The Gold Eaters Page 13

  —

  Midwinter comes, and still no word from the Council of the Indies or the King. The snows spill lower down the hills. One morning Waman emerges from his lodging, a small room at the back of a mean patio, to find roofs and streets all white. Strange that he has looked on snowfields all his life but has never felt the touch of snow till now, in Spain. Sea and river are too rough for fishing. He feels the bite of cold, of hunger; and everywhere sees want and suffering among the Spaniards. Here there are no weekly banquets hosted by the state, no gifts of cloth and corn. Why such poverty amid such wealth and wonders? Why does the Spanish Emperor shame himself by not relieving it?

  Sickness comes to the city. Children are taken by fevers, fluxes, colds. And one of the fevers is smallpox.

  “Candía,” the Commander asks, “you’ve had the pox, no?” The Greek nods, saying he caught it when eight or nine, on Crete. “Then go to the house where Felipe is. Take food and drink, enough to last all in that household for a month.” He counts gold into the Greek’s large hand. “The place must be sealed tight as a cask until the pox has left Seville. Stay there and watch over him. That boy must live. If he dies, it’ll be on your blaspheming soul.”

  These precautions do no good: Waman comes down with a fever in a week. At first it seems like what he had on Gallo Island, which he remembers more vividly than his illness on the ship to Spain. Candía brings him broth and bread and stewed apples. The only thing Waman wants is water, and water runs from him at every pore.

  The Greek pays a girl in the house to help nurse the lad. He takes a room on the same patio, spends each day at the Peruvian’s bedside, busying himself by whittling a set of chessmen from some scraps of wood. Felipe was beginning to show an interest in the game, watching him play in Toledo and here in Seville. Candía has told the lad the set will be his as soon as he’s well—to give him something to look forward to. As he whittles, he prays silently in old Greek to Christ Pantocrator: Lord God let this be only a fever, nothing more.

  Before his friend has finished shaping the pawns, Waman feels pimples in his throat, burning like acid. Within days the rash spreads to his cheek and hands.

  Soon he is delirious—crying out and rambling in his language—a mercy, Candía hopes, for perhaps an unhinged mind feels less of the body’s pain. He thinks it too risky to send for a physician, even if one could be found, for in his view Spanish doctors often carry more evils than they cure. Besides, there’s no room for doubt. Felipe has viruela, the smallpox, for which the only cure is prayer. Now all that can be hoped is that the boy is strong and has a mild strain. A forlorn hope. In Mexico—Candía has heard—the Indians died in heaps like bedbugs; barely one in three survived.

  Waman’s pustules fill and swell, growing to the size of small grapes. A foul liquid flows from them for several days. Then, slowly, they begin to dry and scab. The Greek has never been devout—he’s a practical fellow, at home with things he can touch, the things of this world not the next. He knows how to cast a bronze gun, ream a bore, make powder and shot. But there in the poor lad’s stinking sickroom Candía gets down on his knees, recites every prayer he knows (which are only two or three), and gives joyous thanks to all the great icons of Byzantium. For Felipe, it seems, is on the mend.

  “They are done, my friend! Your smallpox, and your chess set.”

  Waman smiles up at him weakly, a smile marred by hideous pitting on his cheeks, more the left one than the right. Good thing there’s no looking glass in here, Candía thinks. Felipe has won his life but lost his looks.

  A few days later, when Waman is well enough to sit up, to take some broth and a few steps, Candía sets out the wooden pieces on a painted checkerboard. He says nothing, drawing the lad into a game by placing his fingers on the men and walking him through the opening moves.

  “I thank you for this.” Waman is hoarse, his voice almost too low to hear. Each word tears at his throat. “And for my life. Without you I would be dead.”

  “Nonsense!” Candía answers. “It was your luck. Or my God. Most likely both. You had me praying like a monk.”

  At first, Waman takes a childish delight in the pieces—in the men, horseheads, tiny buildings like forts or shrines—well carved and stained, half with lampblack, half with lime. But once he has the moves and opening gambits down by heart, he becomes mesmerized by the endless complexity within simplicity, by the game’s uncanny power to play out the fates of kings and kingdoms, as if it were a kind of divination.

  Spring sun chases the snow up the hills. Scents of blossom: apple, orange, cherry. There are strawberries to eat. Chess has become an obsession, tied in his mind to his recovery, a rite that saved him. By May he is good enough to beat Candía, though usually when the gunner has been drinking.

  One evening over chessboard and wine in a tavern that reminds Waman of their time in Toledo, he asks the Greek why Pizarro seems to have no family. Surely not all his kindred can be dead, even after so many years abroad?

  “Oh, he’s got family. A half-dozen brothers and sisters. By several mothers and two fathers, so they say.”

  “Why hasn’t he been to see them? He hasn’t gone home once. In a whole year. Is Trujillo so far—as far as Toledo?”

  “It’s not that he can’t go, Felipe. He won’t. Not until the King has made a decision. And not then, if things don’t go his way.”

  “Is he afraid of something there?”

  “That man fears nothing but the Devil and himself.” The Greek grooms his beard with a mutton-greasy hand, popping nits between his nails. “No. It’s pride, my friend. We Christians suffer from the sin of pride. A deadly sin, because it kills our love. Only God knows the whole of it with Don Francisco, but I’ll lay gold that it’s his pride. Or his shame, if you like—which comes to the same thing. You’ve heard the stories. Sired on a serving wench. Cast out to mind the pigs. Many are like that, many of us have things to hide. I haven’t been back to Crete myself in more years than I remember”—he sighs, puzzles over his turn; moves a knight recklessly—“but Crete’s a long way, further than Rome. Trujillo’s only four or five days from here. Even for a shitty rider like Pizarro.” The gunner winks and taps the side of his nose.

  Waman is the first to call Checkmate!

  “It would be seemlier,” says his friend mock-sternly, “if you didn’t yell out checkmate quite so fast. Or so—how shall I say?—so gleefully. Sometimes you’re wrong. I still have a move. And even when you’re right—as you often are—it’s wiser to let your opponent come to the sorry conclusion himself.” Candía topples his king, looks Waman in the eye. “Like so. Let him resign.” He pats Waman on the shoulder. “I’m a Greek and I can take it. But Spaniards . . . When they’re beaten, let them find out for themselves.”

  —

  In June, the Commander, Candía, and a few others leave Seville abruptly one dawn without a word. They are gone for some weeks, and the news makes its way back before they do. The King has decided to endorse Pizarro’s enterprise.

  Men unseen for months begin drifting back to the boggy camp on the meadow. Half abandoned all winter, the place fills with life and expectation like a fairground. Tents go up, sea-chests are delivered, the grass is trampled and fouled. By day blacksmiths and armourers set up shop; at night cooks, moneylenders, bootleggers, whores, and card sharps make their rounds among the tents and campfires.

  —

  “What days in Toledo!” Candía tells Waman. “Don Francisco got everything he asked for—a licence, a coat of arms, and governorship of ‘New Castile.’ That’s what they plan to call your land. Even some money towards ships and weapons. And horses and war-dogs when we get to Panama. Here’s to us. To you, the royal interpreter. We’re on our way!”

  “Has Qoyllur come back too?” Waman asks.

  “No. No, she hasn’t. Not yet.” A pause. “But I saw her. She asked after you, said to wish you well and buen viaje.
She speaks Castilian now.” A sweet lie, to spare the lad. Candía hopes that others won’t expose it.

  “Almagro got nothing,” he adds quickly. “Nothing worth having. It’s all in Pizarro’s hands.” The two partners, he explains, had agreed in Panama to share command. One-Eye has been bilked.

  Waman has never understood the Spaniards’ politics. Men seem to rise and sink in a moment, like carp in a pond. And devour one another like carp, too.

  “That Pizarro.” Candía shakes his head, beard brushing chest. “What a bastard! Oh, I forgot. We can’t call him that anymore—the King legitimized him.”

  Now Pizarro goes home to Trujillo, to the little lion-hued town of granite towers on its sunburnt hilltop overlooking the treeless plain. It is his first visit in more than half his life. And it will be his last. He takes Waman, Candía—all his officers—and an entourage of servants befitting the big man he has suddenly become.

  The celebrations last for days. Waman watches in amazement as the would-be conqueror presides from a high oak chair beneath an awning by a church. The Old One has shed years. Overnight he has changed from a brigand into a lord.

  Wine flows and hogs are roasted—descendants, perhaps, of the bristle-back swine Pizarro herded as a boy. But no one speaks of such things now. All are eager to add their breath to the wind of promise in his sail. A scribe sits at a table, enlisting the hopeful and the reckless. A painter sets up an easel to immortalize the new hidalgo posing with his coat of arms: a twin-headed eagle between two columns, wings spread over the city of Tumbes, over its ships and camels, its fortress with a lion and tiger rampant at the gate.

  “Say lion and tiger in Peruvian,” someone asks. Waman is an object of great curiosity, treated like a rare beast, asked to open his mouth and give these barbarians a sound from his land.

  “For lion we say puma. And uturunku for tiger, though the hotlanders call it jaguar.”

  “And gate. Say gate and castle and city!” It is a girl no older than himself, laughter in her eyes.

  “Punku is gate. Castle is pukara. And for city we say llaqta.”

  “Look after that tongue of yours, Felipillo,” remarks one of Pizarro’s lesser officers, a self-important man named Torres, passing by. “It’s the only one we’ve got.”

  “No, two. Once Qoyllur gets here. Her Castilian must be good by now.” He longs to see Qoyllur. Yet he fears what she may think of him, his ruined face. Will she ignore him again, as she did at the beginning?

  “Has no one told you?”

  “Told what?”

  “You’d better ask your friend the gunner.”

  Waman stares at the man walking off. He looks around wildly, guessing the worst. No sign of Candía. He runs along the crooked street, threads his way down alleys to the plaza. There, predictably, he finds the Greek in a tavern. Waman bursts in, not even seeing the others at the table.

  “Get up! Outside! You have to tell me everything. Right now.”

  “What?” The shock on his friend’s face is genuine. But Waman sees it change to understanding as Candía lowers his big eyes.

  “You lied to me!” Waman shouts, tears running down his scarry cheek. “You lied! Qoyllur’s dead, isn’t she?”

  “Come here, lad,” the Greek says quietly. “Let’s go somewhere we can talk alone.” He tries laying an arm on the boy’s shoulder. Waman shrugs it off, his breath frantic, whooping in gasps and gusts.

  “The truth is,” Candía says, when he has succeeded in calming Waman and drawing him to a quiet corner of the square, “the truth is that Qoyllur caught the pox as you did. In the winter. I don’t know exactly when. None of us knew until we went with the Commander to get the royal licence. Yes, I lied when I came back. I lied for you. To spare you while you were still so weak yourself. And yes, I should have told you by now.” Candía sighs, rests a hand on Waman’s shoulder. “The time never seemed right. For a thing so sad, Felipe, there’s never a right time.

  “One thing we can do,” he adds after a long pause. “We go into that church over there. We go in and we light a candle for Qoyllur, a tall one. And we think of her and nothing else.”

  At some point Candía leaves, but Waman doesn’t notice. Nor does he feel the passing hours. He is there until nightfall, when a sexton comes to lock the church. He walks away spent, unsteady, reeling down streets lit only by tongues of candlelight from open doors.

  Among the conditions of Pizarro’s licence are these: he must take royal officials with him to collect one-fifth of all treasure for the King, and friars to convert the Indians; he must raise an army of three hundred; none can be New Christians, former Jews and Moors, lest the New World be tainted by the falsehoods of the Old.

  The Commander gives not a turd for such minutiae. His first reaction to any order or entreaty is always to say no, or to ignore. How can he be expected to know what lurks in others’ souls?

  He takes his recruiting desk to all the likeliest towns in the hard province of Extremadura—to the medieval warren of Cáceres, the Roman streets of Mérida, the border town of Badajoz, and lastly the holy village of Guadalupe, high in the wooded hills beyond Trujillo.

  There in the Gothic shrine Pizarro lights a field of candles and gets down on his stiff knees before the tiny Virgin, with all his leading men around.

  They pray, but Waman does not hear their words.

  He stares a long time at the holy face darkened by centuries of smoke and piety. It seems to look at him, draw near, become a face he knows. She smiles. She winks. Then a hurricane of sound, a blinding rainbow, a smothering breath of roses and gardenias. Or is it the flowers that roar, the music that dazzles, the light that smells so sweet?

  He looks again.

  It is Qoyllur.

  Again.

  The face of Tika.

  THREE

  Northern Peru

  1531–33

  9

  Molina comes back from fishing to a feast laid out in Chaska’s patio. Along with squash and sweet potatoes, there is highland quinoa, which reminds him of rice, though nuttier and more toothsome. Best of all: a steaming heap of roast llama, dug from a pachamanka filled with hot stones and aromatic leaves. Some neighbours are already there, three fishermen with their wives, and several children playing with little Atuq. From the slack grins on one or two faces he guesses the jug on the dining board has already made a few rounds.

  “What thing?” he asks, in his fluent though still uneven Quechua.

  “You can’t guess?” says Chaska. “How long have you been living here?”

  “Oh, maybe three years or so . . .”

  “Yes. And two years to the day since you and I were wed.”

  Two years already! Lucky she doesn’t expect him to know the Peruvian calendar; a Spanish wife would be offended.

  He raises the beaker she hands him, toasts Mother Earth and the guests. “Here’s to all of us. Above all to my Star. Hard times these may be in Little River, but for me the best in my life.” Chaska glows. He’s said the right thing, which isn’t always so.

  After the meal, Atuq is taken to bed and the other children left to play downstairs while their elders go up on the roof for a last drink under the night. As often these days, the talk turns from banter and gossip to remembrance of the dead and how things used to be before the pestilence.

  Little River was forgotten for months after the Great Death, as people call it now. Runners and knotkeepers no longer came. The Empire made no demands, nor issued any supplies. The shrunken community struggled on as best it could.

  Those who’d escaped the sickness by fleeing into the wilds slowly trickled back, rebuilding on the wreckage of their former lives. But even now most houses are still empty, most fields gone to brush.

  Not long before he died, Waman’s father, Mallki, had been appointed town headman, known as the Hundred-Leader, since Little River th
en had about that many households. His duties were to make sure each family received its correct share of the common land; to settle disputes over water and grazing rights; to oversee the public feast in the plaza on weekends; and to report to the Thousand-Leader, the next rung on the ladder that reached all the way to the Apu of Chinchaysuyu—earl of this quarter of the Empire—who answered only to the Sapa Inka.

  Around the time that Chaska and Molina married, government was restored and a new Emperor proclaimed, a young prince named Waskhar. Nobody in Little River had heard of him. He was merely one of Wayna Qhapaq’s surviving sons in Cusco, picked by the imperial clan to replace the designated heir, who had been taken by smallpox only a week after his father. One of Inca Waskhar’s first decrees was to assess the catastrophe, province by province. Overseers of a thousand reported to those of ten thousand, and so on up the ranks until a full census was gathered in the capital’s archive, a great library of thread where row upon row of quipus hung like wigs on racks and walls. There the Empire’s head accountants made the final reckoning, and made it known. Of some twenty-one million citizens before the Great Death, only nine million still draw breath. More than half the World has died.

  Little River suffered rather worse, along with Tumbes Province. Despite returned refugees and new births, the town is barely a fourth of its old strength.

  Besides her new husband, Chaska has two consolations: little Atuq, now a sturdy three-year-old; and the wonderful news, when the posts ran again, that her niece Tika escaped the plague in the highlands.

  —

  “So,” Molina’s wife says in bed, once the guests have left and the house is quiet except for the rasp of crickets, the scurry of guinea pigs, and Atuq’s steady breathing. He knows the tone: something weighty on her mind. “So,” she says again, “this summer it’ll be four years since your shipmates kidnapped my Waman in the hotlands. Do you still think they’re coming back?”