“Save him! Save him! He is too gallant a man to die!” shouted Don Hernando springing forward towards him.
The great mace swung round again and then like a stone from a catapult it whistled through the air, and taking Don Hernando full on the breast it sent him reeling backwards and hurled him prone on the roof. The next moment old Ruminavi drew himself up erect and, still without turning his back on his foes, sprang into the air. The next he was lying smashed out of all human shape on the stones five hundred feet below.
The Spaniards rushed forward and leant over the battlements peering down into the fearful abyss. Then de Soto stood up and made the sign of the Cross and said in a choked, husky voice—
“Heathen or not, comrades, a stark warrior and a good patriot! May God receive his gallant soul in peace. Amen!”
EPILOGUE
It is one of the misfortunes of the romancer who devotes himself to the re-telling of a story which has already been recorded by the pen of History that he cannot deal with his characters as he would with those who are purely the creation of his own fancy. Here or there a date or an incident may be altered, and to a certain extent he may put such words as he pleases into the mouths of those whom he has recalled from the grave to play their parts upon the stage which he has reconstructed for them. But with this the license which he may legitimately use is exhausted. To push his privileges beyond this point would be to utterly destroy the verisimilitude of his narrative by bringing it into flat contradiction with the known facts of history.
Thus I am well aware that in the present instance the unities of Romance would demand that not Ruminavi, but Manco-Capac, should have died that gallant death on the citadel of the Sacsahuaman, or, better still, have brought back a great host with him from the South and overwhelmed his conquerors in the hour of their victory. But the circumstances narrated by the chroniclers of the Conquest, some of whom were actually present, are substantially as they have been given here. The gallant Manco was far away when the last assault was made, although even had he been present the final result, although it might have been deferred, could hardly have been different in the end. And yet as it happens it is this very fact which makes it possible for the romancer to bring the tale of the Conquest of Peru to a close with at least a plausible assumption that in the end poetic justice was done.
With the fall of the Sacsahuaman the Siege of Cuzco virtually ended. It is true that after the seed-time Manco came back and once more encompassed the city with innumerable legions, but meanwhile the Spaniards had stripped the surrounding country bare, not only of the remaining stores of grain, but also of the remnants of the Peruvian flocks and herds. Almagro’s men, too, were marching back from Chile, and reinforcements at length were pushing their way through the mountain defiles from the cities of the coast, and ship-load after ship-load of adventurers from Panama and Nicaragua were landing on the doomed shores of Peru. So in the end the gallant Manco, seeing his legions starving by thousands around him, was forced to yield to famine if not to the Spaniards, and finally raised the siege.
From Cuzco he retired into the fastnesses of Yucay and the impregnable fortress of Ollantay-Tambo. Here expedition after expedition was sent against him, only to be cut off to a man or hurled back in defeat and disaster. Then the well-earned vengeance of Eternal Justice fell hard and heavy on those iron Conquerors who for lust of riches had outraged every canon of human and Divine law. The gold that they came to seek proved their ruin when they had found it. Faction turned against faction, and comrade against comrade, and fiercer fights by far were fought between Spaniard and Spaniard than had ever been fought between Spaniard and Peruvian, and to-day there is not a rood of ground on all the South American continent over which the golden banner of Spain flies.
Of those of the Conquerors who have figured in these pages only one reaped any earthly reward for his labours, and this was the gallant and gentle knight Hernando de Soto, who, after the Civil Wars married a noble Inca princess, whom he took with him as his bride to Spain and presented at the Court of the Great Emperor. Of the rest, Alonso de Molina, as we have seen, died with his head on the breast of his well-beloved enemy and rival in love. Juan Pizarro died a soldier’s death on the citadel of the Sacsahuaman. His brother Gonzalo, taken in revolt against his lawful sovereign, lost his head on the block. Carvahal, after winning himself the title of “the Demon of the Andes,” was dragged to the scaffold in a basket and there hung, drawn, and quartered under the sentence of the victorious Viceroy. Pedro de Candia was murdered on the bloody field of Chupas by Almagro his own commander, and Almagro himself, taken prisoner in Cuzco by Don Hernando, was garroted in prison after abjectly begging his life from his conqueror. And Don Hernando himself went home to Spain only to be flung into a dungeon, in which he languished for twenty weary years—the last of his ever-famous family—to be released in the evening of his days, and to watch from the sad eminence of a hundred years of life the ruin of the great enterprise in which he had borne so conspicuous and, on the whole, so honourable a part.