The Last Days of the Incas (38 page)

For Hernando and Gonzalo Pizarro
and the other nearly 190 Spaniards trapped in Cuzco, meanwhile, their situation was still desperate. Although they had been successful in capturing the fortress of Saqsaywaman, Juan Pizarro and four other Spaniards were now dead, many of them were wounded, food supplies were running low, morale had hit bottom, and—four months after the siege had begun—they still had no word from the outside world. Had Manco’s rebellion spread across the Andes and down to the coast? They had no idea. Were Francisco Pizarro and the other Spaniards in the City of the Kings dead? No one knew. But how else could anyone explain why no relief force had arrived? A few thought that Pizarro might be alive, but that any relief force he may have sent had been unable to get through. With no communication and with rumors substituting for news, none of the Spaniards had a clue about what was going on elsewhere in Peru.

After the capture of Saqsaywaman, Hernando had stationed fifty foot soldiers to hold the fortress while he and the rest of his men had continued to hole up in the two buildings on the main square. Daily, however, Manco’s forces continued to attack the Spaniards and their native auxiliaries. The once luxurious city now lay sprawled like a ruined corpse across the valley, its roofs crumbled and burned, many of its walls tumbled down, and with sling stones, broken barricades, and assorted rubble strewn across its streets. A number of captains now urged Hernando to assemble a small group of their finest cavalry to try to break out of the city and ride to find help on the coast. There they could learn whether Francisco Pizarro or any other Spaniards were still alive and might gather a relief force that could return to their aid. To stay here and watch both their food supplies and their own numbers dwindle, they argued, would only mean certain death for them all.

Others argued that any cavalry group attempting to break out of the city would only be partaking in a suicide mission. Long before the cavalry had reached the relative safety of the coastal plains, the horsemen would have to travel through passes where they could easily be trapped and slaughtered. If the cavalry unit were lost, that would leave those in Cuzco with fewer horses and with a much weaker force. Either they all broke out of their encirclement together, this second group argued, or they all stayed to fight. To divide their already outnumbered forces would surely result in disaster.

Trapped without hope of relief and knowing that if he could just get word to Lima that his brother Francisco—if still alive—would send them aid, Hernando decided that the escape
attempt should proceed. Hernando was unaware, of course, that far larger cavalry forces had recently been annihilated by Quizo’s army and that Manco, no doubt, was waiting for just such an opportunity. Seeing no other way out of their impasse, however, Hernando now selected fifteen of his finest riders for a mission that many of them believed would be their last.

Yet the day before the cavalry was to depart, the Incas unexpectedly presented the besieged Spaniards with news from the outside world, in the form of five severed Spanish heads and a large pile of ripped-up letters. According to Alonzo Enríquez de Guzmán:

Convincing Manco to send letters along with the severed heads had apparently been the brainstorm of one of Manco’s Spanish prisoners. Somehow this man had been able to dupe the Inca emperor into believing that the Spaniards would be as devastated at the sight of the “useless” [ripped-up] “talking pages” as they would be at the sight of their comrades’ severed heads. Even after three years among the Spaniards, it seemed, Manco had no more idea of how writing worked than he had had before the Spaniards’ arrival. Pages with incomprehensible squiggles on them continued to make as little sense to the natives of South America as the coded knots of their
quipus
did to the Spaniards. Thus, without even realizing it, Manco had delivered a treasure trove of information—letters, some no doubt covered in blood, taken from the ill-fated Spanish expeditions that had
recently been annihilated in the Andes.

Reinvigorated by the knowledge that his brother Francisco was probably still alive, Hernando canceled the attempt to reach the coast and instead decided that perhaps he and the rest of his trapped Spaniards might try to crush the Inca rebellion in one bold move.
Yanacona
spies had informed Hernando that Manco Inca was presently headquartered at a place called Ollantaytambo, some thirty miles northwest of Cuzco. If Hernando could strike directly at the emperor, capturing or killing him, then the trapped Spaniards might be able to break the back of the rebellion. Manco’s cousin Pascac, meanwhile, who continued to fight on the side of the Spaniards, could then be placed on the throne. Leaving fifty foot soldiers in control of Saqsaywaman and another forty in the city below, Hernando now led a force of seventy cavalry and thirty foot soldiers, together with Chachapoyan, Cañari, and Inca auxiliaries, out of the city. Hernando’s goal was a simple one: to seize or kill the leader of the native rebellion—Manco Inca himself.

Hernando and his men soon fought their way down into the narrow, flat Yucay Valley plain, then began following the Yucay River, fording it five or six times in the process. At each river crossing, Manco’s sling throwers hurled rocks from the other side, only to be dispersed with lances and swords once the cavalry swam across. As the valley continued to become more constricted, the Spaniards’ native scouts suddenly stopped and pointed. There, on the top of an enormous stone spur jutting out from the valley wall like a buttress, the Spaniards saw for the first time the temple fortress of Ollantaytambo. Remembered Pedro Pizarro, who rode as one of the horsemen:

Dwarfed by the valley’s high walls and with tens of thousands of native warriors clustered on the tops of more than a dozen enormous, staggered terraces that led up to the fortress’s command center, Hernando’s men gathered on the plain below. They soon noticed
that, side by side with the usual native warriors, stood what appeared to be legions of bow-and-arrow-wielding natives from the great forests to the east, people their native auxiliaries referred to as the Antis.

Although the Incas had always incorporated Amazonian warriors into their armies, as only those from the jungle knew how to use bows and arrows, the Spaniards were surprised to see that so many of these warriors had suddenly appeared. Unlike the inhabitants of the Andes, many of the Antis painted their faces with dyes; others more than likely had various feathers from tropical birds sprouting from the skin around their noses or mouths, or incorporated into headbands that added bright splashes of color to their long black hair. When the Spaniards rode too close to the fortress’s walls, slews of arrows immediately arced into the sky, bearing sharpened bamboo and palm wood points, many of which hit the armored men and their horses. The Antis’ aim, Hernando soon discovered, was very, very good.

Thirty miles from Cuzco, in hostile territory and with enemy warriors howling, hurling, and shooting sling stones and arrows down at them, Hernando Pizarro wheeled his horse around and rode over to talk with one of the few gray-haired conquistadors in the group. Wrote one eyewitness:

While Hernando’s qualities of arrogance, greed, and selfishness had made him generally unpopular among the Spaniards, no one had ever accused him of not being brave. Hernando’s sudden display of that latter quality, in fact, apparently shamed the other Spaniards so much that now a group of the younger riders spurred their horses and attempted to reach the single stone doorway leading up to the fortress, one that the natives had filled in with stones. The native defenders, however, quickly repulsed the attack, for, as Pedro Pizarro described, they “hurled down so many boulders and fired so many [slingshot] stones and arrows that even
had there been many more of us Spaniards than there were, they would have killed us all.” During these initial skirmishes, Manco’s warriors killed many of the Spaniards’ native auxiliaries, wounded several Spaniards, and broke the leg of one of the horses so badly that the horse wandered about, alternately tripping and falling to the ground.

As Hernando’s men fell back and regrouped, Manco’s warriors now began to descend from the fortress in order to pursue the harried Spaniards. “There is one thing about these Indians,” recalled Pedro Pizarro, “that when they are following up a victory they chase after you like demons, and [yet] when they flee they are like wet hens. And since here they were following up a victory, and seeing us in retreat, they pursued us with great determination.” The Spaniards found that the Amazonian archers, especially, fought ferociously: “There were among the Incas many … [Amazonian natives] who do not know what it means to flee,” marveled one Spaniard, “for they continue to fire arrows [even] when they are dying.”

Hernando’s cavalry continued to circle and skirmish while the Spanish foot soldiers and native auxiliaries tangled with the ever-bolder Inca troops. As the two forces grappled with each other, the Spaniards suddenly noticed that the plain they were fighting on had mysteriously begun to flood with water. Manco Inca, it turned out, had devised a secret weapon and had chosen this precise moment to unleash it. Along the nearby Patacancha River, which emptied into the Yucay, Inca engineers had built a series of canals. Manco had now given the signal to open them, flooding the only plain upon which the Spanish horsemen could maneuver. According to one account, Manco Inca himself now emerged, riding a Spanish horse and urging his warriors to attack. Soon, the water had risen so high that it reached the bellies of the Spaniards’ horses, paralyzing their ability to attack. According to Pedro Pizarro:

Through the long, black night the Spaniards carried out a forced retreat, their native auxiliaries helping them to fight off hordes of warriors who continually appeared out of the darkness with no warning, shouting and swinging their mace clubs, then disappearing from the circles of jumping, chaotic light of the Spaniards’ torches. Somehow, Hernando and his men managed to struggle across the valley and reach the heights on the opposite side. There they camped for the night in an abandoned Inca village. The next day, tired, wounded, and discouraged, the Spaniards fought their way back to Cuzco, rejoining their embattled countrymen whom they had left behind. Despite their best efforts, their bold military attack had resulted in a number of lost horses and a multitude of wounded men. If anything, the Spaniards’ failed campaign and desperate retreat only seemed to have emboldened Manco and his warriors.

Four hundred miles away and roughly eleven thousand feet lower in elevation, Francisco Pizarro anxiously waited for reinforcements from abroad and wondered whether his brothers in Cuzco were still alive. Pizarro was still receiving reports from frightened
yanacona
spies that a massive Inca army was assembling nearby for an attack. This was the same army, his spies no doubt told him—led by a General Quizo—that had wiped out Pizarro’s relief forces and had massacred the Spaniards in Jauja. General Quizo, they said, had vowed to destroy every bearded invader on the coast, exactly as he had done in the mountains.

Pizarro had been living in the City of the Kings for the last year and a half. Living with him was his seventeen-year-old Indian mistress, Doña Inés—the daughter of the great Huayna Capac and a sister of Manco Inca—as well as a two-year-old daughter, whom Pizarro doted upon, and a one-year-old son. The city Pizarro had founded, laid out around a traditional Spanish town square, currently consisted of a hodgepodge of recently constructed and in-construction buildings, along with an amalgam of tents, lean-tos, and native dwellings that were inhabited by the servants
of the Spaniards and by a recent consignment of African slaves.

Now, because of their recent losses, however, only about a hundred Spaniards were available to defend Los Reyes, or “The Kings,” as it was called colloquially. The latter were divided into a force of eighty cavalrymen and twenty foot soldiers. In addition, Pizarro was relying upon at least several thousand native auxiliaries, mostly Chachapoyan, Cañari, and former members of the
yanacona
, or Inca servant class. Rounding out the assemblage were fourteen Spanish women—the only Spanish women in Peru—together with the Spaniards’ numerous native mistresses, and a sprinkling of female
morisca
(Islamic) slaves. Constructed upon barren sands, the City of the Kings lay some twelve miles inland from the Pacific Ocean. To the east, northeast and southeast rose a number of dry, steep, and rounded brown hills, the last vestiges of the Andes, which tumbled down from their icy heights and eventually sank beneath the windswept coastal sands.