Ancient Enemy (5 page)

“I’m…so…sorry,” I whispered.

I wiped the tears from my face, walked around the bed, and stared down at the mess I’d made of my grandfather’s few cherished possessions.

“Please forgive me.”

I had just knelt and begun carefully examining each object in the dim light from the hallway when I heard the thumping of heavy footsteps, felt their reverberation through my knees, and wondered if there was any possible way the day could get any worse.

“What the hell’s going on in here?”

I couldn’t bring myself to look at her, so I watched her shadow on the worn carpet and the hazy movement of the smoke around her head.

“I knocked the shelf down. I’m cleaning it up now.”

Her shadow swayed before she braced her arm against the threshold.

“Make sure you do.”

And then her shadow was gone and I felt the creaking of the floorboards dissipate as she returned to the couch, which welcomed her back with a screech and a groan.

I removed the parfleche from the pile, smoothed it flat again, and set it aside. The paint was now cracked and flaking, but the design remained otherwise intact. Some of the beads had broken off of the ration pouch and the top of the ticket was creased. It represented an era in our history I’m surprised anyone would want to remember. The neck of the water jar was cracked where the sandstone slab leaned against it, yet otherwise both appeared to have survived largely unscathed. It was the rattle I worried about most. I had to pry it out from underneath the shelf, which had cracked down the middle with the impact.

I held it close to my face and inspected it. The wider portion appeared flatter on one side and the leather cord holding it together had torn through one of the holes. The handle was slightly bent. I rolled it over and listened to the jagged crystals tumble over each other and settle like bits of shattered porcelain. I prayed to God it would work.

The light from the hallway reflected from my grandfather’s eyes as he watched me.

I inspected the rattle as I gently shook it. Just a couple of times back and forth. It felt solid enough in my hand and nothing fell out. I shook it just hard enough to produce the faintest glow through the leather and nearly sobbed in relief when it didn’t come apart. I shook it harder still and bathed the room in the rich cobalt glare. The white walls turned an electric purple. The parfleche and the ration pouch seemed to glow. The paint on the water jar became almost fluorescent and the sandstone—

The rattle fell from my hand.

I’d seen…something there…something that hadn’t been there before.

I felt the weight of my grandfather’s stare and turned to look at him. I saw him behind those fearful eyes, saw him staring right at me.

I picked up the rattle. Turned it over and over in my hands. Hefted its weight. Then looked right at the sandstone slab when I shook it again.

Where once there had been only a solitary stick figure man, standing alone in the Canyon of the Ancients, at the foot of the cliff into which the House of Many Windows had been built, there were now dozens of men and animals around him with Xs for eyes. Stick figures of varying size. Sheep and pronghorns. Deer and elk. Designs that were impossible to see without the mechanoluminscence of the quartz crystals inside the rattle.

There was another animal, too. Perched high upon the cliff near the pueblo. An animal with a hunched back, an oblong head, and a jagged line of teeth. And the horns of a ram.

The moment I stopped shaking the rattle, it was gone.

I looked back at my grandfather, who appeared more at peace than I’d seen him since the stroke. He closed his eyes and I’d swear the left side of his mouth curved upward, if only slightly, into the hint of a smile.

NINE

Of all of the Anasazi dwellings in the Canyons of the Ancients, the House of Many Windows had to be the least accessible. What were originally mistaken for windows were actually the small doorways of eleven adjacent dwellings built onto a ten-foot-deep stone ledge in an otherwise sheer limestone escarpment that could only be reached via a treacherous toe trail from the mesa top fifty feet above it. Below lie only a series of steppes, whose cliffs were lined with dangerous accumulations of talus from which gnarled pines and cedars miraculously grew, leading down to the canyon floor where the dense trees collected the sparse remaining water of what was once a vast prehistoric ocean.

From where I stood now, shielding my eyes from the blinding glare of the sun, I couldn’t even see it.

I left Yanaba to nose through the pinecones and needles for piñon nuts as I worked my way to the edge of the cliff and the start of what hardly qualified as a path by any definition of the word. I caught a glint of sunlight from the National Forest Service sign far across the canyon, in the scenic overlook off of Mesa Top Loop Road, where, during the summer, the tourists snapped pictures of these dwellings with telephoto lenses. I intended to get a far closer look.

A toe trail was literally just that: a series of faint indentations in the sandstone barely deep enough to accommodate your fingers and toes as you crawled down the steep rock like a gecko. I couldn’t imagine having to do this every day to reach my home, especially in the dead of winter when the frigid winds whipped through the valley and every surface was rimed with ice. You’d have to be pretty terrified of something to even consider it.

It took forever to negotiate the trail. At least that’s how it felt. By the time I reached level ground, my muscles ached in places I didn’t even know I had muscles, places that were going to make my ride home a lot more uncomfortable. I kicked a rock over the edge and watched it flutter and flare like a bird before diving to the slickrock and skipping over the steppe below. It vanished from sight long before I heard it clatter down the talus.

The walls of the pueblo were built so close to the ledge there was hardly room to walk. They were composed of flat chunks of sandstone and granite fitted together like bricks. The dwellings toward the center remained largely intact, while the wind and the elements had conspired to topple those at the periphery. I ducked through the first patent entrance and into a blessedly cool darkness that spared me the brunt of the wind and the prospect of falling to my death. The walls between dwellings had fared about as well as those along the front. They’d fallen in sections through which I could crawl from one tiny home to the next if I wasn’t worried about tearing my jacket or the knees of my pants. It was hard to imagine people living here in any kind of numbers. The individual dwellings were smaller than prison cells and even I had to duck to keep from knocking myself unconscious on the low roof near the back. It almost felt as though this entire pueblo had been built for children rather than adults, like some last bastion of safety for the next generation should the battle their parents waged be lost.

I shivered at the thought. There was something about the idea of a vanished society constructing a tiny sanctuary, which was nearly as hard to see from any vantage point as it was to reach, with the sole intention of hiding their children from an enemy it feared it could not defeat that rang true to me. I imagined frightened mothers whispering for their children to be brave as they sent them crawling over the pitfall, while all around them the war cries of their fathers echoed through the valley. Those children sitting in the cool darkness where I now stood, wondering what the resultant silence meant and how much longer they would have to stay hidden before someone eventually came to retrieve them.

I pried the rattle out from beneath my waistband and shook it. The pale blue glow diffused through the small room. Petroglyphs appeared on the sandstone where moments before I had seen nothing. They were old and faded and indistinct, little more than the powdery residue that remained of whatever phosphorescent medium they’d used to paint it. I recognized men and animals. Coyotes and deer and turkeys and pronghorns and bears. Animals like bison and mountain goats I had a hard time imagining had ever roamed this area in any kind of numbers, and yet here they were, immortalized on the stone by hands I would have been surprised to learn were even as old as mine.

And there was something else I recognized, not from the history books or from legends, but from a chunk of rock I suspected originated somewhere nearby and somehow found its way into my grandfather’s possession. There was the animal with the hunched back and the oblong head with the horns of a ram. It must have been utterly terrifying to have been captured in such painstaking detail by what I now believed to be children.

Children who might or might not have understood that their parents would never be coming back for them.

I watched that process of comprehension play out before me on the walls as I crawled from one room to the next, shaking the rattle as I went. I saw great warriors with spears and arrows, etched larger than life by those who revered them, and I saw an enemy against which there was no doubt they would fall, even in the minds of those who drew them. And I watched that number of warriors diminish and their eyes turn to Xs, watched the same thing happen to the animals, and wondered exactly what kind of view this pueblo afforded.

Eventually, I encountered a section where the rear wall had cracked and portions of the storyline had crumbled away and fallen to the ground. This was where my grandfather’s slab had originated. Right here in this very room where once a child had knelt in the darkness, painting his or her final testament onto the sandstone while waiting for the eventual return of his or her parents, or for the enemy against which they fought to scurry over the edge of the mesa and find where they’d been hidden.

And in the next to the last room I found the depiction of another location I recognized. A steep cliff on top of which was the unmistakable design of the Sun Temple. The original construction consisted of fifteen-foot double walls filled with rubble, fortified in a manner well beyond any of the other dwellings. A construction, archaeologists believed, that was abandoned before its completion. And below it, halfway up the steep cliff, was a doorway into which more of the hunched creatures with the horns appeared to be crawling, bringing with them stick men and animals with Xs for eyes. And one creature, right in the middle of the doorway, that I couldn’t help but feel as though was staring right at me through the centuries.

There was no continuation of the storyline in the last room. Nothing but bare rock.

I crawled back out and sat on the ledge with my feet dangling over the precipice for a while. The still darkness, which had initially felt so wonderful after riding so far in the frigid wind, had suddenly become smothering. I reveled in the sensation of the movement of fresh air against my bare skin. There was something about this place that made me increasingly uncomfortable, as though rather than an ancient dwelling, it had served as a tomb.

I climbed back up the toe trail and shared a half-frozen bottle of water with Yanaba before hauling myself up onto her back. We were both going to need it for the long ride ahead.

TEN

The Sun Temple was named for a single design found on a rock in the southwest corner. Experts believed construction on the temple commenced in 1275, well after the Anasazi moved from their original dwellings on the mesa tops into the defensible cliff dwellings, and then was abandoned with the remainder of the Canyons of the Ancients a year later. The truth was no one actually knew the function of the structure high above me on the pine-crowned bluff, with its reinforced outer walls and both circular and square inner rooms.

From where I stood, shielding my brow from the blinding sun and its reflection from the snow, I couldn’t even see it all the way up there. I was looking for something entirely different, regardless, and I was having a devil of a time finding it. The temple itself had been built on a great stone pinnacle at the confluence of two vast canyons. I’d wasted precious hours searching the scree-lined steppes and dense pine thickets of Cliff Canyon and was nearly to the point of calling Fewkes Canyon a total wash when I finally saw what I’d come here to find. It certainly wasn’t a massive cave crawling with great hunchbacked animals with horns, nor did it really look like it had a whole lot of potential. It was little more than an oblong amoeboid shadow high up on a ledge amid the boulders that had collected there through the eons after crumbling from the buttes, the kind of thing you would never see if you weren’t specifically looking for it. Truth be told, I couldn’t be entirely certain it actually was the mouth of a cave and not a trick of the late afternoon shadows, that I wasn’t just seeing what I wanted to see. And even if it was an opening, it barely looked large enough for a coyote to wriggle through, let alone someone my size, but I could worry about that later. The biggest problem from my current vantage point was figuring out how in the name of God I was going to get up there.

Nearly a thousand years ago, there’d been toe trails and handholds that were now smoothed to mere impressions by the abrasive winds of time, tall wooden ladders that connected ledges that had since fallen to ruin, and paths that had grown trees and shrubs that were now impossible to get around. And even with that in mind, it was hard to imagine that there was a single inch of this area that hadn’t been explored and excavated by the anthropology classes from every major university that descended upon this area every summer in hopes of learning why, after building such a truly phenomenal society, the Anasazi had simply disappeared without a trace.