WHOLE VOL. THE WEST INDIES VAZQUEZ DE ESPINOSA 589 



him to be on his guard, for such crowds and so much material for 

 Atahualpa's oath of allegiance and funeral tributes to his father were 

 neither good indications of loyalty, nor were they necessary. 



At all these warnings and notifications of his officers and vassals, 

 the innocent and unsuspecting Huascar awoke to his danger, although 

 too late to prepare for defense against the evident menace of 30,000 

 veteran enemy soldiers, of long experience in warfare; for although 

 from his teeming city and the 100 villages adjacent to it, founded 

 by the great Mango Capac, he could get together 100,000 warriors 

 for its defense, yet in this unexpected crisis he had for the occasion 

 neither time, good counsel, nor warning. But since he could help 

 himself out from the city and these villages, he ordered all the prov- 

 inces of his empire warned and notified ; but since they were so 

 remote, they could not come to his aid in time. Accordingly he set 

 out from the city without even 10,000 of those he might have gathered 

 together inside it, when he should have repaired to the fortress, where 

 he could have been safe until the arrival of aid from his provinces ; 

 he joined forces with 30,000 troops coming from the W., from the 

 Provinces of Condesuyos ; but through the lack of good counsel and 

 preparation, and through the keenness of his enemies, he was defeated 

 and captured by them, as will be detailed in the following chapter. 



Chapter XCIII (87) (Marg.: 90) 



Of the Battle Waged against King Huascar by the Troops of the 

 Rebel Atahualpa, of His Imprisonment and Death, and the Fate of 

 Those of the Blood Royal. 



1583. Good King Huascar Inca was afflicted and overwhelmed 

 with grief, unprepared as he was for the unexpected treachery of 

 Atahualpa ; he could have taken refuge with his followers in the 

 asylum of his fortress, impregnable both because of its site and its 

 thick walls, and there in security he could have awaited the aid he 

 had ordered to come from all the provinces of his empire to overcome 

 and chastise the rebels and the treason of Atahualpa. But here also 

 he lacked good counsel, and knowing that the enemy had already 

 crossed the Apurimac bridge and were shamelessly laying waste the 

 country and killing its inhabitants, he set out from the city to the 

 W. along the Condesuyos Highway to join forces with some 30,000 

 troops who were coming to his assistance from those provinces. 

 But these were mostly raw recruits, tired out and off their guard, 

 after the haste in which they had marched to his aid. So Atahualpa's 

 rebels, not to lose the favorable opportunity Fortune had laid in 



