The Gold Eaters by Ronald Wright Page A

with small shields and pikes. Inside the ring, sitting on a stone seat by the fountain, is an old man with long white hair. In his hands is a message of coloured strings hanging from a thick black cord.
    â€œThis means death,” Yutu says in Molina’s ear.
    â€œÂ¡Vámonos!”
he shouts in hers, suspecting his shipmates and fearing for his life.
“Haku!”
Let’s be gone.
    She laces her fingers into his, tightening her grip. “We stay. And I listen.”
    â€œThe news will be repeated,” guards are calling. “The news will be repeated. Those who have heard should leave and make room for others.”
    The old man gathers himself for yet another reading, calling out in a voice of surprising strength and authority:
    â€œ
Uyariwaychik.
All hear me. This is now made known. Our Emperor Wayna Qhapaq has died, suddenly, in the thirty-fourth year of his reign.” He pauses, while another howl of mourning fills the square; then resumes running his fingers over the knots.
    Molina can’t follow much. Where has their king died? And how? Could it be the work of Pizarro? Some other Spaniards?
    Yutu repeats everything slowly and simply for him back at her house. The Emperor—the Sapa Inka, or Only King—fell ill from a plague without name, a sickness never seen before. This pestilence first appeared in mountain towns on the Empire’s northern border a few weeks ago, spreading quickly through Quito Province to the city of Tumipampa, where the Emperor was residing. Of twelve thousand high officials, army commanders, lords, ladies, retainers, and royal children in the palace at the time, ten thousand fell ill. More than six thousand have died.
    It was hoped Wayna Qhapaq might be saved by isolation—alone in a small house in the palace gardens. But after ten days condors began alighting on the roof. Then the people knew their Only King was dead.
    The Emperor is to be embalmed and taken to Cusco, where he will live forever in the house of his father, the Sun.
    Molina knows at once what it is: the smallpox.
    â€”
    They came for him the next day, two big soldiers at Yutu’s door. Next thing he knew he was frogmarched from the house—toes barely scraping the ground—and thrown in jail.
    He sighs and scratches the stubble in his armpits. He should have known his luck wouldn’t last. Sooner or later the fates always empty a pail of shit on Badluck Molina’s head. Daylight begins to show in the cell’s high window. A window barely big enough for a cat, but ahighway for the sodding mosquitoes, who have given him another sleepless night. The light taunts him. What is daylight without freedom? Only a change of torments: mosquitoes by night; flies by day.
    He is kept in solitary. Each morning cornbread is slid under the door and water trickles into a jar from a spout in the wall. Eventually a jailer comes to clean the cell, a masked man wreathed in incense from a small brazier worn on his chest as a precaution.
    Sometimes this man rouses him in the night for questioning by the All-Seer—a disembodied voice from behind a sheet.
Here for your own protection.
Ha! If that’s the reason, why is the old buzzard grilling him with endless questions, expecting him to speak their lingo perfectly? I can curse in it, eat in it, and fuck in it. That’s about all Yutu got into my head.
    â€”
    He tracks the days with scratches on his wall. He listens to the unseen street beyond the window. Why hasn’t Yutu come? He misses her, finds it painful to think of her, of the good days at her house. Sometimes he hears a woman’s voice in the street that might be hers. But he can never make out words.
    His hairiness grows back, his beard and a dark pelt on chest and thighs. His skin turns grey for want of sunlight. Loneliness and despair settle on him like ash. Molina fears nothing from the plague himself. Smallpox visited the orphanage when he was five or six, as it