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The teenager’s principal qualification for the post was that his mother was Wayna Qhapaq’s sister. Nonetheless, he had no doubts about crowning himself immediately—he didn’t even wait to find out if Wayna Qhapaq had left any instructions or last wishes. The new Inka took the name Washkar Inka (“Golden Chain Inka”). Atawallpa remained in Ecuador, ostensibly because he was unable to show his face after being berated by his father, but presumably also because he knew that the life expectancy of Inka brothers tended to be short.

Meanwhile, Wayna Qhapaq’s mummified body was dressed in fine clothing and taken back to Qosqo on a gold litter bedecked with feathers. Along the way, the dead emperor’s executors, four high-ranking nobles, schemed to depose and murder Washkar and install yet another son in his place. Something aroused Washkar’s suspicions as the party neared Qosqo—perhaps his discovery that Atawallpa had stayed in Ecuador with most of the Inka army, perhaps a tipoff from a loyal uncle whom the conspirators had approached. After staging a grand funeral for his father, Washkar ordered the executors to meet him one at a time, which provided the occasion to arrest them. Torture and execution followed.

The plot circumvented, Washkar went to work eliminating any remaining objections to his accession. Because Wayna Qhapaq had not actually married Washkar’s mother—the union was properly incestuous but not properly legitimate—the new Inka demanded that his mother participate ex post facto in a wedding ceremony with his father’s mummy. Even for the Andes this was an unusual step. Washkar further solidified his credentials as ruler by marrying his sister. According to the unsympathetic account of Cabello Balboa, Washkar’s mother, who was apparently willing to marry her dead brother, objected to her son’s plan to marry her daughter. The ceremony took place only after “much begging and supplication.”

Civil war was probably unavoidable. Egged on by scheming courtiers and generals, relations between Atawallpa and Washkar spent several years swinging through the emotional valence from concealed suspicion to overt hostility. Washkar, in Qosqo, had the machinery of the state at his disposal; in addition, his claim to the fringe was generally accepted. Atawallpa, in Ecuador, had a war-tested army and the best generals but a weaker claim to the throne (his mother was merely his father’s cousin, not his sister). The war lasted for more than three years, seesawed across the Andes, and was spectacularly brutal. Washkar’s forces seized the initial advantage, invading Ecuador and actually capturing Atawallpa, almost tearing off one of his ears in the process. In a sequence reminiscent of Hollywood, one of Atawallpa’s wives supposedly smuggled a crowbar-like tool into his improvised battlefield prison (his intoxicated guards permitted a conjugal visit). Atawallpa dug his way out, escaped to Ecuador, reassembled his army, and drove his foes south. On a plateau near today’s Peru-Ecuador border the northern forces personally led by Atawallpa shattered Washkar’s army. A decade later Cieza de León saw the battleground and from the wreckage and unburied remains thought the dead could have numbered sixteen thousand. The victors captured and beheaded Washkar’s main general. Atawallpa mounted a bowl atop the skull, inserted a spout between the teeth, and used it as a cup for his chicha.

With the momentum of war turning against him, Washkar left Qosqo to lead his own army. Atawallpa sent his forces ahead to meet it. After a horrific battle (Cieza de León estimated the dead at thirty-five thousand), Washkar was captured in an ambush in the summer of 1532. Atawallpa’s generals took the Inka as a captive to Qosqo and executed his wives, children, and relatives in front of him. Meanwhile, Atawallpa’s triumphant cavalcade, perhaps as many as eighty thousand strong, slowly promenaded to Qosqo. In October or November 1532, the victors stopped outside the small city of Cajamarca, where they