The virgin of the sun

by George Chetwynd Griffith

Candia had trained his piece with all too deadly certainty. The little ball struck a golden-armoured, gaily plumed Peruvian who stood at the head of a column of guards within a few paces of the Inca’s litter. He happened at the moment to be looking up towards the fortress. The shot struck him full in the face, burst his head asunder as though it had been a rotten orange, and ploughed its way through the files behind him, leaving a long row of bloody and mangled corpses to mark its path.

To the soldier of to-day such a thing would seem but a trifling and common-place incident of warfare, but to the Peruvians it was the revelation of a new power of destruction so strange and terrible, that its effect upon their minds was as great as would be that of a bolt falling from heaven upon a modern battlefield and annihilating a whole regiment.

But de Candia’s cannon-shot was but the prelude to the dreadful tragedy that was to come. Almost at the same moment the other falconet, which had been mounted in the banqueting hall, belched forth its spurt of flame and cloud of smoke through one of the windows, and sent its ball into the midst of another dense mass of people that had rushed together at the sound of the first shot, impelled by that strange instinct which is common to both sheep and men when faced with some new and therefore more appalling danger.

Then, a moment later, from every window and doorway in the Spanish quarters jets of flame and waves of smoke gushed forth, and a storm of bullets from the arquebuses swept across the square and plunged into the crowded masses of the unarmed and helpless Peruvians. The thick and stifling smoke made by the crude and imperfect powder rolled across the square, blown by an easterly wind into the faces of the panic-stricken people, blinding and choking them. Then the roar of the cannon and the rattle of the musketry was followed by the hoarse, roaring battle-cry of the Spaniards.

“Santiago! Santiago! At them for God and Spain! Ohé! Ohé! At them! At them! Cristo y Santiago!”

Now rang out the clattering thunder of hoofs and the swift, orderly tramp of mailed feet on the stone pavement of the plaza, as the Spanish horse and foot rushed forth from their concealment, and flung themselves with murderous fury and resistless impetus upon the struggling, screaming swarms, which scattered before them in a vain attempt to escape from the crowded square. The cavaliers leapt their iron-shod horses into the shrinking masses of men and women, swords rose and fell every moment, gleaming ever redder and redder in the light of the afternoon sun. Pikes and halberds and axes thrust and hacked their way with pitiless swiftness through the unresisting crowds, and high above the screams of terror and agony that came from the helpless victims still rose the hoarse and murderous cry—

“Dios y Santiago! Ohé! Ohé! Strike for Spain and El-Dorado!”

And still the horses reared and plunged, leaping hither and thither as the spurs of their riders drove them on, stamping the gaily-dressed throngs down and crushing them out of all human shape against the stones till they were more than fetlock deep in blood. And still the cruel steel did its murderous work, wielded by hands that knew no mercy, and ever and anon the cannon boomed out again, and the arquebusiers, reloading their cumbrous pieces, sent their bullets wherever they could aim them without hurting their comrades.

On the western side of the plaza there was a high wall of mud and stone stretching between two buildings some two hundred paces apart, and against this was pressed a vast throng of panting, struggling wretches, hemmed in on all sides by the Spanish horse and foot. The bullets tore their way through the dense mass, the stamping horse-hoofs struck them down by dozens, and the sweeping, thrusting steel mowed them down by scores. At length the vast throng surged outwards for a moment, and then, like a wave beaten back by the rocks, recoiled upon the wall. For one awful moment it remained motionless, pent in between the closing ring of steel and the wall. Then the wall swayed and tottered, and with a rumbling crash fell outwards, and over its ruins and through the cloud of dust that rose over them the wave of human agony and terror surged forward and scattered into broken and flying units over the open field beyond.

Some of the cavalry, foremost among whom was old Carvahal, his broad face purple-red with the lust of slaughter, rolling to and fro in his saddle, shouting hoarse battle-cries and invoking every saint in the calendar as he laid about him to right and left with his long sword, spurred forward over the ruins of the wall and spread out over the plain, careering hither and thither, and trampling and cutting their screaming victims down; but the greater part turned back to take their share in the still more bloody work that was going on round the gorgeous litter of the Inca.