Cloud Road

by John Harrison

  It is easy to make puppet-theatre characters out of the principal actors in this drama: the penniless, bloodthirsty thug, Pizarro, with nothing to lose; the magnificent savage king, Atahualpa, treacherously seized; the hypocritical holy friar, Valverde, who made fine but untranslatable speeches, then gave the signal to attack unarmed men in whose land they were uninvited guests.

  Pizarro was a strange case. He had made himself one of Panama’s richest citizens, then mortgaged it all on this. He was not interested in religion, didn’t womanise and didn’t become a father until middle age. His first child was a daughter, Francisca, by a fifteen-year-old native girl; but this liaison did not lead him to any interest in native welfare. He seemed driven by a directionless ambition. He acquired fabulous wealth but died without money. He seems at times a cipher, playing a game of knighthood, quest and conquest, at the dying of the Middle Ages. When the chivalrous ideal was already dead, and ripe for the touchingly human parodies of Don Quixote, Pizarro and his companions were still trying to live the fantasy in an unknown continent on the far side of the world.

  Atahualpa’s seems the simpler psyche: he was clever, calculating, ruthless, determined and energetic, which was the job description for the imperial throne. On that November night in Cajamarca, he was so sure of his possession of the empire that he relaxed naked in a hot bath, then scarcely bothered to look at the boasting men who visited. The white corpses were already halfway to hell. Tomorrow they would be dead, or eunuch slaves.

  As Pizarro organised his men in the lodgings around the square, little stood between his tall, spare frame and a swift, sordid death. He had not yet seen the humiliating treatment victorious Incas carried out on the bodies of the defeated. Soon he would discover the horror of the ritual humiliation called runa tinya. Since leaving the coast, he had seen no sign of wealth that would justify squandering his life’s toil in gaining estates and comfort. Tomorrow, they were probably going to die, and for what?

  For Atahualpa, it was just a matter of how long he would keep them waiting. After a few changes of mind, his ministers decided it wasn’t even necessary for the troops to be armed.

  Pizarro thought only one plan would work. He knew the tactics of his cousin Cortés in Mexico City. Plan A: seize the head of state and the state is yours. Ironically, it had not worked in Mexico, where the people quickly became disenchanted with Moctezuma’s dithering attempts at diplomacy, and sidelined him. Cortés had been drawn into plan B: an obscene war of attrition, using neighbouring city-states as allies. When he finally starved and overpowered Mexico City he was fighting Belsen-like walking cadavers, kept upright only by fanaticism beyond any belief. But Pizarro, with fewer than two hundred men at his disposal, and no time to recruit allies, was even more vulnerable than Cortés. Tomorrow Atahualpa would see how pitiful his forces were. There was only one way to keep the initiative: seize Atahualpa. It was almost certain to fail. There was no plan B: just death.

  A full frontal attack at their first meeting was the one thing Atahualpa did not anticipate. He moved his top general Rumiñavi behind Pizarro to cut off any escape back to the coast. Atahualpa asked Pizarro to prepare lodgings at a house where a snake was carved in the stone: the House of the Serpent. In moments of crisis, Francisco Pizarro, now in his mid-fifties, showed himself an astute general who had learned from his hard experience. He knew his men. They would respond to an appeal to personal valour much more than to any pious rallying cry. ‘Make fortresses of your hearts,’ he urged, ‘for you have no other.’ He concealed everyone indoors, apart from himself and one lookout. His men couldn’t see the point, but Pizarro knew that only by surprise and speed of movement could he inspire fear and panic. If he drew the men up in ranks, it would only spell out their weakness. The cavalry waited all night and much of the next day, mounted, inside the houses along the square.

  In the cold, early morning, without hurry, Atahualpa’s camp came to life. They feasted and drank to celebrate the end of the Inca’s fast. Eventually the Spanish saw masses of men forming ordered ranks on the gentle slopes below the hot baths of Baños. Anxiety swept through their guts as they watched a great battalion move across the valley towards them. The native discipline was manifest: they stood so their coloured plumes were arranged in a chequered pattern. Then they stopped. Thousands more assembled in the space vacated behind them. They marched forward again, and assembled a third battalion. The colossal force was not fully prepared until midday.

  The Spaniards heard Mass and commended themselves to God.

  The Inca army walked forward singing, cleaning every last speck of debris from Atahualpa’s path. As they bent, their gold and silver head-dresses flashed and sparkled in the noon sun.

  As the Spanish examined their hearts, and tried to summon up courage for this suicidal raid, they would have regarded themselves as the best equipped and most experienced soldiers produced by Europe. After eight centuries, the heretic Moors had been driven from Spain by force of arms. Spanish armies then sought fortunes in Italy, where they carved out victories and kingdoms. Their God, their king and their country were in the ascendant. Now a New World had been disclosed to them, granted to the Iberians by Pope Alexander IV, himself a Spaniard, and its souls commended to their care. Heaven and earth were falling into their laps.

  But they were also ordinary mortal men. Pedro Pizarro, a cousin, was a young teenager. His first foretaste of battle was to watch the veterans around him piss themselves in the terror of waiting, and not even realize what they had done. They stood in their wet trousers, shivering in the shadows. Through the long night, the danger increased their comradeship. Cristóbal de Mena recalled, ‘There was no distinction between great and small, or between infantry and cavalry. Everyone performed sentry rounds fully armed that night. So did that good old man Pizarro, who went about encouraging his men. On that day, all were knights.’ As Atahualpa approached, Francisco coached his men, ‘Come out fiercely at the moment of attack, but fight steadily and when you charge take care that your horses do not collide.’

  The tension mounted. As the afternoon drew out unbearably, Atahualpa suddenly stopped in a meadow half a mile outside the town, and the Incas began to pitch tents. Pizarro sent a messenger out to beg the Inca to continue, for ‘no harm of insult will befall you’.

  As the sun sank low, Atahualpa began to move again.

  This may be the greatest moment in all history. The history of two continents, two worlds, comes to a point, in a town square, at a moment in time, when two great men come face to face. They hardly speak to each other until it is over. It is won and lost in moments.

  Garcilaso de la Vega wrote that it was hard to say which side was more amazed. Each was marvellous to the other. They must each have experienced what Descartes called ‘a sudden surprise of the soul in the face of the new’; momentarily immobilised, feeling desire, ignorance and fear, all at once. In the marvellous figure facing them, each leader would also have encountered something rare and profound: someone utterly alien, yet still bringing a disturbing recognition that they contained something of themselves. There is a moment when the mirror shimmers, and we do not afterwards know if we are still standing on the same side of it. A sliver of your own self lies in the image of the ‘other’ facing you. As the traveller knows: we are all aliens.

  Atahualpa entered the single narrow gate, which led into the great square of Cajamarca, amid singing and dancing, held aloft by eighty nobles in gorgeous blue livery. With a movement of his finger, Atahualpa commanded silence: instantaneous and absolute. The dust stirred up by their marching feet blew slowly away. Sand slowed in the glass. There was a rent in time.

  Seeing no Christians, Atahualpa asked a counsellor, ‘What has become of the bearded ones?’

  He answered, ‘They are hidden.’ Atahualpa thought they were afraid to come out and shouted, ‘They are our prisoners.’ His men roared, ‘Yes!’ But they did not attack. At some stage, a legal document called the Requirimiento, or requirement, may have been re
ad out, in Spanish, requiring the Incas to submit and convert. It was Spain’s legal sop to its uneasy conscience over their right to invade these well-governed kingdoms. Las Casas said he didn’t know whether to laugh or cry at the absurdity of reading it to uncomprehending natives before butchering them. Fittingly, it was signed by Queen Juana the Mad. Deep tragedy was inlaid with farce. Friar Valverde stepped forward with a twenty-two-year-old native from Tumbes, far north on the modern border with Ecuador. Felipe was the Spaniards’ jobbing translator. Quechua was his second language, and he spoke a barbarous, provincial dialect. His Spanish was no better, learned from soldiers, and fouled with oaths. He had been baptised, but had only the faintest knowledge of the faith he was to describe to Atahualpa. Garcilaso de la Vega, fluent in both languages, knew Quechua had no words for the Trinity, and sympathised with Felipe’s attempt to explain it: ‘There are three who are one, so that makes four.’

  Atahualpa tried to help, switching to Felipe’s first language Chinchasuyu, which Atahualpa knew from his mother, a princess of Quito. Valverde’s description of Christianity still came over as gibberish, but when he went on to describe the power of arms which would come against Atahualpa should he not comply, Felipe’s soldier Spanish was fully up to the job. His pitch was clear and warlike.

  Atahualpa said, ‘My father won an empire and never heard of Jesus Christ,’ and he asked Valverde to prove what he said. Valverde held up a Bible or breviary and said, ‘This book speaks the truth.’ The Incas had no writing. Atahualpa picked up the book, turned the leaves, admiring the pages, then held it to his ear. ‘It says nothing to me, in fact it does not speak at all.’ He threw it to the ground.

  There are three main versions of Valverde’s reaction. He cried, ‘At them! At them!’ or ‘Christians, I call on you to avenge this insult to the faith of Jesus Christ,’ or, most chilling of all, ‘Fall upon him. I absolve you.’

  The Incas would have understood none of these, so there was no explosion into action, just an eerie hiatus. Valverde picked up his book, turned on his heel and went back to Francisco Pizarro, who gave an order to his brother Hernando. There was another ghostly stillness. Then mayhem broke loose. Cannon fired down into the crowd, trumpets sounded. Giving the old crusader battle cry, ‘Santiago and at ’em!’, Francisco Pizarro charged forward with his infantry and sixty horses bearing riders in armour and chainmail into the Inca’s unarmed entourage. They burst from doorways all around the square and rode towards a single point. The best steel in Europe cut into the arms holding the imperial litter. Hands and whole arms fell to the sand. Pandemonium reigned; the throne shook under the shock of the assault.

  Pizarro audaciously planned to seize a royal hostage from the centre of his court. Absurd. To believe that bold knightly deeds had a place in a world of guns and cannons was an anachronism which only their isolation in the New World had preserved. When reports of this charge reached Spain, they raised superior smiles at Court. What amusing rustics! Within decades it was the stuff of parody: Sancho Panza would counsel Don Quixote against rash action, saying, ‘It can’t always be “Santiago and at ’em!”’ But in Cajamarca square that afternoon, unconsciously, and without irony, a man who could not sign his own contract for the expedition launched the last flourish of the Middle Ages, and his knightly statue now adorns a hundred plazas.

  Trapped in the square, like flies in a bottle, many of the Inca soldiers panicked. Desperate to escape the carnage, they threw themselves so hard at the twenty-foot high and six-foot thick adobe wall, enclosing one side of the square, that it collapsed down to the height of a man. Those falling at its foot were suffocated and crushed. Spanish horsemen rode up the ramp of human bodies to scatter and scythe down those in flight. Meanwhile, the Inca nobles displayed a morbid magnificence in their discipline. With bleeding stumps, they dug their shoulders in under the litter, to maintain it aloft. Wherever a noble fell, two more sprang in to take his place. One Spaniard became frustrated and stabbed at Atahualpa. Pizarro wanted him alive and parried the thrust, receiving a cut to his arm. Seven or eight cavalrymen forced their way through to the litter and tilted it, and as Atahualpa struggled for balance, a hand reached out and pulled him to the ground. Later many would claim to own that hand. When he fell, the Spanish seized him, and all Inca resistance stopped.

  How could it have happened? Eighteen years before, a slim book had been published in Italy by Nicoló Machiavelli; we know it as The Prince. It is the first Bible of realpolitik, advising, ‘Men do you harm because they fear you or because they hate you.’ Atahualpa had neither of these motives that November day, but Pizarro feared Atahualpa mightily. Pizarro committed himself to desperate action, Atahualpa suffered fatal inertia. Had the Incas brought their spears, Atahualpa would have been encircled, and protected. The Spanish would have been annihilated. As it was, no native weapon was raised against Spain. Pizarro’s cut was the only wound received by a Spaniard all day.

  Atahualpa was taken to a secure room in the temple of the sun. The modern cathedral may lie over the site; it was usual to usurp the old sanctuaries. In the late afternoon, at the same hour as he was taken, Elaine and I walked towards the carved face of the cathedral. The old stones were embers with charcoal shadows. On barley-sugar columns, monkeys grinned from writhing vines, and the turbulent heat of nature was presided over by saints in cool, scallop-shell niches. Stillness and certitude: no seasons here. By one pillar of the porch sat an ancient woman with a face like cloth soaked in clay and crumpled, her eyes like milken marbles, her extended hand a bird’s nest of grimy wrinkles. By the other pillar, a young woman held a three-week-old baby to her copper breast, the skin around the nipple sprayed with a starburst of mahogany freckles. The old lady got up to go. She took the baby’s hand. The infant was a bundle of soft, full flesh, pouting cherub lips and cheeks, looking as if it had flown from a map where it blew pot-bellied ships into the gaping mouths of leviathans. She kissed the baby: the dried and the fresh peach. In the bare, black interior, walls were shiny with the supplications of four hundred years of fingertips exploring impoverished places, cold to the touch. Much is asked, maybe little given.

  The Birdsong Stilled

  Halfway up the main square is an avenue called Puga. On the right-hand side is a narrow building with a coat of arms carved above the door, its natural stone façade contrasting with the rendered colonial frontages to either side. This is El Cuarto de Rescate: it means The Ransom Chamber. Alexander von Humboldt visited it in 1802 and was shown round by Astopilca, a direct descendant of Atahualpa. Like every other visitor for four hundred years, he was shown the wrong room. This was Atahualpa’s prison, not the treasure store. The storehouse is said to be the only surviving building from the Inca town. I saw no others.

  Stepping up from the street I expected to enter directly into an Inca building, but found myself in a tall narrow passage, plainly colonial, with steps rising into a courtyard at the rear. The ground was pocked with circular storage pits, and a drain which ran from a blocked-up door in the centre of a fine Inca wall. The simple rectangular storehouse was seven yards by nine, and rose in six courses of blockwork, now topped with adobe, to a shallow pitched terracotta roof. The Incas did not use tiles. In his cell, Atahualpa would have gazed up at thatch.

  There was a rope barrier across the entrance. The 500-year-old stones have been suffering from polluted air, the oils and acids of human touch and sheer old age. The stone is spalling; the surface flakes away. Tourism is the only one of the three problems that the archaeologists can control. Until they work out a strategy to slow down the damage, the public is excluded. I showed my letter from the Peruvian Embassy, and obtained special permission to enter for ten minutes. The building has changed a little, doors moved, stone lintels filched and replaced with wooden ones, now perilously decayed. Some of the original stone flags remain below the present floor level. A slab of pinkish-brown stone stands against one wall, over five feet high, and shaped like the blade of a shovel with one shoulder missing
. Taken from the old Inca square, it is said to be the stone on which Atahualpa was killed, though he was tied to a post and garrotted, and chroniclers talk about natives carrying away dirt from where his body’s hands and feet had rested. The greatest stories nourish the richest overgrowths of legend.

  The most famous feature in the room is a reddish mark on one wall, at the height a man around five feet six inches tall might make by extending his hand above his head. Not long after his capture, a group of Spaniards were in Atahualpa’s quarters, talking. He said, ‘I know what you want, you desire gold.’ They half turned to look at him. ‘If you release me I will pay a ransom that fills this room with gold from the floor to as high as my hand can reach.’ The Spanish turned back to their conversation. A minute later Francisco Pizarro asked him to repeat what he had just said. Atahualpa confirmed that the room would be filled to a red line drawn at his fingertips, once with gold, and twice with silver. Inside, the room measured twenty-two feet by seventeen feet. Pizarro fetched a secretary to write it down. The paper would, in the view of the astute young Pedro Pizarro, become Atahualpa’s death warrant, one he signed freely and innocently.

  Atahualpa’s willingness to part with treasure made sense. He thought the Spanish would take it and go away. It would buy him time and save his neck. The loss of it would not affect his power; precious metal conveyed status and symbolised political power, but, unlike bullion in Europe, it was not cash. The Incas had no money, they gathered and redistributed; exporting treasure would not affect the real economy, which was agricultural. Besides, there was plenty more gold.

  Like a gangland boss, Atahualpa operated effectively from gaol. His men captured and imprisoned Huascar. To test Pizarro’s reaction, Atahualpa fell to weeping when Pizarro visited. He pretended his men had killed his brother; he said he was upset and feared the Spaniards’ anger. When Pizarro consoled him over the loss, Atahualpa instantly sent orders to execute Huascar. It was done so quickly, the Spanish never suspected they had been duped. In death, Huascar suffered the most horrible of Inca humiliations. He was skinned and made into a drum. It was devised so that when it was struck, the noise seemed to come from his own stuffed hands and arms, beating his belly. One femur was made into a flute and fixed to his lips. This was what they called runa tinya; this would have been Pizarro’s fate, had he failed.