Текст книги "Thunderhead"

Автор книги: Lincoln Child

Соавторы: Douglas Preston,Lincoln Child
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Текущая страница: 15 (всего у книги 28 страниц)

The wheel bucked in Skip’s hands and he realized he was losing control. The basalt ledge yawned ahead, no more than a few seconds away. He turned the car sharply to the left. It twisted beneath him, turning wide, then swinging around in one complete revolution, then another. Skip was shouting now but he couldn’t hear himself over the squealing of the tires. In a dense pall of burning rubber, the car sheered off the road, still spinning, the tires catching first gravel, then grass. There was a tremendous lurch and the car came to a violent stop. A thick wash of cream-colored sand settled on the dashboard and hood.

Skip sat motionless, fingers glued to the dead wheel. The squeal of tires was replaced by the tick of cooling metal. Dimly, he was aware that he had landed in a bunker, canted sharply to one side. Black, foul-smelling, slobbering lips and tongue hovered before his eyes as Teddy Bear frantically licked at his face.

The sounds of pattering feet, quick worried conversation, then a rap on the windshield. “Sonny?” came the concerned voice. “Hey, son, you okay?”

If Skip heard, he gave no sign. Instead, he removed his trembling hands from the wheel, grasped the two ends of the seat belt, and slowly fastened them around his waist.

29

THE REST OF THE FIRST FULL DAY OF WORK AT Quivira went exceptionally well. The core members of the expedition set to their tasks with a professionalism that both impressed and heartened Nora. Black, in particular, had settled down and was quickly confirming his reputation as a top-notch field-worker. With remarkable speed, Holroyd had assembled a wireless paging network, designed around a central transmitter, to allow the members of the group to communicate with each other from anywhere within the site. The fascination and allure of Quivira worked a special magic on professional and amateur alike. Around the campfire that evening, again and again, conversation would spontaneously cease; and, as if with a single mind, all eyes would be irresistibly drawn up the dark walls of the canyon, in the direction of the invisible hollow where the city was concealed.

As the following morning drew to a close, early summer heat had settled in the canyon below; but halfway up the cliff face, beneath the shadow of the rock, the city itself remained cool. Holroyd had ascended the ladder, checked in with the Institute, and descended without incident, returning to his task of scanning the roomblocks with the proton magnetometer. Once that was done, he would use a handheld remote for the GPS system to survey the major points of the site.

Nora sat on the retaining wall at the front of the city, near the rope ladder leading down to the valley floor. Bonarotti had sent up their sack lunches using the pulley system, and Nora opened hers with anticipation. Inside was a wedge of Port du Salut cheese, four generous slices of prosciutto di Parma, and a marvelously thick and dense hunk of bread that Bonarotti had baked in his Dutch oven that morning after breakfast. She ate with little ceremony, washing the meal down with a swig from her canteen, and then rose to her feet. As leader, she was putting together the data for a field specimen catalogue, and it was time to check on the progress of the others.

She walked beneath the shadows of the ancient adobe walls to the far end of the ruin’s front plaza. Here, near the foot of the Planetarium, Black and Smithback were working in the city’s great midden heap: a dusty, oversized mound of dirt, broken animal bones, charcoal, and potsherds. As she approached, she could see Smithback’s head pop up from a cut at the far end, face dirty, cowlick bobbing with displeasure. She smiled despite herself at the sight. Though she’d never give him the pleasure of knowing it, she’d begun dipping in to the book he had given her. And, she had to admit, it was a fascinating, frightening story, despite the near-miraculous way Smithback had of taking part in almost every important or heroic event he described.

Black’s voice came echoing off the cave wall. “Bill, haven’t you finished grid F-one yet?”

“Why don’t you F one yourself,” Smithback muttered in return.

Black came around the mound in high spirits, carrying a trowel in one hand and a whiskbroom in the other. “Nora,” he said, with a smile, “this will interest you. I don’t believe there’s been a clearer cultural sequence since Kidder excavated the mound at Pecos. And that’s just from the control pit we dug yesterday; now we’re completing the first baulks of the test trench.”

“The man says ‘we.’” Smithback leaned on his shovel, and held out a trembling hand to Nora. “For the love of Jaysus, can ye not spare a wee drop for a poor dying sinner?”

Nora handed him her canteen, and he drank deeply. “That man is a sadist,” he said, wiping his mouth. “I’d have been better off building the pyramids. I want a transfer.”

“When you signed on, you knew you were going to be a digger,” Nora said, retrieving the canteen. “What better way to get your hands dirty, literally and figuratively? Besides, I’ll bet it isn’t the first time you’ve done some muckraking.”

“Et tu, Brute?” Smithback sighed.

“Come and see what we’ve done,” said Black, guiding Nora to a small, precise cut in the side of the mound.

“This is the control pit?” Nora asked.

“Yes,” Black nodded. “Beautiful soil profile, don’t you think?”

“Perfection,” Nora replied. She’d never seen such neat work or such potentially rich results. She could see where the two men had cut through the midden, exposing dozens of thin layers of brown, gray, and black soil, revealing how the trash mound had grown over time. The stratified layers had each been labeled with tiny, numbered flags, and even smaller flags marked spots where artifacts had been removed. On the ground beside the cut were dozens of Baggies and glass tubes, carefully aligned, each with its own artifact, seed, bone, or lump of charcoal. Nearby, Nora could see that Black had set up a portable water flotation lab and stereozoom microscope for separating pollen, small seeds, and human hair from the detritus. Next to it was a small paper chromatography setup for analyzing solubles. It was a highly professional job, executed with remarkable assurance and speed.

“It’s a textbook sequence,” said Black. “At the top is Pueblo III, where we see corrugated and some red ware. Under that is Pueblo II. The sequence begins abruptly at about A.D. 950.”

“The same time the Anasazi started building Chaco Canyon,” Nora said.

“Correct. Below this layer”—he pointed to a layer of light brown dirt—“is sterile soil.”

“Meaning the city was built all at once,” Nora said.

“Exactly. And take a look at this.” Black opened a Ziploc bag and gently slid three potsherds onto a nearby piece of felt. They glinted dully in the noon sun.

Nora drew in her breath sharply. “Black-on-yellow micaceous,” she murmured. “How beautiful.”

Black raised an eyebrow. “The rarest of the rare. So you’ve seen the type before?”

“Once, on my Rio Puerco dig. It was very weathered, of course; nobody’s ever found an intact pot.” It was a testament to the richness of the site that Black had found three such sherds in just one day’s digging.

“I’d never actually seen a piece before,” Black said. “It’s amazing stuff. Has anybody ever dated it?”

“No. Only two dozen sherds have ever been found, and they’ve all been too isolated. Maybe you’ll find enough here for the job.”

“Maybe,” Black replied, returning the fragments to the plastic bag with rubber-tipped tweezers. “Now look at this.” He squatted beside the soil profile and pointed his trowel tip at a series of alternating dark and light bands. Each was littered with distinct layers of broken pottery. “There was definitely a seasonal occupation of the site. For most of the year, there were not many people in residence, I’d guess fifty or less. And then there was a large influx every summer; obviously a seasonal pilgrimage, but on a far vaster scale than at Chaco. You can tell by the volume of broken pots and hearth ashes.”

A seasonal pilgrimage,Nora thought. Sounds like Aragon’s ritual journey to a city of priests.She decided not to antagonize Black by saying this aloud. “How can you tell it was summertime?” she asked instead.

“Pollen counts,” Black sniffed. “But there’s more. As I said, we’ve only started the test trench. But already it’s clear that the trash mound was segregated.”

Nora stared at him curiously. “Segregated?”

“Yes. In the back part of the mound there are fragments of beautiful painted pottery and the bones of animals used for food. Turkeys, deer, elk, bear. There are a lot of beads, whole arrowheads, even chipped pots. But in the front we find only the crudest, ugliest corrugated pottery. And the food we found in the front of the mound was clearly different.”

“What kinds of foods?”

“Mostly rats,” said Black. “Squirrels, snakes, a coyote or two. The flotation lab has brought up a lot of crushed insect carapaces and parts as well. Cockroaches, grasshoppers, crickets. I did a brief microscopic examination, and most of them seem to have been lightly toasted.”

“They were eating insects?” Nora asked incredulously.

“Without a doubt.”

“I prefer my bugs al dente,” said Smithback, with an unpleasant smacking of his lips.

Nora looked at Black. “What’s your interpretation of this?”

“Well, there’s never been anything like it in Anasazi sites. But in other sites, this kind of thing points directly to slavery. The masters and slaves ate different things and dumped their trash in different places.”

“Aaron, there isn’t a shred of evidence that the Anasazi had slaves.”

Black looked back at her. “There is now. Either slavery, or we’re looking at a deeply stratified society: a priestly class that lived in high luxury, and an underclass living in abject poverty, with no middle class in between.”

Nora glanced around the city, quiet in the noonday sun. The discovery seemed to violate all that they knew about the Anasazi. “Let’s keep an open mind until all the evidence is in,” she said at last.

“Naturally. We’re also collecting carbonized seeds for C-fourteen dating and human hair for DNA analysis.”

“Seeds,” Nora repeated. “By the way, did you know that most of those granaries in the rear of the city are still bulging with corn and beans?”

Black straightened up. “No I didn’t.”

“Sloane told me earlier this morning. That suggests the site was abandoned in the fall, at harvest time. And that it was abandoned very quickly.”

“Sloane,” Black repeated casually. “She came by here a little earlier. Where is she now, anyway?”

Nora, who’d been looking away, looked back. “Somewhere in the central roomblocks, I think. She’s beginning the preliminary survey, with the help of Peter and his magnetometer. I’ll be checking in with her later. But now I’m off to see what Aragon is up to.”

Black seemed to be thinking about something. Then he turned and laid a hand on Smithback’s shoulder. “Care to finish up F-one, my muckraking friend?”

“Slavery still exists,” Smithback muttered.

She raised her radio to her lips. “Enrique, this is Nora. Do you read?”

“Loud and clear,” came the answer after a moment of silence.

“Where are you?”

“In the crawlspace behind the granaries.”

“What are you doing back there?”

There was a short silence. “Better see for yourself. Come in from the west side.”

Nora walked around the back of the midden heap and past the first great tower. Typical cautious Aragon,she thought; why couldn’t the man simply come out and say what was up?

Just beyond the tower she picked up the small passageway that ran behind the granaries toward the back of the cave. It was dark and cool here behind the ruin, and the air smelled of sandstone and smoke. The passageway doglegged through a gap in the granaries, and there she came to a sunken passage—Aragon’s Crawlspace—at the very rear of the city. Once again, the Crawlspace was a feature unique to Quivira. As Nora moved forward, the ceiling of the passageway became so low that she had to drop to her hands and knees. There was a long moment of close, oppressive darkness, then ahead she could see the glow from Aragon’s lantern.

She rose to her feet inside a cramped space. Before her sat Aragon. Nora drew in her breath: beyond him lay a sea of human bones, their knobby surfaces thrown into sharp relief by the light. To her surprise, Aragon was holding a bone in one hand, examining it with jeweler’s loup and coordinated calipers. Beside him lay the tools for excavating human remains from surrounding matrix, barely necessary here: bamboo splints, wooden dowels, horsehair brushes. The place was silent save for the hiss of the lantern.

Aragon looked up as she approached, his face an unreadable mask.

“What is all this?” Nora asked. “Some kind of catacomb?”

Aragon did not reply for some time. Then he carefully placed the bone back on the heap beside him. “I don’t know,” he said in a flat tone. “It’s the largest ossuary I’ve ever encountered. I’ve heard of such things in Old World megalithic sites, but never in North America. And never, ever, on this kind of scale.”

Nora glanced from him to the bones. There were many complete skeletons lying on the top of the pile, but beneath them appeared to be a thick scattering of disarticulated bones, most of them broken, including countless crushed skulls. Punched into the stone walls at the back of the cave were dozens of holes, a few rotten timbers still jutting out of them.

“I’ve never seen anything like this either,” Nora said in a low voice.

“It’s like no burial practice, or cultural behavior, I’ve seen before,” Aragon said. “There are so many skeletons, so loosely thrown about, even a horizontal section is unnecessary.” He gestured at the closest skeletons. “It’s clearly a multiple interment of sorts: a series of primary burials, overlaying a vast number of secondary burials. These skeletons on top, the complete ones, weren’t even ‘buried’ in the archaeological sense of the word. The bodies seem to have been dragged in here and hastily thrown on top of a deep layer of preexisting bones.”

“Are there any signs of violence on the bones?”

“Not on the whole skeletons on top.”

“And the bones underneath?”

There was a short pause. “I’m still analyzing them,” Aragon replied.

Nora looked around, feeling an unpleasant gnawing in the pit of her stomach. She was far from squeamish, but the charnel-house nature of the place made her uncomfortable. “What could it mean?” she asked.

Aragon glanced up at her. “A large number of simultaneous burials usually means a single cause,” he said. “Famine, disease, war . . .” He paused. “Or sacrifice.”

At that moment her radio crackled. “Nora, this is Sloane. Are you there?”

Nora pulled her radio from her side. “I’m with Aragon. What is it?”

“There’s something you need to see. Both of you.” Through the microphone, the quiver of suppressed excitement in Sloane’s voice was clear. “Meet me at the central plaza.”

A few minutes later, Sloane was leading them through a complicated series of second-story roomblocks at the far end of the ruin. “We were doing a routine survey,” she was saying, “and then Peter found a large cavity in one of the floors with the proton magnetometer.” They stepped beneath a doorway and entered a large room, only dimly lit by the portable lantern. Unlike most of the other rooms she had seen at the ruin, this one was strangely empty. Holroyd stood in a far corner, tinkering with the magnetometer: a flat box rolling on sliding wheels, the long handle projecting from its side ending in an LCD screen.

But Nora wasn’t looking at Holroyd. She was gazing into the center of the room, where a section of floor had been removed, exposing a slab-lined cyst. The enormous flat stone that had covered it lay tipped up carefully against one wall.

“Who opened this grave?” she heard Aragon ask sharply.

Nora stepped forward, anger at this breach of authority flooding through her. Then she looked down and stopped short.

Within the cyst was a double burial. But it was no ordinary Anasazi burial, graced perhaps with a few pots and a turquoise pendant. The two completely disarticulated skeletons lay in the center of the grave, the broken bones of each arranged in a circular pattern in its own large painted bowl, surmounted by their broken skulls. Over each bowl had been draped cotton mantles, which had rotted down to the warp. Enough shreds remained, however, to see that they had once been extraordinarily fine, a pattern of grinning skulls and grimacing faces. The scalps of both individuals had been laid in the grave on top of their skulls. One had long white hair, beautifully braided and decorated with incised turquoise ornaments. The other had brown hair, also braided, with two huge dishes of polished abalone fixed to the ends of each braid. In both skulls, the front teeth had been drilled and inlaid with red carnelian.

Nora stared in astonishment. The bodies were surrounded by an unheard-of wealth of grave goods: pots filled with salt, turquoise, quartz crystals, fetishes, and ground pigments. There were also two small bowls, carved of quartz, filled to the brim with some kind of fine reddish powder—more red ochre, perhaps. Nora’s eyes moved over the cyst, picking out bundles of arrows, buffalo robes, soft buckskins, mummified parrots and macaws, elaborate prayer sticks. The entire burial was covered with a thick layer of yellow dust.

“I examined that dust under the stereozoom,” said Sloane. “It’s pollen, from at least fifteen different species of flowers.”

Nora stared at her in disbelief. “Why pollen?”

“The entire cyst was once filled with hundreds of pounds of flowers.”

Nora shook her head in disbelief. “The Anasazi never buried their dead like that. And I’ve never seen inlaid teeth like that before.”

Suddenly, Aragon knelt by the grave. At first, Nora had the odd notion he was going to pray. But then he bent down, shining a flashlight over the bones, scrutinizing them from a very close distance. As he probed the two pots of bones with his light, Nora noticed that many of the bones had been broken, and some showed signs of charring at their ends. Then Nora heard a sharp intake of breath, and Aragon quickly straightened up. His expression had suddenly changed.

“I would like permission to temporarily remove several bones for examination,” he said, his voice coldly formal.

More than anything else, this request, coming from Aragon, capped Nora’s mystification. “After we photograph and document everything, of course,” she heard herself say.

“Naturally. And I’d like to take a sample of that reddish powder.”

He departed wordlessly, but Nora continued to stand at the edge of the cyst, staring down into the dark hole in the floor. Sloane began setting up the 4x5 camera at the edge of the gravesite, while Holroyd powered down the magnetometer. Then he came over to Nora.

“Incredible, isn’t it?” he murmured in her ear.

But Nora paid no attention to this, or to the excited undercurrent of Sloane’s voice in the background. She was thinking of Aragon, and the sudden look that had come over his face. She felt it too: there was something odd, even wrong,about the burial. In some ways, she thought, it wasn’t like a burial at all. True, some Pueblo IV cultures cremated their dead, and others dug up and reburied their dead in pots. But this: the bones broken and burned; the thick flower dust; the grave goods ranged so carefully.

“I wonder what Black will make of this burial,” came Sloane’s voice, intruding on her reverie.

I don’t think this is a burial at all,Nora thought to herself. I think it’s an offering.

* * *

As they stepped out onto the first-floor roof, its farthest edges tipped in noontime sun, Nora gently laid a hand on Sloane’s arm.

“I thought we had an agreement,” she said.

Sloane turned to look at her. “What are you talking about?”

“You shouldn’t have opened that grave without consulting me first. That was a major violation of the ground rules for this dig.”

The amber color of Sloane’s eyes seemed to deepen as she listened to Nora. “And you don’t think opening the burial was a good idea?” she replied, her voice suddenly low, an almost feline susurrus.

“No, I don’t. We have a whole city to survey and catalog, and burials are particularly sensitive. But like I told you at Pete’s Ruin, that’s not the point. This isn’t how a professional archaeologist should work, simply digging up what interests her.”

“You’re saying I’m not a professional?” Sloane asked.

Nora took a deep breath. “You’re not as experienced as I thought you were.”

“I hadto open that cyst,” said Sloane abruptly.

“Why?” asked Nora, failing to keep the sarcasm from her voice. “Were you looking for something?”

Sloane started to answer, then stopped short. She moved closer, so close that Nora could feel the heat and anger radiating from her. “You, Nora Kelly, are a control freak. You’re just like my father. You’ve been breathing down my neck, hoping for mistakes, ever since I first flew in. I did nothing wrong in opening that burial. The magnetometer showed a cavity and all I did was lift the stone. I touched nothing.It was no more invasive than walking through a doorway.”

Nora struggled to maintain her composure. “If you can’t abide by the rules,” she said as evenly as she could, “I’ll place you under Aragon, where you can learn respect for the integrity of an archaeological site. And obedience to the expedition director.”

“Director?” Sloane sneered. “By all rights, Ishould be the expedition director. Don’t forget who’s paying for all this.”

“I haven’t forgotten,” Nora said, voice steady despite the heat of her anger. “Just one more example of your father not trusting you, isn’t it?”

For a moment, Sloane stood before her speechlessly, limbs taut, face dark under the deep tan. Then, wordlessly, she pivoted on her heel. Nora watched her descend the ladder and walk deliberately away, erect and proud, her dark hair burned violet by the sun.

30

THE GROUP ASSEMBLED IN THE EARLY MORNING silence at the base of the rope ladder leading to the city. Even Swire and Bonarotti were on hand. The swallows, now acclimated to the human intrusion, no longer raised their usual clamor of indignation. An unusually subdued Bill Smithback was fumbling with a cassette recorder. Beside him stood Aragon, face gray and thoughtful. Despite his preoccupation with the bone-filled crawlspace, he had left his work to join them. This, more than anything, underscored the importance of what they were about to undertake.

A rough preliminary survey of the city had been completed, and Holroyd had downloaded the location coordinates and field elevations established by his GPS equipment into a geographic information systems database. It was time to enter the Great Kiva, the central religious structure of the city. For much of the previous night, Nora had lain awake, wondering about what they might find. In the end, her imagination had failed her. The Great Kiva was equivalent to the cathedral of a medieval city: the center of its religious activity, the repository of the most sacred items, the locus of social life.

Black was resting on a rock, drumming his fingers with ill-disguised anticipation. And chatting with him, oversized plant in his hand, was Peter Holroyd, loyal and uncomplicated. The only person missing was Sloane, whom Nora had scarcely seen since the previous day’s confrontation.

As if sensing her glance, Holroyd looked her way. Then he stood and approached her, shaking the plant he was holding. “Have a look at this, Nora,” he said.

She took the plant: an oversized, bushy explosion of green stalks, with a tapered root at one end and a creamy flower at the other.

“What is it?” she asked.

“Oh, about five to ten in a Federal prison.” Holroyd laughed.

She threw him an uncomprehending gaze.

“It’s datura,” he explained. “That root’s loaded with a highly potent hallucinogen.”

“Hallucinogen?”

“The alkaloid is concentrated in the upper sections of the root,” Aragon interjected. “Among Yaqui shamans, fortitude is measured by just how far up the root you can ingest.” He glanced at Holroyd. “But certainly you’ve noticed that’s not the only illegal plant in this valley.”

Holroyd nodded. “Not only datura, but psilocybin, mescal cactus . . . the place is a veritable smorgasbord of psychedelics.”

“The curious thing,” Aragon said, “is that those three plants you mention—which seem to run riot here—are sometimes taken by shamans and medicine men. In combination, they can induce a wild frenzy. It’s like an overdose of PCP: you could get shot at close range and never feel it.”

“Those priests knew what they were doing, settling here,” Smithback cackled.

“The flower’s pretty, at least,” Nora said.

“Looks like a morning glory, doesn’t it?” Holroyd asked. “That’s another funny thing. There’s an enzyme in the datura root that the body can’t metabolize. Instead, it gets exuded in the sweat. And I’ve heard that’s exactly what people who take it smell like. Morning glories.”

Unconsciously, Nora leaned forward, bringing the flower to her nose. It was large and white, almost sexual in its ripeness. She inhaled the delicate scent deeply.

Then she froze, fingers turning cold. In a moment, her mind was back in the upstairs hallway of her parents’ abandoned ranch house, hearing the crunch of glass underfoot, smelling the scent of crushed flowers on the still night air...

She heard a clatter, and turned to see Sloane approaching, burdened by a portable acetylene lantern, a chalk information board, and the 4x5 camera. Sloane caught her eye. Immediately, the woman put down the equipment and came over. She slid a graceful arm around Nora’s waist.

“Sorry,” she whispered in Nora’s ear. “You were right. As usual.”

Nora nodded, pulling herself back to the present. “Let’s not talk about it.”

Sloane drew away slightly. “I guess it’s obvious. I have a problem with authority. Something else I have to thank my father for. It won’t happen again.”

“Thank you,” Nora said, dropping the plant. “And I shouldn’t have made that crack about your father. It was unkind.”

Then she turned to the group, doing her best to push thoughts of Holroyd’s plant out of her mind. “Okay, here’s the protocol. Sloane and I will enter the kiva first, to make an initial analysis and do the photography. The rest of you will follow. Agreed?”

Black frowned, but there was nodding and murmuring from the rest of the group.

“Good. Then let’s get started.”

One at a time, they ascended the rope ladder. Moving through the central plaza, they climbed a nearby sandpile and walked across the first setback of roofs. Mounting an Anasazi ladder placed against the second story—still in perfect condition, lashed with sinew—they topped out on the second story setback. The entrance to the Great Kiva lay at the back, its vast circular bulk in purple shadow. Another ladder had been placed against its wall, and in a moment Nora and Sloane stood on the roof. It was covered with a thick layer of adobe and felt immensely solid beneath Nora’s feet. As with all kivas, it was entered from a hole in the roof. Protruding from the opening were the two ends of a ladder, leading down into the interior. As she stared at the ladder, Nora felt her mouth go dry.

She moved slowly toward it, stopping just before the opening. “Let’s light the lantern,” she said.

There was the hiss of gas, and with a pop of ignition the lantern sprang to life. As they knelt by the opening, Sloane directed the brilliant white light down into the gloom.

The ladder descended about fifteen feet, ending in an anchor groove cut into the sandstone floor. Sloane angled the beam around, but from their vantage point nothing but bare floor was visible: the kiva was sixty feet in diameter, and the walls were beyond reach.

“You can go first,” Nora said.

Sloane looked at her. “Me?”

Nora smiled.

Quickly, Sloane climbed down the first five rungs, then held up her hand for the lamp. Climbing down a few more rungs, she stopped to direct the light around the walls. Nora could not see what Sloane was looking at, but she could see the expression on the young woman’s face. The kiva, she knew then, was not empty.

Sloane rapidly descended to the bottom, and after a last deep breath Nora followed. A moment later she stepped off the ladder, her eyes following the lamp’s broad illumination.

The circular wall of the kiva was covered with a brilliantly colored mural. The images were highly stylized, and Nora had to examine them for a moment before she realized what they represented. Ranged around the top were four huge thunderbirds, their outstretched wings almost covering the entire upper part of the kiva wall. Jagged lightning shot from the birds’ eyes and beaks. Below, clouds drifted across a field of brilliant turquoise, dropping dotted curtains of white rain. Running through the clouds was a rainbow god, his long body encircling almost the entire circumference of the kiva, his head and hands outstretched and meeting at the north. Toward the bottom of the mural was the landscape of the earth itself. Nora noticed the four sacred mountains, placed at each of the cardinal directions. It was the cosmography that still ran through most present-day southwestern Native American religions: the black mountain in the north, the yellow mountain in the west, the white mountain in the east, and the blue mountain in the south. The mural was executed in the finest detail, and the colors, so long buried in darkness, seemed as fresh as if they had been painted the day before.

Nora dropped her eyes. Below the mural, ranging around the circumference of the kiva, was a stone banco. On the banco lay a huge number of gleaming objects, appearing and disappearing as the lantern beam moved slowly over them. As she stared, Nora realized, with a kind of remote surprise, that they were all skulls. There were dozens, if not hundreds of them: human, bear, buffalo, wolf, deer, mountain lion, jaguar—each completely covered with an inlay of polished turquoise. But it was the eyes that struck Nora most of all. In each eye socket lay a carved globe of rose quartz crystal, inlaid with carnelian, that refracted, magnified, and threw back the beam of the lamp, causing the eyes to gleam hideously pink in the murk. It was a grinning crowd of the dead, a host of lidless ghouls, ranged around them, their eyes glowing maniacally, as if caught in the headlights of a car.