Outskirts Press, INC.

A CLASH BETWEEN WORLDS

In 1529 Pedro Pizarro is a sixteen year-old scribe with the promise of an easy life in the grand Church of St. Martin. When his gallant cousin Francisco Pizarro gallops into Trujillo at the head of a stampede of finely-armored cavalry, recruiting for an expedition to the golden cities of Peru, offering “An adventure beyond dreams, riches beyond description and fame beyond generations, while doing God’s work,” Pedro wrestles with his commitments to his poor goat-farming father who gave him to the Church and to his mentor, the good Father Vincent, who lends him books filled with adventures. Youngest, most inexperienced, and useless aboard ship, Pedro is presented with the young Indian Quispe by the great General Francisco Pizarro and the two misfits are given the task of learning and teaching each other their languages. Their friendship grows in Panama, then closer, in the infested swamps, scorching deserts, desperate battles, and constant hardships as they follow the enigmatic General Francisco Pizarro south. On November 15, 1532, Francisco Pizarro leads 168 Spanish soldiers into the evacuated Andean city of Cajamarca. That night, thousands of campfires blaze the surrounding mountains. The Inca King Atahualpa has just been victorious in a destructive civil war. Now with an Empire of twelve million people, and with 80,000 victorious warriors surrounding the trapped strangers, the Inca King awaited a meeting with the 168 hairy-faced white men. The characters, the dates, the battles, the hardships, and the catastrophic confrontation in the plaza of Cajamarca, and the moral sufferings, are all recorded history. Only the friendship between these two young, real-life characters, Pedro and Quispe, is supposed, and therein grows the intriguing story of two views of the pivotal moments in the violent clash between the “Old World” and the “Americas.” This incredible, and fascinating, 34 months of globe-shaking history is detailed on a most compelling and human scale. Each chapter is written as a cliff-hanger; the reader is irresistibly drawn on, into chaos, and History, as were Pedro Pizarro and the Indian translator Quispe, and 168 Spaniards and twelve million Andean People. In no other time in history has there been such an abrupt, world-altering clash between two such distant and different civilizations. In the conquest of Peru there were heroic actors on all sides; and scoundrels, and well-intentioned but misguided protagonists, on all sides. This is a novel about heroes and anti-heroes and the story of two young men who felt the shaking of the world and tried desperately to calm it.