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By Root 1944 0

geographic limits of governability—communication down the long north-south spine of the empire was stretched to the limit. Much of Wayna Qhapaq’s time was devoted to organizing the empire’s public works projects. Often these were more political than practical. Because the Inka believed that idleness fomented rebellion, the Spanish traveler Pedro Cieza de León reported, he ordered unemployed work brigades “to move a mountain from one spot to another” for no practical purpose. Cieza de León once came upon three different highways running between the same two towns, each built by a different Inka.

Consolidation was completed in about 1520. Wayna Qhapaq then marched to Ecuador at the head of an army, intending to expand the empire to the north. It was a journey of return: he had been born in southern Ecuador during one of his father’s campaigns. He himself brought with him one of his teenage sons, Atawallpa. When Wayna Qhapaq came to his birthplace, the city now called Cuenca, Cobo reported, “he commanded that a magnificent palace be constructed for himself.” Wayna Qhapaq liked his new quarters so much that he stayed on while Atawallpa and his generals went out to subjugate a few more provinces.

In 1615, the Inka writer Felipe Guamán Poma de Ayala presented his life’s work, a massive history of Inka society with four hundred drawings, to King Philip II of Spain, hoping that the king would use it to learn more about his new subjects. Whether Philip ever saw the manuscript is unknown, but Poma de Ayala’s work—one of the few non-European accounts of Inka life—is now a fundamental scholarly source. Although the portraits here are not taken from life, they hint at how the Inka viewed and remembered their leaders.

They did not meet with success. The peoples of the wet equatorial forests did not belong to the Andean culture system and were not interested in joining. They fought ferociously. Caught by an ambush, Atawallpa was forced to retreat. Enraged by this failure, Cobo wrote, Wayna Qhapaq “prepared himself as quickly as possible to go in person and avenge this disgrace.” He left his pleasure palace and publicly berated Atawallpa at the front. In a renewed offensive, the army advanced under the Inka’s personal command. Bearing clubs, spears, bows, lances, slings, and copper axes, brilliant in cloaks of feathers and silver breastplates, their faces painted in terrifying designs, the Inka army plunged into the forests of the northern coast. They sang and shouted in unison as they fought. The battle seesawed until a sudden counterattack knocked Wayna Qhapaq out of his litter—a humiliation. Nearly captured by his foes, he was forced to walk like a plebe back to his new palace. The Inka army regrouped and returned. After prolonged struggle it subjugated its foes.

Finding the warm Ecuadorian climate more to his liking than that of chilly Qosqo, Wayna Qhapaq delayed his triumphal return for six years. Wearing soft, loose clothing of vampire-bat wool, he swanned around his palaces with a bowl of palm wine or chicha, a sweet, muddy, beer-like drink usually made from crushed maize. “When his captains and chief Indians asked him how, though drinking so much, he never got intoxicated,” reported Pizarro’s younger cousin and page, Pedro, “they say that he replied that he drank for the poor, of whom he supported many.”

In 1525 Wayna Qhapaq suddenly got sick and expired in his Ecuadorian retreat. Once again the succession was contested and bloody. Details are murky, but on his deathbed the Inka seems to have passed over Atawallpa, who had not distinguished himself, and designated as his heir a son named Ninan K’uychi. Unluckily, Ninan K’uychi died of the same illness right before Wayna Qhapaq. The Inka’s next pick was a nineteen-year-old son who had stayed behind in Qosqo. As was customary, high priests subjected this choice to a divination. They learned that this son would be dreadfully unlucky. The priest who reported this unhappy result to Wayna Qhapaq found him dead. In consequence, the court nobles were left to choose the emperor.