The pile of rocks where they stood—actually a small collapsed Anasazi pueblo—was clearly labeled. Dusty glanced around, oriented himself to the west, and paced out from the edge of the tumbled rock for six long paces. “According to the map,
X
marks the spot. Look around.”
“Got it,” Maggie cried, pointing down. “29SJ10003.”
Sylvia settled the heavy tripod over the aluminum cap. “Mama, we’re home.” She immediately began extending the legs and leveling the instrument.
Leaving her to fiddle with the transit, Dusty walked out into the middle of the lath-marked rectangle. Maggie paced silently beside him.
Hot wind tugged at his blond hair, and whispered softly through the brush. In the distance, a red-tailed hawk shrieked. Shadows had lengthened on the canyon wall. If he just loosened the bonds of reality, he could step back, hear that hawk’s call eight hundred years ago, and feel this same hot breeze.
A clatter erupted as Michall Jefferson dropped a bundle of wooden stakes by the transit and asked Sylvia if she needed help.
“Hey, you still here?” Maggie asked from Dusty’s left elbow.
“Huh?” He glanced at her, this world coming into focus again.
Maggie studied him through serious brown eyes. “I’ve seen eyes like that before. You were looking back, weren’t you?”
“You bet.”
“Grandma Slumber used to get that look. My aunts still do. But they’re of the people, White Eyes.”
“Of the people,” Dusty mused. He bent down, clutching a handful of the silty sand. “I’m about to uncover artifacts that haven’t been touched in over eight hundred years, Maggie. Trust me, when you do that, it makes a bridge. I can feel them. We both touch the same bit of stone, see the colors, feel the flaking on the sharp edge.”
“You’re different, then.”
“Different?”
“Yeah, most archaeologists I know just see the science. That and the damned statistical proofs.”
“Yeah, well,” he said, and let the sand trickle through his fingers.
“There are two kinds of archaeologists, the kind who dig for theories, and the kind who dig for people. Each site is a special miracle that lets me touch those people. If only for a tiny sliver of time. I’ve wanted to touch the Chaco Anasazi all of my life, Maggie.”
Maggie’s eyes had grown larger, seeming to swell in her round brown face. “Just be careful, Dusty. The old ones will be watching you.” She paused. “Will they find you worthy?”
He tilted his blond head. “I doubt it. I can’t imagine why they’d be different from everybody else.”
Maggie smiled. “I have to get back. See you later.”
She turned, and walked away. The hot wind teased her straight black hair, and the brush scratched hollowly at her cotton pants.
Dusty closed his eyes, straining, hearing the faint whisper of the breeze through the succulent leaves of the greasewood. Every time he walked out onto a site for the first time, the quickening came to his blood. Each site had its own unique personality, and guarded its secrets. A site became an obsession, a challenging seductress who lured him, tried to mislead and obscure as she was coaxed to reveal her most intimate details. And like a woman, it needed to be coddled and caressed before it would finally yield to his advances.
Am I worthy?
The question rolled around his mind like an off-balance wheel.
Seeking to escape the wreckage of his youth, he’d driven himself to become the best in his field. But he never really felt good enough. Sometimes he could sit in an excavation unit and feel as if he were having a lengthy conversation with people who’d died ten thousand years ago, and other times his greatest efforts failed to open even a pinprick view of the past.
“Hey, boss man?” Sylvia called. “We’re ready over here.”
Dusty straightened. “On my way.”
V
OICES WHISPERED.
Broswser wearily leaned his shoulder against the pine-pole door frame and pulled the deerhide curtain aside. As he moved, shoulder-length black hair swung around his face, accentuating the tight lines near his dark brown eyes. Twenty-eight summers had passed since his birthing, but this morning he felt as old as the weathered cliff behind Hillside Village. It had taken an act of will to remove his soiled clothing and slip the clean knee-length leather shirt over his head. Lines of jet beads decorated the shirt’s collar and hem; he’d belted the tan shirt at the waist with a red sash, then hung a war club and belt pouch from the sash.
The whispers stopped.
People approached.
I am here to bury my son.
Browser forced himself to stand straight. The day had dawned clear, cold, and bright, the sun low on the southern horizon. Browser watched his breath rise and dissipate—like dreams that had been held too close to the heart.
One by one, the six Elderly Keepers of the Sacred Directions ducked past him, through the low T-shaped doorway, and into the room. He could hear them as they surrounded his boy’s body, and old Flame Carrier began the death chant. The other members of the burial party remained outside, their expressions taut as they watched him.
Several of the women carried infants on cradle boards. They had tied their babies’ heads to the boards to flatten the rear of the skull and broaden the cheekbones, making them more attractive. The babies gurgled and waved tiny fists.
His two best warriors, Catkin and Whiproot, stood to his right near the base of the towering cliff. They had just returned from
four days of surveying the canyon rim, making certain no enemy warriors lurked there. They looked tired, their faces drawn. Both wore white ritual capes, the feathers dotted with chunks of polished stone.
Tall and lanky, Catkin was a beautiful woman. And a brave fighter. During a raid, eight moons ago, the Fire Dogs had wounded and captured her. There had been too many of them to risk his warriors in a direct attack, so Browser had sneaked in after dark, alone, killed the two Fire Dogs raping her, and carried her out on his back. Since that time she’d looked at him differently, her eyes softer, filled with a longing he could not allow himself to fulfill.
For both their sakes.
Whiproot held a ceramic pot in his two strong brown hands. From the top tendrils of smoke rose and wavered in the heat cast off by the coals taken from the eternal fire. Over the last couple of years, Browser had come to rely on Whiproot the way a roof did a support post. A head shorter than Catkin, the man had a thick, muscular body. A series of terrible scars received in battle ran across his nose and cheeks. Though disfiguring, he wore them with a warrior’s pride. Proof of his courage.
Catkin carried a small ladder, a delicate thing made of branches, the rungs tied crossways with neat square knots. At the end of the burial ceremony, they would lay the ladder in the grave, so that his son’s afterlife soul could climb out and be on its way to the Land of the Dead.
He returned his gaze to Catkin, and she gave him a reassuring nod, as if willing him strength across the narrow space that separated them. He closed his eyes. Every time he fought with Ash Girl, he ended up in Catkin’s chamber. She might have been the whirlpool, and he the water. He could tell her anything, and she always offered solid advice. In truth, she was his best friend.
The sickly sweet scent of death drifted through the door, affecting him like a blow to the stomach. Browser pulled deep breaths of clean cold air into his lungs as he gazed across the desert.
Father Sun had not yet crested the cliff behind Hillside Village, but his light flooded the canyon, glistening from the buff-colored sandstone and burnishing the underbellies of the drifting Cloud People. It had snowed less than a half moon ago. White frosted the
ledges of the north-facing cliff, and a patchwork dotted the ground. Most of the snow had melted into the sand, then refrozen, turning it as hard as stone.
Browser reluctantly reached for the door curtain, and let it drop behind him as he ducked into the room. The crimson gleam cast by the bowl of glowing coals sheathed the faces of the six Elders. His son’s wasted body lay on a worn mat in the middle of the floor.
The old men stood on the east and west sides of the room. The old women stood in the north, to his left, and the south, to his right. Old Man Down Below and Old Woman Up Above crouched in the rear of the house, ahead of him, facing each other, softly chanting the Death Song:
“A plume we are bringing, A plume we are giving …”
Each of the Elders carried a folded blanket and wore a finely tanned buffalohide cape, painted with the red images of wolf, coyote, eagle, and raven, the special Spirit Helpers of the Katsinas’ People. Alternating feathers and seed beads knotted the ends of the long fringes on their capes.
Browser said, “Please. Begin.”
Old Man East nodded, and gazed at the naked body lying on the willow twig mat. Tears blurred Old Woman North’s eyes. She made a soft sound of mourning, and Old Man West bit his lip.
Browser could not physically force himself to look down. His gaze roamed the small room. Three body lengths square, dried sunflowers, corn, and beans hung from the pole rafters. Orange squashes lined the bases of the walls. Baskets and pots sat stacked in the far corner to the right of Old Woman Up Above. In the opposite corner, near Old Man Down Below, Browser’s bow, quiver of arrows, and stone hatchet rested beside a pile of rolled hide bedding. The big corrugated pot beside the hides contained shelled beans, and the small black-and-white pot next to it held beads, thread, turkey bone awls, dyed porcupine quills, bone punches for making holes in leather, and other sewing tools—all necessities of Ash Girl’s life.
Without thinking, he glared at the four gods she had painted on the walls. In the wavering reddish gleam they seemed to be Dancing, their masks swaying to the beat of a drum he could not hear. The Ant katsina dominated the south wall, Bear on the north, and
Buffalo Danced on the east wall. He knew without turning, that the Badger katsina peered down at him from the west wall behind his shoulders.
Ash Girl had painted the gods with painstaking care, but they had failed her. As always.
Anger and guilt stirred his heart. Browser reached for the only reliable protection in the world, the heavy war club tied to his belt.
“Death is not an enemy, War Chief,” Old Man East murmured. His ordinary name was Springbank. He had a long hooked nose and wrinkled lips that sunk in over toothless gums. Sparse white hair clung to his freckled scalp.
“Not your enemy, perhaps. But I have been fighting her all my life, Elder.”
“Fighting, yes. But winning? Life Dances, War Chief. It chases and sleeps. Summer and winter, rain and drought, planting and harvesting, war and peace, everything travels in gigantic circles, engaged in an eternal process of becoming something else. We are all raw dough in the hands of the gods.”
“I, of all people, know that, Elder.” Browser clutched his war club more tightly. He had gone on his first war walk before he’d seen fourteen summers. He knew the gods for what they truly were, fickle, and vengeful.
Unlike his wife, Browser had never trusted them.
Springbank squeezed Browser’s shoulder. “Your son is free of the sickness. Let us help him on his way to the Land of the Dead.”
Browser forced himself to look down.
He had washed his son and prepared him as the Elders had instructed. The boy’s naked body looked as thin as a reed. His ribs had stuck out, the knees like knobs. His cheeks and eyes sunk into the skull. The lips had pulled back, each tooth outlined in the disease’s dried lung blood.
The ache in Browser’s chest threatened to double him over. He spread his feet to brace himself.
Everyone had lost someone in the wars, but now they had the sickness to contend with as well. Rumors said that the evil Spirits that caused the sickness had first come from the Fire Dogs who lived in the south. He believed it. Nothing of any good had ever come from the Fire Dogs.
The Katsinas’ People called them Fire Dogs because the raiders believed they had originally come to earth in the form of wolves made from gouts of Father Sun’s fire. Browser believed it. Wild and brutal, they did not think like humans.
Old Woman North, Matron Flame Carrier, set her folded blanket aside and drew a small pack from beneath her cape. She had seen seventy-four summers. Gray hair straggled around her wrinkled face, but her small narrow eyes gleamed. Over the long summers, her eyebrows had vanished, leaving a few kinky gray hairs as reminders. She was sensible and friendly, though she had a stern voice. As she knelt beside Grass Moon, the lines in her forehead deepened. “Help me lift him,” she said.
Springbank handed his blanket to Old Woman South and slipped his hands beneath Grass Moon’s right knee and shoulder. Flame Carrier took the boy’s left side. When they lifted the child, Old Woman South carefully spread the blankets they’d brought over the willow twig mat and smoothed them flat with her gnarled hands.
Springbank and Flame Carrier lowered Grass Moon to the soft bed of white blankets.
The boy’s mouth opened in a silent cry, and Browser could barely stand it.
He clamped his jaw so tightly, his head shook.
Flame Carrier tenderly stroked Grass Moon’s hollow cheek. She said, “Bring the objects of the breath-heart.”
“Yes, Matron,” Old Woman South responded.
Each person had two souls, a soul that stayed with the body forever, and a breath-heart soul that kept the lungs moving, and the heart beating. At death, the breath-heart soul seeped out, but it hovered around the body, not certain where to go until the Keepers prepared the way to the Land of the Dead.
Old Woman South, one of the
Kokwimu
, a sacred Man-Woman of great power, knelt and brought her own pack from beneath her painted buffalohide cape.
Kokwimu
had male bodies but female souls. This allowed them to see and do things that ordinary men and women could not. Younger than the other Keepers, she had coiled her long gray-streaked black braids over her ears and fastened them with rabbitbone pins. Graceful brows curved above
her slanting eyes. Her triangular face and sharply pointed nose shone wetly with tears. Her ordinary name was Cloudblower. She was known for telling long stories filled with moral teachings that people only sometimes understood.
Cloudblower laid out two small yellow bags, a magnificent white shirt covered with red beads, and new moccasins. They shone with a reddish hue in the diffused light.
Browser had taken Grass Moon’s old clothing and tied it into a bundle that now rested to the boy’s right. At the end of the Death Ritual, Old Man East would take the coals from the eternal fire, kindle a blaze, and burn them, making certain to destroy all of the Evil Spirits that had sickened Grass Moon.
Browser bowed his head.
His son had drowned in his own blood, and his mother had not even been there to comfort him. For eight hands of time before he’d died, Grass Moon had choked out, “Mother … mother … mother …”
Browser had rocked him back and forth, whispering,
She’s coming. She’ll be here soon.
A thread of rage wound through his grief. She had been gone for two days, without a word. He clenched his fists, vowing not to think of her. Not now.
Cloudblower opened one of the yellow bags and poured white cornmeal into Flame Carrier’s cupped hands then filled her own. They rubbed Grass Moon’s body with the meal, purifying it for the long journey to the afterworld.
When they finished, Flame Carrier slipped the beautiful burial shirt over Grass Moon’s head. Cloudblower opened the other yellow bag and poured jewelry onto the blanket at the boy’s side—jet ear loops, carved shell necklaces, and two cast copper bells. Very gently Cloudblower pulled the new moccasins onto Grass Moon’s feet. She slipped the ear loops through the holes in his ears and tied the two copper bells to the laces on his moccasins. Finally she draped the necklaces over his head and centered them on his chest.
Cloudblower sat back with her eyes closed. Tears beaded her lashes.
Flame Carrier lifted a hand. “It will take the boy’s Spirit four days to reach the Land of the Dead. He will be distraught and
confused. No one must speak his name, or dream of him, lest they call his ghost back from its journey to the underworld.”
She untied a blue bag from her belt. Blue was the color of the north and signified the Land of the Dead. She bent over Grass Moon and began pouring out a line of blue cornmeal as she slowly backed toward the door. The other Keepers of the Sacred Directions Sang softly, their brittle voices like sand against wood:
In a sacred manner, we send a voice.
We send a voice.
The path of Father Sun is our strength,
The path of Sister Moon is our robe.
A praise we are making.
A praise we are sending.
In a sacred manner, we send a voice.
Browser lifted the door curtain. Flame Carrier exited, pouring her cornmeal trail through the burial party and across the cold village plaza. A whirlwind of snow careened along the south wall of Hillside Village, bobbing and twisting.