Cloud Road (17 page)

This time I couldn’t fit the old and new together. The precise location of the ancient Inca square is not known. It was much larger than the modern one, larger than any in Spain, wrote chronicler Zárate, and it was surrounded with fine lodgings and adobe walls, twenty feet high. Water was piped into the courtyard of each house, a luxury unknown in any Spanish mansion. Francisco Pizarro reached here on the evening of 15 November 1532, and found it eerily deserted. The lodgings and the
square were not an ideal base to defend, but his scouts found none better. He sent a squadron led by his tame gentleman, Captain de Soto, to cross the valley, moving away to our right, and ask the Inca where they might lodge. Pizarro watched the little column of twenty horses make their way over the plain. Atahualpa’s sentries also saw them, and a large group of men began to gather in the heart of his camp. Having second thoughts, Pizarro sent his brother Hernando with twenty more cavalry, and strict instructions to keep his hot temper under control. The Incas observed their opponents’ shaky nerves.

Their camp of snowy cotton tents stretched for a mile and a half on either side of the Inca’s lodgings. Pizarro asked a native chief how many soldiers were camped with Atahualpa. He seemed to give a ridiculous reply, a huge number. Pizarro told the interpreter to check how the Incas counted. He did, and confirmed, ‘There are fifty thousand warriors camped on the hill, and this is not their whole army.’

It began to rain and hail. Francisco retreated into the lodgings and told his gunner, Candía, to conceal himself, and four of their small cannons, in a tower on the curtain wall of the square.

Meanwhile Captain de Soto was shown into a courtyard with a sunken bath set in a lawn and surrounded by simple but beautiful apartments painted scarlet and white. A hanging gauze of great fineness screened a seated figure. As de Soto’s eyes became used to the low rush lights, he could make out a strongly built man sitting on a low stool, and staring at the floor, immobile as statuary, unspeaking. Without any gesture seeming to be made, the gauze was removed, and de Soto saw the stool was made of solid
gold. Around the man’s strong shoulders was a mantle of fur as fine as silk, made from the pelts of vampire bats. A red woollen band was woven round his head. This soft crown was the insignia of the Lord of all the Incas, Atahualpa. He was
Capac Apu
, Emperor Rich and Powerful in War;
Sapa Inca,
Unique Inca;
Intip Cori
, Son of the Sun;
Capac Titu
, Liberal and Powerful Lord;
Huacchacuyac
, Lover and Benefactor of the Poor.

Drinks were brought, which the Spanish took sparingly, fearing intoxication or poison. The fasting Atahualpa took nothing. From chronicler Zárate, we know the words de Soto spoke: ‘I am one of the Governor’s [Francisco Pizarro’s] captains. He has sent me to visit you and say how much he desires to see you. He will be greatly delighted if you will be pleased to visit him.’ Thus, with breathtaking hubris, he invited an emperor, enthroned in the heart of his own realm, to pay his respects to dishevelled soldiers. Atahualpa did not speak. He did not so much as raise his head to look at them. One of his captains said, ‘The Inca Lord is fasting, he will not speak, nor eat, nor drink beer until tomorrow.’

The Inca captain reported accusations that the Spanish had maltreated a chieftain of the coast. De Soto pleaded self-defence. Atahualpa whispered a word to his
spokesman
, who said, ‘That chieftain has disobeyed. The Lord Inca’s army will come with you and make war on him.’

Hernando Pizarro’s fragile temper was insulted by this suggestion that they needed anyone’s help to defeat savages. A superb horseman, he wheeled his mount high on its hind legs and rode it down the courtyard, pulling up, rearing, hooves kicking the air, in the faces of the Imperial Guard. He tore across the open court, repeating
the bravado. None of them had seen a horse at close quarters before; many flinched. Finally he came down the full length of the courtyard and careered to a dusty stop, inches from the seated Inca. He was so close that flecks of the horse’s sweat fell on Atahualpa, and the breath of the horse ruffled the soft fringe wound about his forehead; but Atahualpa did not move a muscle or raise his eyes.

Said de Soto, ‘There is no need for your Indians to go against any chieftain. However great his army, the Christians on horses will destroy him.’

Atahualpa raised his face. Finally, the Spanish had provoked a response. The corners of his mouth lifted, he looked de Soto in the eye, and laughed at him. Atahualpa’s captain dismissed the Spanish.

There was a long silence before Atahualpa spoke. ‘Identify all those who flinched before the horses. Cut off their heads. Kill all their families.’

As they rode back in silence, the Spanish forded two rivers before de Soto looked back. The night fires of the Inca camp stretched across the whole hillside, outshining and outnumbering all the stars in the sky.

‘The insatiable thirst for conquest that marked the Spaniards, as soon as they discovered the New World, is only too well known. Nothing discouraged them, nothing repelled them, nothing exhausted them.’ These are the words of the half-Inca Garcilaso de la Vega. He was raised as a Spaniard and his view favours them. The genuinely Inca voice of Huaman Poma wrote, ‘The conquerors
reached a point where they had lost the fear of death in their greed for riches.’

It is easy to make puppet-theatre characters out of the principal actors in this drama: the penniless, bloodthirsty thug, Pizarro, with nothing to lose; the magnificent savage king, Atahualpa, treacherously seized; the hypocritical holy friar, Valverde, who made fine but untranslatable speeches, then gave the signal to attack unarmed men in whose land they were uninvited guests.

Pizarro was a strange case. He had made himself one of Panama’s richest citizens, then mortgaged it all on this. He was not interested in religion, didn’t womanise and didn’t become a father until middle age. His first child was a daughter, Francisca, by a fifteen-year-old native girl; but this liaison did not lead him to any interest in native welfare. He seemed driven by a directionless ambition. He acquired fabulous wealth but died without money. He seems at times a cipher, playing a game of knighthood, quest and conquest, at the dying of the Middle Ages. When the chivalrous ideal was already dead, and ripe for the touchingly human parodies of
Don Quixote,
Pizarro and his companions were still trying to live the fantasy in an unknown continent on the far side of the world.

Atahualpa’s seems the simpler psyche: he was clever, calculating, ruthless, determined and energetic, which was the job description for the imperial throne. On that November night in Cajamarca, he was so sure of his possession of the empire that he relaxed naked in a hot bath, then scarcely bothered to look at the boasting men who visited. The white corpses were already halfway to hell. Tomorrow they would be dead, or eunuch slaves.

As Pizarro organised his men in the lodgings around the
square, little stood between his tall, spare frame and a swift, sordid death. He had not yet seen the humiliating treatment victorious Incas carried out on the bodies of the defeated. Soon he would discover the horror of the ritual humiliation called
runa tinya.
Since leaving the coast, he had seen no sign of wealth that would justify squandering his life’s toil in gaining estates and comfort. Tomorrow, they were probably going to die, and for what?

For Atahualpa, it was just a matter of how long he would keep them waiting. After a few changes of mind, his ministers decided it wasn’t even necessary for the troops to be armed.

Pizarro thought only one plan would work. He knew the tactics of his cousin Cortés in Mexico City. Plan A: seize the head of state and the state is yours. Ironically, it had not worked in Mexico, where the people quickly became disenchanted with Moctezuma’s dithering attempts at diplomacy, and sidelined him. Cortés had been drawn into plan B: an obscene war of attrition, using neighbouring city-states as allies. When he finally starved and overpowered Mexico City he was fighting Belsen-like walking cadavers, kept upright only by fanaticism beyond any belief. But Pizarro, with fewer than two hundred men at his disposal, and no time to recruit allies, was even more vulnerable than Cortés. Tomorrow Atahualpa would see how pitiful his forces were. There was only one way to keep the initiative: seize Atahualpa. It was almost certain to fail. There was no plan B: just death.

A full frontal attack at their first meeting was the one thing Atahualpa did not anticipate. He moved his top general Rumiñavi behind Pizarro to cut off any escape back to the coast. Atahualpa asked Pizarro to prepare
lodgings at a house where a snake was carved in the stone: the House of the Serpent. In moments of crisis, Francisco Pizarro, now in his mid-fifties, showed himself an astute general who had learned from his hard experience. He knew his men. They would respond to an appeal to personal valour much more than to any pious rallying cry. ‘Make fortresses of your hearts,’ he urged, ‘for you have no other.’ He concealed everyone indoors, apart from himself and one lookout. His men couldn’t see the point, but Pizarro knew that only by surprise and speed of movement could he inspire fear and panic. If he drew the men up in ranks, it would only spell out their weakness. The cavalry waited all night and much of the next day, mounted, inside the houses along the square.

In the cold, early morning, without hurry, Atahualpa’s camp came to life. They feasted and drank to celebrate the end of the Inca’s fast. Eventually the Spanish saw masses of men forming ordered ranks on the gentle slopes below the hot baths of Baños. Anxiety swept through their guts as they watched a great battalion move across the valley towards them. The native discipline was manifest: they stood so their coloured plumes were arranged in a chequered pattern. Then they stopped. Thousands more assembled in the space vacated behind them. They marched forward again, and assembled a third battalion. The colossal force was not fully prepared until midday.

The Spaniards heard Mass and commended themselves to God.

The Inca army walked forward singing, cleaning every last speck of debris from Atahualpa’s path. As they bent, their gold and silver head-dresses flashed and sparkled in the noon sun.

As the Spanish examined their hearts, and tried to summon up courage for this suicidal raid, they would have regarded themselves as the best equipped and most experienced soldiers produced by Europe. After eight centuries, the heretic Moors had been driven from Spain by force of arms. Spanish armies then sought fortunes in Italy, where they carved out victories and kingdoms. Their God, their king and their country were in the ascendant. Now a New World had been disclosed to them, granted to the Iberians by Pope Alexander IV, himself a Spaniard, and its souls commended to their care. Heaven and earth were falling into their laps.

But they were also ordinary mortal men. Pedro Pizarro, a cousin, was a young teenager. His first foretaste of battle was to watch the veterans around him piss themselves in the terror of waiting, and not even realize what they had done. They stood in their wet trousers, shivering in the shadows. Through the long night, the danger increased their comradeship. Cristóbal de Mena recalled, ‘There was no distinction between great and small, or between infantry and cavalry. Everyone performed sentry rounds fully armed that night. So did that good old man Pizarro, who went about encouraging his men. On that day, all were knights.’ As Atahualpa approached, Francisco coached his men, ‘Come out fiercely at the moment of attack, but fight steadily and when you charge take care that your horses do not collide.’

The tension mounted. As the afternoon drew out unbearably, Atahualpa suddenly stopped in a meadow half a mile outside the town, and the Incas began to pitch tents. Pizarro sent a messenger out to beg the Inca to continue, for ‘no harm of insult will befall you’.

As the sun sank low, Atahualpa began to move again.

This may be the greatest moment in all history. The history of two continents, two worlds, comes to a point, in a town square, at a moment in time, when two great men come face to face. They hardly speak to each other until it is over. It is won and lost in moments.

Garcilaso de la Vega wrote that it was hard to say which side was more amazed. Each was marvellous to the other. They must each have experienced what Descartes called ‘a sudden surprise of the soul in the face of the new’; momentarily immobilised, feeling desire, ignorance and fear, all at once. In the marvellous figure facing them, each leader would also have encountered something rare and profound: someone utterly alien, yet still bringing a disturbing recognition that they contained something of themselves. There is a moment when the mirror shimmers, and we do not afterwards know if we are still standing on the same side of it. A sliver of your own self lies in the image of the ‘other’ facing you. As the traveller knows: we are all aliens.

Atahualpa entered the single narrow gate, which led into the great square of Cajamarca, amid singing and dancing, held aloft by eighty nobles in gorgeous blue livery. With a movement of his finger, Atahualpa commanded silence: instantaneous and absolute. The dust stirred up by their marching feet blew slowly away. Sand slowed in the glass. There was a rent in time.

Seeing no Christians, Atahualpa asked a counsellor, ‘What has become of the bearded ones?’

He answered, ‘They are hidden.’ Atahualpa thought they were afraid to come out and shouted, ‘They are our prisoners.’ His men roared, ‘Yes!’ But they did not attack.
At some stage, a legal document called the
Requirimiento
, or requirement, may have been read out, in Spanish, requiring the Incas to submit and convert. It was Spain’s legal sop to its uneasy conscience over their right to invade these well-governed kingdoms. Las Casas said he didn’t know whether to laugh or cry at the absurdity of reading it to uncomprehending natives before butchering them. Fittingly, it was signed by Queen Juana the Mad. Deep tragedy was inlaid with farce. Friar Valverde stepped forward with a twenty-two-year-old native from Tumbes, far north on the modern border with Ecuador. Felipe was the Spaniards’ jobbing translator. Quechua was his second language, and he spoke a barbarous, provincial dialect. His Spanish was no better, learned from soldiers, and fouled with oaths. He had been baptised, but had only the faintest knowledge of the faith he was to describe to Atahualpa. Garcilaso de la Vega, fluent in both languages, knew Quechua had no words for the Trinity, and sympathised with Felipe’s attempt to explain it: ‘There are three who are one, so that makes four.’