“No. At the top of the eastern trail leading down to the village. Someone had wrapped a rope around her belly, then looped it over a boulder to hang her there for us to see.”
The lines around Stone Ghost’s eyes tightened. “For you, Nephew? Why would someone do that?”
He gestured uncertainly. “It just seemed odd that we would return and—”
“If the mummy was placed there for you, Nephew, then the village was destroyed for your benefit. Do you think you and Catkin are that important to your enemies? Would they destroy an entire village to teach you a lesson? They certainly did not do it to lure you in to kill you, because they let both of you go.”
Browser felt foolish. He toyed with his belted club. “When you say it that way, I’m sure I’m wrong, Uncle. But why else would they leave the mummy and then take it away with them?”
Stone Ghost frowned. “They took it away?”
“Well, yes.” Browser ran a hand through his hair and nodded. “This is a long story, Uncle.”
Stone Ghost nodded. “Let us find a place to sit down, Nephew. I must know everything. Even small details you think are not important.”
“Like why they did not kill me and Catkin?”
Stone Ghost took Browser by the arm and headed him toward a cottonwood. “If we can determine that, Nephew, I think we will also know why your Matron was killed.”
A HAND OF TIME LATER, STONE GHOST TURNED TO BROWSER where they sat with their backs braced against an enormous tree trunk and whispered, “Copper bells, a scarred mummy with spirals on her chin, and a little girl skipping on the roof of a kiva filled with headless people. Fascinating.”
“I don’t think it’s fascinating. I think it’s cruel and inhuman.”
“On the contrary. It’s very human, Browser.” A gleam lit his uncle’s sharp old eyes. He steepled his fingers beneath his chin, but he
wasn’t seeing the shadow-dappled river or the glint of rocks beneath the water. He seemed to be gazing into some private memory chamber. “It’s also
brilliant.
” He looked at Browser. “Come, Nephew. I must see your Matron’s body again.”
MAUREEN GAZED OUT THE WINDOW AT THE PASSING pinyon- and juniper-clad ridges. Thick layers of brown sandstone jutted up on each side as they dropped down Bondad Hill into the Animas Valley, then the sandstone gave way to tumbled talus slopes and sagebrush-filled bottoms.
Maureen turned to Dusty. “Sylvia said you were supposed to crash in their room last night? She was worried about you.”
When Sylvia had pressed him on where he’d disappeared to last night, he’d simply told them he’d forgotten an errand, and given them his “don’t mess with me” glare.
Dusty pushed his cowboy hat back on his head. “Yeah, well, that’s a long story. I took 550 north, up the canyon to the top of Molas Pass, and spent some time watching the stars wheel around Polaris. When the cold—vicious at a tad shy of eleven thousand feet—finally ate into my bones, I turned the Bronco around and drove back to Durango.” Dusty lifted his coffee cup from the compartment between the seats and sipped at it, driving with one hand. “Sometime after three, I slipped into the hotel room and found Sylvia and Steve sound asleep in the same bed. I backed out of the room, got into the Bronco, and piled my old Pendleton blanket over myself. I slept pretty good.”
“You could have come to my room. I would have let you have my floor.”
Dusty smiled. “Thanks, but it didn’t seem like a good idea.”
Maureen shrugged. He was right, of course. It would have been very awkward if he’d come knocking on her door at midnight. She would have invited him in, and they’d have both spent the night with one eye open, watching the other—and wondering about things they shouldn’t wonder about.
A few kilometers ahead, rain fell from the cloudy sky in wavering gray sheets.
Maureen kept glancing at Dusty as they passed the fallow farms that dotted the Animas floodplain. Lines had formed around the corners of his eyes, giving his tanned skin a weathered look. His
beard, a darker shade of blond, caught the light. A strong straight nose accented his jawline. The crumpled cowboy hat, with the sunglasses perched atop it, reminded her of pictures she’d seen of Jerry Jeff Walker in his heyday. Stewart had a magnetism, a sense of rugged reliability belied by the stories people told about him.
“What river is this?” Maureen asked as they crossed the bridge below the junction with the Florida.
“The same one that flows past the Doubletree where you stayed last night. Originally it was called
El Rio de las Animas Perdidas.
Loosely translated that means ‘The River of the Lost Souls,’ as in ‘The Souls of the Damned.’”
“Such a hard name for such a beautiful river.”
“That’s why the White guys dropped the ‘Damned’ part and left it as the Animas, the ‘River of Souls.’” He frowned. “Though I’m not sure that was the right decision.”
“What do you mean?”
“A lot of the souls in this country were damned. Consider,” he said and lifted a finger.
Maureen smiled. She could feel the lecture coming.
“At about A.D. 1000 there were hundreds of pueblos, small and large, scattered over the Four Corners region of Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, and Arizona. By 1300, almost everyone was living in twenty-seven settlements consisting of about a hundred and twenty large defensive pueblos. By A.D. 1400, twenty-four of those twenty-seven settlements had been abandoned. The thirteenth century was a period of annihilation-oriented warfare. At the end, only three settlement clusters were left in the original western Anasazi homeland: the Hopi villages in Arizona, the Zuni pueblos in New Mexico, and the Keres at Acoma, New Mexico. In between those settlements were vast no-man’s-lands where, apparently, no one dared to live.”
She cocked her head. “Okay, I’ll bite. What do you think happened?”
“I think it was a vicious holy war that lasted for two centuries, Doctor.”
“Holy war?”
“Yes. We know the Katchina religion starts right after the fall of Chaco Canyon at the end of the twelfth century. The kiva murals in the 1300s are filled with battle images. Why do you paint war scenes on the walls of your church?”
Maureen gazed out at a grove of what looked like apple trees, their leaves just turning yellow. “To show your zeal for killing heretics? The ‘God is on my side’ thing?”
He nodded. “I think so.”
“Well, if your idea about holy war holds up, the ‘enemy’ should be doing the same thing to the new katchina believers that they did to the Christians during the first century after Jesus died, and to the Jews in thirteenth-century Spain, the Muslims in Bosnia. Did they label them as evil and burn them in their churches and temples?”
Dusty lifted his plastic coffee cup in a silent toast to her. “That, my dear doctor, is an understatement. I personally know of over thirty kivas, subterranean ceremonial chambers, filled with dead bodies. Many of them are children.”
A sudden feeling of deep sadness filled Maureen. When a soldier could kill a child, there was more going on than just warfare. Hatred and fear had to be at work. “You’ve found several children in the kiva you’re digging now, right?”
“Right.” Dusty sipped his coffee, and steam curled into his mustache. “I think this kiva is one of the tragedies of the holy war. There are a lot of others. At Sand Canyon Pueblo in Colorado, they found forty people burned in the kiva. The kiva at the Snider’s Well site in southwestern Colorado had ninety bodies in it. At Te-ewi in New Mexico, twenty-four men and six infants were left unburied on the ground outside. Just south of us is Aztec Ruins. When Earl Morris excavated the site in the twenties, he found a mass burial of fifteen children. At Salmon Ruins, south of Aztec, they found a kiva filled with burned children, most under the age of five. That’s just a sampling of the grisly events of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Believe me, there are plenty more.”
Maureen watched the rolling hills for a while, then said, “Couldn’t the deaths be ritual sacrifices rather than warfare?”
“One doesn’t preclude the other, Doctor. Try to see it from the attackers’ side. It takes a lot more than hatred to force men to capture children and burn them to death in their parents’ churches. They have to
believe
very powerfully that what they’re doing is right. I’m sure somebody convinced them that every child was a ritual sacrifice, an offering to the true God—or gods.”
Maureen shifted in her seat to face Dusty. “I was just thinking about that. Killing someone in their place of worship is a potent symbol.
It’s a warning to others that if they share the heretics’ beliefs, they’ll be next.” She studied him with her eyes narrowed. “What else?”
“Oh, lots of things. We find a number of infants stuffed into air shafts. But I don’t get that symbolism.”
“So, who are the factions. What’s the war about? The katchinas versus … whom?”
“Good question,” Dusty answered, and grimaced as rain speckled the windshield. After a moment, the whole glass was covered.
“Time for wipers, Stewart?” she suggested, squinting through the grimy mess in an attempt to see the road.
“In a bit, Doctor.”
She tried not to look worried as the world disappeared into a smear. She impulsively reached for the seat belt, remembering too late the story Dusty had told her about using it for a tow strap once when he got stuck out in the desert. She sank her fingers into the armrest instead.
“All right,” Dusty muttered and rotated the switch on the lever. The wipers groaned and popped, as if the rubber had stuck to the glass. To Maureen’s horror, the smear grew worse. Mud and bug guts streaked the glass in a semi-opaque film.
“Come on, rain!” Dusty called with the same rising inflection as a gambler tossing dice in a crap game.
“Does this improve?” Maureen asked. Dear God, he had to be driving by guess and by golly. She couldn’t see a thing through the sludge on the windshield.
The rain picked up, hammering down in a blizzard of large drops. The view cleared as water sluiced away the grime.
Dusty sank back in his seat. “The rubber hardens up in this high-altitude sun. We get a lot more UV here. Then you get it blown full of dust and the bug guts get baked on the glass. Cooked, you know. It takes a lot of water to soak everything up enough to clean the windshield.”
She lifted an eyebrow. “Isn’t there something called windshield washer fluid? And don’t gas stations in this country have those little squeegees? The ones in the plastic bins?”
“Yeah.” He scowled out at the falling rain. “Somewhere along the line the pump for the window washer got full of dust and plugged up. I think it was back during the Kayenta project. I mean, God, mechanics want real money to fix those things.”
Amazed, she said, “Stewart, you could get killed driving around with a dirty windshield. What if the rain didn’t pick up and wash it clean?”
“Well,” he said with a nod, “we could pull over and piss on it.”
Maureen tried to imagine the positions “we” would have to adopt to accomplish that feat. She said, “You’re on your own there, Stewart.”
“Women have no sense of adventure.” Dusty glanced up at the sky and grimaced. “I hope the tarps over the excavation units hold. We chucked the mattock and shovels over them, but you never know in a storm like this.”
She exhaled and it condensed into a white cloud. “You know, it might be about time to see what kind of disaster happens when you turn on the heater.”
“Disaster, Doctor?” He reached for the knob.
“I remember my first ride in this truck, Stewart. You had to hammer the dash to get the oil pressure gauge to work. The window crank fell off and disappeared into an alternate universe under my seat.”
He smiled, amused, and began rolling his window down.
“That does not improve our situation, Stewart. What are you doing?” she asked.
“Trust me. Roll yours down, too. Oh, and be careful. The—”
“Yeah, yeah, the knob comes off.” She carefully cranked the window down, and icy air and spatters of cold rain insulted her cheeks and hair.
The moment Dusty reached over and flipped the heater fan on, a blast of dust blew from the heater vents and fogged the interior in musty-smelling clouds. Dusty used a finger to lower the rear window and the draft sucked the dust through and out the back. That dropped the pressure just enough that a snowstorm of confettied paper shot from the heater vents.
“Good Lord!” Maureen coughed and waved to clear the chaff in front of her face. “What is this?”
“The little assholes!” Stewart roared, and pounded the dash with a knotted fist.
Maureen grimaced as the wind and rain came buffeting through the lowered window, and bits of shredded paper circled and danced, until they settled on her hair and clothing. It looked like chewed-up toilet paper.
“Stewart?”
Dusty hammered the dash one last time. “I
hate
mice!”
“That’s what this is?” she said as she plucked at the bits of paper that stuck to her rain-damp skin.