Authors: J. A. Jance
Following Quentin and Lani through the cavern, Mitch was shocked when Quentin suddenly seemed to melt into a solid rock wall, taking Lani with him. Mitch, limping hurriedly after them, had to pause and examine the wall with the beam from his flashlight before discovering a jagged fissure in the rock. After squeezing through the narrow aperture, he found himself in a long narrow shaft that seemed to lead off into the interior of the mountain, away from the much larger cavern behind them. Yards ahead, Mitch could see Lani Walker disappearing around a curve.
As soon as Mitch stepped into the passage, the ground underfoot was different—smoother, but slicker as well. Here, the rocky floor had been painstakingly covered with a layer of dirt that constant moisture kept in a state of goopy muck. It was possible there had once been stalactites and stalagmites, just as there were in the other room. If so, they had been cut down and carted away, making the narrow shaft passable.
Hurrying after the others, Mitch rounded the curve and was suddenly conscious of a slight lifting in the total darkness that had surrounded him before. Now his flashlight probed ahead toward a hazy gray glow. At first Mitch thought that maybe Quentin had lit a lantern of some kind. Instead, as Mitch entered a second, much smaller, chamber, he realized this one was lit—almost brilliantly so—by a shaft of silvery moonlight slanting into the cave from outside, from a narrow crack at the top of a huge pile of debris.
Mitch had thought that the passageway was leading them deeper into the mountain. Instead, they had evidently angled off to the side, to a place where the shell of mountain was very thin.
“There used to be another entrance here,” Quentin was saying, pointing the beam of his light up toward the narrow hole at the top of the debris. “At one time this was probably the main entrance. I figure it used to be larger than the one we came in, but it looks like a landslide pretty well covered it up. All that’s left of it is that little opening way up there.”
Not only was there more light here but, because of the presence of some outside air, the second chamber was also slightly warmer and dryer. Here the texture of the dirt underfoot changed from mud to the caliche-like crust that forms in desert washes after a summertime flood.
“You said you came out here earlier today?” Mitch asked.
Quentin nodded.
“Why? What were you doing?”
“Just checking things out,” Quentin said. “Making sure nothing had happened to any of this stuff since the last time I was here. It turns out nothing did. The pots are all still here. Come take a look.” As Quentin spoke, he aimed the beam from his flashlight at something in the far corner of the room. “What do you think?” he added.
Mitch Johnson thrust Lani aside and hurried past her. There on the floor, half-buried in the dirt, lay the shiny white bones of a human skeleton. And around those bleached bones, spilled onto their sides as though having been investigated by some marauding, hungry beast, lay a whole collection of pots—medium-sized ones for holding corn and piñon nuts, grain and
pinole,
and larger ones as well—the kind used for carrying water and for cooking meat and beans.
“It doesn’t look like all that much to me,” Mitch said, “but the guy I told you about wants them, so we’d better pack ’em up and get ’em out of here.”
“You can’t,” Lani Walker said. Those were the first words she had spoken since Mitch had dragged her out of the Bronco down by the wash. She hadn’t intended to say anything at all, but the words came choking out of her in spite of her best effort to hold them back.
Mitch swung around and looked at her. “We can’t what?”
“Take the pots,” she answered. “It’s wrong. The spirit of the woman who made them is always trapped inside the pots she makes. That’s why a woman’s pottery is always broken when she dies, so her spirit won’t be trapped. So she can go free.”
“Trapped in her pots? Right!” Mitch scoffed. “If you asked me, it looks more like she was trapped in the mountain, not in her damn pots. Now sit down and shut the hell up,” he added. “I don’t remember anybody asking for your opinion.”
Without a word, Lani sank down and sat cross-legged on the caliche-covered floor. When Mitch looked back at Quentin, he was staring at the girl while a puzzled frown knotted his forehead.
“What’s she doing here anyway?” he asked. “I don’t understand.”
“She just came along for the ride, Quentin,” Mitch said jokingly. “For the fun of it. Once we get all these pots out of here, the three of us are going to have a little party.” Mitch paused and patted his shirt pocket. “I brought along a few mood-altering substances, Quentin. When the work’s all done, the three of us can have a blast.”
“You mean Little Miss Perfect here takes drugs, too?” Quentin’s frown dissolved into a grin. “I never would have guessed it. Neither would Dad, I’ll bet. He’ll have a cow if he ever finds out.”
Lani started to reply, but before she could answer, a swift and vicious kick from the toe of Mitch’s hiking boot smashed into her thigh. She said nothing.
“Tripping out is for dessert,” Mitch said quickly. “First let’s worry about the pots.”
“How are we going to carry them out?” Quentin asked.
“In your backpack.”
“But we only have one.”
“You should have thought of that before. I guess you’ll have to do it by yourself then, won’t you?”
“By myself?”
“Sure,” Mitch responded. “You’re the one getting paid for it, aren’t you?”
“But if everybody does their share . . .” Quentin began.
“I said for you to do it,” Mitch said, his voice hardening as he spoke. “If the damned pots don’t get down the mountain to that car of yours, you don’t get your five thousand bucks, understand?”
Obligingly, Quentin slipped off his backpack, went over to the corner, and loaded three of the larger pots into it. “That’s all that’ll fit for right now,” he said.
“That’s all right,” Mitch said. “Make as many trips as you need to. We have all the time in the world.”
As Quentin turned to leave, Mitch breathed a sigh of relief. The drug was still working well enough. With Mitch’s knee acting up, he needed Quentin’s physical strength to haul the pots down the mountain to the car. After that, all bets were off.
As Quentin took flashlight in hand and started back through the passage, Lani sat on the floor of the cave, staring at the bones glowing with an eerie phosphorescence in the indirect haze of moonlight.
Looking at the skeleton, Lani knew immediately that the bones belonged to a woman of some wealth. The pots alone were an indication of that. Most likely there had been baskets once as well, but those, like the woman’s flesh, had long since decayed and melted back into the earth—leaving behind only the harder stuff—the clay pottery and the bones. And one day, Lani’s bones would be found here as well. Unknown and unrelated to one another in life, she and this other woman would be sisters in death. Lani took some small comfort in knowing that she would not be left there alone.
Across from her, Mitch sat down on something hard, something that supported his weight—a rock of some kind. In the moments before he switched off his flashlight, Lani realized he was rubbing his knee, massaging it, as though he had twisted it perhaps. It was a small thing, but nevertheless something to remember.
Sitting cross-legged on the hard ground, Lani reached out one arm, expecting to rest some of her weight on that one hand. Instead of encountering the dirt floor, her hand blundered into one of the remaining pots—one of the smaller ones. As Lani’s exploring fingers strayed silently around the smooth edge of the neck of the pot, a powerful realization shot through her, something that was as much
chehchki
—dream—as it was understanding.
This pot had once belonged to
Oks Gagda
—to Betraying Woman. Lani knew the story. She had heard the legend from Nana
Dahd
and from Davy as well. The legend—the
ha’icha ahgidathag
—of Betraying Woman—was a cautionary tale that told how a young girl whose birth name had long since disappeared into oblivion had once fallen in love with an Apache—an
Ohb
. When an enemy war party had attacked her village, the girl had betrayed her people to their dreaded enemy. Much later, the bad girl was brought back home and punished. According to the legend,
I’itoi
locked her in a cave and then called the mountain down around her, leaving her to die alone and in the dark.
Lani had lived all her life with those beloved
I’itoi
stories and traditions, but there was a part of her that discounted them. Over the years she had stopped believing in them in much the same way she eventually had stopped believing in Santa Claus. Although legends of Saint Nicholas and the
I’itoi
stories as well may both have had some distant basis in fact, by age sixteen Lani no longer regarded them as true. The stories and the lessons to be learned from them were part of her culture but not necessarily part of her life.
She had been eight years old when Davy broke the bad news to her, that Santa Claus didn’t exist. Nana
Dahd
was gone by then, so Lani hadn’t been able to go to her for consolation. For the first time, without Rita there to comfort her, Lani had turned to her mother—to Diana Ladd Walker. And it was in her mother’s arms that she had learned that the wonder and magic of Christmas hadn’t gone out of her life forever.
Feeling the cool, smooth clay under her fingertips, Lani felt the return of another kind of magic.
Oks Gagda
—Betraying Woman—did exist. She had been locked in a cave by the falling mountain just the way Nana
Dahd
had said. But now Lani knew something about that story that she had never known before. Betraying Woman had been locked in a cave with two entrances. If she had known about the other entrance, she might have simply walked away, rather than staying to endure her punishment. In a way she would never be able to explain to anyone else, Lani Walker grasped the significance of what had happened.
Oks Gagda
had willingly chosen to remain where she was, choosing the honor of
jehka’ich
—of suffering the consequences of her wickedness—rather than taking the coward’s path and running away.
A wave of gooseflesh raced across Lani’s body. She had left her people-hair basket behind, but
I’itoi
had sent her another talisman to take the basket’s place. Carefully, making as little noise as possible, she lifted the small sturdy pot from where it had sat undisturbed for all those years and placed it, out of sight, in the triangular space formed by her crossed legs.
“What are you doing over there?” Mitch demanded, shining a blinding beam from his flashlight directly in her eyes.
“Nothing,” Lani said. “Just trying to get comfortable.”
“You stay right where you are,” Mitch warned. “No funny business.”
Lani said nothing more. Covering the perfectly round opening of the pot with the palm of her hand, Lani closed her eyes. With the cool rim of clay touching her skin, Lani let the words of Nana
Dahd
’s long-ago song flow silently through her whole being.
Do not look at me, Little
Olhoni
Do not look at me when I sing to you
So this man will not know we are speaking
So this evil man will think he is winning.
Do not look at me when I sing, Little
Olhoni,
But listen to what I say. This man is evil.
This man is the enemy. This man is
Ohb.
Do not let this frighten you.
Whatever happens, we must not let him win.
I am singing a war song, Little
Olhoni.
A hunter’s song, a killer’s song.
I am singing a song to
I’itoi,
asking him to help us.
Asking him to guide us in the battle
So the evil
Ohb
does not win.
Do not look at me, Little
Olhoni,
Do not look at me when I sing to you.
I must sing this song four times,
For all of nature goes in fours,
But when the trouble starts
You must listen very carefully
And do exactly what I say.
If I tell you to run, you must run,
Run fast, and do not look back.
Whatever happens, Little
Olhoni.
You must run and not look back.
Remember in the story how
I’itoi
made himself a fly
And hid in the smallest crack when Eagleman
Came searching for him. Be like
I’itoi,
Little
Olhoni.
Be like
I’itoi
and hide yourself
In the smallest crack. Hide yourself somewhere
And do not come out again until the battle is over.
Listen to what I sing to you, Little
Olhoni.
Do not look at me but do exactly as I say.
Lani paused sometimes between verses to listen. Outside the cave’s entrance, cool nighttime air rustled through the manzanita, making a sighing sound like people whispering—or like
a’ali chum
—little children—gossiping and sharing secrets. Maybe it was that sound that brought Betraying Woman back to Lani’s attention. Not only had she been left to die in the cave, her spirit was still there, trapped forever in the prison of her unbroken pots.
“Pots are made to be broken,” Nana
Dahd
had told her time and again. “Always the pots must be broken.”
And that was why, in Rita’s medicine basket, there had once been a single shard of pottery with the figure of a turtle etched into it. The piece of reddish-brown clay had come from a pot Rita’s grandmother
, Oks Amichuda
—Understanding Woman—had made when she was a young woman. After Understanding Woman’s death, Rita herself had smashed the pot to pieces, releasing her grandmother’s spirit. The only thing Rita had saved was that one jagged-edged piece.