Poul Anderson: The Year of the Ransom

The watchmen at the treasury were a reassuring sight. Lantern glow sheened off armor, pikes, muskets. These were of the iron ruffians who had sailed from Panama, marched through jungle and swamp and desert, shattered every foe, raised their strongholds, come in a handful over a range that stormed heaven, to seize the very king of the pagans and lay his country under tribute. No man or demon would get past them without leave, nor stop them when again they fared onward.

They knew Castelar and saluted him. Fray Tanaquil was waiting, a lantern in his own hand. He led the cavalryman beneath a lintel sculptured in the form of a snake, though not such a snake as had ever haunted white men’s nightmares, into the building.

It was large, multiply chambered, of stone blocks cut and fitted together with exquisite care. The roof was timber, for this had been a palace. The Spaniards had supplied exterior entrances with stout doors, where the Indios had used curtains of reeds or cloth. Tanaquil shut the one through which he came.

Shadows filled corners and bobbed misshapen over wall paintings which priests had piously defaced. Today’s consignment lay in an anteroom. Castelar saw gleams beyond. He wondered half dizzily how many hundredweight of precious metal were heaped there.

He must content himself for the present with gloating over what he had seen arrive. Pizarro’s officers had hastily unwrapped the bundles, to assure themselves about the contents, and left everything where they tossed it. Tomorrow they would weigh the mass and put it with the rest. Cords and wrappings rustled under Castelar’s boots, Tanaquil’s sandals.

The friar set his lantern on the clay floor and hunkered down. He picked up a golden cup, brought it near the dim light, shook his head and muttered. The thing was dented, the figures cast in it crumpled. “The receivers dropped this, or kicked it aside.” Did anger tremble in his tone? “They’ve no more care for workmanship than animals.”

Castelar took the object from him and hefted it. Easily a quarter pound, he reckoned. “Why should they?” he asked. “It’ll soon go to the smelter.”

Bitterness: “True.” After a moment: “They will send a few pieces intact to the Emperor, for the sake of whatever interest he may have. I’ve been picking out the best, hoping Pizarro will listen to me and choose them. But mostly he won’t.”

“What’s the difference? Everything is just as unsightly.”

Gray eyes turned aloft to reproach the warrior. “I thought you might be a little wiser, a little able to understand that men have many ways of . . . praising God through the beauty they create. You have an education, no?”

“Latin. Reading, writing, ciphering. A bit of history and astronomy. It’s largely dropped out of me, I fear.”

“And you’ve traveled.”

“I fought in France and Italy. Gained a smattering of those languages.”

“I have the impression you’ve acquired Quechua too.”

“A minim. Can’t let the natives play stupid, you know, or conspire in earshot.” Castelar felt himself under inquisition, mild but probing, and changed the subject. “You told me you record what you see. Where are your quill and paper?”

“I have an excellent memory. As you observed, there is not much point in itemizing things that are to become ingots. But to make sure no curse, no witchcraft lingers—”

Tanaquil had been sorting and arranging articles as he talked, ornaments, plates, vessels, figurines, grotesque in Castelar’s sight. When they were marshaled before him, he reached inside a pouch hung at his waist and drew forth a curiosum of his own. Castelar stooped and squinted for a better look. “What’s that?” he asked.

“A reliquary. It holds a finger bone of Saint Ippolito.”

Castelar signed himself. Nonetheless he peered closer. “I’ve never seen its like.” It was a hand’s breadth in size, smoothly rounded, black save for a cross of nacreous material inset on top and, in front, two crystals more suggestive of lenses than of windows.

“A rare piece,” the friar explained. “Left behind when the Moors departed Granada, later sanctified by these contents and the blessing of the Church. The bishop who entrusted it to me declared it has special efficacy against infidel magic. Captain Pizarro and Fray Valverde agreed it could be wise, and would certainly be harmless, if I subject each piece of Inca treasure to its influence.”

He assumed a more comfortable position on the floor, selected a small gold image of a beast, revolved it in his left hand before the crystals of the reliquary, which he held in his right. His lips moved silently. When he had finished, he put the object down and went on to another.

Castelar shifted from foot to foot.

After a while Tanaquil chuckled and said, “I warned you this would prove tedious. I’ll be at it for hours. You may as well go to bed, Don Luis.”

Castelar yawned. “I think you are right. Thank you for your courtesies.”

A whoosh and thud brought him whirling around. For an instant he poised locked in unbelief.

Over by the wall, a thing had appeared. A thing—massive, dully slick, perhaps of steel, with a pair of handles and two stirrupless saddles—He saw it clear, for light radiated from a baton the rearmost rider held. Both men wore form-fitting black. It made their hands and faces stand forth bone-white, unweathered, unnatural.

The Friar sprang up. He yelled. The words were not Spanish.

In that eyeblink of time, Castelar saw amazement on the aliens. Be they wizards or devils straight from hell, they were not all-powerful, not before God and His saints. Castelar’s sword whipped into his grasp. He plunged forward. “Santiago and at them!” he roared, the ancient battle cry of his people as they drove the Moors from Spain back to Africa. Make such a racket that the guards outside would hear and—

The rider in front lifted a tube. It blinked. Castelar spun down into nothingness.

Machu Picchu! was the immediate recognition as Stephen Tamberly awoke. And then: No. Not quite. Not as I’ve known it. When am I?

He climbed to his feet. Clarity of mind and senses told him he had been knocked out by an electronic stunner, probably a twenty-fourth-century model or later. No surprise. The deadly shock had been the apparition of those men on a machine such as was not to be made for thousands of years after he was born.

Around him lifted the peaks he knew, misty, tropically green even at their altitudes save for snow on the most remote. A condor hovered aloft. A blue—and-gold morning flooded the Urubamba gorge with light. But he saw no railway down there, no station, and the only road in sight was up here, built by engineers of the Incas.

He stood on a platform that had been attached, with a descending ramp, to a high point on a wall above a ditch. Below him the city spread over acre upon acre; it clung, it soared, in buildings of dry-laid stone, staircases, terraces, plazas, as powerful as the mountains themselves. If those heights might almost have been from a Chinese painting, the human works might almost have been from medieval southern France; and yet not really, for they were too foreign, too imbued with their own spirit.

A breeze blew cool. Its whittering was the single sound amidst the bloodbeat in his temples. Nothing stirred throughout the fastness. With the mind-speed of desperation, he saw that it had not long lain deserted. Weeds and shrubs were everywhere, but they and the weather had hardly begun the work of demolition. That didn’t reveal much, for it still had far to go when Hiram Bingham discovered the place in 1911. However, he spied structures almost intact which he remembered as ruins or not at all. Traces remained of wood and thatch roofs. And—