Something squeals, and the villagers scream and pump the air with their fists. Chicya moves closer. Within the knot of villagers, animals scuffle and grunt.
A loud crack rings out, as if metal has cleaved skull, and the crowd goes wild. Another crack, a heavy blow no doubt, and an animal screeches, then whimpers and falls silent.
Chicya elbows her way to the center of the crowd. Those who recognize her scoff and try to shove her away. She retains her footing and glares back.
And then she sees them, the animals that are fighting: two men in loin cloths, squatting close to the ground, their round bodies smashed together. White fur forms patterns on their black skin, making them look faintly like the black-and-white pottery of the ancient Chimus of the Moche Valley. From their shoulders to their waists, blood mats the white fur into pink cotton. Stumps at the bottoms of their legs wobble in the dirt. Nearby is an Incan death club, gold and etched with serpents.
Slowly the men rise, their faces twisted in pain, and Chicya sees that neither man has a neck. They look like men, but there’s something off about them. Their bodies start sizzling where joined — and how can this be? — and the burned flesh crackles.
The villagers shriek and clap their hands.
Chicya turns to run, but her forehead slams against something hard. She reels back, vaguely sees a shovel and a laughing face.
Furry hands grab her. They lift her, and before she knows it, they throw her into the back of the pickup truck. She struggles but can’t break free.
Bizarre animals pin down her arms and sit on her legs. She can’t kick her legs loose, can’t ball her fists and punch the animals.
They might be women, but then again, they might not even be human. Like the fused men, they have no feet. Their bald heads are tattooed with Inca patterns: three stairs, a feline, a deer, a serpent. They wear rags and have no breasts, and in fact, their bodies are as round as urns. Chicya opens her mouth to scream, but several furry fingers jam into her mouth, and she wretches, the fur wet and dirty, the fingers gagging her. She sinks back, willing herself to go limp. Her torso convulses as she gags, and finally, the fingers slide from her mouth.
In the ancient Quechua language, they talk. “An amazing freak and easy to snatch” and “an orphan, nobody will care” and “people will pay a lot for her.” They coo at her, they stroke her black hair, and one of them tells her, “Relax. We won’t hurt you. You’re one of us now.”
Fingers peel back her lips and force open her teeth. She tries to bite, but the fingers are too strong. Sweet corn juice, the chicha, pours down her throat, and she sputters. But she can’t choke, can’t let them kill her, for now is not her time. She’s not ready to die, not yet, not this way.
They help her sit, and they poke alpaca meat into her mouth, and she chews and swallows. They feed her strange corn, each kernel the size of a thumbnail.
She dozes off and on, and is barely aware she’s in a truck bouncing down the mountain passages. Wheels grind over rock and dirt. The truck wheezes. Female voices say, “Ollantayambo” and “in the heart of the Sacred Valley.” A woodpecker raps a tree, and Chicya pictures its beak and the bobbing of its head. The rapping fades into the crunch of the wheels.
Finally, the truck stops, and the female creatures carry her to a straw pallet, where she sleeps through the night. When she awakens, she’s woozy as if drugged.
She slips outside.
The air is heavy again with the scent of alpaca stew. The truck and van are parked by a small roofless building made from stone, where smoke drifts to the sky.
On a rock bench to her left, a large clay pot begins to rattle. Molded in the clay, two girls embrace on the side of the pot, which now clanks across the bench.
Chicya squeezes her eyes shut, then opens them again, but her vision doesn’t clear.
The pot spins. The clay girls clench each other more tightly.
Chicya whirls, seeking an escape route. Forest-clad cliffs on three sides. Path snaking down the mountain. And behind the bench, rock stairs thrust into the clouds. How’s she going to get out of here?
Her heart raps louder than the woodpecker.
She clenches her fists, wills herself not to cry.
A man saunters from the roofless building. He’s short and round with no neck, but what startles her the most is his face: the lidless black eyes, the toothless smile stretching from ear to ear, and the deep creases — folds really — that make his forehead look like wet clay. Gold prongs, each the size of Chicya’s big toe, skewer his ears, and he wears a gold nosepiece that looks like the spread wings of a condor. His tunic is knit from yarn unlike anything Chicya has ever seen: gold and red, as if spun from a bloody sun, and tufted to make his torso look feathered. Unlike the other monsters, this one holds a gun, and it’s aimed right at Chicya.
With his other hand, he shoves a fistful of ground meat into his mouth. The smile doesn’t waver, even as he mashes the meat with his gums. As he approaches, she smells cuy chactado, fried guinea pig. His pace quickens, and she sees that he has feet. No stumps, but feet.
She shrinks back from him.
“Good,” he says, “it’s good to show respect.” His voice is oddly high, and his Quechua syllables end in trills. He pops the gun into a pocket.
“What . . . who are you?” she whispers.
“Welcome to the True Sacred Valley. Here, all that matters is the most sacred Inca ceremony. We’ve never lost it. You’ll fit right in.”
Her mind reels. What is the most sacred of all Inca ceremonies? She tries to remember. Inca children were sometimes fattened before ritual slaughter. Women drank fermented corn chicha before being sacrificed to the gods. Priests wrapped the corpses of royal Inca in beautifully embroidered funerary blankets, and buried them with gold masks, ear plugs, and nostril plates. She stares at the man. He’s wearing similar accouterments.
“You have nothing to fear in Wakapathtay,” he says.
Surely, he jokes. This can’t be Wakapathtay. Nobody’s ever seen the village, much less lived in it. According to the ancients, Wakapathtay was the birthplace of those who came before the true Inca. It sat high on a mountain over the Sacred Valley, tucked where only goats and alpaca could climb. Wakapathtay was also home to the Sacred Cave where, in 1544, the leader Manqu Inca — who defeated Hernando Pizarro’s forces in the village of Ollantayambo — went to die.
The man takes Chicya’s arm, and he gently strokes it. But if he thinks this soothes her in any way, he couldn’t be more wrong. Her skin crawls beneath his touch. She wants nothing to do with him or his companions. “You’re living proof that Wakapathtay exists, just as we all are,” he says. “We remind people of their heritage. You can’t get this service anywhere else because, you see, everything springs from Wakapathtay.”
“What do you do to these people?” she asks.
“I give their lives meaning.” He turns as two creatures hobble on leg stumps from the path that snakes up the mountain. One creature looks like a spotted deer with a rope around his neck. The other has the face of an owl and the body of a cat. Both have spouts on their heads. They carry a stretcher made from the same yarn as the man’s tunic. On the stretcher is a bizarre corpse made from two fused men. Although their faces are mangled to pulp, she knows from their black skin and bloodied white fur that these are the “men” she saw fighting before her capture. They had beat the life out of each other with the clubs.