The Compass of His Bones and Other Stories Read Online Free PDF Page A

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.
    “It was no dream, Manco,” he said. “It was no dream, then.” His eyes widened and his voice came out in a whisper. “Last night by the fire, I sat at the Last Supper and Our Savior hovered above me and told me to eat and drink and he said that unto me a fortune would be delivered. And he spoke truly! Truly he is the Son of Heaven!”
    He kissed me on both cheeks. “I am rich! And you have served me faithfully.” So saying, he took a few gold artifacts worth twice my