The Last Days of the Incas (21 page)

The sun was beginning to set on Saturday, July 26, 1533, as a group of Spaniards led the emperor of the four
suyus
to the main square, the same square where he had been captured the previous November. Always sticklers for formality, the Spaniards sounded the trumpet and began reading out loud the charges against the emperor. Atahualpa, meanwhile, was tied to a stake that had just been impaled into the ground. Apparently either because what was happening was so obvious or else because one or more of the interpreters had informed them, some of the local townspeople had gathered to watch. For the ordinary native inhabitant, watching the Spaniards prepare for the execution of their lord and god was as frightening as knowing that the sun was about to disappear—and that their world was about to be upended. For a Spaniard, the only thing similar would have been to witness Christ being led to the crucifixion at Golgotha.

The Incas, after all, believed that history was a succession of ages divided from one another by a cataclysmic event, a
pachacuti
, or an “overturning of the world.” The first
pachacuti
had begun with the formation of the Inca Empire itself. Now, as the natives watched their lord Atahualpa being tied to a stake, many feared that a second grand
pachacuti
was about to begin. “When he [Atahualpa] was taken out to be killed,” remembered Pedro Pizarro, “all the native people who were on the square, and there were many, prostrated themselves on the ground, letting themselves fall to the earth like drunken men.”

Some of the Spaniards began gathering wood while others began stacking it in preparation for a fire around Atahualpa’s feet. The Dominican friar, Valverde, meanwhile, spoke to the emperor through one of the interpreters. “[He instructed him in] the things of our Christian faith, telling
him that God had wished him to die for the sins that he had committed in the world and that he should repent of them, and that God would pardon him if he did.”

It is impossible to know what Atahualpa actually understood of the friar’s message. Did Atahualpa think that the god these Christians kept talking about would “pardon” him from being killed if Atahualpa agreed to worship him? Or did he fully understand that the “pardon” being offered was a very limited one that would only allow Atahualpa to select between two different forms of death? In any case, here he was, lord of the four
suyus
, now bound to a stake while bearded men babbling in an unintelligible tongue were obviously preparing to set him on fire. Atahualpa had done everything these invaders had asked for, and now an unfriendly man in a dark robe was threatening him with death by fire if he didn’t accept the invaders’ one and only god, whom the Spaniards called
Dios.

The Spaniards, no doubt, were equally uncomprehending of the fact that there was nothing an Inca feared more than having his physical body destroyed—whether through burning or through some other physical process that made the body disappear. The Incas believed that access to the after-world could only be guaranteed if, after death, the body were kept intact, with the Inca emperors actually going so far as to have their bodies mummified and carefully tended to by subsequent generations. The thought of being burned at the stake was thus a double threat: not only would one’s last moments be very painful, but one would also forfeit the enjoyment of a pleasant afterlife.
^*

Atahualpa’s chief concern for the moment seemed to be less about himself, however, and more about his two small sons. He had left them in Quito nearly a year earlier, when he had begun to make his way south in order to take over his brother’s throne and thus to unify the empire. Friar Valverde, prevented by his religion from marrying, impatiently
told Atahualpa to forget about his wives and children and to concentrate on accepting the Spaniards’ Christian god instead. What was at stake here was the emperor’s
soul
, the friar insisted, although exactly how the translator tried to convey this concept—or even how much the native translator understood of the friar’s religion—is debatable. To Atahualpa, no doubt the Christians’ god seemed to be a very jealous one. The friar, however, continued to insist that Atahualpa would burn for eternity if he did not reject his own gods and worship only theirs.

Atahualpa—dressed in a richly woven tunic and mantle—continued to plead the case of his small children, however. At one point he even requested that Francisco Pizarro take responsibility for them himself.

Apparently reassured by the friar’s promises, Atahualpa finally agreed to convert—whether to save his children, save himself from a fiery end, or to guarantee himself access to the Inca afterlife, is unknown. Friar Valverde—the same man who eight months earlier had commanded Atahualpa to obey the Spaniards’ Christian god, or else face the Spaniards’ wrath—quickly baptized the emperor with water.

As the sky began turning red from the setting sun, several Spaniards fastened around Atahualpa’s neck a garrote—a loop of rope attached to a stick that could be turned like a wheel, thus tightening the loop until the blood supply through the carotid arteries was cut off to the brain. As the friar began intoning the last rites—
Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death
—one of the Spaniards began to twist
the stick, the rope slowly tightening around Atahualpa’s neck—
I will fear no evil, for thou art with me
—until the emperor’s eyes began to bulge and the solitary vein on his forehead rose distended and illumed by the final rays of the sun—
and I will dwell in the house of the LORD forever.
Wrote the notary Pedro Sancho de la Hoz:

“He died on Saturday,” wrote another notary, “at the same hour that he was taken prisoner and defeated [eight months earlier]. Some said it was for his sins that he died on the [same] day [Saturday] and hour that he was seized.”

So ended the life of Atahualpa, the thirty-one-year-old lord of the Incas, the first Inca emperor in over a hundred years who not only had failed to expand his ancestors’ empire, but had instead presided over the beginning of its collapse. For the second time in less than a decade, beginning with Huayna Capac’s death by smallpox, the Inca Empire was suddenly without a ruler. Governors, administrators, generals, and accountants still busied themselves with their daily tasks—but there was now no one to give them orders. From this moment forward the Inca Empire was essentially paralyzed, like an immense giant stumbling forward, incapable of defending itself against the small band of invaders who, like parasites, had burrowed deeply into the Inca body politic and were continuing to wreak their havoc.

As Atahualpa’s body lay crumpled and smoking and native onlookers prostrated themselves moaning on the ground, the Spaniards, meanwhile, prepared to defend themselves against the imminent onslaught of an attack. Pizarro ordered the entire Spanish camp to ready itself and ordered fifty horsemen to patrol the city. That night, neither Pizarro nor his captains slept, periodically visiting with the night watches and readying everyone for battle. As on the eve of Atahualpa’s capture almost a year earlier, the bearded intruders were tense and on edge. Would dawn bring them
face-to-face with hundreds of thousands of Inca warriors? And if so, how many of the Spaniards among them would live to finish the day?

Eventually, the dense star clusters overhead began to dim while in the east the first pale rim of dawn began to emerge. The Spaniards who were already awake now woke their comrades as all strained to listen, fully expecting to hear the dull thud and clank of the approaching native infantry. Slowly, with each minute stretching into what must have seemed like an eternity, the sky brightened until finally the first rays of the sun appeared, the long, shaftlike yellow fingers touching the thatched roofs of the houses and then flooding the green valley with light. As the sun rose further, however, still no attack came. Scouts sent out on horseback returned without having sighted an army, at least not in the vicinity. The question no doubt on everyone’s mind was: what had become of the advancing native army? Why did it not appear and attack? Had the information they received been false—or had it been true?

Reprieved for the moment from the immediate necessity to fight, the Spaniards now found themselves confronted with a more mundane problem: what to do with Atahualpa’s body. All agreed that they couldn’t just leave an Inca emperor lying on the square as they had previously done with thousands of Atahualpa’s slaughtered native soldiers. Atahualpa had been revered as a god, after all, and the natives continued to prostrate themselves on the square, greatly distraught over his death. Pizarro finally decided that the sooner they disposed of Atahualpa’s corpse, the quicker the memory of him would fade. After a brief ceremony, Atahualpa’s stiff, blackened body was interred in a hastily dug hole.

A few days after Atahualpa’s burial, Spanish sentries sighted Hernando de Soto and his horsemen galloping toward camp. Unaware of what had transpired in their absence and assuming that Atahualpa was still alive, Soto rode back in a flourish and dismounted in the square. He immediately hurried off in search of Pizarro, no doubt glancing curiously at the stake impaled in the ground and at the charred wood nearby.

Soto must have wondered at the somber mood in the camp and at finding Pizarro wearing “a large felt hat on his head [as if ] for mourning.” Presumably looking about in vain for Atahualpa, Soto quickly informed Pizarro that he and his men had found “no native warriors in the countryside, but [rather that] everyone was at peace…. For that reason, seeing that it was a trick, an
obvious lie and a palpable falsehood, they [had] returned to Cajamarca.”

Pizarro’s mournful reaction to the good news caught Soto completely by surprise. “I now see that I have been deceived,” Pizarro quietly said. The normally taciturn Pizarro—tall, graying, with a sparse beard and looking like Don Quixote if Don Quixote were the kind of man who murdered other men for their gold—suddenly appeared shaken and had “eyes wet with tears.” Pizarro told Soto that they had garroted Atahualpa a few days earlier, after new reports had arrived of an approaching Inca army. Obviously, Pizarro said, the information had been false.

Soto, who like Pizarro had killed countless natives in personal combat, was deeply disappointed by Atahualpa’s death. Presumably this was both because of Atahualpa’s exalted rank—which the Spaniards in general respected—and also for the obvious bond that he had made with the friendly emperor. Along with Hernando Pizarro, Atahualpa had counted the handsome, dashing Soto as a supporter, or at least as someone with whom he could relate on a personal level. An emotional Soto quickly told Pizarro that it would have been much better to have sent Atahualpa to Spain, and that he himself would have gladly escorted him there. They had killed the emperor for no reason, no justifiable reason at all, Soto said. He then turned and exited the room.

News of Atahualpa’s death slowly began to make its way northward from Peru, across the Isthmus of Panama and eventually via square-rigger ship to Spain. Meanwhile Pizarro, Almagro, and their roughly three hundred Spaniards readied themselves for the second major military campaign of the expedition. Pizarro’s plan was to begin a bold military thrust southward along the rugged spine of the Andes. No longer protected by a hostage emperor they could count upon to keep native armies at bay, however, they would now be forced to entrust their fates to their lances, to their swords, and to their solitary God. If capturing Atahualpa had been the equivalent of seizing the brain or command center of the empire, then Pizarro was now determined to fight his way southward in order to capture the empire’s heart: the legendary city of Cuzco. Pizarro knew that two Inca armies stood between himself and his goal, however. He also knew that another Inca army lurked somewhere to his rear. How those native armies and how their commanding generals would behave, no one could predict.

With many of them no doubt making the sign of
the cross, the cavalrymen with their long lances and the foot soldiers with their sheathed swords began to move out, leaving the town they had inhabited for nearly a year behind them, its wide square with its single forlorn stake slowly receding into the distance until, eventually, it was swallowed by their trail of dust.

FOR THE NEXT THREE MONTHS, PIZARRO AND HIS ROUGHLY
three hundred conquistadors headed south, wending their way past snow-covered peaks, herds of llamas and alpacas tended by wide-eyed native boys wearing alpaca tunics, and occasionally clashing with local and mostly disorganized native resistance. The Spaniards by now had a larger retinue traveling with them: in addition to some native slaves from Nicaragua and a sprinkling of black slaves from Africa, they also enlisted the aid of numerous local natives, who led their pack trains of llamas, the latter loaded with tents, food, weapons, and with Atahualpa’s treasure of gold and silver.