Temple by Matthew Reilly Read Free Book Online Page A

standing in his cell—standing perfectly
still—staring at me intently.

His cage now open, Renco ran over to the dead guard's corpse,
grabbed his weapons and handed them to me.

'Come on,' he said, awakening me from Castino's hyp notic stare.
Dressed only in the barest of prison rags, Renco quickly began to
undress the dead guard's corpse. Then he hurriedly put on the
guard's thick leather riding jacket, pantaloons and boots.

No sooner was he dressed than he was on his feet again, unlocking
some of the other cages. I noticed that he only

the cages of Incan warriors and not those of pris- from subjugated
tribes like the Chancas.

And then suddenly Renco was dashing out the door with rifle in his
hand, ignoring the shouts of the other prison-

and calling for me to follow.

We dashed back across the rickety footbridge, amid a

of running prisoners. By this time, however, others heard the
commotion on board the hulk. Four

from the nearby tent village arrived at the river-

on horseback just as we leapt off the bridge. They fired :us with
their muskets, the reports of their weapons boom-

like thunderclaps in the night.

Renco fired back, handling his musket like the most sea-

Spanish infantryman, blasting one of the horsemen

his mount. The other Incan prisoners ran ahead of us and
overpowered two of the other horsemen.

The last horseman brought his steed around so that it stood
directly in front of me. In a flashing instant, I saw him register
my appearance—a European helping these heathens.

I saw the anger flare in his eyes and then I saw him raise his
rifle in my direction.

With nothing else to call on, I hastily raised my own pistol and
fired it. The pistol boomed loudly in my hand and I would swear on
the Good Book itself that its recoil almost tore my arm from its.
socket. The horseman in front of me snapped backwards in his saddle
and tumbled to the ground, dead.

I stood there, stunned, holding the pistol in my hand, staring
fixedly at the dead body on the ground. I endeavoured to convince
myself that I had done no wrong. He had been going to kill me

'Brother!' Renco called suddenly.

I turned on the moment and saw him sitting astride one of the
Spanish horses. 'Come!' he called. 'Take his horse! We have to get
to Cuzco!'

The city of Cuzco lies at the head of a long mountain valley that
runs in a north-south direction. It is a walled city that is
situated between two parallel rivers, the Huatanay and the
Tullumayo, which act rather like moats.

Situated on a hill to the north of the city, towering above it, is
the most dominant feature of the Cuzco valley. There, looking down
over the city like a god, is the stone fortress of
Sacsayhuaman.

Sacsayhuaman is a structure like no other I have seen in all of the
world. Nothing in Spain, or even in the whole of Europe, can
compare with its size and sheer dominating presence.

Truly, it is a most fearsome citadel—roughly pyramidal in shape, it
consists of three colossal tiers, each one easily a hundred hands
high, with walls constructed of gigantic hundred-ton blocks.

These Incans do not have mortar, but they more than make up for
that deficiency with their extraordinary abilities in the art of
stonemasonry. Rather than bind stones together with pastes, they
build all of their fortresses, temples and palaces by fashioning
enormous boulders into regular shapes and placing them alongside
each other so that each boulder fits perfectly with the next. So
exact are the joins between these monumental stones, so perfectly
are they cut, that one cannot slip a knife blade between
them.

It was in this setting that the intriguing siege of Cuzco took
place.

Now, it is at this point that it should be said that the siege of
Cuzco must rank as one of the strangest in the history of

nodern warfare.

The strangeness of the siege stems from the following fact: during
it the invaders—my countrymen, the Spaniards— were inside the city
walls, while the owners of the city,