Ash and Small Bear go on an adventure!

Cusco rolls over its valley matching the hillsides contour for contour, cobbled streets barely wide enough for the little taxis so that, as they pass, you press yourself against warm stone walls to make room. In the plaza San Blas, a woman with a parrot on her shoulder is making jewelry, sitting in the sun with a pile of shells and hemp, laughing. The parrot is a startling green against her hair, and soft – he will nibble your fingers if you stroke his head, but not too hard.

The conquistadors, in the name of their god and of Spain, tore down the Inca temple in Cusco and used its stones to build the base of a great cathedral at the city center, marble arches and weeping saints and catacombs with names of priests carved into the dark of the walls, the altar plated with 12,000 kilos of silver. In the same city, now, there is a garden filled with hummingbirds and looming golden clouds, and it is beginning to rain – first the smell from far off of heat suddenly quenched, then the sound of muted applause, and finally the rain itself, suitably announced, turning every surface to a mirror that the sky might better admire herself. The clouds sigh and give themselves over to the earth, rain through mist illuminated hanging soft and layered as ferns from the wall of a cave, covering over the cathedral walls and the Inca stones beneath.

Left to the plants and the rain, how long until the echoes of human longing for divinity and power wash away downhill? And when the stone and silver belong again to the hills, whose gods will take up residence?