The Gold Eaters Read online

  Chaska hears shouts on the breeze, though she can’t see anybody from where she is weeding the beans. A cold rill of fear runs through her, though the day is already hot. Some trouble on the highway, which brings so many troubles. She takes up her swaddled baby, glances around for a place to hide him. Just you and me, she says with a smile to calm the small pinched face. More shouts. She lays him down behind a pile of cornstalks. Good thing he just had a feed. With luck he’ll make no noise.

  Only him and me now, she thinks again bleakly, kneeling between the bean rows. Without little Atuq—the last gift of her husband Mallki—she doesn’t know what she would do. What would be the point of anything, with all the others gone? It’s still possible Waman is alive at sea somewhere. And Tika just might have survived, away in a House of the Chosen. But as the months wear on without word of either, she finds this harder to believe.

  Little River stands, but most of the buildings are empty. The canals run, but overflow the sluices. The fields are going to weeds and brush and sand. Llamas and dogs roam loose. And the highway brings desperate folk: dazed, hungry, dangerous.

  It all began with the Emperor’s death. There was public sorrow, much of it genuine, mingled with dread at what might follow. Then, quite a long time later, when many in Little River were beginning to think they might be spared, the spotted death came upon them. The elder Waman was the first to go. He had become withdrawn and listless after his grandson left, perhaps because he blamed himself for filling the boy’s head with sea tales. He sickened and died in two weeks. Within another week Mallki was stricken, his suffering so hideous that at the end she wanted him to die.

  She tries not to think of what they went through. Yet the memories are too vivid to quell: the raging fever; their cries for water; their skin bubbling like the back of a toad, seething, sticking to the sheets and sloughing off in patches as if it had been cooked. How can it be, she wonders, that I am here, untouched? She blows thanks to Father Sun for her life and for little Atuq, born only weeks before the plague.

  The shouts are louder, nearer. She thinks she can hear someone calling her name. Mama Chaska. Mama Chaska. Could this be the news she is waiting for, news of Waman? Tika?

  She gets up and shades her eyes with a hand. Two figures dancing in the heat. Two men lugging a heavy sack between them. The sack becomes a dead man, strangely wrapped. She knows the young men carrying him—a pair of idlers who fled into the desert before the plague arrived. How is it that good men die yet wastrels like these live on?

  “Lady Chaska, help us!”

  “So it’s Lady Chaska now, is it? Last time, you called me something else. I’ve dead of my own to bury. On your way.”

  “He’s not dead.”

  “Then he’s dead drunk. You as well, let me guess.”

  “He’s not one of us. He’s not from here at all. We found him on the road, up there.” The older one lifts his head to the new highway. “He said a few words before he passed out. He says he knows Waman.”

  “How dare you speak my son’s name! On your way. And take your drunken friend.”

  “Lady Chaska,” the youth says in a humble tone. “I am no longer what you think. Neither is my friend here. Not now. If we ever offended you, we’re truly sorry.” The friend nods gormlessly, as if incapable of speech. “I beg you, Lady Chaska, take a look for yourself. We don’t know what this man is. We’ve never seen anything like him. Perhaps you can wake him up again. Please.”

  The unconscious man looks to Chaska like nothing so much as an old sea turtle dying on a beach. His breath is quick and shallow, his lips cracked, his torso encased in a stiff close-fitting leather shell. Pus-filled blisters cover his neck and hands. She steps back in fear of plague—instinctively, for if the spotted death could touch her she would surely be dead by now. She looks more closely. The blisters are big and soft as turtle eggs. Only a bad sunburn.

  “Undo that coat. It’s killing him.”

  The youths obey, working at the strange buttons and laces. From the leather shell emerges a young man’s body. Very hairy. Unwashed. Chaska moves further upwind.

  “Look. He’s carrying this.” The youth hands her a tiny knotted string of cotton thread. Thread she has seen before. Thread she spun herself and wove into Waman’s breechclout.

  “That’s why I call you Turtle. You looked just like an old leatherback. And from your shell came word of my Hawk.”

  Chaska keeps the bearded one (who calls himself Mulina) in Tika’s old room at the back of the house, where it is dark and cool. Every day she rinses his burns with seawater, feeding him baby food—fruit juice, mashed squash, avocado—until his appetite comes back and his cracked mouth can take corn, sweet potato, peanuts, fish. Such rotten teeth. Half the back ones gone, the rest like charred stumps, but at least the front ones are whole, if none too straight. In other respects a good-looking man. Strong, well made. His face pleases her: shrewd, foxy, but wit in its foxiness. It reminds her of the expression on her baby’s face, for which she named him Atuq. She tells Molina this when he’s well enough to be plucked. The less foreign he looks the better.

  “There can’t be two Foxes in one house, so Turtle you’ll be, like it or not.”

  “¡Por Dios!” says Molina as Chaska works on his chin with tweezers. “Weakly, weakly! Skin sore.”

  “Gently, gently,” she corrects. “My skin is still sore.” His knowledge of the language, rough though it is, is a wonderful surprise. She has plied him with a hundred questions about Waman and the outlandish seafarers who took him away. My boy lives! At least he did when they sailed. She can only hope that the plague didn’t reach him, wherever he went. That the ship did not sink. That the barbarians haven’t killed him. That the Empire’s troops haven’t killed them all.

  But her guest’s tale is reassuring. If they took Waman to be their interpreter, surely they will treat him well?

  —

  How lucky that this land of gold is also a land of widows! Molina has begun to notice his rescuer: not quite as young or pretty as Yutu in Tumbes, but a fine woman all the same. Good figure and good teeth, shown off so well when her mouth widens in a smile, which it does more often now. If he plays his cards well, he might become her man. He could stay here. Long as he likes. At least till the Spaniards come back. Maybe forever, depending on how that goes.

  Right now, a hundred Christians could take Peru with hardly a shot fired. The government, the army, the chain of command, the general population—all must be in ruins. But if we’d tried to conquer this land as it was before, we could never have done it, Molina reckons, not even with a thousand horse. What if the Peruvians have time to recover before Pizarro comes back with an army? The card of surprise has been played. So has the card of smallpox.

  No, he decides. He will lie low in Little River until it’s clear what fate intends.

  First thing: woo the widow.

  —

  As his strength returns Molina helps with farm work, mending ditches, turning sod with a foot-plough while Chaska follows with her hoe, singing to herself as she buries each kernel of corn with a fish to give it a good start. He learns how to ride her small boat, an odd banana-shaped craft made of bound reeds; yet swift, light, unsinkable, bucking and nodding beneath him like a pony on the waves. The other fishermen—so few of them left, so many boats rotting on the shore—teach him how to paddle, to cast, to find the best spots. He spends days on the sea, as Felipe and his father used to do, wearing a straw hat and an old cotton shirt against the sun. A dead man’s shirt. Her husband’s? He doesn’t ask, less from tact than superstition.

  Soon he is bringing in anchovies every morning, with squid and tuna when they come his way. Once he caught a young turtle, bearing it home proudly, its flippers rowing in the net. But Chaska’s face became a thundercloud. Bad luck! Bad luck! she yelled. Put it back now! She followed him to the beach and watched angrily until it swam
away.

  Late that evening, drinking beer on the flat roof of the house, he asked, “Why not eat turtle? Others catch them. I’ve seen them do it.”

  “They should have told you. Or I should have. A man must never kill his namesake. Atuq will never kill a fox. You must never kill a turtle. Turtle is your helper, your brother.”

  A fart for her infidel ways, Molina thought, and nearly said so. No wooing her like that.

  “Before you fish again,” she persisted, “you must fast three days. Then you’ll take beer and corn to Mother Sea at dawn. You will tell her you are sorry. That you did not know our ways. That you will never harm a turtle again in your life. And you must thank her for all she yields to your net.”

  —

  Months go by. Months almost as good as Molina’s time in Tumbes, though tinged with melancholy here, with so many friends and family emptied from the homes of Huchuy Mayu. After dinner they spend most evenings on the roof terrace. Chaska brings a jug of beer or palm wine, and they sit up there in the coolness watching sunsets over the ocean and the stars come out above dark mountains and magenta icefields glowing high beyond the desert.

  Often she tells him about her old life with Felipe (whom she calls Waman) and her niece Tika, who he gathers left home several months before the plague to join a nunnery somewhere in the highlands, in a great stone city of the Empire. When things settle down she wants Molina to go there with her to look for the girl, or at least find out her fate.

  One evening, long after the turtle-catching incident is laid to rest, he asks Chaska about her name. What does it mean? What is it she must never harm? The day is a faint memory above the darkening pewter of the sea. A breeze flows over the desert from the water, yet the sun’s warmth lingers in the plaster of the roof, rising agreeably through a soft blanket under their backs.

  She laughs, high-pitched, like a girl.

  “No one can kill my namesake. Look. Look up.” She lifts an arm and spreads her fingers. “I am Star. Like the lights in the sky.”

  “So lovely! I not see such sky before.”

  “Have never seen.” She touches his bare arm lightly with her fingertips.

  “Your language is too hard. And I am too thick. Still I not speak right.” He sighs, remembering how the nuns tried to beat grammar and a good accent into him at the orphanage. He longs to tell her he’s a simple man. No scholar, no gentleman. A rough warrior, a man of deeds, not words. But such a speech is beyond him. And better she think him a big man in his country.

  The moonless night is dark now and unusually clear, and the stars seem to hover near the Earth, layer upon layer, great and small. And some fine as flour, a dusting of light on black velvet.

  Ever since he can remember, Molina has loved the night sky. As a small boy in that orphanage at Molina de Aragón, he would slip from his dormitory, careful not to wake the others, sliding on his belly along cold flags like a snake and up the outdoor stairs to the rooftop. There he would stretch on his back and scan the mystery of the stars. All those tiny jewels, so bright and blue and cold and far, the light of Heaven leaking through a million pores in the dark bowl of the firmament. The eyes of angels, the nuns said. But how could angels be one-eyed? Angels or not, the stars bestowed awe and consolation. No matter how friendless he felt, how sharp his woes, how cruel and unfair the beatings he received (though in truth he brought many on himself, with his tongue, his temper, his midnight raids on the kitchen for a wizened apple), his sorrows would wash away under the greatness of the stars. And later, when he left Spain for the Indies, he would haunt the deck of the caravel at night as it made its lonely way across the Ocean Sea, gazing at constellations like old friends. And as he sailed with Ruiz into this unknown South Sea, he saw new stars rising into place, pricking new patterns on the skin of the night, from below the rim of a new world.

  Molina returns the touch on her arm, says softly, “Mira, Chaska. Tantas estrellas, y tú eres la más bella.”

  “What are you saying? I like the sound.”

  “I say stars are many. Are lovely. And you most lovely of all.”

  “I don’t believe a word of it, Mulina!” But she is laughing. And he likes the way she says his real name. He doesn’t much like Turtle. A slow and harmless creature. He is neither.

  Chaska takes his hand in hers and sweeps it like a painter’s brush over the sky, tracing the figures and patterns the Peruvians see. Some are familiar: Qollqa the Granary, their name for the Pleiades; Chakana the Crossbeams, which Pilot Ruiz called the Southern Cross. But there are others for which he has no match: Kuntur the Condor and Amaru the Anaconda, rearranging in his mind the stars of Scorpio. Strangest of all are the dark formations the Peruvians recognize—ink spills on the misty whiteness of the Milky Way—Atuq the Fox, Machaqway the Snake, Yana Llama the Black Camel, with the twin stars of Centaurus for its eyes.

  Molina does well at this, or so it seems after another drink. His faith in his mind’s agility returns. By my sins! he thinks, I’m not doing so badly in the Peruvian tongue for only a few months. I can curse and eat and make love in it. And now I’m learning the heavens.

  They have drawn close together on the blanket. He feels the stretched length of her beside him.

  “And all that,” she says, her fingers sweeping the Milky Way, so much broader and brighter down here than in the northern world, “that is Hatun Mayu, the Great River. We live in Little River. Up there is the big one, greatest of all.”

  Molina grunts, his interest in the heavens waning as a familiar ache in his lower body grows.

  “La Vía Láctea,” he answers dreamily.

  “Llaqta? Which meaning, city or nation?”

  “No. In my language, it’s the Way of . . . Leche.”

  “What is lichi?”

  “I don’t know . . .” How to explain milk in a country where milk is unknown? But of course, that isn’t so.

  “It is the drink from a mother. For feeding baby.” With this he lightly brushes the side of her breast, where there is wetness on her dress. Chaska laughs; flirtatiously, it seems to him. His cock is tenting his tunic.

  “For us it is a man’s milk,” she says. “A god’s. The Great River is the gushed seed of Pachakamaq, Maker of the World. Maker of all Space and Time.”

  Emboldened by this, Molina grabs her hand and plants it on his tent.

  She snatches free, leaps up and strikes him hard across the face. The blow lands like a cudgel in the fog of his lust. He sits up, feels blood running from his nose, tastes iron.

  “Don’t you dare do that,” she is shouting. “With my husband not dead a year! His child unweaned.”

  —

  Molina flees to his room—stumbling down the stairs and across the courtyard—as surprised by his own reaction as by the fury of Chaska’s rebuff. What’s he doing, putting up with that? He never takes shit from a wench. When he wants one, he has one. Can it be that this savage widow has unmanned him? Bewitched him? He must go back up and take her. A good fight makes a good fuck. Then be gone from this godforsaken town.

  The pain worsens as the drink wears off. Slowly Molina calms down, begins to reflect on where he is. And on her angry words, parsing them over and over. If he heard and understood aright, her objection was not, maybe, to the move itself. Perhaps it was only too soon.

  No. In the morning he will ask to be forgiven. If she lets him, he will stay. He will bide his time. They need each other. With time he may yet win this widow.

  TWO

  Spain

  1528–29

  6

  Waman awakes, runs a hand along a wasted body. He pinches thigh, chest. Feels the pinch.

  Alive.

  A lick of air on his face. A smell of land, earth, blooms, fire. Drowned by the stink of bilge.

  His eyes are sewn up like a purse.

  Blind?

  He lifts a han
d to his face, picks at crusted lids. Sore, not stitched. Light floods his mind.

  The sky is square.

  He lies in stench and darkness, fixed on the blue square which slowly he understands to be an open hatch. Aboard, then, within scent of land. He tries to get up, can only bend a knee. He calls out, voice weak as his limbs. Nobody comes.

  A touch on his cheek, very soft. A purr. All these ships have cats. And the cats always come to him. But which cat, which ship? Which sea?

  Something is new.

  The ship no longer heaves.

  No. There. He feels it. Gentle. No pitch, no yaw. Only small answers to the wind.

  Slowly he assembles details—some real, others perhaps from delirium, from dreams. They were on the Other Sea at last, the one the Christians call the Ocean Sea, which reaches all the way to Spain. In a ship bigger than Ruiz’s. A better ship. Built in Spain not Panama, of Spanish wood.

  There were others from the World. A girl, named Qoyllur, a little older, too highborn to notice him. And two youths, her helpers—all taken on board by the Old One during his southerly reconnaissance along the Empire’s shore. Also six llamas and other gifts from ports of call.

  Those people, those animals: did they die? Am I the only living creature from the World?

  He sinks into a doze and a face comes before him: hard, wrathful, bald as a cannonball. A lone blue eye, scanning mistrustfully. The eye of Almagro, the Commander’s partner. Dreaming again: One-Eye can’t be on this ship. He was left behind in Panama. Waman’s mind casts back to landing there after leaving Peru and sailing north past the hotlands. Almagro came down to the beach to greet Pizarro, as he had on Gallo Island. A great show of welcome, the two old men embracing like boys, like brothers. One-Eye plunging into the hold to see—and count—the new things from Peru. His whoops at every scrap of gold.