CHAPTER VII.
THE KINDLING OF THE PYRE
When the sound of the first myriad-voiced cry had died away the spell of a great silence fell upon the multitude. The torches smoked and smouldered out harmlessly on the ground, and they whose nerveless hands had dropped them stood like the rest, gazing upwards with fixed eyes, forgetful of all else but the awful portent in the sky.
Slowly the haze grew deeper and redder, and as it grew the sun seemed to shrink until they could see it shining dully as through a mist of blood, scarce larger than the moon. Then the spell of silence was broken again, and a long, low, shuddering wail went murmuring round the square. But soon above it rose the sharp shrieks and shrill screams of women and children.
Soldiers flung down their arms and broke their ranks unreproved by their officers. Some grovelled on the ground, hiding their faces in their hands, and some ran about waving their arms and wailing like children or shrieking out incoherent words. Even the Inca had forgotten alike his majesty and his vengeance in the universal terror, and sat upon his golden throne, clutching with shaking hands at the arms and staring up with eyes that seemed about to burst from their sockets, and at his feet his queen-mother cowered, shuddering and moaning and covering her face with her cloak, not daring to look up.
A black shape, blacker than starless night, was beginning to creep across the sun’s rim, growing slowly broader and broader, and then, though it was scarcely an hour past midday, a darkness as of sudden midnight began to fall upon the valley, and here and there stars began to flicker palely in the sky as the black shape ate its way into the dimmed brightness of the fading sun.
And now there was not a sound in all the swarming, fear-stricken city as, right over the visible face of their God, the Children of the Sun watched that incarnate Blackness creep, until at last, in the very height and majesty of its noonday pride, it was blotted out from their sight. Then, from behind the blackness, there leapt out lurid flaming shapes of ghastly splendour, blue and red and yellow--the last flickerings, as they thought, of their dying God’s expiring glory.
But this was only the beginning of the terrors of that awful noontide, for as they watched the hideous disc of flame-encircled darkness a roar as of a thousand thunder-peals in one shook the firmament and seemed to bring its ruins crushing down upon the shuddering earth. Then out of the north-west there leapt up a vast sheet of glaring ruddy light, and against it they saw the shape of Yavirá, crowned by the altar of the Unknown God, stand out huge and black and sharp.
A fiery wind like a blast from the very mouth of Hell itself swept roaring through the valley, and, as though swiftly drawn out by invisible hands, a black curtain spread over the heavens from north to south and east to west, and under it the ever-broadening glare blazed out, swiftly changing it from black to red. The earth reeled and swayed beneath their feet: the stone-paved streets cracked and gaped, and the mighty walls of palace and temple, built to endure for ever, shook and split, and great stones came crashing down, crushing scores out of all human shape beneath them.
And now the spell of fear was broken and the bonds of horror loosed, and madness came. Those who had moaned and wailed before now laughed and sang and shouted, and at the sound Manco woke from his stupor.
All this time he had stood with Nahua in his arms and the knife ready poised above her breast. Both seemed as though the fearful magic of the sights and sounds about them had changed them to statues of bronze, paralysed alike in mind and body.
When her father and mother fell dead beside her a shudder had run through Nahua’s body and then it had become fixed and rigid, and she had stood staring at the dead with blank, unmeaning eyes, heedless of the horror that was in Heaven and the terror that was on the earth.
Manco too, though half-prepared by his vigil on the altar and the words of Mama-Lupa for what had come to pass, had been smitten with a thought at once terrible and glad, the thought that in another moment Nahua would have died by his hand, and this had seemed to turn his heart and brain to stone and his blood to ice.
But now, in the midst of the delirium about him, the spell that had bound him was suddenly loosened, for the love which but a little while before had bidden him slay the being dearest to him on earth, leapt up into new life in his soul, triumphant even over the terrors of the convulsed heavens and earth, and love brought hope with it now where it had brought despair before.
All order was at an end. In the face of the awful majesty of nature’s tragedy the Inca himself was nothing more than a trembling man, helpless as the meanest wretch who was running shrieking about the square. For the moment the whole fabric of his rule had crumbled to nothing, even as the monuments of his power seemed about to do. No one in that maddened multitude gave a thought to the bound and helpless ones on the scaffold. When Death, swift and terrible, was threatening all, what mattered the lives of three-score men and women?
And yet here was hope, if anywhere, and here too alone was calmness, for these had already set their faces to meet the bitterness of death. For nearly an hour now they had been standing bound on the brink of a fiery grave and death had lost well-nigh half its terrors for them. But if destruction were coming they should at least have the chance of flight with free feet, and their hands should be loosed so that, if it might be, they should save their little ones or die seeking to save them.
Waking Nahua from her stupor with a kiss, Manco bade her wait for him, and set to work cutting the bonds of the others, and they, as soon as they were free, took such garments as they could lay hands on and hastily clothed themselves and their children in some sort, and then, flinging the fagots aside, made themselves a way to freedom, leaving only the dead bodies of Amaro and his wife behind them, and, led by Manco, began to make their way as best they could towards the street that led to the Southern Gate.
But Mama-Lupa broke away from them and gained the terrace where Atahuallpa still sat, shivering on his golden throne, and, standing beside him over the prostrate Zaïma, she threw up her hands and screamed out shrilly above the tumult--
“The shade of the great Inca is angry! He stands alone in his house in the Mansions of the Sun. Where are those he honoured upon earth--wives of Huayna-Capac? Your Lord is lonely, get ye gone to him--sacrifice! sacrifice! The Divine Ones are wrath, and only sacrifice can appease them!”
A crowd of women that had been huddled about the palace door heard her and with one accord sprang towards her, tearing at their hair and their robes, and in shrill, screaming tones echoing her words--
“Sacrifice! sacrifice!”
They were the wives of the dead Inca, and they remembered how, in the olden times, when a king died, those who had loved him and whom he had loved had of their own accord gone with him to the Mansions of the Sun. It might be that the wrath of the Divine Ones would pass if they did this now, and one of them screaming out: “To the scaffold, to the scaffold! Let us go to our Lord on the wings of the flames!” began to fight her way down the terrace steps and towards the deserted pyre. Others caught up her cry and followed her. Then Mama-Lupa, pointing down at Zaïma’s prostrate form, screamed out again--
“Ay, to the flames and through them to your Lord, as becomes true wives according to the Ancient Law! But here lies she who was chief and dearest of you all in his eyes. Leave her not behind lest he shall send your souls back to seek her.”
Zaïma heard her and sprang to her feet, her fears banished by this nearer danger. But before she could turn to fly a score of eager, pitiless hands were clutching at her limbs and garments, and a score of screaming voices were crying--
“Come with us, Coya, come! We dare not go to our Lord without thee.”
She grasped one of the arms of the golden throne and clung to it, crying to her son to save her. But the Inca sat still, staring straight before him and seeing nothing, like one in a waking dream, and not seeming even to hear her prayer. So they dragged her away, screaming and chanting salutations to their Lord, and with her in their midst they ran across the square, now almost bare of people, for with one consent nearly all the throng had made for the outlets and were swarming into the narrow streets, strangling and trampling each other down between the rocking and gaping walls.
Some of the women who had gone first to the scaffold had picked up the smouldering torches, and, waving them swiftly in the air, had made them burst into flame again. Then, with Zaïma still struggling and shrieking in their midst, the others mounted the platform over the fagots, and then those with the torches followed and danced round them, while all but Zaïma chanted the Death-Song. When it was done they flung their torches in among the fagots, and as the wall of flame and smoke rose up around them they flung their arms about each other, calling upon their Lord to witness their faith and fondness, and so they went to bear him company in the land where there is no death, leaving the fire-smitten and shuddering earth behind them.[11]
But all the while the terrors of the earthquake were multiplying throughout the valley of the doomed city. Mighty masses of red-hot rock were flung high into the air from the throat of the volcano and fell back to earth, some on the mountain-sides and some on the squares and streets and buildings of the city, bursting in the midst of close-packed masses of men and women and children. Great gaps were opening in the ground and closing again, swallowing fragments of walls and buildings and burying hundreds alive in their depths. But the new-crowned Inca sat still and unharmed upon his throne, for at length his terror had passed, lost in a cold despair, and he had resolved to die, if die he must, crowned and throned as became a king and the son of kings, and so, in the midst of the ruins of his city and the death-agonies of his people, he remained to the last, the one being unmoved, watching the blazing pyre and waiting for the hand of death to strike him.[12]
In the cold, clear dawn of the morning after the Day of Terrors, Manco stood with Nahua in the doorway of a tambo, or rest-house, some five leagues to the south of Quito, on the great road that ran between the Sierras to Cuzco. They two alone of all the threescore victims who had stood together on the scaffold had escaped through the miracle or the mercy of the fate which had decreed for them the strange destiny of which the pages that follow will tell.
They were facing the eastern mountains, and their eager eyes were shining in the silver light of the fast brightening dawn. Soon long shafts of rosy light shot up from behind the clear-cut mountain-tops, and the morning star grew paler in the midst of their radiance. A broad band of ruddy golden light outspread across the sky behind the peaks and snowfields which gleamed and glittered in the glory it shed upon them, and then, in the eternal splendour of his unclouded majesty, the great sun rose up to smile once more upon the world.
Instantly Manco and Nahua bowed themselves in glad adoration before it. Then Manco took Nahua in his arms and said--
“Our Father’s wrath is past, my Nahua, and the wrath of the Divine Ones is appeased! See, his face shines as brightly as ever upon his children. He has given us his blessing again as he has done every morning that we have lived. Now let us go, and I will take you to my home, and you shall see the true City of the Sun.”
Then, hand in hand, they went on their way towards the South, leaving the darkened North where the doomed city still lay under its pall of mingled fire and darkness, behind them.
BOOK II