The Gold Eaters (4 page)

A few townsfolk are sitting drowsily in the middle of the square, on the edge of a low dais with a trickling fountain. He joins them to take a drink and eat the last of his grain. His eyes roam over the city sights, particularly a strange and even larger building opposite the painted palace. He strolls by for a closer look on his way out. This must be a temple of the Empire, for its roof is steeply pitched—not flat like the others—and trimmed with sheets of gold. The doorway, twice his height, is made of smooth masonry, the work so massive and precise it looks impossible, as if stone blocks had magically been
rendered soft as clay and pressed together in a perfect fit. A crimson curtain hides the mysteries beyond the threshold. In the heat, his hunger, his light-headedness, the boy feels a little of his father's awe for the highland emperors who can build such things—who long ago, when Grandfather was young, swept down from their city in the clouds to rule the World.

It's a tiring walk to the docks, longer than expected, though Waman is cheered by the familiar sight of fishing craft upended along the shore. There is little business at this hour. Most people are indoors or under trees and shelters, resting after lunch.

Three big ships are tied at a jetty that bends into deep water. Men and women are working by the furthest, stowing freight briskly as if aiming to catch the tide. Delicious smells of pineapple, coconut, sweet potato, peppers, and jerked meat waft from the ship's stores, contending with the burnt sharpness of pitch from timbers and ropes. Bales of cotton and wool are being slung aboard and fastened on deck beneath oiled tarpaulins. In charge is a burly man wearing nothing but a white cloth tied up around his loins, a red turban on his head, and a tattooed band of pelicans marching in faded blue across his chest. He is bent over a tangle of rigging, sweating heavily, cursing to himself.

“Are you the owner?” Waman asks.

“Owner? If it's the owners you want, you won't find them here. They're fifteen days south, and that's the way I like it.”

“But this is your ship?”

“I'm her skipper. And I'm busy.”

“Do you need men?”

“Men, maybe. Boys, no.”

“I can paddle, steer, and fish. I'm strong . . . I've sailed to the Tortoise Islands.”

“How so?” The captain looks the boy up and down for the first time.

“With my grandfather.”

“Why aren't you sailing with him now, then? What's his name? Has he got one? I know every skipper from here to Chincha.” Seeing that his lie is about to unravel, Waman glances aside, to where several ships are moored abreast in the channel. The serpents-and-rainbow flag of the Empire hangs limply from each masthead. Soldiers are dozing against a deckhouse.

“The Emperor took his ship. For the wars. But not him—he's too old.”

The captain looks up from his work again, a sly grin on his face.

“I'll say one thing for you, boy. You're quick-witted. Get loading there. We'll see what kind of worker you are.”

“I ask nothing. Only food.”

A single cough of mirth from the tattooed chest.

“Food is all you'll get.”

At the dock
, in Tumbes, the ship had seemed huge—thirty paces in length, eight in beam, made of giant balsa logs cunningly notched and lashed, with a raised deck of slatted timber and a long split-cane deckhouse between the masts. But alone on the heaving vastness of the sea, the craft has shrunk in Waman's eyes to a floating cage. They are twenty-three on board: ten crew, himself, and a dozen traders, men and women who between them have more than thirty tons of cargo. At first the boy is entrusted only with tending the cook fire, fishing on calm days, tightening lashings over the freight whenever seas are high. But he is quick to learn the ship's ways—how to spread
and reef a sail, how to raise and lower the centreboards that make her tack into the wind.

—

They are eleven days out, in a region where twice a year the noonday sun stands straight overhead, when the lookout spies another sail. A ship is approaching from the north, running before the wind as if homeward bound to the Empire. The merchants get angry with the captain: he should have told them others had sailed this way already. Their goods will fetch less. The choicest products of the hotlands—the best gems, chocolate, conches, corals—will have been snapped up. The captain glares at them, makes no reply. He climbs the foremast and stays aloft at the crosstree for a long time, staring, gripping the perch with his knees, roofing his eyes with both hands.

“Rigged like us,” he says, upon regaining the deck. “But I don't recognize that ship.” He stands by the foremast, arms folded, waiting. When all the traders have gathered and calmed themselves, he speaks with the air of someone who knows more than he will say.

“That ship isn't one of ours—though it's rigged like ours. It looks as big as we are. It is sailing swiftly. There's a strange emblem on the sail. You should worry less about your prices and more about your skins.”

They are far out on the open sea, the white cusp of a mountain the only trace of the World in sight. He orders the crew to fall off and make for land.

The strange ship matches the change of course. It will catch them. The captain knows this. As the vessel draws near he sees it is indeed the new thing he has heard about from other seafarers, the thing he dreads.

2

F
rancisco Pizarro is sick of salt horse. “Horseflesh is for riding, not eating,” the Commander growls at the cookboy as they all sit down to another meal of the same foul stew in the caravel's sterncastle.

Pizarro stares at the hollow faces, mangy beards, and dull eyes around the table. A skeleton crew—eight lads and a brace of old men, counting himself and Pilot Ruiz—and beginning to look like skeletons too. The Commander tests the slackness of his belly with a clutch. It was firm when the expedition sailed from Panama in such hope and pride: two ships, two hundred men, three dozen horses, and enough stores to feed them all (so he gambled) until they reached the golden kingdom of the south.

Pizarro's belief in this rich land—
Perú
, as some call it—is still unshaken. The rumours have been many and consistent. But in Christ's name, how much further can it be? He asks himself this every day. How can native traders reach such a far country with their clumsy craft, while his ships meet only headwinds, squalls, tempests, eerie becalmings, thwarting currents? To say nothing of the shipworm, who never sleep, gnawing their little tunnels through the hull.

Sometimes he wonders if Pilot Ruiz has missed Peru somehow, overshot it in fog or darkness. But the kingdom sounds too big for that—a vast country of dry sands stretching forever along the shore,
a land without trees except where rivers run down to the South Sea from ranges of snow-capped mountains. They have seen no hint of anything like this. Quite the contrary. Nothing but gloomy jungles, impenetrable mangroves, endless rains, snakes that can swallow a man whole, and enough mosquitoes to bleed the hordes of the Great Turk dry. And the few open spots where Christians might rest, might even settle and live—all teeming with cannibals and sodomites who fight like tigers, unfazed by horses and guns.

The Commander keeps these musings to himself. Outwardly he is confident, as the leader of any pack must be lest his fellows tear him down. Thank God his irascible partner, Almagro, isn't aboard. He'd be making mischief by now, to be sure. It is all too clear to Pizarro, and doubtless to others, that this southerly reconnaissance is the last hand he has to play, its opening provided by a lucky change of wind two weeks ago. Months before, with supplies exhausted and his men on the brink of mutiny, he had no choice but to halt and make camp on a small island. Until conditions improved. They did not, though costly raids on the mainland for corn, meat, women, and whatever gold could be sacked from Indian towns and villages bought him a little time. Almagro, the other ship, and the bulk of the force are waiting back on that island, barely one hundred men all told—reduced to half strength by hunger, illness, wild beasts, and poisoned arrows, one of which took out Almagro's eye.
Half strength!
he thinks ruefully, scratching his ribs. He could say that of himself. His shirt sags loose, his belt has been shortened, and in the looking glass his cheeks hang like rags.

Pizarro seldom allows himself to feel his years, though he's old enough to be the father or even the grandfather of his shipmates, all in their late teens and early twenties. All except for Pilot Ruiz, the gaunt fellow of forty or so presiding self-importantly in the captain's chair. The Pilot, too, might be the father of this lot. Not that there's
anything fatherly about him. A master shipman without doubt, but what a pious, humourless, ascetic stickler. The Commander sighs, releasing a foul gust. Every one of his fifty years, it seems lately, weighs upon him like an incubus.

The Commander's dislike for the Pilot is reciprocated. Ruiz has not forgotten that Pizarro was among the betrayers of poor Balboa, beheaded on false charges. Eight years ago now. Long enough to be set aside in mutual interest, maybe. Not long enough to forgive.

What does Pizarro know about horseflesh anyway? Ruiz asks himself on hearing the growled complaint. Our leader he may be, but everyone laughs behind his back whenever he's fool enough to get on a horse. The man rides like a drunk on a donkey.

The Pilot also glumly scans the men around the
Santa Elena
's table. And these the best: the fittest from the base camp. What a relief to have left the rest of that mob behind! Better at sea with ten starving men than ashore among a hundred. If the damned Indians hadn't killed so many horses, there wouldn't even be this filthy meat. And if so many Christians hadn't died, there'd be even more mouths to feed. Mouths willing to eat rats, dogs, seagulls, perhaps even their own dead—a thing he's seen more than once in thirty years at sea. A feast for the Devil.

The Pilot notes several men drooling as the miserable fare is ladled into their bowls, especially the Greek Candía, Pizarro's gunner and the tallest aboard. They can barely wait for the grace. Time to put matters before them all, once we've eaten. Time to give up before we die, one by one, and slide into the sea. Although Ruiz is master of this ship, the decision to turn round cannot be his alone—once back in Panama (God willing), Pizarro would gladly make him the scapegoat for yet another failed expedition. Rotten wood sinks, the Pilot says to himself, but rotten men tend to float above their betters.

He raps his pewter mug on the table.

“Commander Pizarro. Gentlemen. Two weeks have now passed since we left Gallo Island and our comrades. The stores”—the Pilot waves his hand at the cleaned-out bowls—“well, we've barely enough left for another fortnight. Furthermore, it has pleased God to keep the wind behind us until now. Unless He turns His winds around when we do, they'll be against us heading back.

“By my reckoning”—the Pilot pauses theatrically, straightening in his chair to give the listeners time to reflect that Bartolomé Ruiz is the best pilot in the Indies, his navigation not to be doubted—“by my reckoning we've made four degrees of latitude since Gallo: a little under three hundred miles, give or take. Land miles, that is.” His eyes settle on the Commander to underline Pizarro's ignorance of seamanship. “The astrolabe tells me we are now upon the equator. No Christian has ever sailed so far into the great South Sea. Yet what have we seen of the southern kingdom we seek? Have we come to a desert land where people ride camels, where they dwell in stone cities, where gold is common as iron?”

The Pilot searches the faces to gauge the effect of his rhetoric. “It is true the forest savages have some gold and emeralds on them,” he adds, to forestall any argument on those grounds. “But only enough to lure us on, to make us hazard our God-given souls.”

Murmurs and nods around the table. Pilot Ruiz's frustration is widely shared.

Commander Pizarro sits rigidly upright, glaring like an eagle over their heads. Without a glance at the Pilot, or any sign he's even listened, he speaks at last.

“We'll hold our course. I have no doubt the golden land draws near. And we must cross the equatorial line decisively so none can deny that ours is the first Christian ship to do so. This honour is within our grasp. Let us seize it for King Charles!”

He gets up from the table abruptly and goes on deck, into a moonless night.

—

Has my luck forsaken me at last? Francisco Pizarro asks himself, clutching the rail and staring towards the distant shore which lies like a black whale basking under the stars.

He conjures a boyhood memory from Spain, an inner talisman he summons whenever he's especially low. A spring evening in the year his whiskers sprouted. The church of Santa María in Trujillo. He was praying to the Virgin for good fortune, kneeling on a floor paved with the gravestones of dead Pizarros. Often he came here to greet their bones and beseech their souls to help him, since the living Pizarros never did.

As he left the church, his sleeve was plucked. A ragged man stood there, a cripple with an arm hanging like the writhen stem of a dead vine.
For Holy Mary touch this shrivelled arm, young man,
the beggar said.
For God's love give me a coin and I shall tell you all. One day you shall be great!
Francisco looked into eyes like boiled onions framed by a filthy hood. The man was blind. Yet the sightless gaze had some unearthly hold, the gaze of a seer. Pizarro had two
maravedís
in his pocket. He gave one, and did not shrink from tapping the handless arm, for somehow the words seemed more than beggar's lies.
Your sword-arm shall be as mighty as this arm of mine is weak.
You shall win wars in a far land. You'll be the greatest warrior since Alexander. You'll become the richest conqueror in the world!

When, old man, and where? Granada? Italy? Tell me!

But the beggar slid away, saying nothing more except to turn his head towards the west and hiss,
The sea, the Ocean Sea.

So not Granada, the infidels' last nest in Spain. Nor Naples, where
his father had gone to war. Did the beggar mean the Canaries, the Azores? Even a boy knew those islands had no riches.

Young Francisco walked on in a trance, stopping beside the chapel of Santiago, Slayer of Moors. There, watching the daylight flare and fade behind the Moorish castle on the height, he thought of the great sea that swallows the sun. He had to give his last coin and hear more! He ran back through narrow streets and thickening shadows to where the fellow had accosted him. But nobody was there. The evensong worshippers had left for home, the iron-bound doors were locked. Only swallows scything the sky, stray dogs regarding him with shifty eyes, storks on the bell tower clacking their bills like doleful castanets.

For weeks Pizarro sought the man, roaming all Trujillo, accosting monks and shopkeepers, even searching shepherds' huts in rocky outcrops where the hills break up in a stony surf on the Extremadura plain.

A beggar! people said, laughing. You seek a beggar? Look in any doorway. And Pizarro, given to daydreams born of hunger and solitude, eventually came to doubt the meeting had ever happened; even to fear he'd been tempted by a minion of the Devil.

Then, just two or three years later, Admiral Columbus found the islands of the Indies across the Ocean Sea. When the Admiral sought men for a second voyage, Francisco Pizarro was on board.

—

The following day, about mid-morning, a lookout sings from the crosstree. He has spied a sail—another caravel—beating towards them from the south. The Pilot orders the man down and goes aloft himself, hoisting his worn body up the shrouds, no easy task for an underfed man of his years. Ruiz has been scrupulous in giving the same rations to all, making no exception for himself—nor for the
Commander, however much that mastiff growls. He stays aloft half an hour, until certain the lookout is not mistaken. The unknown ship is still hull-down, but her rig and twin masts must be a caravel's.

The Pilot regains the deck in a fury. Not only have they failed in their errand to find the golden land, but the consolation prize of being first to sail these waters has been snatched away. What has he, a devout man, done to so anger the Lord? And who in God's name could those seafarers be? One of Magellan's long-lost ships? Some other navigator sent round the Horn by King Charles? Or a Portuguese from the Spice Islands, blown here by storms or—worse—daring to trespass on realms the Pope has given by treaty to the King of Spain?

He draws the Commander aside, out of earshot from the rest, who might well look on this unwelcome surprise as a deliverance. Pizarro shares the Pilot's thoughts.

Their misgivings sharpen when the other ship goes about and falls off, as if to avoid them and run for land. But she is slower. Soon the two close to half a mile, and the sharp-eyed Pilot—again at the crosstree—is more baffled than ever. Though rigged like a caravel, the other ship is long and low on the water, with a house amidships. Unlike any vessel he has seen.

Drawing nearer, Ruiz sees she is built of buoyant timber like the rafts made by Indians along the coast. But this is far bigger, with two masts, and her sails are indeed as tall and shapely as his own. There are stacks of freight or provisions and some twenty people on deck, watching him as he watches them. What can they be but survivors of some shipwreck—most likely a Spanish wreck—who have made a craft from local timber and their salvaged rig? Yet the striped pennant at her masthead bears no sign of a cross. And the folk aboard are outlandishly dressed in turbans and bright tunics, as if they were Moors or Jews.