CHAPTER VI.
THE VEILING OF THE SUN
He found her standing bound beside her mother, leaning her head against her breast, and looking with fixed, dazed eyes blankly at the wall of fagots in front of her. In an instant he was at her side, in another he had severed the thongs which bound her wrists and ankles, and the next they were in each other’s arms, and she was sobbing on his breast and imploring him piteously to save her, and not to let them burn her father and mother and little brother.
“Alas! Nahua, I have but come to die with you!” he answered, stroking her hair and kissing her upturned brow. “The Inca gave me the choice of being burned alive with you or lighting the fagots myself, and, as he thought, I chose to be your executioner. But I only did that so that I could reach you unbound and armed and save you the torture of the flames.”
“But I do not want to die yet, Manco!” she pleaded with him, as though he himself held the power of life and death for her. “What have we done that our Lord should be so cruel?”
“There is no time to tell you that, dear,” he answered, brushing the tears from his eyes with the back of the hand that held the knife. Nahua’s eyes caught the yellow gleam of the blade, and she shuddered and clung more closely to him, murmuring--
“Then if I must die I would rather you should kill me than the fire should burn me, for you will not hurt me more than you must, will you, my Prince?”
“Quickly, Prince--quickly!” her mother cried out at this moment, “for our Lord has had more torches brought, and they are coming to fire the fagots. But I pray you set free Amaro first, that I may die by his hand, and not see thee shed my Nahua’s blood, even in mercy.”
Manco looked towards the throne and saw the Inca pointing towards the scaffold, and four soldiers, each with a lighted torch, descending the terrace steps backwards. He cut Amaro’s bonds and then those of Nahua’s mother, so that they might embrace each other for the last time. Then he gave the knife into Amaro’s hands, and taking Nahua in his arms again turned his head and hers away.
The four men with the torches were now inside the square of soldiers around the scaffold, and he knew that in a few minutes more the flames would be roaring about them. But the Fates had ordained that a greater tragedy even than the sacrifice of the threescore victims of Atahuallpa’s fury was to avenge the outraged shade of his murdered father.
The torchbearers stationed themselves one at each corner of the pyre and stood with their eyes on the Inca, waiting for the signal to fire it together. But the signal was never given, for, before Atahuallpa could make it, a long, shrill, piercing scream rang out over the square, and every eye was instantly turned upon a weird unearthly figure standing on the top of the wall of the House of the Virgins where it fronted on the square overlooking the terrace on which the throne was set.
It was Mama-Lupa the Palla and prophetess. Her white clothing was rent and disordered, her grey hair was streaming wildly about her face and shoulders, and her arms were outstretched above her head, waving slowly to and fro. Again and yet again the scream rang out. The torchbearers dropped their torches and stood trembling beside them, and a thrill of terror shook every heart in the vast multitude saving only Atahuallpa’s.
Then Mama-Lupa’s voice, high and shrill and clear, rose above the murmurs that were beginning to run from lip to lip, and her words reached every ear in the great throng as she half screamed and half chanted--
“There is woe coming to the great city and death to its people! Put out thy torches, Inca, for the Divine Ones have bidden the demons of the fire mountains light theirs and there shall be no need for thine. Thy Father is wrath with thee and shall hide his face from thee, and ye, O People of the Valley! fly while there is yet time, for ere long there shall be darkness in heaven and fire and desolation on the earth.
“Fly lest the rocks open and swallow you and the mountains come together and crush you, for the City of the Sun is doomed and its streets shall be graves and its palaces and temples shall be sepulchres, and the Llapa shall smite the altars and rend them, and where there is life there shall be death, for the Son of the Sun has sinned, and his Father shall turn his face away from him!”
No words more awful could have been uttered in the ears of the multitude, for to every man and woman in the city the Inca was as the visible incarnation of a God, and to say that he had sinned was to say that the Gods themselves had done wrong since they had permitted him to sin. It would have been blasphemy from any lips, but from those of Mama-Lupa, revered by the whole people as the wisest and holiest of the Pallas, they were more, and they smote the hearts of her hearers like words uttered by the very voice of Doom.
Atahuallpa heard them without moving a muscle or a feature till the last of them had died away in a long, wailing scream. Not even he, immeasurably far removed as he was above the common herd of the people, could resist wholly the great wave of terror which was sweeping over the souls of the multitude.
He saw the sea of upturned faces turning as though moved by a single impulse from the figure of Mama-Lupa on the wall to himself on the throne. He saw his soldiers, perfectly disciplined as they were, relaxing the rigidity of their lines, and looking about them with frightened, shifting glances. In another moment fear might have blazed up into panic and all order have been lost in a riot of terror. He sprang to his feet, and, pointing to where Mama-Lupa stood, he shouted--
“Let the blasphemer’s tongue be silenced! Pay no heed to her lying words, my children, go and fling her from the wall, and let her body be food for the vultures. Stop--no--such a death is too easy. Bring her here and I will judge her. Challcuchima, let the scaffold be guarded that none may escape, but let not the fagots be kindled till this speaker of lies is ready for the flames.”
“I will come to thee, Inca!” Mama-Lupa screamed. “I will come to thee without the bringing, and thou shalt judge me and I will judge thee.”
Then she vanished from the top of the wall, and presently, when the soldiers had reached the door of the House of the Virgins, she came forth and, waving them aside, strode along the terrace, every one making way for her as she passed, and, without deigning to make the universal sign of homage, she stood erect before Atahuallpa, looking him in the eyes, and said in a loud voice--
“The Son of the Sun has sinned, and would slay the innocent for his own sin! I tended my Lord that departed last night to the abode of the Divine Ones, and I saw his face when he was dead, and thou, Inca, didst see him die, thou and thy mother, the queen!”
Such words had never yet been spoken by mortal lips to a crowned Inca, and Atahuallpa, struck dumb by their daring and the terrible meaning that lay hidden in them, heard her to the end perforce ere the command of speech came back to him. When it did all he said was--
“She is mad! Take her away and throw her into the midst of the others, then let the fagots be kindled. Away with her, and let my eyes be no longer polluted by the sight of her!”
Four of the guards advanced to seize her, but their hands trembled as they stretched them out, for the terror of her words had sunk deep into their hearts. She waved them back, and they stood trembling and looking from her to their master, and she raised her voice again and replied--
“Thou canst send me to the flames, Inca, but that will avail thee but little against the wrath of thy Father, who shall presently turn his face from thee, and in the days to come thou shalt follow me, for on thee the embalmers shall never do their work, and thou shalt have no place in the Chambers of the Dead. The golden mask shall never cover thy face,[10] and thy soul shall wander for ever in the darkness, seeking its body yet never finding it, for thou, Inca, shalt never see the bright portals of the Mansions of the Sun!”
Again the horror of her words held Atahuallpa silent, his face blanched to a dull grey; his lips were half parted and dry, and his eyes rolled in his head, striving vainly to meet her steady gaze, for the guilt that was in his soul opened the way to fear, and the crowned despot and lord of life and death to millions trembled before the victim he was about to send to the flames. But as soon as she had ceased his rage got the better of his terror. He snatched a spear from the hand of the guard who stood nearest to him and, with a stroke like lightning, drove it through the heart of one of the four soldiers he had bidden to seize Mama-Lupa.
“When thy Lord speaks to hear is to obey or die. Take her away and let me see her die, or may the face of my Father the Sun be darkened if I do not send you all to the flames with her!”
“Ay, it shall be darkened, Inca!” Mama-Lupa cried as they dragged her away. “It shall be darkened with a cloud of blood, and thou shalt see it fall from Heaven and consume thee and thine utterly with its flames!”
By this time, though terror was shaking every heart, the angry words of the Inca had stayed the impulse which had so nearly turned the fear into panic, and as Mama-Lupa was taken to the scaffold the multitude was silent and orderly once more. One of the soldiers climbed up the wall of fagots, dragging her after him by a rope that they had noosed round her waist, and then threw her down among the others, bound hand and foot.
All this while Ullomaya and Manco and the other victims had stood wondering and watching yet making no attempt to escape, knowing well that they could never pass the triple files of spearmen round the scaffold. But now the knowledge of their own near-approaching doom came back, and Amaro put his left arm about his wife and drew her to him. The next moment a shudder ran through her body, and with a little gasping cry her head dropped heavily on to his breast. Then he raised the red dripping knife high above him, and with a swift downward stroke drove it into his own heart.
As he fell with his arm still clasped about his dead wife, Manco snatched the knife out of his side and, throwing his arm round Nahua, drew her to him just as the Inca made the signal to light the pyre. Another instant and he would have heard the crackling of the kindled fagots, and the knife, wet with the blood of her father and mother, would have been buried in Nahua’s heart.
But before a torch touched the fagots a great screaming cry of almost more than mortal terror rang out from thousands of throats at once, and tens of thousands of hands went up, pointing to the sun. The torch-men looked up too and stood transfixed with terror, their torches dropping from their trembling hands, for Mama-Lupa’s terrible words were coming true. A blood-red haze was stealing across the face of the sun sailing unclouded in the zenith. In the whole heavens there was neither cloud nor mist, but as the bloody haze deepened all the sky grew dim at once, and its azure turned to dusky grey. From Atahuallpa on his throne to the destined victims of his unrighteous vengeance on the scaffold utter terror held every heart still and frozen in its icy grip.