Stone Ghost tilted his head and frowned at the fire. “Bear Dancer, gods, I have not thought about him in many summers. He was a violent man, always provoking fights just so he could hurt someone—much like his father.”
“What about his father?” Browser said. “Did you ever hear our Matron talk about him?”
“No,” Stone Ghost answered. “I heard many rumors from other people, but—”
Redcrop said, “I asked Grandmother about him once, and she just smiled and said that she did not wish to remember him. I don’t think she liked him very much.”
Ant Woman brushed corn-bread crumbs from her crooked fingers onto her yellow cape and tried to see through the hazy veil between the present and the past. Contemplatively, she said, “A woman from the Green Mesa villages. Twenty summers ago. I don’t recall anyone coming down from Green Mesa, except Traders, of course. But there weren’t any women Traders from Green Mesa at that time.”
Stone Ghost said, “Perhaps a man from Green Mesa, then. He may have been carrying a message for the woman.”
Ant Woman rubbed her wrinkled jaw. “Old Pigeontail was from somewhere near Green Mesa. He frequented our village. He’s still around, charging outrageous prices for his trinkets. He may know. And your Matron was married to him for a few summers. He—”
“What?” Redcrop said, stunned. “Grandmother was married to Old Pigeontail? I never knew that!”
Browser added, “Great Ancestors, that’s like corralling a buffalo bull with a wolf! What battles they must have waged against each other.”
Ant Woman grinned. “That’s why the marriage did not last long. She was always chewing at his throat, and he was always trying to kick her senseless—but Spider Silk ordered her to marry him. I never knew why.”
Redcrop laughed. She had tears in her eyes, but a smile turned her lips. “When was that, Elder? How old was Grandmother?”
“Oh, let me see.” Ant Woman rubbed her wrinkled throat. “It seems like that was forty summers ago. Maybe a little longer. Pigeontail was younger than your Matron. That was part of the problem. She’d seen a lot more of life than he had, but he didn’t like it when she pointed that out.”
“How strange,” Browser said. “Old Pigeontail has often visited our villages, but our Matron always went out of her way to avoid him. I used to wonder why.”
Ant Woman could feel Stone Ghost’s gaze. She turned, and found him staring at her with unwavering eyes. White wisps of hair had glued themselves to his wrinkled cheeks.
“What are you staring at?”
Stone Ghost lowered his voice. “I was remembering a tragedy that happened twenty summers ago in the Green Mesa villages. Four old women were murdered.” He rubbed his thumb over the black-on-white geometric paintings on the side of his teacup. “One of them was my sister.”
Browser said, “That would be about the time the woman from Green Mesa supposedly came to see our Matron.”
Ant Woman nodded. “I remember those murders. Your reputation soared after you found your sister’s killer. Everyone wanted you to come and solve crimes in their village.”
Stone Ghost answered, “That is exactly why I’ve spent the last twenty summers living alone in the middle of nowhere.”
“But you have helped many villages.”
“Yes. The ones I could.”
Ant Woman brought up her aching right knee and rubbed it. On cold damp days like this, a fire built in the joint. She’d have to brew up a cup of willow bark tea before she’d be able to sleep tonight. “Whatever happened to your house down at Smoking Mirror Butte?” She used her chin to point southward. “Is it still there?”
Stone Ghost turned to the south and longing filled his old eyes. His white hair fluttered in the wind. “I hope so. I plan on going back.”
“Not until after you’ve found the people who murdered my friend, I hope.”
“That is my first duty, Matron.”
Flame Carrier’s smiling face appeared on the fabric of Ant Woman’s souls and the pain in her heart expanded to fill her whole chest.
“Well,” she said, “if you have no more questions for me, I would like to go to my camp where I can be with my family.”
“I understand,” Stone Ghost said. “Thank you for speaking with us, Ant Woman. How long will you be staying in Longtail village?”
“Perhaps another day. I need to speak with Crossbill about trading some of our pots for her pretty red blankets. Then we’ll be going.”
Stone Ghost rose unsteadily to his feet, and Browser grabbed his elbow to help support him.
Stone Ghost said, “If we have more questions, I hope you will speak with us again?”
“I will do whatever I can to help. Just don’t interrupt me when I’m haggling for blankets.”
“I promise not to.” Stone Ghost smiled and bowed to her. “A pleasant evening to you, Matron.”
“And to you, Stone Ghost.”
The old man hobbled away with Browser and Redcrop behind him.
Ant Woman watched them with narrowed eyes as they walked through the crowd. Stone Ghost knew something he wasn’t telling. She could feel it in her squirming belly. What was he hiding? The reason for Flame Carrier’s murder? Maybe the reason for a number of murders that had happened in the past twenty summers?
Ant Woman shook her head, finished her tea, and struggled to her feet. As she walked across the plaza, she saw the pain on the faces of others, and it made her own grief worse.
Could Browser be right? The murderers were hunting down those who’d known the Blessed prophets. Why would someone do that? Cornsilk and Poor Singer had never harmed anyone. Legends said they’d spent their lives teaching and Healing, moving from village to village. They had claimed to have no clans, or families, which made them members of all clans and all families. That was their greatest strength.
Ant Woman sighed, too tired and grief-stricken to think more about it today. As she rounded the southeastern corner of Longtail village
and looked down at Dry Creek village’s camp, a sea of yellow capes flashed. Her people drifted from one fire to the next, speaking in hushed tones. Her daughter, Rock Dove, knelt before her own fire, nursing her baby. The beautiful boy had been born less than four moons ago. Rock Dove waved at Ant Woman.
Ant Woman lifted a hand and smiled. If she could just lie down for a time before the evening Dances, she might be able to stand it.
She forced her aching knees to walk.
T
HE SOUND OF RAIN DRUMMING ON HER TENT ROOF WOKE Maureen.
She opened her eyes and stared at the darkness until she realized that the bottom of her sleeping bag was soaked clear through, as were her favorite pair of wool socks.
“No wonder I froze all night.”
She shoved out of her bag and looked around. Even in the storm light, she could see pools of water glistening on the tent floor around her.
She tugged off her drenched socks and reached into her suitcase for a clean pair. She had to be a magician to dress beneath the bowed, waterlogged tent walls, but she managed. The aroma of coffee perking and breakfast cooking drifted from the trailer, encouraging her. Dusty must be up.
Maureen shrugged on her black down coat and ducked out of her tent. In the light from the trailer windows, she could see the water puddles. While the supply tent, Steve’s, and Sylvia’s, stood resolute against the storm, Maureen’s had become a pathetic pond. The sides sloped inward as though ready to collapse. It took an act of will not to pull the stakes and let the rest of it collapse.
Maureen shoved her hands into her pockets and ran for the trailer. As she stamped the mud off her boots on the stairs, Dusty called, “Come on in. Coffee’s on!”
Maureen pulled the door open and stepped into the warmth. “Oh, this feels good. My tent leaked last night.”
Dusty turned from the frying pan on the stove to give her a knowing look. The white light of the lantern pulsed, giving his blond hair and beard a silver sheen. “I noticed. Sylvia bet me ten bucks that it would collapse on top of you before you got up.”
“How nice. You win.” Maureen took off her coat and hung it on
the peg by the door. Wet splotches darkened her jeans. There must have been more water on her sleeping bag than she’d realized. “You’re ten dollars richer. Speaking of Sylvia, where is she?”
Dusty handed her a note with rain-smeared ink:
Boss Man! The skies opened. Since it doesn’t look like this is going to quit, we’re making a town run. We promise to do the shopping
before
we find a couple of cold brews. See you late tonight or first thing tomorrow depending on how fuzzed up we get.
Love and Kisses,
S
2
Dusty’s version of
huevos rancheros
simmered on the stove, made with a local brand of salsa, fresh jalapeños, canned beans, and tortillas; it smelled wonderful. They’d eaten it three days in a row, but she hadn’t grown tired of it, yet.
“This is going to take a while,” he said. “Why don’t you sit down and I’ll pour you a cup of coffee.”
“Thanks.”
Maureen shivered and walked over to the table piled high with specimen boxes. Dusty’s neat stacks of papers sat on the opposite side of the table.
“Sometime,” he said, gesturing at her with the spatula, “you ought to have my specialty. I make my own refritos. Two parts black beans to three parts Anasazi beans.”
“Anasazi beans?”
“Yeah. The same kind the Anasazi grew here eight hundred years ago. It’s the single biggest industry up in Dove Creek, Colorado.”
“This is a joke, right?”
“No. Fact. If we have time, we can drive up to Dove Creek and look at their bean elevator. That, and the café and gas station,
are
Dove Creek. See that and you’ve seen it all. Unless, of course, you’ve got a thing for tractors.”
Last night after dinner, she’d spread her first collection of bone—a child’s femur, a skull fragment, and what looked like an adult’s tibia—out onto the little square table and set up her microscope. She started rearranging things so she would have a place to put her elbows. She slid her microscope to the right and blew dust from the table.
“You don’t think Sylvia will get her Jeep stuck in the mud getting back in here, do you?”
“No, I know those two. They’ll get a hotel room and watch the weather report. They’ll linger, enjoying town life until this lifts.”
Dusty set a steaming cup of coffee in front of her, and Maureen cradled it in her cold hands. “Oh, that smells great.” She took a swallow and said, “My tent and sleeping bag look grim. Maybe I’d better go in and get a motel room tonight, too.”
Dusty leaned against the counter and picked up his own coffee cup, one of those insulated travel mugs. “Dale keeps extra blankets in the cabinet over the couch. It’s mouseproof up there. Why don’t I move to the rear of the trailer, and you can have the front. That’ll save me a trip into town tonight and another one to go get you in the morning.”
She hesitated. “I guess you won’t come crawling into my bed in the middle of the night.”
Amusement twisted his lips. “No, probably not. Not that it would be such a bad bed to crawl into.”
Maureen gave him a skeptical look. “You’re such a sweet talker, Stewart.”
He smiled and took another drink of coffee. “I was thinking I’d go back to work while I waited for the
huevos
to cook. Will you mind?”
“No. I’ll just do the same.”
“Okay.”
Dusty slid into the booth opposite her and huddled behind piles of photo logs, feature records, artifact lists, field specimen forms, and the other minutiae of a well-run archaeological dig.
Maureen had begun her cataloguing with the partially burned child’s femur she and Sylvia had recovered. It lay before her on the table, next to her notebook.
Dusty didn’t seem much inclined to talk this morning, which was unusual. Dark circles filled the hollows beneath his blue eyes. More bad dreams?
She glanced at him, set her coffee down, and picked up her hand lens and pen. As she examined the bone, she wrote in her notebook, remarking on the scalloping and charring, the overall preservation, the fact that the epiphyseal lines were unossified—meaning it was a young child’s leg bone.
“Uh, Doctor?”
She glanced up from measuring the mid-diaphyseal diameter—the middle of the long bone—and hesitated, calipers in one hand.
He was watching her with uncertain eyes.
“What?”
“About my nightmare.” Dusty seemed to be fighting the urge to cringe. “I just wanted you to know that—”
“You’re not a raving lunatic?”
“That, too. But, no, I was just going to say thanks for listening to me. I appreciated it.”
“No problem.”
She bent back to her work. After several minutes, she could feel his unrelenting blue-eyed stare boring into her. She looked up.
Dusty said, “You don’t think I’m on the verge of a mental breakdown of catastrophic proportions, do you?”
Maureen could read the rest in his eyes—
like my father?
“No. I think you’re stronger than that.”
He fiddled with his pen. “I’ve been trying to figure out who the old woman is in the dream. The brain cooks up strange things. Maybe it was something I saw in a movie, or on TV. Something that clicked, got a reaction, and stayed buried until the
basilisco
called it up.”
She reached for her coffee cup where it steamed next to a dirt-encrusted child’s skull. She took a sip, and ran a finger over the curve of the frontal bone. “Do basilisks have a reputation for doing that? Calling things up?”
He frowned down at a field specimen list. “Frankly, Doctor, I don’t know. They had a lot of trouble over in the Valley early in the last century.
Basiliscos
didn’t show up much after World War II.” He shook his head. “I keep telling myself I don’t believe in them.”
“We could call Maggie. Find out how to destroy the evil.”
“No,” he said, and ran a hand through his blond hair. “She has enough problems herding tourists for the Park Service without us exposing her to some sort of ancient Anasazi evil. Let’s leave Maggie out of this. Besides, I know how to deal with the little son of a bitch. You’re supposed to force the basilisk to look into a mirror. It creates a sort of feedback loop that makes the evil feed on itself and kills the wicked creature.”
Dusty leaned over his specimen list again, his brow furrowed.
Maureen went back to her bones. She studied the curved length
of femur, puzzled for a moment, and then lifted it, hefting the light tube of bone and sighting down the shaft. “Stewart, I think this child had rickets.”
“Huh?”
“Vitamin deficiency. I can’t prove that here, in the field, but I probably can in the lab. That, or some soil pressure has caused deformation of the diaphysis.”
“In English, please, Doctor.”
“Vitamin D fixes calcium in the bones. Without it, bones go soft. This bone curves. See it?”
“Yeah, I do.”
Having completed her measurements, taken notes, and made a preliminary description, she rewrapped the bone in tissue and newspaper and replaced it in the box. Then she turned to the skull. The fragment consisted of a child’s frontal bone, both orbits—eye sockets—and the maxillary bones. She carefully studied the heat-damaged incisors, cracked and broken by the fire. The alveolar area, the part of the upper jaw just under the nose, had been calcined where the lip had pulled back in response to extreme heat. This, she noted, and then used a bamboo pick to break soil loose from the inside of the orbits.
“It was just so real,” Dusty said absently. He was staring off into space, and she could almost see the dream playing behind his eyes. Dusty shook his head. “They must have ritually killed the katchinas, that’s why they chopped the hearts out of the paintings and burned the masks.”
Throwing caution to the winds, Maureen said, “Maybe the woman was a witch and that’s why they burned her in the fire with the masks.”
“Possibly. That’s a universal way of handling evil.”
Maureen paused when she noticed the roughness inside the child’s orbits. She turned the thin fragment of skull and squinted at it in the gray light. Reaching for her brush, she carefully whisked dirt out of what should have been the smooth top of the orbit. “I’ll be—”
“Be what?”
“I’ve got
cribra orbitalia
here.”
“Why is it that every time I talk to you, I have to keep mentioning that the language of the realm is English, not Latin?”
“Science uses its own language, Stewart.” She lifted her hand lens as Dusty rose and crossed to watch her. She smiled at the frothy look of the bone, little holes visible across the concave top of the orbit. She pointed as he leaned over. “Look here. See, this is just above where the eyeball is set. This porosity and irregular bone. That’s
cribra orbitalia.
”
“Okay, so it looks like someone boiled the top of the kid’s eyeballs. Was that from the fire?”
“No.” She cocked her head, glanced at him, and then turned her attention back to the broken piece of skull. “Remember the hypoplasia, the ripples, I saw in the teeth that first day?”
“Yes, the burned mandible.”
“That’s the one.” She indicated the wrapped femur. “Then I see rickets in that femur, and now
cribra
in this skull.”
“Which means?”
“These children were really sick. We’re seeing nutritional deficiencies everywhere. A lack of vitamin D causes rickets. Iron deficiency is one of the suspected causes of
cribra orbitalia
, and I’m betting I’ll get thickening of the cranial vault, uh—the skull bones—as well as
cribra cranii
: holes in the inner table of the braincase. This whole population was under stress.”
He braced a hand on the tabletop. “That fits. If my pottery is correct, if these are like the same people we found at 10K3—” He seemed suddenly stunned.
“What is it?”
For a moment, he was silent. “At 10K3, you found tuberculosis among some of those women. Remember? You told me that for there to be that many cases of tuberculosis in the bones, the disease’s attack rate had to be through the roof.”
She nodded. “That’s right.”
“Okay,” he said, excited. “Then, like 10K3, this site dates to the period about one hundred years after the fall of Chaco. These folks are making Mesa Verdean–style pottery, they’re sick, and running, moving from place to place in search of a sanctuary. They’re rebuilding the kivas, right? And, I’m willing to bet that once we get through the bone bed and the kiva roof, we’re going to find that they remodeled this tower kiva, too.”
“Okay. So?”
“Of course they’re malnourished. Entire sections of the Southwest were being abandoned at that time. People were fleeing the warfare and crowding into the remaining villages, swelling the population. There had to be a lot of hungry people. Agriculture depends on a predictable workforce.”
Dusty picked up the bit of skull and looked into the empty orbits, as if seeing the bright brown eyes that might have once stared back at him. “The poor little guy never had a chance. His whole world was plunging itself into a holocaust.”
Maureen unwrapped the fragment of adult femur Sylvia had found. The specimen consisted of the upper, proximal portion, the head, neck, trochanters, and perhaps fifteen centimeters of shaft that ended in a badly calcined end. She couldn’t tell if it had been broken, or just burned so badly that the bone had crumbled.