The Gold Eaters (28 page)

Waman explains that his knowledge of the barbarian tongue was still weak when Molina was left behind at Tumbes; he can't say he knew him very well. “He was young then, twenty or so. About our age now. The others used to call him a hothead. But they're all hotheads, every one! He helped me learn their language. He was quick to anger—they all are—but kind to me in a rough way. He laughed
a lot. My friend Candía—he's the one I've got to know best—he liked Molina too.”

“Mulina?”

“Turtle's real name.”

“What is it, some kind of animal?”

“Don't think so. It's just a town in their land. Most of them are known that way, by where they come from. Or say they do—quite a few have things to hide. The bearded ones aren't all alike. Candía's a Greek, not a Spaniard. A different nation with their own language. No one seemed to know what Molina was. He wouldn't talk about it. Some said he was a Moor or half a Moor, a people conquered by the Spaniards. He's darker than most, almost our colour. Black hair. Good-looking. So if my mother's keeping him clean and plucked, he won't be such a monkey after all.”

Tika laughs. They're both tipsy now, with emotion as much as beer. “Aunt Chaska always had good taste in men. Your father was a handsome man. And you're not bad-looking yourself.”

Waman's hand flies to his cheek.

“Don't be silly,” she says. “You look distinguished. And you're lucky. A lot went blind. Say it again, my step-uncle's real name. And your friend's.”

“Molina. And Candía.”

“
Mulina. Kantiya.
I like it. They sound almost human. About as human as you are nowadays. Tomorrow I'm pulling out that beard. And you'll have to get rid of those barbarian clothes. They look awful. And they stink.”

Now the invaders
pull out of Cajamarca, not westward to their ships but south along the highland road to the capital. The journey
takes three months. From time to time they are harried by northern troops, losing men and horses. But not enough to stop them. Atawallpa's forces are drifting away to their homes and his officers are losing heart, wondering whom they are still fighting for, and why. Moreover, Pizarro holds hostages: the dead Inca's lords and ladies who survived the massacre, and one of his top generals, Challkuchima.

As the strange killers of Atawallpa move southward, troops loyal to Waskhar's faction come out of hiding to support them, warning of ambush points, helping fight off each attack. The column swells to thousands, a moving village of bearded men on foot and horse, Nicaraguan auxiliaries, Peruvian and African slaves, Inca troops loyal to Cusco, and an ever-growing number of women and camp followers. The Empire's fine roads and way stations, by which it projected its power, now serve its invaders, supplying food and shelter on the march.

The Old One and his leading men have helped themselves to Atawallpa's wives and concubines, Pizarro taking the Inca's sister Wayllas Yupanki as a mistress, the one Waman saw searching for her brother so pathetically the night he died.

Waman and Tika travel together, sharing a tent, sleeping chastely on separate alpaca skins. He has told the Old One that she is his sister, long lost, rescued from Atawallpa's retinue. Without ever having discussed the matter, this is how they treat each other: as siblings. Tika stays voiceless in public. But when they're sure they can't be overheard, they talk; reliving their shared years in Little River, rehearsing family stories, telling each other more and more of their years apart. In Tawantinsuyu. In Spain.

Waman longs to become more than a brother to her, and sometimes he thinks he sees something in her eyes or her manner that hints she might feel the same. But he makes no move. She has not
spoken of what happened in Cajamarca, the thing that made her speechless. He will give her all the time she needs. That kind of love, if it ever comes, must come in its own time, its own way.

About a month south of Cajamarca, the royal road crosses a bald plain between two ranges, a high, cold place where a sea of dry grass runs before the wind in waves, and llamas graze under a wide sky that seems very near the Earth. The Andean winter is bitter here, the ground crisp with frost each morning, the roadside ditches glazed with cat ice. Yet the sun is growing stronger, heralding spring and the months of warmth and rain.

One morning before dawn, while the column is still asleep, Waman and Tika climb a small rise to greet P'unchaw, the Day. Tika seems excited.

“There!” she says, tugging Waman's arm once the first rays are lighting up each feature of the subtly undulating plain. “There. Can you see it?”

“What?” Dull with cold and sleep, Waman sees nothing but the same great pampa stretching onward to a faint loom of hills and the white tips of mountains so far away they might be in another land.

“That hill with towers. Can't you see?” She tilts back her head, points her full lips at the horizon. Waman, hands cupped around his eyes, scans the pitiless landscape. Far ahead, where plain meets sky, he makes out a ridge with a row of dots along the crest, bright in the sun.

“That's my city! Huanuco Pampa. Those are the warehouses. We'll be there tonight.”

He nods, gives a stoic smile. It will be interesting to see where Tika lived so many years, to have her show him her old haunts, maybe even the former House of the Chosen, normally forbidden to men. But he hopes the column won't linger in Huanuco Pampa. He's wearing every stitch he has, Castilian clothes under his Tumbes
tunic and an alpaca poncho. Even his chin, deprived of its tuft, feels chilled. Who would build a city on such a wind-scoured heath? Only the Incas, of course, who can build anything anywhere.

Guessing his thoughts, Tika tries to picture the place through his lowland eyes. What seems bleak and stark to him is to her magnificent. This is her homeland, the province she was born in, where she lived more than half her girlhood, and where she came back as a young Aklla, a Chosen One. True, she found the Inca city colder than her old village of Yaruwillka, which lay in a dale mild enough for corn and fruit and flowers. But it's good to be back in Huanuco Province again. And far from Cajamarca.

They reach the centre in late afternoon. Tika sees that some roofs have burnt in the war, and all are stripped of their golden trim. Yet the buildings still have a fresh-hewn look—unworn, their stone the same colour as the grasslands—the look of a city built by decree where nothing had stood before, so new that parts of the royal compound stand unfinished. Stopped dead by the Great Death.

The excitement she felt that morning curdles to sorrow among these walls. As they make their way across the great square, she sees only hundreds of citizens where before there were tens of thousands. She feels how Waman must have felt when he found Little River an empty shell. What is missing from Huanuco Pampa is its life—townsfolk in deep-red woollens, soldiers and workers in bright uniforms, farmers from surrounding towns, each town with its distinctive headgear, and the splendid palanquins of Inca officials coming and going on the Empire's business.

The Old One assigns billets: Almagro, himself, his mistress, his brothers, and other leading officers within the stone gates of the royal palace; horsemen and their mounts in the public halls looking onto the plaza; the rest in the city's barracks, workshops, and empty compounds.

Tika and Waman are assigned a room in the empty House of the Chosen, along with kitchen staff, other women from the column, and prisoners of particular value. Built to keep men out, it serves equally well to keep them in. This town within a town—some forty halls enclosed by a high perimeter wall pierced by a single gate—is guarded now by Spaniards, as it was by imperial sentries when Tika lived here.

She passes through the narrow entrance in a welter of memory and apprehension. It was this door, bricked up for weeks, that saved the House from the Great Death. Perhaps she owes her life to it. And it was here that she and Chaska said their last goodbye, the sadness leavened by her aunt's surprising news:
I wasn't quite sure, Tika. At my age one can't be. But now I am. There've been three of us on this journey. You and me, and a little one in here. A good traveller.
She took Tika's hand and placed it on her belly, promising to come back with the youngster as soon as they could make the long trek from Little River. And that was that. Neither knew those would be the last days of safe roads, sound bridges, well-kept way stations: the last days of the World that was.

Will she ever see her aunt again? And might she, perhaps, see her
soon
? If Chaska did come to Huanuco with Atuq and Turtle, as her message promised, they would likely have gone on to Puma Hill, the hamlet in the eastern foothills where they had kin. That would have been about two years ago. They may still be there. The only certainty is that they never returned to Little River.

Tika remembers the way well enough. On her first leave from Huanuco Pampa, just before the Great Death, she visited there with two friends from her House. It was only a few days' walk, a bit longer coming back because of a stiff climb into the highlands. She recalls her cousins' welcome, the evening meals spread out on bright cloths above the coca terraces, the jungle far below them, fireflies pricking
the night. A warm place with warm folk who helped make the cloistered simplicity of her life in Huanuco easier to bear.

While the column rests and resupplies itself, she must decide what she will do. It wouldn't be hard to slip away while Waman is busy working for the Old One or playing that silly board game with his bearded friend. The guards on the gate wouldn't stop her, wouldn't even know who she is.

The dilemma tears her, splits her in two. How far can she trust Waman? How much of a barbarian has he become? Will he be able to change, abandon his bearded friends, fight them if need be? His longing for her—always obvious, sometimes oppressive—makes her uneasy. How much is it really a longing for his past, for his old home and innocence, a second beginning? If she leaves him now in Huanuco Pampa, she can't tell him why or where she is going. No matter how trustworthy he may be, the barbarians might suspect some plot, might torture him. And if he told them, they would rake the district—not for her, but for Molina.

She could go. But only in silence. Only alone.

And her plan, to call it that, is made of nothing but guesswork and wishful thinking. She might well find Puma Hill deserted like so many towns and villages they've seen along the way. She can't be sure its remoteness will have saved it from the Great Death or the war. Again she thinks of the peace and plenty of the hamlet as she saw it. Yet it's just as easy to imagine Puma Hill forsaken, its roofs rotted, its fields gone to the wild.

She sleeps badly that night, her dreams filled with obstacles she struggles to overcome, only to be confronted by another, and another. Several times she wakes adrift, not knowing where she is, or thinking she is back in the past, a student here in the Akllawasi, and everything since is merely nightmare, an illusory future.

In the morning, after the two of them have eaten in the kitchen,
she shows Waman round the buildings where she lived and worked. It's clear from the state of the House that it was used as a barracks in the civil war. And there's more recent damage: barbarians riding ahead of the main column have ransacked the compound for anything of value. The buildings are intact but the contents scattered—the brewery strewn with potsherds and overturned vats—the weaving halls littered with broken spindles and shuttles, tangled skeins, trodden rags. Waman seems to find some detached fascination in these forlorn discoveries. Tika, remembering the House as her home—clean, cheerful, scholastic, orderly—burns with sad anger at the wrecking of this women's sanctuary by the wrath of men.

She falls silent, goes back to her bed for the afternoon but gets little rest. Reality has fallen on her like a net. She feels pinned, inert, drained of will and possibility, her mind racing. Waman is not a free man, and is unlikely to become one until . . . Until what? What will happen when the invaders reach the capital, if they ever do? Another Cajamarca? His fate is tied to the barbarians' fate. And hers to his.

Unless she flees now. But if she abandons him—the one member of her kindred she can be certain is alive—she might find nothing, might become lost in a world destroyed, as she was when the earthquake smothered her young life. It comes to her now that maybe that's why she wanted to join the Chosen in the first place: to belong to a family so big she would never again be alone.

—

While his cousin is resting, Waman seeks out Candía, feeling eyes upon him—guards' eyes—as he walks the city centre. It's been a while since they had a chess game. The Greek has been busy with military duties, and Waman spends most of his time with Tika, who avoids all the invaders, acting as if she cannot see or hear them.

It is nearly sundown when he spots his friend's bulky figure on the
usnu. They embrace at the head of the stairs in the Spanish way, patting backs. “Any idea how long we'll be here?” Waman says. “This city's too cold for me.”