Waman bites his cheek till he tastes blood. Why me? He knew Pawllu would be going—he was at Manku’s palace when it was agreed—but nothing was said about himself. If the Old One hadn’t caught him listening, would this be happening at all? It seems cruel, arbitrary. And foolish. How will the Pizarros deal with Manku without him?
He spends the rest of the afternoon looking for Tika. She is not in her room, nor at the school. She must be in the Akllawasi, but no man sets foot in there. He leaves a message with the sentries on the gate—to meet him behind the Roundhouse as soon as she comes out. He waits on a stone bench in the shade of a cherry tree.
How will Tika take it? Will she agree to flee with him tonight? Could that succeed, with so many Spaniards in Cusco? Or will she want to come to Chile with him? Not likely, not in the midst of the biggest barbarian army yet assembled in Peru. It would be wrong to put her through that, even if she asks. Even if everything goes well. And how can it? This will end in blood and fire.
—
Tika sees the dejected figure of her cousin slumped on the bench, elbows on knees, head in hands. She touches his shoulder gently, yet he starts. That dead look in Waman’s eyes, a look she hasn’t seen for some time. She puts an arm around his shoulders. “What’s happened?”
The news tumbles from him. She is as shocked as he.
“How long will you be gone?”
“Months! All winter at least. It could be a year.”
She sits quietly for a while, gazing at the high walls of the Akllawasi as the setting sun creeps up them, lighting the bright colours of the mural on the top storey, under the eaves. Chevrons, frets, flying geese, hummingbirds, pumas. Weaving motifs writ large.
Her cousin is again what he was when they first found each other: a prisoner of the bearded ones.
“There’s only one thing to do, Waman. I’ll join the House until you get back. I’m sure they’ll have me. One of the Mothers already asked. I’ll be safe among friends in there.”
She gets up, takes Waman’s hands, pulls him to his feet. She hugs him fiercely, feeling the knot within. “Tomorrow. I’ll join first thing tomorrow. Then it’s settled. Then only one of us has to worry. Only me.”
Next morning they say tearful goodbyes at the Akllawasi door. He hands over her things. A plan for escaping the Spaniards is already forming in his mind. He knows that much of Chile Province lies along the sea, beyond the highest ranges in the World. Once Almagro’s army gets down near the coast he will run, find a trading ship, make his way north by sail. After that . . . he doesn’t know.
That night he and Candía get drunk. Waman nearly blurts his escape plan but reminds himself just in time that while the Greek may be his closest friend, he is also a conquistador.
“I don’t much like the smell of this, Felipe. My guess is Almagro wanted you as part of his price for going quietly. But why? He got along fine without you on campaign last winter. And I doubt he’ll be needing you to translate any psalms. Walk carefully there. The Commander’s a dangerous dog. Almagro is a mad one.”
Almost as if he has guessed the turn of Waman’s thoughts, Candía adds, “Don’t forget that little ingot. Did you get it cut up yet, like I told you?”
“I did. In ten bits. Neatly done by a goldsmith on Peace Square. The old fellow looked wretched—said he’d melted his life’s work into bars like that.” Waman pats his doublet. Six gold squares sewn into the padding, the other four swapped for small items easier to exchange: copper axe coins, steel blades, a few emeralds.
“Good lad. Mind you don’t lose it.”
Almagro musters five hundred Spaniards in War Square, himself on a tall grey horse by the gallows, helmet hanging from pommel, his bald head shining in the sun almost as brightly as his breastplate. The lone blue eye sweeps coldly over the scene. Waman, given a bay mare too old for war, is also mounted and in Spanish attire, his Peruvian clothes in a swag fastened behind him.
Two silver-roofed battle palanquins are coming into the square from Manku’s palace. The first brings young Pawllu. The other holds a man in his forties dressed as an Inca general. To Waman’s surprise, this is the high priest, Willaq Uma. Why would he be coming, and as a field commander?
A further surprise has been the arrival in Cusco of One-Eye’s son, named Diego like his father. Most call him simply the Boy. Waman recalls seeing him years ago in Panama, a little boy then, one of the first mestizos of that place. Now he looks about fifteen, with the colouring and features of an Indian, easy on his horse, though too slim to fill his armour.
—
Within a week, after crossing a cold plain, they reach an inland sea lifted high between ice-fanged ranges. Lake Titicaca. Here, in the land of his mother’s kindred, Pawllu and his guests are received with feasts and dances. Even so, Almagro’s men raid public buildings along the shore, and neither the young prince nor Willaq Uma tries to stop them, despite the thousands of Inca troops under their command. Evidently Manku has told them to let the barbarians take what they want, as in Cusco. The most Willaq Uma can do is save the shrines at Copacabana and on the holy islands of the Sun and Moon, where the first Inca pair came down from the heavens to bring order to the World.
The soldier-priest keeps aloof from the barbarians. Waman is sure he loathes them—has hated them, no doubt, since the very first reached Cusco and jimmied the gold off his finest temple. Pawllu is harder to read. For a while he seemed to fear One-Eye. At times, while interpreting between them, Waman saw the same nervous flutter of eyelashes that Atawallpa had. He wondered if their father, Wayna Qhapaq, also had the tic. Hard to imagine that great Emperor fearing anything. But maybe he did when young. In other respects Pawllu does not resemble Atawallpa or Manku much at all. He is shorter and more thickly set, like many in this region, with a doughy face, broad nose, and heavy-lidded eyes.
Whatever Pawllu may think of One-Eye, he has warmed to the man’s son, Almagro the Boy, who has been showing him what he knows of riding and swordplay. In return, the prince is teaching the Boy how to catch vicuña alive with an ayllu: three weights at the end of stout cords which are whirled above the head and thrown to entangle the animals’ legs. Pawllu is clearly enjoying the role of local expert; for once, he isn’t the younger, the lesser, as he has been in Cusco. That role now falls to the Boy.
Almagro encourages this friendship, sometimes demonstrating Spanish warcraft to the two teenagers himself.
—
In haste to reach Chile after tarrying by the lake, One-Eye insists on taking the shortest route—across salt flats and bald ranges between Titicaca and the coastal desert. Pawllu and Willaq Uma warn against it. “Tell Sapa Ñawi,” they instruct Waman (adopting the nickname he coined), “that the road he favours runs over the harshest country in the World. At this time of year the cold is extreme. We will guide him to a better way, by lower passes and green valleys further south.”
Almagro laughs in their faces. “Why should I follow a heathen priest and an Indian barely older than my son?” Waman does not translate the remark, but the two Incas exchange a look that suggests he didn’t need to.
One-Eye presses on compulsively, towards icefields and passes far higher than anything Waman or the Spaniards have yet seen. Range after range, with nothing but treeless plains, salt pans, and bitter lakes between them. The fingers of great glaciers claw at the road, and the air is so thin on the passes that Waman’s mind loses power over speech, unable to summon any language except a few words of his native Tallan. Only his body still functions at these heights, slow and ponderous as the body of an ox.
Horses go lame and die of frostbite. So do men, beginning with slaves in the baggage train. As each one drops, the Spaniards cut off his head to save themselves unbolting the iron collar. The two Almagros now share a curtained litter warmed by a charcoal brazier, a suggestion from Pawllu they did not disdain. Waman wears all his clothes, Spanish under Peruvian, an
d his thick alpaca poncho; he drapes a blanket over the saddle to spare his old horse. The Inca squadrons are equipped with heavy cloaks and ear-flapped hats of wool or fur. But many Spaniards, who have little to wear besides armour, see their flesh turn to marble. Some, pulling off their boots, watch in horror as toes come away as well.
With the cold is noise: glaciers cracking like bones; wind keening in frozen weeds and cactus spines. Hail stings like grapeshot in the face. Nobody lives on these high plains but a few herders following llamas and alpacas. As supplies run low, Almagro’s horsemen ride out and steal the flocks, killing anyone in their way.
—
The worst comes at the first outlying hamlets of Chile Province—not far below the snow line on the western wall of the mountains—small oases of huts and grass at the bottom of gravelly ravines stained ochre and green with ore. The Spaniards fall on these settlements, killing men and livestock, tearing down roofs to make campfires, taking the women.
Riding at the rear of the cavalry through wind-carved dunes of snow, Waman comes upon a dozen Spaniards thawing their feet in the disembowelled bodies of people they have slain. He sees others, not far ahead, butchering three stout women merely for this purpose.
Then nothing.
He feels himself being helped to his feet. A Spaniard he doesn’t know. “You dropped from your horse, lengua. Like you’d been shot.” Waman looks around. The gruesome scene is still there. Bloody snow, war-dogs at the corpses, others lapping vomit where he fell. His own.
He climbs back into his saddle, shaking, avoiding the barbarians’ eyes, not answering when they call, Are you all right? He rides off a short way, lets his mare drink where a spring breaks from the ice. He cannot watch more, cannot wait until One-Eye nears the sea. He must flee soon, at the first chance, no matter what risk. He must get down to the coast, return in disguise by some roundabout way to Cusco, to Tika. The barbarians appear to him now as they must to her: as demons, creatures of nightmare.
—
On the following afternoon the vanguard spies a terraced hillside of corn and potato fields, and the first town of any size in Chile.
The houses are empty of people and supplies. Forewarned of what is coming, the townsfolk have barricaded themselves behind some ancient ramparts on a crag, which Pawllu’s men call Mawk’a Pukara, the Ruined Fort. Almagro sends Waman up alone with the usual message: that the people have nothing to fear if they will surrender and become the Christians’ friends.
At the foot of the ragged walls the interpreter unbuttons his doublet, bares his chest, and spreads his hands to show he is an Indian and unarmed. After a short delay, he is allowed through the gate and taken to a roofless building near the top of the stronghold. From the woollens of those around him comes a smell of smoke and cold sweat, a taint of fear. He is given water and a bowl of potato stew—the best meal he’s eaten in weeks.
Waman relays Almagro’s message to some leading men who understand the Empire’s language. He then tells them it is a lie, that if they leave the fort they will all be killed, even women and children. Their only hope is to stay where they are.
For some time they give no answer. He sees them speaking in their own tongue, looking him up and down, inspecting his strange clothes. Why should they trust him?
“If you wish,” he says, “I will stay with you. I will help you hold this place. I’ll tell you all I know about the strangers. How best to fight them. They are many. Their beasts run like the wind. Their swords can cut a head off in one blow. They have pipes that shoot fire with a sound of thunder. And they are well armoured, very hard to kill. I am not saying that if you listen to me you will win. The choice may be bleak: to die fighting up here or be slaughtered like llamas down there. The decision must be yours.”
Again, the people confer in their own tongue.
“Tell us who you are,” an elder woman asks. “If they are as you say—and you are as you say—why haven’t they killed you? Why are you with them? Why do you claim to be our friend.”
Why indeed? Waman gives the quickest summary he can. “I am their prisoner,” he concludes. “I have chosen this moment to escape. Escape or die.” In the discussion that follows he hears them saying Atawallpa, Cusco, Manku several times. A man takes Waman to a high vantage point on the walls. They can see the Cusco squadrons forming up behind the Spaniards, pikes flying the serpents-and-rainbow.
“Why so many troops of the Inca with those barbarians?”
Waman begins to elaborate, then stops. How to answer them? How much does he truly know? Nothing in the World is what it seems. Is Pawllu here as a hostage? Or are he and Willaq Uma feigning, waiting for the best time to throw their troops against Almagro’s? “I am not sure,” he admits. “There was discord in Cusco. Among the barbarians and among the Incas. All may be playing hidden games.”
It is just possible, he thinks, that if these Chileans put up a good fight, Willaq Uma might attack the Spaniards here. He keeps it to himself: he mustn’t tempt these folk with his own hopes.
“Whether you want me with you or not,” he adds, “here’s what I can tell you. The bearded ones are most dangerous in open country, where they fight from their animals’ backs and spear anyone who walks or runs. But you have this crag, these walls, many boulders and sling stones. And I see you have food and water. Do not leave the fort, even if they turn and flee. That’s a favourite trick of theirs, to draw you out. Stay behind your walls. Hurl everything you’ve got when they’re in range.”
All that day and the next, the fighting raged. On the second evening Spaniards swarmed over the weakest points with ladders. Waman heard the war cries—Santiago!—and the wounded invaders calling on their god, or cursing him. He climbed a broken parapet above the breach, threw rocks at glinting helmets until it was too dark to see. Several times he heard that sound from Gallo Island: the low crunch of stone on skull. Spanish losses were heavy, but not enough to stop them cutting down the defenders, room by room. The interpreter! He heard. Find the interpreter! Take him alive.
But the sky had clouded over and darkness pooled thick in the warrens of the ancient fort. Waman lost his footing on the wall, knocked his head, blacked out. He came round sticky with blood, pinned under fallen men, unsure if he was badly hurt. He could hear Spaniards elsewhere in the ruins—congratulating one another, readying to leave, carrying out their wounded—a shouted order to leave the dead till morning.
Waman lay still, heart pumping. When there were no more voices and the attackers seemed to have gone, he wriggled free. His limbs worked; the blood on him was mostly others’. He took the clothes off a headless Chilean and dressed the body in his own. Remembering the gold and other valuables sewn into his doublet, he searched the quilting still warm with his old life.
He stayed where he was for what seemed two hours, until sure the Spaniards had gone. A thick fog descended, with freezing drizzle. A few survivors began to groan and stir.
A man and girl, perhaps father and daughter—both wounded but walking—led him away through the night into the hills.
FIVE
THE AFTERMATH
Cusco and Vitcos
1544
19
Waman greets the Day, then sinks onto the doorstep of his one-room farmhouse, elbows on knees, head thrust out towards the risen sun. He feels like an old man at the end of a long, hard life. How old am I? he wonders, totting up the years since Chile.
When he fled One-Eye he thought he’d get back to Cusco and Tika within a year at most. But it has taken eight. Two of them at sea. He remembers making his way down through the Chilean mountains to the desert coast, finding a small port and a ship bound for the north—a two-master like the one on which he sailed as a boy. When the ship reached Chincha, a small craft came alongside with news that the Empire was again at war. After enduring many outrages, Waman learned, and being held prisoner in his own palace, the young Inca Man
ku had escaped from Cusco, repudiated his alliance with the bearded ones, and attacked them throughout Tawantinsuyu. Manku’s armies had killed all the barbarians except for the Old One’s force at Lima, which was under siege. Some reports said Cusco was also besieged, others that the city had been burnt along with its Spanish occupiers. The fate of Almagro and Pawllu was unknown.
The ship’s master changed plans at once, sailing on north beyond the Empire’s border. He picked up provisions in the hotlands, then struck west across the ocean many weeks without sight of land.
Waman gazes vacantly at a snowpeak ruddy with dawn, his mind’s eye on very different landscapes: ocean fogs and the smoking cone of a volcano; the scrub hills of the Tortoise Islands, roamed by giants of that kind, prized for their meat and shells; lava-rock headlands where great lizards swam like seals in the surf. Then there were gales that carried them far south to other islands—these high and lush—inhabited by wild men tattooed from head to foot. He sighs at the irony: his childhood dream of a great voyage to the faraway lands his grandfather knew was unexpectedly fulfilled. Yet now he has no family he can tell. Perhaps no living kin at all.
Twenty-two when he fled Chile. So he must be thirty now. Eight years. And they seem like eighty.
His eyes stray wearily over the familiar landscape of his refuge, Pukamarka. Its houses of red clay. A dale green with alders at the foot of the hillside. Stepped fields. Coppery grass marching in waves on the uplands. His home for six months now; if a wanderer like him can have a home. He was lucky to find such a place—only three hours’ walk from Cusco, yet far enough to have escaped the wars. The people, much reduced by plagues, were glad to take him on as a helper, to plant and weed, clean sluices and canals.
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