The Conquistadors (39 page)

Atahualpa's real difficulty was that the two generals he had grown up with and trusted, Quizquiz and Challcuchima, were in the Cuzco region. Had they been with him at Cajamarca, he would probably have accepted their advice, and even in the face of such a small force, taken military precautions. But the usurper never has that innate confidence that enables him to act without regard to appearances, and though the empire was so absolutely subservient to the Inca that even the most outrageous commands, as we shall see later, would be obeyed without question, Atahualpa, at that moment of time, could not be sure. It was almost certainly lack of self-confidence, the desire to make public demonstration of his fearlessness and his godlike command of the situation, that was his undoing.

The lay-out of the Indian town was on the neat, orderly Inca state pattern – houses, streets, alleys, all in straight lines. The big triangular courtyard was in the centre, surrounded by a wall with two gateways opening on to the streets. Inside the courtyard walls were the local government buildings. These were single-storey and included, on the south-eastern side, the palace of the local
curaca,
Angasnopo. The westernmost point of the triangle touched the foot of the sacred hill of Rumy Tiana (now called the Sanctuary of Santa Apolonia).
⁶
On entering this courtyard the procession split into two parts, so that the chiefs bearing the Inca on his litter moved to a central position. There was no sign of the Spanish force, and it was Valverde, not Pizarro, who came forward to greet Atahualpa with the Bible and Crucifix and a long discourse on the Christian faith.

There are various accounts of what happened then, Garcilaso's being quite extraordinarily detailed, but since they are from Spanish sources it seems unlikely that the actual words spoken by Atahualpa would have been correctly reported –
Valverde's discourse and the Inca's replies were all passing through the Spanish ‘tongue', Felipillo. Visual reporting is less open to doubt, and it seems likely that the friar did hand Atahualpa the Bible, as the authority upon which the Christian faith was based, and that the Inca did throw it to the ground. However difficult he may have found it to follow the Dominican's theological argument, he can have been under no illusion as to the intention: this miserable stranger, with his tonsured head and his cross, was urging him to renounce his own divinity in favour of a god who had been stupidly killed by his own people, and at the same time to acknowledge, in the Emperor Charles, a king greater than himself. He was to forfeit, in other words, all that he had just fought so hard to attain. His anger at this effrontery was immediate, his rejection of the Book inevitable. The proud gesture as he pointed to the sun, and the words, ‘My God still lives', are probably correctly reported.

The Dominican Friar retrieved the Bible and scuttled away. The square, packed with Indians, click-clacked with the staccato sound of the Quechua language.

Atahualpa, seated head and shoulders above the clatter of speculation, may have seen the handkerchief dropped by Pizarro. He certainly saw the smoke from the cannon as it boomed out, cutting a swathe through the crowd. It was the signal, followed instantly by the battle-cry – ‘Santiago!' The fire of the arquebuses was sharp and clear, like the crackle of fireworks, above the sudden din of cavalry charging; the Spanish foot poured into the square, their swords flashing in the late afternoon sun – steel at first, then dripping crimson as they hacked and hacked at the helpless wall of human bodies.

The Indian chiefs died fighting with their bare hands in defence of Atahualpa. The attendants and some of the unarmed bodyguard pressed with such panic at one part of the courtyard wall that they broke it down and fled into the country beyond, pursued by the cavalry. The butchery of those that remained trapped in the square was such that even Spanish eye-witnesses say they were hacking at the defenceless Indians for a full half hour and did not desist until the sun was behind the mountains and it was almost dark. Before then, Atahualpa's litter had crashed to the ground. Such was the blood lust of the Spaniards that it was only the intervention of Pizarro himself and some of his cavaliers that saved the Inca.

The massacre at Cajamarca on that fatal evening of November 16, 1532, has disgraced Spanish chivalry in the eyes of the world. The attack can possibly be justified in the circumstances – what else could a small, determined force do to gain the ascendancy, faced as it was by overwhelming odds? It was the brutal stupidity of the Spaniards and the whole foul record of their behaviour in Peru that history cannot stomach. The massacre has thus become symbolic of what happened later, so that the assessment of history, which has accepted without such revulsion so many similar cruelties ordered by generals far greater than Pizarro, is a correct assessment.

For the Spaniards, who had just completed a long and exhausting march across an unknown mountain range, the waiting that Saturday must have seemed interminable. It is hardly surprising that some of them had lost heart at the sight of the enormous army of Indians camped by the hot springs. But, as Pizarro bluntly told them, it was too late to retreat; their only hope was to emulate Cortés and secure the person of the Inca. This had been his plan from the beginning, and on the Friday evening he had put it to his officers in council. Zárate says the Spaniards were outnumbered by two hundred to one – ‘But notwithstanding, he and all his company being haughty minded, and also of great stomach. The night following they comforted one another, putting their only confidence in God, so that then they occupied themselves in trimming their armour and other furniture, without taking any rest of sleep the whole night.' In fact, they slept, as they always did, with their arms beside them, and sentinels posted. But there was no movement from the Indian camp and the night passed quietly. At dawn Pizarro made his dispositions. The public buildings were open-doored halls, ideal for the concealment of troops. The cavalry, in two divisions under Hernando Pizarro and de Soto, occupied two of these halls, the foot soldiers a third, and Candia, with a few soldiers and the two falconets, was posted on the lower slopes of Rumy Tiana, thus commanding the open triangle of the courtyard. Pizarro kept twenty picked men to act as an independent force under his personal command.

The dispositions completed and every soldier briefed, mass was celebrated, ‘and all joined with enthusiasm in the chant, “
Exsurge, Domine
” – “Rise, O Lord! and judge thine own cause”'. After that everyone went to their posts. The hours passed slowly, and as the soldiers waited, they had ample opportunity to reflect on the odds against them. It was mid-day before the look outs reported the Inca's army on the move. And then, when the procession was still half a mile away, it stopped. Tents began to be pitched. Finally the news was brought that the Inca would not enter Cajamarca till the following day. By then the tension of waiting had become intolerable.

Pedro Pizarro, the general's kinsman and page, says that the answer his master returned to Atahualpa ‘deprecated his change of purpose', and added that ‘he had provided everything for his entertainment and expected him that night to sup with him'. But there must have been something more to it to persuade Atahualpa to come unarmed into Cajamarca. Prescott says, ‘He was too absolute in his own empire easily to suspect, and he probably could not comprehend the audacity with which a few men meditated an assault on a powerful monarch in the midst of his victorious army.' Sombrely the great historian adds, ‘He did not know the character of the Spaniards.' This failure of the Indian to appreciate the single-purposed drive of the invader is a recurring theme in the Spanish conquest of the Americas, and it is difficult to understand, since both the Aztecs and the Incas had also been small in numbers when they themselves began the subjugation of
their neighbours. The only explanation is that even a century of absolute power blinds the despot to the history of his own race.

And so, as the sun of the Incas set over the Andes, Atahualpa came unarmed into Cajamarca. And that night he supped with Pizarro as his captive, in one of the halls of the great courtyard where his people had been slaughtered, the smell of death and the reek of blood still in the air. ‘It is the fortune of war', he is supposed to have said, much as the Moors of Granada would have said, ‘It is the will of Allah.' But this, and the suggestion that he expressed admiration of Pizarro's cunning, is, of course, a Spanish version, intended to support the contention that, in doing what he did, Pizarro was only forestalling Atahualpa's own cruel intentions. Xeres is most careful to explain that the Inca's attendants had all carried arms under their cotton tunics, including stones and slings, ‘all of which made it appear that they had a treacherous design'.

Whatever those intentions may have been, and there is no certainty that he was planning to destroy the Spaniards, his behaviour in captivity induces in us none of the sympathy we feel for Moctezuma. Nevertheless, we cannot avoid a sense of sadness, for the passivity of the Peruvian Indians was so ingrained that they lacked all initiative and so had no will to resist. At Cajamarca the Spaniards were allowed to loot the camp and to drive off the great flocks of Peruvian ‘sheep' collected by their herdsmen to feed the Inca's army. The Indian warriors seemed stunned into immobility; finally they melted away without making any attempt to rescue Atahualpa.

It was unbelievable. Pizarro suddenly found the great empire wide open. It had all been achieved by a stroke of luck in which not a single Spaniard had lost his life. Indeed, none of them had even been wounded, except Pizarro himself, who had received a sword cut on the hand whilst defending Atahualpa from the blood lust of his own men.

In the royal baths, they found five thousand women, of whom they did not fail to take advantage, despite the fact that the women were sad and weary; they also took possession of many fine, large tents and all kinds of provisions; clothing, household linens, valuable tableware, and vases, one of which weighed one hundred kilograms in gold; Atahualpa's tableware alone, which was entirely of gold and silver, was worth one hundred thousand ducats.

With the wives and attendants of Atahualpa, they brought in so many Indian men and women that even the foot soldiers found themselves with a retinue of servants. They were more interested, however, in the gold and silver looted from the pavilions of the Inca and the tents of his
orejones;
there was a great deal of very large, very heavy plate, also some unusually large emeralds.

Atahualpa, who appears to have made no attempt to get a message out to his generals at Cuzco to destroy the Spaniards, presumably because he had been
warned that such action would cost him his life, was quick to take advantage of their greed at the expense of his people. He proposed that, in exchange for his freedom, one of the halls should be filled with gold ‘as high as he could reach'. Thus Pizarro was offered the same very advantageous deal that Ferdinand had proposed to the Moors after the fall of the city of Málaga forty-five years before. Like Ferdinand, he was convinced that such a huge ransom could never be met, for the hall was twenty-two feet long and seventeen feet broad, and the line he drew in red around the walls was over seven feet above the floor. The plan, however, would mean that, instead of secreting the empire's wealth, the Indians themselves would collect it and transport it to the Spaniard's camp. To make absolutely certain that the terms of ransom would never be fully met, Pizarro insisted that an adjoining hall, rather smaller in size, be filled twice over with silver. Atahualpa agreed, only insisting that the gold and silver should be piled in the form in which it arrived and that his people should be given two months in which to deliver it. The terms of ransom were recorded by the notary, and Atahualpa immediately issued the necessary instructions to his
chasquis.

In this way Atahualpa bought time. Strangely, he never seemed to doubt that Pizarro would keep his side of the bargain. Presumably he thought that somehow in those two months he would be able to escape, rejoin his main army, and kill the Spaniards – hopes that were presumably based on his experience of Indian levies. In this again he underrated the Spaniards, and particularly their leader, whose peasant cunning matched his own.

Once the order for the delivery of the treasure had gone out, Pizarro played his second card. Atahualpa's freedom was one thing, but if he had to free him, there was no reason why it should be as Inca. The true-born Inca was still alive, and Garcilaso may be right when he says that de Soto and del Barco visited Huáscar on their way to Cuzco, and that, after speaking of the injustice done him by his brother, Huáscar offered three times the ransom Atahualpa had contracted to provide – ‘it will not be up to any line drawn on the wall, but up to the ceiling that I shall fill the room, because I know where the incalculable riches amassed by my father and all his predecessors are hidden; whereas my brother does not know this, and he is therefore reduced to stripping our temples of their ornaments in order to fulfil his promise'.

This suggestion, reported back to Pizarro, would almost certainly have reached Atahualpa, and Zárate may be correct in suggesting that Atahualpa endeavoured to discover the reaction of the Spanish general to Huáscar's death by pretending that it had already happened and feigning sadness at the news:

The Governor hearing his sorrowful complaint, comforted him, and bid him be of good cheer, saying moreover, that death was a thing natural. … When Atahualpa perceived that the Governor took the matter so slightly, he then fully determined to execute the thing which he had devised, and sent privily to the Captains, who had the keeping of Huáscar, express commission to kill him, which was forthwith committed with such speed, that it was never certainly known whether he was slain in the time that Atahualpa made his feigned mourning, or afterwards, of which evil success the principal fault was laid to Captain Soto and Pedro de Barrio, who were so precise in their determined journey to Cuzco.