CHAPTER III.

“WILT THOU BE INCA OR SLAVE?”

With the first gleam of dawn Pizarro’s envoys set out on their already bootless errand to Andamarca. He made no secret of their object during an interview which he had that day with the Inca, and Atahuallpa, fully believing that he had forestalled them, contented himself with a feeble show of protest, saying that what he had not only inherited from his father but also won by the sword was surely his beyond all reach of foreign arbitrament; but very soon he took refuge in a dignified silence, as though he had made up his mind that the inquiry could result only to his own advantage--with which Pizarro, having his own plans, as he thought, already well matured, was well content.

Now Andamarca lay at such a distance from the Spanish camp that not even the imperial post-runners could convey a message there and bring an answer back in less than a week, and Pizarro had been given to understand that the roads were so unsuited for horse travelling that two weeks at the least would be necessary for his envoys to make the journey there on horseback and return with the captive Huascar, whose exalted station would render it imperative that he should be carried by bearers in one of the royal litters.

This, as Filipillo had foreseen, gave him ample time to push forward the plot which, with a cunning far beyond his birth and years, he had conceived with a daring as great as the ruthlessness with which he put it into execution. The day following the departure of the escort intended for Huascar he let fall certain vague hints about the camp and in the hearing of the Captain himself as to the stealthy departure of runners from Cajamarca for unknown destinations, and spoke of rumours that had reached him of movements of the army under Challcuchima which boded no good to the Spaniards, and promised but ill for the accumulation of the gold which was to pay Atahuallpa’s ransom.

It was but in reason that Pizarro, placed in circumstances still so difficult and dangerous, should be to some extent disquieted by this. He himself could neither read nor write his own language and knew not a word of the Quichua tongue, and none of his better-learned followers had deigned to make any acquaintance with it, saving only Hernando de Soto, and he knew but a few words and phrases which had served well enough on his embassies with Filipillo at his elbow, but were of no use in the lengthy conversations which they were obliged to hold with the Inca.

Thus the sole channel of communication between the Spaniards and their captive or any of his people was the youth, whose precociously keen intellect had been quick to perceive and make use of the advantages of his singular position, an advantage which, as has been shown, he was ready enough to use for his own purposes rather than in the service of those who, powerful as they might be in other respects, were yet utterly at his mercy in this one.

So far he had used all the opportunities that his position gave him to procure even a few minutes alone with the Princess Pillcu-Cica, whose girlish beauty had inspired him with a passion whose gratification was so far the sole object of his plotting. On the one side there were the stern commands of the Pizarro that the Inca’s household should be held sacred and inviolate, even by the greatest of those among whom he was the least. On the other was the immeasurable gulf which lay between one such as he and a princess of the Blood upon whom the Son of the Sun had looked with favour. The slightest outward sign of his passion might mean, not only the final ruin of his daring hopes, but such punishment as his heart quailed at the thought of. Yet day by day, almost hour by hour, he saw her and looked ever more and more longingly upon her beauty, and at last, when the time for the return of the envoys was growing near, he determined upon a bold and, as he hoped, decisive stroke.

The Inca had been growing impatient for news from Challcuchima, and on a suitable pretence had summoned him to his presence in his private apartment.

“Are there no tidings from the army yet?” he said as he entered the room.

“None, Lord,” he answered, “nor is any news to be had of the General himself. The runner whom I sent with thy mandate should have returned the next day, or at latest the day after, but I can learn no tidings of him. It may be that some of these Unbelievers, who are ever prowling about the valley, have met him and slain him for their sport, for every hour I hear people talk of such doings outside the city. Truly it was an evil day that they came into the Land of the Four Regions, and bitterly do I now repent the service that they have forced me into! Yet, though appearances may have deceived my Lord, still am I his faithful servant and would most gladly see him freed from the base bondage they have put upon him.

“Thou, Lord,” he went on, dropping on to his knee and spreading out his hands towards the Inca, “hast had but too good cause to know that, despite all their courtesy and present gentleness, these Unbelievers hold thee here a prisoner when thou shouldst be seated free and lord of all the land on thy father’s golden throne in the City of the Sun.”

The Inca’s brows lowered angrily, and his blood-shot eyes gleamed darkly as he listened to these bold words from the lips of one who was little better than a slave, yet in his heart he knew, bitter as they were, that they were true. He kept a moody silence for a minute or two, and then he said with the manner of one who is musing aloud--

“Ay, true--too true! Would that I had taken faithful old Challcuchima’s counsel! What madness made me trust these strangers who have murdered my people, and, with fair speeches, broken their faith to me! But it is too late. My madness has earned my doom, for even if the captains of my hosts led them here to victory I should be dead before it could avail me anything. What is lost is lost!”

“Yet not all lost, Lord,” said Filipillo, in his gentle boyish voice; “though what thou hast said is true, for I have heard the Spaniards talking of what they will do should thy Generals attack them. They will put thee and thy wives and children in front of the battle; their war beasts will be behind thee, and thine own legions before thee, so that they can strike only through thy sacred person. Of this I am well assured, for it is the common talk of the Camp.”

He paused for a moment or two to watch the effect of his words on the Inca, and seeing him shrink back and shudder with an irrepressible emotion of horror, he went on, speaking even more softly and insinuatingly than before--

“But there is another way, Lord, another path which the devotion of thy slave might open for thee to freedom and the regaining of thy lost empire.”

“Another way?” said the Inca, starting from the seat into which he had thrown himself in an attitude of dejection that was almost like despair. “Another way--a way to freedom and the empire that was mine! Boy, if thou knowest such a way--if thou canst open these prison doors of mine--speak, and when I am once more on the throne of Huayna-Capac, nay, when I once more stand a free man at the head of my hosts, thou hast but to ask and have. I would even bind the yellow Llautu round thy brow and have thee hailed one of the noble Blood, however base thy birth may be, for such a deed would make thee worthy to rank with the noblest. Speak now and open thy mind freely to me.”

“Know then, Son of the Sun,” replied Filipillo, speaking almost in a whisper, “that Mama-Zula, the Palla, the Wise Woman, has journeyed hither from Pachacamac, the temple of the Supreme One. I have spoken with her in secret and she hath put into my mind the thought that I am about to speak to thee. She knew of the coming of these strangers long ago, since she dwells in the temple by the sea-shore and saw their ships go by many moons ago. She knew how their white shining clothing and thunder-smiting weapons made them irresistible to all assault of battle. She knows, as she told me but yesternight, that though thy hosts came against them a thousand to ten yet would they be conquered, even as unnumbered waves are beaten back from the face of one rock.

“But, though some have called them the sons of Viracocha, they are but mortal men like the meanest of thy servants, for some of them have died since they came into the land, and some of their war-beasts too. Therefore, though the weapons of thy warriors are harmless against them, there are others that may prove of more avail.”

He paused here and looked up at the Inca again as though mutely asking his permission to proceed.

“And those, if I mistake thee not, boy,” said Atahuallpa, with a thrill of honest anger in his voice, “are not the weapons of kings and warriors. I know the Palla’s fearful power, but it was given her by the demons, not by the gods. If that is thy way say no more, for my ears are closed. Captive and fallen I may be, but I am still a warrior and a king.”

“Ay, Son of the Sun, but king by no better deed than that which would now rid thee of thy tyrants!”

The voice came from the doorway. The Inca started back and looked up and saw the tall, lean figure of a woman who might almost have been Mama-Lupa herself come back from the fiery death to which he had consigned her years ago. She stretched her long, skinny arm out and pointed at him and said again--

“Shall those eyes of thine which looked upon thy great father’s death shrink from beholding the death of thy masters and plunderers? Have they not slain thy helpless people in thousands with pitiless treachery? Have they not already sent to bring hither Huascar, who, if thy father’s will had been made known before he died by thy mother’s hand, would have been sharing the double throne of the Four Regions with thee now? Will they not set him up against thee when he comes? Will they not play the two Sons of the Sun off against each other like two counters in a game and perchance slay them both when the game is played out? Wherefore shrink then, O Son of the Sun, from using my arts to strike the only blow that thou now canst strike for liberty--ay, for life itself?”

As she said these terrible words the Palla had advanced with slow steps towards where the Inca was standing, staring with fixed eyes and dropped jaw at her.

“How--how knew you--from whence had you such lies?” he gasped, retreating before her as he might have done from a spectre.

She laughed a low, wild laugh at him as she answered--

“How do I know, Son of the Sun? Did not Zaïma the Queen shriek out her confession as the wives of Huayna-Capac dragged her away to join their Lord? Did she not scream it out again louder than before as the flames touched her and she called upon his spirit to be merciful to her, and did not many hear her whose lips thou hast closed as thou didst those of Mama-Lupa, my sister--yet not before she had sent me trusty word of the truth?

“But that is past. It was not thy hand that did the deed. For thee the question is now: Wilt thou be Inca or slave? Wilt thou live or die? The price to pay is not great. In a few hours I can have potions ready, distilled from my roots and herbs, enough to slay every unbeliever in the city so swiftly that none of them shall know the manner of his death. The boy here who speaks for them can see that they are secretly mixed with their food and drink, and an hour after they have eaten and drunk thou art free, and Lord of thine own land again.”

“And the price?” said the Inca in a hoarse whisper, once more dropping on to his seat and covering his eyes with his hands.

“For me,” replied the Palla, “the office of Chief Priestess of the Sun and Mother of the Virgins in Cuzco--a gift that a word of the Inca’s can give me. The boy can ask for himself.”

“And thine?” said Atahuallpa, raising his head and looking at Filipillo.

It was a moment when, strange as the saying may seem, the fate of an empire hung on the word of a boy. Had Filipillo had but a few years more of life’s discipline to teach him wisdom and restraint, had he even known how enormous was the mistake he was about to make, he would have asked only what the Inca had already promised him--elevation to noble rank and the right to wear the insignia of the Sacred Blood--and trusted to the course of events to cool a passion which the Inca could no more gratify, even if he had the will, than he could have diverted it from the Princess Pillcu-Cica to a more attainable object. But instead of that his wayward love and longing flamed up hot in his untaught heart, and, seeing, as he thought, the prize within his grasp, he said, with somewhat less of meekness in his voice than he had used before--

“My Lord has already promised me the right to wear the yellow Llautu and to take my place among the nobles of the land. That would have been more than his slave had dared to hope for had not the service demanded of him been so great and full of danger. Mine is the only hand that can put the poison into the Spaniards’ meat and drink; but were I discovered--nay, even suspected--nothing less than a death of fiery torment would be mine. Therefore, Lord, to give me greater hope and a better heart in so deadly an enterprise, I pray thee add to thy promise the gratification of a love that has so far consumed my heart with hopeless longing.”

He paused for a moment, and the agile intellect of Atahuallpa instantly went back to the scene of de Soto’s embassy at the hot springs, and he remembered the lad’s bold and lawless glances at the princess, and the disquiet, as she had afterwards told him, they had caused her. His black brows met suddenly over his eyes, and fixing a steady, staring gaze upon him, he said in a cold hard tone--

“Say on and tell me which it is of my handmaids’ handmaids that thou hast honoured with thy choice.”

The note in the Inca’s voice and the flash in his eyes told Filipillo plainly that the crisis had come. One older or wiser or less ignorantly daring would have taken the warning and deferred the request, or asked only that his Lord should have given him a mate befitting the new rank that was to be his. But he, puffed up by the arrogant sense of the power which he knew to be his, lifted his head and said boldly--

“I love none of thy slaves, Lord. If I did those other masters of mine would give me as many as I needed. If I am to stand by thy favour among the other Children of the Blood I would wed only one of its daughters. Such a one does my heart already long for. Give me thy royal word that the Princess Pillcu-Cica----”

Before he could say another word the skinny hand of the Palla was clasped tightly over his lips. The Inca had staggered back, his face purple-red with rage, stricken aghast by the bare mention of such a sacrilege as had never before even been thought of in the Land of the Four Regions.[14] He could find no words in his speechless wrath, but the voice of the Palla broke the silence with a low, fierce hissing sound as, with the sudden strength of passion, she flung him back against the wall--

“O thou, base-born and accursed, canst thou know what thou hast said! Wouldst thou make the price of thy Lord’s salvation the dishonour of himself and his whole race? Dost thou not know that, by the Ancient Law that may not be broken, the very telling of thine impious love hath already doomed, not only thee, but also her whose fame thou hast sullied by the foul breath of thy passion, together with all her kindred, to the fiery death? Thou fool, why didst thou not ask for the borla itself? Thou couldst have had it as easily as this! Henceforth and for ever thy name and thy memory are accursed among the Children of the Sun! Slay him, Lord! Slay him--worthless as he is for thy sacred hands to touch--ere he hath time to add some deadly mischief to thy dishonour!”

Atahuallpa started at the shrilly-spoken word, and, with a low cry like that of a sorely-wounded wild beast, he came across the room with outstretched hands.

A cry of fear burst from Filipillo’s lips. He saw nothing else but swift death in the awful aspect of Atahuallpa’s countenance. With an effort whose vigour was far beyond his years he tore the Palla’s clinging hands away from him, hurled her to the floor in front of the Inca, and fled swiftly and silently from the room and through the passages and chambers of the House of the Serpent till he reached the gate that was guarded by Spanish sentries. They stopped him with crossed halberds. But already his quick wit had found, even in the few short moments of his flight, a way to safety and revenge.

“Let me go!” he gasped breathlessly. “It is life or death for the Captain and all of you! Let me go, or one of you take me with you to the Captain. It is life or death, I tell you! Let me go!”

Then, with a swift, sudden motion he slipped under one of the halberds and sped away across the square towards Pizarro’s quarters as fast as his fleet and fear-winged feet could carry him.