The Gold Eaters (12 page)

Soon he is bringing in anchovies every morning, with squid and tuna when they come his way. Once he caught a young turtle, bearing it home proudly, its flippers rowing in the net. But Chaska's face became a thundercloud. Bad luck! Bad luck! she yelled. Put it back now! She followed him to the beach and watched angrily until it swam away.

Late that evening, drinking beer on the flat roof of the house, he asked, “Why not eat turtle? Others catch them. I've seen them do it.”

“They should have told you. Or I should have. A man must never kill his namesake. Atuq will never kill a fox. You must never kill a turtle. Turtle is your helper, your brother.”

A fart for her infidel ways, Molina thought, and nearly said so. No wooing her like that.

“Before you fish again,” she persisted, “you must fast three days. Then you'll take beer and corn to Mother Sea at dawn. You will tell her you are sorry. That you did not know our ways. That you will never harm a turtle again in your life. And you must thank her for all she yields to your net.”

—

Months go by. Months almost as good as Molina's time in Tumbes, though tinged with melancholy here, with so many friends and family emptied from the homes of Huchuy Mayu. After dinner they spend most evenings on the roof terrace. Chaska brings a jug of beer or palm wine, and they sit up there in the coolness watching sunsets over the ocean and the stars come out above dark mountains and magenta icefields glowing high beyond the desert.

Often she tells him about her old life with Felipe (whom she calls Waman) and her niece Tika, who he gathers left home several months before the plague to join a nunnery somewhere in the highlands, in a great stone city of the Empire. When things settle down she wants Molina to go there with her to look for the girl, or at least find out her fate.

One evening, long after the turtle-catching incident is laid to rest, he asks Chaska about
her
name. What does it mean? What is it she must never harm? The day is a faint memory above the darkening pewter of the sea. A breeze flows over the desert from the water, yet the sun's warmth lingers in the plaster of the roof, rising agreeably through a soft blanket under their backs.

She laughs, high-pitched, like a girl.

“No one can kill my namesake. Look. Look up.” She lifts an arm and spreads her fingers. “I am Star. Like the lights in the sky.”

“So lovely! I not see such sky before.”

“Have never seen.”
She touches his bare arm lightly with her fingertips.

“Your language is too hard. And I am too thick. Still I not speak right.” He sighs, remembering how the nuns tried to beat grammar and a good accent into him at the orphanage. He longs to tell her he's a simple man. No scholar, no gentleman. A rough warrior, a man of deeds, not words. But such a speech is beyond him. And better she think him a big man in his country.

The moonless night is dark now and unusually clear, and the stars seem to hover near the Earth, layer upon layer, great and small. And some fine as flour, a dusting of light on black velvet.

Ever since he can remember, Molina has loved the night sky. As a small boy in that orphanage at Molina de Aragón, he would slip from his dormitory, careful not to wake the others, sliding on his
belly along cold flags like a snake and up the outdoor stairs to the rooftop. There he would stretch on his back and scan the mystery of the stars. All those tiny jewels, so bright and blue and cold and far, the light of Heaven leaking through a million pores in the dark bowl of the firmament. The eyes of angels, the nuns said. But how could angels be one-eyed? Angels or not, the stars bestowed awe and consolation. No matter how friendless he felt, how sharp his woes, how cruel and unfair the beatings he received (though in truth he brought many on himself, with his tongue, his temper, his midnight raids on the kitchen for a wizened apple), his sorrows would wash away under the greatness of the stars. And later, when he left Spain for the Indies, he would haunt the deck of the caravel at night as it made its lonely way across the Ocean Sea, gazing at constellations like old friends. And as he sailed with Ruiz into this unknown South Sea, he saw new stars rising into place, pricking new patterns on the skin of the night, from below the rim of a new world.

Molina returns the touch on her arm, says softly,
“Mira, Chaska. Tantas estrellas, y tú eres la más bella.”

“What are you saying? I like the sound.”

“I say stars are many. Are lovely. And you most lovely of all.”

“I don't believe a word of it, Mulina!” But she is laughing. And he likes the way she says his real name. He doesn't much like Turtle. A slow and harmless creature. He is neither.

Chaska takes his hand in hers and sweeps it like a painter's brush over the sky, tracing the figures and patterns the Peruvians see. Some are familiar: Qollqa the Granary, their name for the Pleiades; Chakana the Crossbeams, which Pilot Ruiz called the Southern Cross. But there are others for which he has no match: Kuntur the Condor and Amaru the Anaconda, rearranging in his mind the stars of Scorpio. Strangest of all are the dark formations the Peruvians
recognize—ink spills on the misty whiteness of the Milky Way—Atuq the Fox, Machaqway the Snake, Yana Llama the Black Camel, with the twin stars of Centaurus for its eyes.

Molina does well at this, or so it seems after another drink. His faith in his mind's agility returns. By my sins! he thinks, I'm not doing so badly in the Peruvian tongue for only a few months. I can curse and eat and make love in it. And now I'm learning the heavens.

They have drawn close together on the blanket. He feels the stretched length of her beside him.

“And all that,” she says, her fingers sweeping the Milky Way, so much broader and brighter down here than in the northern world, “that is Hatun Mayu, the Great River. We live in Little River. Up there is the big one, greatest of all.”

Molina grunts, his interest in the heavens waning as a familiar ache in his lower body grows.

“La Vía Láctea,”
he answers dreamily.

“
Llaqta?
Which meaning, city or nation?”

“No. In my language, it's the Way of . . .
Leche
.”

“What is
lichi
?”

“I don't know . . .” How to explain milk in a country where milk is unknown? But of course, that isn't so.

“It is the drink from a mother. For feeding baby.” With this he lightly brushes the side of her breast, where there is wetness on her dress. Chaska laughs; flirtatiously, it seems to him. His cock is tenting his tunic.

“For us it is a man's milk,” she says. “A god's. The Great River is the gushed seed of Pachakamaq, Maker of the World. Maker of all Space and Time.”

Emboldened by this, Molina grabs her hand and plants it on his tent.

She snatches free, leaps up and strikes him hard across the face.
The blow lands like a cudgel in the fog of his lust. He sits up, feels blood running from his nose, tastes iron.

“Don't you dare do that,” she is shouting. “With my husband not dead a year! His child unweaned.”

—

Molina flees to his room—stumbling down the stairs and across the courtyard—as surprised by his own reaction as by the fury of Chaska's rebuff. What's he doing, putting up with
that
? He never takes shit from a wench. When he wants one, he has one. Can it be that this savage widow has unmanned him? Bewitched him? He must go back up and take her. A good fight makes a good fuck. Then be gone from this godforsaken town.

The pain worsens as the drink wears off. Slowly Molina calms down, begins to reflect on where he is. And on her angry words, parsing them over and over. If he heard and understood aright, her objection was not, maybe, to the move itself. Perhaps it was only too soon.

No. In the morning he will ask to be forgiven. If she lets him, he will stay. He will bide his time. They need each other. With time he may yet win this
widow.

Spain

1528–
29

6

W
aman awakes, runs a hand along a wasted body. He pinches thigh, chest. Feels the pinch.

Alive.

A lick of air on his face. A smell of land, earth, blooms, fire. Drowned by the stink of bilge.

His eyes are sewn up like a purse.

Blind?

He lifts a hand to his face, picks at crusted lids. Sore, not stitched. Light floods his mind.

The sky is square.

He lies in stench and darkness, fixed on the blue square which slowly he understands to be an open hatch.
Aboard, then, within scent of land.
He tries to get up, can only bend a knee. He calls out, voice weak as his limbs. Nobody comes.

A touch on his cheek, very soft. A purr. All these ships have cats. And the cats always come to him. But which cat, which ship? Which sea?

Something is new.

The ship no longer heaves.

No. There. He feels it. Gentle. No pitch, no yaw. Only small answers to the wind.

Slowly he assembles details—some real, others perhaps from
delirium, from dreams. They were on the Other Sea at last, the one the Christians call the Ocean Sea, which reaches all the way to Spain. In a ship bigger than Ruiz's. A better ship. Built in Spain not Panama, of Spanish wood.

There were others from the World. A girl, named Qoyllur, a little older, too highborn to notice him. And two youths, her helpers—all taken on board by the Old One during his southerly reconnaissance along the Empire's shore. Also six llamas and other gifts from ports of call.

Those people, those animals: did they die? Am I the only living creature from the World?

He sinks into a doze and a face comes before him: hard, wrathful, bald as a cannonball. A lone blue eye, scanning mistrustfully. The eye of Almagro, the Commander's partner. Dreaming again: One-Eye can't be on this ship. He was left behind in Panama. Waman's mind casts back to landing there after leaving Peru and sailing north past the hotlands. Almagro came down to the beach to greet Pizarro, as he had on Gallo Island. A great show of welcome, the two old men embracing like boys, like brothers. One-Eye plunging into the hold to see—and count—the new things from Peru. His whoops at every scrap of gold.

Waman was disappointed to find the barbarian outpost to be nothing but a straggle of huts and muddy alleys between the foreshore and the jungle. A shipyard. A few hundred whites, a few dozen blacks, many Indian slaves and half-breed children, among them One-Eye's small son by a woman of Panama. They were there about a month, he recalls, all four from the World kept in cells beside the church: the only building made of stone.

One day the Old One came, fetched them out into steaming sunlight, had them chained behind a train of mules. Pizarro bade
farewell to One-Eye with friendly words. But no warmth in his expression. Suspicion as usual in Almagro's lonely eye.

For days they followed a muddy track across the Isthmus, through a high forest to the Other Sea. There they boarded this ship bound for a place called Seville—the greatest city, Candía said, in Spain.

But did they reach it?

He hopes they did not.

—

Two faces in the blue square: one black, one brown. Tomás and Qoyllur, the haughty southern girl.

“Welcome back, Waman.”

Why is she here, speaking to him? “You live!” he says. “The others . . . where are—”

“No talk. Drink.” She lifts his head, swabs his face with soft wet cotton. Tomás holds a cup of water to his lips. Fresh water, sweet and cool.

“Have we gone back?” he asks.

He counted thirty-three days on the Other Sea, tying them on a thread. Then he fell ill, sweating in his hammock, not knowing night from day, nor caring, wanting death. How small the ship. How vast the Ocean Sea. How little food. And what food. Stinking pork, weevily corn, water like saliva, cheese that walked the board on legs of worms.

For every one of those days until he lost his wits, Waman yearned for the ship to turn back. Back from its mad fight with endless storms on an endless sea. Back to land, to life. He prayed for this to every god he knew, his and theirs. He swore he would run into the great woods the moment his feet touched the Isthmus of Panama, run all the way home to the World.

“Did we go back?”

“It's over now. Rest. We're there.”

“Where?”

“The Great River.” Tomás's voice. “The Wad-al-Kibir. I can see the towers of Seville.”

“Ispañapim kanchik!”
Qoyllur's voice. “We're in Spain!”

—

Waman dozes and more faces come before him: the girl, her helpers. Where are those boys? And the llamas, his special charges, whose sufferings he tried to ease until he couldn't leave his hammock.

He remembers Tomás appearing like a spirit in the fires of delirium, making him swallow thin broth, stale water. And Candía, his great beard dull and wilted. And Pizarro, telling him to trust in God.

Then a jaundiced priest with candle, book, and oil. And that was the last.

Until now. This breath of wind, this box of sky.

—

Again he sleeps, waking to the dankness of a tidal river, to bells and cries, human voices, the
tock
of horseshoes. A sudden clatter of armed men coming aboard. One climbs down the ladder, casts around, holds a kerchief to his mouth, climbs back into the light.

Waman does not see them arrest the Commander, but he hears of it soon enough. Francisco Pizarro has been taken to jail.

Why? Because the Old One never put in at Tumbes for Molina? Pizarro blamed winds and currents, he recalls, but Candía did not believe him. Neither did others. They whispered that Molina was marooned by the Commander's impatience, his drive to get to Panama and on to Spain, to lose no time in petitioning the King.

Next morning the Greek comes down and tells Waman what he
has learnt: Pizarro is being held for all the debts run up by Panama, because he served as the settlement's mayor and is its first official to show his face in Spain. Debts? Waman asks himself. He knows the word, but has never quite grasped its implications. They put many things down to debt. Isn't it some kind of
ayni
, a favour to be returned, reciprocated? How and when does it become a crime?

They are kept on the ship several days, forbidden to go ashore. He hears feet and heavy sounds on the deck above. Tomás and Qoyllur visit him two or three times daily, bringing food and water. He sees how changed they are. The black's skin is grey, the whites of his eyes yellow in a ravaged face. More teeth are gone. Qoyllur still has her teeth, but her mouth is a wound, her long hair dry and listless, her touch cracked and coarse on his brow.

At last she tells him: all from the World are dead except he and she and three llamas.

The llamas. Who would have cared for them after he fell ill? They are not in the hold, nor does he hear their tread on deck. The last thing he remembers is seeing them bound under nets during terrible storms, their knees and bellies rubbed raw by the reeling ship, each lying in a pool of blood and waste despite the straw he tried to spread beneath them. Fear in their soft eyes. He tried to soothe them, hugging their woolly necks, telling them one day this would be over and their feet would touch dry land. He went to the chaplain and brought them holy water, to make them Christians. Perhaps if they drank it they might survive this Christian ship. But each day the necks rose more weakly to greet him. One neck, then another, did not rise. Poor suffering beasts. Of the six, only three.

And of the four of us, only Qoyllur and myself. Qoyllur, the grand one, humbled and changed. Until now she'd made it clear she deemed him beneath her. She was not a captive. She came of her own will and curiosity, or at the behest of her parents. Or perhaps of the
Empire, as a spy. She came in style, well dressed, helpers carrying her belongings.

We are the only two left. So that's why Qoyllur's being so good to me. She can talk to nobody else.

—

As soon as Seville's authorities give permission to unload the ship, Waman is lodged at a wine merchant's house, in servants' quarters on a back patio, with Tomás to sleep across his door. For protection, Waman wonders, or to stop him stowing away on the next ship bound for the Indies as soon as he can walk? The building has high walls, no windows except on the inside, and a single door to the street, iron-bound. Qoyllur, less valuable to Pizarro and therefore freer, stays with a seamstress not far away, below the walls and towers of Seville.

Little by little, fresh water, fresh air, fresh fruit—above all the miraculous orange, a great gift of the Christians' god—rebuild his health. He sees it in Qoyllur too, her healed gums, the gloss returning to her hair.

She treats him as a brother now, calling him
tura
, stroking his head, bringing food. As Tika used to do. Whenever Waman thinks of Tika and home he feels cloven in two like an avocado, and the hard stone that is his heart falls out.

Echoed footsteps
on flagstone. Getting nearer. The chime of heavy keys.

“I piss on God!” Pizarro swears into the darkness. What a homecoming after twenty-seven years in the New World! Hauled away before Spain is steady beneath his feet. Thrown in a dungeon. And
for other men's debts—not even his own. For the debts of every fool in Panama, merely because some years ago he was its mayor.

The door opens. A welcome glow. A lantern in the hand of a brute like a fairground bear.

“Curse God all you like,” the jailer mutters, as if to himself, tossing some straw in a corner, setting a plate of old bread and mildewed olives on the floor. “He won't hear you. He doesn't listen to bores. Luckily for you.”

“You speaking to me, man?”

“Why would I do that? You debtors are all bores. Nobodies.” The jailer farts, following this with an odd, shrill giggle. “Give me a murderer. Give me a rapist. A heretic. A backsliding Jew. A Moor. Interesting work, squeezing out their lies. But scum like you . . . It's not worth oiling a thumbscrew to hear what you have to say.” The jailer hawks and spits on the floor, inches from the food. He regards Pizarro, hand on hip. “Let me guess. You're a drunk? You stink at cards? You throw money at every pair of tits?

“Good night, Lord Nobody. Until tomorrow. And tomorrow.” Another giggle, a slam, the old lock tumbling; echoed footfalls fading down a corridor.

I'll throw that whoreson to the dogs, Pizarro vows.

But how? How, when a lifetime in the Indies ends in this? He curses that charlatan of a beggar by the church in Trujillo, preying on the dreamy youth he used to be. Nearly forty years ago now. Might things be different if he'd been more open-handed, given both coins, not one? Better he'd never left Spain at all, better he still wandered Trujillo's hills behind a drove of swine.

The Commander sighs, eats. Rotten food, fit only for rats and cockroaches, though no worse than what was left on the ship. Self-consolation slowly cools his rage. Most men of his years are long dead. Most men of his birth would be proud to have done what he
has done. In the Caribbean with the great Columbus. Discovering the South Sea with Balboa. Founding Panama. That city's mayor. Those aren't the deeds of a nobody!