“Ah, slave and son of a slave!” she cried shrilly, “so thou hast returned with thy new masters to whom thou hast betrayed thy Lord. Truly his doom lies heavy upon him since his life is at the mercy of so base a thing as thou art!”
“What is that, she says?” said Pizarro.
“She says, Master,” he replied, “that though I may have saved you from her poisons, and though you may slay her and the Inca too, yet none can save you from the tempest of spears that is about to burst upon you.”
“Take her and search her, some of you,” said Pizarro shortly. “Let us see if she has brought her poisons with her.”
He looked round at his followers as he said this. They were men of a hard and cruel age, men with but little mercy or gentleness in their hearts, and all, saving Vincente, who had incited them to it, had wetted their steel with innocent blood but a few days before; yet it seemed that this was a business but little to their liking; still it had to be done, and Pizarro, seeing their hesitation, smiled one of his grave almost sorrowful smiles, and said—
“Caballeros, I know it is mean work for soldiers’ hands to do, yet it must be done if we would know the truth. De Candia and de Molina, go you and guard the Inca yonder so that he does no harm to himself or any other. De Mendoza and Avila, take hold of the witch, if so she be, and Holy Father, since it may be yours to exorcise the evil spirit in her hereafter, your hands will be most fitting to make the search.”
So this was done, though by no means willingly, Atahuallpa remaining seated all the while in the stoical silence of despair, and when the search was over Vincente had found some half-score of little bags of finely-dressed leather concealed about the Palla’s garments, and when these were opened they were found to contain fine powders of greyish-white and red-brown colours.
Mama-Zula, seeing that all was hopeless, had relapsed into silence and bore the degrading ordeal with the stoical resignation of her race, and when the search was over she stood between her two captors, looking at the little bags of powder in Valverde’s hands with an angry glow in her eyes and a smile of scornful defiance on her thin, withered lips.
“Such things, Caballeros, may be carried for good purposes or ill,” said Pizarro drily, when the angry murmurs that had greeted this discovery had died away. “These may be harmless and healing medicines, simples such as these Indians have ever been renowned for the use of. So, too, they may be poisons intended for the deadly use which Filipillo here has warned us of. We have the proof at hand. Fetch a goblet of water one of you.”
De Molina went out and presently returned with a silver cup three parts full of water.