The Compass of His Bones (And Other Stories)

by Jeff VanderMeer

  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.

  “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 meager fee, put them in a pouch, and gave them to me.

  Pizarro was eager to leave in all haste and thus we left the ruins almost immediately, although I felt a reluctance to do so. We soon found our way back to the dead Spaniard and lower still by dusk.

  That night, I fell asleep to the clink-clink of gold against gold as Pizarro played with his treasure.


  But, come morning, I heard a curse and woke to the sight of Pizarro rummaging through his packs. “It has vanished! It is gone!” His cheeks were drawn and he seemed once more an old man. “Where has it gone? The gold has vanished from my hands, into dust.”

  I could not tell him. I had no clue. If he had not seen it disappear himself, he might have blamed me, but I was blameless.

  We went back to the city and searched its streets for two days. We found nothing. Pizarro would have stayed there forever, but our food had begun to run out and I pleaded with him to return to Cuzco. With winter closing in, I thought it dangerous to stay.

  We started down again and Pizarro seemed in better spirits, if withdrawn. But, on the fifth day, we camped by a small, deep lake and when I woke in the morning, he was gone. His nag stood by the lakeside, drinking from the dark waters. His clothes were missing. Only the map remained, black ink on orange parchment, and his sword, stuck awkwardly into the hard ground. I searched for him, but it was obvious to me that the Spaniard had been broken when the treasure turned to dust, and had drowned himself in the lake.

  I continued the rest of the way down, leading the nag but not riding her, for I did not know how. I knew only that my gold had not faded. It still lay within the pouch, and it was with that gold that I would later buy my way to America.

  Soon I came upon the ghost dancers again, but I did not stay long, though I wished to, for the man who resembled Pizarro stood in the highest part of the tower and for some reason he troubled me. I believe I thought it was Pizarro, gazing down on me.

  Thus, rich beyond measure and fortunate to be alive, I hurried past the tower and down into the lowlands and the fields to rejoin my family.

  V

  The reporter doesn’t know what to say at first, so she doesn’t say anything. Ignore the parts that aren’t possible, she tells herself. He’s an old man. He’s just mixing fact and fiction on you. But it’s not the impossible parts that bother her.

  Manco stares at the wall, as if reliving the experience, and she says, “Did you ever discover who the Conquistador was?” She could really use a smoke, but she doesn’t dare light up in front of a dying asthmatic.

  His gaze turns toward the darkened window, toward the movement outside that window. His eyes seem unbearably sad, though a slight smile creases his lips.

  “Among his personal effects were letters written to his family and when I returned to Cuzco, the mestizo he had bought the horse from filled in the gaps. It is quite ironic, you see — ” and he stares directly at her, as if daring her to disbelieve “ — he was an immigrant, a destitute carpenter whose father had herded sheep across the Spanish plains. Had he attended the military academy in Barcelona? I do not know. But during the time of land grants, his forefathers had settled in Peru, only to come to misfortune at the hands of other fortune hunters, the survivors limping back to Spain. No doubt he had read the accounts of these pathetic men and hoped, long after it was possible or politic, to acquire his own land grant. Practically speaking, though, he chose the best route: to steal treasure.”

  “But where did the map come from?”

  Manco shrugs, so that his shoulders bow inward, the bones stark against brown skin.

  Silence, again, the reporter trying to think of what to ask next. It frustrates her that she is reduced to reacting. Her mind alights upon the woman dancing around the fire. An adolescent wet dream. Believable? Perhaps not in the setting he had described, but the romances in the man’s life might fill up a side bar, at least.

  “What happened to the woman?”

  He closes his eyes so that they virtually disappear amid the wrinkles. He must have twenty wrinkles for each year of his life, she thinks.

  “I forgot her. I forgot much, as if my mind had been wiped clean. Sometimes the memories would brush against my mind as I sought my fortune in America. Other women . . . other women would remind me of her, but it was as if I had dreamed the entire night.”

  “When did you finally regain your memory?”

  “Years later, as I walked through Death Valley, dying of thirst, certain that the bandits who had stolen my horse would find me again. My eyes were drawn to the horizon and the sun. It was so hot, and the sun was like a beacon filled with blood. I stared and stared at that sun . . . and after a while it began to give off sparks and I heard myself saying ‘Inti was in the fire.’ I saw the bonfire then and the gods who had surrounded the bonfire, and . . . her, the woman — and I wept when I realized what I had lost when I lost my memory, for she had been human, not a goddess.

  “Those memories sustained me through that dry and deadly place, as if I drank from them for strength, and when I reached California, I decided to return to the city.”

  “You went back to the city?” the reporter says, which vexes her even more.

  “I spent a night in the ruined tower where the Ghost Dancers had once danced. I stopped by the lake where the Conquistador had drowned.”

  “And you found the city again?”

  “I did, although it had changed. The vegetation — the path of flowers, the many trees and vines — had died away. The towers and buildings still stood, but more eaten away, in ruins. So too did I find the woman — still there, but much older. The gods had left that place, driven back into the interior, so far that I doubt even a Shining Path guerrilla could lead you to them now. But she was still there. The gods had preserved her beauty well past a natural span, so that in their absence she aged more rapidly. I spent seven years by her side and then buried her — an old woman now — in the courtyard where I had once jumped across a fire with a hundred eyes staring up at me. And then I left that place.”

  Manco’s voice is so full of sadness that suddenly the reporter feels acutely . . . homesick? Is it homesickness? Not for New York City, not for her apartment, her cats, her friends, but for the bustling white noise of her office, the constant demands on her time which keep her busy, always at a fever pitch. Here, there is only silence and darkness and mysteries. There is too much time to think; her mind is working in the darkness, trying to reconcile the possible, the impossible.

  Something dark moves against the lighter dark of the window. Something in the darkness nags at her, screams out to her, but she wants to forget it, let it slip back into the subconscious. Outside, someone shouts, “No habla inglés! No habla! No habla!” She can feel dust and grit on her and her muscles ache for a swimming pool. When her husband left — was it four years now? — she had swum and swum and swum until she was so tired she could only float and stare up at the gray sky . . . and suddenly, she is looking up from the water . . . into Manco Tupac’s eyes.

  “You changed the most important part,” she says, her heart thudding in her chest. “You changed it,” and as she says it, she realizes that this story, this man, will never see print, that the darkness, the shadows, the past, have changed everything. What is there left to her with this story? What is left at all? Nothing left but to go forward: “Tell me what you left out.” It is one of those moments that will not last — she’ll recant later, she’ll publish the story, but for this moment, in this moment, she is lost, and frightened.

  He is quiet for a moment, considering, then he turns his head to consider her from an angle. “Yes, I will,” he says. “Yes. I’ll tell you . . . What does it matter now?”

  Then he is whispering, whispering the rest of the story to her, an enigmatic smile playing across his lips, as if he is enjoying himself, as if the weight of such a story, never before told, can now leave him, the machines the only weight left to keep him tied to this earth. And every word takes her further from herself, until she is outside herself, out there, in the darkness, with him.

  VI

  Tupac remembered precisely when he decided to kill the old man he called the Conquistador. They had stared into the dark waters of a lake above Cuzco and the Conquistador, already dismounted from his horse, had said, “This place holds a million treasures, if we could only find a means to wrest them from
the hands of the dead.” The lake held the bones of Tupac’s ancestors as well as gold, but he did not say this, just as he had not protested when the old man’s map had led them to the hidden city. He had done nothing while the Conquistador had rummaged through the graves on their last day in the city, picking through the bones for bits of jewelry to supplement the gold. How could he have done nothing?

  But as they stood and looked into the dark waters, Tupac realized that the old man’s death had been foretold by the lake itself: the Conquistador’s reflection hardly showed in those black depths. If the Conquistador’s reflection cast itself so lightly on the world, then death was already upon him. Killing this man would be like placing pennies upon the eyes of the dead.

  When they came out of the hills and the fog of the highlands into the region of the deep lakes, Tupac’s resolve stiffened. In the early morning light, the Conquistador’s horse stepping gingerly among the ill-matched stones of the old Inca highway, Tupac had a vision: that a flock of jet-black hummingbirds encircled the Conquistador’s head like his Christian god’s crown of thorns.

  The Conquistador had not spoken a word that morning, except to request that Tupac fold his bed roll and empty his chamber pot. The Conquistador sat his horse stiffly, clenching his legs to stay upright. Looking at the old man, Tupac felt a twinge of revulsion, at himself for serving as the old man’s guide, and at the old man for his casual cruelty, his indifference, and most frustrating of all, his stifling ignorance.

  At midday, the sun still hazy through the clouds, the Conquistador dismounted and stood by the edge of yet another lake. He did not stand so straight now, but hunched over, his head bent.

  Tupac hesitated. The old man looked so tired. A voice deep inside him said he could not kill in cold blood, but his hand told the truth: it pulled the Conquistador’s sword from its scabbard in one clean motion. The Conquistador turned and smiled when he saw that Tupac had the sword. Tupac slid the sword into the Conquistador’s chest and through his spine. The Conquistador smiled more broadly then, Tupac thought, and brought close to his victim by the thrust, he could smell the sour tang of quinoa seeds on his breath, the musk of the Conquistador’s leathers, and the faint dusty scent they had both picked up traveling the road together.