The Romance of Golden Star Part 19

It was through thinking of this that I came to see that I was by no means blameless myself for his madness and the treachery that had come from it.

In my own days and among my own people gold was held precious only for its beauty and its usefulness. We had not learned the art of making it into money and buying men's soul and bodies with it, but I had already lived enough of my new life to see that now, save for the few, gold was all and honour nothing; and knowing this, I should also have known what I was doing when I showed Djama the treasures in the Hall of Gold. The sight of them had made him mad, and, as my hand had shown them to him, the blame of what he had done in his madness was in part mine.

All this I remembered in the hour when my soul was filled with joy and my heart warm with love, and I thought how great a pleasure I should give to her who had given me the better part of my own joy if I looked upon Djama with pity and forgiveness and did an act of mercy as the first deed of my new reign.

So, when the ceremonial of my crowning was over, I bade Tupac take some of my body-guard and bring him before me from the place where he had been lodged after his release from his golden cell, and at the same time I quieted the fears of Joyful Star by telling her what was in my heart concerning him.

They brought him unbound, but well guarded by soldiers with bayonets on their rifles, up the broad avenue which the parted throng had made across the square in front of my throne.

I saw him stare wildly about him as he came near, gazing at the splendid sun-lit pageant like a man in a dream, or one just awakened into another world, as I had been after my long death-sleep. But when he came near, and saw me sitting in my royal state with Joyful Star on my right and Golden Star on my left, both robed as princesses of the Ancient Blood, his face grew dark with pa.s.sion, and his eyes, losing their wonder, gazed in fixed and furious hate at me--the man who was going to give him his life, and much more that he had coveted besides.

They placed him between two soldiers before me at the foot of the terrace steps above which my throne had been set, and I was about to speak and greet him kindly, when his anger already got the better of him, and, with a mocking smile on his lips, he said in a loud, rough voice that was most unlike his own quiet, even tones,--

'Well, your Majesty, as I suppose you think yourself for the present, I expected something like this--to be brought out into the midst of your fellow-savages and sentenced like a felon before my own sister and the woman who, like yourself, owes her life to me!'

Then he laughed one of his strange, joyless laughs, and went on before I could reply,--

'Well, I suppose I mustn't grumble. You have won, and to the victor go the spoils. Now that you have apparently bought the girl who was once my sister with your gold, and I have given you your own sister-wife back, you will be able to try an interesting experiment in your old form of matrimony--'

I saw Joyful Star shrink back in her seat and turn her head away from him with a little cry as he said these evil words, and they angered me so, that--forgetting they were spoken by a man who stood helpless before me--I cried,--

'Silence, liar and speaker of evil! or your next words shall be the last that human ears shall hear you speak. Are you still mad, or have you forgotten that you were once a man?'

He smiled such a smile as you may have seen on the lips of one who has died in agony, and said with a swift change in his voice,--

'I beg your Majesty's pardon, and--and the ladies' too. It was a most ungentlemanly thing to say, and one should not forget one's manners on the threshold of the next world--if there is one. But come, your Majesty, you are wasting your valuable time, and keeping all these interesting savages of yours waiting. You'll find I shall take it quietly enough. What do you propose that it shall be--something with boiling oil or red-hot pincers in it?'

I knew that a man who could speak thus, believing that he was about to die, must be in a pitiful plight, and so I answered him sternly, and yet without anger,--

'Laurens Djama, I have not brought you here to jest with you, nor yet, as you think, to condemn you to die, though your life is justly forfeit to me and my people, whom you would have betrayed again to their oppressors. Now, listen! You brought me back from death to life, and for my life I will give you yours, and for Golden Star's I will pay you the price agreed on and something more. It was by my foolish act that the madness of the gold-hunger came upon you, and for that I will give you your freedom; but not now, for that would not be safe for me or my people, since you have betrayed us once, and, knowing what you do, might do so again. You shall be taken hence to a pleasant and fertile valley, where you shall have all freedom, save permission to leave it until this war is over and I am undisputed lord of the land of my fathers. Then you shall take the wealth that shall be yours and go to your own country, or wherever you please, so long as you do not remain in mine, for here there is no place for you, since my people do not forgive as easily as I do. Now I have spoken; if there is anything more that you can ask, and I can give with safety, ask it.'

Most men who had sinned as he had done would have very willingly taken such forgiveness, and Laurens Djama might have taken it but for a seemingly small thing. While I was speaking to him his eyes had wandered from mine and were looking into Golden Star's. As I ceased I felt her hands clasping my arm, and heard her voice say tremblingly in our own tongue,--

'Save me, my lord and brother, save me! Evil Eyes is looking into my heart and turning it cold!'

This Djama saw, though he did not understand her words, and the sight brought the madness into his blood again. He shouted with a voice like the cry of a wild beast in pain,--

'Curse you! I will have neither life nor liberty from you, but I'll have your life for mine, and that will pay me better!'

As the last word left his lips he made a movement so quick that my eyes could not follow it. The next instant he had wrenched the rifle from the hands of the soldier on his right hand and levelled it at me. Even as he did so Joyful Star flung herself with a scream upon my breast and Hartness sprang forward from behind my throne-seat.

The rifle flashed. I heard a hissing sound close to my ear and a deep groan and the fall of a body behind me. In the same moment Djama was seized and flung to the ground, where he lay quite still and silent. I rose to my feet, clasping Joyful Star for the first time in my arms, and looked round. Hartness stood beside me unharmed, but old Ullullo, the first friend that I had made in my new life among my own people, lay dead behind my throne with a bullet through his forehead.

I had not forgotten that old training which taught an Inca warrior to look on near-approaching death with unmoved eyes and unshaken heart, and this was only such a hazard as I had taken a score of times before. I bade Hartness lead Ruth and Golden Star into the temple behind us, so that they should not see what was about to be done. Then I took my place on the throne again and ordered Djama to be raised and stood on his feet.

He rose of himself, very pale but calm and strong in his own evil strength, fearing nothing, as became a man for whom death had no terrors and, it might be, few secrets. We looked each other in the eyes in silence, and in the midst of an utter stillness that had fallen on the vast throng, until Hartness came back. Then I said,--

'That is enough, Laurens Djama. Choose now what death you will die, but, for your own sake and Joyful Star's, choose a quick one.'

Although my voice was as the voice of doom to him, yet he did not quail even then, for if his heart was black it was very strong, and fear had never entered into it. He drew himself up to the full height of his stature and, looking me full in the eyes, he said as quietly as I had ever heard him speak,--

'That choice is always mine, whether you give it to me or not. You have threatened me with death before and I have told you that you could not kill me. Now watch and see if I spoke the truth.'

Then, with a soldier holding each of his arms and two others grasping his shoulders, he drew a quick, deep, gasping breath. The blood rushed into his face till its pallor became purple. The next instant it became deathly white again. His jaw dropped, his eyes grew fixed and blindly staring, and then his shape seemed to shrink together like an empty bag, and he sank down between those who were holding him.

They pulled him upright again, and his head dropped forward on his breast. He was dead--dead as though the Llapa itself had struck him--and so Laurens Djama, master of the arts of life and death, pa.s.sed out of the world of living men by the act of his own will, though not of his own hand.

CHAPTER XIV

THE RE-KINDLING OF THE SACRED FIRE

Now this story of mine is nearly done, for there are but few things left for me to tell. It is not for me to write of all the battles that we fought after the City of the Sun and the region about it fell into our hands, for to do that is a task better fitted to the hands of him who led my ever-growing hosts to victory after victory until the whole land that had been my fathers' was mine from north to south and from the great rivers of the east to the Sea of the Setting Sun, which you now call the Pacific Ocean.

It is enough for me to say that I used my gold without stint, and that it did all and more than the work I had been told it would do. As we marched southward and westward to the sea, army after army left those who were fighting between themselves for the ruins of the land and, having no real quarrel of their own, ranged themselves under the Rainbow Banner and fought with me for freedom and the ancient faith of their long-dead fathers, and how city after city welcomed me as I came to give it peace and wealth instead of strife and misery.

My unforgotten story and the marvel of my coming back from the days of our old-time glories had sped like the leaps of the lightning from mountain to mountain and valley to valley, and every man in whose veins flowed even the smallest drop of the Sacred Blood threw aside the broken fragments of the oppressor's yoke and came to give me his service.

From other countries, too, and from far over the sea, there came men to fight for me, men whom Hartness had called from afar by speaking to them over the lightning-wires, and they brought s.h.i.+ps with them, armed with flame and thunder, which the promise of my gold had purchased, and these took all the seaports for me, while my ever-growing armies were taking the cities of the inland valleys--all of which those who would learn may read in the great book which Francis Hartness and the professor, who with Joyful Star have helped out these lame words of mine, are writing together to tell how the ancient empire of the Incas rose at my call and the bidding of my gold--which I doubt not was far stronger than I--out of the degradation into which the oppressors had cast it, and has even now begun to prosper again with more than its former glory.

But, as I have said, these things are not for me to tell, since I have neither the skill nor the knowledge to do so. What I have set down here is only the story of my own awakening out of the death-sleep into which the arts of the priests of the Sun had cast me with Golden Star, and of her return to join me in my new life. I have told of that and of all that befell us afterwards, and now there remains only the telling of that which fulfilled our strange fates and completed our happiness in the new world into which those fates had brought us.

Many weeks pa.s.sed and grew into months before the oppressors were finally subdued and I found myself undisputed lord of all the land, and, as I had promised Joyful Star, all this had to come to pa.s.s before I would ask her to put her hand into mine and take her place beside me as my Coya and queen on the throne of Huayna-Capac.

But at length there was peace in the land and we returned from Lima, the capital of the Spaniards, where I had been proclaimed and acknowledged Inca and Emperor of my ancient domains, to the City of the Sun, which many loving and willing hands had cleansed of the abominations of its new idolatries and made in some measure fit to receive us, to crown our new lives with such happiness as, with the help and blessing of the Unnameable, we might be able to bestow upon each other.

The treasures of gold and silver and ornaments of jewels, the rich hangings and the sacred and precious emblems had been brought from the Hall of Gold and the throne-room beneath the Sacsahuaman and set up in the chief temple of the Spaniards, which stands in the place where the holy Temple of the Sun once stood and is in great part built of the self-same stones.[F]

It was the eve of the Feast of Raymi, or the Coming of the Sun, which in the olden time we counted as the beginning of the year, and I had determined that this day should witness the restoration of the old order and the beginning of my own true happiness--so that night Golden Star and I, as became the son and daughter of the Royal Race and Sacred Blood, watched and prayed according to the ancient rites--she in a chamber of what had once been the House of the Virgins of Sun, and I in the purified temple--from the setting of the sun until the first waning of the stars in the coming dawn.

Very early in the morning she was brought to me in the temple by Tupac-Rayca--whom I had in virtue of his pure blood and n.o.ble decent, consecrated Villac-Umu or High Priest of the Sun, and who had in turn invested such others of the Blood as he thought worthy with the subordinate dignities of the holy office. He and his attendants were arrayed in the ancient priestly robes and adorned with the sacred emblems of their rank, and Golden Star was attired as a royal Virgin of the Sun, in garments of white edged with scarlet and decked with ornaments of pure gold.

Then we prayed together before the newly-set-up altar, which stood over against the eastern window of the Sanctuary, and when that duty was ended, and while the growing light was yet dim, there came to us Joyful Star, also arrayed as a princess of the Blood, and Francis Hartness, whom my thankful people had already named Viracocha, after one of our golden-haired hero-G.o.ds of the olden time.

After them came all those of the Sacred Race that were left in the land--men and matrons, youths and maidens--all dressed in the long-forbidden garb of their forefathers, and ranged themselves in two silent, orderly ranks down the sides of the Sanctuary, waiting with patient eagerness for that which they had been bidden here to see.

Above the altar hung the great golden Emblem of the Sun, upon which the radiant glance of the Lord of Light would first fall through the circular window in the eastern wall, and on it was a pyramid of wood anointed with scented oils; for here was soon to be re-kindled--if our Lord the Sun should smile on the new fortunes of his long-suffering children--without the aid of human hands, that sacred fire first lit by Manco Capac and Mama Occlu, son and daughter of the Sun, and which had burnt unquenched through all the ages that had pa.s.sed from the founding to the fall of our ancient empire. Beside it lay a cone-shaped vessel of burnished gold, in the depths of which the Sacred Fleece awaited the touch that was to change it into flame.

When all were a.s.sembled, Tupac-Rayca mounted the steps of the altar, and, facing the silent throng, began to speak in the ancient and unforgotten tongue and said,--

'Children of the Sun, sons and daughters of those whose ancestors in the unremembered days received the divine command to create the empire over which they ruled with ever-growing glory until, by the inscrutable decrees of the Unnameable, the destroyer and oppressor were permitted to come into the land, listen with open ears and thankful hearts to the words which our Father shall put into my mouth to say to you!'

All bowed their heads and crossed their hands over their b.r.e.a.s.t.s as he spoke, and after a little silence he went on,--

'The last of the Villac-Umus who stood where I am standing told your fathers and mine of the near-approaching night of gloom and desolation that was about to fall upon the Land of the Four Regions. For what sins of his children our Father permitted that night to eclipse the bright day of their empire we know not, nor is it lawful for us to inquire. Let it be enough for us to believe that, grievous as the doom was, it could not have been anything save the inflexible justice of the Unnameable.'