But, as I have said, these things are not for me to tell, since I have neither the skill nor the knowledge to do so. What I have set down here is only the story of my own awakening out of the death-sleep into which the arts of the priests of the Sun had cast me with Golden Star, and of her return to join me in my new life. I have told of that and of all that befell us afterwards, and now there remains only the telling of that which fulfilled our strange fates and completed our happiness in the new world into which those fates had brought us.
Many weeks passed and grew into months before the oppressors were finally subdued and I found myself undisputed lord of all the land, and, as I had promised Joyful Star, all this had to come to pass before I would ask her to put her hand into mine and take her place beside me as my Coya and queen on the throne of Huayna-Capac.
But at length there was peace in the land and we returned from Lima, the capital of the Spaniards, where I had been proclaimed and acknowledged Inca and Emperor of my ancient domains, to the City of the Sun, which many loving and willing hands had cleansed of the abominations of its new idolatries and made in some measure fit to receive us, to crown our new lives with such happiness as, with the help and blessing of the Unnameable, we might be able to bestow upon each other.
The treasures of gold and silver and ornaments of jewels, the rich hangings and the sacred and precious emblems had been brought from the Hall of Gold and the throne-room beneath the Sacsahuaman and set up in the chief temple of the Spaniards, which stands in the place where the holy Temple of the Sun once stood and is in great part built of the self-same stones.[F]
It was the eve of the Feast of Raymi, or the Coming of the Sun, which in the olden time we counted as the beginning of the year, and I had determined that this day should witness the restoration of the old order and the beginning of my own true happiness—so that night Golden Star and I, as became the son and daughter of the Royal Race and Sacred Blood, watched and prayed according to the ancient rites—she in a chamber of what had once been the House of the Virgins of Sun, and I in the purified temple—from the setting of the sun until the first waning of the stars in the coming dawn.
Very early in the morning she was brought to me in the temple by Tupac-Rayca—whom I had in virtue of his pure blood and noble decent, consecrated Villac-Umu or High Priest of the Sun, and who had in turn invested such others of the Blood as he thought worthy with the subordinate dignities of the holy office. He and his attendants were arrayed in the ancient priestly robes and adorned with the sacred emblems of their rank, and Golden Star was attired as a royal Virgin of the Sun, in garments of white edged with scarlet and decked with ornaments of pure gold.
Then we prayed together before the newly-set-up altar, which stood over against the eastern window of the Sanctuary, and when that duty was ended, and while the growing light was yet dim, there came to us Joyful Star, also arrayed as a princess of the Blood, and Francis Hartness, whom my thankful people had already named Viracocha, after one of our golden-haired hero-gods of the olden time.
After them came all those of the Sacred Race that were left in the land—men and matrons, youths and maidens—all dressed in the long-forbidden garb of their forefathers, and ranged themselves in two silent, orderly ranks down the sides of the Sanctuary, waiting with patient eagerness for that which they had been bidden here to see.
Above the altar hung the great golden Emblem of the Sun, upon which the radiant glance of the Lord of Light would first fall through the circular window in the eastern wall, and on it was a pyramid of wood anointed with scented oils; for here was soon to be re-kindled—if our Lord the Sun should smile on the new fortunes of his long-suffering children—without the aid of human hands, that sacred fire first lit by Manco Capac and Mama Occlu, son and daughter of the Sun, and which had burnt unquenched through all the ages that had passed from the founding to the fall of our ancient empire. Beside it lay a cone-shaped vessel of burnished gold, in the depths of which the Sacred Fleece awaited the touch that was to change it into flame.
When all were assembled, Tupac-Rayca mounted the steps of the altar, and, facing the silent throng, began to speak in the ancient and unforgotten tongue and said,—