The Gold Eaters

Books by Ronald Wright

FICTION

The Gold Eaters

Henderson's Spear

A Scientific Romance

NONFICTION

What Is America?

A Short History of Progress

Home and Away

Stolen Continents

Time Among the Maya

On Fiji Islands

Cut Stones and
Crossroads

RIVERHEAD BOOKS

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New York, New York 10014

Copyright © 2015 by Ronald Wright

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Wright, Ronald, date.

The gold eaters / Ronald Wright.

p. cm.

ISBN 978-1-101-98287-7

1. Incas—Fiction. 2. Culture conflict—Fiction. 3. Conquerors—Peru—Fiction. 4. Explorers—South America—Fiction. 5. Pizarro, Francisco, ca. 1475–1541—Fiction. 6. Insurgency—South America—History—16th century—Fiction. 7. Peru—History—Conquest, 1522–1548—Fiction. 8. South America—History—16th century—Fiction. 9. South America—Discovery and exploration—Spanish—Fiction. I. Title.

PR9199.3.W75G65 2015 2015014720

813'.54—dc23

MAP BY MEIGHAN CAVANAUGH

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously.

For Deborah

O Peru, land of metal and of melancholy!

—
FEDERICO GARCÍA LORCA

And my forebears there in Cusco . . . called themselves lords of Tawantinsuyu, which is to say the Four Parts of the World, for they thought there could surely be no other world than this.

—
TITU KUSI
YUPANKI

Visit
http://bit.ly/1PQaWZi
for a larger version of this map.

Not until a generation after they reached the Caribbean islands in 1492 did Spaniards begin to invade the thickly peopled mainland of the Americas, which many still believed to be a part of Asia.

They achieved no major conquest until smallpox—a mass killer new to the New World—opened the way, enabling Hernán Cortés to recover from his 1520 defeat by the Aztecs and return to take their capital, the city of Mexico, by siege in 1521.

Meanwhile, Vasco Núñez de Balboa had crossed the Isthmus of Panama and waded knee-deep into an ocean new to Europeans. This he named the South Sea. In 1519 the Spaniards began building an outpost on its shore at Panama, a base from which to explore, subdue local “Indians,” and plunder seafaring traders who plied the Pacific coast.

From such traders came tales of a great empire where people lived in stone cities, kept animals resembling humpless camels, and ate from plates of gold.

Far to the south, beyond the jungle, where the trees gave way to dunes and snow-capped mountains, lay the realm of the Incas. Running more than three thousand miles from southern Colombia to central Chile and western Argentina, the Inca Empire was then the second largest on Earth (after China) and the last great civilization unknown to the outside world.

In 1526, Francisco Pizarro, a founder and mayor of Panama, formed a company to find and conquer this golden land.

Northern Peru

1526–
27