The Last Days of the Incas (10 page)

The first meeting between an Inca emperor and a Spaniard: Hernando Pizarro and Atahualpa Inca. Atahualpa was actually seated on a small stool on the ground for the encounter while Hernando Pizarro was accompanied by Hernando de Soto, not by Sebastián de Benalcázar, as is depicted here.

Pizarro and his men now became the first group of Europeans to climb into the Andes, a mountain chain more than four thousand miles in length and with dozens of peaks puncturing the heights at over twenty thousand feet.
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Marching and riding along a well-maintained Inca road, the Spaniards found innumerable dead natives in one town, strung up and left to hang by their feet. Apparently these were citizens of a community loyal to Huascar that had been razed by his brother. Informed that Atahualpa was aware of their presence and worried about what forces he might bring to bear against them, the Spaniards seized and then tortured a reluctant informant, hoping to pry information out of him. The Inca emperor, the man finally blurted out, awaited them with hostile intentions; Atahualpa had said he would kill the bearded strangers.

Alarmed, yet not knowing whether to believe their informant or not, the conquistadors nevertheless continued to ascend higher and higher. At night, they “rested in the cotton tents they brought with them, making fires to protect themselves from the great cold of the mountains. For on the plains of Castile [in Spain] it is not colder than in these mountains, which are devoid of trees but are covered with a grass like a short
esparto.
There are a few stunted trees and the water is so cold that it cannot be drunk without first warming it.”

The Spaniards numbered 168:106 on foot and sixty-two on horse. They did not know how many warriors Atahualpa commanded. But the natives they questioned and tortured told them that Atahualpa commanded a large army. Pizarro by now was fifty-four years old. Alongside him traveled his four half-brothers: thirty-one-year-old Hernando, who was one of his captains; twenty-one-year-old Juan; twenty-year-old Gonzalo; and his nineteen-year-old half-brother from his mother’s side, Francisco Martín. None of his four half-brothers had any previous experience in native conquests; what little they had had been gained on this trip.

Out in front of the group, on a handsome and energetic horse, rode one of the newest arrivals, the dashing Hernando de Soto, the future explorer of Florida and discoverer of the Mississippi River. Thirty-two years old and given to wearing rakish clothes and an assortment of earrings,
Soto had arrived on a separate ship just before Pizarro’s departure from Tumbez. He had brought along his own, handpicked men and Pizarro had immediately made him a captain.

Also tagging along with the makeshift group of entrepreneurs—all armed, self-financed, and therefore entitled to a proportional slice of any future spoils—were a few black slaves, twelve notaries—four of whom would later write eyewitness accounts of the expedition—a Dominican friar, at least several
moriscas
(slave women of Muslim descent), native slaves from Nicaragua, and a handful of merchants. The latter had no interest in fighting but were there solely to sell their wares to the conquistadors on credit, hoping to be repaid if any gold or other treasure were found. The merchants, evidently, were banking on the old Spanish proverb,
“el dinero llama al dinero”
(“money attracts money”), hoping in the end to make large capital gains on their investments.

On Friday, November 15, the stage was finally set for the second major collision of two civilizations from completely different worlds. The first collision had been with the Aztecs, a fierce struggle that had lasted for three years, involved the capture of the Aztec emperor, and culminated with Hernando Cortés directing a mass slaughter and razing the Aztec capital. Now, as Pizarro and his fellow Spaniards climbed over a mountain pass and looked down for the first time upon the green valley of Cajamarca, located at an elevation of nine thousand feet, two empires were once again poised to collide. Here, just a few miles beyond the Inca town, Atahualpa and his army were encamped, spread out along a hillside beside a vast armada of tents. It was the Spaniards’ first glimpse of an Inca army. The notary Miguel de Estete wrote:

The Spaniards rode and marched into town, three abreast and in military formation, with the hooves of their horses clacking against the stone-paved streets and with storm clouds gathering overhead. Like a scene from
High Noon
, the town appeared empty—most of the inhabitants had either hidden or fled. Described the notary Francisco de Xerez:

Pizarro led his men directly to the main square, where they could assemble together and decide what to do. Surrounded by a wall with only two entrances, the square seemed the safest place available while they waited for word from the Inca lord. Hail now began to fall, the tiny balls of ice bouncing upon the stone paving of the courtyard and striking the Spaniards’ curved steel helmets and armor. The Spaniards took shelter in the buildings of cut stone flanking the plaza, which were built like a series of galleries with trapezoidal doors. When no messenger arrived from Atahualpa, the impatient Pizarro decided to send fifteen of his best horsemen, under the command of Captain Hernando de Soto, to invite the Inca emperor to a meeting.

The selection of Soto was a wise choice, for, other than Pizarro, he was perhaps the most experienced conquistador among them. Although small in size, Soto had arrived in Peru with an already well-established reputation. Impetuous, gallant, brave, and excellent with a lance, he was also a renowned rider, scout, and Indian fighter. Also an
extremeño
, Soto had arrived in the New World while still a
teenager in 1513, the same year that Balboa and Pizarro had discovered the Pacific. Despite his youth, Soto’s rise had been meteoric. By the age of seventeen he and two partners had formed a corporation of plunder and by 1520, in his early twenties, he was already a captain.

By the time he was thirty, Hernando de Soto possessed large native estates in newly conquered Nicaragua and could have retired in comfort. Hugely ambitious, however, like Cortés and Pizarro, Soto wanted a governorship—a native realm to rule as his own. Thus in 1530 Soto and his partner—Hernan Ponce de León—negotiated an agreement with Pizarro: if Soto and his partner would provide two ships and a contingent of men, then Pizarro would give them partial command and some of the choicest fruits of the proposed conquest of Peru—whatever those fruits might prove to be. Two years later, and presently high up in Peru’s northern Andes, the now thirty-two-year-old Soto was leading an advance party on horseback along the paved stone road connecting Cajamarca and the camp of the most powerful native lord in the Americas. According to Xerez,

Soto and his men rode through the legions of motionless Inca infantry, who stared silently after them. The troops betrayed no emotion but no doubt must have been astonished to see bearded men, many of them wearing glinting metal and riding what looked to be some kind of giant llama. Avoiding a bridge, the Spaniards splashed their way on horses across a low river, sending up beads of water that glistened in the sunlight. At a second river Soto ordered most of his men to remain, taking only two along with him, as well as the interpreter Felipillo to meet the Inca emperor.

Not far ahead, a native pointed them in the direction of a building that proved to be a sort of bathhouse; inside lay a courtyard where an artificial pool of smooth stone had been constructed for bathing. Two stone pipes, one carrying hot thermal water and the other water
that was icy cold, fed into the bath. There, on a grassy area before the entryway to the courtyard, sat a man on a low stool who wore a long tunic, abundant gold jewelry, and a scarlet sash that hung across his forehead. Although the man did not look up, both by his demeanor and by the obvious deference of those around him, Soto realized that this could be none other than Atahualpa, the great Inca emperor. After three expeditions, culminating in over four years of arduous travel, a vanguard of Pizarro’s latest expedition had finally come face-to-face with “that great lord Atahualpa, about whom we had heard so many reports and had been told so many things…. He was seated on a small stool, very low on the ground, as the Turks and Moors are accustomed to sit. He projected such majesty and splendor as had never before been seen.” Another eyewitness recounted, “He was seated [on a low stool] … with all the majesty in the world, surrounded by all of his women, and with many chiefs near him … each standing according to his rank.”

Although all Inca nobles wore headbands and clothing with patterned symbols displaying both their rank and place of origin, the Inca ruler was the only individual in this empire of ten million souls who was allowed to wear the sacred royal fringe, or
mascaypacha.
Carefully woven by his female attendants, or
mamaconas
, the delicate fringe hung from a headband and was made of “a very fine scarlet wool, very evenly cut, and very cleverly bound in the middle by small golden tubes. This wool was corded, but below the tubes it was unwound and this was the part that fell upon the forehead…. This fringe fell to just above the eyebrows, was an inch thick, and covered his entire forehead.”

Brash and impudent, having killed countless natives in hand-to-hand combat, Hernando de Soto rode his horse right up to the Inca emperor, approaching so close that the horse’s breath caused the emperor’s royal fringe to momentarily flutter. Atahualpa, however, confronted by a thousand-pound animal he had never seen before and by a strange foreigner who now looked down upon him from a height of nine feet, didn’t so much as flinch. Instead, the Inca lord kept his eyes to the ground, neither looking up nor acknowledging the Spaniard’s presence. With Felipillo interpreting, Soto launched into a prepared speech, the first one ever delivered by a European to an Inca emperor:

In the midst of a vast army, and before the Incas’ royal court, Soto and his small group waited for a response. Soto assumed that his words had been correctly translated and that the speech and the background information necessary to understand it were intelligible to the Inca emperor. At least one later chronicler, however, who was bilingual in Spanish and in the Incas’ language of
runasimi
, or “people speech,” questioned the ability of the young translator to accomplish such a daunting task.
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The mestizo (mixed-blood) chronicler Garcilaso de la Vega wrote: