The Compass of His Bones (And Other Stories)

  Now the mists began to roll in: thick soups that our weak eyes could not penetrate. We traveled through this underworld with no anchor to secure our senses. In the absence of taste, touch, hearing, we became each a ghost to the other, a form in the mist. Only sharp sounds — the jingle of bit and harness, the creak of leather saddle — pierced the whiteness. It did not, of course, affect our camaraderie, because our camaraderie would have fit into the space between his saddle and his horse’s back.

  Pizarro’s nose bled copiously in the thin air. He tried, and failed, to staunch the flow with his spare shirt. The white fabric was soon clotted red as if he had suffered a fatal wound.

  I had many strange thoughts. Disembodied by the mist, not even able to see our own feet, I found that my imagination tried to compensate for the loss of sight. Soon, every tree root under my tread was a human bone — here a thighbone, there a spine. Helmets, too, I found aplenty with my feet, no doubt only rocks.

  The only relief from the mist came in the form of lakes so blue and deep that they seemed black; so thickly placid that a skipping stone would only plunk and disappear, leaving no ripple to mark its entrance. The bones and treasure of many Inca lay at the bottom of such lakes, and I felt in my heart that a man would fare no better than the stones. The lakes were all graveyards without markers.

  I told this to the Conquistador and he laughed.

  “Think of the gold,” he said. “If only we could find a way to raise the gold.”

  I began to fear his determination, his single-mindedness, his refusal to make camp until after the moon rose high above the mountain peaks. He was old and yet by strength of will refused to allow his body to betray him.

  On the seventh day, when the silence and the mist made me both jumpy and melancholy, he asked me to tell him a story. I told him it was an odd request.

  I thought I saw him shrug through the mist as he said, “My father once told me stories to pass the time when we went out into the fields — to oversee the men. This mist unsettles me.” And then in a whisper, “Please.” I wondered if he saw the ghost dancer in his dreams, if the man stood in the ruins of the old Incan highway and stared at Pizarro, night after night.

  I thought for a moment and then said, “I shall tell you a tale from the beginning of the end of our reign.”

  He nodded, motioned for me to continue.

  And so I launched into my tale, determined to drive away the mist that clotted my eyes and stole my breath . . .

  III

  They journeyed to see the toad that lived in the maggot-cleansed eye of an eagle. This eagle had died high above a granite canyon, and already on the trek all seven llamas had been lost to thirst and fatigue. The meat was rationed by the seven Quichua who walked the ancient paths. These paths had been laid down long before the Inca rulers had arrived at Machu Picchu and built the city of Vilcapampa. The paths never remained the same — carefully chosen stones led the uninitiated to ravines, or places where the earth buckled, cracked, as mountains tossed and turned in fitful sleep.

  One Quichua, Melchor Arteaga, was a lunatic. He danced the dance of the Emerald Beetle, Conchame, bringer of drunkenness and shortened breath. Twelve days before, Melchor had been struck by a Spanish musket load near Vitcos, where even now refugees straggled in ahead of the conquerors. The left side of the lunatic’s head had darkened; he moved jerkily. His eyes darted back and forth, perhaps following a hummingbird’s frantic flight from flower to flower. By nightfall, Melchor would be dead. By nightfall, the toad would have told them what they wished to know.

  Two men, nobles, had already died, but three strong men carried the corpses on shrouded litters, muscles straining, faces long since stripped of any fat. Captain Rimachi Yupanqui, oldest of them all, had suffered through Inca Atahualpa’s capture by Pizarro. He of narrow eye and hawkish nose had seen the old king butchered once he filled a room with gold. Rimachi remembered the delicate butterflies, beetles, alpacas: children’s toys. The metal work had bought nothing. It never would. Rimachi walked with a soldier’s sense of fixed steps. His companions, Sayric Tupac and Titi Cusi, sons of the seventh man, had witnessed excesses themselves on the fields outside Cuzco; they listened with hatred when Rimachi spoke of Pizarro, the man who had robbed them of their birthright. All three carried bolas at their waists, the stones flaked with dried blood.

  The seventh man was the king, Manco. His army awaited his return, bearing the oracle of the toad. The toad had always decided the punishment of the worst evildoers. Manco staggered forward, clutching his side, Rimachi supporting him at intervals. The wound would heal in time. But the king’s eyes were hollow and the clear, cold air cut through his robes. He shivered.

  “Treachery,” Manco muttered, speaking to the sky. After raising the banner of revolt, many Quichua had joined him. But the Spanish had routed Manco near Cuzco and he had fled to the Urubamba Valley; the safety of fortress-capital Vilcapampa reassured him. Steep drops, raging rivers, and passes three miles high would hinder pursuit. But his forces needed a sign as the Spaniards approached, stripping bodies of metal, their thirst for gold unslaked. Manco made this pilgrimage because his captains had lost faith, and he himself refused to be ruler over the solitary mountain peak of Machu Picchu. Manco still hoped the toad who watched from the eagle’s eye, the oracle of the Quichua, would shed some wisdom on this crisis. Certainly the resident priest could help him understand.

  So, sliding and stumbling, seven men lost themselves on the paths. Squinting, Manco pressed forward in the glare of the morning sun. Melchor followed, giggling and clutching his broken head. Behind both, the king’s sons and his captain dragged the dead nobles; they would be placed near the oracle, buried under rocks. No one spoke, though once or twice Rimachi would mutter a word to Titi, staring with concern at Manco. They ate as they moved, llama meat and quinoa, the cereal-like seeds kept in waist pouches. The sun eclipsed Melchor’s face. Manco allowed himself a smile, his callused feet lifting more easily with each step. They were close. Rimachi smiled too, a guarded smile. He knew the odds, had known them since Manco had cast off the role of puppet king.

  They reached the bridge that joined the two sides of the canyon. Its liana cord made it durable, but the ropes swung and groaned in the wind. Manco crossed first, bracing himself against the gusts, planting one foot in front of the other. Melchor ran across, nearly ramming a foot through the webbing. When everyone had reached the other side, Manco said, “We will cut the bridge once we cross over again. We will cut every bridge . . . ” He looked to Rimachi, who nodded his approval. Manco glanced at his sons, then moved forward.

  The stone hut next to the bridge was empty. The priest who had stood guard was discovered by Rimachi. He pointed downward to the base of the cliffs. The man was dead, sprawled with arms outstretched, his robes a blur of blood. Manco frowned, and said, “Leave him.”

  Together, they made their way to the toad’s alcove, their bolas held ready. The alcove lay in a grotto which had been hollowed out at eye level above a shelf of rock. From the shelf, the men could see the stacked range of mountains fading into the distance, clouds stalking from above. The valleys beneath them were green smudges, the rivers sinuous lines broken by the white interruptions of rapids.

  Although Rimachi and Titi searched, fanning out to cover the shelf’s rim, no enemy could be found. A cold wind blew out of the west and Manco shivered again. He called his son and captain back and, bravely, he approached the alcove. A judgment would be passed down. Behind him, Rimachi watched, a grimace forcing its way through wrinkles; the death of the priest made him wary. Sayric and Titi stood frozen, their burdens temporarily forgotten. Melchor picked a flower from behind two stones.

  Manco peered into the hole. Within lay the toad, staring out from the eagle’s eye. How it sparkled in the sunlight!

  Manco’s shoulders slumped. He sank to his knees, a sigh and snarl of exhaustion on his lips. Rimachi cursed, kicking at the ground. Sayric and Titi dropped their burdens. The dead men
tumbled over the edge of the rock shelf, falling until they disappeared from sight.

  Melchor laughed, as though Conchame, the Emerald Beetle, was buzzing in his ear, and brought his musician’s pipes to his mouth. Whirling, flailing, Melchor pawed at his head. A hollow sound, slow and melancholy, crept into the air, a counterpoint to his crazy dance. Manco, knowing he would never reclaim his lands no matter how hard he fought, raised his head to catch the notes. He nodded wryly as Rimachi helped him to his feet and his sons wept. A dirge. How fitting.

  For the toad had turned to gold.

  IV

  I told this tale as a warning. If it marked centuries of slow decline and failure for the Inca, it also foretold a punishment for the Spanish: to be enraptured and consumed by their obsession with gold. Pizarro did not take it as such. He was silent for a long time, so long that I thought he had fallen asleep on his horse.

  But then he said, haltingly, as if explaining to an idiot, “I studied at the military academy in Barcelona many years ago. You must understand that war is not a game for children.”

  “Thank you for your wisdom, but I do not see it that way,” I said.

  To which he replied, “That is why I am upon this horse and you are my guide.”

  I kicked at the skulls that must have been roots or rocks, and cursed myself for telling such a story at all. The Spaniard was without subtlety and I without patience.

  The sparse yucca and scraggly herds of wild alpaca gave way to bleak ice and snow, without the mist, which we soon learned had been a blessing, for now we saw each other more clearly, and neither of us could more than tolerate the other. Myself, because the Spaniard was conservative and withdrawn. The Spaniard, because I refused to agree with him and told him stories with no useful moral.

  We argued about supplies.

  “Surely there is wild game about,” he said when I suggested his dry beef and water skins would only last the journey if we turned back within three days.

  “Look around you,” I whispered, afraid of avalanche. “Look around you! Do you see any trees? Any bushes? Anything for an animal to eat? Do you?”

  We were tiptoeing through a field framed by abutting mountains whose flanks raced upward toward the sun. Not a blade of grass, and no water, except in the form of ice. Beneath the ice, more ice.

  “How do you know?” he said.

  “Because I live here,” I said.

  He shivered, nudged his horse forward, its hooves making soft scrunching sounds in the snow.

  An hour later, we came upon a frozen waterfall.

  The Spaniard, complaining of the cold, trailed off in mid-insult, saying, “My God!” A solid wall of ice confronted us. In the center of this wall, a doorway had been covered over by water that had once flowed in a river down the mountainside and now formed a facade of ice. A man, frozen through, looked down at us from within the doorway. At first I thought he was floating in the ice, but as we moved closer I saw the frayed end of a rope. The man had been hung by the neck and the passage sealed with him inside it. The man wore a Conquistador’s armor and his head lolled; his helmet had frozen to his forehead and his arms hung limply at his sides.

  “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.