The Gold Eaters

by Ronald Wright

  Late that day the remnant of Atawallpa’s southern army makes a last stand in the hills, killing enough Spaniards and horses that Soto is forced to retreat. But in the small hours after midnight comes the sound of trumpets. Almagro has broken through with reinforcements.

  The road to the capital lies open.

  FOUR

  Cusco and Chile

  1533–35

  16

  A pair of young eyes, watchful, long in hiding, observes the strange procession straggling for leagues along the highway. At the head are armed barbarian riders, four abreast; then foot soldiers, hundreds more bearded ones, thousands of auxiliaries; in the rear come women, chained prisoners and slaves, a pack of hounds, a long llama train carrying supplies. The watcher notes several palanquins of Inca lords, their colours and banners, the bearers’ uniforms: members of his own kindred and others who opposed Atawallpa. Friends.

  The column is nearing the causeway across the Anta marshes. Cusco is only hours away. Now is the time to end his exile and announce himself. Now or not at all.

  Waman sees the lone figure walking down a grassy hillside on a course to intercept the Old One and One-Eye at the column’s head. The Spanish leaders also notice the visitor. Though he seems young and slight, wearing the dress of Indian farmers in these parts—a simple tunic and yellow cotton cloak—there is something in his bearing and the boldness of his approach which makes the Commander call a halt.

  Always more at ease on his own feet, Pizarro gets down from his horse and calls for the interpreter. The visitor can be no threat. His hands are open and empty, and when the wind presses his clothing to his body there’s no trace of hidden weapons; only the slim build of a youth in his teens. But a youth who seems to have something of importance to say.

  By now two other men are coming down the hill—older, judging by their gait; though dressed as plainly as the first, they too have the bearing of lords. “Stay in your saddles,” Pizarro tells his officers. “Keep your eyes on that ridge.” He signals Candía to ready a musket. The young stranger, now only yards away, is unfazed by these preparations, though he knows very well what they are. He watched the fighting above the Apurimaq two days ago; he saw how these barbarians use their weapons.

  “Ah, Felipe. There you are!” the Old One says. “Find out what this Indian wants.”

  Waman looks at the youth. A few years younger than himself, perhaps seventeen. The sun brightens from behind thin cloud, lighting their faces, and as their eyes meet a spark of empathy passes between them, an unspoken you too. Both are marked by smallpox, and in much the same way: each has a light drift of pitting on one cheek, a deeper roughness on the other. Waman is about to speak when he recognizes something else. In the broad highland face, strong-boned and handsome but for its scars, there is a look of Atawallpa.

  “Get on with it, Felipillo!” The Old One hisses. But Waman deems it unwise to speak first. This is no lowly farmer. It is an Inca; likely a prince.

  “I see you understand their tongue,” the visitor says, looking the interpreter up and down. In deference to Tika, and not expecting to have any duties until Cusco, Waman is dressed as the northern lowlander he is, with the unhappy addition of a threadbare velvet cap. “Do you understand me also?” the youth asks.

  Waman nods, unsure how to address him. He adds a hesitant Arí, qhapaq Inka, Yes, mighty Inca, lowering his eyes.

  “Good. I am Manku Yupanki, son of Inka Wayna Qhapaq and Qoya Mama Runtu. I am the brother of Inka Waskhar, half brother to the rebel Atawallpa.” He pauses while Waman relays this to Pizarro, going on to say he has lived in hiding for more than a year, ever since Atawallpa’s army occupied the capital and began slaughtering potential rivals for the throne. “This is why I am disguised as you see. Tell the Machu Apu here that I have heard great things of him, that I would have preferred to welcome him to my city more fittingly. This will be done in due course. All in Cusco are grateful to the bearded ones for killing the usurper. We shall honour and reward them well. That is all.”

  By this time the two elders who shared Manku’s exile have joined the group. They summon Inca lords with the barbarian column. All give the same answer to the Old One’s eager questions. This young Manku is the highest-born prince in the Empire. He will be crowned Sapa Inka in Cusco’s great square as soon as members of the royal clans who fled the northern occupation have returned.

  Waman hears excited chatter among the Spanish leaders. Broad grins on hairy faces show their delight. Here is the puppet king they need! Better still, this new Inca is a boy. It will be easy to tug his strings.

  “Felipe, tell Lord Manku this. That I have come here not for my own ends, but for the express purpose of freeing him and his people from the tyranny of Atawallpa. Those are my Emperor Charles’s orders.”

  Suppressing a skeptical smile (a smile, Waman thinks, much like Atawallpa’s when Hernando Pizarro boasted so windily at the Cajamarca baths), Manku steps forward and embraces the Old One in the way he has seen them do amongst themselves. The coarse wool of the beard brushes his cheek; the barbarian’s foul smell invades his nostrils. But Manku, too, is delighted. Drawing back, he turns to his nearest kinsman. “They mean to use us,” he whispers. “We shall use them.”

  Waman and Tika have heard many tales of the capital’s splendour. Cusco, they expect, will be like Cajamarca and Huanuco Pampa, only more so. A vast city rearing from the land on some height or rise where its buildings can impress from afar. They are up at the front now, walking beside the Old One’s dapple mare. Manku leads the way, riding in a double palanquin with one of the Inca lords from the column, dressed now in borrowed finery: a vicuña tunic of brightly coloured squares; gold earspools with emerald inlay; a gilt-bronze helmet framed by a short arc of crimson plumes.

  The city itself is not in sight, though outlying towns already climb the hills on either side of the highway. These suburbs are as dense as any Waman saw around Spanish cities, though better laid out, with paved streets and water channels. The road is sloping downward, beside a small river in a conduit, and the steepening hills are contoured with terraces.

  Manku calls a halt and steps down from his palanquin. He beckons Waman and the leading Spaniards, bidding them follow him a few yards to a rock outcrop carved like a dais. From here, with outstretched arm, the Inca blows a prayer to the Sun, to snowpeaks on the horizon, and to Qosqo Llaqta, the City of Cusco, at his feet.

  Waman feels a light touch on his elbow. Tika has come up silently behind him, lifting herself on tiptoe to rest her chin on his shoulder. They look down on an extraordinary sight, one neither of them could have imagined, or will ever forget. The Empire’s capital, Navel of the World and City of the Sun, lies hundreds of feet below. It fills the head of a long valley sunk among mountains on three sides. The fourth side is open to the south, widening out to distant fields and icy ranges. Nearest them is the heart of the royal city, steep roofs and bannered towers laid out between two rivers. One of these is the Watanay, the same stream that runs by the highway, water and road descending to a broad square in the midst of great halls with elaborate thatches and dazzling crests of gold.

  The only building Waman thinks he can identify—from descriptions brought back to Cajamarca by the two Spaniards who looted it on Atawallpa’s behalf—is a high structure commanding the far end of the city, where the two rivers seem to meet. That must be Qorikancha, the Golden Court, the Empire’s greatest temple to the Sun and heavenly powers.

  Manku stands on the carved rock as if in trance. He says nothing, takes no notice of the throng behind him, the gleeful backslapping, the greedy laughter, the din of the barbarian tongue. After a year of flight, hardship, and fear for his life, he has returned at last, ready to rule the United Quarters of the World.

  The Inca beckons the Old One and an ugly one-eyed man, also old, who is with him. The column moves down into the city, drawing up in the great square, which Wama
n now sees is two squares divided by the Watanay yet joined by a row of three stone bridges. A large crowd has gathered, cheering, singing, waving banners. The Inca orders his palanquin to halt on the middle bridge. He stands up, raising his hand and letting it fall slowly until there is silence, even among the Spaniards.

  A herald announces who he is, though this news has already been brought by runners sent ahead.

  “All hear me,” Manku begins. “I stand here today on the bridge between the squares of War and Peace. Beneath me runs the River of Years. These outlanders from across the sea are my guests and allies. They have killed the killer of my brother Waskhar. Young though I am, in due course I shall offer myself for election by the royal clans to take my worthy brother’s place. In the meantime I ask you to treat these people as our friends. Do anything they ask of you, as you would if I asked it myself. The times of war are ending. A new peace begins.

  “That is all.”

  A month goes by. The Inca kindreds—all those who have survived the plague and civil war—return to the city and declare their support for Manku, their new Sapa Inka. His coronation is about to be held, coinciding with the solstice.

  Alone at dawn some days beforehand the young Inca leaves his palace on Granary Terrace, halfway up the escarpment crowned by Cusco’s hilltop citadel. Dressed once again as a simple farmer, though for humility now, not disguise, Manku climbs a road that runs beside a stretch of the megalithic ramparts above the city. From here he will walk all day without food or drink, making his way by nightfall to a small mountain shrine where each new Sapa Inka must fast three days, mourning his predecessor, calling on all his forerunners to guide his hand and mind.

  The path is in deep shadow, the air cool, Cusco’s other river, the Tullumayu, plunging behind him in its conduit. Manku takes a last look at his waking capital, its rooftops draped with scarves of mist. He turns to the huge stones beside him, some big as a house, all flawlessly cut and fitted, a masterwork that took thirty thousand men fifty years to build. He remembers when his father brought him up here as a boy, showed him every feature—the tiered ramparts, the water supplied to the heights by pressure, the towers’ tall windows watching over the city. At the top of the middle tower, his father traced out for him the schematic puma in the city’s plan, explaining that the fortress is the head of the great cat, with the zigzagging bastions its teeth.

  Manku lingers, draws strength from the building: the Empire’s might proclaimed in stone. We did this once; we will do such things again. He gazes up at the walls sailing against a pink-flecked sky. As sunrise touches the highest tower, he utters a prayer to the Day.

  The new Inca hastens on, his slight figure soon swallowed by the hills beyond.

  Notwithstanding his outward poise, his youthful sense of invulnerability heightened by surviving the Great Death and Atawallpa’s purge, Manku knows he is the youngest ever to become the Only King. Yet there is no one else. All elder brothers by his father’s Queen are dead, along with most of his uncles and senior advisers. His half brother Pawllu, now living with him in Waskhar’s former palace, will be a help. Born to an Aymara noblewoman from Lake Titicaca, Pawllu is well connected in the southern quarters of the Empire. But even younger, barely sixteen. Together they must deal with these barbarians led by a pair of old men. Old yet strong, shrewd, seasoned by long lives of fighting and intrigue. How to control them? How to rid the World of them when they’re no longer needed?

  —

  Manku is not seen until the morning of the ceremony, when he returns on a rich palanquin, dressed in full regalia, lacking only the imperial sceptre and the crimson fringe that is Tawantinsuyu’s crown. These will be conferred on him later by the high priest, Willaq Uma. That morning, the new King visits eleven previous kings and queens, kneeling before them in their palaces, where they preside everlastingly over the lives of their descendant clans.

  In the afternoon these ancestors repay Manku’s homage. To the amazement of the Spaniards and the wrath of Friar Valverde, the royal forebears are carried solemnly into the square on canopied thrones like a grand procession of Christian saints. They are set down by their bearers, who stand aside while Chosen women fan the ancient faces and lay out food and drink for them. The royal mummies indeed look lifelike to Waman, their faces and limbs unwithered. Only the eyes give them away: pupils of polished obsidian in whites of sea-ivory.

  To Manku’s right sits his father, the great Wayna Qhapaq, face pitted and half his nose destroyed by smallpox. On Manku’s left is his dead mother, Mama Runtu, at the head of all the queens. A hush falls on the eerie scene.

  Waman is trembling, racked with belly pains and fear, despite the Spanish army camped behind him in the other square. Or rather because of it. He will have to translate the Requirement yet again, when the Old One chooses. It could all end in blood.

  Although Cusco, like its Empire, has lost more than half its people, the plaza is thronged by royal kindreds and other high-ranking onlookers from across the World. Every window, doorway, and terrace is filled with faces. The best outlook (and the safest, Waman thinks) is enjoyed by those high up on two flat-roofed towers flanking the gate of Wayna Qhapaq’s palace.

  There begins a heartbeat of big drums, a hooting of pan-pipes, a shrilling of flutes and women’s voices. The serpents-and-rainbow flag swishes at the tip of the Roundhouse, the highest tower on the square, roofed by a cone of lacquered wood with a mahogany spire like a mast. Scars where Atawallpa’s ransom was torn from the walls are hidden by bunting and flowers, and it is almost possible to believe that everything is as it should be in the City of the Sun.

  “Look there, Commander,” Valverde says to the Old One. The friar has just arrived from the Christians’ camp after saying a mass to counteract the heathen rites. “Here comes their pagan pope!” A procession is emerging from the mouth of Sun Street, which runs into the square from the Golden Court at the far end of the city. Leading on foot, dressed simply in white cotton, comes the high priest, Willaq Uma. In his hands are staves, one topped with a silver moon, the other with a golden sunburst. Borne in a litter behind him is the Day, a gold statue of a seated boy, recalling the first Inca’s descent from the Sun.

  Valverde can barely contain his outrage at what seems to him a demonic parody of his own faith. These sights would not be out of place in Rome: the golden image might be Our Lord in youth; the sun-headed stave a monstrance for the consecrated Host. “How the Devil mocks us!” he says for all to hear. “Our sacred duty is to ensure this young Antichrist’s reign will be a short one.”

  Willaq Uma, a sturdy man in middle years, walks up to Manku and makes a short speech. Waman strives to follow. It is an oath in an old form of the language, adjuring the new Sapa Inka to rule for the good of all; to treat the Empire’s citizens as one great family; to feed, shelter, and care for them, never neglecting their needs, nor failing to protect them. Once Manku has answered, the older man places the royal sceptre in the smooth young hands and fastens the crimson fringe across the forehead of the Only King.

  At this Valverde and the Old One step forward, Waman between them, sweating heavily. Although Manku has agreed in advance to accept the Requirement, forestalling any casus belli, Waman’s mind is back in Cajamarca. The tossed Bible, the five thousand butchered in an hour.

  It is Manku who brings the interpreter back to here and now. Before Waman remembers to lower his head in respect, the Inca meets his gaze for an instant. Again that flow of empathy. You too.

  War Square now rings with the sound of Castilian as Valverde reads out his rival claim to heavenly and earthly powers. If the new Inca listens to Waman’s stumbling translation, he gives no sign. He stares through the three men as if they were not there, still as the dead monarchs around him. At the end he says simply, Kusan. It is well.

  For Manku this formality is a mere courtesy to the foreigners whose intervention brings a welcome end to the Inca war of succes
sion. It proclaims nothing more than an alliance. Once they have helped him mop up Atawallpa’s forces, he will load them with all the treasure they can carry and send them to their ships. Gold is easily replaced. Tawantinsuyu will then enjoy a fresh beginning, united under himself—a new King named for the very first, Manku Qhapaq, the ancient Sunchild looking on through obsidian eyes.

  The Inca stands, holding a beaker aloft. He tips the Earth her drink, toasts the mountains and people on all four sides, drains it in one long draught.

  A joyful shout from the crowd: Kawsachun Sapa Inka! Long live the Emperor!

  The Old One lifts his hand, not to signal a massacre this time but in salute. ¡Viva el rey! he shouts. ¡Viva el rey del Perú!

  And who is that? Waman asks himself. Manku Yupanki? Or Carlos Habsburg?

  —

  The usnu in the middle of Cusco’s square is a round stone fountain with a golden bowl representing the navel of the World. This begins to fill, as if by magic, with an endless flow of beer.

  The celebrations go on for a whole month. So many are the drinkers, and so great their thirst, that the city drains brim with urine where they empty downstream into the Watanay.

  It is Tika who points out this remarkable sight to Waman while they are strolling beside the river arm in arm; a little unsteadily, having contributed their share. Like everyone in Cusco, they are divinely drunk. Not the private drinking of Spaniards but a communal drunkenness hosted by the state in honour of its gods and institutions. The Inca’s generosity flows to and from the people, repaying them for their duties to the Empire, affirming the Empire’s duties to them. Waman is swept up in the collective mood; he feels welcomed home at last. His part in the invasion, which has weighed on him so long, has been lifted, washed away. If Peru and Spain are now at peace, then the war within himself can end.

  Standing here with Tika at the riverside, watching the yellow spate of plenty and happiness begin its journey to the sea, he feels she is drawing closer to him, day by day, in her own time, like the returning sun.