Capitán Cristóbal de Varga’s drive for glory and gold in 1538 Peru leads him and his army of conquistadors into a New World that refuses to be conquered. He is a man torn by life-long obsessions and knows this is his last campaign.
What he doesn’t know is that his Incan allies led by the princess Sarpay have their own furtive plans to make sure he never finds the golden city of Vilcabamba. He also doesn’t know that Héctor Valiente, the freed African slave he appointed as his lieutenant, has found a portal that will lead them all into a world that will challenge his deepest beliefs. And what he can’t possibly know is that this world will trap him in a war between two eternal enemies, leading him to question everything he has devoted his life to – his command, his Incan princess, his honor, his God.
In the end, he faces the ultimate dilemma: how is it possible to battle your own obsessions . . . to conquer yourself?
Cracking the code of the quipu
In an early scene of my historical fantasy novel Conquist, a royal Incan runner clutching a quipu of coloured knots to his chest is being chased by two conquistadors on horseback. The quipu is in my view the most fascinating aspect of Incan culture, and we are still trying to decipher the mystery of the coloured knots.
In Conquist I speculated on this mystery. Fantasy comes under the umbrella term of speculative fiction, so that shouldn’t be a surprise. The areas where historians don’t know the facts with any great confidence is the space fiction writers can do what they do best. As a writer of historical fiction I look for gaps and unknowns in history. And the quipu represents the greatest gap in our knowledge about the Inca.
In an early scene of my historical fantasy novel Conquist, a royal Incan runner clutching a quipu of coloured knots to his chest is being chased by two conquistadors on horseback. The quipu is in my view the most fascinating aspect of Incan culture, and we are still trying to decipher the mystery of the coloured knots.
In Conquist I speculated on this mystery. Fantasy comes under the umbrella term of speculative fiction, so that shouldn’t be a surprise. The areas where historians don’t know the facts with any great confidence is the space fiction writers can do what they do best. As a writer of historical fiction I look for gaps and unknowns in history. And the quipu represents the greatest gap in our knowledge about the Inca.
We know most about the societies that have provided us with a written record which we can understand. We don’t have this for the Inca. For a long time the consensus among historians has been that the Inca had no written language. There has been recent research, however, that suggests the quipu represents a form of written language and that after the Spanish conquest, the skill to read it was lost.
So, what do we know about this enigmatic object?
Quipus are made of cotton fibres or the hair of llamas, alpacas, vicuñas or guanacos. They consists of strings with four kinds of knots—single, long, figure-eight, and figure-eight with an extra twist—dyed in various colours. To read a quipu, you need to look at the colour, number, and order of the knots. The numbers shown on a quipu use a base-ten system like ours and the knots are used to do arithmetic operations, such as addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division.
The quipu was one of the main reasons the Incan Empire grew so quickly and became the largest nation in the world at the time of the conquistadors. It enabled high-level recordkeeping of complex data. The Inca kept meticulous records, and because they didn’t have a monetary system, and bartering was dependent on complex exchange systems, recordkeeping was the key to their economy and to the control over the peoples they had conquered. Without the quipu, the Inca wouldn’t have been as successful as they were.
But the quipu was more than just an accountancy tool. Apart from monitoring tax, it was used for collecting census information which counted everyone from infants to “old blind men over 80”. It was also used to keep track of the calendar, land use, military organisation, and for keeping a record of historical events.
Some historians argue that during the rebellion against the conquistadors, the Inca used quipus to pass messages to each other which the Spanish would not be able to decipher if intercepted. There are records of Inca historians using quipus when telling the Spanish about the Empire’s history, but it’s not clear whether they were just using the numbers on the quipu as a reference or the actual words they were saying were recorded by the knots.
At first the Spanish adopted quipus to help in the administration of their colony, but when it was discovered that the Inca were using them to keep track of offerings to their gods, the Christian officials ordered them to be burned. As a result relatively few now exist, making breaking their code even more difficult.
Studies by American anthropologist and ethnohistorian Sabine Hyland claim to have made the first step to proving that the quipu was also used as a phonetic language and that the knots represent words as well as numbers. A seventeenth-century Jesuit manuscript discovered by Laura Minelli, a professor of pre-Columbian studies at the University of Bologna, describes literary quipus. The manuscript consists of text in Spanish, Latin, and ciphered Italian texts as well as a wool quipu fragment.
The quipu is central to the plot of my novel Conquist. As well at featuring at the start of the novel, it also features at the end. The second last chapter is called “The Quipu’s Tale”. So, you can guess I’m banking that the recent historical research is going in the right direction. Let’s hope historians crack the code of the quipu.
Universal Amazon Buy Link: https://books2read.com/u/4AM52K
Publisher’s Conquist page: https://www.collectiveinkbooks.com/roundfire-books/our-books/conquist-novel
Meet Dirk Strasser
Dirk Strasser’s epic fantasy trilogy The Books of Ascension—Zenith, Equinox and Eclipse—was published in German and English, and his short stories have been translated into several European languages. “The Doppelgänger Effect” appeared in the World Fantasy Award-winning anthology Dreaming Down Under. He is the co-editor of Australia’s premier science-fiction and fantasy magazine, Aurealis.
Dirk was born in Germany but has lived most of his life in Australia. He has written a series of best-selling school textbooks, trekked the Inca trail to Machu Picchu and studied Renaissance history. “Conquist” was first published as a short story in the anthology Dreaming Again (HarperCollins). The serialized version of Conquist was a finalist in the Aurealis Awards Best Fantasy Novel category. Dirk’s screenplay version of Conquist won the Wildsound Fantasy/Sci-Fi Festival Best Scene Reading Award and was a featured finalist in the Cinequest Film & Creativity Festival and the Creative World Awards.
Connect with Dirk
Website: https://www.dirkstrasser.com/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/DirkStrasser
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dirk-strasser-1249a949/
Amazon Author Page: https://www.amazon.com.au/stores/author/B00CWMHGHO
Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/203225407-conquist
Dirk’s blog: https://www.dirkstrasser.com/dirks-blog
