He laid him down with gentle reverence on the sands, and when he had taken Nahua’s jewel from his neck he ordered one of the royal litters to be instantly brought that he might be taken back to the fortress, and while it was being brought he stood over him with bent head and wet eyes, mourning for him as man seldom mourns for his enemy, and, for the time, heedless in his sorrow of the battle which was still roaring away up the valley. CHAPTER X. BELEAGUERED Nearly five months had passed since Juan Pizarro and Hernando de Soto had ridden at the head of twenty-eight wounded and wearied men, the sole survivors of the terrible Battle of the Valley, into the northern gates of Cuzco. Their homeward march had been one long fight of two nights and two days, during which not a man left his saddle save when he dropped from it overcome by wounds and weariness, and lay waiting for the axe or spear or mace which ended his fighting days for ever. Those who reached the city had found it closely invested on all sides by seemingly innumerable hosts, which had come flocking from all quarters of the land in answer to the call of its last champion. The beleaguering hosts had opened to let them through, and the Peruvian warriors had laughed at them as their wounded and jaded steeds crawled feebly into what seemed the death-trap in which they were about to die, but those who had fallen behind had been butchered without pity. The young Inca had fulfilled with terrible exactness the oath which he had sworn to Anda-Huillac on the fateful night when Nahua and Mama-Oello had devoted themselves to a death of shame and torment to buy him his last chance of liberty. The news of the Battle of the Valley had sped with the swiftness of lightning throughout the length and breadth of the land, and the Inca’s call to arms had been answered north and south and east and west by hosts of fierce and pitiless warriors, who had seemed to spring full-armed from the earth like the fabled fruit of the dragon’s teeth of old. Wherever the Spaniards had settled in isolated families and small communities, they had been fallen upon and butchered, men, women, and children, without warning and without pity, for the day of reckoning had come, and the penalty of outrage and massacre, of plunder and treachery, had now to be paid.