So, after long and earnest debate between the young Inca and his General, the priests of the Sun and the chief nobles of the Blood, a compromise was decided upon. Manco was to start at dawn with his priestly retinue, and proceed with all possible dispatch to Titicaca. The bulk of the people were to be sent to their homes to prepare the fields for sowing, and Ruminavi was to remain with the picked regiments of the army to continue the blockade of the city. It was thus that there came about the last of the long series of fatalities which had seemed to foredoom the empire of the Incas to destruction. If this decision had been made even a day later, or even if the Spaniards had carried out their original plan of attacking the fortress the next morning, Cuzco might have fallen, and the Spaniards might have been forced to begin the whole conquest over again in the face of a victorious and triumphant people. But it so happened that the next day was St. James’, and when Hernando Pizarro told the Fray Valverde, who was now duly consecrated Bishop of Cuzco and the Southern Indies, of the projected attack, he protested with all the vigour of his eloquence against the desecration of the holy day by avoidable bloodshed, and ended by refusing point blank to celebrate Mass or to give absolution to any who took part in the impious enterprise. “No, Señor,” he said sternly, in reply to Don Hernando’s military arguments as to the necessity of striking quickly. “No, the day on which the holy St. Jago died is no day for battle and slaughter if good Christians can avoid them. If you are attacked again, then strike back like true men, and prayers shall not be wanting for the souls of those who fall. But if the heathen leave you in peace, as after to-day’s defeat they may well do, then should the solemn hours of to-morrow be devoted to a better and more urgent service. They must be hours of fasting, humiliation, and prayer. “Do you wonder, Señor, at the misfortunes that have overtaken you when you and your captains have permitted your men to imperil their own souls and pollute their holy cause by all manner of greed and lust and violence? Think you that God and the Holy Saints can look down with favour on work done by hands so foul and wicked as theirs are? It is not a battle with the heathen that they must fight to-morrow. It is a battle with their own evil lusts, which destroy the soul as well as the body. Do your will according to your own advice, Señor, but remember that to-morrow I proclaim a solemn fast and day of humiliation and intercession, and those who go out to battle between the rising and setting of the sun, save to repel an assault of the enemy, will go followed, not by the Church’s blessing, but by her solemn anathema!”