The Romance of Golden Star ...Griffith, George Chetwynd
Science
The Romance of Golden Star ...
Griffith, George Chetwynd
Fantasy fiction
But, as I have said, these things are not for me to tell, since I have
neither the skill nor the knowledge to do so. What I have set down here
is only the story of my own awakening out of the death-sleep into which
the arts of the priests of the Sun had cast me with Golden Star, and of
her return to join me in my new life. I have told of that and of all
that befell us afterwards, and now there remains only the telling of
that which fulfilled our strange fates and completed our happiness in
the new world into which those fates had brought us.
Many weeks passed and grew into months before the oppressors were
finally subdued and I found myself undisputed lord of all the land, and,
as I had promised Joyful Star, all this had to come to pass before I
would ask her to put her hand into mine and take her place beside me as
my Coya and queen on the throne of Huayna-Capac.
But at length there was peace in the land and we returned from Lima, the
capital of the Spaniards, where I had been proclaimed and acknowledged
Inca and Emperor of my ancient domains, to the City of the Sun, which
many loving and willing hands had cleansed of the abominations of its
new idolatries and made in some measure fit to receive us, to crown our
new lives with such happiness as, with the help and blessing of the
Unnameable, we might be able to bestow upon each other.
The treasures of gold and silver and ornaments of jewels, the rich
hangings and the sacred and precious emblems had been brought from the
Hall of Gold and the throne-room beneath the Sacsahuaman and set up in
the chief temple of the Spaniards, which stands in the place where the
holy Temple of the Sun once stood and is in great part built of the
self-same stones.[F]
It was the eve of the Feast of Raymi, or the Coming of the Sun, which in
the olden time we counted as the beginning of the year, and I had
determined that this day should witness the restoration of the old order
and the beginning of my own true happiness--so that night Golden Star
and I, as became the son and daughter of the Royal Race and Sacred
Blood, watched and prayed according to the ancient rites--she in a
chamber of what had once been the House of the Virgins of Sun, and I in
the purified temple--from the setting of the sun until the first waning
of the stars in the coming dawn.
Very early in the morning she was brought to me in the temple by
Tupac-Rayca--whom I had in virtue of his pure blood and noble decent,
consecrated Villac-Umu or High Priest of the Sun, and who had in turn
invested such others of the Blood as he thought worthy with the
subordinate dignities of the holy office. He and his attendants were
arrayed in the ancient priestly robes and adorned with the sacred
emblems of their rank, and Golden Star was attired as a royal Virgin of
the Sun, in garments of white edged with scarlet and decked with
ornaments of pure gold.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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