Among the Ruins

"There is no evil darker than the human soul, and no stone so eroded as our own understanding." - Father Rodriguez, Memoirs from the Church on the Ruins, 1557

1542 in the year of our Lord had been good thus far. It was February and even though the warm months had been colder this year, nothing seemed to cool Don Veladio's demeanor. He was a man on fire for one purpose: Glory, or better yet, gold. The thirty-year-old conquistador's always furrowed brow hovered above his glooming brown eyes and precisely chiseled black beard.

For his part in the current situation, Diego was simply a means to an end. Don Veladio needed a man of God for his planned expedition, and young Diego was the only fool willing to pitch in with him. All the other priests and friars in New Castille were in demand, busy amidst a civil war between the royal appointee Governor Vaca de Castro and self-elected Governor Almagro; the latter of whom murdered the previous governor and conqueror of the Incas Francisco de Pizarro.

Don Veladio had lived in Quito for the last six years, having made his way here shortly after the fall of it as an Inca stronghold, seeking riches and glory. He had found none of that, only hardship and violence. The natives were the proud and unrelenting sort, many still seeking a return to their old rule still to this day. Many had fled high into the mountains to continue their fight. As such, the war may have been long over, but the fighting would always remain.

You cannot conquer a people if there are still those who remember freedom still among the living.

That's how Don Veladio had justified his actions in the Massacre of Oyacachi the previous year to Diego. That should tell one the sort of man Diego now found himself associating with; the kind born into a wealthy family in Aragon that would leave all that behind, sail across harrowing merciless seas to come to this new world for as vain an idea as glory. It was a necessary association, however. Diego differed from many of his brethren of the cloth, believing that rather than reading the Spanish Requerimiento, declaring the natives must convert or be killed, there was a much better way to convert them. He had read of a man named Cabesa de Vaca who had travelled from one coast to another in the lands far north of Ciudad de Mexico and converted many of the natives there through acts of kindness and love, not violence. Diego had become to believe that this is how he would spread the word of God to the natives. The only problem was that there was only so much a twenty-year-old and newly arrived friar in New Castille could do. He hoped that would change today though.

The two of them were in Governor Vaca de Castro's recently constructed headquarters in the heart of Quito, now a royalist stronghold. The year before, tired of his incessant grappling for merely enough to get by, Don Veladio had sought a commission from the previous Governor to go searching for the fabled El Dorado. The commission was instead given to the governor's brother, Gonzalo Pizarro, much to Don Veladio's anger. Don Veladio had always hated the younger Pizarro, viewing him as an ungrateful child who sought riches and glory simply because his elder half-brother had conquered an empire. Don Veladio was so angered, Diego even remembered him laughing and rejoicing at the assassination of Governor Pizarro months later by Almagro.

However, Don Veladio had no problem putting aside his anger and putting on a face of concern if it meant who could get what he wanted: An opportunity. Gonzalo Pizarro's expedition was to send word back to Quito six months after it left. It had now been an entire year, and it seemed as if the expedition had fallen off the edge of the earth. Don Veladio's request was simple, a commission for fifty men and fifty slaves to find out what happened or even to rescue Gonzalo Pizarro's expedition. How noble and concerned he seemed now sitting across from the Governor in his armor as if ready for anything, his brow still furled but in concern for his "dear old friend" Gonzalo.