. The dead and dying from Tumbes must be with him in the dark. His breathing races but his lungs can’t fill. He blacks out.

  Waman is roused by a strange vibration, a purring sound, as if a puma were with him in the reeking darkness, very near. Of course! He is trussed here as food for wild beasts as well as wild men. He imagines bodies all around him, half devoured. Next, he feels soft fur against his cheek and the purr loud in his ear. He cries out and flails against the beast, but it’s too quick. He lies rigid a long time, straining to hear the cat’s stealthy movements above the roaring in his temples. But if it moves, it makes no sound. He drowses fitfully until awakened by another touch of fur, this time against his shackled leg. The creature is still. Slowly he understands that it has crept beside him for warmth in the dank hold. Too small to harm him, only a youngster, a puma kitten purring in its sleep.

  Footsteps on the roof above. Words he can’t understand. Then the barbarian ship falls silent except for groans of timber and rope, the clop of waves against the wooden wall to which he’s chained. Later there comes a strange sound, drifting, keening, as if from bowstrings; weirdly beautiful.

  He comes fully awake to a shaft of sunlight. A door in the roof slides open and someone descends into the wooden cave: a youth not much older than himself, bringing a tray. The youth smiles broadly, makes a beckoning gesture, sets food and water within reach. Still dazzled, Waman takes some time to notice that his visitor is painted black from head to foot. As his eyes adjust he scans the recesses of his prison, fearful of what may lie around him. There are barrels and bales, seemingly from his own ship, and dirty straw, and shackles and cinches for tying down large animals. But he sees no corpses, no other captives, no big carnivores. The young man leaves, and so does the little cat. Not a puma kitten, but some other kind, striped, tame, bounding like a puppy up the ladder.

  Two of the ghost men from yesterday come to take him up on deck. His hands are tied behind his back and the heavy iron is left around his ankle. He looks for signs of his people, his ship, but there is nothing. No sail, no land, no others from the World. The open sea rolls all around, empty but for the distant feather of a whale spout. He drinks the fresh air deeply, tries to calm his mind. They seem to be heading northwards now, hauled to the wind, tacking to wherever it is they came from.

  He is taken to a low wooden house at the stern, made of planks, lit dimly by small round windows filled with crystal. Four barbarians are seated at a high board in the middle of this room: two old, two younger, all lean and watchful as stray hounds. They wear leather caps, tight britches, loose
cotton shirts. Their strange clothes are torn and dirty. Vermin roam in their hair and beards. No wonder the hotlanders took them for the dead: all have a deathly pallor, young and old; their mouths are blistered, their teeth rotten or missing. The stench that pervades the ship is coming from them—their bodies and their breath.

  More enter, making eight. One has reddish hair, others black or brown, and the red one has eyes like the sky. Their skins are of all shades: pink, wan, grey, and one much the same hue as himself. The youth comes in, sets a bowl and a jug of water on the dining board. This one is indeed dyed black, except for the palms of his hands.

  The oldest begins speaking from a mouth like a sea anemone, toothless and red, sunk in a grizzled beard. Waman cannot hear the words. It’s as if he is deaf, yet he can hear the ship and the water and a mewling of gulls from the door. He gives silent thanks to Mother Sea that he’s alive. And thanks that Tika did not run with him, into this. His thoughts fill with her, with everyone at home. Tears spring in his eyes.

  The barbarians are speaking again and still he cannot hear them. He wants to ask many things. Where are his shipmates? Are they alive? Why is he the only one here? What do they want with him? But when he opens his mouth they are as deaf to his tongue as he to theirs.

  —

  After the fifth night they unbolt the iron from his foot and let him walk the ship by day. They have not harmed him, and he is growing used to their looks and ways. He has counted ten on board including the barbarians’ leader and the captain, who are much older than the rest. There is also the black one, their cook and helper, who treats him kindly yet still locks him in the hold at night.

  The unearthly keening he heard the first night is no longer a mystery. On evenings without rain two or three gather on the foredeck, where they sing and play an instrument with strings and a round belly made of wooden strips like the hull of their ship. Waman has always loved music. Sometimes in Little River he would play his flute at weddings, and he was a good singer until his voice began to fray. He hates these barbarians who must have slaughtered many, perhaps all, of his shipmates. He is ashamed that he blacked out and did not see what happened. He vows in his heart to kill them, as many and as soon as he can. Yet he can’t help becoming drawn to their weird music. Surely men who can make such beauty must have had some goodness in them once, if only when they were children?

  So many other wonders: the abundance of iron in the ship’s fittings, the great knives they wear; also iron helmets and armour, all cunningly wrought and riveted. They have stacks of white leaves between leather covers, the leaves painted with marks like rows of black ants, which the captain can read as easily as the Emperor’s men read quipu strings. On the walls of the wooden deckhouse hang strange gods or spirits: a dead man nailed to a scaffold, a lady in blue with a baby, another dead man porcupined with arrows. One morning they all gathered at the stern and listened to words read from the white leaves, after which they knelt and shut their eyes and sang. They brought Waman to listen, showing him their gods and gesturing that he should do as they did, kneeling, shutting his eyes, tracing the four quarters of the Earth with a finger in the air.

  They are teaching him words or names. The nailed god is Tius or perhaps Hisús. The skipper who runs the ship is called Luwis. The small panther who prowls the ship is Ilqatu. The oldest barbarian, who Waman can see is more feared than trusted by the others, has several names or titles, as leaders often do. Waman can say Pisaru with some difficulty, but he dubs this one Machu. The Old One.

  Several times the boy has tapped his lips and told them his own name, but they shake their heads and laugh and stab their fingers at his chest, saying Pilipillu. Whenever they want him, they yell out Pilipillu!

  —

  The Empire is far behind, and Waman fears he will never see home again. By his reckoning tied on a loose thread of his shirt, six more days and nights go by before the ship makes landfall and the lookout begins scanning the shore, as if watching for a port or anchorage. The winds have been contrary, and the barbarian craft tacks badly because it has no centreboards. Strange, he thinks, that a ship so cleverly made should be lacking in this way. It is mainly a strong current that carries them against the wind.

  Pilot Ruiz’s noon sighting reveals he is near the second parallel above the equator. Aside from the unhelpful wind, the weather is fair. A white jaw of great peaks gnaws the eastern sky, and the skirts of the land below are verdant in the sun—dark forest broken by lighter green wherever the Indians have their fields and towns. Savages we deem these natives, Ruiz reflects, yet they’ve bested us too many times. Even when we fought on horseback.

  At least one town that was whole when he left has been burnt to the ground during the month the Santa Elena has been gone. Wondering if this is the work of Pizarro’s partner and deputy, Almagro, the Pilot keeps within sight of land in case the Christians have moved camp.

  Ruiz thanks God for the current bearing the Santa Elena northward like a river. He also gives thanks for the gift of the Indian ship. Were it not for that prize well stocked with food—worth more to him just now than all her gold—he might have lost some men. He looks with satisfaction at the improvement in everyone’s health, not least his own. Mouth sores are healing, breath is no longer quite so foul. Though there’s nothing to be done for teeth lost to scurvy.

  The captive boy has proved an able fishermen, casting a small net they took from the Indian ship. The Pilot orders the last of the salt horse, alive with grubs, heaved over the side. Not even sharks will touch it.

  On the following day the lookout spies a ship’s masts by a small island with a comb of trees. This is the one they named Gallo, the Cock. But is that a caravel, or another Indian ship? Before they get near enough to settle the matter, a dandelion of smoke lifts from the crest. The bark of a cannon follows. Almagro and the men are still here.

  Waman is taken ashore in the ship’s boat by the Old One and four men pulling on long oars. How oddly the barbarians paddle: sitting backwards so they can’t see where they’re going.

  He has become used to the men on the ship, has begun to think of them as individuals. But here he beholds many more—perhaps eighty—waiting on the island’s foreshore to greet their lord. The sight is both frightening and pitiful, for what he sees is a throng of starvelings, ragged, filthy, hairy—like drowned men draped in seaweed. As he draws nearer he sees that most of these skeletal figures are only a few years older than himself. The midday light shows up particularities: a weak chin under a thin beard, grey skin spotted with moles, thighs little more than bone beneath torn britches and peeling skin. Men in such straits should be easy to kill when he gets the chance.

  Now an even odder sight: behind the crowd is the bobbing head of a man borne aloft as if on others’ shoulders. He seems to be wearing a close-fitted skullcap, shiny and red. As the crowd parts to let this man through, Waman sees that he is sitting on a beast—tall as a llama but with a thicker neck and build.

  His eyes return to the rider’s head. What he took for a red hat is the barbarian’s scalp—shiny, sunburnt, bald as a gourd. The face below, furrowed and liver-spotted, wears a short white beard like the muzzle of an old dog, but its outstanding feature is a lone blue eye swivelling up and down, back and forth, scanning around warily. The other is merely an empty socket, rough-healed, puckered like an anus.

  The man climbs down from the animal’s back, showing himself to be much shorter than the Old One, whom he approaches with arms spread in welcome. The two embrace, smiling and clapping each other on the back. The Old One breaks free first and snaps his fingers at the boatmen. Some pieces of loot—gold cups and dishes—are brought forth in a strongbox and shown to the one-eyed man, who inspects them closely, turning them in the sunlight, weighing them in his hands, even biting the metal and uttering cries of delight. Waman is shocked. He has never seen men of importance show feelings publicly. In the World, as his father and mother t
aught him, people of rank carry themselves with reserve. And lesser folk do well to follow their example.

  The half-starved rabble comes suddenly alive, thrusting in on all sides, elbowing, fighting for a sight of gold. Not until the Old One draws his sword and waves it above his head does the clamour begin to die down.

  Once the onlookers have been driven back and the gold returned to the boat, the Old One grasps Waman by the shoulder, pushing him towards the one-eyed man. He feels a tap on his chest, hears himself called Pilipillu. Then the Old One puts a whiskery mouth to Waman’s ear, points to the other and says a word that sounds like amaru. But Waman has already named the bald rider: Sapa Ñawi, One-Eye.

  The Commander rations out food taken from the Indian freighter. As soon as the men are somewhat stronger he has them careen his ships, hauling the vessels from sea to sand with a windlass and long hawsers at high tide. The wormy hulls are scraped, caulked, given a coat of stolen tar. This done, he sends his partner to forage on the mainland. Almagro is always keen to raid Indians, especially these hotlanders, for it was one of their arrows that took his eye.

  Pizarro installs Waman in a back room of his own quarters, a strong timber-framed house that survived the fighting when he took the island. Recalling that many of the natives escaped by swimming, he keeps the boy chained to a post. Few of us Christians know the art of swimming, Pizarro muses, but the Indians on this coast are eels.

  To teach his prisoner Spanish, he picks out men who got to know the boy on Ruiz’s ship: Molina, a hothead but good talker; Tomás the cookboy; and Candía, the genial Greek gunner. Having two languages each, these men are well suited to the task. True, Candía speaks with a thick accent, and the cookboy’s first tongue is Arabic, but their Castilian is good enough. And though Molina also knows Arabic—may indeed be half Moor or even a full-blood passing as a Christian—his Spanish is as good as the Commander’s own. Maybe better, Pizarro thinks sourly, recalling his unschooled youth in Trujillo.