David Golemon: Legend

These prehistoric tribesmen were a hardy people and, according to their stories and legends, had been so since they had been enslaved by the empire to the west. They had gained their freedom thanks to the river gods who had dealt their Inca taskmasters a savage blow a hundred years before, which had finally freed the small people. When asked how their river gods had achieved this, the elder of the village would answer only that the Inca had gained the secret knowledge of the Sincaro through murder and slavery, and had even tried to chain their deities and turn them on the Sincaro in the Incan pursuit of earthly riches. The river gods would not become the slaves of men, and they revolted. Then the Inca were no more. The old man would smile at that point when he saw the skeptical looks of the Spaniards. The Inca had never returned to the valley, and now it was the captain who would have to gain the trust of these strange and vibrant people to learn the secret that had brought and then driven the Inca from these lands.

The short-lived harmony between Spaniard and Indian lasted for exactly twenty days: Good days that they used to their advantage, learning the Sincaro way and their simple lifestyle. Long days of nurturing the trust he sought, and in return Padilla's men helped these industrious people learn the strange ways of their taller visitors. The soldiers amazed them with the strange black powder that made their cooking fires jump toward the heavens in a shower of smoke and sparks.

There had been smaller things, to be sure: The screaming enjoyment of young and old alike when they had been shown small mirrors. Letting the Sincaro touch and be awestruck by their armor, which the primitives thought was some sort of magical skin. The Spaniards had been patient as the children tugged and pulled on their beards and laughed as the men playfully tickled them in return. Padilla and his soldiers were also happy to share their own rations of pork and rice, and eat the strange but delicious meals the Sincaro painstakingly placed before them. It had been during one of these evening meals that the Spanish learned the Sincaro had never ventured out of the valley. Even their enslavement had been here, which indicated to the captain that what the soldiers sought was indeed close by.

A time of trust had presented itself just as Padilla had said it would. Ever so slowly, the Indians of the Sincaro village began to take the Spaniards into their confidence and soon began bringing forth small trinkets of gold they had so cautiously and painstakingly hidden during the early days of their encounter. The gold not only started to appear as small bracelets, idols, and necklaces but loose, in leather sacks around their necks that brimmed with dust from the Amazonian tributary. It had been hard to hold his men in check once they had seen that. Padilla only succeeded in doing so by promising them the El Dorado that Pizarro had rightly guessed to be hidden in this green-canopied country, despite the Incan denial. If they bided their time, these friendly people would probably share the location of the source of their gold with them without much prodding and, even more important to Padilla, without bloodshed.

Captain Padilla suspected the trouble would come from dreams of avarice, but instead it came from a man he should have been watching all along. Joaquin Suarez, a brute of a man who had worn out his welcome with the main company of conquistadors in Peru because of blackish and boorish behavior, had been attached to the expedition by Father Corinth himself, after Suarez's unholy rape and murder of an Indian child near the new Spanish town of Esposisia. The priest had sent him as far from Pizarro as he could, knowing that the big man would have been executed on the spot if word of his crime had reached the generalissimo's ears. The captain mused often how one could murder entire villages, even kidnap and kill the reigning monarch, but the single killing of a child was worth a death sentence, because nothing spawned revolt more than the deliberate murder of innocence. So the accused Suarez, a distant cousin of Father Escobar Corinth, was sent away with the only expedition to venture out this year, to keep him out of Pizarro's sight.

During those many days of travel into these forsaken parts of the world, Suarez had grumbled about how he had been treated shabbily over the murder of the Incan child; after all, he thought to himself, It wasn't as if she had been a child of God . But he obeyed the orders given to him. He was silent and brooding most of the time, even treading lightly among the other men of the expedition, who looked upon the large soldier as a pariah. Suarez remained well behaved even after the gold started to appear. But now Padilla rebuked himself for not remembering the brute's black heart.

Last night Suarez had taken Spanish wine with a tribal leader, against express orders to not give anything fermented to the Indians. The men could accept the strange beer that the Sincaro brewed, but the soldiers were to offer the Indians nothing of an alcoholic nature from their own stores.

After an hour of drinking, Suarez had managed to get the elder drunk. But even then it was as if the old man knew exactly the giant Spaniard's intentions, and refused to say anything about where the Sincaro mined the gold. Suarez, having been driven mad by the refusal of the elder to talk, had finally tortured him for what he knew.

Hours later, when the other tribesmen found the torn and battered body of their much-beloved leader, they viciously attacked the sleeping soldiers without warning. The raid was so fierce that the Spaniards' defense had been hurried and, in the end, futile. Padilla and his men fought back with a loss of sixteen of his best soldiers and most of their firearms. Among the casualties was Pizarro's own nephew, Dadriell. The Sincaro had lost at least forty or more, mostly women and, God forgive them all, children.

Now the survivors of his once proud and now cursed expedition were holed up in a large green basin that was fed water by a very deep tributary of the Amazon, at least ten leagues from the site of last night's massacre. This great lagoon, which for all practical description was like a small lake, lay before them. They had waded along the shore of the tributary, following the treacherous rapids to gain entrance into this hidden Eden that had trees so tall they stretched and bent over the dark waters.

This was a setting Captain Padilla had never thought to see in his lifetime. It was too beautiful, somewhere one would not wish to conclude a massacre if the small people chose to attack them here. It truly was a place God had sculpted when last upon this earth. Tree branches hung out over the water and soft grasses grew all the way to the slow-flowing lagoon. The walls of what had to be an ancient and extinct volcano rose on three sides, actually leaning out over the lagoon, creating three natural shelves.

Flowers of every variety bloomed and nourished honeybees that gently moved from species to species, never noticing or caring about the sudden invasion by the Spaniards. The strange flowers that grew with only small dapples of sunlight were large and the most fragrant Padilla had ever smelled.

The ancient volcanic bowl was not only fed by the Amazon tributary but also by a mammoth waterfall that fell from high above on the far end of the lagoon. But that was not the outstanding feature of the small valley. There, flanking either side of the tumbling waters of the falls, were pillars. They were at least 120 feet high, carved from the surrounding rock, and supported an arch that vanished into the white waterfall of the river above. Vines coursed through the cracked and weather-worn pillars; in several places they had separated the stone completely, making the columns look as if they would fall at any moment.