The Gold Eaters Read Online Free PDF Page A

into the great South Sea. Yet what have we seen of the southern kingdom we seek? Have we come to a desert land where people ride camels, where they dwell in stone cities, where gold is common as iron?”
    The Pilot searches the faces to gauge the effect of his rhetoric. “It is true the forest savages have some gold and emeralds on them,” he adds, to forestall any argument on those grounds. “But only enough to lure us on, to make us hazard our God-given souls.”
    Murmurs and nods around the table. Pilot Ruiz’s frustration is widely shared.
    Commander Pizarro sits rigidly upright, glaring like an eagle over their heads. Without a glance at the Pilot, or any sign he’s even listened, he speaks at last.
    â€œWe’ll hold our course. I have no doubt the golden land draws near. And we must cross the equatorial line decisively so none can deny that ours is the first Christian ship to do so. This honour is within our grasp. Let us seize it for King Charles!”
    He gets up from the table abruptly and goes on deck, into a moonless night.
    â€”
    Has my luck forsaken me at last? Francisco Pizarro asks himself, clutching the rail and staring towards the distant shore which lies like a black whale basking under the stars.
    He conjures a boyhood memory from Spain, an inner talisman he summons whenever he’s especially low. A spring evening in the year his whiskers sprouted. The church of Santa María in Trujillo. He was praying to the Virgin for good fortune, kneeling on a floor paved with the gravestones of dead Pizarros. Often he came here to greet their bones and beseech their souls to help him, since the living Pizarros never did.
    As he left the church, his sleeve was plucked. A ragged man stood there, a cripple with an arm hanging like the writhen stem of a dead vine.
For Holy Mary touch this shrivelled arm, young man,
the beggar said.
For God’s love give me a coin and I shall tell you all. One day you shall be great!
Francisco looked into eyes like boiled onions framed by a filthy hood. The man was blind. Yet the sightless gaze had some unearthly hold, the gaze of a seer. Pizarro had two
maravedís
in his pocket. He gave one, and did not shrink from tapping the handless arm, for somehow the words seemed more than beggar’s lies.
Your sword-arm shall be as mighty as this arm of mine is weak.
You shall win wars in a far land. You’ll be the greatest warrior since Alexander. You’ll become the richest conqueror in the world!
    When, old man, and where? Granada? Italy? Tell me!
    But the beggar slid away, saying nothing more except to turn his head towards the west and hiss,
The sea, the Ocean Sea.
    So not Granada, the infidels’ last nest in Spain. Nor Naples, wherehis father had gone to war. Did the beggar mean the Canaries, the Azores? Even a boy knew those islands had no riches.
    Young Francisco walked on in a trance, stopping beside the chapel of Santiago, Slayer of Moors. There, watching the daylight flare and fade behind the Moorish castle on the height, he thought of the great sea that swallows the sun. He had to give his last coin and hear more! He ran back through narrow streets and thickening shadows to where the fellow had accosted him. But nobody was there. The evensong worshippers had left for home, the iron-bound doors were locked. Only swallows scything the sky, stray dogs regarding him with shifty eyes, storks on the bell tower clacking their bills like doleful castanets.
    For weeks Pizarro sought the man, roaming all Trujillo, accosting monks and shopkeepers, even searching shepherds’ huts in rocky outcrops where the hills break up in a stony surf on the Extremadura plain.
    A beggar! people said, laughing. You seek a beggar? Look in any doorway. And Pizarro, given to daydreams born of hunger and solitude, eventually came to doubt the meeting had ever happened; even to fear he’d been tempted by a minion of the Devil.
    Then, just two or three