The Gold Eaters (33 page)

Luis de Morales
, Vicar-General, leans against the leather back of his cross-framed chair and snaps his fingers. A boy refills their goblets with a musty wine.

Still tired from the road, Waman sips slowly, saying little. He examines the churchman in the lamplight. Short, plump, with the face of an old baby. Might be any Christian priest. But disarming, jovial, keen to please and be pleased. A good man, then. Or perhaps merely a good actor, since the truly good tend to be ineffectual. It's the ruthless who get things done.

Either way, the Vicar-General is not the dry stick Waman expected from the letter's tone. His welcome to the Bishop's palace has been warm: his mule unloaded, his bag carried, a good suit of Spanish clothes—shirt, doublet, hose, cape—awaiting him in the guest quarters. Even a hot bath before supper, a rare thing among Spaniards, especially priests, for whom cleanliness smacks of ungodliness. Of course, the building was already fitted with this luxury, being the palace of an Inca king from long ago.

“Perhaps chess, Don Felipe?”

“Chess?”
Waman says, doubting his ears.

“Why, yes. The king of games. The game of kings!” Grinning, the Vicar-General rubs his palms together quickly, as if making fire with a drill. “Come now, Don Felipe. Nothing like chess to soothe the aches of the road. And I've been longing to play the famous interpreter. I hear you're the best in the land.” Without waiting for a reply, Morales fetches a board and set of pieces.

“The best in Peru,” Waman says, “was Atawallpa.”

“It was you taught him—isn't that so?”

“I and others, my lord.” (How should one address a
Vicar-General?) “The gunner Candía—who taught me in Spain—and Hernando Pizarro. Occasionally the late Commander too.”

The Vicar-General stares at the ceiling for a moment. “What a tragedy, no? The great Marquis Pizarro cut down like Caesar by assassins.” He shakes his head. “I didn't know he played.”

“He was better known for other things.”

So many ghosts around the chessboard. Atawallpa had named the game
taptana
. Ambush. Perhaps in ironic reference to his circumstances. What a chain of murder and misfortune! Atawallpa garrotted by Almagro and the Old One. Juan Pizarro slain in battle by Manku. Almagro garrotted by Hernando Pizarro (now jailed for that in Spain). Soto dead in a northern land called Florida, seeking a new Empire of his own. Manku's Queen tortured and burnt by Pizarro, along with Willaq Uma. Pizarro cut down in Lima by Almagro the Boy's cabal. Candía murdered by the Boy's own hand. And the Boy beheaded.

All within ten years of the massacre in Cajamarca.

He mourns none of those men but one: his old friend Candía. Dead two years now, though Waman didn't learn what happened until recently. It seems Almagro the Boy made the gunner fight on his side at Chupas against Spanish forces loyal to the Crown. But the Greek used his guns so badly that the Boy accused him of treachery and knifed him on the spot. He thinks of Candía's great beard and glossy eyes, his friendship, his guidance, his generosity. To Candía he owes his life; once certainly, maybe more. Waman sees the Greek by his bedside when he had smallpox in Seville, whittling chessmen, coaxing out the will in him to live. And the gift of the gold ingot, which did indeed save his life in Chile, buying food, buying silences. And passage on that ship bound for Chincha, which saved him from the wars. Where could his friend be buried? Was he buried at all?

The Vicar-General coughs expectantly. “Don Felipe, are you all right? You seem . . . far away. Shall we at least make a start? We can always finish tomorrow, when you're rested.”

“It would be an honour,” Waman manages, “to share a game before retiring.” Morales's doughy face lights up. He sets out the pieces swiftly, humming to himself, squirming in his chair like a small boy.

The interpreter lets him win, and quickly.

Enough of the games of kings.

When Waman comes down
next morning he finds another priest with Morales.

“Ah,” says the Vicar-General, “here's our interpreter! Allow me, Don Felipe, to present you to Friar Juan Pérez—the very one who baptised the Inca Pawllu—our senior priest in Cusco and a soldier for Christ who has done great things.”

Morales explains that Friar Pérez is a Knight of Saint John, one who fought the infidel Turks. And lost presumably, adds Waman to himself, recalling Candía's tales of the holy wars in the Middle Sea.

This warrior-priest is lean, tall, past his best years but strongly made. He is clean-shaven, the skin of his face hanging like old drapes from sharp bones. He has Valverde's knack of gliding silently about the room in his robes; the same dour mien.

“You are aware, perhaps,
Don
Felipe,” Friar Pérez begins, a note of mockery in the title Morales flatteringly conferred, “that our Holy Mother Church requires everyone, however virtuous, to make confession no less than once a year?”

“Yes, Father.” (Was he aware of that?) “I think so.”

“Be that as it may, the Vicar-General”—a nod to Morales—“has
already told me of your tribulations, your long captivity among the heathen.”

Captivity! A good word, that. Better than
displaced
; much better than
hiding
.

“Moreover, the Church allows leniency with New Christians. Especially those whose deeds speak of their good faith and loyalty. Such as yourself, so I'm told. How long has it been? When did you last confess?”

“It's been . . . more than a year.”

“Let us proceed at once, then. Have the goodness to follow me.”

Friar Pérez takes Waman to a small chapel within the ancient palace, the room's perfect stonework daubed with whitewash, hung with holy pictures and an effigy of the Christians' tortured god. The confessor sits in a high oak chair, its legs and arms ending in claws. Waman kneels on a cushion at his feet. He catches the priest's smell: damp wool, beeswax, incense, unwashed skin.

“First, do you heartily repent of all your sins and renounce the Devil and his works?”

“I do, Father.”

“Have you at any time since your last confession worshipped false gods and failed to keep the Sabbath?”

“If . . . if I may ask your guidance, Father?”

A curt nod.

“Is it sinful to miss the Sabbath when one has no Christian calendar and cannot keep track of the week?”

“Circumstances will be weighed in due course. Sins committed without will and consent are not mortal. They are, however, still sins. You must tell me everything.”

There was a time, Waman recalls—as if thinking of somebody else—when he
might
have done this thing, might have given in to
the unburdening of his soul by this invasive rite. But not after Cajamarca and Chile. Not after what the Christians did in Cusco to young Manku and his Queen Kura Uqllu. Humiliations, beatings, torture; her rape and burning alive.

He sees that now for what it was. Not mere greed and cruelty. No. The Pizarros were provoking Manku to an end. By then they had thousands of new men. If the Inca “rebelled,” the terms of the Requirement would be broken. They could then conquer Peru decisively and make its people slaves.

He will give this priest little things. More than he wants to hear. He will bore him.

“Have you taken the Lord's name in vain? Have you sworn blasphemously?”

“No, Father. Never.” True enough: he's never sworn by the new gods, only the old.

Soon tiring of Waman's drawn-out account of wanderings and petty idolatries—a kiss to a mountain here, a wad of coca left on a cairn there, visits to native healers, oaths calling on Mother Earth—Friar Pérez moves on to matters of the flesh.

“Have you committed adultery?”

“I am unwed.”

“Why so?”

“I'm . . . not sure.” His mind fills with Tika. They would have married if she'd been willing. They still might, if he can find her. But he won't sully her name by speaking it here. “Maybe it's because I've never led a life I could ask a woman to share. I was a child when I went to Spain. Since then I've never spent more than a few months in one place. Except in Cajamarca. The Commander was eight or nine months there. I can't remember how long in the lowlands before that. Several months anyway. And after, on the road—”

“That will do. Fornication, then?”

Waman looks up, having composed a mask of bewilderment.

“Fornication! Come on, man. Surely you know what fornication is? To lie with whores and loose women.”

He admits to a few adventures over the years, beginning with the one in Toledo, arranged by Candía. Another gift. He winces at his jealous and ungrateful outburst.

“Sodomy, then? I know you Indians are great sodomites, even with women. What of sodomy? It's not enough to say you've sinned—you must tell me how. In what ways. How many times.” The priest is leaning forward now, his robes gathered in his lap, his breath washing sourly over Waman, gusts of stale wine, sharp cheese, the dunghill odour of bad teeth.

Sodomy? They have so many distinctions between lawful and unlawful ways of love. Does their god not grow weary of these priests?

“It's no good holding shameful things back. Nothing will shock me. I've heard them all.”

“No, Father. I know only one way to lie with a woman.”

“And what way is that? Go on.”

“Always the same way.”

“The way of begetting, face to face?”

“Yes.”

“Have you sired bastards?”

“Not to my knowledge.”

What if he had? What if Tika had taken him and they'd had little ones—would their children have lived? So many miscarried or stillborn since the Christians brought sickness and hunger to this land. And of those that are born, so few who live beyond a year. He has heard some churchmen say these must be the last days, the coming of the Doom—for God is taking New Christians to heaven straightaway, to spare them his terrible wrath when he destroys the Earth.

Maybe they're right, Waman thinks. Maybe the new plagues are their god's will. I shall not worship a god who kills us so.

Outwardly contrite for the sins he has admitted, Waman is shriven. His penance is light: little more than service to the Vicar-General, whatever Morales may require. And on the following Sunday he must come to mass in the city church and take communion.

The sky is unblemished
, the violet blue of high altitude, yet a pall seems to shadow Waman on his way to Friar Pérez's church, now called the Church of the Triumph. It is still in the Roundhouse, the Sunturwasi, taken by Valverde after Manku's coronation. But the high spire with the Empire's flag has been ousted by a wooden belfry and the gonfalon of Santiago. And the doorway, he sees, is overlaid with a Spanish architrave, carved by sculptors who did not quite grasp what their new masters had in mind. A mismatch. Straddling two worlds.

Like me, he thinks. Like me.

Waman walks sadly, memories welling at each step. Of the Cusco he and Tika used to know, only the bones remain, a colossal skeleton of stone. Bridges are fallen, paving torn up, streets blocked by rubble and charred beams. Palaces lie open to the sky, their thick walls running above him like causeways in the air. The imperial college is being diced into houses, done roughly with rubble and adobe, the newcomers making muddy nests like swallows in its mighty ruins. Here and there a dull tang of old fire under weeds and rubbish: the reek of war. And things which were never smelt in Cusco before: ripe hams, cheeses, a billy goat. Smells of Spain.