Read The Visitant: Book I of the Anasazi Mysteries Online

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

The Visitant: Book I of the Anasazi Mysteries (23 page)

BOOK: The Visitant: Book I of the Anasazi Mysteries

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Browser gazed at Catkin with an odd expression on his face. “Sometimes you are very blunt.”

“I am always blunt. That’s why you come here. You know everything I’m going to say long before I say it, but you let me tell you anyway. Browser, you are an honorable man. That is why you cannot say things you know to be true, and that is also why I do it for you.”

He threw another twig into the bowl, and a flurry of sparks winked and drifted lazily toward the roof hole.

“I fear you are the only person left who thinks I am honorable. Over the past few days, almost everyone in the village has turned their backs on me. Some have even dared to ask me directly if I killed my wife.” He smoothed out a fold of leather in his buckskin cape. “It’s my fault. All of it.”

“Why?”

Wind gusted down the roof entry and fanned the warming bowl. The coals flared, and the red gleam flickered in his hair and eyes.

“If I had been kinder to my wife, treated her better, people would not now suspect me of hurting her.”

“Blessed Ancestors, Browser,” Catkin said. “You
would
have been kinder to her if she had given you one instant of kindness herself. Love requires watchfulness and nourishment or it withers. You
stopped watching long ago. And she stopped nourishing. The soul of your joining has been dead for sun cycles. The only thing she ever gave you that brought you joy was your son.”

At the mention of Grass Moon, he bowed his head, but she could see the torment on his face. He had loved that little boy more than his own life.

Gently, Catkin said, “Browser, you must stop this. You are shredding your heart over something you could not have changed. Surely, you know that.”

A weary smile bent his lips. “I thank you for caring enough to speak straightly with me. I’m going to go now. I know you are exhausted. I probably shouldn’t have come at all, but I—”

“Before you go,” she said, “there is something I wish to ask you.”

He looked at her, nodded. “Ask.”

“For almost a sun cycle you have lived within a day’s run of your great-uncle. Why have you never gone to see him?”

Browser waved a hand. “I barely know him. I suppose I feared he wouldn’t remember me.”

Catkin’s dark eyes narrowed. “Did it never occur to you that he might be lonely? Or need help? He lives by himself in the middle of the desert.”

“No,” Browser said, and propped his hands on his hips. “It never occurred to me. Holy people seem to need privacy more than ordinary people. I have always assumed my great-uncle lived alone, because he wished to be left alone.”

Catkin finished her tea and placed the cup beneath the tripod. “Have a pleasant evening, War Chief.”

“And you also, my friend.”

He climbed up the ladder and out into the starlit night. Catkin could hear his steps patting across the rooftop.

She sucked in a breath of the smoky, cedar-scented air and watched the crimson light flutter over her walls. The blue diamonds that ringed the ceiling shone a deep dark purple.

The tone in Browser’s voice when he spoke about his dead wife had pricked her nerves. His gut feelings usually turned out to be correct. If she were the heart of this insanity, he might be the only one who would know.

But what had his wife ever done to cause such a calamity?

Perhaps it had begun long ago, before Catkin joined the Katsinas’ People.

Catkin curled onto her side and drew her furry buffalo-hide up to her chin.

That would merit some thought.

AS HE WALKED ACROSS THE SITE, EVENING LIGHT STREAMED across the canyon, lavender and glowing. Dusty glared up at the hazy sky. They had passed into the first week of September; the weather patterns had to break sometime, didn’t they? Looking around at the sere land, he could imagine how the Anasazi must have felt as the drought deepened.

He stopped in camp and poured a glass of water from the jug that sat on the Bronco’s shaded north side. He drank half and poured the rest over his head, savoring the feeling as it ran down his sweaty face, neck, and into his dust-streaked brown shirt.

Opening the Bronco’s door, he leaned in, opened the center compartment, and pulled out the cell phone. He checked the battery charge and signal. Not too bad today: he had four bars of power.

He pressed in the numbers and hit “Send.”

While it rang, he turned, looking back toward the excavation. He could see Sylvia perched on a back-dirt pile, head bent as she recorded the locations of each bone Maureen lifted from the pit floor.

After seven rings, Dale’s gruff voice greeted, “Robertson. Go ahead.”

“Hey, Dale, it’s Dusty.”

“Good to hear from you. I tried calling earlier.”

“The phone’s been out. No signal. I—”

“I’m about to leave here. Is there anything I need to bring?”

“That’s why I called. We need burial boxes. We’re up to ten skeletons now, counting the little guy.”

“Little guy?”

Dusty shoved wet blond hair behind his ears. “I guess you might as well know now as later, we’re outside the impact area. I’ve got a woman with a fetus—”

“How
far
outside the impact area?”

“About five meters.”

Silence.

“Listen, Dale, Hail Walking Hawk, our Keres monitor, told me there was a body there. She insisted that I dig the unit, so I did.”

Dusty winced at the curse words.

“You know, don’t you,” Dale continued, “that we are now in violation of our Antiquities Permit, our fieldwork authorization, the project scope of work, and with the proper incentives, the government could prosecute us for violations of the 1906 Antiquities Act, the Archaeological Resources Protection Act, and a host of other rules and regulations.”

“Yeah, but …”

“Yeah,
but?
William, I allow you a great deal of free rein, but this is—”

“Necessary,” Dusty finished. “The Indian monitor demanded we dig the unit. You can use that to rock them back on their heels at the next Pecos Conference. Not only that, Maggie agreed. That means that if anything comes of this, we were acting in compliance with NAGPRA, the American Indian Religious Freedom Act, and the authorized officer was on our side.”

A pause. “We need something in writing, William. I don’t want the Department of the Interior nailing my butt to one of their bureaucratic walls. A dead archaeologist is the sort of thing they’d consider decorative.”

Dusty smiled. “I’ll talk to Maggie about an authorization letter.”

“Please do.” Displeasure dripped from his voice.

“Remember the burial boxes, okay? About fifteen. You know, the ones you pirated from University of Arizona when the NAGPRA people cleaned out their comparative collections. Oh, and we need another ten rolls of film, another stack of forms, ten more boxes of Ziplocs, and that box of empty soil sample sacks that’s back behind the floatation equipment.”

“Done.” Dale said, “How is Maureen adapting to the site?”

Dusty stepped onto the running board, boosting himself high enough that he could see over the Bronco’s blue top to the excavation. Maureen had coiled her long braid on top of her head. Her sweat-soaked T-shirt clung to her body like a second skin, accenting her full breasts and narrow waist. Dusty sighed. If he had to dislike a woman, why couldn’t she be ugly?

“The good doctor is on her hands and knees, Dale. She wanted to remove the burials herself. She didn’t like the way that Sylvia and I were doing it. She says that archaeologists do better work with backhoes than we do with trowels. But she’s spent half the day on a single skull. It’s like she’s never had to deal with a timetable in her life.” He made a face and uttered the worst slight he knew. “She’s definitely an
academician.”

“Besides spending your time digging units outside of the impact area, and Maureen’s attention to detail, how is progress otherwise ?”

Dusty stepped down to the ground, and braced a hand on the open door. “Behind schedule. I don’t suppose you could find us some more field crew? I’ll take any warm bodies you can scrounge.”

“William, we have to be out of there by the first of November. That’s the scheduled date for completion of the fieldwork.” Dale’s voice had taken on that no-nonsense tone that Dusty had come to hate over the years.

“No one expected a dozen burials, Dale. The preservation is extraordinary. Dr. Cole thinks she can even get a handle on stomach contents from the phytoliths.”

“Well, do what you have to but we need to move more dirt, William.”

“Right. See you when you get here. And don’t forget the drinks. We’re down to warm water in the coolers, and the Guinness is thinning out.”

“A tragedy of Biblical proportions. I’ll be there this afternoon.”

Dusty pushed the “End” button and slipped the phone back into the Bronco’s central compartment. As he leaned over the hood, he thought about the woman he’d exposed and the fetus cradled in the curve of her hips. He’d buried the basilisk in the corner of the pit, but it still gnawed at him. It hadn’t felt evil to him, but it did have an odd “presence.” Every time he got near it, he found himself straining to listen, as if for a voice that might or might not be there.

He stared at the pit. “I know you’re calling me,” he whispered. “I just don’t know what you want.”

W
IND BABY RACED THROUGH THE SCRUBBY WEEDS AND whimpered across the fallow cornfields. Wraiths of dust traced his path.

Browser walked across the roof of Hillside Village toward the ladder that led to the ground below. The juniper rungs had iced with the coming of night. He placed his sandals carefully. As he climbed down, he scanned the darkness. Boulders cluttered the base of the canyon wall to his left. Lingering patches of starlit snow veined the rocky crevices.

Preparations for the Celebration of the Longnight had begun that morning. The scents of blue corn cakes, simmering beans, and roasted pine nuts wafted from the roof entries. In two days, people would begin trickling in from the smaller villages, expecting to hear the news, to feast, and to Sing and Dance. Each person would be in a constant state of prayer, sending their sacred energy to Father Sun. After the long sun cycle, Father Sun was often too weak to start the journey back to the north by himself. His people had to help him. They did this willingly, with all their hearts.

Browser stepped to the ground and walked toward the towering ruin of Talon Town. Wispy clouds blew in from the west. They raced through the darkness as though fleeing some hidden sky monster. Browser had passed most of the day stalking back and forth from Hillside Village to Talon Town, avoiding his own chamber, because he could not bear the sadness that came over him when he was there. Few people spoke to him these days. They passed by, their glances wary, troubled. The entire world seemed to be waiting to see what he would do next.

Thank the gods for Catkin. Though her callous manner often upset him, she had an uncanny ability to ferret out his deepest
fears, and lay them before him like a collection of cups and bowls. They lost their power when he could see them clearly. Without her, he suspected he might go mad.

Browser rounded the southeastern corner of Talon Town, examined the frost-coated road that ran south from Talon Town’s entry, cut across Straight Path wash, and headed for the far canyon wall. Stone Ghost should come up that road. Browser held his cape closed at the throat and gazed at it longingly. The road resembled a broad glittering swath of crushed seashells.

Why
hadn’t
he gone to visit the old man?

The question disturbed him, mostly because he’d never even considered going to see Stone Ghost. If his grandmother had lived, perhaps he would have felt differently. She insisted on family and clan unity and worked very hard to properly arrange marriages to assure that unity. With her death, however, the clan had disintegrated. Browser’s father had been killed in a battle when he’d seen four summers. His mother was barely twenty-two when she became clan Matron. She did not have the power or the personal strength to convince people to do what was best for them. Green Mesa clan had fragmented almost immediately. The in-fighting went from vociferous arguments to outright warfare. People separated into seven different villages. Each established their own rules and traditions and called their relatives “outcasts.” Browser’s village had been renamed “Green Mesa.”

Browser had never heard Stone Ghost labeled an outcast, but after the old man solved his sister’s murder, he left and never returned. No one in Green Mesa Village spoke of him, though the number of rumors that circulated outside the clan grew every year. By the time Browser had seen fourteen summers, he’d feared Stone Ghost as much as everyone else.

Still, he
should
have gone to see his great-uncle. His grandmother would have been greatly saddened by Browser’s failure to care for her aging brother.

Burdened by his thoughts, he followed the curving wall around to the front of Talon Town. That sense of old Power, of darkness and blood, seemed to hang on the chill wind, as if pain had soaked into the very stones of the old ruin.

Whiproot stood guard on the roof at the southwestern corner of
Talon Town. His chin-length black hair whipped in the wind as he lifted a hand to Browser.

Browser called, “I’m coming up, my friend.”

Whiproot trotted along the roof, picked up the ladder, and lowered it over the side.

Browser climbed slowly, trying to avoid the worst ice.

No matter how much work the Katsinas’ People did, cleaning and repairing, the smell of ancient destruction seeped from these rooms. The mixed odors of moldering plaster and smoke-blackened timbers offended his nose. Now the wind, moaning around blackened timbers and broken stone, mocked the wailing voices of the past, as though releasing them to the night.

He stepped off onto the roof. “How is everything?”

“Fine. Nothing unusual.” In the starlight, Whiproot’s heavily scarred face reminded Browser of a tangle of thin white ropes. “Cloudblower left and has not returned. Jackrabbit is still guarding the Sunwatcher’s door. The night has been quiet.”

Browser surveyed Talon Town. Frost covered every stone in the toppled walls and painted the five stories with glittering white. He turned his attention to Cloudblower’s chamber. It sat in the southeastern corner, straight ahead of him, but he couldn’t see it very well. Piles of debris surrounded the collapsed kiva that sank into the ground in front of Cloudblower’s chamber. As he gazed along the line of rooms that faced west, he saw Hophorn’s chamber. It nestled in the middle of a three-room block about ten body lengths to the left of Cloudblower’s chamber. The plaster had flaked off, leaving the front of the room-block mottled, a splotchy mixture of white plaster and red stone masonry. Behind her chamber, four stories rose, each stepped-back, giving the ruined town a stairlike appearance.

He said, “Where did Cloudblower go? I was hoping to speak with her.”

“Peavine’s daughter, Yucca Blossom, the one with the coughing sickness, has a bad headache and fever. Cloudblower went to see if she could help.” The red-and-white blanket Whiproot wore rippled in the wind. He pulled it more tightly about his muscular shoulders.

Jackrabbit stood in front of Hophorn’s chamber, watching them.
Fifteen summers old, the youth had a guileless face, with wide brown eyes, and a pug nose. He held his shoulder-length black hair in place with a red headband. Browser waved at him. Jackrabbit lifted a hand in return.

“Has Jackrabbit been there since midday?” Browser asked, worried.

“I told him to go have supper two hands of time ago. I watched Hophorn’s chamber while he was away.”

“Why hasn’t He-Who-Flies come to take his place?”

“Oh,” Whiproot said in surprise. “I forgot to tell you. While you were away, He-Who-Flies developed a stomach ailment. He’s been vomiting since early afternoon. Redcrop came to tell me. Jackrabbit said he did not mind standing guard for the night. It is his honor to guard Hophorn.”

Billowing Cloud People crowded the western horizon, tumbling and shining, pushing toward Browser. He said, “Very well, but by midnight he will be growing weary. Call out to him now and then, just to make sure he is awake.”

“I will, War Chief.”

They stood quietly for a time, then Whiproot asked, “How is Catkin? Jackrabbit said she came in earlier, but I was asleep when she arrived.”

“She is well. Just very tired.”

Browser gazed southward, across the two mounds, to the shadowy canyon wall in the distance. In the brilliant light of the Evening People, he could make out every boulder and drainage. Dozens of small villages glittered along the length of the canyon floor. Their fires dotted the dark cliff face like strewn amber beads.

“Did Catkin say when we should expect Stone Ghost?” Whiproot unconsciously toyed with the war club on his belt.

“Soon. That is all we know.”

Whiproot chewed on his lower lip. “Have you heard the news?” “What news?”

“The Trader, Old Pigeontail, came through this afternoon.”

“Indeed? What did he want?”

“He Traded for a few bags of corn and squash seeds.” Whiproot hesitated. “He also said that Stone Ghost visited Frosted Meadow Village yesterday.”

Browser’s stomach muscles bunched. What was the old man doing? Selling his powers for handsome jewelry when the people of Hillside Village might be in danger?

“Why? Did Old Pigeontail say?”

“Oh, yes. It was a strange tale, War Chief. He said that Stone Ghost spent the evening collecting ghost footprints in a bowl.”

“In a bowl?”

Whiproot nodded. “So he claimed. Apparently everyone else just saw sand in the bowl, but Old Pigeontail said that when Stone Ghost shook the sand, pictures formed.”

“What kinds of pictures?”

“Pictures of a dead girl. Her parents and the clan Matron were apparently amazed by what he saw. Then, just before he left, Stone Ghost planted a prayer in the sand, and gave the bowl of footprints to the clan Matron.”

Browser thought about that. “Frosted Meadow is less than a day’s walk away. Why isn’t he here already?”

Whiproot gestured lamely. “I cannot say, War Chief. He is very old, perhaps he has the joint stiffening disease, and cannot—”

A loud grunt split the darkness, followed by the sounds of a struggle. Jackrabbit cried,
“Help!”

Browser and Whiproot spun around in time to see a katsina, a masked god, slam his war club into Jackrabbit’s head.

“Blessed Ancestors!” Browser shouted. “Hurry! Get the ladder!”

Whiproot grabbed the ladder, pulled it up, and flipped it over the wall into the enormous plaza below.

Jackrabbit screamed and rolled, trying to crawl away. The katsina ran through a gaping hole in the wall near Hophorn’s chamber and vanished.

Browser took the rungs down three at a time and hit the ground running. Whiproot’s feet pounded behind him. When they neared the gasping Jackrabbit, Browser ordered, “Whiproot! See to Jackrabbit. If he is well enough, send him for help, but do not leave the Sunwatcher’s door! Do you understand? Do not leave her alone!”

“I understand, War Chief!”

Browser sprinted for the gaping hole the
katsina
had disappeared into.

As he stepped inside, darkness enveloped him. He had been here once last summer. The walls formed a confused maze of interconnected chambers and kivas, like a rabbit’s warren. Rubble cluttered the floors, and charred roof beams dangled from the ceilings. Finding his way would be …

Soft laughter filtered through the darkness, somewhere up ahead.

Taunting, daring him to walk deeper into the maze.

Browser drew his war club. He kept his gaze focused on the middle of the wall where the doorway stood, and placed his feet like a hunting cat. Despite his care, grit whispered beneath the tanned leather of his winter moccasins.

As he neared the wall, a lighter patch of gray defined the doorway. Browser stopped and listened.

He heard nothing and stepped through.

Starlight shot beams through a ragged hole in the ceiling. Dust glimmered in the silver shaft kicked up by a man’s passing.

Browser gripped his war club and edged forward. He passed through two more rooms and entered a well of cold blackness. He crouched, blinking against the darkness, his war club raised. In the blackness, he could discern no doorway.

The silence ate at his nerves. Silence was a hawk’s shadow just before it dropped on its prey. A wolf’s eyes the instant before it leaped. It started as a mere lack of noise, then crept into a man’s bones, and grew to a deafening roar that shook him apart.

Something moved ahead of him and to his right. The barest of sounds, like corn silk dropped on the floor.

Sweat trickled down Browser’s jaw.

Had Jackrabbit gone for help? Even if he’d had to run all the way to Hillside Village, it should take no more than five hundred heartbeats for armed warriors to stream to the rescue. How many times had his heart beat? One hundred? Two?

Wait. Someone will come. Then you can comb these ruins until you find … what ?

The sight had stunned his senses. He could not be certain, but he thought the katsina had been wearing the same clothing as his dead wife. The gloriously carved wolf mask looked different, however, the colors bright, as if freshly painted.

A god? Or a man?

Browser’s lungs started to suck at the cold air, threatening to give away his position. He had to move to relieve the tension.

He took a step.

And a step sounded
behind
him.

Blind terror gripped Browser. He clasped his war club in both hands, and turned to gaze back through the last doorway.

A black silhouette stood in the shaft of silver light.

Browser lifted his club with shaking hands.

“War Chief?”

Browser did not answer. It could be a trick.

The man stepped closer, and Browser saw the oddly shaped spikes on his war club glitter.

He called, “Jackrabbit?”

“Yes, War Chief! Are you well?”