The Summoning God: Book II of the Anasazi Mysteries (9 page)

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Authors: Kathleen O'Neal Gear,W. Michael Gear

BOOK: The Summoning God: Book II of the Anasazi Mysteries
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“You do not remember me?”
the woman murmured in a choking voice.
“I remember everything about you. I remember your touch and the sound of your voice when you told me stories at night.”
The woman continued wading the river. Flame Carrier had put many children to bed with her stories. Which one might this be?
“Are you one of the Katsinas’ People, child? Or—or a member of my old clan? Are you Ant Clan?”
The katsina stepped out of the water with her furred head bowed. The fringed hem of her dress dripped onto the river cobbles, and her soft cries rode the breeze. Like a warrior preparing for one final battle, the woman slowly untied a hafted chert knife from her belt, kissed the glinting blade, then gripped it in a shaking fist.
“What do you want?” Flame Carrier cried, and hurried up the trail as fast as her legs would carry her.
The katsina called, “You do know me! I knew it!”
“I don’t know you!” Flame Carrier shouted.
Feet pounded the trail behind Flame Carrier.
As the katsina closed in, Flame Carrier whirled around with her walking stick up to defend herself. “Stop! I don’t wish to hurt you, child! Leave me alone!”
Tears glistened in the eye sockets of the mask.
“Oh, Grandmother,” she whispered. “I tried not to come here. Father made me. He said you would remember me.”
Flame Carrier shook her head, uncertain. The voice did sound familiar, but she couldn’t place where she’d heard it. “I do
not
know you!”
The katsina cocked her head one way, then another, as if trying to see Flame Carrier better through the mask’s eye holes. She lowered her head like a wolf on a blood trail and a low growl issued from her mouth.
Flame Carrier shouted,
“Water Snake? Obsidian? Anyone! Can anyone hear me? I need help!
”
The katsina came forward, each step placed with care, rustling in the fallen leaves. Her jaw dropped open and sharp teeth shone in the muzzle.
Flame Carrier let out a hoarse cry, and ran, screaming, “Help! Help me!”
She made it to the top of the trail and gathered her strength for the run into the plaza …
The katsina leaped on her back and knocked her face-first into the damp autumn leaves. The woman gripped a handful of Flame Carrier’s gray hair and twisted her head around to meet her eyes.
“I am Copper Bell, Grandmother,” she said, weeping. Slowly, reverently, she pulled a magnificent turquoise pendant from the front of her dress. The wolf dangled before Flame Carrier’s eyes, shimmering pale gray in the moonlight. “Please,
please
, remember me, Grandmother!”
Flame Carrier’s gaze clung to the wolf, and a sick sensation rushed through her. “Oh, gods, no. You can’t be—”
“Yes, you know now, don’t you?” the katsina whispered. “You know why you’ve been summoned.”
Flame Carrier wrenched her head free … and screamed.
 
THE HOARSE SCREAM BROUGHT SYLVIA BOLT UPRIGHT, GASPING and lunging for her aluminum baseball bat. She clutched it to her chest as her foggy brain replayed other screams in other places … and then she placed herself. New Mexico. Pueblo Animas. Field Camp.
“Jesus Christ!” she heard Steve yell. “What was that?”
Sylvia had to swallow her heart before she could find the voice to answer, “If it wasn’t you or me …”
She turned her head to the right, toward the camp trailer where Dusty slept, and called, “Yo, Dusty! You all right?”
Silence.
Sylvia blinked in the darkness. One by one she catalogued the night sounds: the whisper of a breeze in the sage; the late season cry of the nightjar; a rustle of leaves behind the camp; and … Something scratched the nylon of her tent, and the hollow sound of gnawing came from the rear pole.
“Stop that!” she hissed, and jabbed her baseball bat into the fiberglass pole. The panicked packrat shinnied down the side of her tent and thrashed away through the grass outside.
Dusty whimpered.
Sylvia leaned forward and unzipped the door to her tent. She cocked
her head and heard muffled sounds coming from the camp trailer. Noises like that had two causes. Since Dusty didn’t have a woman in there with him, it had to be the second.
“Dusty?” Sylvia’s breath frosted in the cold night air. Over her head a thousand stars twinkled. “Wake up! You’re having a bad dream!”
Dusty often woke up field camps with his nightmares—but so did she. It was one of the joys they forced other people to share.
Dusty moaned and the camp trailer rocked as he flailed in his sleep.
“Dusty!
”
She thought about slinging the baseball bat in his direction, but it would be just her luck to chuck it through the window. Instead, she grabbed up a handful of gravel and pitched it at the aluminum siding.
“Wake up!” she ordered.
She heard him mumble, then he said,
“Shut up, you little son of a bitch.
”
Sylvia reconsidered throwing her bat. “Who’s a son of a bitch?”
As though not really awake, he said something she couldn’t hear, then the trailer squeaked as he turned over, and she caught the words “witch” and
“basilisco.
”
In less than ten seconds, he was snoring.
Sylvia rezipped her tent, and pulled her sleeping bag up to her chin.
Out of the darkness, Steve whispered, “Boy, that thing has really got a grip on his subconscious. How many does that make this week?”
For a long time, Sylvia just lay there. Then she said, “Too many. He’s starting to worry me.”
I
STRETCH MY ARMS TO THE COLD CRYSTALLINE NIGHT,
and the gentle breeze that sweeps the desert flaps the brown-and-white turkey feather cape around my naked body.
“I remember everything about you, Grandmother,” I say softly. “When I had seen five summers, you told me I would be all right, that I was not alone, because a thousand ancestors slept inside my bones, watching and whispering to me.”
The brilliant lavender gleam of dawn enamels the eastern horizon, but straight over my head the strongest of the Evening People continue to sparkle, their bodies pure white against the deep blue sky.
“You told me that I would only be lonely until I learned to crawl inside my own bones and speak with the ancient voices that lived there.”
I lower my arms, and expel a breath; it puffs whitely before drifting away on the wind. As I look down, an odd sensation spreads through me.
“Oh, Grandmother, I remember so much.”
I grip the old woman’s ankles and drag her through the brush toward the river below. Blood-soaked gray hair streams out over her head. Her toothless mouth gapes, and a moan seeps from her lips.
“Shh,” I whisper. “We do not wish the others to hear us. The village is less than a half a hand of time away.”
To my right, blue smoke rises into the sky. Soon, someone will notice that she is missing. They will mount a search party.
Cottonwoods line the river, their limbs arching over the water like dark twisted arms. Yellow leaves cling to the branches, and I can smell their delicate autumn scent. It is a fragrance I know from my childhood thirty sun cycles ago.
Tears constrict my throat. “I never wished to return here, Grandmother. I tried to stay away. I tried very hard.”
The breeze changes, and the stench of her fear fills the predawn morning, smothering the cottonwoods’ perfume. I fill my lungs and hold the stench
inside me for as long as I can. My heart burns as if it might explode in a shower of bright hot splinters.
The night was long and cold. For both of us.
I gaze at her. A thin veneer of translucent skin clings to her bones. Her chest rises and falls. She is more like an old skeleton than a woman. Her ribs are bars, her hip bones as sharp as knives. Her breasts resemble withered flaps of loose hide. Her face is gone.
I pull her through piles of golden leaves toward the glistening pool at the base of the hill. Three body lengths across, the pool fills a washed-out niche in the riverbank. Purple light twinkles across the pond’s surface.
I stop at the edge and gaze down at my watery reflection. The gray fur of my wolf mask shimmers. The ears are pricked as if listening to the soft sounds of daybreak: birds chirping, leaves rustling, water flowing over rocks. I try to see my eyes through the mask’s holes, but only black, bottomless darkness looks back at me. Tall and slender, I have seen the passing of thirty-five summers.
As I remove her cape and drop it to the sand, wind chills my naked body. Cold pimples rise on my skin.
The cottonwoods were not here thirty sun cycles ago. There were no trees for a day’s walk up or down the Prancing Spirit River. We cut them all down to heat our chambers, cook our food, and fire our pottery. Only when my people moved on did the trees dare to grow again.
My people moved on.
I did not. They left me behind, hoping I would die. I had seen five summers.
I clasp my grandmother’s ankles and drag her over the rocks that ring the pool. Her head thumps the stones, producing a dense meaty sound.
“Yes, I remember, Grandmother. I remember being terrified, starving, running from place to place searching for a scrap of food, stealing what I could. Anyone who saw me chased me away. I remember crying until I couldn’t breathe.”
I step into the pool and pull the old woman in behind me. Icy green water rises to my waist. She floats for several instants as the river swirls and eddies, then it swallows her ruined face.
I let go of her ankles and step back.
Bubbles escape her mouth and perch on the water’s surface like glistening eyeballs. Does she feel the cold liquid filling her lungs? For just a moment, I fear she might suddenly awaken and begin to struggle.
I tremble, both from weariness and from seeing her like this. In the newborn light her gray hair swims as if alive.
“I learned to hear the voices, Grandmother. Just as you told me I must. I learned to live inside my bones with them. That’s how I survived until
he
came for me.”
Father Sun peers over the eastern horizon, and golden light touches the pond. One by one, the bubbles burst, and in their places bloody red flowers bloom.
My eyes widen as I watch each petal unfurl in a single moment of glory before it fades and blends with the water.
I bend over until my eyes almost touch the bloody surface and whisper, “Hello? Are you down there? Can you see me? Let me in.”
… behind me.
Sandals on dirt.
The footsteps are soft, whispers barely heard. He is the blackness, the animal that has haunted me since my first memories. Like dark wings, he flaps through my nights, his touch feathery, caressing, melting the world. His long white cape sways as he kneels.
The water stirs and flickers.
I wait anxiously for a door to open, for faces to appear beneath the green surface.
I feel the other
me
receding, draining away into the dark hole where she lives, and I sink against the bank and wonder where the night went. The sounds of the morning are loud in my ears.
I blink at the old woman’s wide, toothless mouth gaping beneath the water. A sudden rush of bubbles explodes and she flails her arms.
“She’s alive!”
I blurt.
I stare as he removes his sandals and carefully walks barefoot on the stones around the pool. He pulls his deer-bone stiletto from his belt, grabs her hair, and wades into the pool. He tows her to the middle and stabs her over and over. He stabs her so many times that I think it will never end. Five, ten times … more. Then he stops, breathing hard, and shoves her away. Before he wades out, he thoroughly washes himself off.
I tilt my head, studying her through the eyeholes of the mask. “I—I thought I knew her, Father. I thought she was the one who cast me out of my mother’s clan.”
His laughter is velvet on a spiderweb.
“Is she the one, Father?”
My souls seem to be floating above my body. I am shaking from memories that I do not actually remember, but my flesh does. I fear that if I try to move my arms and legs, they will crack and shatter into a thousand pieces. I peer intently at the corpse. “She is, isn’t she? I know her. I do. I
remember
her.”
He strokes the locks of long black hair that have escaped my wolf mask and fall down my naked back. I shudder and lean into his touch. The black serpent pendant he carved for me rests warmly between my breasts, cradled in the soft warmth beside the turquoise wolf, both so close to my heart.
“I wish you hadn’t brought us back here, Father. You know I hate this place. Since we arrived, I’ve heard her hissing at me every moment.”
He lightly draws his fingers down my throat.
I stand for a long while staring down at the water, watching the twinkles of morning that reflect in the dead woman’s eyes. They are very beautiful.
“I’m sure she’s the one, Father. Why won’t you answer me?”
I hear him rise. He takes his hand away.
“I’m sorry,” I whisper. “I know we should go before they come. I left your soul pot on the bank above. It’s your favorite, the one with the Flute Player painted in the bottom. Let me get it.”
I wade out of the pond and reach for her cape where it rests on the rocks. The turkey feathers are soft against my skin, and fragrant, as though she kept her cape near her herb pots.
I walk up the hill in a sun-drenched dream.

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