The Last Days of the Incas (14 page)

Pizarro, meanwhile, with his twenty foot soldiers carrying swords and shields, had immediately begun slicing his way through the crowd in the direction of Atahualpa, who remained on his litter, attempting to rally his panic-stricken troops. Xerez recounted:

Another eyewitness recounted: “Many Indians had their hands cut off [yet] continued to support their ruler’s litter with their shoulders. But their efforts were of little benefit for they were all killed.” As Pedro Pizarro described:

Finally, as the desperate struggle to seize the emperor continued, seven or eight Spanish horsemen now turned and spurred their horses, slashing their way through the crowd toward Atahualpa’s litter. Pushing against the bloodied nobles trying to steady it, the Spaniards then heaved up on one side, turning the litter over. Other Spaniards now pulled the emperor from his seat. Wielding his sword in one hand and fastening upon Atahualpa with the other, Pizarro and a group of Spaniards now rushed Atahualpa back to Pizarro’s lodgings, thus imprisoning the Inca emperor.

Pandemonium coupled with slaughter, meanwhile, continued to reign on the square outside. As the hordes of trapped warriors continued to try to flee toward the overcrowded exits, those furthest from them, in complete desperation, now began to surge against the far wall, which was roughly six feet high and some six feet thick. Thousands lunged against it until finally a fifteen-foot section gave way. As the terrified natives scrambled over and through it, the Spaniards on horseback—like sixty deranged and screaming Horsemen of the Apocalypse—raced after them, spearing, lancing, cutting, and stabbing. Those eyewitnesses who recorded the event remembered the horsemen chasing the warriors out onto the plain, at first singling out the litters of the Inca nobles who were still being borne away by loyal retainers. “All of them were shouting, ‘After those in the uniforms! Don’t let any escape! Spear them!’”

And so the slaughter continued, the Spaniards chasing after
the fleeing natives, inflicting as much carnage as possible, and in the light and long shadows that photographers call the golden hour countless warriors now lay on the ground, many without limbs or with deep gashes and with pools of dark, maroon-colored blood growing quietly beneath them. Elsewhere hundreds lay trampled to death on the square, some crawling, others moaning, many dying and dead, and those who were gradually losing consciousness on this, their last day on earth, trying to understand the nightmare that had so quickly befallen them. Wrote the notary Xerez:

Finally, as the sun sank behind the hills, the Spaniards could still be seen riding and lancing the last fleeing natives in the distance, looking for all the world like the small figures in Pieter Brueghel the Elder’s painting
The Triumph of Death.
Eventually, however, a trumpet sounded and the Spaniards gradually began making their way back to the main square. Although the Spaniards had feared that Atahualpa’s warriors had arrived bearing hidden weapons, not once that afternoon did a native warrior ever raise a weapon against a Spaniard. If the warriors
had
carried concealed weapons, then they had simply suffered too much shock to use them.

Miraculously, in the space of just a few hours, the Spaniards had killed or wounded perhaps six or seven thousand natives,
^*
while they themselves hadn’t lost a single man. Taking advantage of surprise, their artillery, and of their meat-cutting weapons, the Spaniards’ Battle of Cajamarca had resulted in a complete rout and slaughter. As darkness deepened around
the city, the native emperor descended from the sun god—who had wielded total military, religious, and political control over an empire of ten million—suddenly found himself captive. In less than two hours, the Inca Empire had been beheaded, as neatly as one would sever the head of a llama or guinea pig. And now the emperor, no longer borne on a golden litter, his tunic stained with his nobles’ blood, turned to face his exultant captors, one of whom was a tall, helmeted man, still wearing his bloodied and padded armor, and whom the others deferentially referred to as
El Gobernador.

AS THE TRUMPET SOUNDED, CALLING FOR THE SPANIARDS TO
return to the square and the last Inca warriors were being skewered on the ends of lance points, Pizarro was already busy attending to his prisoner, Atahualpa, who after his capture had been taken to the temple of the sun at the edge of town and placed under a strong guard. Because the emperor’s clothes had been ripped during his capture, Pizarro ordered that new ones be brought and waited while the emperor changed into them. He then ordered that a meal be prepared and had Atahualpa sit down beside him as they were served.

Atahualpa had never met Pizarro before that afternoon, and had only first laid eyes on him from the height of his litter, as the veteran conquistador had fought and slashed his way toward the emperor and then had reached out and seized him. That fateful, jerking grasp was both their mutual introduction and symbolic of their future relationship. For here, in Pizarro’s desperate, clenched grip, the illiterate bastard from the
lower
classes of Spain had pulled the cream of Inca nobility abruptly from his throne.

A native inspector in charge of one of Tawantinsuyu’s numerous hanging bridges.

On a more figurative level, Pizarro and his rugged band had climbed up the sheer sides of the Inca Empire’s giant social pyramid, had reached the top, and now stood at its zenith, holding a proverbial knife to the throat of the emperor and daring anyone to throw them off. It was through Atahualpa that Pizarro hoped to manipulate the apparatus of the Inca state, believing that by remote control he could paralyze the movements of Inca armies, prevent counterattacks, and ultimately take command of the empire.

To be able to do so, however, Pizarro first had to establish a relationship with his hostage. The Inca emperor had to understand clearly what it was that he and the other Spaniards wanted. In exchange for prolonging Atahualpa’s life, Pizarro wanted power and absolute control. If he could control the Inca elite at the top of the social pyramid, then he and his Spaniards could control everything that lay beneath—land, labor, gold, silver, women—everything that this obviously rich empire had to offer. If Pizarro’s band of armed entrepreneurs could somehow maintain their new position, then, like parasites, they could feed off the Inca body politic—the labor of the masses—and could thus begin the lives of luxury that they had risked their very lives for.

In a sense, New World conquest was about men seeking a way around one of life’s basic rules—that human beings have to work for a living, just like the rest of the animal world. In Peru, as elsewhere in the Americas, Spaniards were not looking for fertile land that they could farm, they were looking for
the cessation of their own need to perform manual labor.
To do so, they needed to find large enough groups of people they could force to carry out all the laborious tasks necessary to provide them with the essentials of life: food, shelter, clothing, and, ideally, liquid wealth. Conquest, then, had little to do with adventure, but rather had everything to do with groups of men willing to do just about anything in order to avoid working for a living. Stripped down to its barest bones, the conquest of Peru was all about finding a comfortable retirement.

Thus, as food was being served while native warriors still lay dying outside in the numbing cold of the Andean night, Pizarro sought to introduce Atahualpa to what he and his companions had in mind: “Don’t take it as an insult that you have been defeated and taken prisoner,” Pizarro began, presumably slicing off a hunk of llama meat and with one
of his interpreters translating, “for with the Christians I have brought with me, though so few in number, I have conquered greater lands than yours and [I also] have defeated more powerful lords than you, placing them under the dominion of the Emperor, whose vassal I am, and who is King of Spain and of the universal world and under whose command we have come to conquer this land.”

Pizarro was clearly exaggerating the rather minor skirmishes that he and his men had had prior to their arrival in Peru, while borrowing Cortés’s capture of the distant Aztec Empire as his own personal accomplishment. But Pizarro’s message was clear: the disaster that had befallen Atahualpa was as inevitable as were the movements of the stars in the heavens—and any future resistance would be as futile as it would be horrific. “You should consider it to be your good fortune that you have not been defeated by a cruel people such as yourselves,” he continued, as his men outside cleaned blood off their daggers and swords. “We treat our prisoners and conquered enemies with mercy and only make war on those who make war on us. And, being able to destroy them, we refrain from doing so, but rather pardon them.”

Pizarro was of course counting on the fact that Atahualpa knew nothing of the bloody atrocities the Spaniards had committed in the Caribbean, or in Mexico, or in Central America, and that he had never heard of Columbus, or the slave trade, or the assassination of Montezuma, the Aztec emperor. As Atahualpa listened in silence, Pizarro now began driving the main point of his message home: “When I had a chief, the lord of an island, my prisoner,” Pizarro said, looking directly into Atahualpa’s eyes, “I set him free so that from then on he might be loyal. And I did the same with the chiefs who were lords of Tumbez and Chulimasa and others who, being in my power and deserving death, I pardoned.”

Pizarro paused to slice off more meat as the interpreter caught up. “If you were seized and your people attacked and killed, it was because you came with so great an army against us, [despite my] having begged you to come peacefully, and because you threw the book on the ground in which were written the words of God. For this reason our Lord allowed that your arrogance should be destroyed and that no Indian should be able to offend a Christian.”

Atahualpa, widely reported to be a clever man, immediately understood the significance of Pizarro’s offer. Wrote one eyewitness:

The Inca emperor, who only a few hours before had been absolute ruler of the greatest empire the Americas had ever known, now asked Pizarro for permission to confer with some of his men. According to another eyewitness:

As the two Inca nobles left to carry out Atahualpa’s orders, the Spaniards who witnessed their departure must have breathed a collective sigh of relief. With their backs to the wall, they had taken a huge risk in trying to capture the emperor, a risk that had no guarantee of success. So many things could have gone wrong, not the least of which was the Incas’ reaction to their attack. Had Atahualpa’s warriors not panicked and instead of fleeing had charged directly at them, then it might have been the Spaniards who were massacred, and not the reverse. Pizarro had clearly understood, however, that even if he were successful in capturing the emperor, he couldn’t predict the reaction of either the emperor or of his men. Would Atahualpa cooperate? And if so, would his subjects continue to obey him? Or would they ignore his capture and instead attack?