“Thou canst send me to the flames, Inca, but that will avail thee but little against the wrath of thy Father, who shall presently turn his face from thee, and in the days to come thou shalt follow me, for on thee the embalmers shall never do their work, and thou shalt have no place in the Chambers of the Dead. The golden mask shall never cover thy face,[10] and thy soul shall wander for ever in the darkness, seeking its body yet never finding it, for thou, Inca, shalt never see the bright portals of the Mansions of the Sun!”
Again the horror of her words held Atahuallpa silent, his face blanched to a dull grey; his lips were half parted and dry, and his eyes rolled in his head, striving vainly to meet her steady gaze, for the guilt that was in his soul opened the way to fear, and the crowned despot and lord of life and death to millions trembled before the victim he was about to send to the flames. But as soon as she had ceased his rage got the better of his terror. He snatched a spear from the hand of the guard who stood nearest to him and, with a stroke like lightning, drove it through the heart of one of the four soldiers he had bidden to seize Mama-Lupa.
“When thy Lord speaks to hear is to obey or die. Take her away and let me see her die, or may the face of my Father the Sun be darkened if I do not send you all to the flames with her!”
“Ay, it shall be darkened, Inca!” Mama-Lupa cried as they dragged her away. “It shall be darkened with a cloud of blood, and thou shalt see it fall from Heaven and consume thee and thine utterly with its flames!”
By this time, though terror was shaking every heart, the angry words of the Inca had stayed the impulse which had so nearly turned the fear into panic, and as Mama-Lupa was taken to the scaffold the multitude was silent and orderly once more. One of the soldiers climbed up the wall of fagots, dragging her after him by a rope that they had noosed round her waist, and then threw her down among the others, bound hand and foot.
All this while Ullomaya and Manco and the other victims had stood wondering and watching yet making no attempt to escape, knowing well that they could never pass the triple files of spearmen round the scaffold. But now the knowledge of their own near-approaching doom came back, and Amaro put his left arm about his wife and drew her to him. The next moment a shudder ran through her body, and with a little gasping cry her head dropped heavily on to his breast. Then he raised the red dripping knife high above him, and with a swift downward stroke drove it into his own heart.
As he fell with his arm still clasped about his dead wife, Manco snatched the knife out of his side and, throwing his arm round Nahua, drew her to him just as the Inca made the signal to light the pyre. Another instant and he would have heard the crackling of the kindled fagots, and the knife, wet with the blood of her father and mother, would have been buried in Nahua’s heart.
But before a torch touched the fagots a great screaming cry of almost more than mortal terror rang out from thousands of throats at once, and tens of thousands of hands went up, pointing to the sun. The torch-men looked up too and stood transfixed with terror, their torches dropping from their trembling hands, for Mama-Lupa’s terrible words were coming true. A blood-red haze was stealing across the face of the sun sailing unclouded in the zenith. In the whole heavens there was neither cloud nor mist, but as the bloody haze deepened all the sky grew dim at once, and its azure turned to dusky grey. From Atahuallpa on his throne to the destined victims of his unrighteous vengeance on the scaffold utter terror held every heart still and frozen in its icy grip.
CHAPTER VII.
THE KINDLING OF THE PYRE
When the sound of the first myriad-voiced cry had died away the spell of a great silence fell upon the multitude. The torches smoked and smouldered out harmlessly on the ground, and they whose nerveless hands had dropped them stood like the rest, gazing upwards with fixed eyes, forgetful of all else but the awful portent in the sky.