MAGGIE BLINKED. POWER, something ancient and glistening, flowed around her. Maureen’s silhouetted body wavered in the firelight, surrounded by silvery traces of light, like a laser show she’d seen once in Santa Fe.
Toloache.
That’s what Rupert had told her was in the orange drink he’d let her sip on the tailgate of his truck before he’d grabbed her and tied her up.
Toloache,
sacred datura, a plant loaded with alkaloids. Atropine was flooding her system. Spirit power, or a drug? Power or science. Indian or White. She felt her soul swell.
Reggie walked into the fire’s glow with tears running down his cheeks. His black ponytail shone in the firelight. “Put down the gun, Grandfather.”
Rupert regripped the pistol.
Reggie stepped closer. “I wish I’d known why you wanted me to steal those diaries. I thought they contained some tidbit on archaeology that you wanted. Grandfather, please don’t do this. You’re a good and kind man. You saved me, and I love you more than anything in the world. Stop this!”
The gun in Rupert’s hand shook. “Don’t stop me, Grandson! You know they all deserve—”
“They do
not
deserve any of this!” Reggie roared; then his voice dropped to a whisper. “I’m sure you’re right. The evil in that thing is what caused your cancer! You should have left it in the kiva crypt where you found it!”
Rupert said, “Those two old witches at Zuni told me the mask would make me the most powerful witch alive. That I would be able to make people do anything I wished them to. And look!” He lifted a hand to the people in the firelit kiva below. “I summoned them to me from all over the world, and they came!”
Reggie dared to take another step closer. To Rupert aimed the pistol at Reggie’s heart.
Reggie slowly lifted his hands, as though in surrender. In a very tender voice, Reggie said, “You think these people hurt you, Grandfather? Right now, this instant, you are hurting me far more than any of these people ever hurt you!” Reggie extended his hand.
“Give me the gun. Let’s stop this now, before anyone else is harmed.”
From the darkness behind Reggie another form emerged, tall, half stumbling. She wore a long camel-hair coat and had her hair drawn back in a ponytail. The silver conchos on her belt flashed in the fire’s gleam.
Reggie spun at the sound of footsteps.
“Ruth, stay back!” he shouted. “I told you not to come here!”
Rupert stumbled, and his entire body began to shake.
“No! No! How did she get out of the kiva?”
he screamed insanely, and clutched the pistol as though trying to keep hold of a living animal that wanted to be free. The gun seemed to be fighting his grip.
“Help! Help me!”
“Oh, good Lord, what’s happening?” Reggie yelled, and ran forward.
The pistol bucked in Rupert’s hand and the foot drum fractured. Stone chips showered the kiva, falling, falling like many-colored feathers.
Maggie shivered.
Maureen hit the ground on her belly and crawled like a madwoman for the safety behind the foot drum.
“Rupert, for God’s sake!” Dusty stood defiantly in the middle of the sand painting, one arm up while the other hand reached behind him, clawing for something Maggie couldn’t see. “Nichols is on his way! You don’t want to do this! They’ll put you away forever.”
Maureen’s hands were working on the ropes at Maggie’s feet. With a sudden rush of relief, Maggie heard Grandmother Slumber’s voice.
“Don’t worry. We are here, Granddaughter.”
The ropes came loose around her ankles. Maureen? Or Grandmother Slumber?
Maggie climbed out of the foot drum and rose unsteadily to her feet. Her hands remained bound, but she didn’t need her hands for this.
“Maggie, get down!” Maureen’s voice hissed from this world.
“No,”
Aunt Hail’s voice said from behind her other shoulder.
“We are all here, Niece. Together we are stronger than he is.”
“I am Kwewur!” Rupert proclaimed. “I’m going to kill all of you!”
“His name is Two Hearts,”
Aunt Sage’s soft voice came from behind Maggie.
“Tell him!”
“You lie!” Maggie shouted, feeling Sister Datura flowing through her veins. “Your name is Two Hearts!”
The Wolf Witch stopped short, staring at her. The black pistol in his hands wavered, then shifted from Reggie to her.
“We are guarding you,”
Grandma Slumber assured.
“He cannot hurt you.”
Maggie staggered sideways and struggled to stay on her feet. “We are all here, Two Hearts. Come down here! Come talk to the dead!”
“Maggie!” Maureen shouted from the darkness. “For God’s sake, get down!”
Dusty said, “Come on, Rupert. You don’t have to do this. I know you’ve had a tough time, but let me help you!”
“You know nothing!” The wolf aimed his pistol at Dusty’s chest.
“He knows everything!” Maggie said. She swayed on her feet as she stepped forward to stand beside Dusty.
The world spun, shifting and slipping around her. By force of will, she managed to slow it, stabilize it. Power built in her breast, ebbing and flowing. “Two Hearts, the dead are coming for you! Look, there, beside you. See them?”
Maggie watched as phantoms appeared out of the kiva walls, ghosts of images that barely trapped a reflection in the flickering firelight.
Kwewur cocked his head and glanced around him.
“What—?”
“They’re reaching for you!” Maggie shouted, and her knees went weak. She had to lock them to keep standing. Dusty’s hand clamped her arm, steadying her.
“There’s no one!” Kwewur shouted back, and the wolf teeth in his mask clicked together as he whirled to look at Maggie again.
Maggie bent forward. A pounding rush of nausea overwhelmed her,
and she could see him.
His wiry gray hair and mustache glowed in the firelight. He wore his old battered fedora. “Dale? Dale, thank God!”
Dusty’s grip on her shoulder tightened, and Maggie was vaguely aware that his eyes had gone huge and wide.
“Kwewur! Dale is right there. Right there beside you!”
Dale’s voice filtered between the worlds like a mist: “I’m sorry, my old friend, but I can’t let you do this.”
Maggie didn’t know if anyone else heard, but Kwewur turned, looked out at the night, and shrieked, “Who’s there? Show yourself!”
“They’ve come for you!” Maggie shouted. “Look at them, all around you!”
Maggie’s stomach heaved. She threw up, and threw up, until she couldn’t catch her breath, and she saw the dead dancing in the firelight on the kiva rim. Her grandmother and aunts, young again, moving between the katchinas like wisps of white smoke.
From a great distance, Grandmother Slumber’s voice said,
“We’re proud of you, Magpie. We love you so much.”
Maggie’s soul was coming loose, twining up and out of her body. She surrendered to hot wavelike caresses of Sister Datura’s hands and collapsed onto the kiva floor, where her body twitched uncontrollably.
Rupert swung the pistol forward, aimed at Ruth or
Reggie, or the Spirits he saw. The black steel shook wildly in his hand.
“Oh, my God, what are you!”
Rupert screamed, and his finger tightened on the trigger.
Dusty screamed,
“No!”
and jerked his own pistol out.
Maggie saw Reggie leap in front of Ruth just as Rupert’s pistol cracked, and a blinding flash of yellow swallowed the night.
The next muzzle blast, from Dusty’s gun, shook the world.
STONE GHOST HAD to squint into the late spring sunlight to see Browser as he walked out of Streambed Town. His muscular shoulders bulged through the yellow fabric of his shirt. The spring light filled the canyon, painting the sandstone rims that hemmed Straight Path Canyon in hard light. A faint trickle of water ran in the wash just behind the town. A new summer lay just around the corner.
Bone Walker squeezed Stone Ghost’s hand, and he looked down. Her unfocused eyes would forever remind him of Shadow Woman’s as they’d stared up at him in death. They were the eyes of an animal, huge and black, and empty. Bone Walker hadn’t spoken a word in six moons, but he kept talking to her anyway, talking and telling stories, hoping that someday she would peek out of that inner prison where she had locked her breath-heart soul and say something.
“Browser looks rested, doesn’t he?” he asked Bone Walker. “It’s all the new people flooding in. He doesn’t have to stand guard as often now as he used to.”
All morning long, he’d been thinking about what had happened at Owl House six moons ago. He could not
get the images out of his mind. They had set the kiva afire. When the roof had burned through on the south, it had hinged and fallen in. A shower of sparks had twirled into the night sky.
White Cone sat in the sun at the base of the new tri-walled Kiva of the Worlds they’d built.
As Stone Ghost passed, he said, “Greetings, Bow Elder.”
White Cone lifted a hand to shield his eyes from Father Sun’s glare. Wispy gray hair framed his thin face. “A pleasant morning to you, Stone Ghost. Are you ready to head south? I’ve been thinking of the perfect place for us. On the western side of the mountains. Where the rivers head before winding down toward the Hohokam lands.”
Stone Ghost didn’t answer for a time. There was a task he had to take care of before he could allow himself to rest. Somewhere out there, perhaps still in the rockshelter near Longtail village, a dessicated mummy lay on her side in the dirt. It was his duty to find Night Sun and give her a proper burial. Her soul had wandered the earth alone for long enough.
Stone Ghost nodded to White Cone and said, “As soon as Matron Cloudblower gives the order, the Katsinas’ People will be on their way.”
They shared a smile, and White Cone leaned his aged head back against the wall and closed his eyes. He seemed to be enjoying the spring sunshine on his wrinkled face.
Stone Ghost continued on toward Browser.
Just before their paths collided, Browser lifted his gaze to the cliff where his wife, Catkin, stood guard. She was tall and beautiful, and her shoulder-length hair blew in the breeze. They were expecting their first child in four moons.
“How are you feeling, Uncle?” Browser asked as Stone Ghost and the little girl came closer.
“Alive,” Stone Ghost said with a sigh. “And you, Nephew?”
“Better.”
The pain and fear of that terrible day at Owl House had bound them like thongs of dried rawhide. The power of the White Moccasins had been damaged, but not broken. First People had begun to emerge from almost every village to join the White Moccasins. Their attacks on isolated villages had become brutal, inhuman, and frequent. So had the retaliatory raids. To Browser’s horror, Matron Crossbill’s people had split off, and began raiding Flute Player villages in the north.
But as the warfare escalated, the Katsinas’ People grew. Fully one-third of Blue Corn’s Flowing Waters Town’s people had converted. It seemed that what Flame Carrier’s search for the First People’s kiva could not accomplish, a Mogollon prophet’s death did. The Katsinas’ People would survive. Poor Singer’s prophecy would live—and somewhere in the future, the katsinas would dance with the old gods.
“I’ve been thinking about Owl House all morning, Nephew. I’ve never had a chance to ask how you knew that Rain Crow had been working with Horned Ram?”
“I suspected the night the prophet was killed. But when Rain Crow insisted on coming with us, I was positive. Neither he nor Horned Ram knew they were working for the First People when they allowed Shadow access to Gray Thunder’s room. It must have shocked Rain Crow to see Obsidian in the kiva, having just seen her twin sister murder Acorn and Gray Thunder.”
“Why did he do it? Do you know?”
“That I cannot answer. I suspect that our defense of the Mogollon made Rain Crow suspicious. Then the reaction of his people to Gray Thunder’s death, the prophet’s instant popularity and the sudden interest in Poor Singer’s prophecy, coupled with Acorn’s death,
left him uneasy. Since nothing was working the way it was supposed to, Rain Crow knew that he had been used. I think he came here to find out who had turned him into a puppet, and who had killed his nephew.”
Stone Ghost searched his belt pouch, then extended his hand. “Here, Nephew. I took this from Two Hearts’s hand before we left. I believe it belongs to you.”
Browser reached out. Stone Ghost laid the beautifully carved turquoise wolf onto his palm. It seemed to radiate a heat all its own. Browser let out a sigh and clutched it to his heart.
Stone Ghost watched the long line of people coming up the road from the north. They couldn’t remain here. The soil was so played out, the rain and runoff so spotty, they couldn’t feed this many people in Straight Path Canyon.
But they couldn’t go north. Over and over he’d heard the same stories from refugees. They said things were so bad in the Green Mesa country that most of the people had moved to the Great River in the east. It was hard to imagine, the cliff towns deserted, nothing but pack rats living there.
Stone Ghost looked up at Browser. “Cloudblower is worried.”
“Worried?”
“Yes, another twenty people arrived this morning, mostly Flute Player Believers who came to see the heroes who could kill the most feared witch in the land.”
Browser smiled. “I thought you liked all those hands touching you.”
Stone Ghost gave him a disgusted look. “They just keep coming, either to see me, or you, or to see if we really can live together, Made People, First People, Fire Dogs, and all the rest.”
“That’s the strength of the katsinas, Uncle.”
He pointed to the tall round Kiva of the Worlds that stood behind Streambed Town. They had finished
building it just yesterday. “I thought the dawn dedication was beautiful, with the pure white plaster and painted katsinas.”
“Yes,” Stone Ghost sighed, “but no opening appeared to the underworld, Nephew. I wonder—”
“Nor will it,” White Cone called.
Stone Ghost turned back to look at the old man. “What do you mean?”
“That’s not what Poor Singer meant!”
Stone Ghost led Bone Walker back. Browser followed. “Do you know what he meant? Did Gray Thunder tell you his vision?”
White Cone folded his arms across his drawn-up knees. “Gray Thunder told me that the truth is never hidden. It is always right there before our eyes. We are just blind.”
Stone Ghost grunted as he lowered himself to a rock beside White Cone. Bone Walker climbed into his lap and leaned her head against his bony old chest. Stone Ghost patted her back gently.
Life moved, as inconstant and fickle as Wind Baby, frolicking, sleeping, weeping, but never truly still. Never solid or finished. Always like water flowing from one place to the next. Seed and fruit. Rain and drought, everything traveled in a gigantic circle, an eternal process of becoming something new. But we rarely saw it. Humans tended to see only frozen moments, not the flow of things. Is that what White Cone meant about being blind?
“What did he tell you?” Stone Ghost asked.
Browser moved to stand behind Stone Ghost, listening. The fringe on the bottom of his yellow shirt danced in the wind.
White Cone smiled. “When Poor Singer said that you had to find the First People’s original kiva, he did not mean the hole where they emerged from the underworlds in the Beginning Time.”
“But he said we had to reopen the doorway to the
Land of the Dead,” Browser said, and propped a hand on his belted war club. “What else could he have meant?”
“The doorway to the dead is not a physical hole in the earth, you young fool. If you wish to seek the advice of the dead you must have the heart of a cloud.”
Bone Walker’s fists twined in Stone Ghost’s shirt. He lifted a hand to silence White Cone, and looked down.
Bone Walker’s lips moved, but no sound came out.
Very softly, so as not to frighten her, he said, “What is it, Bone Walker?”
She seemed to be struggling to find words.
“Tears … ,”
she whispered.
“You have to live inside the tears of the dead.”
Browser’s face slackened and White Cone smiled.
Stone Ghost hugged Bone Walker tightly against him, and she tucked her head against his chest.
Stone Ghost’s heart swelled until he feared it might explode. He kissed the top of Bone Walker’s head and said, “I told you, didn’t I, that if you worked very hard someday you would be a great Singer.”
Bone Walker smiled. A little girl’s smile, frail and heartwarming. She looked up with sparkling eyes and focused on the cliff where Catkin stood. She looked for a long time.
Finally, she said, “
He’s
going to be a really great Singer.”
“Who is?” Browser asked, looking up at Catkin and frowning.
Bone Walker sucked her lip for several instants, then whispered,
“That little boy in her belly.”
DUSTY WALKED INTO the candlelit church and looked around. The place was quiet and empty except
for one person. Maggie knelt in the second pew, her hands clasped prayerfully before her. Her gaze rested on the crucifix on the wall.
He walked forward, the paper bag crackling in his right hand, and slid into the pew beside her. The church smelled of melted wax and incense, things he found oddly comforting.
Maggie turned to look at him. Her eyes were swollen, and grief strained the lines around her mouth. She wore a white scarf over her black hair, knotted beneath her chin.
“You’re not a churchgoing person,” Maggie whispered. “What are you doing here?”
“I thought I’d surprise God.”
Maggie smiled. “Speaking of God, how are you doing with the owl?”
Dusty gave her a startled look. “How do you know about the owl?”
“I talked to Sylvia this morning. She said you’d been sleeping with your pistol because the owl follows you everywhere you go.”
Dusty turned sideways to face her and propped his arm on the pew ahead. “It’s the strangest thing. The owl kept me up hooting when I was sleeping in my trailer in Santa Fe, so I moved to Dale’s house, and he showed up there. Perched right on the kitchen windowsill and watched me eat breakfast. Gave me the heebie-jeebies.”
Maggie let out a disappointed breath. “When a Spirit Helper comes fluttering at your window, you don’t close it, Dusty. You open it as wide as you can.”
Dusty made a face. He knew that. It was just hard to do in real life. He gripped the smooth wood of the pew and lifted his brows. “Yeah, well, I’m working on it.”
They sat in silence for a moment and Dusty absorbed the calm golden glow of the church.
“How are you doing, Maggie? Are you all right?”
“As well as can be expected after the things that have happened.” She glanced at him. “I saw it all, Dusty. I was hovering there, above my body, and I saw you and Maureen and Reggie and Rupert.” Her brow furrowed.
“Is that a problem?”
Her brown eyes pleaded with him. “I think the datura did something to me, Dusty. I keep seeing between the worlds, and I know”—she swallowed hard—“that datura overdoses can cause insanity.”
Dusty laughed, handing her the sack. “You’re not insane yet, Maggie. Of course, it’s inevitable. Working for the government is bound to get to you sooner or later.” He pointed to the sack. “That’s in return for the fry bread you brought me that day. Those are my own special recipe super black bean burritos.”
Maggie clasped her hands on the sack and squeezed it hard, as though fighting grief. “Aunt Sage used to say that if you wanted to understand death, you had to have the heart of a cloud.”
“Hmm,” Dusty grunted. “Which meant what?”
Tears filled Maggie’s eyes, but she smiled. “That you had to live inside the tears of the dead.”
Dusty sank back into the pew and looked up at the crucifix. Jesus’ body was emaciated, his face anguished. But his painted eyes seemed to be alive and looking at Dusty with a kind of curious benevolence.
Dusty held that gaze for a long time. It hadn’t occurred to him before, but that’s what archaeology was all about.
Living inside the tears of the dead so we can learn from them.
“Maggie? We have one more thing to do, that is, if you’re up to it.”