The Gold Eaters (31 page)

Still, after a couple of months Waman can write Castilian. He finds he can also make the letters work for Quechua. These accomplishments he keeps to himself. It would be unwise to flaunt a skill lacked by the Commander.

Best about his mornings at the House of Learning is that Tika often comes too. With the departure of so many barbarians to the north and the seaboard, her confidence has returned. She is no longer silent in public. And things are easier between them. Although they still treat each other as siblings, Tika is warmer, more trusting; sometimes (it seems to Waman) even a little flirtatious. Yet if he is rash enough to flirt back she withdraws, stiffly polite. At first he wondered why she came to the college—he can teach her all the Spanish she wants at home—but she is there mainly to polish her Quechua, to mingle with other students and pick up the fine speech of the capital.

Tika does not tell Waman this—it would only get his hopes up—but since coming to Cusco she has found new respect for her cousin. During their months on the road she saw him as a prisoner. She pitied him. And pity left no room for admiration. But here at the House of Learning, Waman has become a somebody, an expert on the foreigners with whom the new Inca has chosen to cooperate.

She likes the imperial school, its cloistered atmosphere reminiscent of her years with the Chosen. And when she found out that some of the women who came to study were from the great Akllawasi, the Chosen House on the south side of the square, she
befriended them. She spoke of her life in Huanuco, and asked if any Chosen in Cusco might have come from there. The Mothers were reticent at first, perhaps leery of her link with the barbarians through her “brother.” The mass rapes in the north have not been forgotten. But once they get to know Tika better, they invite her to visit them. Though well below full strength, the capital's Akllawasi holds thousands. It takes several visits before Tika finds girls—young women now—whom she used to know. After that she becomes a regular guest, often spending her mornings at the school and afternoons in the House, where she takes up a loom beside her old friends or helps with brewing the beer consumed in the city's many feasts and rituals.

—

One evening Tika and Waman walk up to the fortress, as they often do. They sit on a terrace below the ramparts, gazing down on Cusco's beautiful roofs and, beyond, the grey-green hillsides darkening to purple. He has brought a bag of toasted corn, a flask of beer. They sip and munch, both drowsy from the climb. Her head tilts against his. The first stars show above the icy mountains; night settles on the city below, its darkness broken by braziers in the squares and pools of light from doors and windows. Smells of woodsmoke and cooking drift towards them. Their fingers interlace.

“You know, Tika,” he says after a while, “all that time I was in Spain, and at sea, not a day went by when I didn't think of you. I wanted time to roll back, to live that morning over again—the morning I left home. To respond like a man when you kissed me. Not the silly boy I was. I swore I'd come back all grown up and win you. Make you my wife.” He pauses, tries to feel her reaction in her touch.

“Oh, Waman.” Her chest falls in a sigh. She looks away, sighs again. “We were children! I can't remember what I said. Or did. I suppose I may have thought of you that way—for a moment. Perhaps
only to make you stay. Or because I was starting to think about boys, and you were the one within reach. We didn't know what we were doing. Neither of us. We were thirteen.”

Crestfallen, he ponders the cruelties of time and space, how two lives can tear apart. How hard it is to stitch them back together.

“Of course I missed you, worried about you,” Tika adds more softly. “We all did, terribly. When we heard of the barbarians for the first time—their attack on a trading ship soon after you left—we were beside ourselves. Your parents went to Tumbes many times, searching for any word. Your mother even went to priests and soothsayers. They told her you were all right—far away, happy, safe. That's what they always say, isn't it? Chaska's not the kind to be consoled by that for long.”

It's still light enough to see her press the heel of her hand to an eye. She misses Chaska, as does he. Finding no words, he offers the bag of corn. He becomes aware of evening sounds rising from the city. A flute on the air, mournful and pure; a horse's whinny; the Angelus tolling from Valverde's makeshift church in the Sunturwasi. She may not have known what she felt for him when he ran away to sea, he thinks, but she seems to know now. And it's not what he has longed for all these years.

“We must go and look for her,” he says. “For my mother and the others. We'll start in Huanuco. What about that village you and she both came from?”

“There's nothing there,” Tika answers quickly. “I already told you. We saw Yaruwillka, Chaska and I. Nothing but the dead.”

“There must be others. Other villages around there where she might be.”

“Perhaps, but how can we go? Huanuco's shattered by war. Worse than we saw. I've heard things. At the House.”

“We have to see for ourselves. We could leave tonight. Or tomorrow. I'll always protect you, Tika.”

“Oh, Waman,” she says again, in a tone that makes him feel like a boy. “How can you? You can't protect yourself.” She pats his hand. “There's nothing I want more than to find Chaska. To get away from these barbarians. To be gone with you. Someday we will do it. But not now. We're safer here—at the eye, in Manku's city. If they're alive, they'll be safe too. In hiding. But getting there, even if we knew where . . . No. Not until we see how things are going. Or war breaks out in Cusco and we have no choice.”

Late that night, sleepless, his mind runs over everything awakened by their talk. Little River. His parents. His desertion. The need to find his mother, the little brother he's never met. As for Tika, he will always love her. He doesn't doubt that she loves him, though not in the same way. Perhaps nothing he can do or become will change her feelings, ever. Perhaps she will never want any man.

He must learn to love her in a way she can accept. And he asks himself whether he too is caged by the things that have happened since he ran away. Whether wanting Tika as his wife has all along been something else: a way into the past, a way home.

17

T
he Inca Manku returns at last to his capital, as do many of the bearded allies who have helped him overcome his foes. The Old One stays in Lima, leaving his interests in Cusco to his brothers Gonzalo and Juan, both young, both bastards, and both troublemakers; Gonzalo the worse. Almagro reappears, deepening the tensions. The rains are beginning: sudden downpours that turn streets into waterfalls, fill drains to the brim, set the twin rivers raging and bucking under their bridges of corbelled stone.

Candía is back in Cusco too, though it's some time before he and Waman are sitting across a chessboard in the great Qasana hall. Milky daylight is spilling through the door from the plaza, where figures hurry by, bent against wind and rain.

“Health and wealth, Felipe!” The Greek tips some beer on the floor.

“And time,” Waman says, more cheerily than he feels. His friend has aged: grey strands in the glossy beard, cheeks withered by the highland sun; even, it seems, a measure of sadness or resignation in the dark pools of his large eyes.

“Time. Yes,” Candía replies sagely with a wag of his head, nudging a pawn onto the field. “I think time is running out.”

With the return of armed men, horses, war-dogs, the capital's
months of calm have ended. And many more barbarians are arriving, new would-be conquerors drawn by the fame of Peruvian gold. At night the streets echo with shouts and singing in Castilian. There are scuffles, especially between newcomers seeking their fortune and the first cohort with their hoards of treasure. Treasure they are willing to gamble but not to share. Waman feels thunder building in the city, as it did in Cajamarca during Atawallpa's captivity. When wealth sticks to a few hands, peace can't hold for long.

“I think the Inca Manku would agree with you,” Waman says. “Have you seen him lately? He's looking haunted. Like a man who can't sleep. He feels time flowing against him too.” Waman refills their cups, goes on. “The other day—I was interpreting for Almagro—Manku asked me why his Christian guests have put up that gallows right beside the usnu fountain. The square may be called War, he said, but it's a place of nourishment not death. I could see how angry he was, though he hid it well. One-Eye said it was merely to remind the Christians to behave themselves.”

“A good answer.”

“When Manku finds out what it really means, anything could happen.”

“How so?” says Candía, thoughts elsewhere. He brings a knight into play.

“They've ‘founded' Cusco as a Spanish city—Santiago del Cusco. They've formed a town council. And it seems the first thing every Spanish city has to have is a gallows! They've also been discussing how to cut up the royal halls into houses and shops. That's on the quiet. But I thought you might have heard.”

Candía looks up from the board to the window, lets out a low whistle. “Those Pizarros! They don't waste time, do they?” He pours another round, changes the subject. “How's your sister doing?”

“Last time I saw Manku,” Waman continues, “he had me stay behind. He said his knotkeepers are counting the bearded ones. A year ago they were hundreds, now they're thousands.”

“He's right. Look around you, Felipe. All the new men here. Countless more on the coast. As soon as Hernando Pizarro reached the Isthmus with the gold for Spain, everyone rushed here like flies. Santo Domingo is empty of Spaniards. So's Guatemala. Yucatán. All they do in Panama is throw ships together for Peru. Flimsy as you like—built to last one way. They're landing in droves. A year ago I was the only Greek. There's a dozen of us now.”

“So that's what you've been doing since you came back. Greeking with Greeks.”

“It's good to speak my own tongue again! You know how that is, Felipe. And one can have enough of Spaniards. I needn't tell you that either. Anyhow, you've been scarce yourself. I hear you've become a scholar.”

Waman nods, falls silent. His thoughts are on Tika. The new men are dangerous enough. But worse are the unseen killers they bring with them: smallpox, measles, influenza. She survived the Great Death by isolation. The next outbreak could take her.

“Felipe! You're in check.”

Waman glances at the board. He could win, but the need for it has left him. He topples his king. Candía shoots a worried look, says nothing.

“The Inca also asked me this,” Waman says. “How much gold and silver would he have to send the King of Spain to make his people stop coming. To make all the barbarians go home. I didn't know what to say. I told him the King of Spain was the least of it, because he takes only a fifth. Then Manku ordered a helper to pour a big jar of corn on the floor and he picked up one kernel. All the gold the bearded ones have taken so far, Manku said, is like this one
grain compared with what there is in the World. Answer me as best you can.”

Candía makes a wry smile, pours the last of their beer. “What answer did you give? Did you tell him wealth is nothing without health and time to enjoy it?”

“What Spaniard truly thinks so? I said all the gold in all the mountains of Peru would never be enough. Because their King couldn't stop them coming if he tried.”

18

T
he rains end, the harvest ripens, filling granaries and silos; the highland winter brings its sunny days and freezing nights. It is the season for campaigns. Troubles in Cusco have worsened. More infighting among the barbarians; more plundering of the people, their homes, their tombs, their shrines. The Inca kindreds are restless, doubting the wisdom of Manku's policy, fearing the barbarians will never go.

Down in Lima, the Commander has had no news of when his brother Hernando will get back from Spain. But plenty of news from Cusco has reached his ears, none of it good. He decides he must leave his beloved new city and make the long trek to the Inca capital.

Within a month he is walking the polished floor of the Qasana. The solution is obvious: Diego de Almagro must leave the city and take most of the new men with him. Now is the time for One-Eye to claim his great prize: the whole southern half of the Empire, still untrodden by a horse's hoof. All of Qollasuyu and Kuntisuyu, including the province of Chile.

Pizarro finds it easier than expected to persuade his turbulent partner. Control of the Inca capital is moot until King Charles's wishes are known. There is little more gold in Cusco anyway. Almagro is keen to move on, to seize his own kingdom at last. Pizarro
hopes his partner will indeed find great cities and treasures. Enough to keep him there.

“Take all the men you want, Don Diego,” the Commander is saying by the Qasana's main door, where a crowd of Spaniards has gathered. “Lots of fine fellows here.” He doffs his plumed helmet and flourishes it at the hopefuls. They raise a cheer. “And Manku's brother Pawllu has offered to escort you to Chile himself.”

Waman is in earshot but unseen, he thinks, in the shadows of the hall. “Furthermore,” the Old One adds expansively, “I will give you the best interpreter.” He turns on Waman like a hound. “Felipillo! Stop your eavesdropping and come here. You'll be leaving with Don Diego soon as Pawllu's ready. Until then you stay in town where we can find you. No wandering in the hills with your whore.”

Waman bites his cheek till he tastes blood.
Why me?
He knew Pawllu would be going—he was at Manku's palace when it was agreed—but nothing was said about himself. If the Old One hadn't caught him listening, would this be happening at all? It seems cruel, arbitrary. And foolish. How will the Pizarros deal with Manku without him?

He spends the rest of the afternoon looking for Tika. She is not in her room, nor at the school. She must be in the Akllawasi, but no man sets foot in there. He leaves a message with the sentries on the gate—to meet him behind the Roundhouse as soon as she comes out. He waits on a stone bench in the shade of a cherry tree.

How will Tika take it? Will she agree to flee with him tonight? Could that succeed, with so many Spaniards in Cusco? Or will she want to come to Chile with him? Not likely, not in the midst of the biggest barbarian army yet assembled in Peru. It would be wrong to put her through that, even if she asks. Even if everything goes well. And how can it? This will end in blood and fire.

—

Tika sees the dejected figure of her cousin slumped on the bench, elbows on knees, head in hands. She touches his shoulder gently, yet he starts. That dead look in Waman's eyes, a look she hasn't seen for some time. She puts an arm around his shoulders. “What's happened?”

The news tumbles from him. She is as shocked as he.

“How long will you be gone?”

“Months! All winter at least. It could be a year.”

She sits quietly for a while, gazing at the high walls of the Akllawasi as the setting sun creeps up them, lighting the bright colours of the mural on the top storey, under the eaves. Chevrons, frets, flying geese, hummingbirds, pumas. Weaving motifs writ large.

Her cousin is again what he was when they first found each other: a prisoner of the bearded ones.

“There's only one thing to do, Waman. I'll join the House until you get back. I'm sure they'll have me. One of the Mothers already asked. I'll be safe among friends in there.”

She gets up, takes Waman's hands, pulls him to his feet. She hugs him fiercely, feeling the knot within. “Tomorrow. I'll join first thing tomorrow. Then it's settled. Then only one of us has to worry. Only me.”

Next morning they say tearful goodbyes at the Akllawasi door. He hands over her things. A plan for escaping the Spaniards is already forming in his mind. He knows that much of Chile Province lies along the sea, beyond the highest ranges in the World. Once Almagro's army gets down near the coast he will run, find a trading ship, make his way north by sail. After that . . . he doesn't know.

That night he and Candía get drunk. Waman nearly blurts his
escape plan but reminds himself just in time that while the Greek may be his closest friend, he is also a conquistador.

“I don't much like the smell of this, Felipe. My guess is Almagro wanted you as part of his price for going quietly. But why? He got along fine without you on campaign last winter. And I doubt he'll be needing you to translate any psalms. Walk carefully there. The Commander's a dangerous dog. Almagro is a mad one.”

Almost as if he has guessed the turn of Waman's thoughts, Candía adds, “Don't forget that little ingot. Did you get it cut up yet, like I told you?”

“I did. In ten bits. Neatly done by a goldsmith on Peace Square. The old fellow looked wretched—said he'd melted his life's work into bars like that.” Waman pats his doublet. Six gold squares sewn into the padding, the other four swapped for small items easier to exchange: copper axe coins, steel blades, a few emeralds.

“Good lad. Mind you don't lose it.”

Almagro musters
five hundred Spaniards in War Square, himself on a tall grey horse by the gallows, helmet hanging from pommel, his bald head shining in the sun almost as brightly as his breastplate. The lone blue eye sweeps coldly over the scene. Waman, given a bay mare too old for war, is also mounted and in Spanish attire, his Peruvian clothes in a swag fastened behind him.

Two silver-roofed battle palanquins are coming into the square from Manku's palace. The first brings young Pawllu. The other holds a man in his forties dressed as an Inca general. To Waman's surprise, this is the high priest, Willaq Uma. Why would he be coming, and as a field commander?

A further surprise has been the arrival in Cusco of One-Eye's son, named Diego like his father. Most call him simply the Boy. Waman recalls seeing him years ago in Panama, a little boy then, one of the first mestizos of that place. Now he looks about fifteen, with the colouring and features of an Indian, easy on his horse, though too slim to fill his armour.

—

Within a week, after crossing a cold plain, they reach an inland sea lifted high between ice-fanged ranges. Lake Titicaca. Here, in the land of his mother's kindred, Pawllu and his guests are received with feasts and dances. Even so, Almagro's men raid public buildings along the shore, and neither the young prince nor Willaq Uma tries to stop them, despite the thousands of Inca troops under their command. Evidently Manku has told them to let the barbarians take what they want, as in Cusco. The most Willaq Uma can do is save the shrines at Copacabana and on the holy islands of the Sun and Moon, where the first Inca pair came down from the heavens to bring order to the World.

The soldier-priest keeps aloof from the barbarians. Waman is sure he loathes them—has hated them, no doubt, since the very first reached Cusco and jimmied the gold off his finest temple. Pawllu is harder to read. For a while he seemed to fear One-Eye. At times, while interpreting between them, Waman saw the same nervous flutter of eyelashes that Atawallpa had. He wondered if their father, Wayna Qhapaq, also had the tic. Hard to imagine that great Emperor fearing anything. But maybe he did when young. In other respects Pawllu does not resemble Atawallpa or Manku much at all. He is shorter and more thickly set, like many in this region, with a doughy face, broad nose, and heavy-lidded eyes.

Whatever Pawllu may think of One-Eye, he has warmed to the
man's son, Almagro the Boy, who has been showing him what he knows of riding and swordplay. In return, the prince is teaching the Boy how to catch vicuña alive with an
ayllu
: three weights at the end of stout cords which are whirled above the head and thrown to entangle the animals' legs. Pawllu is clearly enjoying the role of local expert; for once, he isn't the younger, the lesser, as he has been in Cusco. That role now falls to the Boy.

Almagro encourages this friendship, sometimes demonstrating Spanish warcraft to the two teenagers himself.

—

In haste to reach Chile after tarrying by the lake, One-Eye insists on taking the shortest route—across salt flats and bald ranges between Titicaca and the coastal desert. Pawllu and Willaq Uma warn against it. “Tell Sapa Ñawi,” they instruct Waman (adopting the nickname he coined), “that the road he favours runs over the harshest country in the World. At this time of year the cold is extreme. We will guide him to a better way, by lower passes and green valleys further south.”

Almagro laughs in their faces. “Why should I follow a heathen priest and an Indian barely older than my son?” Waman does not translate the remark, but the two Incas exchange a look that suggests he didn't need to.

One-Eye presses on compulsively, towards icefields and passes far higher than anything Waman or the Spaniards have yet seen. Range after range, with nothing but treeless plains, salt pans, and bitter lakes between them. The fingers of great glaciers claw at the road, and the air is so thin on the passes that Waman's mind loses power over speech, unable to summon any language except a few words of his native Tallan. Only his body still functions at these heights, slow and ponderous as the body of an ox.

Horses go lame and die of frostbite. So do men, beginning with
slaves in the baggage train. As each one drops, the Spaniards cut off his head to save themselves unbolting the iron collar. The two Almagros now share a curtained litter warmed by a charcoal brazier, a suggestion from Pawllu they did not disdain. Waman wears all his clothes, Spanish under Peruvian, and his thick alpaca poncho; he drapes a blanket over the saddle to spare his old horse. The Inca squadrons are equipped with heavy cloaks and ear-flapped hats of wool or fur. But many Spaniards, who have little to wear besides armour, see their flesh turn to marble. Some, pulling off their boots, watch in horror as toes come away as well.

With the cold is noise: glaciers cracking like bones; wind keening in frozen weeds and cactus spines. Hail stings like grapeshot in the face. Nobody lives on these high plains but a few herders following llamas and alpacas. As supplies run low, Almagro's horsemen ride out and steal the flocks, killing anyone in their way.

—

The worst comes at the first outlying hamlets of Chile Province—not far below the snow line on the western wall of the mountains—small oases of huts and grass at the bottom of gravelly ravines stained ochre and green with ore. The Spaniards fall on these settlements, killing men and livestock, tearing down roofs to make campfires, taking the women.