The Seven Serpents Trilogy (62 page)

He stopped pacing. In the lantern light I saw that although the night was cold, drops of sweat stood on his brow.

“My own men quarrel among themselves,” he said. “My officers, the king's inspectors, even Father Valverde, scheme to slit Pizarro's purse. They drain his blood with their sharp claws.”

“Divide the gold,” I said.

“And take the edge off their appetites? I wish to keep them hungry. There's more out there in Peru, ten times a hundred, yet to be gathered.”

“Their appetites will be all the keener once they have a taste of the feast.”

“Young man, you don't know the rules of human greed.”

He began to pace again, swinging the lantern, muttering to himself about
zopilotes
that darkened the heavens with their soft black wings. He was a man possessed.

I glanced across the square. In the tower high in the House of the Serpents, where Atahualpa often lived before Pizarro arrived, I saw that a fire was burning. The girl was there now, warming herself against the cold, pale and frightened of what the next day would bring. The firelight made a path across the stones. It somehow joined us together in the dark night.

Pizarro shone the lantern in my face. “Why do you stare into the night?” he said. “What do you see there? Mounds of gold? Like the rest of the spiders, do you spin webs?”

I didn't answer. If I said, or so much as hinted, that I was appalled by his massacre of the Inca thousands, that from the hour I saw the streets of Cajamarca run deep with blood the very sight of gold had sickened me, then at this moment I would be driven from the town.

Offended by my silence, Pizarro discarded his lantern and walked away to inspect the sentries who watched from the roof and all sides of the stone prison that held the priceless hostage, Atahualpa Capac, Emperor of Peru.

 

P
IZARRO WAS NOT PLEASED BY THE BOOTY
A
LVARADO BROUGHT BACK
from his raid on the pleasure house, consisting of rich plates from the royal table and massive emeralds left behind by the slain nobles. It did not quench his thirst, nor the thirst of his officers and men, who grew more restless day by day.

The bulk of the emperor's vast treasure was yet to be found. Elsewhere, all reports agreed; in Cuzco, the cloud city high in the Andes. But Cuzco was far away. The Spanish forces were small, and many were needed to see that Atahualpa did not escape. It was dangerous to go marching off with a small force on a journey of three hundred leagues among enemy thou sands, leaving a horde of prisoners behind. Some of the officers suggested that Pizarro render them helpless by cutting off their hands.

Pizarro brooded on his problems for days, then put the restless soldiers to work changing one of the Indian temples into a Christian church, thereby giving them something to think about besides gold. He also gave thought to how best to handle the caged eagle, Inca Atahualpa Capac.

Meanwhile the Inca had worries of his own. He was a pri soner, guarded night and day, well treated, encouraged to play games of dice and chess, but still a hostage facing an uncertain future. His half brother, Huáscar, whom he had deposed as emperor, was busily collecting an army, not to use against Pizarro but to make peace with him and thus to regain the throne he had lost.

One of these problems was suddenly solved. Mysteriously, Huáscar turned up dead—killed, some said, on Atahualpa's orders. Having taken note of Pizarro's love of gold, the Inca attempted to solve the second problem by an unusual appeal to his greed.

I first heard of this scheme when I went at Atahualpa's re quest as a translator for a meeting with Pizarro. I had not seen the Inca since the day of his imprisonment. His quarters, a series of gloomy rooms connected by a narrow passage, ad joined the chambers where his favorite wife and daughter were kept. Father Valverde said as we walked through the maze, “The corridors of hell must be like this. A proper place for the savage.”

We found Atahualpa seated on the gold throne he had sat upon the day of the massacre, listening to a message from an Indian who had just come from Cuzco. The man was dressed in beggar's clothes, carried a small burden on his back, as tokens of respect, and spoke in the humblest of tones, though he was said to be the most powerful noble in Peru. I made out little of what he said, but judging from the few words I did understand, he was pledging undying trust in the emperor.

There were a half-dozen petitioners present, and we were kept waiting until the last had been heard—I believe de liberately to impress Pizarro. The general was both impressed and angered.

“You get the idea,” he said to me, not once but twice as we waited impatiently, “that the brown man thinks he is King Carlos of Spain, Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire!”

However, when our time came, Pizarro greeted him with a low, respectful bow. In return, there was only a slight move ment of the Inca's heavy lids—and I may have imagined this. He sat on his golden throne, impassive as a gold idol. He
was
an idol. He was more. He was the offspring of the sun, Lord of the Winds and Lightnings, Emperor of the Four Quarters of the World—or so he was raised to believe.

Atahualpa Inca took his time in speaking, while Pizarro stood and quietly fumed. The child of the sun, dressed all in gold cloth, wore the royal circlet on his forehead; his eyes were shielded by a green jade mask. He tilted the circlet just so, as if he were alone, making ready for a royal appearance, and carefully adjusted the mask.

“You took what you wished from my pleasure house,” he said at last. “I hear that it weighed much. I hear that it took all your beasts and a large flock of my llamas to carry it. Yet your men still ask for more. They yammer at my window. What is this sickness that besets them?”

Pizarro glanced at his polished boots, grasped his graying beard, freshly trimmed for the occasion, and said nothing.

Pizarro was a proud and arrogant man, proud that he was born of a dishonored girl, not knowing his father, a bastard raised in a pigsty, for twenty years and more driving muddy pigs down filthy streets, a ragged outcast. He could boast of all this—and often did—because he had climbed out of the mire, left it behind, become Balboa's right hand, stood with him on a peak in Darién and claimed for Spain the blue Pacific, and at this moment was known to the world as the governor general of Peru, the fabulous land of El Dorado. Yet as he stood before the Inca, searching for an answer, he was again a bastard boy rooting in the mire, awed and uncertain.

“Do you have control over this clamor your people set up night and day like a nest of sick cats?” the Inca said.

Pizarro woke himself from self-doubt. “They have come a long distance, these men,” he answered. “A greater distance ten times over than the distance from here to Cuzco. They have suffered pain and torture. They have earned a reward.”

“Who asked them to come?” the Inca said. “Who asked them to suffer so much?”

“They came at the bidding of the all-powerful emperor of Spain and of other famous lands,” Pizarro said, suddenly angered, ashamed that a moment before he had acted like an ignorant pig boy. “They are here under the protection of God the Almighty to spread the word of his Son, Jesus Christ. To harvest souls in your beautiful kingdom.”

“Harvest souls?” Atahualpa said contemptuously.

He studied the words, which he had heard before. I repeated them, but he shook his head.

“The Inca grows weary hearing about souls,” he said. “My people have no souls to harvest. We are happy, we sun people, without souls. We are content to harvest, not souls, but our maize crops and potatoes.”

“You are the great emperor of a great nation,” Pizarro said, using his softest voice in a courtly manner. “However…”

Atahualpa interrupted him in an equally soft voice. “Great,” he repeated. “My kingdom is great. An eagle can fly north and south, east and west, from the sea to the highest mountains, for days it can fly and never reach the end to Atahualpa's kingdom. I know the birds of the air. And I know my people's names, each one. I give each boy when he becomes a man a fitting parcel of land for him and his wife to hold and use and share its fruits with his neighbors, who share lands and its fruits with him likewise. They work and beget children. They are too busy to go away to other lands—there are many strange ones beyond the high mountains eastward where the vast rivers run. But we do not go there and hurt the people in the name of our god the sun. We do not go there and point a book at them with one hand and with the other a sharp sword, saying solemnly to them, ‘ Do this, stranger, do that, or else we'll kill you.' ”

“
¡Absurdo!
” shouted Valverde. “We come here with love in our hearts. We bring with us Christ's mercy and the hope of heaven. We ask little in exchange for this. Nothing, really, be cause you have no use for gold, except to fashion it into trin kets to adorn yourselves and your wives and your concubines.”

“You tell me I place no value upon gold,” Atahualpa said. “This is not true. People far from here, the Azteca, call gold the excrement of the gods. But this is wrong. It is a bad thought. To me, Atahualpa Inca, gold is the tears of the sun, tears of happiness, which he sheds in tribute to a great king dom.”

“Enough,” said Pizarro, suddenly tired of the talk. “It is also stuffed with gold, as full as a crow's crop in a blind man's cornfield. We wish our rightful share. We wish it soon.”

“Now,” Valverde said, “or else we shall have you burned.”

It was then that Atahualpa, sensing the proper moment had come, rose from his throne chair, strode to the end of the room, and slowly returned, waving his jeweled hand, the golden bells on his sandals tinkling as he moved. He pointed to the four walls, one after the other, and to the ceiling.

“You pine for gold,” he said, speaking with the arrogance of a god. “I will give it to you. I will fill this room from wall to wall and to the ceiling with gold.”

Pizarro had unsheathed his sword. He put it back in the scabbard. “You'll fill this place?”

“Full,” the Inca said.

Pizarro glanced around the room, which was some six paces in width and eight or nine in length. “How high?” he said.

“High,” the Inca said, “higher than you, higher even than the young man who speaks for you.” He made a mark on the wall that nearly reached the ceiling. “This high.”

“You wish something in return,” Pizarro said. “What?”

“My freedom,” Atahualpa answered.

“It's a trick,” Valverde said. “Beware.”

“Agreed,” Pizarro said at once. “You are a free man the hour this room is filled with gold. But not a moment sooner.”

Before we left him, Atahualpa had passed word of the pact to his servants. By nightfall dozens were on their way in all directions—to the treasure house of Titicata on the knife's edge of the Andes, to the gardens at Quito and Pachácamac and Xauxa, to the palaces of Arequipa and Coricaucha, to the Temple of the Virgins in the sacred city of Cuzco.

They returned slowly, too slowly for Pizarro's wishes, like a column of ants, throughout the summer, along with dozens of other servants recruited on the way, burdened under heavy loads, leading strings of llamas also burdened. They filled the room with gold from the floor to the mark Atahualpa had made on the wall. It consisted of utensils for ordinary use, dining plates, golden tiles from palace roofs, lordly earrings and ceremonial crowns, graceful statues of animals and birds, collars and necklaces, fretted figurines of the greatest delicacy.

 

T
HE CONQUISTADORES CHEERED AND DRANK TOASTS TO
A
TAHUALPA
Capac, Emperor of Peru. I did neither, for from the very beginning, from the moment Pizarro had said, “You are a free man the hour this room is filled with gold,” I doubted that he would ever honor his promise. The perfidies of Hernán Cortés were still fresh in my mind.

My doubts were well based. Days passed and Atahualpa remained a prisoner. A week passed. Rumors spread that thousands of Indians were massed around Guamachucho, a large town to the south, sharpening their obsidian knives, pray ing for the Inca's return. At other towns farther away, it was said, even greater numbers had gathered.

De Soto and a band of horsemen were sent to search out the truth. Patrols were doubled. Horses were kept saddled and bridled. Soldiers slept on their arms. The general himself made the rounds at night to see that every sentinel was at his post.

Pizarro didn't wait for de Soto's return. In an angry mood he limped off to confront Atahualpa, taking me with him as usual, and to make certain that the talk was correctly translated, his other interpreter, Little Philip.

It had rained through the night and was raining hard now as we crossed the square. We all were dripping water when we broke in upon the emperor.

He was eating breakfast, seated in a nest of red cushions, dressed in a black gown, soft looking as satin, made from the silky undersides of bat wings. Two musicians with flutes and one with a cymbal were playing a lively little tune.

At our sudden appearance the music stopped. Atahualpa glanced up and, surprised, upset a drink into his lap. A bevy of servants rushed out, set up a screen in front of him, and behind it changed him into a fresh gown, while Pizarro strode back and forth, his anger increasing.

At last the stained gown was taken away—the emperor's used clothes were always burned, never washed or worn again—and the gold screen removed. He didn't rise to greet us, but sat gazing out at the rain falling in the square, his heavy-lidded eyes serene.

The general started to speak, then changed his mind and stood awkwardly with his hands dangling, unsure of himself. He was no longer Pizarro, Governor General of Peru, come to upbraid a culprit. His anger had vanished. Again he was the pig boy face to face with an emperor.