I scratched both of our names in the book. Then when I had finished, the two of us stepped onto the narrow wooden footbridge that stretched out from the riverbank over to a door set into the side of the prison hulk in the middle of the river.
No sooner had we stepped past the filthy night guard, however, than the young Tupac whirled around quickly and grabbed the man from behind and twisted his head, breaking his neck in an instant. The guard's body slumped in its chair. I winced at the sheer violence of the act, but strangely I found that I felt little sympathy for the guard. I had made my decision—had pledged my allegiance to the enemy—and there was no turning back now.
My young companion quickly took the guard's rifle and his pistallo -or 'pistol' as some of my countrymen were now calling them—and, last of all, his keys. Tupac then affixed a stone weight to the dead guard's foot and dropped the body into the river.
In the pale blue moonlight, we crossed the rickety wooden footbridge and entered the hulk.
The interior guard leapt to his feet as we entered the cage room but Tupac was far too quick for him. He fired his pistol at the guard without missing a step. The explosion of the gunshot in the enclosed space of the prison hulk was deafening. Prisoners all around us awoke with a start at the sudden terrifying sound.
Renco was already on his feet as we came to his cage.
The guard's key fitted perfectly in the lock of his cell and the door opened easily. The prisoners all around us were shouting and banging on the bars of their cages, pleading to be released. My eyes darted around in every direction and in the midst of all this uproar, I saw a sight that chilled me to my very core.
I saw the Chanca, Castino, standing in his cell—standing perfectly still—staring at me intently.
His cage now open, Renco ran over to the dead guard's corpse, grabbed his weapons and handed them to me.
'Come on,' he said, awakening me from Castino's hypnotic stare. Dressed only in the barest of prison rags, Renco quickly began to undress the dead guard's corpse. Then he hurriedly put on the guard's thick leather riding jacket, pantaloons and boots.
No sooner was he dressed than he was on his feet again, unlocking some of the other cages. I noticed that he only the cages of Incan warriors and not those of prisoners from subjugated tribes like the Chancas.
And then suddenly Renco was dashing out the door with rifle in his hand, ignoring the shouts of the other prisoners and calling for me to follow.
We dashed back across the rickety footbridge, amid of running prisoners. By this time, however, others heard the commotion on board the hulk. Four from the nearby tent village arrived at the river-bank on horseback just as we leapt off the bridge. They fired at us with their muskets, the reports of their weapons boom-like thunderclaps in the night.
Renco fired back, handling his musket like the most able Spanish infantryman, blasting one of the horsemen from his mount. The other Incan prisoners ran ahead of us and overpowered two of the other horsemen.
The last horseman brought his steed around so that it stood directly in front of me. In a flashing instant, I saw him register my appearance—a European helping these heathens.
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-
