The virgin of the sun

by George Chetwynd Griffith

“There closes the death-trap!” he laughed. “Well, now it is just a question of who lives longest. There is nothing much to be done with these fellows. There is better work than that to do in front. Adios, Señores!” and with that he put spurs to his horse again and, waving his sword as though in invitation to the shouting throng behind him, he galloped away over the plain and joined the troop.

Juan Pizarro had by this time got his men into battle array—that is to say, he had divided them into three divisions in the invariable Spanish style, a main body or “battle” in the centre and two wings a little in advance of it. But the gleaming wall of soldiery in front made no move as they rode up to it, and when they came within some thirty paces they found a rising ridge of ground running from the mountain-side to the river across the plain strewn and piled so thickly with stones that no cavalry could charge across it without being broken, and as they halted before this showers of arrows and stones from slings were rained upon them, and then bands of javelin-men ran out almost up the ridge of stones and hurled their heavy weapons pointed with tempered copper at the horses’ heads and flanks until the maddened animals, already galled by the arrows and bruised by the stones, began to rear and plunge and swerve aside in somewhat ominous fashion, and Juan Pizarro, seeing that not much good could come of this, drew his troop back and ordered a score of men to dismount and cross the barrier on foot.

Nearly twice the number obeyed, and then, sword and dagger in hand, the grim, iron-clad Spanish soldiery leapt through the stones and sprang at their assailants. It was steel against copper, iron cuirass against quilted cotton mail, European discipline and training against mere savage valour, and what followed was butchery until the Inca himself led a troop of his own body-guard down into the plain and drove the Spaniards back nearly to the barrier.

But meanwhile the right wing had scrambled through the stones, and, as they were forming to charge, old Ruminavi led a column of spearmen across their path while another moved out to cut them off by the rear. The spearmen took the charge kneeling with their spear-butts planted firmly in the ground. They were ridden over and slain almost to a man, but when the charge was past four of the dreaded war-beasts were writhing and kicking on the ground, screaming with pain and gashed with fearful wounds inflicted by the barbed copper lance-heads, and this was a greater loss to the Spaniards than a hundred men to the Peruvians.

Old Ruminavi himself rode at the first man who broke the line, caught his sword-thrust on his own Spanish buckler, and then dealt him so shrewd a blow with a huge, copper-headed mace that he hammered in the iron of his cap as though it had been parchment and broke his skull like an egg-shell beneath it. Almost at the same time the Inca, seeing three troopers playing sad havoc with their long swords among his own guards, put his Spanish lance down and charged one of them so strongly and so truly that he drove him from the saddle and flung him down among the struggling footmen, there to be speedily stabbed to death. And then, letting go his lance and unhooking his battle-axe, he clove another through helm and skull to the chin. Then he wrenched his axe out just in time to take a sword-cut from the other on his shield and drove the blade under his still up-lifted arm and hurled him too, crippled and bleeding, to the ground.

“Santiago! that was well hit, Señor Inca!” shouted Michael Asterre through the bars of his vizor.

He had just forced his way through the press towards the mounted and mailed figure, longing to find some worthy foe to prove his new armour and weapons, and when he saw the third man go down under the Inca’s fierce attack he made sure he had found one; but to his amazement and disgust the Inca only turned in his saddle towards him and then leapt his horse over the dead and dying and flung himself into another part of the battle.

All through the long burning afternoon the fight raged fast and furious, and until sundown Michael Asterre sought to close with the mailed figure that carried the sacred plumes in its helmet, but ever without success. Once only they came to blows, and then the Inca contented himself with taking the savage sword-cut on his buckler, and once more avoided the single combat without returning it.

There was another of the Spaniards, a man clad and armed like one of the meanest troopers, who also seemed to the Inca to meet him at every turn in the battle and three times he wounded him without taking a scratch back. Indeed so light and half-hearted were his blows that Manco took him at last for some soldier enfeebled by disease, and so avoided him too as not worthy of his own royal steel.

So the Battle of the Valley raged on until the sun drooped towards the western ridges and the long shadows of the mountains began to fall across the river and the now bloody plain. Yard by yard the Spaniards had driven the Peruvians back under their fortress walls. Superiority of discipline and weapons had now, as ever, proved better than superiority of numbers; and although neither the Inca nor Ruminavi had been captured or even wounded, so far as was known, yet when the Peruvians at length retreated into their impregnable fastnesses and Juan Pizarro took the remains of his troop back across the stony barrier to form his camp in the middle of the plain, where he would be secure from a night attack, he was fain to confess that, if all the battles to come were to be like this one, even victory would leave the Spanish forces so weak that it would be worthless to them.