The Compass of His Bones and Other Stories by Jeff VanderMeer Read Free Book Online Page B

standard, as you would our beloved flag, and then fasten this standard through a stirrup on my horse, that I may always carry the head of my enemy upon a pole.”
    Gaspar stares up at Manuel, slight and effete beneath his robes, hands more weathered than his face. Startling white hands against the black.
    “As you wish,” Manuel says.
    Gaspar sees nothing in Manuel’s countenance to mock him.
    Gaspar and Manuel have never discussed what occurred in the high tower above Vilcapampa, during the Emperor’s torture. From the wounds on Tupac Amaru’s body, wherever he bled, black-and-crimson hummingbirds had burst forth and flown into the greater wound of the sky. Until the blood had dried and the Emperor had stopped his moaning. Gaspar and Manuel had stood there, unable to believe.
    Gaspar has blocked it from memory. He knows it happened, but at best it remains a fluttering at the edge of his vision, an event from a fever dream. The shock of it still frightens him during his sleep. He wakes now with a sharp, upward lunging motion that, as he will not or cannot admit, mimics the hummingbirds rising from the Emperor’s body. Where had they gone? What had they meant? Their crimson bodies had been like flakes of blood against the mountains outside the window.
    “I dreamt of nightmares within nightmares last night,” he tells Manuel sometimes. To which Manuel replies, “Nothing in dream is real.” Or in waking life, Gaspar thinks. Or in that place between sleep and wakefulness, the twilight he inhabits more and more. He is always sweating, the coolness of Cuzco given way to heat. And the plains below the plateau of the city have faded away into a heat-inflicting haze. And the insects are ever-present around him, reminding him of the hummingbirds.
    If he saw a hummingbird now, he might not recover.
    Even in letters to his wife Isabel, a beauty with raven hair that he has not seen in several years, Gaspar cannot express what he has seen. He sits in his office near the barracks and stares at her portrait on the wall — an image more real to him than her face in his memory. Behind her, a window, and through the window, a wide lawn, with a church in the background. Sometimes he wishes he could step through the portrait back into Spain. Sometimes he wonders why the scene in the portrait seems so unfamiliar to him. He searches his memory for that moment, sun-drenched and far away, but cannot find it. Maybe someday it will find him.
    Gaspar reads poorly, and his writing is painful, simple. It is Manuel who takes the words from his Captain’s mouth and translates them into missives Isabel might appreciate, if read to her by their son’s tutor. The first time Gaspar wrote to her after the Emperor’s death, it seemed like a confession. Although Gaspar could not tell her, through Manuel, what had really happened to him. The closest he came was this: “After the Emperor would not divulge his secrets, Manuel administered the last rites and we brought him to Cuzco in an ox cart.” Something in this statement seems true. Something in what it denied calms him even now.
    Later, when he is alone, he tries to compose his own letters to his wife, his fingers soon black with ink, raw. He does not want Manuel writing for him anymore. He knows the priest changes things, although he does not know what. He knows that he himself has changed, but he does not know how. The clues are few enough. Finally he gives up, lets the ink dry on his hands. Lets the sweat trickle down his back.
    The Viceroy requested Gaspar’s presence, to report on the taking of Vilcapampa, as soon as he returned to Cuzco. Gaspar has resisted the request for days, uncertain of what he might say to the man. What was the truth? What would be seen as lies? He knows what the Viceroy wants. He does not want to give it to him.
    Gaspar hears a flurry of beating wings, but when he looks up, the sky is empty.
    Two days later, Tupac Amaru’s skull graces the top of a pole fastened