The Gold Eaters by Ronald Wright Page B

did every few years. Same with measles, mumps, chickenpox. Many children died, but the rest never caught those things again.
    His mind often returns to Spain, awake and in dreams. What he would give to see his shipmates now! He yearns to hear Castilian, a lute, for a taste of wine, a card game with Candía—one of the few he got along with. He even prays, a thing he does only when hope forsakes him. He tallies up his scratches on the wall. More than amonth now. More than four since Pizarro sailed away. A long time. Maybe they too are in a Peruvian jail, rotting in a hole like this somewhere down the coast.
    The All-Seer seems to believe that the arrival of the new sickness and the Spaniards is no coincidence. Molina has denied this, pointing out there was no plague on his ship and it did not begin in Tumbes. But to himself he admits it might well have made its way south from Mexico or Panama, through hotlands and highlands until it burst into the Peruvian Empire.
    Molina gathers that the pestilence still rages, despite all efforts to contain it. The authorities have given it a name, the spotted death, and described its early symptoms. Movement on the highways has been forbidden. No ships are allowed to sail. The postal service is suspended, except for imperial business at the highest level.
    Yet already the smallpox has spread south through the highlands to the distant capital. It can’t be long before it sweeps down into each coastal valley, even though this land is so vast, so rugged. Molina recalls asking Yutu how long it would take to walk to Cusco. She said people in no hurry allow a month and a half, but the postmen can get there in five days. That seemed impossible. Now he knows better. Perhaps that’s how it spread so quickly, with the mail.

    For some days he hears bustle in the street beyond his window: the slap of many sandals, the shouts of soldiers, the soft tread and clicking toes of llamas.
    Then no more. Only dogs howling by night. Only a hiss and flutter of big wings by day. And on the air a stink of death.
    His captors have died or fled, leaving him here like a rat in a jar.
    His cell door is a sturdy affair of hard timber, fastened outside bya thick metal bar through stone rings. No hope there. His only chance is to dig through the adobe wall, which he judges from the window opening to be about three feet thick. Molina snaps the rim off his water pot. With the shard he scrapes away a patch of plaster, exposing brickwork—big adobes of mud and gravel, laid with clay. He manages to dislodge a sharp stone the shape of a mango pit. With this he works at the joint. By nightfall he has loosened one brick, pulled it free with bleeding fingers. The work goes better the following day. The bricklayers were sparing with mortar in the core. By sundown he’s wrenched out a dozen bricks, leaving only the street side undisturbed. When he kicks those away he will be free.
    Molina breaks out in the thick of night, lit by a thief’s moon, enough to see without being seen. He is tempted to raid a house for food, but shrinks from the reek at every door. And there are dogs, growling in gutters or sloping along behind him, lost and searching for their owners. He slips a hand into a pocket of his jerkin, checking for the tiny string with three knots given him by Felipe. Still there. Thank Christ the All-Seer let him keep his clothes, though his boots were taken and he has only rags to bind his feet. He will go south by the great road to Huchuy Mayu and look for the boy’s family. If they haven’t died or fled like the citizens of Tumbes. Little River sounds like a small place, out of the way, fanned by sea winds. Perhaps they have been spared.
    Once well beyond the fields Molina feels safe enough to slake his thirst at the roadside canal and eat from trees planted along the Emperor’s highway. The low fruit is gone—in all the world it’s always so!—but he knocks down some