Dark Tales Of Lost Civilizations (6 page)

That night a dog came to her in a dream. He claimed he was her father and told her she must speak to the gods, take dirt from the footprints of the bear, and turn it upside down. He explained that this would cause the bear to be turned upside down and rendered unable to move. She would then be able to catch it and exact her revenge. The fiery spite in the dog’s eyes reminded Izanami of what her mother had said about her father being not the kind of dog from Grandmother Huchi’s tales.

Izanami woke in a panic and debilitating pain, to find her raccoon coat soaked with blood and what appeared to be her entrails splayed across the floor of the cave. For a wild moment she believed the bear she sought had mauled her in her sleep. She lay there for six days and nights, enduring the sleepless agony and the persistent spite of her father, waiting for death to cover her with a shroud. But her spirit refused to let go and on the seventh day she crawled out of the cave and buried the body of her stillborn child in the raccoon skin coat.

Izanami returned to the village and her grandparents’ hole in the ground. She forgot about the bear and the hunter boy, but the mangled face of her stillborn child never left her. While she was away, Grandmother Huchi had weakened in body and spirit. She remained holed up while Ekashi continued to produce fish from handfuls of sand and Izanami gathered berries and fruits from the lowland hedgerows, and mushrooms and mountain vegetables from the highlands. When the seasons were dry they sacrificed raccoons and prayed for the rain. But the gods did not always listen and the people of Ezo suffered a season of spoiled crops.

They buried Grandmother Huchi the following fall. Ekashi withdrew from society, leaving his work to Izanami. He refused to eat and pray. His body withered, and before spring could make its round again, Ekashi passed away.

Izanami sacrificed an entire forest of raccoons for her grandfather. That was the year of the torrential rains; the year the earth bore an abundance of fruit for the people of Ezo. From time to time she would run her hand over the little cedar box that she kept hidden in her cloak.

The people of the village avoided her. They said she would summon a tsunami to your door if you gave her so much as a passing glance. They said she was the one who breathed the fog that concealed the beautiful autumn moon. They said she was the one who threatened the turtle with death if the rains didn’t come. But it was clear that she had grown to possess an undeniable beauty, like her mother Hapi, and when the ships from the south finally arrived, bringing Wajin in search of land and settlement, a sailor took her for his lover, but she could not trust him.

She became skillful in the art of invisibility. One night she became invisible and followed the sailor back to his ship. There she overheard him telling his comrades how he had known the dog’s daughter. She heard how her father the dog had hunted down, savaged, and cannibalized his people. He laughed as he referred to her as a bitch, a beast, a barbarian. She looked on in fury as he lay down beside a goddess of the crystal mountain. Spurned, she built an effigy of straw and nailed it to a pine tree, prepared fetishes of the guilder-rose, and buried them upside-down. She chanted, “O demon, I offer this image of the man I despise to thee. Take his soul and carry it together with his body to the fiery depths of Hell. Turn thou my enemy into one of thy kind; make him a demon.”

The sailor disappeared, but Izunami didn’t need the Saaghalian magician to divine his whereabouts. Besides, it was a vanishing custom.

The Wajin settlers built houses of wood above the ground and erected magnificent shrines to the gods of the south. The season was dry when the officials came to count her head. They dragged her from her hole in the ground and told her she lived in a different country now. They changed her name and wrote the new name on a register in a language and script she could not read. When the official spoke, she didn’t listen. Her hand was in her robe, her fingers running over the grooves of the tiny cedar box in which she kept her two tiny navel strings.

The stories of her ancestors that Huchi had told her and the customs Ekashi had taught her roared inside her head. She resolved to never again run a stick through a fish and face its mouth to the sky.

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Mark Lee Pearson
is from the United Kingdom. Aircraft toolmaker, translator, and father of two little monsters, he has a degree in Philosophy and English Literature, and a Masters in Japanese. When he was nineteen years old, Mark founded the legendary indiepop label,
Ambition Records
, in his Southampton bedroom. He now divides his time between teaching junior high school students in Japan how to communicate in English, and trying to communicate his own ideas about the nature of the universe to the world. His stories have appeared in various magazines and anthologies including
Apex, Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine,
and
Space and Time.
For more information check out
markleepearson.blogspot.com
.

Jackson Kuhl

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Out of the submissions I received, few struck me as unique and colorful as this next selection. Connecticut author, Jackson Kuhl, infuses humor and mystery with an exceptional ability for story telling.
Quivira
is a legendary city of gold and has come to symbolize the misfortune that befalls those who search for it. Where Quivira actually was ever located has long been a mystery associated with the ruse of misdirection, purposely guiding those that get close to travel the wrong way. If it exists however, it just goes to reason that someday, someone will find it . . . or is even the legend itself a ruse for something else?

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The Sioux tell a story about four brothers who went hunting and came across a buffalo. The buffalo said to them,
Sure, you can eat me—I taste real good—but when you’re done, lay my bones together so my hoodoo will make me whole and alive again
. The brothers promised to do this and killed the buffalo. But after they finished supper and the youngest brother gathered up the bones, the others mocked him. Buffalo can’t talk, they said—they must have been hearing things. Besides, what good would putting the bones back together do? And so the older brothers, bellies full, went to sleep.

The youngest brother left them and walked up a hill to lay out the bones. Leg bone connected to the shoulder bone and so on. He finished and watched as the moonlight fell upon the skeleton. Before his eyes the bones knitted together, flesh grew, hair sprouted. The buffalo rose and walked away.

When the hunter went down the hill, he discovered his three brothers had transformed into enormous rattlesnakes: this was their punishment for ignoring the buffalo. They slithered into a hole to live beneath the hill. The youngest brother put his head in the hole and told them,
Even though you’re now serpents, and jackasses as well, you’re still my family
. So from that time onward the Sioux would bring offerings to the entrance of their hill, whereupon the snakes would give the tribe powerful medicine to use in battle against their enemies.

This story came suddenly to the head of Tobias Clayton Lyddy as he picked himself up from the scree he had just rolled down like a wheel of cheese. Having walked three steps off the trail to piss, his fingers undoing his fly as he trod, he became aware of a cunning illusion in the landscape: a crevasse in the ground that, through perspective and an arrangement of brush, was indistinguishable from solid earth until Lyddy’s boot heel met nothing but wind and curses. He tumbled into darkness. Lay there some moments at the bottom, wondering if he was broken completely or if just parts were.

Staring upwards, wiggling fingers and toes to confirm their assemblage, Lyddy saw a cavernous dome far overhead, the underside of the mesa he had been circumnavigating. Sunlight sliced down through pierced rents. Lyddy had tripped into one of these. But rather than plummeting straight to the rocky floor, his fall had been interrupted by a landslide of bruising stone.

After he realized his legs would hold him, Lyddy stood. Faced the clusters of buildings cut into the walls of the enormous cavern, many of their facades etched with winding serpents. That’s when the story of the four brothers jumped into his brain.

He had heard the story years ago around a campfire, one of those impromptu nights when the paths intersect of a half-dozen Conestogas and a couple of prospectors and maybe a few rowdies on the run from a warrant, a night where bottles of whiskey are passed around. Stories told about Indians and ghosts and the Devil swapping fiddles for souls. The teller had said the tale of the four brothers was from Sioux lands—up north, in the Dakota Territory. But seeing the snakes under the mountain made Lyddy think he had found where the three siblings had sidewinded off to.

Lyddy was fresh to New Mexico. Had held over a dozen claims, each of them squeaking out just enough to keep him in shovels and cornmeal before he would shake his fists at Jesus sitting at the Right Hand and light out to buy another patch someplace else. Nebraska, Colorado, now the Territory. He had heard descriptions of pueblo cities, square stone houses and courtyards built into the sides of canyons, and he imagined these were them: wedges of sandstone fitted together to make walls, black gaps for windows and doorways. Empty places, their architects disappeared. Some Indians, like the Hopi, knew about the cliff villages. Shunned them. Refused to even discuss them. Or so Lyddy had been told.

These buildings weren’t square. They were cylindrical, without corners, with painted snakes wrapped around them. Lyddy was ringed by shelves upon shelves of giant hat boxes, rising up toward the fractured ceiling of the mesa.

He crossed the cavern floor, climbed a ladder to the lowest tier. He was surprised the wood and fiber twine held his weight.

“Hello there, hello?” he called.

No answer except his echo. He approached the buildings, the wet armpits and back of his shirt turned icy, once away from the smolder of the desert. Up close he saw the snakes weren’t painted. Instead formed by thousands, millions of deep hash marks incised into the adobe plaster, cut so their shadows formed scales and rattles—murals, appreciable only from a distance.

Lyddy wandered among the hat boxes. Encountered not so much as a mouse. The darkness was too thick to see within the buildings.

He left, slipped and scrambled back up the slope, clambered through the hole. The horse and pack mule were nowhere to be seen. Lyddy swore and slapped his hat against his knee until he found them a hundred yards down the trail. He led them back. Both shied away from the crevice, his chestnut with the crooked blaze whinnying and pulling sharply on the reins. The animal instinctually feared the pit and the broken limbs it threatened, Lyddy reasoned. He hobbled them a safe distance away under a pinyon.

He slid to the cavern floor again with an oil lantern and a pick taken from the mule’s load of supplies. Lit the lantern. Restarted his exploration. Now he could see inside the silo structures. Dwellings, he guessed, bowls and blankets and metates arranged on low benches. As if the owners had straightened up before leaving on a trip. No, Lyddy thought, that was wrong—it was too neat and tidy, as if nobody had ever lived here at all. More like a storefront window, items arranged for display. Corncobs lay shriveled in dishes. Whatever liquids had been in the gourds had long since evaporated.

Other chambers were mysterious to Lyddy, oubliettes dug into the rock, their only entrance or egress a ladder descending into shadows his lantern couldn’t resolve. His heart beat too hard to go down into them.

The Cliff Dwellers
, they called them. The makers of these places. Built them and then vanished.

Lyddy searched and searched, amazed, dumbstruck, down alleys and across courtyards. He stopped peeking into the houses, their furnishings redundant. Truth was, they unnerved him. Some of the interior walls were painted. Handprints, bighorns, snakes. Ordinary animals. But there were also lizards walking on two legs. And strange figures with square heads and geometric features, feathers sprouting in place of hair. Kachinas, Lyddy knew. Spirits. The Hopi and Zuni carved fetishes of them. Their weird faces, their staring eyes. Lyddy didn’t like them.

He passed a black window. The swinging light of the lantern caught something. A glint, a glimmer. Lyddy thrust his lantern through the opening.

A golden statue.

Less than a foot tall. Standing on a bench beside the usual bowls and dishes. Blocky head, ears like pie slices. A kachina fashioned from gold.

Lyddy stood slack-jawed, asking himself if he was seeing what he was seeing. He waved the lantern, the light catching and reflecting the surfaces of the figure.

He forgot his dislike, went inside. Picked it up. Heavy in his hand, heavier than it looked. Heavy because it was made of gold. He pushed his thumbnail into it, marked the surface.