The Last Days of the Incas (35 page)

All day in Cuzco the fighting continued, again with hundreds of native warriors being slaughtered due to the Spaniards’ better armor, horses, and weaponry; nevertheless Manco’s warriors continued pressing forward, seemingly undaunted. Piles of dead bodies littered the streets of what had once been a glorious Inca capital but that had now been transformed into a smoking, burned-out shell. Above the city, on the grassy plain before Saqsaywaman, Manco’s fresh troops had arrived and now began pressing Gonzalo and his cavalry so much that “the Spaniards were in a very difficult situation with these reinforcements, because the Indians who arrived were fresh and attacked with great determination.” Only by redoubling their efforts were the Spaniards able to prevent themselves from being surrounded and annihilated.

That night—exhausted, wounded, and increasingly desperate—the Spaniards were nevertheless ready with a new plan. Realizing that Manco might send even more troops the following day and that their exposed presence above the city only invited greater counterattacks, the Spanish captains had decided to mount a night assault on the fortress. The Spaniards knew full well that Manco’s troops would never expect such an attack; they also knew that the natives disliked fighting at night, especially on the night of a new moon, which was due this very night. Thus, despite the day’s fierce fighting, the Spaniards had somehow been able to supervise the building of assault ladders, probably constructed by their native auxiliaries. The ladders were similar to those the Spaniards had used on the Iberian peninsula for centuries to assault the castles of the Moors.

Under the cover of darkness, Hernando Pizarro and many of the Spanish soldiers from the city now secretly climbed up the steep hill to join those above. Before them lay the Inca fortress, its gloomy shadows punctuated here and there by orange campfires on the upper terraces.
As quietly as they could, the Spaniards and their auxiliaries began carrying their assault ladders across the plain, seeking out the darkest sections of the walls against which to stage their attack. Steel helmets and unsheathed swords glinted dully as the Spaniards placed the ladders against the walls and then began creeping upward in the dark.

Pulling themselves onto the top of the first wall, the Spaniards attacked the first startled sentries before the natives even understood how the armored invaders had so miraculously appeared in their midst. Slicing and stabbing with their swords, the Spaniards quickly gained the terrace alongside the top of the first wall. Their native auxiliaries, meanwhile, climbed up after them, pulling the ladders up from behind. Soon, an alert was sounded and stones began to pelt down, the conquistadors nevertheless throwing their ladders up against the next giant wall and climbing up, holding their shields in one hand and their swords in the other.

Caught by surprise, Manco’s troops were soon forced to abandon the two lower terraces but rallied on top of the third. Directly behind rose the complex of buildings and the three towers that loomed overhead in the night. With only a single wall remaining, the defenders had no other choice than to make a final defensive stand. According to one of the attacking Spaniards:

With a ferocity born of desperation, the Spaniards swung their swords, fending off volley after volley of stone missiles with their shields. One man, an
extremeño
from the town of Badajoz, about seventy miles from Pizarro’s hometown of Trujillo, stood out that night. Hernán Sánchez was one of twelve cavalrymen Hernando had sent up earlier as reinforcements and was also one of the first to climb up a ladder set against the third and final wall. Using his shield to ward off the barrage of stones, Sánchez reached the uppermost level, then threw himself through the window of one of the buildings, discovering numerous startled natives inside. Shouting
and slashing at them with his sword, Sánchez forced back the natives, who soon began to retreat up a set of stairs that led onto the roof. Like a man who had utterly lost his mind, Sánchez rushed after them onto the roof, howling like a crazed animal, only to find himself at the base of the central, cone-shaped tower. Sánchez now noticed a rope hanging from the top of the tower, which descended to the ground. Fastening his shield to his back, he began pulling himself up, using his feet to push off from the tower wall. Halfway up the tower, native defenders launched a stone from above “as big as a jug” on top of him. Just in time, Sánchez swung forward, causing the stone to glance off his back after smashing against his strapped-on shield. Eventually, Sánchez reached a higher window, leapt into another crowd of warriors, yet somehow still had the wherewithal to shout to his comrades below, encouraging them to continue their attack.

Throughout the long night, the two sides grappled, the Spanish forces on one side pushing against Manco’s forces on the other. When dawn broke the next morning, the Spaniards and Manco’s troops were still locked together in a desperate embrace, neither side having slept now for a day and a night and with no rest in the offing. Despite the Spaniards’ best efforts, however, the native defenders still held the three towers and most of the buildings while the Spaniards and their native auxiliaries held the terraced walls below. Villac Umu, and his general, Paucar Huaman, meanwhile, continued to direct the defenders from somewhere deep within the complex of buildings. Saqsaywaman had one glaring weakness, however: it had no source of water. Further, the piles of stones, darts, and arrows that had once filled its storehouses were now beginning to run low. “They fought hard that day and throughout the night,” remembered one eyewitness. “When the following day dawned, the Indians on the inside began to weaken, for they had exhausted their entire store of stones and arrows.”

With the situation beginning to deteriorate, Villac Umu and his general decided that there was not enough water and weapons to supply his defenders. Placing a sub-commander in charge—an ethnic Inca noble who wore large earplugs—the high priest ordered the defenders to break through the Spaniards’ ranks, thus allowing him and General Paucar Huaman to escape. Making their way to Calca, the two leaders urged Manco to send additional troops, hoping that with a fresh counterattack the Spaniards
could be routed and destroyed.

By now, however, the remaining native defenders had retreated to the three towers, with the Inca noble who had been placed in charge striding about on top of the central one. This same
orejón
had no doubt been present less than a month earlier in the town of Lares where he and a host of other nobles had drunk from the golden vases of
chicha
and had pledged themselves to Manco’s rebellion. Wearing confiscated Spanish weaponry, the noble presented such a spectacle and fought so ferociously that he guaranteed a place for himself in the otherwise heavily Spanish-centric chronicles. According to Pedro Pizarro:

Hernando Pizarro now ordered that the scaling ladders be set against all three of the towers and that his men storm them simultaneously. According to Pedro Pizarro,

According to another eyewitness:

With the native defenders now out of weapons, their heroic commander dead, and Spaniards clambering into all three towers, the rout soon became a slaughter. “With his death the remainder of the Indians lost their courage,” wrote one chronicler, “giving way to Hernando Pizarro and his men who were [now] able to enter and who put all those inside to the sword.” Countless natives, rather than face sure death at the hands of the Spaniards, chose instead to leap from the high walls and from the towers. Most died on impact. Others, falling on top of the piles of the dead, survived, although these, too, were soon clubbed or stabbed to death. By the time the last defenders of the fortress were overcome, so many bodies lay strewn about the area that groups of vultures and majestic black condors soon descended to the ground to feast upon their flesh. Wrote one of the Spanish attackers, Alonzo Enríquez de Guzmán:

As was usual in the lopsided battles between natives and
Spaniards, thousands died on the Inca side while the Spaniards suffered relatively few losses. Thus far in Manco’s rebellion, in fact, the mortality score had risen to perhaps two to four thousand dead native troops versus roughly thirty-five dead Spaniards, two African slaves, and an unknown number of dead native auxiliaries. That lopsided ratio, however—and indeed nearly three years of almost uninterrupted Spanish victories—was soon about to change.

FRANCISCO PIZARRO DID NOT LEARN OF MANCO INCA’S RE
-bellion until May 4, 1536, two days before Manco’s massive assault on the besieged Spaniards in Cuzco. Alarmed, he dashed off letters to his brother Hernando and to a few other citizens in Cuzco, letting them know that he would send reinforcements as soon as possible. The contents of only one of those letters—which eventually made its way up into the Andes and arrived in Cuzco months later, ripped in pieces and more than likely splattered with blood—has survived. It was sent by Pizarro to Don Alonzo Enríquez de Guzmán, a cavalryman of noble birth, who three weeks later would be involved in the desperate storming of Saqsaywaman: