The Last Days of the Incas (17 page)
The Inca emperor, however, was not nearly so magnanimous with his own brother, Huascar, as he was with the trembling native lord. Atahualpa still considered his captured brother to be his only competitor for the throne; thus, even though Huascar was now his prisoner, as long as he was alive, Huascar remained a threat. The Spaniards, Atahualpa no doubt believed, were going to leave, and hopefully would do so very soon. When they did, Atahualpa wanted to make sure that his position as emperor would remain unchallenged. Shortly after Atahualpa’s capture by the Spaniards, messengers had informed him that his brother was only a few days’ march away, having been brought there as a prisoner under an armed escort. By this time, almost all of Huascar’s family line had been thoroughly exterminated. Having already witnessed the brutal murders of his wife, children, and relatives, Huascar must have realized that he was now being led to what could only be a grisly execution. According to one account, “Huascar, after being taken prisoner, was abominably maltreated. Rotten maize, bitter herbs and [llama] dung were given to him to eat. His cap was filled with llama’s piss; [and] his natural desire was mocked by putting him to bed with a long stone dressed up as a woman.”
Through his interpreters, Pizarro learned of the impending arrival of the rival Inca emperor and looked forward to having him, too, in captivity. The only pretender to the Inca throne, Huascar in captivity would mean that Pizarro would have
two
Inca emperors under his control, thus increasing his power over the central and southern portions of the empire. Atahualpa had begun his struggle while initially controlling only about 10 percent of the Inca Empire, in what is now northern Ecuador. Huascar, by contrast, had begun while controlling the other 90 percent. During the next five years, those percentages had gradually changed, until by
the end of the civil war the area under Huascar’s control had effectively shrunk to zero.
Unbeknownst to Pizarro, however, Atahualpa had sent secret messengers to intercept his brother’s escort. About two hundred miles south of Cajamarca, Inca soldiers murdered Huascar and tossed his body into a river. Rather than release his brother and ask him to help organize a national resistance against the bearded invaders, Atahualpa had instead allowed traditional dynastic politics to take precedence. A captive Inca emperor had ironically decided that it was more important to protect his throne from his brother’s aspirations than it was to protect that same throne from a group of foreign invaders. Confident that the Spaniards would soon leave, Atahualpa apparently believed that now that his brother was dead, his own control of the empire was finally complete.
Pizarro surprisingly accepted Atahualpa’s explanation for Huascar’s sudden death—that his brother’s guards had murdered him without his orders. With only one Inca emperor left and with that one as securely in his possession as was an ever-increasing amount of gold, the important thing was that Pizarro was still able to control the empire through Atahualpa, whose lords and chiefs continued to obey their king.
The contrast between Atahualpa’s behavior toward his subjects, meanwhile, and his behavior toward his captors fascinated the Spaniards. To those natives beneath him on the hierarchical scale—which included every citizen in the Inca Empire—Atahualpa’s behavior remained aloof, stern, and magisterial. Usually the emperor received visitors while seated behind a screen, so that he himself could not be seen. Only with select individuals did Atahualpa grant them the privilege of viewing him in person. As a rule, the Inca style of governance was to treat one’s underlings with disdain, thus reinforcing the divisions of power. In the presence of his subjects, therefore, Atahualpa behaved every bit the god descended to earth, projecting a culturally prescribed aura of power and divinity.
Toward the bearded invaders, however, who by their very seizure of him had trumped his own ranking in power, Atahualpa displayed a completely different side of his personality; in the Spaniards’ presence, the imperial facade imposed by Inca culture disappeared. In its place, Atahualpa instead behaved more like an “emperor without clothes,” perhaps revealing something closer to his true personality. Alone among
the Spaniards, Atahualpa was convivial, friendly, even cheerful—a man in fact who bent over backward to please. The Spaniards, in the meantime, allowed Atahualpa to maintain his own servants, to continue the life of luxury to which he was accustomed, and to continue running his empire. But the Spaniards no longer allowed Atahualpa to wage war, to command armies, or to make any attempt to free himself.
During the many months of Atahualpa’s captivity, a number of Spaniards grew fond of the native emperor, especially Hernando de Soto and Hernando Pizarro. The two Spanish captains even taught the Inca emperor how to play chess and spent hours with him enjoying a game originally invented in India. Atahualpa soon became proficient and gave chess the name of
tap-tana
, or “surprise attack,” thoroughly enjoying the game’s obvious parallels with military strategy.
Peppering his captors with questions, Atahualpa in fact amazed the Spaniards, who often marveled over the supposed barbarian’s display of reason and logic. “After he was a prisoner,” wrote the notary Francisco de Xerez, “the Spaniards who listened to him were astounded to find so much wisdom in a barbarian.” “[The emperor] is the wisest and most capable [native] who has ever been seen,” wrote Gaspar de Espinosa. “He likes to learn about the things we possess to such an extent that he plays chess very well. By having this man in … [our] power the entire land is calm.”
The Spaniards, meanwhile, most of whom were from the lower classes and a third of whom were illiterate, were fascinated by their close proximity to royalty, even if this were only of the barbarian kind. Coming from an extremely hierarchical society themselves, the Spaniards couldn’t help but be dazzled by Atahualpa’s royal treatment, or by the fact that he was waited upon hand and foot by a covey of beautiful women, most of whom were his concubines. Remembered Pedro Pizarro, who was eighteen years old at the time:
The ladies … brought him his meal and placed it before him on delicate green rushes…. They placed all the dishes of gold, silver, and earthenware [on these rushes] and he [Atahualpa] pointed at whatever appealed to him. It was then brought over, one of the ladies taking it and holding it in her hand while he ate. One day, while I was present and he was eating in this manner, a slice of food was being
lifted to his mouth when a drop fell onto the clothing he was wearing. Giving his hand to the Indian lady, he rose and went into his chamber to change his clothes, then returned wearing a tunic and a dark brown cloak. I approached him and felt the cloak, which was softer than silk, and said to him, “Inca, what is this robe made of that it is so soft?” He replied that it was from the skins of [vampire] bats that fly by night in Puerto Viejo and Tumbez and that bite the natives.
When asked how it had been possible to collect so many bats, Atahualpa paused and said that it was done by “‘those [native] dogs from Tumbez and Puerto Viejo—what else did they have to do other than to catch bats and make clothes for my father?’”
On another day, Pizarro’s young cousin accompanied a native to a royal storehouse filled with trunks made of dark leather.
I asked him what the trunks contained, and he showed me some in which they kept everything that Atahualpa had touched with his hands and the clothes he had thrown away. Some contained the rushes that they placed before his feet when he ate, in others the bones of the meat or birds he had eaten … in others the cores of the ears of corn he had held in his hands…. In short, everything that he had touched. I asked him why they kept all this there. They told me that it was in order to burn it because every year … what had been touched by the [Inca] lords, who were sons of the Sun, had to be burned, reduced to ashes, and thrown into the air, and that no one was allowed to touch it.
Perhaps the closest modern equivalent to such behavior is the reverence still shown by the Catholic faithful before the reliquaries of the saints, whose bones and bits of hair are kept as precious, sacred objects even today. Such was the adulation that Atahualpa, the Son of the Sun, received during his lifetime.
When November and December of 1532 and then January of 1533 rolled by, the pile of golden objects still had not reached the line that Atahualpa had drawn on the wall of the chamber. Both Pizarro and Atahualpa were by now restless. Pizarro was impatient to receive reinforcements, to complete the gathering of the treasure, then to journey south to
Cuzco, the Incas’ capital, and thus to finish the conquest. Atahualpa, meanwhile, was anxious to give the Spaniards what they coveted so that they would leave his empire forever. When one of Atahualpa’s brothers arrived, supervising a caravan of treasure, he told Atahualpa that another treasure convoy had been delayed at Jauja, a city lying between Cajamarca and Cuzco, and that much more gold still remained in the capital and had yet to be removed from the temples.
Impatient for his release, Atahualpa suggested to Pizarro that the latter send some of his troops to Cuzco in order to supervise the collection of the ransom. Pizarro, however—knowing that Atahualpa had two armies in the south and another in the north—was reluctant to divide up his forces, for fear of an attack. Three of Pizarro’s men—perhaps bored with so much waiting and having heard Atahualpa’s glowing descriptions of the Inca capital—nevertheless quickly volunteered to make the journey south. Two of them—Martín Bueno and Pedro Martín de Moguer—were illiterate sailors from a seacoast town in southern Spain’s Andalusia. The third was a Basque notary named Juan Zárate.
Pizarro agreed to send the three men yet just as quickly reminded Atahualpa of the nature of their relationship: if anything should happen to the three Spaniards, he warned, then he would have him killed. Atahualpa reassured Pizarro, offering to provide an Inca noble, a number of native soldiers, and also porters who could carry the three Spaniards on royal litters. Pizarro then met with the men, ordering them to take possession of the city of Cuzco in the name of the king and to do so in the presence of the notary, who was to draw up a legal document to that effect. He then gave the three orders to carefully behave themselves—to do nothing that the Inca
orejón
accompanying them did not wish, so that they would not be killed. Their mission was to reconnoiter the conditions and terrain to the south, to help with the collection of treasure in Cuzco, and to bring back a full and detailed report of everything they saw.
One can only imagine what a journey the three men had—the first Europeans to travel along the jagged crest of the Andes from Cajamarca to Cuzco—all seen from the height of their royal litters, as if the two rough sailors and the humble notary had suddenly been transformed into powerful Inca lords. The litters they traveled on were luxury
vehicles consisting of two long poles, sheathed on their ends in silver in the form of animal heads, and with a floor built between them. On the floor was constructed a passenger seat which in turn was overlain with soft cushions. Low walls boxed in the sides of the seat for security while overhead a canopy of feathers interwoven with cloth protected the passenger from both sun and rain. Carried normally by members of the Rucana tribe, who were trained since their youth to provide the smoothest ride possible, litters were clearly a mark of power and prestige. Their use was restricted to only the highest Inca nobility.
The small procession soon headed south from Cajamarca, climbing the flanks of fantastic mountains, cutting past pale, blue-green glaciers, crossing through Inca cities and villages set beside rivers that sparkled in the sun, then traversing giant gorges on hanging Inca bridges while witnessing vast flocks of llamas and alpacas that seemed to extend for as far as the eye could see. Strangers in a strange land, these were the first Europeans to witness an untouched Andean world, one with a thriving civilization in all its color and scarcely understood complexity. Everything was new—plants, animals, people, villages, mountains, herds, languages, and cities. A trio of Marco Polos adrift in the New World, they were similarly off to seek riches in a distant and fabled city. Wrote the notary Pedro Sancho de la Hoz:
All the steep mountains … [have] stairways of stone. One of the greatest works the conquistadors … [witnessed] in this land were these roads…. Most of the people on these mountain slopes live on hills and on high mountains. Their houses are of stone and earth [and] there are many houses in each village. Along the road every four to seven miles are found the houses built for the purpose of allowing the lords to rest while they were out visiting and inspecting their realm. And every seventy miles there are important cities, capitals of the provinces, to which the smaller cities brought the tributes they paid with corn, clothes, and other things. All these large cities have storehouses full of the things that are [harvested from] the land. Because it is very cold, little corn is harvested except in specially designated places. But [there are plenty of ] vegetables and roots with which the people sustain themselves and also good grass like that in Spain. There are also wild
turnips [potatoes] that are bitter.
*
There are many herds of sheep [llamas and alpacas], which go about in flocks with their shepherds who watch over them and keep them away from the sown fields. They have a certain part of [each] province set apart for them [the herds] to winter in. The people, as I have said, are very polite and intelligent and always go about dressed and with footwear. They eat cooked and raw corn and drink a lot of
chicha
, which is a beverage made from corn that is much like beer. The people are very friendly and very obedient and [yet] warlike. They have many weapons of diverse sorts, as has been told.
Like Cortés’s men gaining their first glimpse of Tenochtitlán—the capital of the Aztecs that his fellow Spaniards likened to a city more wondrous than Venice—when the three travelers finally arrived in Cuzco, after more than a month of being carried ever southward, they, too, were stunned by what they beheld. Nestled on a hillside that opened into a broad valley at 11,300 feet, the Incas’ mountain capital appeared like some medieval town in the Swiss Alps, with smoke rising from the thatched roofs of its high-gabled houses and with green hillsides and snow-and-ice-covered mountains rising in the distance. “This city is the greatest and finest that has ever been seen in this realm or even in the Indies,” the Spaniards later wrote the king. “And we can assure your Majesty that it is so beautiful and has such fine buildings that it would be very remarkable even in Spain.” Wrote Sancho de la Hoz:
