Cloud Road (16 page)

Unwilling to endorse either heir, and fearful of Inca Wayna Capac’s wrath, they returned to tell him. They need not have been afraid: he was dead. Priest Cusi Tupac Yupanqui told them to follow the old king’s first wish, and pass his mantle to Ninan Cuyoche, who was in the luxurious royal palaces in Cuenca, to the south. When they
got there, he too was dead from smallpox. To prevent unrest, Wayna Capac’s corpse was carried back the length of his empire to Cuzco in a closed litter, as if he were still alive, and greeted in triumph. Huascar was given the throne. Huaman Poma, a native source, gives him a bad press, describing him as swarthy, long-faced, graceless, ugly with a character to match, brave but miserable. Soon he was clashing with Atahualpa, who was supported by their father’s best generals, and claimed governorship of the north. Like his father, Atahualpa killed two other brothers to help clear the air. Civil war was declared between north and south, Atahualpa and Huascar. Armies of tens of thousands clashed. Fortunes ebbed and flowed. Just as Atahualpa was beginning to get the upper hand, into this weakened and unstable empire limped 164 Spanish troops. Atahualpa’s spies observed them. His generals tracked them but did not deign to attack such a rabble.

Captain Hernando de Soto, small, dextrous in arms, thirty-two years old, was the nearest thing Pizarro had to a gentleman in his ranks. He was despatched as an envoy, to meet Atahualpa’s councillors, and assure them of their peaceable intentions. They were welcomed to the town of Cajas by the stench of death, and Indians hanging from trees by their feet. A man seeking sex had entered the house of the virgins. He now hung from the trees, next to the guards he had bribed.

Captain de Soto returned with a chief sent by Atahualpa to meet Pizarro. The chief gave him a gift of two drinking vessels, and said his lord waited to receive him peaceably at Cajamarca. The chronicler Zárate recorded how the crafty Pizarro verbally caressed him in response. ‘I am
delighted to receive you as a messenger of Atahualpa. I have heard such good things of your lord that I long to meet him. I have been told he is making war against his enemies. I have decided to visit him therefore, as a friend and a brother, and, with the Christians of my company, to aid him in his conquests.’ Had Pizarro only known how brothers of the royal family behaved, it would have described his true intentions perfectly. He accepted the drinking vessels. They were carved from stone in the shape of castles. The men passed them round, soberly studying the miniature walls; a nervous quiet fell. Many thought they were veiled warnings of what lay ahead.

A second lord appeared, and introduced himself as Atahualpa’s brother, Atauchi. He brought llamas, guanacos, alpacas and vicuñas: the four South American members of the camel family. Streams of servants presented stags, deer, rabbits, partridge, ducks, wild fowl, parrots, monkeys, dried meat, maize, flour, honey, peppers, grains and beer. The tattered soldiers were given rolls of fine woollen goods, vases, pitchers, platters, gold and silver bowls and pots, emeralds and turquoises. For Pizarro personally, there were gold sandals and bracelets. The half-Inca chronicler Garcilaso de la Vega tellingly observed, ‘Everything that Peru contains was represented in this offering.’ It was designed to display Atahualpa’s power and scope, and to make the Spanish feel poor and weak, as they, in return, put together their gifts: a few Venetian glasses and a linen shirt.

Atauchi made a fine speech, assuring them of Atahualpa’s friendship. Pizarro lied. ‘We have come in the name of the Pope, to reveal to the Peruvians the vanity of their idolatry, and to teach them the real religion of the
Christians; as well as in the name of the Emperor and King of Spain, to the Inca and all his Empire, and sign treaties of permanent peace and friendship with him; that they would not make war on the Inca.’ But when Atauchi left, they surveyed the microcosm of empire laid out before their feet, and shivered.

As well as receiving the messages from his ambassadors, Atahualpa heard the reports of his spies.

Atahualpa smiled a slow smile. ‘We have nothing to fear from these corpses, but the tall sheep they call horses interest me.’ He sent gold and silver. The messengers, as instructed, presented it to the horses, champing their bits. ‘Do leave your iron aside, and eat this fodder, which is much better.’ The Spaniards laughed up their sleeves.

In the villages ahead they found that behind the polite facade of their welcome, most of the inhabitants were arming themselves and melting away into the countryside. Hernando Pizarro, a half-brother, put a chief to the torture. It was said of Hernando that ‘No touch of pity ever stayed his arm.’ The chief confessed Atahualpa was preparing for war and had boasted, ‘Every Christian will
be killed.’ If Pizarro and Atahualpa were well matched in anything, it was a talent for duplicity.

The Spanish had reached heights where they suffered intense cold at night in their thin cotton tents. The horses, used to the hot and humid coast, caught coughs. The icy stream water gave the men stomach aches. Where the trail grew narrow among the mountains, and the horses slithered on the stone stairways, the men grew afraid of ambush. It would be easy to crush their column with boulders launched from above, but Pizarro would not leave the road for fear of being thought afraid.

Pizarro’s translator, a non-Inca chief brought up from the coast, reconnoitred and confirmed the tortured chief’s intelligence: ‘Atahualpa is preparing for war, and has already led his army into the country. Finding Cajamarca deserted, I went out to the camp, where I saw a large army and many tents. All is ready for war.’ They spent their next night on a treeless plain. On the evening of Friday, 15 November 1532, they marched into Cajamarca’s empty streets.

Our coach crested the tree-lined final ridge at just over 10,000 feet and roared down the endless hairpins with sudden urgency. The modern city houses 70,000 people but looks smaller. Although its original Quechua name means ‘town in a ravine’, the site of the city is that rare thing in the Andes, an extensive flat site, welcoming and prosperous-looking. Through the juddering glass, I looked down on a sea of terracotta roofs. The centre is still almost entirely one-and two-storey buildings, and the ornate church towers and spires rise over them just as they would in a medieval city. The town the Spanish saw would normally have housed two thousand subjects, but
most had joined the Inca’s forces across the valley at the hot springs of Baños.

The coach pulled into a rough gravel yard fenced with corrugated iron. We shouldered our packs and, glad to stretch our legs, walked down into the main square: the arena where an empire was seized in an afternoon.

The Hotel Plaza is an ancient two-storey colonial building in one of the lower corners of the main square. We stepped through the door and into the seventeenth century. The walls of our room were painted dense yellow and an orange-brown: it was like living in a Mark Rothko painting. There was a shallow balcony, just big enough for us both to squeeze onto and raise tin mugs of cane rum to our left, to toast where the sun was setting behind the lantern towers of San Francisco church. The colonial civil authorities only began to tax churches when they were finished, so the church drew a bell-tower on the plans but never built it. The low cathedral, squatting on the other side of the square, still has none, a tactic that ensured neither God nor Caesar was rendered their due. I watched the warm light fade on Elaine’s cheek, then kissed it softly.

Opposite, on Santa Apollonia hill, a stone stairway steepled up to an enormous white concrete cross. Apollonia was the favourite saint of the Spanish king, Philip II, of whom a contemporary said, ‘He is immovable, even if he has a cat in his pants.’ She was tortured by having all her teeth pulled out, and became the patron
saint of dentists. Obsessed by death (he lost three wives and most of his children), Philip was a fanatical collector of holy relics. When he died, he owned 290 true teeth of Santa Apollonia.

Below us, a rectangle of roads enclosed a formal garden where topiary monkeys and Olmec heads stared among the slender palms. Lovers pressed each other against the waist-high walls enclosing the planted beds. Friends passed the moist rims of shared beer bottles round hungry lips, humming the songs they would use all their lives, to conjure back absent friends and lost lovers who will be forever seventeen. As dark fell, the bulky hills became flat silhouettes, and leant closer, hemming in the town. Santa Apollonia hill vanished into darkness, except for the floodlit cross, which hung as if suspended in mid-air.

We ate at Salas’s, a Cajamarca institution a couple of doors along the square. The entire courtyard has been roofed in and cavernous kitchens cook up traditional food. I ordered roast guinea pig and Elaine asked for a pork dish. In countries where meat is a treat, fat stays on.

I warned, ‘It’ll undo all that fitness and preparation.’

‘Look at your ribs, I need to stock up if that’s what a country diet does to you. Talking of bones, how is your back?’

‘Very good.’

‘I’m glad, mine’s been playing up and I didn’t want to hear that backpacking was going to finish it off.’

‘No, don’t worry, the pack hurts your shoulders so much you’ll barely notice it.’

Torrential rain began to beat on the roof. Laughing diners shifted their chairs to avoid the leaks. Cooked guinea pig, if you study it from the end without shining
white buckteeth, looks like a chicken with four wings. The fat had been crisped up like pork crackling – it can otherwise be rather sickly – but the meat was harder to find; you have to collect it into little mouthfuls. It tastes like game bird. Afterwards its sharp ribs provide you with toothpicks, and when you go home, you can always enjoy telling small children what their pets taste like.

Back in the room, I re-opened the narrow, ceiling-height doors onto the balcony, placed the small table where I could sit and gaze over the square, and wrote my diary. Candles in bottles eased the gloom of a forty-watt bulb that stained everything the colour of tea. Elaine lay on the bed reading. I felt perfectly content; at ease, more at home than when I am in my own house. Life was stripped down to the things I loved. There was just a tremble at the back of my mind: was that because this trip was all about me; was my happiness a kind of selfishness?

The buildings which figured in the actual confrontation between the Inca Atahualpa and Francisco Pizarro have all gone. I decided we should begin with the hot springs where Atahualpa was camped when the Spaniards straggled into Cajamarca. A ten pence morning bus ride took us across the valley to the village of Baños (literally ‘baths’), where, for a pound each, we hired a private bathroom fed by the same hot springs which bathed the Inca the night before his capture. Now, at six degrees south, the water once again spiralled happily down the plughole. Mentally counting how many other opportunities there would be over the next month for us to bathe privately in a hot pool, a number extremely adjacent to zero, I purred seductively, ‘Shall I wash you first, or do you want to do me?’

She soaped her flannel up vigorously. ‘Oh I just want to enjoy a good soak.’

‘As opposed to an old soak?’ I sulked, but she was too busy working the flannel through the gaps between her toes to answer.

After, we walked up through the gardens to the ponds, lined with sinister blooms of orange and green algae, thriving in the quietly bubbling waters while sulphurous clouds of steam drifted softly over the ground. A skull and crossbones sign said
Danger: 78°C
. The hot springs of Kónoj fed one of two stone pipes, hot and cold, serving Atahualpa’s bath.

Picture Atahualpa: he was in his thirties and ‘possessed a very sharp mind and knew how to be extremely clever as well as tactful in the usual circumstances in which he was placed’. That is the judgement of a hostile chronicler, the pro-Huascar Garcilaso de la Vega. Atahualpa had won a series of battles, survived setbacks, and his rival Huascar was on the run, and would soon be seized by Atahualpa’s troops. The empire was practically his, and some valiant and very useful animals were about to come into his hands. He would capture the Spanish, sacrifice most to the Sun and castrate a few to look after the horses, which he was anxious to breed. He was finishing a religious fast, abstaining from sex, meat and spicy foods. He would complete his fast tonight, and see the strangers tomorrow. With Huascar’s strength broken, and his armies scattered, there was now time, so much time. Based on the intelligence coming in, Atahualpa’s assessment was fair, but his spies had only observed the Spanish at their weakest.

Next morning, back in Cajamarca, we climbed the long
stairways up to the peak of Santa Apollonia. Fierce light glanced off the white stones and lanced our eyes. The whole of the town was in view. Children’s marching bands paraded round the square in a competition; we had seen pupils pinning their sheet music to the pigtails of the girl in front. Rhythm was supplied by a gut-shaking bass drum, usually hung on the belly of the only fat child in the class. The artillery beat came clearly up the hill, the melodies came fitfully on the unreliable wind.

The tragedy which befell the Incas was acted out on the stage spread before me. Usually I do not find it difficult to come to a place I have read about, and mentally turn back the clock and replay the action; as a writer, I am always constructing worlds in my head. We sat on a knoll of rock, carved by Inca hands, with little ledges, seats and hollows, listening to birdsong and the sweet drone of bees, feeling the sun find a chink of flesh to burn above our shirt collars. I looked down on the town, its traffic hushed by distance. Its neat, repetitive streets looked too complacent to have harboured hot blood, butchery and the tremors of falling empires, fear banging in men’s rib cages until they felt as empty as mummies. The boom of a bass drum reached us for a few beats, then died.