Temple

I saw the anger flare in his eyes and then I saw him raise his rifle in my direction.

With nothing else to call on, I hastily raised my own pistol and fired it. The pistol boomed loudly in my hand and I would swear on the Good Book itself that its recoil almost tore my arm from its socket. The horseman in front of me snapped backwards in his saddle and tumbled to the ground, dead.

I stood there, stunned, holding the pistol in my hand, staring fixedly at the dead body on the ground. I endeavoured to convince myself that I had done no wrong. He had been going to kill me.

'Brother!' Renco called suddenly.

I turned on the moment and saw him sitting astride one of the Spanish horses. 'Come!' he called. 'Take his horse! We have to get to Cuzco!'

The city of Cuzco lies at the head of a long mountain valley that runs in a north-south direction. It is a walled city that is situated between two parallel rivers, the Huatanay and the Tullumayo, which act rather like moats.

Situated on a hill to the north of the city, towering above it, is the most dominant feature of the Cuzco valley. There, looking down over the city like a god, is the stone fortress of Sacsayhuaman.

Sacsayhuaman is a structure like no other I have seen in all of the world. Nothing in Spain, or even in the whole of Europe, can compare with its size and sheer dominating presence.

Truly, it is a most fearsome citadel—roughly pyramidal in shape, it consists of three colossal tiers, each one easily a hundred hands high, with walls constructed of gigantic hundred-ton blocks.

These Incans do not have mortar, but they more than make up for that deficiency with their extraordinary abilities in the art of stonemasonry. Rather than bind stones together with pastes, they build all of their fortresses, temples and palaces by fashioning enormous boulders into regular shapes and placing them alongside each other so that each boulder fits perfectly with the next. So exact are the joins between these monumental stones, so perfectly are they cut, that one cannot slip a knife blade between them.

It was in this setting that the intriguing siege of Cuzco took place.

Now, it is at this point that it should be said that the siege of Cuzco must rank as one of the strangest in the history of modern warfare.

The strangeness of the siege stems from the following fact: during it the invaders—my countrymen, the Spaniards— were inside the city walls, while the owners of the city, the Incan people, were positioned outside the city walls.

In other words, the Incans were laying siege to their own city.

To be fair, this situation came about as the result of a long complicated chain of events. In 1533, my Spanish countrymen rode into Cuzco unopposed and, at first, they were

to the Incans. It was only when they began to per-

the full extent of the riches within the city walls that any pretence of civility vanished.

My countrymen pillaged Cuzco with a frenzy never seen before.

Native men were brutally enslaved. Native women were ravaged. Gold was melted down by the wagonload—after which time the Incans began calling my Spanish countrymen 'gold-eaters'. Apparently, they thought that my countrymen's insatiable lust for gold stemmed from our need to eat it.

By 1535, the Sapa Inca—Renco's brother, Manco Capac—fled the capital for the mountains and assembled an enormous army with which he planned to retake Cuzco.

The Incan army—100 000 strong, but armed only with sticks and clubs and arrows—descended upon the city of Cuzco in a fury and they took Sacsayhuaman, the massive stone citadel overlooking the city, in a day. The Spaniards took refuge inside the city walls.

And so the siege began.

It would last for three months.

Nothing on this earth could have prepared me for the sight that I beheld when I rode through the enormous stone tollgates at the northern end of the Cuzco valley.

It was night, but it might as well have been day. Fires burned everywhere, both within the city walls and without.

It looked like Hell itself.

The largest force of men I have ever seen filled the valley before me, an undulating mass of humanity pouring down from the citadel on the hill toward the city—100 000 Incans, all of them on foot, shouting and screaming and waving torches and weapons. They had the entire city surrounded.

Inside the city walls, fires could be seen ravaging the stone buildings situated there.

Renco rode ahead of me, right into the seething mass of people, and like the Red Sea for Moses, the crowd parted for him.

And as it did so, an enormous roar went up from the Incans, a cheer of rejoice, a shout of such fervour and celebration that it made the hairs on my neck stand on end.

It was as if they had all recognised Renco instantly— despite the fact that he was dressed in Spanish clothing—and stood aside for him. It was as if every single one of them knew of his mission and would do their utmost to allow him every possible haste in effecting it.