The Gold Eaters (35 page)

Waman admits that his travels have sometimes taken him into disputed territory, but he has shied away from Manku's stronghold in the Empire's eastern quarter. To go there, he fears, would bring death, revenge for his years with the Spaniards.

“Ah, but things are changing, Don Felipe. The chance for you to go there is now. With our blessing and protection.”

Morales explains that by suppressing abuses against the native population, the New Laws will remove just cause for Manku's resistance. The Viceroy believes the time is ripe to approach Manku, to sue for peace.

A loud sniff from the dark figure in the room. “Peace,” Friar Pérez declares, “must be both spiritual and temporal. Peace under God and King. Neither can be achieved while the Inca Manku clings to the falsehoods of his fathers. Anyone who doubts this land was Satan's realm has only to see that fortress up there.” He shakes an angry finger in the citadel's direction. “There the Devil's hand is plain, for men alone could not have built it!

“Manku's kingdom,” he goes on, “may be only the rump of Peru, but it bristles with idols and he lives in those mountains like a god. The Indians everywhere—here in Cusco, even in Lima—still worship him, as the Romans did their Caesars. They won't convert until he does. Peru won't rest until Manku lets Christ into his soul and friars into his lair!”

The Vicar-General seems annoyed by this outburst. “Quite so,” is all he says.

Waman says nothing. He knows Manku is the key—and in more ways than one. Not only have the Spaniards, despite many attempts, failed to crush him, but Manku is the fiercest foe of Gonzalo Pizarro—the man who stole his first Queen. If Gonzalo attacks the Viceroy, Manku is again a potential ally for the Crown.

“So, what we ask,” Morales goes on, “is that you go there, to Manku's city of Vitcos in the province of Willkapampa, with gifts for the Inca and a letter from myself. An exploratory gesture of goodwill. Nothing more. You'll be back here in no time.”

The request—the command, rather—appals Waman. True, it may allow him to search for his family in the forbidden kingdom. But it could easily end in disaster. For himself and for the Inca.

“I'm not the one to send, my lord. Manku will remember me as the Commander's mouthpiece. He will also see me as one of Pawllu's party. I'll be killed as soon as I set foot across the border.”

The Vicar-General strokes the soft continuum of his chin and throat, as if pondering these objections. “We have reason to think otherwise.” He reminds Waman that the alliance between Manku and Pizarro was still in effect when the interpreter left Cusco for Chile. “As for your connection with Pawllu during Almagro's campaign in the south, didn't you leave those two before they conspired and marched on Cusco?” He gives Waman a searching look. “There's also a report, Don Felipe—doubtless a slur against you spread by ill-wishers of Almagro's party—that you took up arms against them yourself. That you went over to the Chilean natives and helped them hold a fort.”

Waman feels the ground opening beneath him. How could they know that?

“Then you must also have heard that I died there. Obviously I didn't.”

“Mere lies, of course, as I've said, Don Felipe. Do not allow them
to upset you. Even if it
were
true that you fought against Almagro . . . well, he was a traitor. To betray a traitor is no crime.”

The Vicar-General holds Waman with his small eyes, bright above puffed cheeks. He gives a sticky smile. “There is a question of timing, though. There are those who say that at that particular time Almagro wasn't
yet
a traitor. He had yet to show his hand.”

Morales leans back in his chair, arms folded, watching.

“My point is merely this,” he adds, when he judges the implications have sunk in. “However groundless that tale may be, if we have heard it, the Inca Manku will have heard it too. It will serve you well. Manku will welcome you.”

And if I refuse, Waman thinks, what I did in Chile will be investigated.

I am caught. Again.

20

W
aman saddles up in a steely foredawn, his mules' breath hanging like smoke in the dark courtyard.

Followed by three helpers, also mounted and bearing gifts for the Inca Manku in their saddlebags, he rides unsteadily down the street, his eyes following the locked shadows and sunken joints of the palace's cyclopean wall. He would rather be alone, especially at this hour. He would rather be on foot, leading a llama. He would rather not be doing this thing at all.

Might his “mission” (Morales's word) become the trigger of another war? He wonders whether Manku, as some say, is raising an army to retake the city. What then, if the Sun were to rule again in Cusco? The new faith, the new power, squat uneasily in the capital, flimsy as the new belfries and terra-cotta roofs, awaiting the next earthquake, whether sent by gods or men.

The four riders cross the Tullumayu, the Bone River, spine of the puma in the city's layout. The bridge is whole, though the channel below is more sewer now than stream. They climb from the valley by the eastern highway—towards Antisuyu, the unconquered quarter of the Empire.

The top of the sun's fire appears, welling up like molten lava. After a glance over his shoulder Waman stretches out his hand to greet it, asking for help with this fool's errand in which he is
ensnared. He stops and looks back on the capital. Sacked by invaders, burnt by its own, burnt again when the invaders fought one another, Cusco is still the holy city, the axis of the World. Dawn is blooding the puma's fangs, the citadel's great sawtooth ramparts, where Manku's troops killed Juan Pizarro.

They reach an upland where the wind plays over a sea of grass and the sun burns their faces, though every boulder shades a frosty outpost of the night. Hawks and condors ride the sky. The llama herds whose land this was were slaughtered in the wars. Only a few still graze, lifting watchful heads from time to time as if searching for their dead.

Waman's mood brightens as the road at last winds down towards the Willkamayu, the Holy River. Its valley comes into sight, a corridor of warmth and order in the sunlight, towns and contoured fields, the river running straight between embankment walls.

They spend the night at Tampu, last town in occupied Peru. If Tampu can be called occupied at all. There are no Spaniards here, and the few locals are wary and tight-lipped. They lodge in a public hall on the plaza, silent but for the hiss of fast water nearby. Above them in the twilight hangs a hilltop temple as fine as any in Cusco, though still only half built when Manku made it into a fortress, adding embrasures for his captured guns. It was here he fought the conquest to a standstill, miring the invaders' cavalry by opening sluices and flooding the valley floor. While the Spaniards stumbled and drowned, the Inca watched from the temple on a tall white horse, a pike in his hand.

Beyond Tampu
, precipitous mountains pinch the valley to a gorge. The river runs wild and fierce to Manku's free kingdom and the
rainforest beyond. Not even the Incas carved a road through there. The way to Willkapampa makes a long roundabout climb to a high pass below the eastern snowfields. For a while they can ride this fading track, but as it steepens they have to dismount and tow the unwilling mules, who protest with bared teeth and flattened ears. Not long ago, when the World was one, this was a
road
, Waman reflects. Now it's an obstacle course, its flags torn up and piled in barricades when Manku sealed the border between Spanish and free Peru. Yet the seal is not absolute. Like the waist of an hourglass, the way becomes slow and narrow, yet open just enough for his party to slip through.

No line, no gate, no garrison. Not even a manned watchtower. None in sight, anyway. Yet with each step and turn Waman feels the world of the Christians withering behind him, while another is ripening ahead. Unmarked, unfixed, the shift between realms has no definition; it is, rather, an ordeal through which the traveller passes and is changed. Like winter and summer, Waman thinks. Like his years of wandering. Only with time, with hindsight, can a person know that one season—or one life—has ended and the next begun. Time and space. Castilian needs two words:
tiempo
and
espacio
. Quechua has one:
pacha
. Pacha is space, and pacha is time, for neither exists without the other. With time, every place becomes another place. And any journey in space is also a journey in time.

He steps aside to piss. An emerald hummingbird, drawn by the glint of moisture, hangs in the air above his stream. They are near the high pass, in a noon light bleached by snowfields. No clouds, no shadows. Nothing stirs. Waman feels as if time has stalled, as if the sun has ceased to roll across the sky. A bird, a man, a kingdom, a universe. All are pacha.

He buttons his britches—he is still in Spanish garb—and blows a
prayer to the mountain lords above in their white gowns. Once again he is the chaka, the bridge between worlds.

He thinks of what he saw that morning as they left Tampu—great stones on ramps and rollers, waiting for the temple-building to resume.

So one world ends and another begins. Or has it? Does it?

—

A night of cold and starlight, some way beyond the pass but still in highlands. They huddle under blankets against a comb of broken wall. Then down and down all morning, sinking into a quilt of overcast and a cloud forest of giant ferns, writhen trees, shaggy beards of dripping moss.

“Ever seen anything like it?” the interpreter remarks to the helper called Kunturi when they stop for lunch. Oldest of the Vicar-General's men, Kunturi is the only one at ease in Quechua, though with a heavy accent. Among themselves the three all speak Aymara. Are they just levies from the south serving their work-tax, as the Empire's machinery rolls on by sheer momentum? Or could they be Pawllu's men, from Lake Titicaca? Not only Waman's helpers but his guards? Certainly they eat like lakers—salt fish and freeze-dried potato.

“Like what,
siñu
?” Unsure what to call Waman, Kunturi mangles
señor
.

“This heat, these woods. Hail up there this morning”—Waman nods at the pass over which they came—“now rain as warm as blood.”

“Never, siñu.” The old helper shakes his head. “I don't like it. So gloomy. Father Sun's face is veiled here, yet he still steams us like cobs in a pot.” The man shrugs off his woollen tunic, revealing the wrinkled hide of a stocky highland chest. “If you don't mind, siñu?”

“Wear what you like. But watch for snakes. The deadliest, I'm told, are green. They look like vines.”

The tunic goes back on.

They are nearing
the Holy River again, many thousands of feet below Tampu, its voice raging in the woods, punctuated by the low boom of stones bowled headlong in the flow. The road is better here, undamaged though overgrown. Several times they've had a hard time scrambling across downed trees alive with ants and spiky plants like pineapples. Waman examines the moss on the paving: thick, untramped. Nobody can have come this way for months, maybe years. He wonders how the Vicar-General and Viceroy know anything of affairs inside Willkapampa. But of course there are other ways out of the Inca's stronghold—secret passes, known only to the Inca Manku and his generals, by which their troops appear without warning, strike the invaders, and vanish. Perhaps, Waman muses, he is invited as well as sent?

The road ends abruptly at a rock face above seething water. Two stone pylons and a great pier in the middle of the stream are all that remain of Chuqichaka, the Golden Bridge, whose name seemed to promise a grand crossing to Manku's kingdom. The river is not wide here but deep and angry. Amid the bush on the far bank Waman can make out an answering pair of towers for the missing suspension cables. Perhaps they are still there, coiled like anacondas in a shed, awaiting the Inca's command to open the way. The interpreter calls out, just in case a bridgekeeper is on duty. His shouts die on the water's roar.

So, this ends before it can begin. A relief. Yet also a disappointment, the shutting of a door that might have led him to his family.

Kunturi comes up in a hurry, takes him to see the sag of a thin line spanning the chasm, hidden among trailing roots and vines. The helpers haul on the rope, which is tied to a stronger one that unspools from one of the far pylons. This they pull taut and belay. So, a missing bridge that is not quite missing; a bridge like the road it serves, enough for a few to cross like monkeys, nothing more. Waman orders an
uraya
made from a saddle and pack threads—a hanging basket on which he can pull himself hand over hand along the cable. In this undignified way he and the younger helpers reach the far bank. Kunturi he sends back to Cusco with the mules.

In Manku's kingdom now, Waman sheds his foreign garb and dons a fawn vicuña tunic with a black-and-red checkered belt—fine Cusco wear given him by the Vicar-General. He runs his hands down the silky weave, feels easier in these clothes.

They spend the night in the bridgekeeper's empty house, which smells of mice and bats, setting off again at sunrise. The morning is hot and muggy, but as they leave the wooded lowlands the air slowly dries and cools, though the sun does not relent. The road to Vitcos peels away from the main river to climb alongside the Willkapampa, a tributary flowing from the mountain wall that defends the free state on the west and south. Unrefreshed by new snow for months, the peaks are yellowed teeth in the afternoon light, cracked with ridges of dark rock, smirched by drifts of scree. Then the sun drops behind the icy claw of Pumasillu, casting shadow and chill in the walkers' path. Dusk is upon them quickly. The way steepens into a step-road, its granite slabs glowing palely in the twilight as if lit from within.

Cloud settles on them, more felt than seen, wetting Waman's face and hands. The darkness is thicker now, and once or twice his feet nearly stray from the road into nothing.

A figure appears, almost runs into him, yells out a startled
greeting. Head wrapped against the cold, the man, who has no lantern, will say only that the Inca Manku has sent him to greet and guide the visitors. Placing a woollen rope in their hands, he leads them the rest of the way like little children. Not until they reach a house can Waman examine his escort: near forty, vigorous, with a blue sunburst on one cheek and a spiral on the other—or so it looks by the glow of a brazier warming the room. He has never seen tattoos like these, not even in the islands. Yet there seems something familiar about their owner, a man of few words, which he speaks oddly.