“It must have been difficult for the elderly and the sick,” Marsh Hawk said.
“That was the least of their concerns. The First People who lived in Talon Town were being murdered one by one. Their bodies were thrown into shallow graves. Stones were dropped over their heads to keep their wicked souls locked in the ground forever. When the town was abandoned, the bones of those people became priceless. To witches.” She laced her hands in her lap, and gazed into the faces of her listeners. “About—oh, let me see—it must be fifteen summers now—the most powerful witch in the land moved into Talon Town. He was called the Wolf Witch, but his real name was Two Hearts.”
“Two Hearts?” Flame Carrier said.
“Yes. Blessed gods, he was evil. Common witches gather putrefying corpse flesh to make their corpse powder, but legends say that Two Hearts made his from the bones of stranded ghosts. By grinding the bones, and carrying the powder with him, he could
force a ghost to do anything—even kill entire villages of people. He—”
From the rear of the crowd a man shouted,
“His corpse powder was always lethal because he made it from the bones of First People!”
Villagers began shuffling back, shoving each other to get out of the way. In the narrow alley that formed, Stone Ghost appeared, wearing the same ratty turkey-feather cape he’d worn days ago at Frosted Meadow village.
Little Bow gaped.
The old man was covered head to toe with gray ash. He hobbled forward, and extended his cupped hands, as if silently asking people to look at what he carried. “Even a single grain of Two Hearts’ corpse powder could kill. Several people in nearby villages had this powder sprinkled in their hair, and died writhing like clubbed dogs.” More loudly, he added, “And it was rumored that Two Hearts stashed entire pots of corpse powder in the burials of people he truly hated. To drive their souls mad for eternity!”
A roar went through the gathering.
Little Bow shuddered. He could imagine no more terrible curse. Even in death the witch’s enemies could not escape his evil.
As Stone Ghost came closer, Little Bow craned his neck, trying to see what the old man held.
Stone Ghost grinned, stopping often to allow puzzled people to look into his hands. His sparse white hair stuck out as though he stood on a high mountain during a lightning storm. The dark age spots on his scalp showed through the thick layer of ash.
“What’s he been doing?” Little Bow whispered to Marsh Hawk.
“Sleeping in the trash mound?”
As Stone Ghost came closer, he spied Corn Mother and a look of genuine excitement brightened his face. “My dear Corn Mother!” he called. “How good to see you again. I hope you buried that footprint as I instructed.” He shouldered between Little Bow, and Marsh Hawk, dumped his rocks at Corn Mother’s side. Then he reached out, seized her hand. “We wouldn’t want to have it running around trampling people’s souls.”
“I buried it properly.” Corn Mother jerked her hand away.
“What happened to you? You look like someone shoved you face-first into an old fire pit!”
“Well, that’s almost right,” he said, and flopped down on the hide beside Corn Mother. As he brushed at his filthy cape, a choking veil of ash rose.
Corn Mother waved at it. “Where did you find so much ash?”
“Hmm?” Stone Ghost said, and his eyes narrowed, as if he’d no idea what she meant. “What? Oh! It’s remarkable what a man must do to dig out the truth. You see, I thought it was very odd that there was no woodpile beside the ritual fire. Wouldn’t you think that odd? The Sunwatcher knew the burial would last for another hand of time, and she would be responsible for burning the boy’s clothing, and then smoking the burial participants in pinyon smoke to cleanse them. Why wasn’t there a woodpile?”
Corn Mother turned to Flame Carrier. “What’s he talking about?”
Flame Carrier’s face turned a mottled crimson. “I knew there was something strange that day, but the woodpile … gods, I should have noticed.”
Stone Ghost scooped up the rocks he’d dropped, gathering them into a pile before him. As he began to arrange them, he said, “After I thought about the missing woodpile, another thought occurred to me. You know how, on a freezing night, snow falls into a fire, melts, puts out flames, then freezes over the ash bed?”
“Of course. What of it?” Corn Mother squinted.
Flame Carrier released her blue-and-white hood, and bent forward to point at the white rocks. “What are those?”
“That,” he said, and shook a finger, “is the question, Matron.”
Stone Ghost lifted a rock, turned it on end, and tried to fit it to another rock, as if reassembling a shattered pot.
Little Bow gestured to the rocks. “Where did you find them?”
“Beneath the ice in the ash bed. That’s why the mysterious messenger tonight told you to ask about the ashes. It took half the day, but I finally sifted them out.”
The hair at the nape of Little Bow’s neck tingled. “How did he know you would be looking through an ash bed?”
“He watched me until well after sunset. He knows what this is, of course.”
“What?”
“I said
he
knows, Little Bow, I don’t.”
Little Bow gave Marsh Hawk an askance look. The rocks had
broken jaggedly, along the tiny white lines that veined the stones. Such fractures appeared when you threw a chert cobble into a very hot fire and it exploded.
“You think this was once whole?” he asked. “Like a hammerstone ?”
“I think it was whole, yes. Here.” He shoved several rocks toward Little Bow. “Help me piece it together.”
Little Bow squatted. The white chert cobble had probably been pulled from a creek bed, but what it had been used for, he could not tell. “Who is the man who spoke to us, Elder?”
“How would I know?”
“Well, if you saw him watching you, you must know—”
“I never saw him.”
Little Bow’s mouth quirked. He debated asking the old fool how he could possibly have known he was being spied upon if he never saw the spy, then decided against it. He suspected Stone Ghost would just spout something equally ridiculous.
The evening’s merriment had faded to an eerie anxiety. Only the people on the farthest edges of the plaza continued to talk and laugh. At least one hundred people ringed them, listening.
“Tell me, Little Bow, the man who stopped you tonight, was he tall?”
“Yes, Elder.”
“Slender? Or a heavy, broad-chested man?”
“We could not see him very well, Elder. He clung to the shadows. But I would say heavy.”
Moonlit clouds massed over the towering sandstone wall behind Hillside Village, blotting out the Evening People. Thunderbirds slept in the clouds, their deep voices rumbling.
“Elder, is it possible that the man who spoke to us is the Wolf Witch?”
Stone Ghost fitted six pieces together, and the object began to take shape. It resembled an elongated egg, a little more pointed on one end than the other. “I cannot answer that. If so, he has seen the passing of at least fifty-five sun cycles.”
Marsh Hawk said, “This man was much younger, Elder. He—”
Corn Mother interrupted, “Witches can prolong their lives by
removing their relatives’ hearts with a spindle, and putting the hearts into their own chests.”
“Yes, that’s true,” Stone Ghost said, “but it is difficult for me to believe that Two Hearts is alive. I have not heard anyone speak of him in at least fifteen summers. Witches are vain. They take pride in their despicable acts. If Two Hearts is alive and working evil, he would make certain people knew.”
Little Bow picked up a rock, and fitted it in place. “Hmm,” he said, “this piece is grooved. Do you see this?”
Stone Ghost’s eyes flared. He pulled Little Bow’s hand close to examine the groove. “Where does it go? Can you tell?”
Little Bow turned it over, tipped the rock up, and placed it in the middle. It wasn’t connected to any other pieces, but that’s where it went. The smooth outer edge of the stone fitted the curving line of the “egg.”
“Elder,” Little Bow said, then paused while he thought about Talon Town and Two Hearts. “Why did the First People seal up every window and door? Were they afraid of witches? Fire Dogs?”
Stone Ghost looked up, and their gazes held. “Neither, warrior. Humans can fight witches. Humans can fight Fire Dogs. What they often cannot fight are the shadows that whisper to them from their own souls. That’s what they were afraid of. As we all should be.”
Little Bow tilted his head, wondering what that meant. Shadows whispering from the souls? Lofty sounding nonsense. He fitted another rock into place.
As he drew back his hand, he paused. “Elder,” he said, and studied the emerging shape. “This is the head of a war club.”
Stone Ghost froze with a rock halfway to the blanket. White hair fluttered around his face and tangled with his stubby eyelashes. He did not bother to brush it aside. His dark pained eyes lifted to Flame Carrier.
“Matron, would you send for my nephew?”
T
HE SHARPENED EDGE OF THE SHOVEL CAUGHT ON roots as Dusty lifted and tossed the dirt into Maureen’s screen. She threw her weight into rocking the mesh-bottom box. Dirt cascaded through onto the back-dirt pile.
All in all, it hadn’t been too traumatic. Maggie had reluctantly agreed. Dale had crossed his arms and firmly forbade them to make further excavations outside the designated impact area. His bulldog jaw had been set, his wiry gray hair poking out from under his fedora.
Dusty had immediately set up the transit, and while Maureen held the rod, shot in the elevation for the control corner. He wanted to get it down before anybody had time to reconsider. After they’d measured out the two-by-two unit, he’d started digging.
Sylvia knelt in her unit ten paces away, continuing the slow process of skeletal removal. Maggie and Hail sat under the ramada, sipping tea, talking softly.
Dusty took a minute to pull the line level tight and extended his tape measure to check the depth of his pit floor while Maureen sifted through the root mat, gravels, and small stones in the screen.
“This is hard work.” Maureen sighed, flipped the junk out of the screen, and wiped her forehead on her white T-shirt sleeve. “I’m going to have great arm muscles when I get back to Ontario.”
“And every other kind of muscle,” Dusty said, as he jotted notes on his clipboard. “There are no out-of-shape, pudgy women archaeologists. Unless they’re
academicians,
” he said the word like a five-syllable curse.
Maureen leaned on the screen. “Did your mother excavate or just do cultural fieldwork?”
Dusty hesitated, his pen hovering over his clipboard. Without looking up, he said, “If I talk about my mother, I don’t want any flippant comebacks from you, all right?”
“Sure.”
Dusty took a deep breath. “She never sank a trowel. She never washed a potsherd. Her kind of fieldwork was walking around a village, taking notes about what people were wearing or eating. If she ever got dirty, she went into town and took a shower, so she’d look ‘pretty’ the next day. The Zuni used to make jokes about her behind her back. They called her ‘The-Woman-with-No-Eyes,’ because she never looked at them, just her papers.”
Maureen toyed with a root that had lodged in the hardware cloth of the screen. “She must have had a knack for languages though, if she could understand what they were saying.”
“She did.” He left it at that.
Maureen worked the root out of the screen and tossed it onto the dirt pile. “How did you end up with Dale?”
Dusty finished making his notes, closed his clipboard, and set it aside. “There wasn’t anybody else. After Dad …”
“When did he die?”
He met her gaze. “Actually, that’s the wrong word. He didn’t just die. He killed himself.”
To his surprise, her voice softened. “Were you the one who found him?”
He shook his head. “No. A nurse in the hospital did.”
Maureen rubbed her fingers along the wooden rim of the screen. “I found John. He’d been making dinner. He was in the kitchen. I came home late.”
She had said the words matter-of-factly, but he heard the buried pain.
“My father electrocuted himself. The nurse said that he didn’t give any sign. Just took off his slippers, jumped up on the sink, and by the time the orderly got the door open, Dad had unscrewed the lightbulb, and stuck his finger into the socket. He had his bare foot on the metal faucet.”
Dusty sank his shovel again, and Maureen extended the screen to catch the dirt. She sifted it back and forth, before reaching down and lifting something. “Potsherd,” she said, and flipped it to him.
Bracing the shovel handle on his hip, Dusty rubbed it clean with his thumb, and studied the decoration. “Mesa Verde Black-on-white. I’d say we’re coming down on our cultural layer. You’re going to have to go over and fill out an artifact bag for this level.”
“On my way.” She let the screen down, and walked for the green ammo box where Dusty kept supplies.
He studied the ground, looking for the soil discoloration that indicated the old ground surface. Root casts—the places where brush had grown, died, rotted, and been refilled with dirt trickling down from above—spotted the soil.
Maureen pulled a Ziploc sandwich bag from the dig kit. She used a Sharpie pen to mark it with the unit provenience, and level depth.
Dusty frowned at her. She was a striking woman. Her face aquiline, her eyes the deep black of velvet.
He smiled grimly at himself. He’d known a lot of striking women. They tended to gravitate to him. They usually hung around for about two weeks, just enough time to peel back his good looks and see what lay beneath.
“Did he …” Maureen proceeded slowly, as if moving through a mine field. “Was it a terminal illness? Is that why your father was in the hospital?”
Dusty used his shovel to scoop up loose sand and tossed it into the screen. “It wasn’t that kind of hospital.”
She set the artifact bag down and gripped the handles of the screen. The muscles of her slender forearms tightened. “I’m sorry to hear that.”
“It was a long time ago.” He knelt down to retrieve his notebook, blew the sand off the page, and jotted his level notes. He made a quick description of the soil, the root casts, and the single potsherd. Setting the notebook aside, he glanced up at her, and an odd prickling sensation went through him. The veil that generally covered her eyes had vanished. She was gazing at him somberly.
“I don’t think I’ll ever be able to look back at John lying on the floor, and say, ‘It was a long time ago.’”
“Yes, you will. Pain goes away, Doctor. Eventually. That or it tears you apart.”
He focused on the pit floor, trying to gauge where he’d most
likely come down on the burial. If the soil horizons continued to slope, he ought to hit it just to the left. He made his first shovel scrape, then a second. They worked in silence, him shoveling to the
shish-shishing
of her screening.
He had almost dug another ten-centimeter level when he noticed the discoloration, a subtle distinction of color and texture. He stopped. “Curtain time.”
She set the screen aside and knelt on the lip of the unit. “What did you find?”
Dusty indicated the changing soil horizons with a finger. “This,” Dusty told her, “is the darker stain from the organic content of the old site surface. That’s from the ash, organic trash, and stuff left over from the occupational phase of the pueblo. This,” he indicated a lighter soil that curved in an irregular arc, “is intrusive. Younger silt and sand washed in.”
“The grave?” She looked at him with sudden anticipation.
“Apparently.”
She started to get down into the pit. “Let’s get her uncovered.”
Dusty held up a hand. “How about you stand back and let me map this in first? You know, do a little
real
science along the way.”
Maureen sank down on the edge of the pit with a disappointed expression. “Just don’t take too long, Stewart.”
Dusty measured in the soil discoloration, took notes, and began troweling, pulling out the intrusive soil until he encountered jumbled dark soil, several chunks of stone from the toppled pueblo wall, and three sherds of pottery.
“What is all this?” Maureen asked.
“Trash. He shoveled it on top of the grave to cover her up.” Dusty took a soil sample, and bagged it. “Do you see the ragged edge of the grave?” He pointed to the irregular pattern. “Normally we’d see long scars left by the digging sticks as they levered the soil loose. This is choppy, as if the digging was difficult because the ground was frozen.”
“Pollen in the nasal sinus will tell us, but I’ll bet you’re right.”
He worked quickly but diligently, troweling for a time, then mapping in the broken sandstone rocks, potsherds, and stone flakes. When he finally stood up to stretch his back muscles, Dusty studied the outline of the soil discoloration, the grave, and tried to
imagine how the skeleton might be laid out below. If this burial followed the pattern set by the others, her body should be laid out with the head to the north.
For a reason unknown to him, Dusty suddenly said, “My father was committed for his own safety.”
Maureen’s eyes tightened. She frowned at the ground. “By your mother?”
“She was long gone by then.”
“Your grandparents?” she asked gently.
“They weren’t on speaking terms with Dad. He was supposed to become a lawyer, or doctor, or something productive. I don’t know the history of it. Just bad blood between them.”
“Then who?”
“Dale did.” He rolled the trowel in his fingers. “I think it’s one of the toughest things he’s ever done. God knows, because of it, I’ve hung like an albatross around Dale’s neck for years.”
“What happened to your mother?”
“She teaches at Harvard, manages a big collection of Australian Aboriginal and Maori artifacts at the Peabody. That’s where she made her name for herself.”
Maureen sat back, stunned. “You mean, Ruth Ann Sullivan is
your
mother?”
Dusty knelt and started troweling dirt again. “You know her?”
“Everyone knows her. Her books are classics. After Margaret Mead died, Ruth Ann Sullivan filled her place, writing about culture for the popular audience.” She frowned at the top of Dusty’s blond head. “You really hate her, don’t you?”
“If I gave her any thought, I probably would. But I don’t. In fact I—”
Bone grated beneath his trowel. Dusty’s blue eyes narrowed. He slowly pulled back the darker earth, exposing the rear of a skull.
“My God,” Maureen whispered. “There she is.”
Dusty stood, smacked sand from his hands and pants, and said, “I need to get the camera. Would you like to
gently
excavate around the skull while I do that?”
“Would I!” She jumped into the pit and grabbed for his trowel.
Dusty got out and walked over to the ammo box. By the time
he’d removed the camera, placed the North arrow and scale, and snapped a couple of shots, Maureen had excavated around the side of the skull. He’d just started walking back to the ammo box to put the camera back when Maureen called, “Dusty?”
It was the first time she’d ever called him by his first name.
She stood up in the pit and looked at him. Her breathing was coming fast, and her voice had a higher pitch than normal. “You’d better take a look at this.”
Dusty hurried back and knelt, looking down at the skull. “What did you find?”
Maureen used her trowel to point to the dent in the woman’s skull. Fractures radiated out from the temple on the left side. Just where she’d predicted. “Language skills, Stewart. He was trying to find the source of language in the human brain.”
He got into the pit with her. “Amazing,” he said in awe. Beside the skull, Maureen had exposed a small patch of what looked like ground stone. “Can I have my trowel back?”
“Why?”
“This looks like a metate, but it doesn’t seem to be very big. It may be a fragment of a broken metate.”
He took the trowel and cleaned the dirt away until he could see the metate fragment had been inverted, its smooth grinding surface carefully stuck to the top of a pot with what looked like beeswax.
“This is curious,” Dusty said and wiped his forehead with the back of his hand. “The person who did this was taking special precautions to preserve whatever’s inside this pot.”
“Can we open it?”
Dusty’s trowel hovered over the pot. “I don’t know if that’s wise. This is an unusual burial artifact. First, we’d better …”
He heard Hail Walking Hawk’s cane tapping the ground and Maggie’s soft voice: “We can see it once they get it out of the ground, Aunt.”
“I want to see it now, child,” Hail answered.
Dusty shielded his eyes against the sunlight and looked up at the old woman. Gray hair framed her wrinkled face.
“Did you find that woman, Washais?”
Maureen said, “I think so, Mrs. Walking Hawk. We also found a
pot that’s covered with a grinding stone. The stone is held in place by wax. Do you know what it might be?” Maureen pointed to it.
Hail squinted her ancient eyes, as if trying to see the pot, but not quite able to. “Might be food for the afterlife.”
Dusty asked, “Is it all right if we take it out and open it?”
Hail didn’t answer for a time. Wind blew her hair around her face. “Do you think it will tell us something about the murderer, Washais?”
“It might. We won’t know until we open it.”
Hail’s head tottered in a nod. “Open it up, then, and let me know what you find.”
MAUREEN SLID BEHIND THE CRAMPED TABLE IN DALE’S camper and carefully placed her microscope and dissecting kit on the Formica top. A Coleman lantern sat in the middle of the table, hissing softly. As she reached into her travel bag for slides and stain, she looked around. A tiny gas stove and cupboards filled the space to her left. To her right, a small window reflected the lantern’s silver gleam. The booth had once been upholstered in reddish brown fabric, but years of dust, spilled coffee, and sweaty archaeologists had turned it gray. The battered old trailer possessed the faint metallic smell of mice.