“T
HEY’RE COMING,” STRAIGHTHORN SAID AND STAMPED his feet to keep warm.
The cold morning wind whipped Jackrabbit’s shoulder-length black hair over his pug nose and into his dark brown eyes as he shifted to look. “Where? I don’t see them.”
“They are just leaving the plaza.”
A purple gleam haloed the eastern horizon. In the distance, he could make out the shape of Longtail village. Gray forms emerged from the great kiva, and flute music drifted up to them, the notes sweet and mournful.
From their guard position on the knoll across the river, they would be able to watch most of the burial ceremony.
Redcrop led the procession, sprinkling the path with cornmeal to sanctify the way. Long black hair draped her white cape.
Behind her, six spectral figures Danced, twenty hands tall, with no arms or legs. They glided forward as if canoeing on air, and the rhythmic clacking of their carved beaks cut the stillness like knives. Buffalo horns curved upward from the enormous empty eyes of their masks. Red-feathered capes covered their misshapen bodies. Part bird, part buffalo, and part man, the katsinas united the worlds of sky and earth, animal and human. They were moments of perfect harmony in a sea of chaos.
“I will miss our Matron,” Jackrabbit said.
“She was a good leader. Was she your clan?”
“She was my
family
, Straighthorn.” Jackrabbit rubbed his cold arms.
“I have no knowledge of my clan. Three summers ago, I woke at the bottom of a cliff with my head bashed and bloody. I could remember nothing. Not even my name. I may have slipped and fallen, or been in a battle. I wandered for days before I saw the Matron standing
outside of Flowing Waters Town. She was looking up as if searching for me. I walked down, and she took me in. She fed me and clothed me.” His voice turned brittle. “She gave me a home.”
“I did not know her for long, but she was always kind to me. I will miss her, too.”
The burial procession came slowly down the path toward the river. Cloudblower followed the katsinas, and behind her, Springbank, Wading Bird, and Crossbill marched. On the elders’ heels, War Chief Browser and Catkin carried Matron Flame Carrier’s burial ladder. A large group of mourners assembled at the rear and fell into line as the procession descended into the cottonwoods.
Thirty people from Dry Creek village had come in for the ceremony late last night. Their campfires gleamed on the outskirts of Longtail village. They walked in the rear. Most wore bright yellow capes that contrasted sharply with the red and white capes of the Katsinas’ People. The Dry Creek Matron, Ant Woman, had been a good friend of their Matron.
Straighthorn lost sight of them. Wind Baby shrieked across the desert and blasted the trees until they squeaked and groaned. A hurricane of golden leaves tumbled through the air.
Redcrop reappeared as the burial party moved toward the grave. She walked slowly, solemnly, her right hand extended to the path. The cornmeal falling from her fingers blew away in a glimmering haze.
Straighthorn whispered, “She must be dying inside. I wish I was there.”
“Skink will relieve us at dawn. We will be there for the final Songs, my friend.”
“I hope so.”
Jackrabbit turned to look at him. “Oh, believe me, he will come. Skink may not be happy with you, Straighthorn, but he will not disobey the War Chief’s orders. He values his skin too much.”
The War Chief had a reputation for explosive anger, though Straighthorn had never seen it. In the past nine moons he had seen only a very solitary man, a man in mourning who dwelled on the deaths of his wife and son. Browser kept to himself, did what had to be done to protect the village, and retreated to his chamber alone at night. Many of the Longtail Clan widows had initially viewed Browser with interest,
but he had politely shied away from them. The only woman he spent time with was Catkin.
Straighthorn had heard the story of how, two summers ago, Browser had sneaked into an enemy camp where she was being held prisoner and rescued her. She’d been injured, and was dazed. He killed the men raping her and carried Catkin out on his back. He’d rescued her again in Straight Path Canyon. Straighthorn wondered at that. Browser had risked his life at least twice to save Catkin, but he did not appear to be in love with her. Rather, she seemed to be his best friend.
Straighthorn said, “I should have kept my temper yesterday, Jackrabbit. I embarrassed Skink—”
“Everyone knew you were right. You had found the murderers’ tracks. We should have followed them until we couldn’t see our own feet in the darkness. Most of us wished to continue the search. The fact that you argued with Skink about it only improved your reputation.”
Straighthorn gestured lamely. “Yes, but the argument diminished his. I fear he will find a hundred small ways to punish me.”
“He is a very powerful man, my friend. You should be worried about the big ways he can get you. He is as cruel as a weasel, and you know it. If you turn up dead some morning, I’ll be very disappointed in you.”
Straighthorn sighed and looked up at the last of the Evening People who glittered on the western horizon. Wolf Slayer and his brother Raven were always the last to go to sleep. They watched over the world until Father Sun rose into the sky and could guard it himself.
“You have only known Skink for a few moons, Straighthorn,” Jackrabbit said. “He is very clever. If he decides to kill you, he’ll make it look like an accident. ‘Oh, poor Straighthorn, he slipped and fell on his own knife. I swear there was nothing I could do!’” Jackrabbit nodded for effect.
“That’s not amusing. You just sent chills up my neck.”
“Good.”
Straighthorn glanced over his shoulder, examining the path at the base of the knoll.
“You’re going to have me jumping at my own breathing. Let’s speak of something else.”
Jackrabbit remained silent for a time, then he gestured to the rolling hills in front of them. “Do you think they’re out there?”
“Who?”
“The murderers.”
“No! Why would you think that?”
Jackrabbit shrugged. “I was in Talon Town when my friend Whiproot was killed. I heard his death screams. Later, the War Chief told me that Stone Ghost said murderers always come to watch if they can. I guess it gives them some”—he waved a hand—“thrill.”
Straighthorn felt as if a nest of wriggling baby snakes had hatched in his hair. He pulled his war club from his belt and gripped it in a hard fist.
“I thank you, Jackrabbit. I was getting tired. Now I’m fully awake.”
“Just in time. Skink is coming.”
Straighthorn turned.
A shadow emerged from the brush and came toward them. The sound of feet crunching sand rode the wind.
Straighthorn sucked in a deep breath to prepare himself, and called, “A Blessed morning to you, Skink.”
Jackrabbit lifted a hand and smiled. “We’re glad to see you. It’s been a bitter night.”
Skink’s buckskin cape swayed around his tall, lean body as he climbed to the top of the knoll. The pale morning gleam sheathed his catlike face. He did not even glance at Jackrabbit. He stopped in front of Straighthorn and looked down through dark cold eyes. “You saw nothing?”
“Nothing unusual,” Straighthorn replied.
“Well,” Jackrabbit clarified, “we saw the burial party leave the village and walk to the gravesite. That’s a little unusual, but these days not—”
“Then leave. You are no longer needed here.”
Straighthorn bowed respectfully, and he and Jackrabbit marched down the hill. They didn’t speak until they had passed beyond the brush at the base of the knoll.
Jackrabbit said, “I don’t think he likes us.”
“It’s me he doesn’t like.”
A sliver of brilliant pink light painted the east.
“It’s almost dawn,” Straighthorn said. “We’d better hurry if we’re going to make it for the last Songs.”
Straighthorn broke into a trot, and Jackrabbit followed him down onto the leaf-choked path by the river.
PIPER CLUTCHES HER CORN-HUSK DOLL TO HER CHEST AND
slides forward on her belly, inching her way to the top of the hill where she can look down at the hole in the ground. All of the people are shiny birds, red, white, and yellow. They can’t talk. They squeak and squeal. Mother wears white, and stands beside another woman in white, but they are surrounded by yellow birds.
Piper puts her dirty finger in her mouth and sucks on it; it tastes bright and bitter, like licking a pyrite mirror.
New people come. Two men. They walk up from the river bottom and stand at the edge of the crowd, right behind Mother. But Mother does not see them. She is crying, her shoulders shaking apart. Or maybe it is laughing. Sometimes laughing looks like crying.
People lift the dead woman from the burial ladder and lower her into the hole. The Songs start. Human Songs. She can hear them. People live inside the squeals. As the masked Dancers spin around the edge of the grave, an old man lowers the burial ladder into the hole so that the woman’s afterlife soul can climb out and go to the Land of the Dead.
Piper watches the children come forward, get down on their knees, and begin shoving dirt into the hole. There are many children. More than Piper has ever seen in one place.
The Songs stop. People hug each other and start to walk away. The old people move closer to the grave. Their hair is the color of rain clouds and snowflakes.
As if Mother knows Piper is spying on her, she lifts her head and stares at the hilltop.
Piper cannot move. Her body is frozen. She clutches her doll to her chest.
Mother has dead flying squirrel eyes. Black and bulging.
A small, terrible cry escapes Piper’s lips.
She forces her legs to slide her backward down the hill, then she gets to her feet and runs, runs away fast, down the hill.
She stumbles through a tangle of rabbitbrush and takes a deer trail into the bottom of the drainage. The sand is wet; it squishes around her sandals. She runs, searching, her eyes moving until she sees a hole. An old coyote den dug into the wall.
Piper squirms in headfirst. It is big inside, big enough for her to turn around and stare out of the hole at the sunlight.
She listens. The birds have gone quiet. Not even Wind Baby dares to breathe.
“No one yet,” she whispers to her doll. “It’s all right. We’re all right.”
D
USTY LEVERED ANOTHER SHOVELFUL OF DIRT FROM HIS excavation unit and tossed it into Sylvia’s wheelbarrow. Despite the fact that the late afternoon temperature hovered around sixty-two degrees, he wore a short-sleeved gray T-shirt. Sweat matted his blond hair to his cheeks and soaked his armpits. October in the high desert was like nowhere else on earth. The patches of blue showing through the clouds glistened, and the air smelled like freshly plowed earth.
“Anything yet?” he called up from his meter-deep pit. To either side, the classic Chacoan walls of the structure caught the afternoon sun. The interior of the walls were rubble-filled, but the outer layer of stone consisted of flat slabs, carefully fitted together. Each layer was of a varying thickness, creating a pattern. More than once, while looking at such walls, it had struck him that they resembled the weft of weaving, as if the patterns were similar to those reflected in the occasional specimens of blankets recovered from dry cave sites. The masonry workmanship was spectacular. During the time when the pueblo was occupied, that beautiful stonework would have been covered by thick mud plaster, and painted with designs. Despite what modern people thought about brick and stonework, bare rock was anything but beautiful to the Anasazi.
“Nada
, boss,” Sylvia replied as she fingered through the dirt. A sweaty lock of brown hair curled over her forehead. She wiped a hand on her dirt-caked blue jeans and tugged at the battered canvas hat on her head.
“Have I ever told you how much I hate clearing out room fill?” he asked.
“Maybe once or twice.”
He bent down and tugged to remove another weathered chunk of toppled sandstone and heaved it into the wheelbarrow.
“Whoa!” Sylvia said. “That’s a load!”
“Oops. Sorry.”
She artfully turned the wheelbarrow and trundled it down the line of planks that crossed the rubble on the collapsed pueblo. At the edge of the ruin, she separated the rock and tipped the wheelbarrow to spill the dirt into a wooden-framed screen. He heard the unforgettable
shish-shish
as she worked it back and forth.
Dusty wiped his dirty face on his sleeve and took the opportunity to stretch his aching back muscles. “God, I think age is catching up with me.”
“Yeah, I’ve heard thirty-seven is a real turning point. Like the storm surge before the hurricane. Just wait till next year.” Sylvia lowered her screen and tossed the dregs—roots, insect hulls, and a few rocks—out onto the back-dirt pile. “Okay, hit me again.”
Dusty pried more of the tumbled stone loose and tossed it up into the wheelbarrow. Across from him, he heard Maureen and Steve talking in low voices as they worked over the bone bed in the bottom of the kiva. One by one, Maureen was mapping in the bits of bone, painting the more fragile pieces with polyvinyl acetate preservative, and removing them, many on their pedestals of dirt, to be cleaned later in the lab.
Dusty heaved another stone into the wheelbarrow and gazed out to the east. Beyond the cottonwoods, the Animas River flowed through the floodplain like a winding brown serpent. In every direction, hills rolled until they butted against golden sandstone cliffs. Just to the south, the land turned a drab shade of gray as the Animas wound its way southwest toward the town of Aztec.
He bent to the task of freeing more head-sized blocks of sandstone and tossed them up into the wheelbarrow. The work couldn’t be called anything other than nasty, but doing it by hand was the only way to be certain nothing important got damaged.
As Sylvia wheeled another load away, Dusty propped himself so that he could look over the wall. Steve was drawing in his field notebook. The bottom of the tower kiva had been cordoned off into a grid, yellow nylon string crisscrossing the floor in one-meter squares.
Dusty’s gaze lingered on Maureen. She’d pulled her long black hair up and pinned it under her hat. The oversized black sweatshirt she wore declared an emphatic OH, CANADA! But his attention was on the way it conformed to her shoulders, and stretched down to accent her slim waist. Her butt did really nice things to the black jeans she wore.
“Uh, Boss Man? You working, or building up to a cardiac condition?” Sylvia asked.
Dusty turned. Sylvia stood behind the wheelbarrow, her arms crossed, green eyes amused.
“I didn’t hear you come back.”
“No shit?” She cocked her head. “You want Steve and me to cart rocks while you go hold the tape measure for Maureen?”
He pitched a rock into her wheelbarrow with enough vigor to make the steel ring. “Careful. I might start asking questions about your personal life.”
“I don’t have a personal life.”
Dusty scratched the back of his neck. “Right. Sure. At dinner last night, I was afraid to seat you two next to each other.”
She rolled the chunks of sandstone to the back of the wheelbarrow. “Yeah, well, we went down to the river to talk. That’s all. I mean, we didn’t really plan … You know, that thing in Durango? It just sort of happened. We were trying to …” She shook her head. “I don’t know, Dusty, it’s just all so quick.”
“Yep.”
“Well, what do you think? I mean, about Steve and me.”
“Not a thing. If you make it work, more power to you. If you don’t, it’s none of my business, and whatever you do is what you do.”
“Gee, thanks, Dusty. That was really helpful.”
He gave her a sidelong look. “I don’t have to worry about assigning you to the same pit, do I? If that will be uncomfortable for either of you, just pull me aside and tell me, and I’ll figure something out.”
“Naw, we’re cool. We’re just going to take some time. See if we really like each other as much as we think we do. I mean, God, we’ve been friends for years. We’ve always liked each other, but Steve’s not sure—”
“You didn’t hit him with the baseball bat, did you?”
Sylvia grinned. “No, but I keep having to remind myself. You know, I’ll wake up at night and catch myself about to brain him, but so far so good.”
Sylvia hauled off another load of rock and dumped it. Dusty had just about picked the floor clean enough to shovel again. Using a broom, he swept the shovel full, waited for Sylvia to return, and pitched it up into her empty wheelbarrow, then frowned at the hard-packed clay. He had finally found the room floor, the original living surface.
He had just bent over to begin troweling when Sylvia called: “Yo!”
“What?” He looked up.
Sylvia brushed the twigs and rocks to the side in her screen and picked up a tiny bone fragment. As she held it up to the yellow light, she said, “Looks human to me.” She brought it over and handed it to him.
“Looks like a deer skull to me, but let’s ask the expert.” He stepped over to the wall and called. “Dr. Cole, would you grace us with your opinion, please?”
Maureen said something to Steve, straightened her back, and tiptoed to the edge of the kiva. She stood in the shadow cast by the wall. He could see her Seneca heritage in every line of her face, her straight nose, full lips, the breadth of her cheekbones.
“Catch,” he said, and tossed it to her. “And be careful.”
She snagged it out of the air and frowned at the flat fragment of bone.
Steve watched Maureen thumb soil from the bone. His blue jeans had turned gray from the charcoal and soot, and the splotches of dirt-caked sweat on his brown shirt made it look as though it had been tie-dyed.
Sylvia said, “Dusty says deer bone. I say human. What’s the verdict, Washais?”
Maureen turned the bone over in her hand. “I think, Sylvia, you’re a better archaeologist than your boss.”
Dusty’s brows lifted. “Yeah, why?”
Steve looked up mildly. “Don’ I get to guess, massa?”
“No,” Dusty said. “I’m not letting you make any more guesses until you learn to speak twentieth-century English.”
“You mean like Ebonics?” Sylvia asked.
Dusty scowled. “Okay, Maureen, what part of the human body is it?”
“The same part as your big ‘bead,’ Stewart: the skull.” She leaned over the pit and frowned. “Where’s the rest of it?”
“That’s all we’ve uncovered, but hold on.”
Dusty jumped down into the excavation unit and picked up his trowel again. He didn’t see anything on the surface, but he scraped around the place where he’d taken his last shovelful of dirt. The earth smelled damp and rich. In the corner, the soft soil indicated an intrusion in the prehistoric floor.
“Got a hole here.”
Maureen and Steve climbed the aluminum ladder out of the kiva and perched on the wall next to Sylvia. All of them stared down at Dusty like vultures.
Dusty’s trowel clanked on what sounded like a rock. He scraped the top of it clean, frowned, and began excavating around the object. Oblong, the quartzite river cobble had been battered on both ends. “Hammerstone,” he said, then translated for Maureen’s benefit. “The ends took quite a bit of beating. Probably crushing acorns.”
“What do you mean, probably?” Maureen asked.
Sylvia answered, “Well, we just found a crushed piece of skull, Washais.” Maureen’s Seneca name meant something scary like “ritual knife.” “Somebody might have used that hammerstone to whack bone instead of acorns.”
As he pulled dirt away from the artifact, Dusty added, “Don’t forget that people ate each other down here, Doctor.”
“Probably
ate each other,” Maureen corrected.
“Mark this one down in the books. She sort of agrees with me.”
His trowel clicked in that distinctive way of metal meeting bone. Dusty reached for the brush sticking out of his back pocket and carefully whisked earth from around the smooth stone. A ring of bone beads, twenty centimeters wide, emerged.
He propped his elbows on his knees. “Well. Welcome to feature four. Sylvia, grab a handful of Ziplocs, the Sharpie pen, and the camera.”
“On my way!”
Steve rubbed his jaw. “More evidence to support the cannibalism theory?”
“Not necessarily,” Maureen said as she crouched on the wall. “Someone may have made beads out of the cranial bones, but that doesn’t prove he ate the meat attached to the bones.”
“Hmm,” Steve said. “What do we have to find to prove the Anasazi ate somebody?”
“Two types of human blood in human feces would be nice. Fragments of human bone would be even better.”
Dusty said, “I always thought finding an intact foot in somebody’s stomach would prove it conclusively.”
Sylvia trotted up with the camera dangling from her neck, a wad of Ziplocs stuffed in her coat pocket, and the Sharpie pen hooked to her belt. “Here you go, Boss Man.” She lifted the camera over her head
and handed it down to him, then lowered the “feature kit” in its metal ammo box.
“Thanks,” Dusty took the articles and positioned himself in front of the ring. He placed a stick, painted black-and-white in centimeters, beside the feature for scale, arranged the north arrow, then jotted the details on the little chalkboard before adjusting the camera’s focus. He took several bracketing shots.
Sylvia said, “That’s a really strange feature. I mean, it looks symbolic, you know?”
“Symbolic?” Steve wiped his face on his sleeve. “You mean religious?”
“Yeah. Definitely religious.”
Dusty handed the camera back to Sylvia, and said, “Plastic, please.”
Sylvia pulled the Ziplocs from her pocket, gave him the wad, then handed Dusty the Sharpie pen.
Dusty troweled fresh dirt into a plastic bag and measured in the location. He reached for his line level and took the depth from the pit datum stake. As he pulled the cap off the Sharpie and labeled the bag, he said, “What makes you two think this is religious symbolism?”
Sylvia’s freckled face seemed to light up. “Didn’t you ever read Mircea Eliade’s book,
Patterns in Comparative Religion
? There’s this really weird history of people connecting stones and bones. I mean, like, we all know that southwestern tribes put rocks over the heads of people they don’t like to keep their souls locked in the earth forever, but did you know that the Gonds tribe in India place a big rock on a grave to fasten down the dead person’s soul? There are even people who speculate that we originally set a headstone on a grave to keep the soul in the body until the Second Coming, when the stone would be rolled away, à la Jesus, and the person resurrected.” Sylvia glanced around the pit. “Cool, huh?”
Steve gave her a deadpan look. “You took another philosophy class last semester, didn’t you, Sylvia?”
“Religious studies,” she corrected. “Anyway, this feature is even neater because many people associate stones with giving birth. Childless women among the Maidu tribe in California touch a rock shaped like a pregnant woman to get knocked up, and in parts of Europe young couples have to walk on certain stones to make their union fruitful. In Madagascar, women who want to have a child smear stones with grease.”