Catkin recoiled a step. “Look at her mouth.” Stubby brown teeth filled her gaping jaws. “She must have screamed at the end.”
Browser studied the rope that wrapped the mummy’s waist and looped over the top of the boulder. “Someone hung her here for us to see.”
“A warning not to take the trail down to the village?”
He looked out at the fallen trees and rocks that loomed in the darkness. “Perhaps, but a mummy is a poor substitute for freshly mutilated bodies.”
Catkin glanced around, then stepped closer to look at the mummy. “Where do you think she came from?”
“Many of the dry caves in this region contain burials.” He gestured to the dark hollows that pocked the cliffs on the opposite side of the canyon. “They could have stumbled upon her while sneaking up to get a better look at Aspen village.”
“And carried her away?” Catkin scoffed. “I do not think so. War parties travel fast and light. She would have been a silly burden.”
“Warriors are often silly, Catkin. They do unfathomable things when they are tired and hungry.”
The quartzite cobble on the end of Catkin’s war club lowered to the woman’s right wrist. “Her arms were broken. It looks like she used them to block blows.”
The bones had not mended correctly and stuck out like knobs on old limbs.
“But not blows from fists,” he said. “Something that could snap bone. An ax or stone-headed club.”
Catkin’s war club moved to the mummy’s head. “Her arms weren’t the only things they struck.”
The skull undulated like the surface of a rotten melon. The numerous small dents meant the woman’s skull had been cracked by a master, a man who knew how to strike hard enough to injure, but not hard enough to kill.
“And look at this,” Catkin said.
Browser knelt at Catkin’s side and saw the tattoo. Black spirals decorated the mummy’s chin. Three or maybe four. A cold sensation filtered through him. His grandmother and all of her people had proudly worn spirals on their chins. He did not know what the spirals stood for, but … it seemed odd that this ancient corpse would carry the same symbol. Could she be one of his distant relatives?
Catkin whispered, “Isn’t that the same—”
“My great-uncle, Stone Ghost, has three black spirals on his chin. My grandmother had four. I don’t know what it means.”
His gaze landed on every human-shaped shadow on the trail below. Pine needles glimmered. Boulders wavered in the moonlight.
Had someone expected him to be here? Perhaps known he would be here? No. Many people wore tattoos. Many tattoos included spirals. This was coincidence. Nothing more.
The sun-bleached shreds of cloth that hung from the mummified body fluttered in the wind. Browser looked at the darker splotches, brown with age. He used his club to push the cloth aside and saw the wide slit in the abdomen. “They cut her open.”
Catkin shifted to look, and her eyes widened. “Gods. I wonder how long it took her to die?”
Browser shook his head tiredly. “A person can live for days with a belly wound. I remember once when I and four of my warriors were captured by the Fire Dogs. They sliced Mug’s gut open and slowly pulled out his intestines. He screamed for three days.”
Catkin reached for the dead woman’s necklace, but halted when she noticed that skeletal fingers twined in the brightly beaded strip of rawhide. Alternating chevrons of turquoise, shell, and coral covered the hide. Magnificent work. Catkin backed away.
“Browser”—her voice had gone tight—“she deliberately grasped the necklace before she died. It must have been very important to her, like a Power bundle or sacred pendant.”
Browser studied the delicate fingers that clutched the hide. “Are you sure it’s a necklace? Or is it a collar?”
She gave him an incredulous look. “No one would waste such beauty on a slave.”
Browser pulled the mummy out from the boulder to examine her back. “A necklace would have laces. The woman might wish to take it off. This is sewn together. And look here.” He indicated the scar tissue beneath the necklace where the flesh had been rubbed raw and healed. “The rawhide must have been wet when they sewed the collar together. It shrunk tight to her throat. Too tight. She must have had trouble breathing.” Browser met Catkin’s gaze. “A slave, but a very highly prized one.”
Catkin frowned for a long moment at the fingers in the collar. “Gods, Browser. She’s not holding the hide. It’s wrapped around her fingers, as though she used the collar to cut off her own air.”
Browser touched the hide. It felt dry and as hard as rock. Despite the tightness of the collar, the woman had managed to slip two fingers beneath it and twist the hide into a loop. Her mummified fingers
remained locked in the twist. She hadn’t let go. Not even at the end, when panic must have set in.
“What a brave woman. I wonder who she was?” Catkin asked. “A clan matron?”
“Or maybe a great warrior.”
Catkin got to her feet and looked at the woman’s belly slit. She straightened and her mouth fell open. “Did you see this?”
“What?”
Catkin held something up. It tinkled.
“A bell?” he said in surprise.
She held it up to the moonlight. The bell shimmered and twinkled. “A bell worth a village’s ransom.”
Catkin handed him the cast copper bell, and Browser turned it over and over in his palm, awed by the sight. They were rare and beautiful. The Feathered Serpent People who’d made them had died out long ago. They had lived far to the south, but had traded with the legendary First People of the Straight Path Nation.
During the Age of Emergence, the First People had bravely climbed through a series of dark underworlds to get to this world of light. On the second day, the Creator decided the First People were too few and needed help to build the world. He had turned a variety of animals into humans: badgers, buffaloes, tortoises, ants, wolves, and other creatures. Hence, they were “made” people. The First People had never liked the Made People. They had considered them inferior, and had enslaved and tortured them. Fortunately, First People only married other First People, and their blood weakened over time. When the Power began to dwindle, the Made People rose up and made war on them. The last of the First People had died more than a hundred summers ago, and the Made People had celebrated for a full sun cycle. Browser’s people, and all people alive today, were Made People.
The bell might have been an offering, placed inside her wound by the people who’d buried her. In that case, they had either been very wealthy, or they’d sold everything they had to possess it.
He said, “Whoever buried her loved her very much. No one today would squander such wealth on the dead.”
Browser put the copper bell into his belt pouch. His village, Longtail village, had been raided six times in the past nine moons. They
could trade the bell for enough food to feed their children through the winter.
“No, Browser.” As she turned, moonlight gilded the smooth dip in her nose and splashed her broad cheeks.
“What do you mean?”
“That bell was loose in her belly. If it had been placed there when she was buried, it would have melted into the drying flesh and become part of it. I would not have been able to just pick it up. Someone put it there tonight.”
“But why?” he whispered, and slowly rose to his feet. “Whoever hung the mummy here must have known the first traveler who came by would take it.”
Catkin pinned him with dark moon-glazed eyes. “I’m sure they did. They probably also figured they would get it back when they killed us.”
Browser turned to search the trees and cliffs for any sign of an ambush. Wind Baby whimpered through the boulders on the slope below.
“Maybe, but I’m still going down. We have to know what has happened. I wish you to stay at the top of the trail where you can see the trees.”
Catkin nodded, but her gaze remained on the mummy. The corpse’s stubby teeth gleamed. Moments ago, she had seemed to be caught in a final scream. Now she looked like she was laughing, a great deep belly laugh.
Browser’s skin prickled.
Your shattered souls are playing tricks on you, you fool. The mummy hasn’t changed.
“Shout to me if anyone comes out of the forest. I will return as soon as I know what’s happened.”
“Go. I will guard the trail.”
Browser cupped a hand to his mouth and gave the melodious call of a raven in flight,
kloo-kloc-kloo-kloc,
to signal Walker and Bole to start down the western trail.
Then he headed down himself.
Aspens grew in the spaces between the boulders. The trembling autumn leaves appeared white in the pale light, but he remembered that in the daylight they glowed a brilliant luminous yellow.
Browser silently skirted a large boulder and navigated the first bend in the trail. He lost sight of Catkin. Wind Baby gusted across
the cliff, rattling the fringes on his knee-length shirt. As the trees blew, splotchy wind-spawned shadows danced over the slope.
He’d never had much love for solitary heroics. He preferred a large and conspicuous war party at his back. But he had no choice tonight.
He proceeded slowly, on the balls of his feet, until he came to a fallen tree where he crouched and gazed at the village no more than half a bow shot away. They’d built in a secure but difficult location. The huge rain-eaten hollow in the stone swallowed the small two-story village. Just a few body lengths beyond the plaza, the sheer cliff dropped seven hundred hands to the canyon bottom. If a person slipped, it meant his doom.
Where were Walker and Bole? Inside, searching from room to room? The faint trace of smoke clung to the air. Someone had lit a fire today, but he saw no glow of flames in any of the windows or doors. Aspen village appeared dead.
Browser turned when he heard a sound.
He whispered, “Walker?”
No, the soft scraping couldn’t be an adult. A child’s moccasins on gravel? Claws working at stone?
He could not identify it yet, but some other scent twined with that of the smoke, a tang that clung to the back of his throat like pine pitch.
Browser moved only his eyes.
There, on the ground two paces away, lay another copper bell.
He stared at it.
It had been polished until it glowed. Browser walked over and picked it up. The velvet feel reminded him of the skin of a young woman. Sensuous. Too smooth to be real. He tucked it into his belt pouch and re-gripped his war club. His palms had grown sweaty.
The quiet ate at his insides. The very emptiness of the village held threat. Every dark window and doorway seemed to watch him.
Another copper bell lay just ahead.
He could not believe his eyes. He grabbed it and shoved it into his pouch. Right here in front of him lay enough wealth to …
Three more bells. In a line.
The trail led to the kiva, the circular chamber ten paces away.
Browser’s gaze darted over every shadow. He had captured wolves this way, by dropping pieces of meat just far enough apart that the wolf could see the next one. The last piece of meat always rested on the disguised roof of the killing pit. By the time the wolf got there,
his mouth dripped saliva, eager for the tasty bite. When the wolf leaped onto the roof to get it, the roof collapsed and sent him plummeting twenty hands straight down. Hunters with bows could walk up and shoot him with little effort.
A tingle moved from the base of Browser’s skull, down his arms, and into his belly. They wanted him in the kiva. Why?
He turned in a slow circle, seeing nothing. No one.
The clawing continued.
“Walker? Bole?”
They might have come down, found the village empty, and gone back up the trail to search for him and Catkin.
Browser walked to the edge of the kiva. The only way in or out was by ladder through the entryway cut into the middle of the roof. The ladder had been pulled out and the entry covered with thick-buffalo hides. The ladder rested on top of them. If someone was imprisoned in there, no one would ever hear his screams.
The owner of the bells wanted Browser to look into the kiva. He was betting that once Browser looked, he would have to climb down, and then …
Browser backed away and turned to the village.
The katsinas had been lovingly painted. The teeth in the Wolf Katsina’s muzzle gleamed. The white spots of stars on his black arms and legs fell in perfect rows. The spear in the Badger Katsina’s right hand shimmered as though made from a fine glassy obsidian.
Perfectly rendered. Except that each katsina had a gaping white hole in the middle of its chest. A kill hole. The Fire Dogs did the same thing with Power pots. They believed that such pots had souls, and that by knocking a hole in the bottom they released the soul to travel to the afterlife with its dead owner.
Had the invaders sent the katsinas’ souls to the afterlife with their dead followers?