The Compass of His Bones and Other Stories (3 page)

“An angel! It is a sign,” Pizarro said. He dismounted, bent to one knee, and crossed himself.

“Just an adventurer,” I said. “A plunderer, who was put here by my ancestors as a warning.”

He ignored me, walked up to the frozen doorway, put out a hand to touch the ice near the dead man’s head. He muttered a few words.

“A fire,” he said. He turned away from the man. “We must light a fire to melt the ice. Beyond the ice lies the lost treasure of the Incas.”

As the sun faded, we lit a fire. Rather, I lit a fire and Pizarro hacked at the ice with an ax. The blade was dull and made a hollow sound as it cut into the ice. Pizarro was strong for his age and his technique fluid. Soon, the dead man began to float and when Pizarro finished hacking a hole in the ice, water spilled out, more ice broke, and the man was set free. He came to a stumbly rest at our feet, face down, a sodden mass of armor and rags and flesh. The doorway was almost clear and beyond lay a passageway untouched by frost.

Then I knew that we had entered the spirit world and our minds, our wills, were not truly our own.

In one convulsive motion, the lump of flesh at our feet roused itself, bracing itself with its arms until the face, still lolling hideously against the neck, looked up at us with soggy eyes, exhaled one last breath and, shuddering, fell back to the ground. In the moment when the eyes stared at me, I swear I saw someone else looking out at me, not the dead soldier, but someone else, a god perhaps, or one aspiring to godhood. A sentry for the immortal.

I screamed and turned to run, but tripped and fell in the snow, bruising my left shoulder. Pizarro, through inertia or bravery, stood there as the corpse died a second death.

His sheer ignorance of the danger forced me to curb my instinct to flee, though my heart pounded in my chest. I remember that moment as the one time when I could have moved against my future. The moment after which I could not turn back, could never again be just a simple guide in a town outside Cuzco. If I could, would I go back to that wall of ice and tell myself to run? Perhaps.

Pizarro gently knelt and closed the corpse’s eyes with a sweep of his gnarled hand. He crossed himself and laid his crucifix upon the dead Spaniard’s breast. The light in his eyes as he rose frightened me. It was the light of a beatific yet cruel self-assurance. It lifted the wrinkles from the corners of his mouth, sharpened and smoothed his features.

Pizarro did not choose to break his silence now. He merely pointed toward the path cleared for us, patted me on the back, and remounted his horse. We entered the tunnel.

The tunnel was damp and cold and the sides painted with old Incan symbols, the paint faded from water erosion. Everywhere, water dripped from the ceiling, speaking to us in drips and splashes. The temperature grew warmer. Soon we saw a sharp yellow light through the dimness and the passageway opened up onto the burning orange-red of sunset.

The tunnel overlooked a shallow basin between mountains. We had come out upon a hillock that overlooked a vast city, the likes of which I had never dreamed: magnificent towers, vast palaces of stone, a courtyard we could barely discern, radiating out from a ripple of concentric walls. A
city,
whole and unplundered, lying amid thick vegetation — this is what took our breath, made us stand there gawking like the explorers we were not.

It is difficult, even now, to describe how strongly it affected me to have reached the location on the Conquistador’s map and to have found the bones of my ancestors in those buildings. No longer was I a simple villager, poor and bound to the earth — here was my legacy, my birthright, and if nothing else, that knowledge gave me the confidence with which I met the world the rest of my days. Here was yet another last refuge of the Inca, another place the Spaniards had never touched, could never touch. I wept uncontrollably, wondering how long men might have lived there, how finally they must have died out, protected from everything except their own mortality. The city radiated a desolate splendor, the pristine emptiness of the abandoned, the deserted. Perhaps then I understood what Pizarro meant when he had called Spain an old lion rocking back on its haunches.

But if my reaction was violent to an extreme, then Pizarro, by virtue of his hitherto unbroken mien, had passed into madness. He wept tears, but tears of joy.

“It is truly here! I have truly found it!” He let his horse’s reins fall and he embraced the ground. “Praise to God for His mercy.”

To see his face shine in the faded sun and his mouth widen to smile its first smile in nine days, an observer would have believed him caught in the throes of religious ecstasy. It did not strike me until then what a betrayal it had been to guide him to that place.

“Come, Manco,” he said. “Let us descend to the city center.” We made our way down into the basin — along a path of red and green stones locked perfectly together, into the antique light, the legion of yellow flowers, the perfumed, blue grasses.

We could not simply press through to the center of the city, for walls and towers and crumbled stones stood in our path. But, as we progressed, gaps in the stone would allow us to glimpse the ragged flames of a bonfire near that center. A bonfire that, minutes before, had not been lit. Yet now we could feel the heat and hear the distant sound of Incan pipes: a dry reed that conveyed in its hollow and wispy sound the essence of ghosts and echoes and every living thing deadened and removed from its vitality. Behind it, as a counterpoint, a flute, twining and intertwining in plum-sweet tones, invited us to dance, to sing.

From the moment we first heard the music, we fell under its spell and could do only what its husky silken voice told us. We hurried in our quest for the center, the courtyard. We wept. We sang. We laughed. Pizarro threw his rifle to one side. It caromed off a wall and discharged into the air. I dropped my bolas to the ground, prancing around them before moving on. We were slaves to the spirit of the city, for the city was not truly dead and the life in it did not come from the wilderness beyond, nor yet from the power of its ghosts. No, these were
living
forces that had fled from Cuzco and all the lower lands.

Thus we drew near over the ancient and smoothed flagstones, luminous-eyed crocodiles lured in dance to the hunter’s spear. The Conquistador was crocodile indeed with his salty tears and I, uncowed even by the myths my own mother had told me, an unbeliever at heart, was brought back into belief only by the compulsion and evidence of my own eyes.

We danced through the city until my lungs ached from laughter and my feet throbbed against the stone. Finally, we unraveled the circles of the maze and came out upon the center square. Within a blackened pit, a fire roared, muffling the music that had seemed so pure.

Around the fire danced men and women wearing the masks of gods and goddesses from the Inca faith, and from earlier, more powerful faiths. Conchame, the Emerald Beetle, bringer of drunkenness and shortened breath, danced his own mad dance, while Cupay, the amorphous God of Sin, adorned himself in cockroach carapaces of the finest black and aped their scuttling walk with a shuffle and hop, his eyes always surveying the others with suspicion. Ilapa, God of Thunder, made lightning-fast moves around the flames, letting them lick his fingers, his feet, as he twisted and turned in a blur. The hummingbird, messenger to the gods, was there too: a woman who wore thousands of feathers about her arms and legs, so that she shimmered and dazzled; even when she stood still, the movements of the others were reflected in the feathers, to give her the illusion of motion. Of them all, only her face was not hidden by a mask. She had delicate features, with high cheekbones, and lips that formed a mysterious smile. Her chest was bare, covered only by her lustrous black hair.

The rest I could not identify by name, and no doubt they came from older faiths — jaguar gods and snake gods and monkey gods — but nowhere could I see the Sun God, Inti. The smell of musky incense rose from them. The fire spewed sparks like stars. The laughter of the dancers, the chaffing of bodies moving closely together, seduced our ears with its other-worldly wonder.

From behind, wind-swift, hands guided us to positions closer to the fire. I found myself reluctant to glance back, to identify our hosts, and Pizarro, too, looked only ahead. The hands — strangely scaled and at times too heavy with hair — brought alpaca meat on golden trays and a wine that burned our throats but soon went down smoothly until it was mild as water.

Alternately, we wept and laughed, the Spaniard embracing me at one point as a brother and asking me to visit him in Barcelona. I heartily agreed and just as quickly burst into tears again.

The dancers continued in their dance, a numbing progression of feet and whirling arms. Sometimes they moved at double speed, sometimes much slower than natural. Through it all, I caught glimpses of the hummingbird woman’s smooth brown legs as she made her way around the fire — or a flash of her eyes, or her breasts, the nipples barely exposed, brown and succulent. She spoke to me when she drew close, but I could not understand her above the fire’s roar, the jocularity of the Conquistador and our invisible servants, the hands that offered us berries and wrens in spicy sauces. Her lips seemed to speak a different language, the effect akin to ventriloquism.

The Conquistador mumbled to himself, seeing someone or something that was not there. Even in my drunken state I could tell that he did not see the gods and goddesses. Cupay danced much too close to him and eyed him with evil intent, sprinkling him with a golden dust that melted when it touched the old man’s clothes. “Yes, yes,” he muttered to no one. “It is only fair,” and “I, your servant, cross myself before you.”

While Pizarro talked, I watched the hummingbird woman. She flitted in and out of the dance with such lascivious grace that my face reddened. A toss of black hair. A hint of her smile, with which she favored me when I looked in her direction.

I wept again, and did not know why.

Pizarro said, “To the glory of Jesus Christ!” and raised his glass high.

The heat became
cold,
a burning as of deep, deep chill.

Conchame danced a dance of desperation now, bumping into the others with a bumbling synchronicity, his laugh as bitter and wide as an avalanche. A sneer lining his mouth, Cupay no longer danced at all, but stood over the Conquistador. The jaguar god snarled and writhed beside the fire. The snake god hissed a warning in response, but discordant. The Inca pipes grew shrill, hateful. Only the hummingbird woman’s dance remained innocent. The incense thickened, the sounds deepened, and my head felt heavy with drink.

The jaguar god, the snake god — all the gods — had removed their masks, and beneath the masks, their true faces shone, no different than the masks. The jaguar head blended perfectly onto the jaguar body, down to the upright back legs. The snake’s scales ran all the way down its heavily muscled flanks.

They were my gods, but they frightened me; the fear came to me in pieces, slowly, for my thoughts swam in a soupy, crocodile-tear sea. They were so desperate in their dance, their very thoughts calculated
to keep them moving,
because if they ever became still they would die. The Spaniards had taught them that.

A hand grabbed mine and pulled me to my feet. The woman. She led me into the dance, my fear fading as suddenly as it had come. Calm now, I did not weep or laugh. We whirled around the heat, the sparks, growing more sweaty and breathless in each other’s company. The feel of flesh and blood beneath my hands reassured me, and my desperate attempts to keep up amused her. I danced with recklessness, nothing like the formality of dances at the village.

I even began to leap over the fire, to meet her litheness on the opposite side. She laughed as I fanned mock flames. But the next time I jumped I looked down and saw in the flames a hundred eyes burnished gold and orange. They slowly blinked and focused on me with all the weight of a thousand years. After that, I simply sat with the woman as the others danced and Pizarro talked to an invisible, presumably captive, audience.

“The flames,” I told her. “I saw eyes in the flames.”

She laughed, but did not answer. Then she kissed me, filling my mouth with her tongue, and I forgot everything: the eyes, the Conquistador, Conchame bungling his way around the fire. Forgot everything except for her. I felt her skin beneath me, and her wetness, and my world shrank again, to the land outlined by the contours of her skin, and to the ache inside me that burned more wildly than the fire. I buried my head between her breasts, breathed in the perfume of her body and soon forgot even my name.

I believed in the old gods then. Believed in them without reservation or doubts.

When I woke, I remembered nothing. I had dirt in my mouth, an aching head, and the quickly fading image of a woman so beautiful that her beauty stung me.

I recalled walking through the city and marveling at its intricacies. I recalled the fire, and that we had met with  . . . with whom? A beetle crawled past my eyes, and I remembered it was Conchame, but I did not remember seeing him the night before, bereft and sadder than a god should ever be. It would be many years before I truly remembered that night; in the meantime, it was like a reflection through shards of colored glass.

Slowly, I rose to an elbow and stared around me. The city lay like the bleached and picked-through bones of a giant, the morning light shining cold and dead upon its concentric circles. The courtyard’s tile floor had been in ruins for many years. All that remained of the fire was a burnt patch of grass. Near the burn lay the Conquistador, Pizarro, his horse nibbling on a bush.

Beside Pizarro lay a pile of golden artifacts. They glittered despite the faint sun and confounded me as readily as if conjured from thin air, which indeed they had been. Children’s toys and adult reliefs, all of the finest workmanship. There were delicate butterflies and birds, statues of Conchame, Cupay, Ilapa, and Inti, and a hundred smaller items.

Pizarro stirred from sleep, rose to his knees. His mouth formed an idiotic “O” as he ran his fingers through the gold.