—
Later she asks if they know where they’re going.
“No more than you do,” says Molina. “They put us on this raft without a word and shoved us off.”
“Well, I do know a little more than you. In a few days we must be sure to keep to the left bank. There’s a riverside town called Red Earth. From there a road runs up into the foothills of Lower Huanuco. They gave me this.”
She hands Waman a small quipu, sees his surprise.
“It’s a safe-conduct—to show Manku’s officials when we get there.”
—
It’s as if they are standing still, for they move at the speed of the river, so wide and deep it seems not to flow at all.
Molina makes a notch in a timber each dawn. He is getting sunburnt, his lips cracked, the skin moulting from his shoulders.
Waman tells him to go into the palm-leaf deckhouse, but he doesn’t move. Perhaps he is shy of Tika, who is dozing there.
“Now I’ll tell you,” he says.
“Tell me what?”
“Where Chaska and I were living.”
“Puma Hill!” Tika’s voice from the shelter. “Was it Puma Hill?”
“Yes,” he says. “It’s been more than two years since I left. But I think she’ll still be there. She and Atuq.”
They question Molina until the sun is fierce and he agrees to go into the shade.
In this emptiness, this heat, this seeming stillness—and this anticipation—a man might lose his mind. Waman withdraws to the stern, throws the net. The fishing is bad in the soupy water. Only three small fish in five days.
—
On the ninth day, about noon, they reach Red Earth.
“First we eat,” Tika says to Waman. “Then we walk. Up into the mountains.”
The free Inca state lived on almost thirty years after Manku’s death, ruled by his sons from a new capital nearer the jungle, less easily reached than Vitcos.
Meanwhile, Gonzalo Pizarro overthrew the Lima Viceroy and killed him in 1546. Gonzalo’s conquistador regime, brutal even for its day, ended with his hanging by the Spanish Crown in 1548. But the revolt caused repeal of the benevolent New Laws, worsening the plight of Peruvians.
The quisling Pawllu died in 1549, perhaps of foul play, during negotiations with the Inca state. His son, Carlos Inca, married a Spanish noblewoman and presided over collaborationist Inca aristocrats in Cusco.
In the late 1550s, Sayri Tupa travelled to Lima and made a short-lived peace, building a palace near Cusco, where he was poisoned three years later. The Pope had approved Sayri Tupa’s marriage to his sister Kusi Warqay, and their daughter later married into Jesuit nobility. Ironically, their granddaughter would marry a Borgia, kin to the pope who had given the New World to Spain and Portugal long before the mainland was invaded.
Titu Kusi now took over in Willkapampa, ruling until his death in 1571 (perhaps of natural causes). Shrewd and resourceful, he fended off Spanish attack with drawn-out negotiations while secretly continuing his father’s policy of supporting uprisings in occupied Peru. Titu Kusi also became the author of an important history of the Spanish invasion and his father’s resistance (see the Afterword). This he sent to Spain, hoping to convince King Philip II of the justice of the Inca cause.
He was succeeded by Manku’s youngest son, Tupa Amaru (or Tupac Amaru), who ruled Willkapampa only a year. After yet another smallpox outbreak ravaged the independent state, the ruthless Viceroy Toledo pursued this last Sapa Inka into the jungle and, despite strong protest from both Incas and moderate Spaniards, beheaded him in Cusco.
With resistance crushed and the native population still collapsing—by the early 1600s it would fall to less than a tenth of what it had been in Wayna Qhapaq’s day—Toledo felt secure enough to convert the old Inca work-tax into grinding slavery. Over the following two centuries, more than a million would die in the silver mines of Potosí and the toxic mercury workings at Huancavelica, used for refining silver and gold.
Even so, the history of the Incas did not end. The Spaniards had killed Tupa Amaru’s son, but not his daughter. In 1780, by which time the population had begun to recover and nationalist feelings were stirring among the native aristocracy, a direct descendant proclaimed himself Inca Tupa Amaru II and came close to overthrowing Spanish rule. Joined by the Aymara under Tupac Katari, the convulsion shook the Andes. The second Tupa Amaru, like the first, was executed in Cusco’s great square, but his rebellion exposed the weakness of the Spanish Empire, hastening its breakup in the 1820s.
Although the republics that replaced Spanish rule were founded by small white elites intent on exploiting indigenous people and erasing their culture, the ancient civilization of the Andes lives on in the twenty-first century. Quechua is the most widespread native language of the Americas, with some ten million speakers in Peru and other parts of the old Tawantinsuyu; Aymara is spoken by three million, mostly in Bolivia. Despite centuries of persecution, native religious traditions thrive both openly and under a Christian veneer. In recent years a political transformation has begun as white elites lose some of their power through the ballot box. Peru and Bolivia currently have presidents of indigenous background: Ollanta Humala and Evo Morales Ayma. Morales, who is Aymara, has been the more radical and effective, implementing policies to redress five hundred years of colonization.
Afterword
How much of The Gold Eaters is true—insofar as truth can be deduced from a patchy, complex, and sometimes contradictory historical record? I have kept to the skeleton of fact, adding flesh where fiction demands. The main events happened, and most of my characters are based on people known to have taken part in them. Inca and Spanish leaders are much better documented than ordinary folk, of course. After the raid on the Inca ship, a young Peruvian (perhaps several) was kidnapped and taken to Spain. The Spaniards dubbed him Felipe or Felipillo. Meanwhile a Spaniard named Molina was left ashore at Tumbes, his subsequent fate uncertain. Most sources agree that Felipe was the interpreter at Cajamarca six years later, and in Cusco.
Felipe’s life after that is less clear, but accounts have him rebelling against the Spaniards during Almagro’s invasion of Chile. There is no evidence he ended up in the Inca Manku’s kingdom, though it’s not impossible; other go-betweens and fugitives certainly did, not least Manku’s assassins. Felipe’s own name and family are unknown. I’ve called him Waman in honour of Felipe Waman Puma, the indigenous writer and artist whose work so brilliantly illuminates the Peruvian experience of those tragic times.
Specialists will know the freedoms I’ve taken. The definitive modern history is John Hemming’s superb The Conquest of the Incas (1970). James Lockhart’s The Men of Cajamarca (1972) is indispensable for details of Pizarro’s army and the melting of Atawallpa’s ransom. William H. Prescott’s classic History of the Conquest of Peru (1847) still repays the reader. Kim MacQuarrie’s The Last Days of the Incas (2007) also gives a good account, especially on events after Cajamarca.
Many Spanish chronicles are available in various English editions. The best, and most fair-minded, is widely agreed to be Pedro de Cieza de León’s The Discovery and Conquest of Peru, first published in part in 1553, now available in full from Duke University Press (1998).
Of histories written by indigenous Peruvians, David Frye (2006) has made a well-abridged translation of the massive First New Chronicle and Good Government by Felipe Waman Puma (or Guaman Poma), written in the 1590s and early 1600s, though unknown until 1908.
The work of Manku’s son Titu Kusi Yupanki (or Titu Cusi Yupanqui) has recently been translated twice, by Ralph Bauer (2005), and in a bilingual edition with the original on facing pages by Catherine Julien (2006).
The most famous history with an Inca perspective is the Royal Commentaries of the Incas, by Garcilaso de la Vega, El Inca, whose mother was Ñusta Chimpu Ocllo, a niece of Emperor Wayna Qhapaq, and whose fathe
r was a conquistador. First published in 1609, the work became a seventeenth-century bestseller which did much to establish a Utopian view of the Inca Empire. It was later deemed subversive and banned by Spanish authorities, though not before it helped inspire the great revolt led by Tupa Amaru II. The best translation is by Harold V. Livermore (1966).
—
I have modernized spelling of Quechua words and Inca names (Wayna Qhapaq for Huayna Capac, etc.) but have kept traditional spelling for words and place names commonly used in English, such as Cusco (Qosqo or Qusqu), Cajamarca (Qashamarka), Huanuco (Wanuku), and quipu (khipu).
Some eyebrows may be raised by my assumption that quipus—besides being mathematical in content—were a mature form of writing, but this is supported by recent research, most notably the work of Gary Urton. It is in any case hard to see how lengthy messages could have been sent thousands of miles, with hundreds of fast relays, if they needed spoken commentary.
Readers curious about the Inca language (also called Runasimi) can get started with Lonely Planet’s Quechua phrasebook by Serafín Coronel-Molina (2008), much expanded and improved since a slim first edition done by me in 1989 with the help of Nilda Callañaupa.
Acknowledgments
First thanks to the book’s first readers, to whom I owe many helpful suggestions: above all Deborah Campbell, who read several drafts; also Anthony Weller, Denis Smith, Michael Wall, and my agents Jackie Kaiser and Henry Dunow. I am very grateful to Nicole Winstanley at Penguin Canada and Laura Perciasepe at Riverhead in New York, whose editing was all one could wish for; and to Alexander Schultz for his deft copy editing. Flaws that persist are my own.
I’m also indebted to many people for fruitful discussions about this book and historical fiction in general, especially Louise Dennys, George Lovell, Sarah Dunant, Colm Tóibín, Annabel Lyon, Louise Doughty, Karen Robert, and Sarah Tidbury.
My thanks to Robin Vose for his insights and kind loan of early sources, to John Hemming for his inspiring work and conversations over the years, to Persis Clarkson for her knowledge of Chile, to the late Celia Toribia Chávez for the folk song (adapted) in chapter 10, to Shane Hawkins for information on period Greek, to Satva Hall for photography, and to Charles Montgomery, whose portrait of Inca Garcilaso watched wryly over my efforts.
I am deeply grateful to all the Peruvians and peruanistas—too many to name—who have been so kind, hospitable, and generous over many years of travel and research in their country.
I thank the Canada Council and the British Columbia Arts Council for their support.
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