GHOST DANCING WITH MANCO TUPAC

Ghost dancing was not simply a phenomenon central to the North American Indian mythos, but also an integral part of the ritual of the indigenous South American populations, particularly to the descendants of the Incas. The primary difference between the North and South American versions of the ghost dance is that the Incas danced more for remembrance than renewal. To the Inca, the future, unknowable, was considered to be at a person’s back and the past, known, opened up before a person to be seen clearly.

— Sir Richard Bambaugh, Inca Ritual (Harper & Row, 1986)

I

At times it seems to the reporter as she scribbles notes in the dim light that this is his last breath, that the lungs will collapse in mid-sentence; the arms — hands twiglike but supple — will punctuate his stories with a flourish and then convulse, become limp, cold, languid. The eyes, shining from the sunken orbits, will dim to the color of weathered turquoise. The mouth will die a hummingbird’s death, slackening in a final flutter of lips. Already a smell, old as parchment and strong as vinegar, has begun to coat the hotel room. Outside, Cuzco’s moonlit streets are silent.

She can taste his death on her tongue: a bitterness softened by the sweet-sour of incense burning in a bowl. Her pen falters on the page, then hurries forward ghoulishly, to catch his essence before it vanishes into the air.

But he does not die that evening, despite the heaving of his breaths, the pauses and halts that disrupt the urbanity of his voice and its subtle hints of accent, none of which can quite break the surface of syntax.

Behind him, black machinery sputters and jerks as it feeds his lungs. At times he is lost within the machines that engulf him, their own cough-cough threatening to drown out his words, or snatch them before they can reach the reporter’s ears, and by extension, her pen.

She thinks it odd that a machine, a collection of cogs and wires and bellows, should keep a man’s soul in his body, the two having no natural connection, nor even a common meeting ground. Yet, when she looks up from her page, he appears to have melted into the machine, no longer a figure draped in sheets, lying placid on a wooden bed.

Then, too, she finds it odd she should be here, having closer kinship to the machinery than the man. At least she can understand the machinery. Peru stonewalls her. It has nothing to do with who she is or what she desires from life. The hotel, for example, carved into the mountainside, and the hotel room with its small window that winks from the wall opposite her chair. The window, during daylight hours, shows a cross-section of mosses and lichens, the loamy soil alive with beetles. Now it is just another shadow, rectangular amid deeper shadows.

The window reminds her of the grave and, staring again at Manco Tupac, last true descendent of the Inca Emperors, she realizes just how small, how birdlike, he is. She had expected a giant, with the sinewy, leathery health of a man who claims to have survived one hundred forty winters in a country that already has her gasping for breath, ears popping. The man lying on the bed looks as though a breeze could strip the flesh from his ribs.

Her expectations have often led her astray; her vision of New York City before she moved there from Florida was of a citadel of shining chrome and steel — evenings at the Met, operas at the Lincoln Center, walks in Central Park. Cultural Eden. It was an image that, as her editor at Vistas: Arts and Culture Monthly often says, “Got turned on its ass.”

When her thoughts stray, as now, to home, or the hypnotic movement of his hands lulls her toward sleep, his words, muscular and tight, bring her back to her notes, to the physical sensation of the pen in her hand, to the nerves in her wrist that tense, untense, tense again.

Already she has been writing for an hour, her tape recorder broken and discarded an isthmus away in Mexico, her wrist ready to break on her now, with no money to replace that, either. She feels a spark of resentment toward the old man in front of her and then rebukes herself. She asked for it. It was the type of assignment her rival freelancers regularly had orgasms over as they drummed up articles from their pathetic little stomping grounds in Manhattan and Brooklyn: interviewing the last of a breed, with all the echoes of faded glory, lost triumphs, a hitherto overlooked pocket of nostalgia that readers and award judges alike could fawn over. Dramatic headlines dance through her head: BRUTAL IRONY: LAST DESCENDENT OF THE INCAS DYING OF ASTHMA; THE SECRET HISTORY OF THE 20TH CENTURY, AS REVEALED BY THE LAST OF THE INCAS. She does not know much more — yet. She knows that the old man requested the interview and that he holds an honorary degree from the National University of Lima at Cuzco. Beyond this, nothing. A void as black as the window carved into the mountainside.

“Do you think you have transcribed my words accurately thus far? It must be difficult.”

His voice startles the reporter, because now it is directed at her. She squints at the page. Her eyes blur. The words become hieroglyphics. What did it mean, really, as a whole? Where is the article she dreamed up while still in New York? The perfect story and yet, almost indefinably, she can sense it going sour, going south.

“Yes, I think so,” she says, smiling, looking up at him. Even her feet and ankles ache, a healthy, well-used ache, as if she just swam ten laps at her local gym.

“Good,” he says, and spins out the dry reed of his voice until it is impossibly thin, impossibly tight, tighter than the quipo knots his ancestors wove into compact messages: scrolls of knots sent across the Empire by fleet-footed men with muscles like knots beneath their skin.

She has only her pen.

II

In 1879, when I met the man who called himself Pizarro, though Pizarro had been dead for over 300 years, I knew the Inca knots better than the Español of the usurper. I had not yet left my village for renown on the Brazilian coast, nor infamy in the United States, where I would spend many years being hunted by Pancho Villa over one misunderstanding and two exaggerations. I had yet to become known by the moniker of “Jimmy Firewalker,” and still relied upon my given name, Manco Tupac, which I have returned to in these later years.

And also in 1879 my mother and father were still living. My parents, my four brothers, two sisters, and I all worked the land, never owning the land, although we were allowed to plant some crops for our family’s use. The hours were hard and we had few pleasures in our lives, but, for better or worse, I was always scheming to do better, to get out of our ruined hut of a house, to be someone. For the man you see before you is dissipated and jaded from too many years traveling this world, but in 1879 I was very, very young . . .

The man who would be Conquistador again entered my village, two miles from this very city, as winter began to settle over the land. The trees had lost their few leaves, the sun had a watery, distant quality, and in the far off mountains, I heard the raw sound of avalanches as falling snow dislodged packed ice.

The man who would be Conquistador again rode up the old Inca road from Cuzco. He rode a nag, was himself a nag of a man: thin to a shadow, arms like poles of balsa wood, and his age above sixty. Wedged into the wrinkles of his face, his blue eyes shone with a self-assurance that beggared the decay of his other parts. He wore a rusted helmet from the past century, such as the men of the Peruvian viceroyalty wore before Bolivar swept them into the sea. At his side hung a rusty sword in a scabbard and a flintlock rifle, aging but oiled and shiny. Supplies weighed down his horse — blankets, water skins, pots, pans — and it was the banging and clanging of these supplies that alerted me to his presence.

As this oddity approached, I sat idly in a chair outside our leaky house and pretended not to see him. Our family had just eaten our noontime meal and everyone was already in the fields, my father yelling for me to join them. I pretended not to see him as well.

The stranger’s shadow fell across my body. The voice that addressed me held no trace of quaver, more akin to the Damascus steel in his eyes than the ruins that surrounded them.

“Manco Tupac?”

“Yes,” I replied.

“I am called Pizarro. I require a guide.”

I stared up at him, saw the yellow cast to his face, smelled the quinoa berries on his breath.

“Where?”

He pointed to the mountains.

“Up where Tupac Amaru used to rule. I seek the Lost Treasure of the Incas.” He said this with precision, capitalizing the phrase. “In Cuzco they say you are the best guide, that your ancestors are descended from Tupac.”

I nodded and folded my arms. I was not the best guide. I was cheap. I had gained my meager reputation from my name, which combined the names of the two last and greatest Incan Emperors, this an act of bravery on the part of my mother. It had been several months since anyone had requested my services due, no doubt, to the landowner wars that sputtered and flared like brushfires across most of the lower country.

“I have a map.”

I stifled laughter. They all had maps in those days, whether it was black-clad Dominicans searching for treasure for a European diocese, or the newly coined “archaeologists” who dug up our graves, or common thieves from Lima and Quito. Maps on parchment, lamb’s skin, papyrus, even tattooed on their skin. Never once had I heard of their quests turning up anything more profound than pottery shards, skulls, or abandoned mercury mines.

I nodded and stated my fee for such a venture.

“Of course.” He inclined his head, an odd gesture of deference that almost made me forget he claimed the inheritance of Pizarro.

Our quest began amicably enough. I said goodbye to my family, my father stern, his brow furrowed with worry, as he handed me his own set of bolas, with which I could bring down wild game. My mother, feigning indifference, had already returned to the fields by the time I left with the Spaniard. I cannot pretend they did not fear for me, but the money I earned would keep us fed and clothed through the winter. All the while, Pizarro upon his nag looked neither left nor right, harmless as statuary from another age.

We set out into a morning sharp and bright enough to cut our eyes, he upon his horse, myself following on foot. We traversed the Incan highway, still intact after four hundred years, which ran from Cuzco into the mountains. The road was pockmarked with rubble, shot through with sweet-smelling grasses. We would not leave the highway until well near the end of his quest.

Every few miles my companion would point proudly to the etched initials of a Spaniard immortalized in stone. Some of the crudest carvings dated back to Pizarro’s original few score men.

As we traveled, he spoke to me of his ancestors, of what they had endured to bring my ancestors into the light of Christendom.

“It was a time of great energy! A time of great industry, unlike today, when Spain has fallen back on its haunches like a toothless lion.” He grimaced at the thought, but then he brightened. “Perhaps a time will again come when . . . ” He trailed off, as if realizing to whom he spoke.

“You are Christian, are you not?” he asked.

“I am not,” I said.

“But you have been baptized?”

“I have not,” I replied.

“Your parents?”

“They have not.”

He shook his head, as if this did not make sense to him.

“There is but one true God,” he said, in a lecturing tone, “and His Son, who died for our sins, is Jesus Christ. If you do not believe in Jesus Christ, you shall be eternally damned.”

“What do you hope to find?” I asked. I had no religion, only a faith in the myths my mother had whispered to me even as a baby at her breast, a faith in the confident way she told them. It gave me secret pride that such tales had outlived the Spanish conquest, for the Christian god was by contrast colorless.

“What do you hope to find?”

A one word answer.

The only honest answer, ever.

“Gold.”

We did not converse much after that first brittle exchange, but contented ourselves with watching the countryside unfold, always ascending along the winding road. The mountains surrounded us ever more and if we looked at them for too long, perspective seemed to place them within reach, as if we had only to clutch at the glittering domes of snow and they would be ours. But when we let our gaze drop to the ground beneath our feet — and we did this rarely — we quickly noted the precariousness of the path: our feet often came to the edge of open air, almost stepping out into a sky that could plunge us one thousand, two thousand feet to a valley floor, a river bed. Pizarro developed the habit of glancing down, then over at me, as if he wondered whether I would lead him to his death.

Near dusk of the third day, weary and ready for sleep, we came upon a troupe of Ghost Dancers. They danced around the ruined spire of an old Inca guard tower. The tooth of stone had served as a home to animals for at least three hundred years, but they danced to restore the guard tower to its former glory and purpose. The bittersweet smell of sweat and exertion was a testament to their faith, their hope — a dream I could not share, for I found it impractical at that age. It would have accomplished much more, in my view, to rebuild the tower and refit the stones into the highway.

The dancers had adorned themselves in the rags of old ceremonial dress, clothing that still glittered with iridescent reds and greens, where it was not torn and resewn. The women, stooped and folded in on themselves, stank from years of labor in the mercury mines. Miraculous that they walked at all, and they danced like scarecrows on a puppeteer’s strings, their jerky strides worn down to a caricature of normal human motion. To me they appeared bewitched, their twitches and stumbles those of a people caught forever in trance.

The men blended in with the women, except for one, who looked up at Pizarro astride his horse. Age had hardened this man until his true nature had retreated into the wrinkles and taut skin around the bone: one last rear guard against death. One could not guess whether he was happy or sad or merely indifferent, for his face had become such a mask that even ennui was a carefully guarded secret. And yet, if one discounted the faded rags, the dull eyes, this man resembled Pizarro closely enough to be his brother — and Pizarro must have recognized this, for he turned quickly away and muttered to me, “Do not stop here. Do not stop. Go on. Go on!” and urged his nag forward at a pace I could hardly match.

When, after several strides, I glanced back, I saw that the man stood in the middle of the highway, staring at us. His gaze stabbed into my proud Pizarro’s back like a dagger blunted by ill use, though why the similarity in their faces should frighten the Spaniard I did not know.

That night we camped in the sandy soil beside a patch of thorny yuccas. Though our clothing barely protected us from the chill, the Conquistador refused to unpack the blankets. He seemed to invite the cold, to embrace it, as if seeking penance. But for what? Because a mirror had been held up to him?

He remained awake for a long time, watching the stars glint like the eyes of gods. In his face, I still saw the ghosts of the men from the dance, and realized they haunted him. His prayers that night, conducted in a whisper I strained to understand, were for his wife and children in Spain.

Ever upward we climbed. I led now, despite his map, for the road contained treacherous potholes, overgrown with eel grass and other weeds that disguised ruts until too late. On the fifth day, I brought down a wild pig with my bolas to supplement his supplies. Always we went higher. Always higher. However we traveled — slow or fast, on foot or leading his horse — we went higher.

“The air is thinner here,” he said, wheezing.

“Yes, it is.”

“How much longer?”

He asked this question often and I had no ready reply. Who could predict what obstacles we might encounter? Our conversations consisted of little else, and this depressed me, for I was normally talkative and animated with my clients. But when I asked Pizarro, he had no stories, no descriptions of his country. At most he might say, “Where I live it is beautiful this time of year.” Or, “Churches are the only bastions of faith left, the only strength left in Spain.” Once he said, “You will never go to Spain. Why do you ask?” He said this so matter-of-factly that I determined that I would travel to Spain, if only to spite this stupid old man who really thought his map and his alone led to the lost treasure of the Incas.

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.

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.

Then the old man fell, the sword still in him, Tupac’s hand letting go of the hilt.

Tupac stood above the dead man for a moment, breathing heavily. An emptiness filled his mind as if he were a fish swimming blind through the black lake that shimmered before them. The sound of a chipparah bird’s mating call startled him and he realized that the Conquistador had died silently, or that his own frantic heartbeat had drowned out any noise.

The Conquistador’s eyes remained open and blood had begun to coat his tunic. Blood coated the sword’s blade, which had been pushed upward, halfway out of the Conquistador’s body when he fell to the ground. Tupac tasted salt in his mouth and brushed the tears from his eyes. He felt nothing as he rolled the Conquistador’s body over and into the water. The body sank slowly, first the torso bending in on itself, then the legs, and finally the arms, the palms of the pale hands turned upward as if releasing their grip on the world.

When the hands faded from view, the emptiness spread through Tupac, from his arms to his chest and then to his legs, until it felt like a smooth, cold stone weighing down his soul. He would never forget that moment, even when he was old and bedridden. He would see the Conquistador falling, for a hundred years, and no matter how many places he visited, no matter how many adventures he had, no matter how many memories he filled his mind with, he could not stop seeing that slow fall, or stop feeling the sword, as if it had entered his body, as if he had fallen into the dark wet lapping of waves, into the unending dream of drowning . . . .