CHAPTER IX.
“FOR GOD AND SPAIN!”
“Anathema! Anathema! Shall the word of God be trodden under-foot of the heathen?” cried Valverde, his voice rising almost to a scream as he plunged forward with both hands outstretched to rescue the sacred volume from the feet of the Inca’s bearers and escort, who, as though fearing that some violence was about to be done to their Lord, were beginning to crowd round the litter. He seized it in his right hand, and then, drawing himself up to the full height of his meagre stature, and spreading his arms out wide above his head, he turned his face up to the heavens and cried in a voice that rang loud and shrill through the silent square--
“Fall on! Fall on! Strike for God and for Spain! The Church absolves you. Strike, strike, and spare not, for the hour has come!”
Then, turning towards the Spaniard’s quarters, he ran with his hands still above his head to Pizarro, who, at the head of the troop that had been called the guard of honour, was slowly advancing towards the Inca’s litter and cried again--
“Son of the Church, fall on! Do you not see how the fields on both sides are filling with the host of the heathen? Strike now, straight and swift, ere it is too late.”
Even at this supreme moment it seemed as though the soldier-soul of Pizarro made a last revolt against the treachery which he himself had planned. He knew that the splendidly arrayed guards of the Inca and the people who were now crowding fast into the square were unarmed, that they had not even taken the precaution of bringing those simple weapons which, however effective in their own warfare, would be but as children’s playthings if pitted against the shot and steel of his own troops. As Valverde reached his horse’s head he drew rein, and threw up his right hand to stop those behind him, saying, in a low, husky voice--
“Is there no other way, Father? These poor people have no arms. There are many of them, but they would only be as a crowd of children before our charge----”
“There is but one way with the enemies of the Lord!” cried Valverde, raising his voice again to a shrill scream. “Fall on, I say, fall on! By my lips the Church absolves you! God Himself, whom this heathen hath insulted by casting His holy Word into the dust with contumely, will see whose hand is first raised to wipe the shame away, and ere long the king must know whether to-day an empire has been won or lost for him. Fall on! Fall on! for God and Santiago!”
The words, impassioned as they were, were skilfully spoken, and they left Pizarro with but one course open to him. A scarf of white silk, the colour of peace and truce between honourable enemies, was lying across his saddle-bow. With a hand that trembled as it had never done in battle, he took it up and waved it once aloft. Pedro de Candia, who had mounted one of his guns on the little fort above the square, was standing beside it with the lighted match in his hand, and as he saw the scarf wave he raised the smouldering match to his lips, blew on it and laid it on the priming.
The next instant the ears of the thronging thousands who had followed the Inca into the city were for the first time thunderstricken by the hoarse roar of cannon. For the first time their eyes saw leaping from the throat of a gun the flash which foretold the coming of the iron messenger of death.
Candia had trained his piece with all too deadly certainty. The little ball struck a golden-armoured, gaily plumed Peruvian who stood at the head of a column of guards within a few paces of the Inca’s litter. He happened at the moment to be looking up towards the fortress. The shot struck him full in the face, burst his head asunder as though it had been a rotten orange, and ploughed its way through the files behind him, leaving a long row of bloody and mangled corpses to mark its path.
To the soldier of to-day such a thing would seem but a trifling and common-place incident of warfare, but to the Peruvians it was the revelation of a new power of destruction so strange and terrible, that its effect upon their minds was as great as would be that of a bolt falling from heaven upon a modern battlefield and annihilating a whole regiment.
But de Candia’s cannon-shot was but the prelude to the dreadful tragedy that was to come. Almost at the same moment the other falconet, which had been mounted in the banqueting hall, belched forth its spurt of flame and cloud of smoke through one of the windows, and sent its ball into the midst of another dense mass of people that had rushed together at the sound of the first shot, impelled by that strange instinct which is common to both sheep and men when faced with some new and therefore more appalling danger.
Then, a moment later, from every window and doorway in the Spanish quarters jets of flame and waves of smoke gushed forth, and a storm of bullets from the arquebuses swept across the square and plunged into the crowded masses of the unarmed and helpless Peruvians. The thick and stifling smoke made by the crude and imperfect powder rolled across the square, blown by an easterly wind into the faces of the panic-stricken people, blinding and choking them. Then the roar of the cannon and the rattle of the musketry was followed by the hoarse, roaring battle-cry of the Spaniards.
“Santiago! Santiago! At them for God and Spain! Ohé! Ohé! At them! At them! Cristo y Santiago!”
Now rang out the clattering thunder of hoofs and the swift, orderly tramp of mailed feet on the stone pavement of the plaza, as the Spanish horse and foot rushed forth from their concealment, and flung themselves with murderous fury and resistless impetus upon the struggling, screaming swarms, which scattered before them in a vain attempt to escape from the crowded square. The cavaliers leapt their iron-shod horses into the shrinking masses of men and women, swords rose and fell every moment, gleaming ever redder and redder in the light of the afternoon sun. Pikes and halberds and axes thrust and hacked their way with pitiless swiftness through the unresisting crowds, and high above the screams of terror and agony that came from the helpless victims still rose the hoarse and murderous cry--
“Dios y Santiago! Ohé! Ohé! Strike for Spain and El-Dorado!”
And still the horses reared and plunged, leaping hither and thither as the spurs of their riders drove them on, stamping the gaily-dressed throngs down and crushing them out of all human shape against the stones till they were more than fetlock deep in blood. And still the cruel steel did its murderous work, wielded by hands that knew no mercy, and ever and anon the cannon boomed out again, and the arquebusiers, reloading their cumbrous pieces, sent their bullets wherever they could aim them without hurting their comrades.
On the western side of the plaza there was a high wall of mud and stone stretching between two buildings some two hundred paces apart, and against this was pressed a vast throng of panting, struggling wretches, hemmed in on all sides by the Spanish horse and foot. The bullets tore their way through the dense mass, the stamping horse-hoofs struck them down by dozens, and the sweeping, thrusting steel mowed them down by scores. At length the vast throng surged outwards for a moment, and then, like a wave beaten back by the rocks, recoiled upon the wall. For one awful moment it remained motionless, pent in between the closing ring of steel and the wall. Then the wall swayed and tottered, and with a rumbling crash fell outwards, and over its ruins and through the cloud of dust that rose over them the wave of human agony and terror surged forward and scattered into broken and flying units over the open field beyond.
Some of the cavalry, foremost among whom was old Carvahal, his broad face purple-red with the lust of slaughter, rolling to and fro in his saddle, shouting hoarse battle-cries and invoking every saint in the calendar as he laid about him to right and left with his long sword, spurred forward over the ruins of the wall and spread out over the plain, careering hither and thither, and trampling and cutting their screaming victims down; but the greater part turned back to take their share in the still more bloody work that was going on round the gorgeous litter of the Inca.
This was now tossing to and fro above the human flood like a boat labouring in the sea, and in it Atahuallpa sat clinging to his golden chair, staring with dazed eyes at the hideous scene about him, thinking, it may be, of that other scene in far-off Quito, and remembering those last words of Mama-Lupa as she stood above the prostrate body of Zaïma, his mother, on the terrace--
“Sacrifice! Sacrifice! The Divine Ones are wroth, and only sacrifice can appease them!”
And sacrifice it truly was, such sacrifice as human ruthlessness has seldom exacted or human loyalty and devotion paid. The nobles and princes of the doomed empire, their trappings of gold and silver and gems splashed and spattered with the noblest blood in the Land of the Four Regions, crowded round the litter of their Lord, opposing their bare hands to the steel of the Spaniards, and making a wall of their bodies to protect him from the plunging, trampling chargers. They clung with despairing heroism to manes and bridles, they strove to drag the riders from their saddles, and even flung their arms round the horses’ legs, as though with their puny strength they would wrestle with these strange and terrible war-beasts and overthrow them. No sooner did one go down trampled to death or cloven to the chin than another sprang forward to take his place and meet his doom.
So the bloody, ruthless work went on, and ever the devoted throng round the Inca’s litter grew less and less, and the Spaniards forced their way nearer and nearer towards the sacred and hitherto inviolate person of the Son of the Sun. At length one of the men-at-arms, Michael Asterre by name, a soldier of huge frame and giant strength, burst through the last ring, struck down one of the bearers with a blow of his iron mace and, standing on his body, reached up and grasped Atahuallpa by the left arm. The litter rocked and swayed more violently than before, and just as Asterre was dragging him down a horse was driven close up, so close that the foam from its bit dripped upon the splendid feather work, and the deep voice of the Captain shouted--
“On thy life harm him not! Let go, I tell thee, or, by our Lady, I will cut thee down myself!”
As Pizarro said this he stretched out his hand to save the falling Inca. At this moment Atahuallpa’s stupor vanished, and the flame of the old warrior spirit seemed to blaze out again at such an insult as no Inca had ever before suffered--the touch of a hostile hand. He snatched a dagger of polished copper from his girdle and struck at Pizarro with it, but before his hand fell a sword blade, whose hilt was in de Soto’s hand, leapt across the litter and struck the dagger from his hand. Yet the forceful stroke of the Inca’s arm beat the sword-blade down and drove the point into Pizarro’s wrist.
“Well meant, de Soto, and I thank thee!” laughed Pizarro, as he saw the blood flow. “Yet I never thought that blood of mine would be shed by Spanish steel.”[13]
Years afterwards he thought of this when the crime of that moment of his greatest triumph had been assessed at the bar of Eternal Justice, and the penalty of the ancient law, blood for blood, was about to be duly exacted.
At the same moment de Soto’s horse, forced forward by the press behind it, stumbled against the litter and overturned it. Pizarro gripped the falling Inca and pulled him across his horse’s neck and, as he fell, Michael Asterre put out his hand and snatched the imperial borla from his brow. And thus was the Last of the Inca’s, the son of the great Huayna-Capac, and lord and master of many millions, discrowned by the hand of a common soldier who had embarked upon this wondrous enterprise for no better reason than to save himself from a debtors’ cell at Panama.
BOOK III