“Ay, praise to the Lord, for in His strength we shall conquer, though of ourselves we be but few and weak. Mount and forward, gentlemen. Yonder dawns the morning of salvation for us which shall end the long night that we have passed through together. Forward, and God be with us!”
As he said this he turned his horse a little to the right and rode past where Valverde stood with the crucifix still raised above him by the strong arms of Brother Joachim. As he passed it he lowered the sword which ere long was to drink so deeply of innocent blood, and made the sign of the Cross with the hilt, and the priest blessed each man of the troop as he went by with bended head and crossing himself. When all had passed he and Brother Joachim mounted their mules and took their places in the rear, and so those whom they believed to be the sons of the god Viracocha passed from the wondering gaze of the first of the Children of the Sun who had beheld them, and went on their way to El-Dorado.
There is no room to tell here of all that befell them day by day on that first march of theirs, for this is not the story of their journeyings—of which you may learn better from the pens of those who made them—but rather of the things that they did when the end of the march had at length brought them to the scene of their triumphs and their crimes.
They passed through Caxas and Huamacucho, finding them as de Soto had said, and being entertained with the simple and yet bounteous hospitality of the kindly-hearted people who were soon to whisper their names to each other as words of more than mortal terror.
They were surrounded by sights as strange as Christian eyes had ever seen, though not yet by things as terrible as those which the soldiers of Cortes had seen a few years before far away in Mexico on the other side of the central line of the earth. Everywhere they beheld the signs of perfect peace and order, though but a few days’ marches to the eastward the earth had trembled not many weeks before beneath the tread of countless hosts rushing to the conflict out of which was to spring the doom of Atahuallpa and the Children of the Sun, and which Ullomaya the priest had spoken by the bedside of the great Huayna-Capac in far-off Quito.
Everywhere, too, throughout the valleys and towns they saw the wealth of field and mine and the triumphs won by patient labour spread about them with lavish hand. The fields were green and golden with bounteous crops. In the groves of fruit-trees the branches bent beneath the weight of their luscious harvest. Gold and silver seemed to be in as common use as brass and iron were in Spain, and the people, clad in their bright-coloured stuffs of many hues and decked with jewels such as only princes wore in Europe, seemed to be living lives as calm and cloudless as the endless summer which smiled down from the changeless skies above them.
Many another hand than old Carvahal’s closed ever and anon itchingly on sword-hilt or pike-handle at the sight of all this; and often passions less holy than the ardour of conquest, to say nothing of the service of the Church, stirred in many a grim warrior’s breast, for the daughters of this strange and childlike people were very fair and dainty to look upon with eyes which, like theirs, had starved so long for the sight of woman’s beauty.
But the orders of the Captain were very strict, and, what was more, he obeyed them himself, for the greatest honour that can be accounted to Francisco Pizarro is accorded to him by those who truthfully say that he never asked a follower of his to dare or do that which he would not do himself, or forego delights which he himself would not go without.
Only once on that long march did any man seek to break the bonds of this iron discipline, and this was done by one Pedro Navarro, a man-at-arms who, on the morning that the army left Huamacucho, was accused by one of the headmen of the town of having offered violence and insult to his daughter.
Pizarro instantly put off the march until the accusation was made good in due form. Then in the presence of the army and the townspeople he called the offender before him and said—