But even as he said this he reeled in the saddle, and the Inca, calling to Ruminavi, sprang from his horse just in time to catch him in his arms as he fell. As he laid him down on the sand he saw that there was scarcely a part of his body in which he had not received a wound, and that blood was flowing from him in nearly a score of places. He at once took his morion off and bade one of his men go to the river for water. A draught of it revived him for the moment, and he put his hand to his neck and pulled out the gem that Nahua had given him.
“You can tell your princess, friend Manco, that I spoke truly when I said that this should only leave me with my life. I have not many more moments left. When they are over take it back to her and tell her that I died happier holding this dear token of her friendship than I could have lived without her love. As a loyal Spaniard I cannot wish you victory, but for her sake I can wish you safety and happiness when this evil war is over. Farewell, friend Manco! May your last fight be as hard a one as mine has been, and may you come better out of it. Mother of God, pray for one who is a sinner!—Dios y Santiago, they are coming!—Stand fast, gentlemen, for God and Spain! They are on us! Now strike! Ah, that was my death-wound, yet we must hold them a few minutes longer. It will not be long—not long——”
As the delirium of death had come on him he had struggled up into a sitting posture and waved his right hand above his head as though it still held a sword. Manco threw himself on his knees beside him, but just as he clasped him in his arms his head fell back heavily against his shoulder, and there, on the breast of his best-loved enemy, Alonso de Molina breathed out his gallant soul with a sigh so soft that even Manco’s strained ears could scarcely catch it.
He laid him down with gentle reverence on the sands, and when he had taken Nahua’s jewel from his neck he ordered one of the royal litters to be instantly brought that he might be taken back to the fortress, and while it was being brought he stood over him with bent head and wet eyes, mourning for him as man seldom mourns for his enemy, and, for the time, heedless in his sorrow of the battle which was still roaring away up the valley.
CHAPTER X.
BELEAGUERED
Nearly five months had passed since Juan Pizarro and Hernando de Soto had ridden at the head of twenty-eight wounded and wearied men, the sole survivors of the terrible Battle of the Valley, into the northern gates of Cuzco. Their homeward march had been one long fight of two nights and two days, during which not a man left his saddle save when he dropped from it overcome by wounds and weariness, and lay waiting for the axe or spear or mace which ended his fighting days for ever.
Those who reached the city had found it closely invested on all sides by seemingly innumerable hosts, which had come flocking from all quarters of the land in answer to the call of its last champion. The beleaguering hosts had opened to let them through, and the Peruvian warriors had laughed at them as their wounded and jaded steeds crawled feebly into what seemed the death-trap in which they were about to die, but those who had fallen behind had been butchered without pity.
The young Inca had fulfilled with terrible exactness the oath which he had sworn to Anda-Huillac on the fateful night when Nahua and Mama-Oello had devoted themselves to a death of shame and torment to buy him his last chance of liberty. The news of the Battle of the Valley had sped with the swiftness of lightning throughout the length and breadth of the land, and the Inca’s call to arms had been answered north and south and east and west by hosts of fierce and pitiless warriors, who had seemed to spring full-armed from the earth like the fabled fruit of the dragon’s teeth of old.
Wherever the Spaniards had settled in isolated families and small communities, they had been fallen upon and butchered, men, women, and children, without warning and without pity, for the day of reckoning had come, and the penalty of outrage and massacre, of plunder and treachery, had now to be paid.
Messenger after messenger had been dispatched from Cuzco to the coast, and when at length one of them had reached Pizarro in his newly-founded City of the Kings, he had sent an army of four hundred horse and foot to the relief of the sorely beleaguered city. Then the host which had been besieging Lima had drawn back into the mountains, hovering on the Spaniards’ flanks and rear until they had caught them entangled among the narrow, winding mountain-paths and the fearful gorges of the mountains. Then they had cut the bridges and broken down the roads before and behind them. Avalanches of rocks and stones had fallen upon them from inaccessible precipices, clouds of warriors had descended on their nightly camps, and though these had fallen by hundreds under the well-wielded Spanish weapons, in the end the inevitable happened, and of the army which was more than twice as strong as that which had conquered Atahuallpa in Cajamarca, only a few sorely-wounded stragglers had struggled back across the mountains to Lima to tell their tale of disaster and defeat.