It must be a sign from the true Inca gods. They won’t let the false holiness of Maras taint the already warped villagers any longer.
Perhaps Chicya spent her life on Orq’O Wichay for a reason. She kept the ancient ways alive. She was the only one. Perhaps with Chicya’s help, the true Inca gods will intervene.
To the left of the yellow flowers, a coca bush displays its leaves like ornaments. Chicya plucks several and chews, mashes the coca with the lime and lets the juice dribble down her throat.
Eventually, she reaches the brush where Maras disappeared. The mountain rises far beyond the top stair, which levels off and joins a rock path cut into the side of the cliff. She ducks beneath the brush, then scoots against the rock wall along the narrow path. Her palms press against the rock, red like clay, red like blood.
She’s not afraid. She’s been training for this moment her entire life for reasons she only now understands.
The buzzard circles. He’s in the right place, for now is not her time, but it’s time for someone else.
Maras’ voice trills happily from the Sacred Cave. “Back on the shelf with you, my lovelies. I need new Inca blood. Perhaps you will do. And you.” Pottery clatters, and an odd keening echoes off the walls of the cave and filters down the cliff.
Chicya slides closer to the cave.
His trilling stops—
and she stops—
and now she inches closer until she finally steps into the mouth of the Sacred Cave. Heat flushes through her body. Her flesh tingles. The ancient air envelops her, and suddenly, she knows . . . without a doubt, she knows why she’s here.
A candle flickers in the far end of the cave, where Maras tinkers with his pots.
Hundreds of pots.
Thousands of pots.
Shelves reach from the cave floor to the ceiling in all directions, and crammed on every shelf are ancient Incan pots of all sizes, types, and dimensions. Black pots with white paint. Clay pots with red paint. Pots of men fighting. Pots of clay okra, corn, all forms of vegetables and fruits. Pots of doctors performing surgery on a girl’s chest, a man’s abdomen, a child’s head. Pots of women giving birth. Pots of two girls and a dead man having sex. Pots of deer frolicking in the woods. Pots of owl faces with cat bodies.
Next to the broken Bachue and Cava pot — the two girls — is one that looks like the fused Cisco and Luis.
Does Maras plan to turn Chicya and Narya into a pot like Bachue and Cava?
Yes. Maras plans to put Chicya and Narya on the shelf . . .
Chicya gazes at row upon row of the clay figures. Some weep. Some wave their arms at her. Some squirm, some twitch.
The ancients made pots depicting every aspect of life involving humans, animals, vegetables, fruits, and the supernatural dead. In Wakapathtay, the corn is larger than any other Peruvian corn, the alpaca wool is stronger than any other wool, and the alpaca meat tastes the best.
Why doesn’t Maras turn into pottery along with everybody else?
The stew jar shifts in her pants, and instinctively, her hand grabs it. Her back knocks against some pots, which rattle on the shelves.
Maras spins, and he whips out his gun. His lidless eyes widen, and candle light flicks across his slick smile. His laughter is shrill. “I knew you were special. I knew you were different. You’re feisty, aren’t you, little girl?”
He wiggles the gun, breaks into wild laughter, and leaps at her, and his forefinger presses the trigger.
She screams and darts to the side, her back banging against the shelves, as a bullet cracks into a pot of two warriors. They crumble to dust at her feet.
She throws herself at him, tackles him to the ground, and pins his arms down the way the female freaks pinned hers in the pickup truck. The gun skitters across the floor.
He wriggles beneath her, but she’s massive now and rock-solid, having consumed so much of the alpaca stew and corn, for now she knows: it is the special alpaca and corn of Wakapathtay that deforms the people and turns the pots into living creatures. It’s the only thing that makes sense.
Everyone here eats the stew except Maras, who eats cuy chactado. He must have stopped eating the stew shortly after his body began to change. This is why he still has feet, why he doesn’t freeze up and turn into a footless freak.
This is why the pots seem so alive, because they are alive.
Withhold the stew, the deformed people become pots again. On the shelf. Give them stew, the pots transform into mindless fighters.
But how . . . ? Nayda said something about smallpox. This is what she meant: here, in isolation, the virus changed . . . mutated . . . and infected the alpaca . . .
Maras wrenches his arm free, and she cracks it against the ground — it breaks. He howls in pain as she reaches into her pants and removes the jar of stew. His lips burble froth. “No, not that, no!” he shrieks.
What does Maras get out of it, the fighting? she wonders, as she twists open the jar and tilts it over his mouth.
“This is what you’ve been doing to me all this time, isn’t it? Pump me full of alpaca, and I’ll become another fighting freak, right? When I’m done fighting, when I’m broken, you’ll put me on the shelf with all these other poor people. Well, it’s stew time for you, Maras, and when you are a neckless monster, I’ll withdraw the stew, and then I’ll put you on the shelf.”
He shakes his head. No no no no no no . . .
A blob of stew falls between his lips. He chokes, but he must swallow. And now another blob falls.
It was here in the Sacred Cave that Manqu Inca died eight years after defeating the Spanish who spread smallpox throughout Peru. Manqu Inca knew that mutated viruses flourished in the alpaca of Wakapathtay, that the viruses infected the Inca after they ate the meat, and that the Sacred Cave held many of his people — transformed and on the shelf, but still alive. Manqu Inca wanted to die among these people, the strangest victims of the Spanish conquest.
“Do the alpaca grazing in Wakapathtay possess something in their meat that gives strength to these pots?” she asks.
Maras shakes his head. No no no no no no . . .
She twists her body and sits on his unbroken arm. Her free hand claps the bottom of the jar, and half the stew plops onto his face. She smears it into his wide, wide mouth.
His head slams from one side to the other. The gold ear plugs rattle, and tomatoes drip from the gold condor wings in his nose.
She rips strips from his alpaca tunic, the color of bloody sun. She ties his wrists behind his back and his ankles behind his body. He’s face down on the clay-red rock.
She places a huge pot next to Maras’s head. His lidless eyes weep. He knows what she’s going to do.
The pot is from the time of the people who built the temple Collud, ancestors of Chicya’s ancestors, and has a spider’s head, a feline’s mouth, and a bird’s beak. It is the spider god, who fills its webs with decapitated human heads.
She dumps stew on the spider god to revive him, then thrusts the last alpaca chunk into Maras’ mouth. She will return and force more meat into Maras. He will be a freak. And then she’ll go away from here, far away, and Maras will become pottery with a broken arm –
Unless the spider god takes care of him first.
She imagines the humiliation and torture endured by the spider god time and time again fighting for Maras.