On the branch above him, Catkin stirred, her slender body hunching like a cat’s.
“There’s one missing,”
she said.
Browser tensed. She must have counted nine on the trail.
“Shh. Two coming.”
Two?
Browser gripped his club again. Perhaps she’d miscounted. Didn’t matter, they could take two. He would leap up and club the first man in the head, while Catkin’s arrow lanced the second, but if one of their victims managed to scream before he died, the entire war party would be on them in less than thirty heartbeats. He would move only as a last resort.
Lightning danced in the sky above Browser and lit the aspen grove. Between the flashes, he saw the two people.
A man shoved an old woman before him. The woman stumbled and weaved on her feet as though injured.
Blessed Ancestors, a survivor.
The woman staggered through the deep leaves, clutching the back of her head, as though to block another blow from her captor’s club.
Then Browser saw the truth. Her captor’s eyes gleamed. Her eyes did not. Black gaping pits stared at the ground. Someone had gouged out her eyes. She couldn’t see. The woman reached out to beseech her captor, but her voice came out thick, the words slurred, meaningless. They must have cut out her tongue, as well.
Hatred welled in Browser’s gut.
The warrior bent down and said, “You are the last. You know why?
Our sacred leader used your eyes to see where your people had fled. We found them all. Now we are done.”
He grunted as he clubbed the woman. She sprawled face-first into the leaves near the other bodies. The murderer stood over her for a time, smiling, triumphant.
At the edge of his endurance, Browser had to strain against his rage. His club hand shook with the need to kill.
Apparently sated, the warrior turned and trotted after his companions.
It took an eternity before Browser heard Catkin’s familiar steps and reared up from his bed of leaves.
Catkin sat down, pulled the woman’s body into her lap, and smoothed hair away from her sightless eyes.
Browser rose to his feet and brushed himself off. “Is she alive?”
“Yes.”
“Who is it? Do you know her?”
Catkin said something soft, but he didn’t hear.
He went to Catkin’s side and knelt, and he no longer needed a name. Despite her mutilation, he recognized Matron Eagle Hunter. Shallow breaths moved her old chest, but the back of her skull had been crushed.
Catkin clutched the dying Matron and rocked her back and forth, whispering, “It’s all right, Matron. It’s Catkin and War Chief Browser. You are safe now. We’re here.”
Browser stared at Catkin. He doubted the Matron could hear, but it was very much like Catkin to offer this small comfort just in case.
As he rose, he placed a hand on Catkin’s shoulder to thank her, then walked to the trail the warriors had taken. He looked both ways, praying he would see no one. Cloud People had filled the sky and the darkness seemed to ripple with each punch of his heart. The trail more than a few paces away appeared warped and dreamlike.
He cocked his head and listened.
The aspens rustled. The explosions of leaves continued like far-off cries. Catkin whispered.
Then … a rush of air.
Catkin gently rested the Matron on the ground. The sound must have been Eagle Hunter’s afterlife soul escaping with her last breath.
Browser bowed his head and silently prayed for the ancestors to come and find her soul, to guide it to the sacred lake and the opening
that led to the underworlds and the Land of the Dead. He and Catkin could not afford to bury her properly.
“Let’s go,” he called.
Catkin stood, a slender pillar of gray in the blackness. “I’m ready.”
“H
E’S A PYGMY,” SYLVIA RHONE SAID AS DUSTY PULLED UP at the end of a faint two-track, set the brake, and turned off the Bronco’s ignition.
“Mr. Wirth is short,” Dusty corrected. “I met him in Dale’s office yesterday. He seemed okay.”
Sylvia tucked a lock of shoulder-length brown hair behind her ear and her thin, freckled face went pensive. She wore a green sweatshirt and blue jeans, with heavy hiking boots. “Yeah, well, if you say so, but check out his hair. It takes a lot of skill to get that much hair spray in one spot. I mean, we’re talking years of spray-paint practice. He probably spent his entire youth on overpasses.”
“Give the guy a chance, will you?”
“I always give men
a
chance.”
“Oh, I feel better. Thanks.”
With practiced eyes, she looked out at the site. “So. They’ve decided to call it Pueblo Animas, eh? Nice touch. Sounds scary.”
“‘Town of Souls’ is a clever bilingual pun, since it’s an Anasazi site on the terrace above the Animas River.”
The site didn’t look like much, just a mound of rubble spotted with occasional sagebrush, rabbitbrush with its autumn browned tufts, and tawny patches of bunchgrass. Here and there, craters pocked the surface where eighty years of pot-hunting had taken its toll. Finding an intact ruin anywhere in the Southwest was akin to finding a true virgin in a Juarez brothel.
Sylvia’s eyes narrowed at the man leaning against the dark blue Mercedes. “What does he do for a living?”
Dusty gave her a sidelong glance. Her tone suggested that Mr. Wirth might be a drug lord, or worse, a politician. Dusty said, “He’s an investment banker from New York. Be polite, no matter what he says.”
Sylvia’s freckled face froze. “Why, is he going to say something to set me off?”
Dusty reached for the door handle. “I think he’s used to giving orders, that’s all.”
“Oh, God,” she groaned.
They both stepped out of the Bronco and walked to meet Peter Wirth. Sunlight shot gold and yellow from the cottonwoods that flanked the riverbank east of the site. According to the latest culturally sensitive perspective, they weren’t supposed to call these “ruins” anymore, that being pejorative to some ears. The same with the term “Anasazi,” though Dusty hadn’t heard any of those selfsame politically correct people disparaging the use of “Anglo” when it came to people like him—no matter how offensive it might have been to his Scottish, Irish, and French ancestors.
“Good morning,” Peter Wirth called and thrust his thumbs into the back pockets of his twill slacks. The wind didn’t even move his white hair, but it tugged at the corners of his tweed jacket.
“Hello. Thanks for meeting us out here.” Dusty extended his hand. Wirth shook, and Dusty added, “This is my assistant, Sylvia Rhone.”
Sylvia stepped forward and shook, but she eyed Wirth suspiciously. “Hey, great site.”
“Glad you like it,” Wirth replied. “We want you to get this excavated immediately.”
“Immediately?” Sylvia pushed up the sleeves of her green sweatshirt. She had an amused look on her face. “You mean, like, next year?”
Wirth’s face went stony. He looked at Sylvia as though she must be joking. He said, “I mean like now.”
“Uh, yeah, well,” Dusty said, and folded his arms as if in defense. “We will certainly get started immediately, but please keep in mind that archaeology isn’t exactly an ‘immediate’ sort of science.”
Wirth’s bushy white brows plunged down over his blunt nose. “What does that mean?”
A flock of rosy finches swooped over their heads, chirping and twittering as they soared into a cottonwood tree down by the river.
“It means—” Sylvia said with an evil tone.
Dusty broke in, “It means that archaeology takes time, Mr. Wirth. We—”
“I mean, wow,” Sylvia added, missing Dusty’s cue to keep quiet, “if we had one hundred people and about ten years, we
might
be able to dig half this site—”
Wirth’s eyes narrowed, and Dusty said, “Please, let me explain, sir. This looks like a Chacoan great house, Mr. Wirth. I suspect you have a two-story pueblo with around two hundred rooms in it. I don’t think you understand how expensive archaeology can be.”
Wirth’s mouth smiled, but it didn’t reach his eyes. “Let me point out the property boundaries so you don’t get lost. My wife and I bought a twelve-hundred-acre parcel that runs from the pinyon-juniper uplands over there, to the irrigated riverfront where you see those cottonwoods and willows. This ruin is the property’s crown jewel and our best hope for a payoff on our investment.”
“Yes, sir, I understand that, but—”
Wirth interrupted, “Well, let’s just start with one portion, something we can show to demonstrate the property’s grand past. Maybe a kiva. There should be a kiva here, right?”
Dusty pointed, and his black-and-gray plaid sleeve waffled in the breeze. “You see that big round depression in the middle of the rubble mound?”
“Yes.”
“That’s it.”
“Great.” Wirth nodded. “Start there.” He slapped Dusty on the shoulder and strode to the driver’s side of his Mercedes. Over the roof, he called, “I have to get back to New York. Let me know what you find.”
Dusty smiled and waved. “Will do.”
They watched him drive away in a cloud of dust.
“Wow,” Sylvia said in admiration. Brown hair blew around her face in the wind. “I bet he can handle anything—Heimlich maneuvers, CPR, pulling the switch at the local prison.”
“Well,” Dusty sighed. “At least it’s pretty country.”
To his left, the northwest, the land undulated, rising and falling in tan-and-green swells. To the south, an eroded mesa etched a line against the crystal blue October sky.
Sylvia propped her hands on her hips. “How much money do we have? A lot, I gather.”
“I don’t think he’d approve a request to do remote sensing from the space shuttle.”
“Bummer. But we can run all the C-14 dates and palynology samples we want to?”
“I think so.”
Dusty started toward the pueblo, his boots grating in the sand as he climbed the slope. “Let’s face it, no matter what we have to put up with, this is an archaeologist’s dream. We’ve got an untouched Chaco outlier. Think about it. Aztec Ruins is about fifteen miles south of us, and Salmon Ruins another eight miles straight south of that. We’re the first archaeologists to sink a shovel into this thing.” He waved his arms in growing excitement. “It’s been thirty years since anyone has opened a great house. And we’re not on a skinny budget.”
“Yeah,” Sylvia said, trudging along at his side, “almost too good to be true. I wonder what the catch is?”
“Catch?”
“Oh, come on,” Sylvia groaned as though Dusty were stupid. “You don’t really think this guy is interested in archaeology, do you?”
“I don’t have any evidence to the contrary, and I try very hard to live my life as an optimist.”
“Yeah, I know,” she answered blandly. “I’ve seen the stash of Trojans in your glove compartment.”
Dusty glared at her, but didn’t miss a step. Maybe he ought to put them in a paper bag? “Think of it this way, normally at this time of year we’re walking some pipeline right-of-way out in the saltbush flats around Aneth. This is a vast improvement.”
Sylvia hung her head. “Yeah. Okay. You’re right.”
He walked to the highest point in the rubble and looked around. Sagebrush and rabbitbrush covered everything. The place looked like a rock outcrop. Now he knew how Earl Morris or A. V. Kidder felt when they first set foot on a huge pile of rubble; and Pueblo Animas was only a small Chacoan outlier.
“You know,” Dusty said, as he watched a whirlwind of leaves careen over the ruin, “for the first time I understand why the old guys back in the twenties dug like they did. I mean, we’re so used to small sites, collapsed pueblos with a couple of rooms, that we lose the enormity of what it means to excavate a city from scratch.”
Sylvia propped herself on the canted chunks of sandstone and looked around. Wind ruffled her straight brown hair. “So, what next?”
“Datum.”
“Right, where do you want it?”
The datum was a length of rebar, a metal rod, that they would hammer into the ground. All of their measurements would be tied to that point.
“There.” Dusty pointed to the northern edge of the kiva depression. “We need to shoot it in from the section corners.” Which meant they needed to survey in the exact location.
Sylvia gave him a sour look. “That’s a hard day of packing around the rod. When is Steve going to be here?”
“Tomorrow. But we need this done
pronto.
Life is full of little disappointments.”
“I just want you to know—”
Dusty held up his hand and cocked his head to the wind.
Sylvia jerked around wide-eyed, staring straight at the brash-filled kiva. “Did you hear that?”
He didn’t respond for a second. “What?”
“Well, I—I don’t know. It sounded like children screaming.” Sylvia had started breathing hard, and her face had flushed.
Dusty lowered his hand and scowled at her. “I thought it sounded like a far-off engine.”
Sylvia just stared at him, her green eyes wide. “What can I say? Ten minutes with an investment banker, and I think it’s the Apocalypse.”
Dusty looked at her over the rims of his sunglasses. “You’re not going to start saying ‘Praise the Lord’ every other sentence, are you?”
“Not unless I see some guy ride down from the sky on a white horse.”
Dusty glanced up at the clouds, then nodded. “Good, you had me worried. I’ll get the rod and transit, if you’ll pick the datum location in the kiva.”
She trotted toward the circular depression in the middle of the rubble mound. “I’m on it.”