ST. JAGO’S DAY
While the Spaniards were holding their council in the camp in the
great square, Manco and Ruminavi were holding another no less
momentous in one of the chambers of the central tower which crowned
the fortress of the Sacsahuaman. Nor was their debate less anxious
than that of Hernando Pizarro and his companions. The truth was that
the feeding of the vast host which had now for months been
encompassing Cuzco was fast becoming impossible. More than that, the
time for sowing had come, and this among the Incas and their people
had for ever been the season of universal religious observance. It was
to them what Holy Week was to the Catholics, or the feast of Bairam to
the Moslems.
Moreover, in such a country as the elevated regions of the Sierras, it
was absolutely imperative that the grain should be sown
simultaneously, and at this one season. If not, the next year the
Children of the Sun would have to fight a foe even more pitiless than
the Spaniards, for there would be famine throughout the length and
breadth of the land. There were thus two reasons--one religious and
one economical--which made it imperative to partially raise the siege
of Cuzco, at least for a time.
Now that the great Temple of the Sun had been defiled and desecrated,
the most holy place in the Land of the Four Regions was the temple on
the sacred Island of Titicaca, some six days’ journey to the south,
and thither it was necessary that the Inca, in his sacred character as
Brother of the Sun, should go and open the first furrow with his
golden hoe and plant the first seeds of the next year’s harvest. To
have neglected this duty would have been an incredible impiety, and a
breach of a custom hallowed by ages of solemn observance.
On the other hand, too, the multitudes which had been gathered about
Cuzco, feeling the pinch of famine, and wearying of the length and
rigours of the siege, were getting more and more difficult to keep
together in any semblance of an army. Their thoughts were turning to
their homes and families, and to the starvation and misery that would
be their fate if the crops were not sown.
The last grand attack on the Spanish camp had failed, as all the
others had done, and the disheartened hosts of the Inca were falling
back to their old belief that, after all, these strange invaders must
be something more than human, and therefore unconquerable, and Manco
and his old General well knew that, while the people were in this
temper, to neglect or even to postpone the Feast of Sowing would be to
provoke almost universal mutiny and revolt, and utterly ruin all hope
of future resistance.
So, after long and earnest debate between the young Inca and his
General, the priests of the Sun and the chief nobles of the Blood, a
compromise was decided upon. Manco was to start at dawn with his
priestly retinue, and proceed with all possible dispatch to Titicaca.
The bulk of the people were to be sent to their homes to prepare the
fields for sowing, and Ruminavi was to remain with the picked
regiments of the army to continue the blockade of the city.
It was thus that there came about the last of the long series of
fatalities which had seemed to foredoom the empire of the Incas to
destruction. If this decision had been made even a day later, or even
if the Spaniards had carried out their original plan of attacking the
fortress the next morning, Cuzco might have fallen, and the Spaniards
might have been forced to begin the whole conquest over again in the
face of a victorious and triumphant people.
But it so happened that the next day was St. James’, and when Hernando
Pizarro told the Fray Valverde, who was now duly consecrated Bishop of
Cuzco and the Southern Indies, of the projected attack, he protested
with all the vigour of his eloquence against the desecration of the
holy day by avoidable bloodshed, and ended by refusing point blank to
celebrate Mass or to give absolution to any who took part in the
impious enterprise.
“No, Señor,” he said sternly, in reply to Don Hernando’s military
arguments as to the necessity of striking quickly. “No, the day on
which the holy St. Jago died is no day for battle and slaughter if
good Christians can avoid them. If you are attacked again, then strike
back like true men, and prayers shall not be wanting for the souls of
those who fall. But if the heathen leave you in peace, as after
to-day’s defeat they may well do, then should the solemn hours of
to-morrow be devoted to a better and more urgent service. They must be
hours of fasting, humiliation, and prayer.
“Do you wonder, Señor, at the misfortunes that have overtaken you
when you and your captains have permitted your men to imperil their
own souls and pollute their holy cause by all manner of greed and lust
and violence? Think you that God and the Holy Saints can look down
with favour on work done by hands so foul and wicked as theirs are? It
is not a battle with the heathen that they must fight to-morrow. It is
a battle with their own evil lusts, which destroy the soul as well as
the body. Do your will according to your own advice, Señor, but
remember that to-morrow I proclaim a solemn fast and day of
humiliation and intercession, and those who go out to battle between
the rising and setting of the sun, save to repel an assault of the
enemy, will go followed, not by the Church’s blessing, but by her
solemn anathema!”
Don Hernando was too good a soldier as well as too good a Catholic not
to see that in the face of such an interdict the order to march would
be answered by the superstitious soldiery with nothing less than flat
refusal and mutiny. So Bishop Valverde had his way, and, all
unknowingly, did more than any other man at such a juncture could have
done to ensure the triumph of the enterprise. All through the day a
silence hung over the Spanish camp, broken only by the tolling of
bells and the murmur of prayer and chanting and exhortation. The
Peruvians, most mistakingly believing that they were preparing to
leave the city and run the fatal hazard of the mountain passes, left
them unmolested and went on with their own dispositions. The Inca
departed southward at dawn, his heart full of heavy forebodings, and
yet firmly persuaded that duty as well as necessity compelled the
observance of the sacred duty he was going to perform; while Ruminavi
and his captains busied themselves in organising the people according
to their divisions, or nations, preparatory to dismissing them to
their homes.
And so it came about that, when that ever memorable Saturday came, the
amazed and delighted Spaniards looked out upon the surrounding hills
and saw that the innumerable hosts which for months had blackened the
hillsides and covered the plain had melted away and vanished like the
creatures of an evil dream.
“Behold how quickly the Lord has answered the prayer of His servants!”
cried Valverde, when the news was brought to him, and he came out on
the terrace before the palace of Viracocha, which he had consecrated
as the Cathedral of San Francisco. “Behold the Lord of Hosts hath
spoken and His enemies are scattered, even as were the multitudes of
Sennacherib before Salem! Now, soldiers of the Cross, go forth and
conquer, for the voice of your contrition has risen up to Heaven and
the hour of your deliverance is at hand. Go now and take the triumph
that awaits you and the blessing of God and His holy Church go with
you!”
The soldiers who had assembled before the terrace at the sound of his
voice knelt by one impulse and received his benediction. Then they ate
as good a meal as their scanty resources afforded them and set about
their preparations.
Juan Pizarro’s first plan of attack had been greatly altered in after
debate. In the first place the assault was to be made under cover of
darkness, as the Peruvians, like all Indian nations, never fought at
night unless forced to do so. Secondly, Don Hernando was to take
command of the troop which was to carry out the flanking operations,
while Gonzalo Pizarro, with Pedro de Candia as Captain of the
Artillery, was to hold the square and what was left of the city.
The morning was busily employed in constructing scaling-ladders and
mantlets, to protect the assailants from the stones that would be
showered upon them, and shortly after the midday meal Juan Pizarro, at
the head of forty horse, rode out of the city to the southward. This
move was a feint to persuade the Peruvian leaders that he had gone on
a foraging raid to replenish the exhausted store-houses of Cuzco.
But as soon as the sudden darkness had fallen over the valley he
turned aside and threaded his way up through the side valleys on to
the open plain which was commanded by the curved northern and eastern
face of the great fortress. Meanwhile another party on foot had left
the city carrying the ladders and mantlets, and made their way up
under cover of the darkness to the gorge of the Rodadero past the
south-eastern flank of the fortress and met him on the plain. By this
time, too, Don Hernando had taken his troop round by the north up the
steep, paved roads towards the head of the pass from which de Soto and
his companions had first seen the City of the Sun.
The Sacsahuaman, the guardian fortress of the metropolis of the Land
of the Four Regions, was at this time by far the most splendid and
stately monument of architectural skill in the Western Hemisphere, and
would have lost little by comparison with some of the strongest places
of the Old World. It was, indeed, rather a fortified hill than a
fortress--a Gibraltar of the land.
On the side facing the city it towered up an almost sheer ascent of
more than seven hundred feet, faced with massive masonry, and
approachable only by narrow zigzag paths and flights of steps hewn in
the living rock, and absolutely unapproachable by a hostile force so
long as the summit or fortress proper was held even by a scanty
garrison. The approaches to the hill at either end were ravines
dominated by high walls built of stones so huge and solidly set
together that they stand to-day as firm as the primæval rock on which
they are founded. To the northward the true fighting face, commanding
the little, level plain of the Rodadero, consists of three angled
walls of cyclopean stonework, extending in the shape of a bent bow and
rising in terraces one above the other to a height of some seventy
feet, and the lower of these walls forms a curve of some eighteen
hundred feet in length.
At the time of the Conquest this colossal structure was crowned by
three towers, the central and greatest of which was the true citadel,
half palace, half fortress, built close to the perpendicular wall
overlooking the city, and rising some sixty feet above its summit.
These three towers have vanished, and much of the outworks are damaged
now, torn down by the Conquerors to yield dressed stones for the
building of the modern city, but, even after the ravages of three
centuries, the Sacsahuaman remains to-day the greatest as well as the
most marvellous structure of the New World.
Such, then, was the strong place which the remnant of the Spanish army
in Cuzco, something less than a hundred men in all, set out to storm
on that memorable night. If it had been held by disciplined troops,
furnished with even the most primitive artillery of the times, it
would have been impregnable, but its present defenders possessed only
the arms of savage warfare--bows and arrows, darts and stones, and for
closer quarters axes, maces and swords of copper, while its
assailants, few as they were, were equipped with the most efficient
arms that the art of war had so far produced.
Had it not been for the fatal decision of the night before the whole
country would still have been occupied by the countless throngs,
through which it would have been impossible for the attacking forces
to have passed without discovery, as they now did, until they had
reached the points at which the assault was to be delivered. Instead
of this they must have been entangled and overwhelmed in the difficult
defiles which, by an oversight of which no European commander could
have been guilty, they now found unguarded.
The point which Juan Pizarro had selected for his attack was a great
gateway opening on to the narrow valley through which the little
stream now known as the Rodadero flows down to the ravine. This was
called the Tiapunco, or Gate of Sand, possibly from the sandy nature
of the little plain. It was an opening in the lower and outer wall of
the fortifications, and led on to the first terrace of level ground
between the outer and middle wall.
When they reached it they found it blocked by masses of stone which
made almost as solid a barrier as the wall itself, and guarded by
vigilant sentries, who instantly gave the alarm by kindling a huge
pile of grass and brushwood saturated with oil and fat which had been
built up in an angle beside the gate. The moment that the flames leapt
up they were answered by others all along the triple walls and on the
battlements of the central towers.
A score of archers and half as many arquebusiers had come up with the
ladders and mantlets, and these Juan Pizarro posted on a little
eminence on the other side of the stream about forty paces away, with
orders to keep the terrace and wall clear while a company of sappers
attacked the pile of stones in the gateway with their picks and
crowbars.
The pain of his wounded jaw had been so great that he had been forced
to discard his helmet and trust entirely to his buckler, yet, in spite
of this, he led the first party up to the assault as coolly as though
he had been encased from head to foot in mail of proof.
Before they had reached the gate the alarm had spread over the whole
vast fortress, and the three terraces were already alive with armed
men. A storm of missiles, arrows, javelins, and stones was rained down
upon the sappers as they advanced to the attack, but the next moment
the roar of the arquebuses rolled out, and the heavy balls, directed
by the light of the fires, plunged into the crowded masses of men.
Then came the hissing flight of the long, steel-headed arrows and the
short, heavy, crossbow bolts, which did almost as much execution as
the bullets. Under cover of this fire the mantlets were pushed
forward, and under them pick and lever and crowbar went to work on the
stones.
A little higher up one of the scaling-ladders had been planted against
the outer wall, and up this began to crawl a dark stream of mail-clad
men, headed by Sebastian ben-Alcazar with his buckler close down over
his head, and a long, broad-bladed dagger between his teeth.
Four times was the ladder planted against the wall, and four times did
the gallant Spanish Moor climb to the top of it through a storm of
missiles, only to be flung down again when he had almost reached the
top. The fifth time a well-directed volley from the archers swept the
wall clear for a moment and in that moment he made good his footing.
He struck down two warriors with his dagger, and then, drawing his
heavy broadsword, he set his back against the inside of the wall and
valiantly held the place he had won until a dozen more had scrambled
up the ladder and planted themselves beside him.
Then, shoulder to shoulder and with bucklers interlaced, they went
like a moving wall of iron along the terrace towards the gate, hewing
down all who opposed them with the swift, swinging strokes of their
good Toledo blades. Meanwhile the sappers had been doing their work
well, and the Peruvian warriors, gallant as they were, were recoiling
before the well-directed arrow-flights and the volleys of the
ever-dreaded fire-arms. Presently a great stone was prised out from
below and sent rolling down into the valley followed by an avalanche
of others, and at last the gate was clear.
“Dios y Santiago! Make way there for God and Spain, ye heathens!”
roared old Carvahal, flinging his huge bulk first into the breach. “To
me, comrades, to me! Carrai! there goes another heathen soul to Hell!”
he shouted again as he struck out with his heavy blade at the first of
a stream of warriors that had poured down into the gateway, and the
splendidly attired Peruvian rolled over with severed shield arm and
head split to the jaws.
Close behind Carvahal came Hernando de Soto and Juan Pizarro followed
by a score of men shouting the familiar war-cry. For some minutes they
were checked by the solid mass of warriors which had poured down from
the second terrace to oppose them, and so close was the press that
they could scarcely find room to use their weapons. They were even
driven back a few feet by the sheer weight of the crowd descending
upon them; but meanwhile ben-Alcazar and his comrades had been hacking
and hewing away at the Peruvian flank, more ladders had been planted
against the outer wall; the archers and arquebusiers had left their
position as soon as there was danger of their volleys injuring friends
as well as foes, and they too had joined in the desperate escalade.
Again and again the ladders were hurled away from the wall by the
ever-increasing throngs of warriors who came pouring down from the
upper terraces, and again and again they were up-reared, until, one by
one, the climbing columns of men gained the summit of the first
rampart and made good their footing. Some drew their weapons and
turned fiercely on the swarming defenders while others dragged the
ladders up in readiness for the assault on the second line. Before
long ben-Alcazar had nearly forty men behind him, and, forming these
into a solid wedge of steel and iron, he drove them deep into the
flank of the column that was still holding the assailants of the gate
in check.
For a few moments it stuck fast as though locked in and overwhelmed by
the swarm of men into which it had driven itself. Then the wedge began
to move slowly forward again, and then the column burst asunder, half
of it scattered flying up the slope and the other half fast shut in
between the wedge and the gate.
Now the wedge dissolved and spread out into a double line, and between
this and the head of the Spanish column coming through the gate the
Peruvian warriors were entrapped. They had no more chance against the
steel-clad Spanish soldiery than a mob of children would have had
against themselves, but they went down to the last man fighting and
dying like heroes, and when the bloody, pitiless work was over the
Gate of Sand was won, and the hitherto inviolate fortress was
impregnable no longer.