“Let the room be cleared and guarded!” he said. “Remain here yourself with the guard and let none enter on any pretence till I return.”
“I hear but to obey, Lord!” the old warrior answered, bending yet lower. “I will guard the chamber with my life, even as I will guard thy dominions against all that shall dare seek to take them from thee.”
“Nor could they be better guarded than by him whose shield was ever the best bulwark of my father’s realm!” Atahuallpa replied almost tenderly, as he laid his hand lightly on the old man’s head. Then, leading his mother by the hand that had slain his father, he passed from the death-chamber through the little throng of princes and nobles, who bowed themselves almost to the floor as he went by and then arose and followed him at the bidding of Challcuchima, who at once blocked the passage with a guard of soldiers and remained alone in the room to await the coming of his master.
He drew the heavy curtains of brilliantly dyed wool, interthreaded with fine-drawn strings of gold, closely across the entrance and then he went to the bedside and reverently drew back the covering from the face of the dead Inca. He stooped and looked at it, and then suddenly started upright and clasped his hands over his forehead. Then he looked down again more closely than before, and, after gazing awhile, he closed with a gentle and reverent touch the glazed eyes that were staring up with their last look of horror scarce faded from them. Then he softly pushed the protruding tongue back into the mouth and bound up the fallen jaw with a strip of dyed cotton that lay beside the pillow.
“My Lord died hard, it would seem,” he muttered to himself, “and yet all thought his end could not fail to be peaceful. Well, well—hard or easy, it was very near, and I had rather have Atahuallpa the soldier-prince for my lord and leader than Huascar the lover of women and dreamer of dreams. What is done is past, and who knows but that some day we may have a wider realm than this and my Lord may reign with one foot planted on Quito and the other on Cuzco, master of all the Four Regions.
“There is no strife like the strife of brothers, and these two will not long reign side by side in peace. After that will come the day of brave men and stout warriors, and the victory shall be with us—with skill and order and strength and valour! It was a bold deed and a fearful one—I would have slain a score of men ere I had permitted it, yet now it is done and the Divine Ones themselves could not undo it.”
CHAPTER III.
THE WARNING OF THE LLAPA
While Challcuchima was soliloquising thus to himself over the dreadful secret that he had discovered, a youth, who could scarce have seen his fifteenth year, was walking with slow steps and down-bent head from the great gate of the palace towards a vast building which loomed darkly through the dusk of the starlit night some five hundred paces along the side of the slope on which it stood, like the palace, facing on to the great square of the city.
Though he was one of those favoured Children of the Sun who ripened to maturity so rapidly, he had yet hardly passed from boyhood to youth, but his stature was already tall and his limbs lithe and strongly shaped, and his thoughts, as he walked, were rather those of a man than of a boy. He was one of those who had been summoned by the high priest to hear the last words of his father the Inca; for this was Manco-Capac, bearer of the Divine Name, and youngest and fairest son of Huayna-Capac and his sister-wife and Coya,[5] Mama-Oello, princess of Cuzco.
What he had seen and heard in the death-chamber had filled him, not only with the darkest forebodings for his people and his country, but also with feelings close akin to agony and terror which in this hour were sharper and bitterer than they. The great building towards which he was walking was the House of the Virgins of the Sun, in which dwelt the fairest and most nobly-born daughters of the Sacred Race, awaiting the time of their marriage or vowed to their perpetual maiden-wifehood in the service of their Divine spouse, the Sun, and among them was one, the very gem and flower of them all, Nahua, the daughter of Amaro, son of Ullomaya the high priest, a little maiden who had seen but ten years of life, and whose beauty, like that of one of Nature’s fairest flowers just opening to smile at the sun, had in one fatal instant set his heart aflame.