The Prince of Terra Firma

She died, he said, for the sake of purity.

In that final hour, the word had none of the irony which it deserved. Besides, she was pure. There was no way that she could be otherwise under his tireless care. It wasn't her fault that the word was meaningless. Donna Elvira de Aguirre - El Pura, they should have called her, just as their christened her father El Loco.

He had always searched for purity. The meaning of it changed as he grew older and more deranged - the purity of religion, perhaps, as the heathen temples were reclaimed. The purity of blood, certainly. Even when he lay claim to the throne of Spain, he did not dispute their holy right to hold on to it. But by the end of his life the purity was made of flesh and metal: the body of his daughter, and the gleaming spectre of gold.

He killed her, of course. For the want of a horseshoe nail a battle is lost. For the want of grain and clean water, his army sickened and died. For the want of an army the city crumbled, and its mythical gold was forever lost. For the want of gold, he turned to his own possessions. He had slaves, a few stragglers, a boat and a daughter.

Aguirre was not a good man, even amongst conquistadors. When they cut his body into pieces nobody wept. Perhaps Elvira would have, if her severed throat could produce such an animal sound. She had lived well from the carrion her scavenger father had ripped from the hearts of the Aztec tombs. That was not his crime. Nor was it the taking of slaves, the incest, murder and torture which he delighted in. Those were normal enough. Aguirre roused an army against the Spanish throne - three hundred men, raising five guns against a country on the other side of the world. He invoked the name of Almighty God - ah! There it is.

That is not the whole story, but it is enough.

The gleam of gold was lost in the murky filth of the Amazon river. It trickled away as slowly as the endless hours they spent staring at the shore. The men they passed smiled and waved, and threw them darts and arrows in the same way a woman might throw a flower at a stage. The thorns pricked, and many men's hearts skipped a beat. Some stopped altogether. The ones who God did not call home were sick and frightened enough to listen to Aguirre's fevered words, and so he showed them his purity.

Gold.

The slaves pointed into the wall of trees and promised a whole city of it. Their eyes gleamed in laughter, but the soldiers saw only passion. In their world a lump of yellow metal could transform a life. If it had so little value here that whole cities could be hewn from it, then why would the natives look so enthalled? One might as well ask for bone or brick. They did not want to believe it, but they had been ordered to find it. They did not know that the expedition was meant to humour them while the politicians brokered for peace. They drank up Aguirre's stories like men dying of thirst.

Parched, on the river, they continued to die. El Pura survived. Nobody ever speaks of her. She is as lost as a city of gold crumbling into the trees. Nothing beside remains.