The Gold Eaters (11 page)

For some days
he hears bustle in the street beyond his window: the slap of many sandals, the shouts of soldiers, the soft tread and clicking toes of llamas.

Then no more. Only dogs howling by night. Only a hiss and flutter of big wings by day. And on the air a stink of death.

His captors have died or fled, leaving him here like a rat in a jar.

His cell door is a sturdy affair of hard timber, fastened outside by
a thick metal bar through stone rings. No hope there. His only chance is to dig through the adobe wall, which he judges from the window opening to be about three feet thick. Molina snaps the rim off his water pot. With the shard he scrapes away a patch of plaster, exposing brickwork—big adobes of mud and gravel, laid with clay. He manages to dislodge a sharp stone the shape of a mango pit. With this he works at the joint. By nightfall he has loosened one brick, pulled it free with bleeding fingers. The work goes better the following day. The bricklayers were sparing with mortar in the core. By sundown he's wrenched out a dozen bricks, leaving only the street side undisturbed. When he kicks those away he will be free.

Molina breaks out in the thick of night, lit by a thief's moon, enough to see without being seen. He is tempted to raid a house for food, but shrinks from the reek at every door. And there are dogs, growling in gutters or sloping along behind him, lost and searching for their owners. He slips a hand into a pocket of his jerkin, checking for the tiny string with three knots given him by Felipe. Still there. Thank Christ the All-Seer let him keep his clothes, though his boots were taken and he has only rags to bind his feet. He will go south by the great road to Huchuy Mayu and look for the boy's family. If they haven't died or fled like the citizens of Tumbes. Little River sounds like a small place, out of the way, fanned by sea winds. Perhaps they have been spared.

Once well beyond the fields Molina feels safe enough to slake his thirst at the roadside canal and eat from trees planted along the Emperor's highway. The low fruit is gone—in all the world it's always so!—but he knocks down some avocados with a stick. Also a custard apple and carob pods filled with a pith like sherbet.

He is in foothills now, in thorny scrub above the watered valley. He slips over a side wall and naps on the soft screef, awakening to mad laughter: parrots. For a while he makes his way laboriously
through the bush, but soon abandons this precaution. There are no other wayfarers. Even the posthouses every few miles are unmanned.

Around noon on the third day, he spots movement far ahead on a shining shield of heat. Travellers? Troops? Or a trick of the light?

It is a flock of vultures, hopping and tearing at the bodies of a man and woman. He hurls stones at the big birds, who draw back insolently, without taking to the air. The elderly couple are side by side, face down, their dead lips sunk in the cool water of the roadside channel. They have not been there long, perhaps only two days. Molina lifts the man's tunic, sees the craterous pustules that erupted from the flesh like a thousand tiny volcanoes.

He searches the bodies, finding a bag of toasted corn and slices of dried sweet potato. He pops the earspools from the man's stretched lobes—small ones of gold alloy. Worth having all the same. As are the beads in the woman's braids. Unwinding his foot rags, he tries on the dead man's shoes. They fit.

Chaska hears shouts
on the breeze, though she can't see anybody from where she is weeding the beans. A cold rill of fear runs through her, though the day is already hot. Some trouble on the highway, which brings so many troubles. She takes up her swaddled baby, glances around for a place to hide him. Just you and me, she says with a smile to calm the small pinched face. More shouts. She lays him down behind a pile of cornstalks. Good thing he just had a feed. With luck he'll make no noise.

Only him and me now, she thinks again bleakly, kneeling between the bean rows. Without little Atuq—the last gift of her husband Mallki—she doesn't know what she would do. What would be
the point of anything, with all the others gone? It's still possible Waman is alive at sea somewhere. And Tika just might have survived, away in a House of the Chosen. But as the months wear on without word of either, she finds this harder to believe.

Little River stands, but most of the buildings are empty. The canals run, but overflow the sluices. The fields are going to weeds and brush and sand. Llamas and dogs roam loose. And the highway brings desperate folk: dazed, hungry, dangerous.

It all began with the Emperor's death. There was public sorrow, much of it genuine, mingled with dread at what might follow. Then, quite a long time later, when many in Little River were beginning to think they might be spared, the spotted death came upon them. The elder Waman was the first to go. He had become withdrawn and listless after his grandson left, perhaps because he blamed himself for filling the boy's head with sea tales. He sickened and died in two weeks. Within another week Mallki was stricken, his suffering so hideous that at the end she
wanted
him to die.

She tries not to think of what they went through. Yet the memories are too vivid to quell: the raging fever; their cries for water; their skin bubbling like the back of a toad, seething, sticking to the sheets and sloughing off in patches as if it had been cooked. How can it be, she wonders, that I am here, untouched? She blows thanks to Father Sun for her life and for little Atuq, born only weeks before the plague.

The shouts are louder, nearer. She thinks she can hear someone calling her name.
Mama Chaska. Mama Chaska.
Could this be the news she is waiting for, news of Waman? Tika?

She gets up and shades her eyes with a hand. Two figures dancing in the heat. Two men lugging a heavy sack between them. The sack becomes a dead man, strangely wrapped. She knows the young men
carrying him—a pair of idlers who fled into the desert before the plague arrived. How is it that good men die yet wastrels like these live on?

“Lady Chaska, help us!”

“So it's Lady Chaska now, is it? Last time, you called me something else. I've dead of my own to bury. On your way.”

“He's not dead.”

“Then he's dead drunk. You as well, let me guess.”

“He's not one of us. He's not from here at all. We found him on the road, up there.” The older one lifts his head to the new highway. “He said a few words before he passed out. He says he knows Waman.”

“How dare you speak my son's name! On your way. And take your drunken friend.”

“Lady Chaska,” the youth says in a humble tone. “I am no longer what you think. Neither is my friend here. Not now. If we ever offended you, we're truly sorry.” The friend nods gormlessly, as if incapable of speech. “I beg you, Lady Chaska, take a look for yourself. We don't know what this man is. We've never seen anything like him. Perhaps you can wake him up again. Please.”

The unconscious man looks to Chaska like nothing so much as an old sea turtle dying on a beach. His breath is quick and shallow, his lips cracked, his torso encased in a stiff close-fitting leather shell. Pus-filled blisters cover his neck and hands. She steps back in fear of plague—instinctively, for if the spotted death could touch her she would surely be dead by now. She looks more closely. The blisters are big and soft as turtle eggs. Only a bad sunburn.

“Undo that coat. It's killing him.”

The youths obey, working at the strange buttons and laces. From the leather shell emerges a young man's body. Very hairy. Unwashed. Chaska moves further upwind.

“Look. He's carrying this.” The youth hands her a tiny knotted string of cotton thread. Thread she has seen before. Thread she spun herself and wove into Waman's breechclout.

“That's why
I call you Turtle. You looked just like an old leatherback. And from your shell came word of my Hawk.”

Chaska keeps the bearded one (who calls himself
Mulina
) in Tika's old room at the back of the house, where it is dark and cool. Every day she rinses his burns with seawater, feeding him baby food—fruit juice, mashed squash, avocado—until his appetite comes back and his cracked mouth can take corn, sweet potato, peanuts, fish. Such rotten teeth. Half the back ones gone, the rest like charred stumps, but at least the front ones are whole, if none too straight. In other respects a good-looking man. Strong, well made. His face pleases her: shrewd, foxy, but wit in its foxiness. It reminds her of the expression on her baby's face, for which she named him Atuq. She tells Molina this when he's well enough to be plucked. The less foreign he looks the better.

“There can't be two Foxes in one house, so Turtle you'll be, like it or not.”

“¡Por Dios!”
says Molina as Chaska works on his chin with tweezers. “Weakly, weakly! Skin sore.”

“Gently, gently,”
she corrects. “
My
skin
is
still sore.” His knowledge of the language, rough though it is, is a wonderful surprise. She has plied him with a hundred questions about Waman and the outlandish seafarers who took him away. My boy lives! At least he did when they sailed. She can only hope that the plague didn't reach him, wherever he went. That the ship did not sink. That the barbarians haven't killed him. That the Empire's troops haven't killed them all.

But her guest's tale is reassuring. If they took Waman to be their interpreter, surely they will treat him well?

—

How lucky that this land of gold is also a land of widows! Molina has begun to notice his rescuer: not quite as young or pretty as Yutu in Tumbes, but a fine woman all the same. Good figure and good teeth, shown off so well when her mouth widens in a smile, which it does more often now. If he plays his cards well, he might become her man. He could stay here. Long as he likes. At least till the Spaniards come back. Maybe forever, depending on how that goes.

Right now, a hundred Christians could take Peru with hardly a shot fired. The government, the army, the chain of command, the general population—all must be in ruins. But if we'd tried to conquer this land as it was before, we could never have done it, Molina reckons, not even with a thousand horse. What if the Peruvians have time to recover before Pizarro comes back with an army? The card of surprise has been played. So has the card of smallpox.

No, he decides. He will lie low in Little River until it's clear what fate intends.

First thing: woo the widow.

—

As his strength returns Molina helps with farm work, mending ditches, turning sod with a foot-plough while Chaska follows with her hoe, singing to herself as she buries each kernel of corn with a fish to give it a good start. He learns how to ride her small boat, an odd banana-shaped craft made of bound reeds; yet swift, light, unsinkable, bucking and nodding beneath him like a pony on the waves. The other fishermen—so few of them left, so many boats rotting on the shore—teach him how to paddle, to cast, to find the
best spots. He spends days on the sea, as Felipe and his father used to do, wearing a straw hat and an old cotton shirt against the sun. A dead man's shirt. Her husband's? He doesn't ask, less from tact than superstition.