De Soto, with an eye at once to good generalship and the value of first impressions, threw his hand up again and reined in his charger within fifty yards or so of the water.
“That bridge was never made to carry such as we are,” he said to his two companions. “We should make as foolish a spectacle as we should an easy prey to those heathens did we trust to it and fall through. For my part I would rather trust the water. Follow me, Caballeros! God and Santiago for Spain!”
With that he set spurs to his horse, galloped to the river’s edge and plunged into the water, followed with a great splashing and snorting of steeds by the rest of the troop. They crossed the river bed and gained the opposite bank with scarcely a break in their ranks. On the far side there was a broad stretch of level meadow-land, and across this they cantered in perfect order under the wondering gaze of the silent thousands drawn up on either side of the Inca’s pleasure-house.
This was a vast, low structure, white-walled and built in the form of three sides of a square, with the open side towards the river. The interior space was filled with a brilliant array, composed of the Inca’s chief warriors and the ministers of his court, and in the midst of a great semicircle, awaiting his already expected visitors, sat Atahuallpa, the most plainly-dressed man in all the glittering assembly, and yet distinguished from all by the golden throne-chair in which he sat while all the others stood about him or crouched at his feet, and by the crimson fringe of the borla which covered his forehead and half concealed his eyes. For all the sign that the Inca gave the display of the Spanish advance had been wasted, though wondering and perhaps admiring glances were not wanting among the courtiers and the bevy of bright-eyed, long-haired princesses that was gathered about the Inca’s throne. But Atahuallpa sat like an image carved in bronze, not even raising his head as the strange and terrible apparition approached him.
De Soto halted his troop some hundred paces from the Inca’s throne, and then at a word from him Diego’s trumpet rang out and it deployed into line. Then, with Molina on his right hand and ben-Alcazar on his left, he rode forward, and the three helmed and plumed heads bowed together within ten paces of the throne. Still Atahuallpa gave no sign that he was even conscious of their presence. His body was there on the throne, but his spirit was far away in Quito, whither it had travelled back through five years to the Day of Disaster to watch the darkness stealing over the face of the sun, and to hear the words which had foretold the doom of which these fair-faced, shining strangers, mounted on their marvellous and terrible beasts, were assuredly the harbingers.
Somewhat chilled by so frigid a reception, de Soto called Filipillo to him and bade him deliver to the Inca the brief speech that he had already prepared for him, telling Atahuallpa who they were and whence they came, whose servants they were and how their lord and master, His Most Catholic Majesty of Spain, had sent them to bear his greetings across many thousand leagues of ocean to his brother, the Emperor of the West.
This oration Filipillo delivered, putting more than enough bombast into his tone as though he knew that all this splendid state which surrounded the doomed monarch was but as a thin plate of burnished gold soon to be pierced and cut asunder by a dagger of steel. There had been a time when such as he would scarce have dared to enter the presence of the Inca grovelling on his face in the dust. Now he stood before him erect, almost as an equal, and as he stood so and delivered his message his bold eyes wandered from the impassive countenance of the Inca to a slender, half-clad form seated beside the throne, and a fair face framed in long, shining hair—a face whose beauty, as it happened, was ere long to prove fatal to him at whose footstool Pillcu-Cica-Ñusta, princess of the blood-royal of Peru, lay as a slave might lie at the feet of her master.
When the speech was ended de Soto awaited some reply from the Inca, but none came. Atahuallpa still sat motionless, not showing even by a movement of his eyes that he had understood or even heard what Filipillo had said. Then a tall and splendidly-dressed old warrior who stood at the right hand of the throne, and who was none other than Challcuchima, General-in-Chief of the army of Quito, said curtly—
“It is well so far, but the ears of our Lord are not for such base voices as thine, thou slave of his servants! Let thy master speak, and it may be that our Lord will hear.” This speech Filipillo, with no very good grace, translated to de Soto, and he, having already acquired sufficient of the Peruvian tongue to achieve a few words in it, prayed the Inca to answer with his own lips. Hearing this Atahuallpa looked up for the first time and said in a clear, passionless voice—
“Go back and tell him who sent you that I am keeping a fast which will be ended this midnight. To-morrow I will come and speak with him. Till then let him remain in the lodgings that have been given him and await my pleasure with patience.”