The Last Days of the Incas (18 page)

On the heights above the city, the Spaniards saw a fortress with three towers that resembled a European castle. When the three visitors presumably used sign language to point and ask, their hosts replied with a word that sounded like
Saq-say-wa-man
, which they eventually learned meant “(the fortress of ) the satisfied falcon.” Described Sancho de la Hoz:

One side of the Inca fortress was protected by an immense stone wall composed of rocks of gargantuan size—thirty-ton behemoths that somehow the Incas had cut and carved and moved into place. Elsewhere in the city, as the Spaniards wandered about, they were stared at by the curious inhabitants, whose cotton or alpaca-wool tunics and headbands, as well as hairstyles, indicated both their rank and what part of the empire they hailed from. Everywhere they looked, the Spaniards saw finely constructed stone walls lining the streets, walls that exhibited the most remarkable craftsman-ship the Spaniards had ever seen. According to Sancho de la Hoz:

Pedro Pizarro recounted: “[And they are] so close together and so well-fitted
that the point of a pin could not have been inserted into any of the joints.” Concluded de la Hoz: “The Spaniards who see them say that neither the bridge of Segovia nor any of the structures that Hercules or the Romans made are as worthy of being seen as this.”

The capital of the New World’s greatest empire was a clean, well-engineered, and obviously well-organized place. If the hallmark of civilization is the intensification of production of food and other goods and the corresponding increase of population and the stratification of society, then nowhere was this more apparent than in Cuzco, which in the Incas’ language means “navel.” It was in this very valley—where the four
suyus
met and formed their epicenter—that the Incas had begun their rise to power. Now the rest of the empire was connected to it via a webwork of umbilical-like roads—roads that, all combined, stretched for more than 25,000 miles, from the Inca capital to the furthest frontiers.

Here, in the polyglot navel, the ruling emperor normally lived, and also the lesser lords. It was here, too, that even chiefs from distant provinces had their homes. A sort of gated community for the elites, Cuzco was the royal hub of the empire, a city that was purposely meant to display the ostentation of state power. To serve the elites, peasants—the workhorses of the empire from which all the nation’s power derived—visited the capital daily and kept it supplied with every conceivable kind of product the elites might require. Everywhere the Spaniards traveled in the city, in fact, they found warehouses stuffed to the ceiling with goods that millions of industrious citizens were constantly churning out, and that were then collected, tabulated by an army of accountants, and stored in massive, state-owned warehouses.

As they had been instructed, the three Spaniards “took possession of that city of Cuzco in the name of His Majesty.” The Basque notary, Juan Zárate, dutifully drew up a document that he signed with a flourish and notarized with a seal, as puzzled natives no doubt watched over his shoulder. Neither the natives nor the two illiterate Spanish sailors who had accompanied him could read a word of what he had written.

What had really caught the trio’s attention, however, from the moment they had looked down upon the capital after crossing the final crest of hills, were certain buildings that seemed to burn as brightly as the sun, as if the buildings themselves had been dipped
into a golden fire. After some investigation, they discovered that, sure enough,

Before the three conquistadors could begin collecting the gold, however, they first had to meet with the Inca general who was in command of the city. Cuzco, after all, was presently an occupied city, the former command post of the provinces that had fought against Atahualpa. Until very recently, Huascar had worn the royal fringe, or
mascapaicha
, and from here he had commanded his armies. It was here, too, that he had received reports about the battles raging to the north, which over the last few years had gradually moved closer and closer, until the final battle had finally crashed down upon him like a giant tsunami.

One of Atahualpa’s finest commanders, General Quisquis, presently occupied the capital with thirty thousand troops—legions who were nearly as foreign to Cuzco’s citizens as were the three men riding about on royal litters and speaking an unintelligible tongue. Like General Sherman’s brutal march through Georgia during the American Civil War, Quisquis had fought an equally devastating campaign all the way down the spine of the Andes, had occupied Cuzco with his legions, had captured the emperor Huascar, and had exterminated almost all of Huascar’s family including even the unborn children. Only after his successful campaign did the general receive surprising reports about the sudden attack of a marauding band of foreigners in the north, who had somehow managed to capture the emperor. And only later did he begin receiving the ominous and puzzling orders from Atahualpa to send all available gold and silver objects north to Cajamarca, sacred objects that apparently were needed in order to secure the emperor’s release.

And now, sometime in March or April 1533, as the Andes were beginning to enter into winter, General Quisquis found himself gazing at the three foreign emissaries, seated comfortably on litters borne by native porters who stood with downcast eyes before him. The visitors wore strange
clothes, the general saw, had hair growing from their faces—so unlike his own smooth-skinned people—and even though their skin had browned under the fierce Andean sun, Quisquis could see patches when they moved that were white in color, hidden beneath their ragged and dirty clothes. The foreigners also each wore a long piece of metal at their waist, which Quisquis no doubt presumed was some kind of mace or club, although it looked thin and flimsy. The visitors spoke a barbarian tongue, for they replied in an unintelligible manner when spoken to and understood nothing of the empire’s lingua franca,
runasimi
, or apparently of any other native language. As such they were nearly impossible to communicate with. Wrote the native chronicler Felipe Huamán Poma de Ayala:

The victorious Inca general himself was a spectacle that equally impressed the Spaniards: he wore resplendent clothing, consisting of a tunic, or
unqu
, decorated with black and white squares creating a chessboard-like effect, and he wore a mantle hanging from his shoulders made of the finest alpaca wool. The general’s tunic reached to his knees and below it he wore colored knee and ankle fringes. Hanging from his neck Quisquis wore a golden disc, given to him by the emperor Atahualpa for bravery, while twin golden bracelets encircled his wrists. Sandals made from leather, cotton, and alpaca covered the general’s feet, each overlain with a miniature golden mask.

General Quisquis’s grave black eyes appeared quick and intelligent; he also had a proud face and possessed the long earlobes with inserted golden plugs of the Inca blood nobility, whom the Incas called
pakoyok
. The Spaniards undoubtedly noticed that not only was General Quisquis’s voice commanding but that his attendants and lower officers obeyed him immediately. Not surprisingly, the proud Inca general gave
the three Spaniards a cold reception. How does one behave, after all, toward foreign invaders who have just seized the leader of your country? Still, with direct orders from Atahualpa, there was little the veteran general could do.

“He didn’t like the Christians, although he marveled greatly at them,” wrote the notary Cristóbal de Mena. “This [Inca] captain told them not to ask him for much gold and that if they refused to release the chief [Atahualpa], then he himself would go to rescue him.” General Quisquis, no doubt suppressing his own desire to immediately seize and kill the foreigners, was now forced to swallow his pride as he allowed the Spaniards to enter the Incas’ most sacred temple—the Qoricancha, the temple of the sun. Doing so was akin to the cardinal secretary of state allowing three thieves to enter and sack St. Peter’s Cathedral. The Qoricancha was the holiest temple in the Inca Empire. Not open to the public, it was visited only by specialized priests and by the reclusive temple virgins, or
mamacuna
. All who entered were required to remove their shoes and to perform numerous forms of religious observances and ablutions.

The two sailors and the notary, oblivious to Inca culture and concerned only with immediate plunder, entered the temple in their shabby leather boots and pushed past the stunned temple priests. They soon discovered that the Qoricancha was lined both inside and out with banded sheets of gold. Cristóbal de Mena described what happened next: “The Christians went to the buildings and with no aid from the Indians (who refused to help, saying that it was a temple of the sun and they would die) the Christians decided to strip the ornaments away … with some copper crowbars. And so they did.” With native crowbars, much grunting, and no doubt planting their boots when necessary against the sacred walls, the three Spaniards began prying off the golden sheets, piling them up outside like so much scrap metal before a group of horrified onlookers and angry priests. “The greater part of this consisted of plates like the boards of a box, three or four
palmos
(two to two-and-a-half feet) in length,” wrote the chronicler Xerez. “They had removed these from the walls of the buildings and they had holes in them as if they had been nailed.” Each plate weighed about four and a half pounds, which meant that every plate in monetary terms was enough to buy a caravel, or was worth the equivalent of nine years of wages for either of the two sailors carrying
them. Eventually, the Spaniards assembled a pile of some seven hundred golden plates, each rudely ripped from the empire’s holiest of walls.

On May 13, 1533, after an absence of nearly three months and a journey of more than 1,200 miles, the first of the three Spaniards arrived back in Cajamarca, still carried on a royal litter. The two Spaniards left behind eventually shepherded a vast procession of 178 loads of gold and silver, each load carried on a type of stretcher borne by four native porters; in all, more than a thousand porters labored northward plus llamas carrying provisions.

Once they had arrived back in Cajamarca, the three travelers found Pizarro’s camp much changed. Diego de Almagro—Pizarro’s short, one-eyed, fifty-eight-year-old partner—had arrived a month earlier. Almagro had marched up into the Andes and had joined Pizarro with a force of 153 more men, including fifty new horses, leaving six ships behind.

Almagro’s sudden arrival had apparently had the effect of crushing Atahualpa psychologically, as ever since his capture five months earlier the emperor had been waiting patiently for the Spaniards to depart. With the sudden near doubling of Pizarro’s forces and the arrival of so many fresh horses and men, the message was now as clear to him as was the information spread across the colored knots of an Inca
quipu
. Watching the newly arrived Spaniards greedily eyeing the roomful of gold and excitedly chatting among themselves, Atahualpa no doubt realized that he had been fooled. Far from being a small party of marauders preparing to leave with their plunder, the Spaniards now appeared to be readying themselves for a full-scale invasion of his empire.

Trying to confirm Pizarro’s true intentions, Atahualpa and one of his chiefs asked Pizarro at one point a leading question: how were the peasants in Tawantinsuyu going to be divided among the Spaniards, they asked. When Pizarro said without thinking that every Spaniard was going to be granted a native chief, which meant that every Spaniard was going to control an entire native community, Atahualpa’s plans for assuming the Inca throne were suddenly dashed, just as unexpectedly as an unforeseen attack in a game of chess. One of the inherent challenges of chess, Atahualpa knew, was trying to divine the intentions of one’s opponent while simultaneously trying to mask one’s own. In this regard, Pizarro had clearly succeeded while Atahualpa had just as clearly failed.