Free She Walks in Shadows by Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Paula R. Stiles Page A

pictures while he spoke and he eventually taught a few of us English. You could easily say that several of us became his friends, including myself, as silly as that may sound — a grown man and of his age! But we were friends all, nonetheless.
    “All during the dry season, they made trips out to the holy ruins and the priests told him: You may draw what you see; you may copy the inscriptions, but you must take nothing. And the men from my village ensured that he did not, though Henley, you know, he’s … he was a very fiend for collecting things. Everywhere he went, his hands darted out, so, so, like the head of a bird, and he would pick up a little rock, or a fossil, or a feather or a flower or a seed, and put it in his pockets. How we loved to laugh at his pockets! We had none; everything we valued had a life and a place, and we would never have moved it.
    “He filled books and books with this trip — he showed me, later — and he waved goodbye and left, on the funny things we had finally learned to call horses, all alone. And we did not think of him much again for a few years, when he returned once again at the end of the rainy season, with photographic equipment and more blank notebooks, and even hammers and chisels and shovels. The first night, we sat around the fire as always and when he saw me, he cried, ‘My friend Sima! How have you been?’ and I said, ‘I have been well!’
    “Oh, my father laughed so loudly at the English we spoke. He said I sounded like our gray local bird, who imitates the things he hears. But I was pleased that he remembered me and I begged him to let me come with them the next day. ‘I know the ruins,’ I told him. ‘Every part of them, I know. We play there so often. Let me come with you!’ ‘Oh, no, my little parrot,’ he said. ‘That I shall not allow.’
    “Well, Mr. Greene, I was a wild and wilful child, if you will believe it, and when they set off the next dawn, I followed. They swiftly outpaced me, being ahorse, but I knew well where they were going. Our ruins were circular, with a great tower at each of eight points on the circle, though much tumbledown, and one tall structure in the center. We sometimes called them Sun Stones, for the shape, like the sun. Although the walls were so beaten down by wind and rain that a man could walk through at many points if he cut away the vines, there was only one place where anything so big as a horse could pass, a great gate built of neatly cut basalt blocks, and it was for there that they made. As I followed them in, one of the men, Lemba, saw me and cried out for me to leave, but Henley said that I might stay, for I might have some use, perhaps to squeeze in the tight spaces that the grown men could not reach.
    “Henley was asking the men about the ruins — who had made them? How long had they been there? Well, the second question we could not answer, none of us. Until the white man came, in fact, we did not realize that we measured time differently than he did. But we could answer the first, so my father’s friend Olumbi, who knew many stories, told him it was our own men doing the bidding of the old gods who could not speak. Who were these gods? asked Henley.
    “Olumbi explained: All the gods of our land speak, and it was they who gave the power of speech to the lion and the jaguar, the buffalo, the eagle and the snake and the elephant. But the old gods had come before, so there had been no opportunity for them to be given this power from the gods who came after. The old gods who could not speak could still command, of course, because they were gods, so they commanded the men who lived there to build these structures, to carve them with holy words, and to bring the stone from far away. Henley had noticed that there was no basalt for many days’ walk around our village, which we had not noticed, us in the village, for of course we did not need to work stone. We had clay and wood enough. He taught us the words for basalt