CHAPTER VII.
HOW DE SOTO PERFORMED HIS EMBASSY
The matter of the embassy to Atahuallpa having been thus decided, but little time was wasted in carrying it into execution. While Pizarro and his captains had been debating the venture in the banqueting-hall in the quarters which the Inca had assigned to them, a fierce and sudden storm of wind and hail had swept down the valley, and this, enduring only for a short time, as storms in those regions are wont to do, was followed by a swift change of temperature which melted the hail into a warm, soft rain. Then this with equal suddenness vanished, and the parting cloud-masses rolled in great shadowy billows up the mountain-sides, and down between them the sun streamed warm and bright over the humid foliage of the valley, turning it by one of Nature’s subtle strokes of magic into an enchanted realm paved with emeralds and diamonds--dazzling and yet fleeting forecasts of the fate of those whose daring had led them thus far into the unknown land which for most of them should prove at once a treasure-house and a grave.
“A good omen, comrades!” laughed de Soto as he wheeled his horse in between the chargers of Alonso de Molina and Sebastian ben-Alcazar, a tall, spare-built, dark-faced cavalier with more Moorish than Christian blood in his veins, and who was a Christian now only because his father had abjured his faith for love of a dark-eyed, fair-haired maiden of Castille. “A good omen, forsooth! Sunshine after storm. In good truth it seems to me that we have battled through storm and darkness enough from the sands of Gallo to this pleasant vale before us to earn somewhat of sunshine after our labours.”
“Sic itur ad astra!” replied ben-Alcazar gravely. “I have heard of a proverb which says that the memory of toil which is past is the best heartening brave men can have to strengthen them for future labours.”
“That is as true as thy scrap of Latin, ben-Alcazar,” laughed de Molina more gaily than he had done; “yet surely we have climbed near enough to the stars in coming here. For my own part I wish to go no nearer till I go for good.”
“We are ready--Vamos!” cried de Soto before he could get any further with his philosophical speech.
As he spoke he drew his sword and at the same moment the trumpet sounded, and at the head of their little troop of fifteen horse, the pick and flower of the whole army so far as mounting and accoutrements went, they moved across the square towards the opening of the street which led to the roadway running from the city walls to the pleasure-house round which the army of the Inca lay encamped.
This, when they came upon it, they found to be such a roadway as they had not so far met with in Peru, and forming a most pleasant contrast to the mountain paths over which they had so lately toiled. It was broad, straight, level, and well paved with evenly set stones, upon which the hoofs of their iron-shod horses rang merrily as they trotted along it. When they had covered about half of the way and had come within full view of the splendours of the Inca camp, with its thousands of brightly-coloured tents and hundreds of waving standards covering the plain beyond and sloping up the hillside on the other side of the valley, de Soto, turning in the saddle, said to the trumpeter of the troop--
“Diego, fill thy chest and give us a good honest blast so that we may give his heathen High-and-mightiness over yonder some warning of the honour that the servants of his Most Catholic Majesty are about to do him in this visit.”
The trumpeter put the shining brazen tube to his lips and sent the shrill, piercing notes ringing down through the silence of the valley, and as the echoes of the mountain wall repeated them de Soto said again--
“Caballeros, it is long since our good beasts have stretched their limbs on such a road as this, and mine is already pulling at the bridle as though a gallop were well to his taste. Give rein, then, and forward at speed. To come in good style before His Majesty will do us no harm in the eyes of the heathen.”
With that he threw up his right hand and gave his charger the rein. The troop, riding three abreast, followed suit, and with a thunder of hoofs and a rattle and jingle of arms and harness, with the afternoon sun shining brightly on breast-plate and morion, tossing plumes and waving pennon, the Spanish cavalcade swept along the causeway, as the historian of the Conquest has well described it, “like some fearful apparition on the wings of the wind.”
Thus they came into full sight of the Peruvian camp and saw long, serried lines of gaily-dressed warriors, splendid in armour of gold and casques of silver, drawn up motionless and expectant on the farther bank of a broad, shallow stream at which the causeway ended in a bridge of such light structure that it was manifestly made for nothing heavier than foot traffic.
De Soto, with an eye at once to good generalship and the value of first impressions, threw his hand up again and reined in his charger within fifty yards or so of the water.
“That bridge was never made to carry such as we are,” he said to his two companions. “We should make as foolish a spectacle as we should an easy prey to those heathens did we trust to it and fall through. For my part I would rather trust the water. Follow me, Caballeros! God and Santiago for Spain!”
With that he set spurs to his horse, galloped to the river’s edge and plunged into the water, followed with a great splashing and snorting of steeds by the rest of the troop. They crossed the river bed and gained the opposite bank with scarcely a break in their ranks. On the far side there was a broad stretch of level meadow-land, and across this they cantered in perfect order under the wondering gaze of the silent thousands drawn up on either side of the Inca’s pleasure-house.
This was a vast, low structure, white-walled and built in the form of three sides of a square, with the open side towards the river. The interior space was filled with a brilliant array, composed of the Inca’s chief warriors and the ministers of his court, and in the midst of a great semicircle, awaiting his already expected visitors, sat Atahuallpa, the most plainly-dressed man in all the glittering assembly, and yet distinguished from all by the golden throne-chair in which he sat while all the others stood about him or crouched at his feet, and by the crimson fringe of the borla which covered his forehead and half concealed his eyes. For all the sign that the Inca gave the display of the Spanish advance had been wasted, though wondering and perhaps admiring glances were not wanting among the courtiers and the bevy of bright-eyed, long-haired princesses that was gathered about the Inca’s throne. But Atahuallpa sat like an image carved in bronze, not even raising his head as the strange and terrible apparition approached him.
De Soto halted his troop some hundred paces from the Inca’s throne, and then at a word from him Diego’s trumpet rang out and it deployed into line. Then, with Molina on his right hand and ben-Alcazar on his left, he rode forward, and the three helmed and plumed heads bowed together within ten paces of the throne. Still Atahuallpa gave no sign that he was even conscious of their presence. His body was there on the throne, but his spirit was far away in Quito, whither it had travelled back through five years to the Day of Disaster to watch the darkness stealing over the face of the sun, and to hear the words which had foretold the doom of which these fair-faced, shining strangers, mounted on their marvellous and terrible beasts, were assuredly the harbingers.
Somewhat chilled by so frigid a reception, de Soto called Filipillo to him and bade him deliver to the Inca the brief speech that he had already prepared for him, telling Atahuallpa who they were and whence they came, whose servants they were and how their lord and master, His Most Catholic Majesty of Spain, had sent them to bear his greetings across many thousand leagues of ocean to his brother, the Emperor of the West.
This oration Filipillo delivered, putting more than enough bombast into his tone as though he knew that all this splendid state which surrounded the doomed monarch was but as a thin plate of burnished gold soon to be pierced and cut asunder by a dagger of steel. There had been a time when such as he would scarce have dared to enter the presence of the Inca grovelling on his face in the dust. Now he stood before him erect, almost as an equal, and as he stood so and delivered his message his bold eyes wandered from the impassive countenance of the Inca to a slender, half-clad form seated beside the throne, and a fair face framed in long, shining hair--a face whose beauty, as it happened, was ere long to prove fatal to him at whose footstool Pillcu-Cica-Ñusta, princess of the blood-royal of Peru, lay as a slave might lie at the feet of her master.
When the speech was ended de Soto awaited some reply from the Inca, but none came. Atahuallpa still sat motionless, not showing even by a movement of his eyes that he had understood or even heard what Filipillo had said. Then a tall and splendidly-dressed old warrior who stood at the right hand of the throne, and who was none other than Challcuchima, General-in-Chief of the army of Quito, said curtly--
“It is well so far, but the ears of our Lord are not for such base voices as thine, thou slave of his servants! Let thy master speak, and it may be that our Lord will hear.” This speech Filipillo, with no very good grace, translated to de Soto, and he, having already acquired sufficient of the Peruvian tongue to achieve a few words in it, prayed the Inca to answer with his own lips. Hearing this Atahuallpa looked up for the first time and said in a clear, passionless voice--
“Go back and tell him who sent you that I am keeping a fast which will be ended this midnight. To-morrow I will come and speak with him. Till then let him remain in the lodgings that have been given him and await my pleasure with patience.”
It was no very kindly greeting, and one that gave but little encouragement to those who received it. Whatever effect the strangeness of the embassy might have had on the minds of his soldiers and courtiers, it had none upon the frigid composure of the Inca himself. But the Spanish leader in the midst of his discouragement caught a gleam of interest in Atahuallpa’s eyes as he looked upon the splendidly caparisoned war-horse that stood nodding his plumed head and pawing the ground impatiently before him. Seizing the opportunity, de Soto, who was the finest horseman and best-mounted cavalier in the army, suddenly drove his spurs into his charger’s flanks, and, wheeling him sharply round, sent him careering away at full gallop over the level plain in front of the courtyard, and then, before the wondering eyes of the assembled thousands, he galloped and cantered, wheeled and caracoled and curveted in wide circles round the flanks and rear of his own motionless troop, and then, plunging in again at full gallop, he reined his charger up and pulled him back upon his haunches so close to Atahuallpa’s throne, that the foam flying from the bit was blown by the breath of his nostrils on to the skirts of his imperial robes.
Faint screams broke from the lips of the frightened women about the throne, and some of the nobles shrank back in something like terror from the strange sight--a weakness for which, as the chronicles say, they paid that night with their lives--but not a muscle of Atahuallpa’s form moved. He had cast his eyes to the ground again, and did not even raise them as de Soto finished his show of horsemanship. He who had sat unmoved amidst the falling ruins of Quito might well look without disturbance upon such a spectacle, strange and even terrible as it might seem in other eyes.
But when de Soto, feeling somewhat foolish after his arrogant display, had retired to his place in front of the troop, Atahuallpa looked up and made a sign with his hand, and immediately refreshments of cakes and fruit and roasted meat were brought out in dishes of silver, but these de Soto, on behalf of his men, declined with the best grace he could, for his reception had not been such as to persuade him to risk the danger of dismounting in the midst of all those armed thousands about him. Still, as the historian truthfully says, they did not hesitate to quaff the sparkling chicha from golden vases of wondrous size which were presented to them by the dark-eyed beauties of the Inca’s harem.
This they took as their dismissal, and so they made their salutations and departed with heavier hearts than they brought with them, and, having crossed the river more soberly than before, they took their way back to Cajamarca along the causeway, saying little among themselves, yet thinking much of the majesty and power that they had seen, and wondering how they, but a handful of strangers in a strange land, should overcome the innumerable hosts which the next morning might see arrayed against them.
Night had fallen when they got back to their quarters, and from thence they looked across the valley and saw the countless camp-fires of Atahuallpa’s legions sprinkled over the fields and up the distant hillsides, “as thick as the very stars of heaven.”
Later on that night Challcuchima was standing with bowed head before his master’s seat in his private apartment. Atahuallpa, buried in thought, was sitting with hands clasped in his lap and chin resting on his breast. His old servant and General had been giving him such counsel as few save he would dare to give, and now he was making a last effort to save his Lord and the son of his brother from the consequences of the gloomy fatalism that had robbed the conquering ruler of his wisdom and the absolute master of many regions of his strength.
“Think once again, Lord, I beseech thee!” he said in solemn and yet impassioned tones. “This resolve of thine is a resolve of ruin and death. These strangers are no gods, or sons of gods. Do they not eat and drink like men? More, have we not heard how some of them have fallen and died amidst the snows of the upper mountains? Have not some of these strange beasts of theirs also fallen and died by the wayside? It is true that the weapons they bear are potent and terrible, yet have not tidings come to us from the North telling us how they have turned them against each other? Would the true sons of Viracocha have done that? Would they have ravaged and plundered our towns on the seaboard as these men have done who come to us with words of friendship on their lips and lies in their hearts?
“I tell thee, Lord, as I have told thee oft before, they are but plunderers who have come to rob thee of this metal by which they set such store, and for which they will endure all toils and risk all dangers. By the memory of thy father and lord, who is even now looking down upon thee from the windows of the Mansion of the Sun, I conjure thee to speak the word that shall bid me lead thy legions to Cajamarca, and take these white-face plunderers in the trap that they will lay for thee to-morrow. Have not our spies told us of their intention? To-night all may be saved. They are few and we are many, and the darkness will cover us from the aim of their lightning-bolts. Ten thousand to-night will gladly die to save thee and destroy those who would rob thee of the inheritance of thy fathers. But to-morrow, once thou hast set foot in the snare they have prepared for thee, not all thy legions could save thee, and if thou art lost, Lord, then all is lost, for thou art all we have.”
Atahuallpa heard him in silence, and when he had finished the silence continued. Minute after minute passed and the doomed Inca gave no sign that he had even heard the warning that might have saved him. Then at length Challcuchima’s broad breast heaved with a great sigh that ended in a choking sob, and then, knowing that all further argument must be in vain, he bowed himself in silent farewell, and walked with slow steps and down-bent head towards the curtained doorway. There for a moment he paused and looked back at the unmoved figure of his Lord, and then, making the silent sign of appeal to the Unnameable, he turned again and left the Last of the Incas to his thoughts and the near impending doom from which his whole army would joyfully have died to save him.