Sancho de la Hoz, who had been rotting for months in a cell, yelled to be released and given a sword. Monroy decided that all arms were desperately needed, including those of a traitor, and ordered the chains to be removed. And I give witness that the courtier fought that day with the same ferocity as the rest of the heroic captains.
“How many Indians do you calculate are coming, Francisco?” Monroy asked Aguirre.
“Nothing to upset us, Alonso! Maybe eight or ten thousand. . . .”
Our two parties of cavalry galloped out to confront the first attackers, furious centaurs lopping off heads and limbs and crushing chests beneath the hooves of their horses. In less than an hour, nevertheless, they began to fall back. In the meantime, thousands of yelling Indians were already racing through the streets of Santiago. Some of the Yanaconas, and several women trained by Rodrigo de Quiroga months before, loaded the harquebuses for the soldiers to shoot, but the process was long and clumsy; the enemy was on top of us. The mothers of the babies in the cellar with Cecilia were more valiant than the most experienced soldiers; they were fighting for their children’s lives. A rain of fiery arrows fell on the straw roofs, which, even though they were damp from the August rains, burst into flames. I realized that we would have to leave the men to their harquebuses while we women tried to put out the fire. We formed lines and passed buckets of water, but we quickly saw that it was futile; arrows kept falling and we could not afford to waste water on the fire, since soon the soldiers would need it desperately. We abandoned the houses on the periphery and grouped in the Plaza de Armas.
By then the first wounded were arriving, soldiers and Yanaconas. Catalina, my helpers, and I had organized as usual: rags, hot coals, water, and boiling oil; wine to disinfect and muday to help bear the pain. Others of the women were preparing soup pots, water gourds, and corn tortillas; it would be a long battle. Smoke from burning straw covered the city; our eyes were burning and we could barely breathe. As men came in bleeding, we tended to their visible wounds; there was no time to remove their armor. We gave them a cup of water or broth, and as soon as they could stay on their feet, they staggered off to fight again. I do not know how many times the cavalry held off the attackers, but the moment came when Monroy decided that it would not be possible to defend the entire city; it was burning an all four sides, and Indians occupied nearly all of Santiago. He conferred briefly with Aguirre and they agreed to fall back and combine all our forces in the plaza, where the aged Don Benito had already sat himself down on a wooden stool. His wound had healed, thanks to Catalina’s sorcery, but he was weak and unable to stand for long at a time. He had at hand two harquebuses and a Yanacona helping to load them, and all through that long day he wrought havoc among the enemy hordes from his invalid’s perch. He fired so steadily that he burned the palms of his hands on the red-hot weapons.
While I was busy with the wounded inside the house, one group of assailants climbed over the adobe wall of my patio. Catalina gave the alarm, screeching like a stuck pig, and I ran to see what was happening. I did not get far; the enemies were so near that I could have counted the teeth in those ferocious, war-painted faces. Rodrigo de Quiroga and González de Marmolejo, who had strapped on a breastplate and taken up a sword, came to drive them back, since it was essential to defend the house where we had the wounded and children hidden in the cellar with Cecilia. Some of the Indians confronted Quiroga and the priest while others started burning my plants and killing my domestic animals. That was what drove me over the edge; I had cared for each of those animals as I would the children I never had. With a roar that rose from my entrails, I ran toward the Indians—though I was not wearing the armor Pedro had had made for me; I could not treat the wounded while immobilized inside that metal. I am sure my hair was standing on end, and I was foaming at the mouth and cursing like a harpy; I must have presented a very threatening picture because for an instant the savages stopped and stepped back in surprise. I have never known why they didn’t crush my skull right there. I was later told that Michimalonko had given the order not to touch me because he wanted me for himself, but those are stories people invent after the fact to explain the inexplicable.
And then Rodrigo de Quiroga came to my aid, whirling his sword overhead like a windmill and shouting for me to run to safety, and also my dog Baltasar, snarling and barking, his lips drawn back to reveal sharp eyeteeth, looking the beast he never was under normal circumstances. The attackers scattered, chased by the mastiff, and I stood in the middle of my burning garden and the corpses of my animals, desolate. Rodrigo took my arm to pull me away, but when we saw a rooster with singed feathers trying to stand, I instinctively lifted my skirts and wrapped it up in them. A little farther along I saw a pair of hens stupefied by the smoke, and it was an easy task to catch them and put them in with the rooster. Catalina came to look for me and when she saw what I was doing, she helped me. Between us, we saved those fowl, a pair of hogs, and four handfuls of wheat. Nothing more, but those we put in a safe place. By then Rodrigo and the chaplain were back in the plaza fighting alongside the other men.
Catalina, several Indian women, and I went back to tending the wounded, who were being brought in alarming numbers to the improvised hospital in my house. Eulalia came leading a foot soldier covered in blood from head to foot. “My God, this one hasn’t a chance,” I remember thinking, but when we removed his helmet we found that although he had a deep slash across his forehead the bone beneath wasn’t broken, only slightly caved in. Catalina and another women cauterized the wound, washed his face, and gave him water to drink, but they could not get him to rest, not even for a minute. Dazed and half blinded by monstrously swollen eyelids, he stumbled back to the plaza.
While they helped him, I was trying to remove an arrow from another soldier’s neck, a man named López, who had always treated me with ill-concealed disdain, especially following the tragedy of young Escobar. The poor soul was deathly pale and the arrow was in so deep that I knew I could not remove it without enlarging the wound. I had decided to take that risk when he began to shudder and utter rasping death rattles. I knew there was nothing to be done for him, and called the chaplain, who came quickly to administer last rites. The floor of the main room in my house was littered with the bodies of wounded in no condition to return to the plaza, about twenty, most of them Yanaconas. We had run out of rags, and Catalina was tearing the sheets that we had lovingly embellished with embroidery during the lazy winter evenings; then we had to cut our skirts in strips, and finally, my one elegant dress. At that point Sancho de la Hoz came in carrying a soldier who had lost consciousness, leaving him at my feet. The traitor and I exchanged a glance, and I feel sure that in that instant we forgave each other the affronts of the past. To the chorus of howls of men being cauterized with red-hot iron was added the whinnying of the wounded horses the blacksmith was treating as best he could in the same room. On the dirt floor, the blood of Christians and animals flowed together.
Aguirre appeared at the door, without dismounting, bloody from helmet to stirrups, announcing that he had ordered all homes to be abandoned except those around the plaza, where we would prepare to defend ourselves to the last breath.
“Get off your horse, Captain, and let me treat your wounds!” I begged him.
“Not a scratch on me, Doña Inés. Take water to the men in the plaza,” he yelled with fierce jubilation, and disappeared on his rearing horse, it, too, bleeding from the ribs.
I ordered several women to take water and tortillas to the soldiers, who had been fighting since dawn, while Catalina and I removed the armor from López’s corpse; then, just as they were, soaked with blood, I put on his coat of mail and breastplate. I picked up his sword—I couldn’t find mine—and went outside to the plaza. The sun had passed its zenith some time ago; it must have been about three or four in the afternoon. We had been fighting for more than ten hours. I took a look around and saw Santiago burning to the ground, the labor of months lost. It was the end of our dream
of colonizing the valley.
In the meantime, Monroy and Villagra had joined the surviving soldiers and were fighting on horseback inside the plaza, which our men were defending shoulder to shoulder, attacked from all four directions. A part of the church was still standing, and Aguirre’s house, where we were holding the seven captive caciques. Don Benito, black with gunpowder and soot, was firing methodically from his wood stool, carefully aiming before pressing the trigger, as if hunting quail. The Yanacona who had been loading his weapons lay motionless at his feet, and Eulalia had stepped into his place. I realized that the girl had been in the plaza all the time, in order not to lose sight of her beloved Rodrigo.
Above the pandemonium of gunfire, whinnying horses, barking, and the Indians’ chivateo, we could clearly hear the voices of the seven captive caciques spurring on their warriors at the top of their lungs. I do not know what came over me then. I have often thought about that fateful September 11, and have tried to make sense of events, but I don’t believe that anyone can describe exactly what happened; each of the participants has a different version, according to his or her part in it. The smoke was dense, the confusion overwhelming, the noise deafening. We were beside ourselves, fighting for our lives, maddened by the blood and violence. I do not recall any details of that day and so necessarily have had to trust what others have told me. I do remember that at no moment was I afraid; rage had taken over completely.
I looked toward the cell where I could hear the captives yelling, and despite the smoke and flames, I clearly saw my husband, Juan de Málaga, who had been haunting me since Cuzco, leaning against the door frame, staring at me with the pained eyes of a wandering spirit. He made a gesture as if calling me to come. I pushed my way through soldiers and horses, evaluating the disaster with one part of my mind and with the other obeying the mute order of my deceased husband. The improvised cell was nothing more than a room on the first floor of Aguirre’s house, and the door a few boards with a crossbar on the outside. It was guarded by two young sentinels with instructions to defend the captives with their lives, since they represented our only negotiating card with the Indians. I did not stop to ask permission, I simply pushed them aside and lifted the heavy bar with one hand, aided by Juan de Málaga. The guards followed me in, unwilling to confront me and never imagining my intentions. Light and smoke sifted through cracks in the walls, choking the air, and a reddish dust rose from the ground, making everything hazy, but I could see the seven prisoners chained to heavy posts, straining like demons as far as their chains would allow, and howling to their warriors. When they saw me burst in, accompanied by the bloody ghost of Juan de Málaga, they fell silent.
“Kill them all!” I ordered the guards in a voice impossible to recognize as my own.
Both prisoners and guards were struck dumb.
“Kill them, señora? They are the governor’s hostages!”
“Kill them, I said!”
“How shall we do that?” one of the frightened soldiers asked.
“Like this!”
I lifted the heavy sword in both hands and swung it with all the strength of my hatred toward the nearest cacique, beheading him. The force of the swing threw me to my knees, where gushing blood hit my face as a head rolled on the ground before me. The rest I don’t remember at all. One of the guards swore later that I had decapitated the remaining six prisoners, but the second said no, they had completed the task. It doesn’t matter. The fact is that in a question of minutes there were seven heads on the ground. May God forgive me. I took one by the hair, strode out to the plaza with giant steps, climbed to the top of the sacks of sand forming the barricade, and threw my horrendous trophy through the air with unnatural strength and a paralyzing cry of triumph that issued from the depths of the earth, traveled through me, and escaped, echoing like thunder, from my chest. The head sailed through the air, turned several times, and landed in the midst of the throng of Indians. I did not stop to see the effect, but went back to the cell, picked up two more, and launched them from the opposite side of the plaza. It seems to me that the guards brought me the remaining four, but I am not sure of that either. Perhaps I went to get them myself. I know only that the strength of my arms was as great with the last heads as with the first. Before I had thrown the last of them, an eerie quiet fell over the plaza; time stopped, the smoke dissipated, and we watched the Indians, mute, terrorized, begin to retreat: one, two, three steps, then, jostling and shoving each other, they began to run, back along the streets they had just captured.
An infinite period of time went by, or perhaps only an instant. Exhaustion hit me and my bones turned to foam; then I awakened from the nightmare and realized the horror of what I had done. I saw myself as those near me saw me: a tangle-haired demon covered with blood, voiceless from screaming so hard. As my knees buckled, I felt an arm at my waist. Rodrigo lifted me in his arms, held me tight against his armor, and carried me from the plaza in the midst of absolute stupor.
Santiago de la Nueva Extremadura was saved, although nothing was left but burned posts and ruin. Only a few pillars remained of the church; of my house, four blackened walls. Aguirre’s was more or less standing, and the rest was ashes. We had lost four soldiers; all the others were wounded, several gravely. Half of the Yanaconas died during the combat, and in the following days five more died of infection and loss of blood, but the women and children hiding with Cecilia emerged unscathed because the attackers had not discovered the cave. I did not count horses or dogs, but of my domestic animals only the rooster, the two hens, and the pair of hogs that Catalina and I saved were left alive. There were nearly no seeds at all, only those four handfuls of wheat.
Rodrigo de Quiroga, like everyone else, believed the madness that had invaded me during the battle was irreversible. He had carried me in his arms to the ruins of my house, where the improvised infirmary was still operating, and carefully laid me on the ground. When he bid me good-bye with a light kiss on my forehead, to return to the plaza, he wore an expression of sadness and infinite weariness. Catalina and a helper took off my breastplate, the coat of mail, and my blood-soaked dress, looking for wounds I didn’t have. They washed me as well as they could with water and horsehair rolled up like a sponge—we had no more rags—then forced me to drink half a cup of liquor. I vomited a reddish liquid, as if I had also swallowed blood.
The noise of the hours of battle was replaced by a spectral silence. The men could not move; they dropped where they were, and lay there, bleeding, covered with soot and dust and ash, until women came out to give them water, remove their armor, and help them up. The chaplain went around the plaza making the sign of the cross upon the brows of the dead and closing their eyes; then one by one he threw the wounded over his shoulder and carried them to the infirmary. On will alone, Francisco de Aguirre’s noble horse, fatally wounded, stood on trembling legs until several women were able to help Aguirre dismount; then it bowed its neck and died before it hit the ground. Aguirre had several superficial wounds, and was so stiff and cramped that they could not remove his armor or take his weapons; they simply left him for more than half an hour, until he could move again. Then the blacksmith sawed both ends of his lance so they could pull it from his clenched fist, and several of us women undressed him—not at all an easy task because he was a large man and rigid as a bronze statue. Monroy and Villagra, in better shape than the other captains, and still fired up by the conflict, had the wild idea that they would take a few soldiers and pursue the disorganized Indians. They could not, however, find a single horse able to move, or a single man who wasn’t wounded.
Juan Gómez had fought like a lion, thinking all through the day of Cecilia and his son, buried in my cellar, and the minute things quieted down he ran to open the cave. Desperate, he dug the dirt away with his hands; he couldn’t find a shovel because the attackers had carried off everything. He ripped away the boards, opened the tomb, and peered into a black and silent hole.
“Cecilia! Cecilia!” he shouted, terri
fied.
The clear voice of his wife replied from the depths, “You’ve come at last, Juan. I was beginning to get bored.”
The three women and the children had spent more than twelve hours underground, in total blackness, with no water, very little air, and no knowledge of what was happening outside. Cecilia assigned the wet nurses the task of nursing the infants in turn, all through the day, while she, hatchet in hand, stood ready to defend them. The cavern did not fill with smoke, thanks to the hand and grace of Nuestra Señora del Socorro, or perhaps because it was sealed by the soil Juan Gómez had shoveled over it to conceal the entrance.
Monroy and Villagra decided to send a messenger that very night to take the news of the disaster to Pedro de Valdivia, but Cecilia, who had emerged from underground as dignified and beautiful as always, said that no messenger would come out alive from such a mission; the valley was seething with hostile Indians. The captains, little accustomed to listening to a woman’s opinion, ignored her.
“I beg you, señores, to listen to my wife. Her network has always been helpful to us,” Juan Gómez intervened.
“What do you suggest, Doña Cecilia?” asked Rodrigo de Quiroga, whose two wounds had been cauterized and who was pale from exhaustion and loss of blood.
“No man can slip past the enemy lines . . .”
“Are you suggesting we send a homing pigeon?” Villagra interrupted sarcastically.
“No. Women. Not one, but several. I know many Quechua women in the valley; they will send the news to the governor, from one mouth to the next, more quickly than a hundred pigeons can fly,” the Inca princess assured them.
As they did not have time for long discussions, they decided to send the message two ways: one by Cecilia’s chain of women and the other by a Yanacona who was as nimble as a hare, and who would attempt to cross through the valley by night and find Valdivia. I regret to say that this loyal servant was caught at dawn and clubbed to death. Best not to think what his fate might have been had he fallen into Michimalonko’s hands alive. The cacique was surely enraged by the failure of his vast army. He had no way to explain to the indomitable Mapuche of the south that a handful of bearded ones had held off eight thousand of his warriors. Much less mention a witch who threw heads of caciques through the air as if they were stones. They would call him a coward, the worst thing that could be said of a warrior, and his name would not be remembered in the epic oral tradition of the tribes but instead in malicious jests. Through Cecilia’s network, however, the message reached the governor in twenty-six hours. The notice flew from one hut to another across the valley, through forests, and over mountains to reach Valdivia, who was scouting the area, vainly looking for Michimalonko and still unaware that he had been tricked.