The Seven Serpents Trilogy (65 page)

“The message is from Chima's mother? That's curious, because she is not alive,” the priestess said. Then, perhaps to soften my embarrassment at being caught in a lie, she added, “The dead often send messages. And they are always important. What message do
you
bring from her mother? Tell me, so that it can be delivered at once. The dead are not impatient, but they wield power. It is wise to humor them.”

With a click of a fingernail she summoned a servant, whis pered in his ear, and sent him away. She glanced at me, waiting for a reply. Her eyes were black and the lids painted with blue shadows.

When I fumbled at an answer, she said, “Chima Atahualpa has taken the vows of chastity. She is now a Virgin of the Sun.”

The words sank into my flesh like the coldest steel. I was too stunned to speak.

“She is a mere child,” the priestess said. “Pretty, loving, but a child. Set your mind to rest. Forget the Princess Atahualpa.”

I managed to speak. “You ask something of me that I can not do.” “You must,” the priestess said. “There is no other way. A vow was taken. Nothing can break it.”

She got to her feet and led me from the room onto a balcony that seemed to hang in midair. It was evening now, and a purple haze covered the snowy peaks. Far below, in a small pocket between the peaks, the haze was deeper, yet scattered lights were beginning to show. “You are looking down upon the village of Machu Picchu,” the priestess said. “The cluster of lights you see there at the center is the Temple of the Sun. It is where Chima lives and hundreds of other virgins live. Their lives are dedicated to the sun. To the sun alone. Look once and for the last time.

Then close your eyes and close your mind to what is for bidden. She is safe in the Temple of the Sun.”

I looked down through the darkening haze at the clustered lights—one quick glance—and turned away. The last of the evening glow rested for a moment on the woman's face. She was neither old nor young. She once had been beautiful.

 

P
ALATIAL QUARTERS WERE PREPARED FOR ME, FAR MORE LUXURIOUS
than those I had enjoyed as Kukulcán, Lord of the Evening Star. I dined alone that night on sumptuous fare and lay down in a bed wide enough for half a dozen men, under blankets of the finest llama wool. I should have slept well, exhausted as I was by the arduous climb, yet I scarcely closed my eyes.

I had only the woman's word that Chima had made vows that bound her to the sun god. It was possible that she was only a student, as I once had been, a beginner learning the rites of worship. But how was I to know this, except by talking to her? I had been forbidden to see her—not threatened, but warned. The palace was surrounded by guards. I had seen them patrolling the wall when I came in. Indeed, as an intruder and a Spaniard, I was actually in danger of my life.

Snow fell in the night, large flakes like feathers settling over the village, so that at dawn, when I looked down upon it from my window, I was unable to make out even the faintest lines of the temple. Everything was lost in a field of glistening white.

I saw nothing of the priestess that day, though once in the evening I heard her give instructions in her throaty voice to the little nobleman. What they were I couldn't tell. I was fed three bountiful meals and in between was brought trays of prickly tuna fruit and green-fleshed pears, though it was not the season for fruit.

Toward dusk of the following day I was visited by two female servants, who removed the rough clothes I wore and dressed me in a flowing tunic, sandals tasseled with gold flowers, and a cap of wool and feathers. Everything fit me so perfectly that it appeared someone had taken my old clothes while I slept and modeled new ones from them. But, surveying myself in a copper shield that the servants held up, I had a moment of panic. The man who gazed back at me was Kukulcán, Lord of the Four Winds. I turned away.

That evening the priestess was waiting in a different room from the one where she had received me before. It had no windows, but the ceiling, thanks to an arrangement of gold baffles that slid back and forth, lay open to the sky.

She sat on a low bench encrusted with jewels, shading her face against the westering sun. At her feet a sleeping pink-skinned dog, one of the hairless breed, raised its head, sniffed, and went back to sleep. Her jeweled hands cast a shadow that concealed her eyes, but certainly she was carefully studying me.

After a long silence, she said, “You are not an Inca nor a Maya nor an Aztecatl. Not with this blue gaze and this corn-colored hair. You must belong to those who destroyed our beautiful city of Cuzco. You are one of those who call them selves Spaniards, yes? But you do not look like the ones who came here among the peaks and knocked at our gates. I only saw these men when they were dead, lying on the ground, dead. But they were very small, all seven of them. Small and dark, not like you. You are different. You are not a real Spaniard.”

I smiled and thanked her, but I was not deceived. Beneath the honeyed words I heard a bitter strain of hatred.

She picked up the hairless dog and kissed it. “Your thoughts are troubled,” she said. “You brood about the princess.”

The priestess turned her head and gave me a sidelong glance.

“My heart goes out to you,” she said. “I have been in love myself long ago. I am familiar with the pangs you suffer, the sleepless nights and clouded days—all this I know.”

She fell silent for a while, then called the old noble and instructed him to send word to the temple and let the girl know that I was here on the mountaintop, waiting to talk to her.

The instructions were clear, the old noble carefully repeated them—he seemed somewhat deaf—but when I went back to my quarters a short time later and looked down at the road that led to the temple, I saw that the snow that covered it lay level and unmarked.

No one went to the temple the next day—I watched the road for hours—nor the day following. Then it snowed again, and when I asked the priestess to let me take my horse and ride to the temple, she refused me.

“Men are forbidden in the temple,” she said. “Those who dare to go there never come back. The snow will melt soon, and on that day I will send a swift messenger.”

Days went by, a week, a month. Then a warm wind came up the slopes from somewhere and in hours melted the snow that covered the road. At once a messenger ran to the temple and returned to say that the temple was closed and solemn rites were being held, which would last for another quarter of the moon.

At the end of this time the messenger sped down again, was gone for two days, and then came back, bringing an answer from Chima Atahualpa. It was not a spoken answer. The mes senger handed me a small package sealed with wax.

I was eating dinner. Leaving the table, I went to the window, where the light was better, and opened the package with trembling hands. A sheaf of dried leaves taken from a
dama de la noche
vine was wrapped around a string of beads and a cruci fix. It was the rosary I had given Chima in Cajamarca months before.

From the moment I first learned that she had sealed herself off in the Temple of the Sun, I had thought the act was caused by the tragedies that had befallen her. She would return to the world. But now, stronger than any words, the rosary was a message of renunciation.

I barred the door and stood at the window looking down upon the temple. I stood there until night fell across the peaks of Machu Picchu and hid the temple from my sight. The priestess, alarmed when I did not appear that evening or the next day, sent the old noble in his creaking Spanish boots to see if I were still alive. I sent him off with a curse upon him and his family.

When I did appear, some three days later, the priestess was shocked at my appearance.

“You alarm me,” she said. “You are like a dead man who turns his back upon the grave and tries to walk away. Come and sit here and let me comfort you with my thoughts.”

I wanted none of her comforting thoughts. Nothing except to leave Machu Picchu. I told her so with what politeness I could summon. She called the old noble and he came tripping in with his catbird walk—five quick hops and then a pause.

“You remember,” he said when I asked him for my horse, “that we sent the animal to the lowlands because we had no food for it here in the snow.”

I didn't remember. My memory, always good, had begun to fail me. “Bring the horse,” I said. “To save time, have someone ride her back.”

Men were sent down the mountain. They returned without the horse. The osier bridge had been ripped from its moorings by a storm, and the river could not be crossed.

I considered crossing the river on foot, but was warned that it would mean my death. At this moment I began to feel that I would never see the horse again. Nor would I be allowed to leave the mountain. I was a prisoner. Machu Picchu was a jail. The priestess, I realized, was my jailer.

She was very understanding after that, and while I was waiting for the bridge to be built again, every night I was invited to have dinner with her. She wanted to know about the land I came from and what gods I worshipped there. She wondered if all the men were as tall as I was and were blond. She loved my hair when the candlelight shone on it, and once made up a little poem about it and sang it in her throaty voice.

She talked a lot, but not about her own life. About herself she was quiet, but I gained the impression that she was a woman of high birth. She even hinted very delicately that she had once been in love with Atahualpa Capac himself and he with her. But it was a different man—his cousin?—whom she had really loved and loved now.

The night she hinted at all this we fell to talking about love, about Chima—she spoke of her as a spoiled child who didn't know her own mind—and, still talking about love, she took my hand in hers, gently as if it were some precious ornament.

Never before, since the day I arrived at the palace, had I heard a note of music, but now suddenly it seemed to come from everywhere. A musician in a room far off would play a piece and no sooner finish than another would take up the same strain on a different instrument from a different room—a strange, unfamiliar music of tinkling stops and starts played in a minor key.

Her mouth was now close to mine, so near that our breaths mingled. She laid my hand on her bodice, and then on one soft breast.

I was embarrassed, terribly so, yet she was not discouraged. Nor was she repelled by my awkwardness. In fact, dropping her gown to the floor, she reveled in my youthful dismay as I saw for the first time a woman's body in all its majesty.

The night was brief, and when gray dawn stood at the win dows and the snowy peaks of Machu Picchu showed pink against the sky, the morning stole upon me as a surprise.

They became an addiction, an overpowering drug, these nights. I lived for them. They were never out of my waking thoughts. At times, frightened by the power she held over me, I prayed to God for deliverance. Truthfully, I tried to pray and failed. The words never left my mouth.

Spring brought an end to this madness. It came suddenly on a bright noon when the old nobleman appeared while the priestess and I were eating breakfast. He turned his back to me, whispered a name in her ear, and left. In a few minutes he returned with a handsome Indian dressed in the regalia of an Inca noble. I was aware at once, as a secret look passed between them, that this was the man the priestess loved.

They brought my horse up from the lowlands late that day. I bade farewell to the priestess with a show of courtesy that I did not feel, no longer bewitched by her storm of black hair and her cinnamoncolored skin.

I rode away at a walk, unnoticed. Instead of taking the road that led out of Machu Picchu, on an overpowering im pulse I rode down the slope to the Temple of the Sun.

The massive, gold-studded door was open and women were standing about, their arms full of flowers. They scattered at my approach and I rode through the doorway into a vaulted room, toward the sound of young voices singing in unison, past a gigantic gold replica of the sun, lit by votive candles.

The virgins, clad all in white, quit singing and scurried back into the shadows. All save one, who stood facing me as I reined the horse toward her. She wore a dress of springtime colors, her hair caught up in a band of golden beads.

“I have come to take you away, Chima.”

Frightened murmurs from the girls who had hidden drowned out my words. I spoke again. Chima did not answer.

“You returned the rosary given to you in Cajamarca,” I said. “And for a long time I thought you had returned it be cause you blamed me for your father's death.”

“You were to blame. And you are to blame now.”

“I did all that I could to save him, before the trial and while it was taking place. After the trial I went to see your father and planned a way for him to escape.”

“A dozen guards were watching. How could he ever escape?”

“There was a chance.”

“A chance for you to win favors from him?” Chima said.

“A man sentenced to death doesn't have favors to give,” I said. “But we talk words. Words mean nothing.”

“The words of a Spaniard mean nothing,” she said.

There were cries now in the street. Voices came from the doorway. I slid down from the horse and went toward her. She retreated from my outstretched hand. In desperation I grasped her arm. She pulled away.

Light from the votive candles fell upon her face, and I saw then the same look of horror and distrust that I had seen when she walked down the aisle to her father's bier.

She was moving away from me. The mammoth gold image of the sun, blindingly bright, now stood between us. From far off came the sound of girls softly chanting.

Chima had gone into the shadow of the sun's image. She had disappeared. I called her name. There was no answer, only the sound of running steps.