“How do I know, Son of the Sun? Did not Zaïma the Queen shriek out her confession as the wives of Huayna-Capac dragged her away to join their Lord? Did she not scream it out again louder than before as the flames touched her and she called upon his spirit to be merciful to her, and did not many hear her whose lips thou hast closed as thou didst those of Mama-Lupa, my sister—yet not before she had sent me trusty word of the truth?
“But that is past. It was not thy hand that did the deed. For thee the question is now: Wilt thou be Inca or slave? Wilt thou live or die? The price to pay is not great. In a few hours I can have potions ready, distilled from my roots and herbs, enough to slay every unbeliever in the city so swiftly that none of them shall know the manner of his death. The boy here who speaks for them can see that they are secretly mixed with their food and drink, and an hour after they have eaten and drunk thou art free, and Lord of thine own land again.”
“And the price?” said the Inca in a hoarse whisper, once more dropping on to his seat and covering his eyes with his hands.
“For me,” replied the Palla, “the office of Chief Priestess of the Sun and Mother of the Virgins in Cuzco—a gift that a word of the Inca’s can give me. The boy can ask for himself.”
“And thine?” said Atahuallpa, raising his head and looking at Filipillo.
It was a moment when, strange as the saying may seem, the fate of an empire hung on the word of a boy. Had Filipillo had but a few years more of life’s discipline to teach him wisdom and restraint, had he even known how enormous was the mistake he was about to make, he would have asked only what the Inca had already promised him—elevation to noble rank and the right to wear the insignia of the Sacred Blood—and trusted to the course of events to cool a passion which the Inca could no more gratify, even if he had the will, than he could have diverted it from the Princess Pillcu-Cica to a more attainable object. But instead of that his wayward love and longing flamed up hot in his untaught heart, and, seeing, as he thought, the prize within his grasp, he said, with somewhat less of meekness in his voice than he had used before—
“My Lord has already promised me the right to wear the yellow Llautu and to take my place among the nobles of the land. That would have been more than his slave had dared to hope for had not the service demanded of him been so great and full of danger. Mine is the only hand that can put the poison into the Spaniards’ meat and drink; but were I discovered—nay, even suspected—nothing less than a death of fiery torment would be mine. Therefore, Lord, to give me greater hope and a better heart in so deadly an enterprise, I pray thee add to thy promise the gratification of a love that has so far consumed my heart with hopeless longing.”
He paused for a moment, and the agile intellect of Atahuallpa instantly went back to the scene of de Soto’s embassy at the hot springs, and he remembered the lad’s bold and lawless glances at the princess, and the disquiet, as she had afterwards told him, they had caused her. His black brows met suddenly over his eyes, and fixing a steady, staring gaze upon him, he said in a cold hard tone—
“Say on and tell me which it is of my handmaids’ handmaids that thou hast honoured with thy choice.”
The note in the Inca’s voice and the flash in his eyes told Filipillo plainly that the crisis had come. One older or wiser or less ignorantly daring would have taken the warning and deferred the request, or asked only that his Lord should have given him a mate befitting the new rank that was to be his. But he, puffed up by the arrogant sense of the power which he knew to be his, lifted his head and said boldly—