C
ATKIN STOOD BESIDE GRASS MOON’S BURIAL LADDER.
Everyone else had gone.
Father Sun hung like a fiery red ball over Talon Town. The cracked white plaster gleamed a bloody hue. Voices rose from the plaza. People must have gathered outside of Cloudblower’s chamber.
Catkin knelt and propped her war club across her knees. She whispered to the dead boy, “Don’t worry, little one. I will make certain you reach the Land of the Dead. No one will desecrate your body.”
Two hundred paces to her left, Browser’s dead wife lay at the base of the towering canyon wall. Toppled boulders jutted up around the grave. When Wind Baby gusted, a fine mist of snow whirled up and bobbed along the cliff face.
If a body were not properly cared for, cleansed, and rubbed with cornmeal, the confused soul would not know where to go or what to do. It would become a wicked, desperate ghost, wandering the land, crying. The only fate worse belonged to witches. A stone kept their souls locked in a space barely big enough for the body, where they squirmed in the darkness forever.
Who could have hated Ash Girl enough to have killed her and treated her like a witch? Or perhaps she had been a witch and had gotten what she deserved.
Catkin glanced around.
As always when fear taunted her, her thoughts turned to her dead husband, Wind Born. He smiled at her from the room in her soul where she kept all precious things hidden.
She had been a warrior for two summers before he became a man. As a boy, he had looked up to her. Every time she returned
from a raid, she found him waiting at the edge of the village, his eyes searching, eager for a glimpse of her. At first, she had trotted by him with the other warriors, her chin high. Later, she had made a point of stopping to speak with him, to satisfy his insatiable curiosity about her life and the battles she had fought.
Wind Born had once asked her,
“You are tall and strong, of course, but aren’t the men stronger than you? How can you fight them?”
She remembered smiling at the thin, frail-looking boy, and saying, “Each blow of my club, each arrow I shoot, must hit its mark exactly. Men can afford to be careless, to strike three or four times, or to shoot several arrows. They know that even if their wounded victim reaches them, they will probably be able to fight him off. I do not know that. So. I do not miss. Ever.”
Wind Born had gazed up at her with worship in his wide eyes and then trotted at her heels as she’d made her way into the village.
It had been a full sun cycle before he’d become a man. In the moons that followed, he had courted her, often shoving his way through throngs of warriors to sit quietly at her side, gently touching her hand, and listening to the war talk. Dimly, gradually, Catkin had realized that his soft voice, and the way he tilted his head when he smiled, were very dear to her.
They had joined during the Falling River Moon when the aspens turned golden and the last mountain wildflowers blossomed. Wind Born had seen fourteen summers. He’d been ill since boyhood, but the Evil Spirits had finally nested in his lungs that summer. Catkin had spent their joining night holding him while he gasped for air.
She had lost him two summers ago, ten summers after they’d joined.
Catkin touched the malachite pendant she wore. When Wind Born could no longer walk, he’d lain in their chamber and carved. The malachite teardrop gleamed like green fire. Part of his soul lived in the pendant. She could feel him, loving her, smiling at her in that boyish way that always wrung her heart. He’d promised her that the pendant would protect her from all evil.
Catkin thought about Stone Ghost.
No one had ever dared call him evil, but Catkin wondered. One of the many stories her mother had told her described Stone Ghost
as a young man. He had supposedly lived in a brightly lit cave in the northern mountains. The light had come from the skulls that encrusted the walls, hundreds of them, filled with a fire that never died. Whenever anyone approached his cave, they heard snakes hissing and coyotes and owls making hideous noises.
It sounded like witchery to Catkin.
She suspected, however, that whether or not a person was accused of witchcraft depended on how much Power people thought he had. No one wanted to incriminate a witch who could point a finger and turn them into a pile of mouse droppings.
Singing rose in Talon Town. It sounded like the entire village had joined to pray.
Catkin bowed her head.
Poor Browser.
Catkin knew some of what he must be feeling. The tingling emptiness. The fear that withered the souls.
After Wind Born’s death, she’d been lost and lonely. Her grandmother had tried to marry Catkin to anyone and everyone who might be interested. Last sun cycle, she had tired of arguing and run away to join the Katsinas’ People.
She’d hoped to find a quiet place to heal, and think. A place where no one knew her.
Only three moons after joining the migration, she’d been captured by the Fire Dogs. A despicable people, the Fire Dogs raided constantly, killing, stealing food, burning entire villages, then taking the survivors as slaves and driving them southward to dig and haul stones for their filthy towns.
Browser had risked his own life to free Catkin. He’d carried her out of the Fire Dog camp on his back, hidden with her, tended her wounds, and held her at night to keep her warm.
Now she had two holes in her heart.
One for a man she had lost. The other for a man that, until a hand of time ago, she had thought she would never have.
Hope vied with guilt inside her.
What would they do now?
Her gaze lifted to Talon Town. Soon he would come to her, longing to talk, to pour out his fears and agony. She would listen. She would soothe him. And he would say good night and leave.
He allowed little else. A touch on the shoulder. A private smile or exchange of glances.
Catkin gripped her war club when movement caught her eye.
Whiproot trotted around the corner of Talon Town, his white-feathered cape flapping, his young face stern. His chin-length black hair swayed as he ran. She studied the grisly scars that crisscrossed his face. She’d killed the Fire Dog who had done that to him, but not soon enough. Every day for the rest of his life, Whiproot would be reminded of that man and his knife.
For three moons after the battle people whispered that Whiproot’s wife, Silk Moth, could not bear to look at him. He had, briefly, moved into a chamber in Talon Town. The Elders had urged Silk Moth to go on a vision quest to ask guidance from the Spirit World. She had, reluctantly, and returned happy and smiling, saying she had gained a powerful Spirit Helper. Whiproot had moved home again, and they seemed to be doing well.
“What is it, Whiproot?”
“Forgive me, Catkin. I know that the War Chief asked you to guard his son, but Matron Flame Carrier has duties for us.”
“What does she wish?” Catkin saw the shining new war club tied to his belt. Beautiful. Strange that she hadn’t noticed it before. Had he taken it on the war walk?
“She says the boy’s”—he looked down at Grass Moon, and his voice softened—“the boy’s burial pit has been desecrated. She wishes you to dig a new one while I keep watch from the south wall of Talon Town. If you keep me in sight, I will be able to see both the boy and you from there. Do not fear. If you yell, I will be there.”
Catkin nodded. “Very well. I will need to get a digging stick.”
“The slaves stacked several between the big trash mounds. After you have finished the new grave, come and fetch me. Flame Carrier also wishes us to lift the War Chief’s wife from the defiled pit and carry her back to the village where the War Chief can care for her. She does not believe his wife was a witch.”
Catkin gave him a curious look, wondering how Flame Carrier could be so certain. “Why just us? Where is everyone else?”
“While Elder Cloudblower is opening the Sunwatcher’s skull, they will be Singing. Praying for peace, and safety. Honestly, they are very afraid.”
“How is Hophorn?”
Agony lined his face. He twisted his war club in his hands. “She does not look well, Catkin. More than that, I cannot say.”
The Singing stopped. They both focused on the town in silence.
Catkin tucked her war club into her belt. “Well, I had better begin the new grave. The sand is frozen. It will take some time.”
“And I had better get to my guard position.”
They walked back together.
When they reached the wide, shining road that ran in front of Talon Town, Whiproot trotted for the ladder. He climbed to the roof of the low one-story line of rooms that created the south wall, scanned the plaza inside the town, then looked out across the canyon. Finally he walked to the southwestern corner, and crouched down, overlooking Grass Moon’s burial ladder.
Catkin climbed into the space between the two enormous mounds that bordered the road. Snow covered the tools. She kicked them to knock it lose, and selected a good fire-hardened chokecherry digging stick.
As she walked back out into the sunlight, the Singing started again.
The melody rose into the cold air like sad wings.
MAGGIE WALKING HAWK TAYLOR SQUINTED AS THE HEADLIGHTS of her Park Service truck lit the narrow greasewood trail. For a moment, the brush seemed alive, reaching out to her with spindly arms, then it recoiled as the truck rolled by. Out here, the Ancient Ones were not dead. They peered through the veil of time with little effort, examining the curious ways of modern people.
The first time she had felt them was eight years ago. Fresh out of the university, she’d come to Chaco Canyon as a Park Service summer temporary. She’d walked down to the great kiva at Casa Rinconada and heard flute music. The park closed at sunset. Tourists were prohibited in the ruins after dark. With her ticket book in hand, she’d sneaked silently into the giant subterranean ceremonial chamber, ready to write a citation.
She had flicked the big black maglight on and seen no one. The place stood empty, the stones bathed in the moonlight.
She had taken a deep breath, turned the flashlight off, and leaned
against the cool stone, head back, to look up at the moon. She would have sworn she’d heard flute music. Like something Carlos Nakai would play.
Her soul responded to the chanting before her ears did. Distant, but oh, so close. The harmonic voices rose and fell as if to the metronome of her heart. At the edges of her hearing, the flute lilted.
A tape player? Something left by a tourist? She had slowly walked around the great kiva.
In the peaceful moonlight, her grandmother’s words had come back to her:
“Only when your soul is still will you hear the Singing.”
Something electric kindled deep down in her soul. Just beyond the senses she could
feel
them around her. Ecstasy claimed her, carried her up, as if she were part of the moonlight and the ancient voices that whispered from the time-worn rock.
How long she stood, caught in that rapture, she did not know.
But that night had changed her life. For the first time she’d felt whole.
Maggie guided the truck through a series of dips and thought about her life.
She’d grown up hard. Her mother died in car wreck when Maggie was eight, killed when she passed out at the wheel after drinking too much whiskey in a Taos bar.
Her grandmother, Slumber Walking Hawk, and her two aunts, Hail and Sage, had used subtle but effective pressure to raise Maggie traditionally. At the same time, she’d had the radio, television, basketball shoes, and computer game arcades. They had irresistibly drawn her toward the White world, and the University with its challenges and excitements. She’d earned her Bachelor of Arts degree in History, specializing in Native American history.
She’d met her husband at school. Richard had been tall and dark, with a keen mind and a playful way about him. They’d loved each other for two years, then Maggie had noticed him pulling away, slowly at first. He’d made up excuses to go into town. Later he’d stayed away all night. They’d divorced three years ago, after she discovered he had several other women on the side. She still missed him. She also still longed to kick his ass.
The lights of her passing truck sparkled on eyes that bounded
away. Deer? Or ghosts? Grandmother Slumber would have told Maggie that the other world had been stirred up by something.
Maggie smiled. Her “Western” rational side no longer fought with her “Traditional” side. Depending upon the situation, she could play in either court. Her heart and head worked in unison, each knowing when to give way to the other.
She bounced through a shallow wash and followed the two tracks through a sinuous turn. In her headlights, the reflectors on the archaeologist’s trucks gleamed like little red flames. Then she saw the flicker of the campfire illuminating the greasewood.