The Gold Eaters by Ronald Wright Read Free Book Online Page B

Commander’s own. Maybe better, Pizarro thinks sourly, recalling his unschooled youth in Trujillo.

    Within a fortnight the prisoner suddenly falls ill, racked by sweats and chills, babbling deliriously, his life running from every pore and orifice. Each day he is thinner and weaker. The Commander begins to fear he won’t pull through. How easily these Indians die! Everywhere Spaniards have been in the Indies—the Caribbean, Mexico, Panama—it’s as though the mere smell of a Christian is enough to kill the natives. Measles, mumps, chickenpox, even a cold, cut healthy men and women down like babes. To say nothing of smallpox, the deadliest plague of all, but luckily Felipillo does not seem to have that.
    â€œWell, Father?” Pizarro asks the camp’s priest, who has spent much time on this expedition ministering to the sick. “What’s wrong with my interpreter? Will he live? If he won’t, give him the rites. But first baptise him. Christen him Felipe.”
    â€œWhy Felipe, Commander? We’re nowhere near Saint Philip’s Day.”
    Pizarro shoots a withering glance at the weedy, black-frocked young churchman—how dare he question an order—then relents.
    â€œHe’s been called Felipillo ever since we found him. He may as well come by the name honestly. And mind you pray well for his life—for your sake as much as his. Christen him now.”
    â€”
    Waman slowly crawls back from the borderland of death. All his life he has enjoyed good health. Now he knows what it is to feelold, to be weak and worn, to be sucked like a drowning dog into the underworld. Sometimes he woke from his delirium to moonlight falling from a window, burning his eyes like the sun no matter how tightly he shut them. His skin was on fire. His hands looked unfamiliar, like another’s; or some animal’s claw, a bear’s, a crab’s. He willed them to leap at his throat but they wouldn’t stir. He begged Mother Moon to take him:
Mama Killa,
yanarimuway, wañuchirimuway. Hina kachun.
Please help me, please kill me. May it be so.
    Now he is glad Lady Moon didn’t heed his prayers, that he lives after all, in rekindled hope of going home, of killing these barbarians or at least escaping before they make him lead them back to the World. Dimly he recalls one in a black gown like a widow coming to his bedside, uttering long incantations, sprinkling him with water, saying
Pilipi
. A sorcerer? Is that what brought him back to life?
    The Old One was there too.
¿Cómo te llamas?
he kept saying. Why was he speaking of llamas? They have none.
    But now he knows.
    Wamanmi sutiy.
My name is Waman.
    Â¡No!
The Old One again. A curse, a cuff on the head.
¿Cómo te llamas?
    Pi-li-pi my name.
    Better. Say it better, Felipillo!
    I am called Felipe.
    To himself he adds,
Qanllarayku.
Only by you.
    The lessons resume with Candía, the big man with the thicket of raven beard, and with Tomás the cookboy. Molina sometimes comes too, good-humouredly correcting their pronunciation. Soon Waman has a smattering of the barbarian tongue. His first words arequestions. Where are his shipmates? What happened after he blacked out? His teachers try to be evasive, but the Greek and the Spaniard are talkative by nature. Little by little Waman learns something of that day.
    He is healthier now, built up with extra rations. But when the Old One at last unbolts the chain and lets him walk outside—unsteady on weak legs, yet still with a heavy shackle on one ankle—Waman sees that most of the barbarians look as underfed as they did when he got here. One-Eye still raids the mainland if the winds are fair, but each time he comes back with less food. And with fewer men and horses.
    On the island itself there is nothing to eat but crabs and limpets and mangrove nuts, a seal if they are lucky, or a thin broth of barnacles and seaweed. Waman is set to work digging shellfish or casting his net