The Next Skywatcher: Prequel to The Last Skywatcher Triple Trilogy Series (The Last Skywatcher, Anasazi Historical Thrillers with a Hint of Romance Book 1) (2 page)

1041 A.D. Chimney Rock National Monument, Colorado:
The Twins

Outside the house
where his wife shrieked in pain, a man paced. He wanted it to be over. He wanted to hold his son, his new warrior.

Even twenty feet away, at the edge of the cliff, his wife’s cries pierced his ears like jabs of lightning. To calm himself, he put his fingers in his ears and looked over the blanket of pines that covered a wide valley that rose and ended at another sharp cliff line. He saw it more with his mind than his eyes. The dying quarter moon didn’t illuminate it enough to see well. But he knew the coolness of the valley. Its darkness. Its cruelty. Its indifference.

A great brown bear had killed his father in that valley. Dragged him to a hiding place and ate him. After they found the remains, his mother sprawled there wailing in a voice that grew hoarse and weak until the full moon came and took her away. He lived after that with an aunt he hated, and hunted great bear when he could escape from the women. The elder men laughed at him because he failed to make a kill, to even get a glimpse of one. But they missed the point, and he was proud. His hatred for the great bears was so strong that they sensed it and were afraid to come near him. He even taunted them at times, strolling naked and unarmed, barefoot even, through places covered with their tracks. But they never showed themselves. He was invincible. Nothing could match his fierce spirit.

He repelled not only bear, but people. He tried to reason with them, to think like they told him to, and do the things they did. But he recognized the error of their ways. What they called pureness of spirit, he called weakness. They were mice, while he became more mighty than the greatest of great bears.

He had no feelings for his wife. When he needed to be charming and compassionate, he did. He studied others and learned to act like them, and he fooled this woman into loving him and her father, the sky chief himself, into giving his blessing. But after she bore his son and weaned him from her breast, he would be done with her. Finished with all women, except for his physical needs. When any of them started talking, it always sounded like pointless wailing to his ears. Like his mother. Her spirit was so weak, she let the full moon take it away.

Ah, his son! He would raise the boy right. Teach him how to have a spirit strong enough to repel great bears. Together they would…. He shook his head, the options were so endless. They could rise to power and rule anywhere they wished, even the sacred canyon with its grand buildings, solemn priests, and gaudy warriors. Whoever controlled the warriors could rule anyone and anything. A faint grin pulled at the corners of his mouth. He and his son would rise to greatness together.

The screams stopped and he removed his fingers from his ears and stood still to catch the first cries of his son. A falcon screeched from the twin cliff spires and launched itself into the night. Strange behavior. Did it mean something? He looked up toward the platform of the sky chief. Surely he heard it and knew what it meant. But the old man hid himself inside his circle of stones rather than attend the birth of his own grandson.

That was fine. He disliked the old sky chief and preferred being alone to wait for the spirit of his little warrior.

The long silence began to worry him. The woman or that strange midwife might do something to deny him a son. Maybe the cry of the falcon mean something. A signal to steal or harm his son.

He rushed onto the roof and climbed down the ladder, taking a deep breath as he passed through the cleansing piñon smoke that rose from the hearth, and once inside, in the burnt-orange light of a thick bed of coals, he saw the albino midwife he did not trust and his wife looking at a thing that seemed impossibly small and still.

“What is that?” he asked, smoke billowing from his mouth and nose. He deflected the reflexive urge to cough. He was in complete control.

“It’s your son,” said his wife in a flat voice. “It has no spirit. Did you not hear the night falcon? The gods are not happy with you.”

Her sarcasm sparked his anger. He loved the rise of anger. He welcomed it and used it well when it came. It’s what made him stronger than any other man. As a boy he discovered he could make anyone do anything after a show of extreme and explosive anger. The more freely he loosed it, the more easily the world of men fell at his feet. The Southerners who ruled the sacred canyon respected him for it, and he had risen in their esteem. A son, raised right, would solidify his place among them, give him something to build and pass along. But the thing this worthless woman had spat out of her sick birth hole would not do.

He leaned close to the lifeless body and inspected it. A boy, no doubt. But it had no fat, a stick-child, head too large for its body, fingers curled like tiny dead spiders. A roar erupted from him. It burst out hot as the smoke from a bonfire, pure anger from the core of his being. The white-haired midwife cowered, hands over her face, but his wife stared at him as if this were
his
fault. He hated her more than he had hated even his father for letting himself get eaten by a great bear.

He swung a leg and kicked at the cowering midwife. A rush of air escaped her lips, followed by a retching sound as his foot sank deep into her stomach. He danced to change feet and kicked with his other foot at her face, which collapsed with a satisfying crunch. He gave himself fully to the anger and watched his hands pull everything from the walls, smash pottery, scatter the sky chief’s sacred stones, and then turn to his wife, who still watched him in that calm way she inherited from her father. He hated her for that. For the old man’s spirit showing through her. For living with the worry that it might pass to his son. But she had ruined everything. He grabbed her hair and dragged her off the birthing mat. She grunted and twisted but did not call out.

“If you cannot give me a better son than this,” he said, “then there is no use for you in this world.”

He dragged her to the hearth and forced her face into the glowing coals. She jerked and flailed. Her screams, not unlike the shrieks of birthing, filled the house. When he smelled searing flesh and her body rattled and trembled, he stepped hard onto the back of her head until she stopped twitching and his foot became too warm to tolerate. The stench, he thought, was lovely.

He looked around the room, quiet as if the air had been sucked out, and heard a faint pop, followed by gurgles and a choking sound. The midwife had come to, he thought, but the sound became the unmistakable cry of a baby.

He picked it up and held it in his right hand, its head lolling on his fingers and its legs bouncing against his wrist. If it had a tail, it would look like a lizard, tiny scales and all. It would be so easy to snap its neck. But the beautiful rush of anger drained from him as if he’d been gutted. He felt empty and weak as he stared at the thing in his hand, the most pathetic form of life imaginable.

“You are less than nothing,” he muttered.

What should he do with it? The sudden appearance of its spirit worried him. When life flowed out of the mother, it flowed into the child. Should he kill her again?

No. He had failed to kill her spirit once. This time she would be ready, leap into him, claw at him from the inside out, turn him against himself. He had to get rid of it and escape before it died.

He rushed up the ladder one-handed, palming the lizard baby, walked to the edge of the low cliff, knelt, and tossed it into the trash pile below. In the thin moonlight he saw it land, bounce, and roll. He listened for a cry and heard only the far-away yipping of coyotes running from wolves.

He swallowed hard and breathed deep. He had to get away before her spirit made its way up to him. He looked around, hoping no one witnessed, and hurried to a steep, little-used trail that led down the darkest backside of the tilted mesa.

Sixteen years later, 1057 A.D., south of Chaco Canyon, New Mexico

Tuwa looked over
the rolling sunbaked grasslands below. He swallowed, a nervous sweat coating the fuzz on his upper lip, and shifted the dried-meat jar he had carried since he joined The Pochtéca.
Now
, he told himself. But he hesitated. He had never challenged The Pochtéca to this degree before, and he wasn’t sure how the iron-willed trader would react. But, then, The Pochtéca had never led them back to the place where the horror had happened. Where Tuwa, his childhood friend Choovio, and half the two-dozen orphans who followed The Pochtéca lost their families. Finally, Tuwa clenched his stomach muscles and stepped aside to let the others pass. Choovio joined him in lockstep, as he expected. Soon the line of children split into two—half standing with Tuwa and Choovio, half following The Pochtéca, their wide eyes gawking at the rebels.

Tuwa studied the faces of those who stood with him, all made homeless by the terror that followed the appearance of the Day Star That Faded three summers ago. None laughed, none even fidgeted in the sunlight waiting for The Pochtéca’s reaction to their stepping out of line. They’d just passed over the final ridge of a high plateau that marked the southern boundary of the People of Shadow, foreigners from the far South who came to worship knife-edge shadows cast by rocks and cliffs in what they called Center Place Canyon, a treeless landscape where they built stone buildings as tall as mesas, and a massive earthen altar for…Tuwa could barely think it…human sacrifice.

His taut face ached waiting for the wrath of The Pochtéca, while his mind raced with memories of that time. He knew it had seared separately into the hearts of those who stood with him, a pain so deep they rarely spoke of it, acknowledged it mostly in silence and lips pressed hard together as they toiled, perhaps with an occasional twitch of the hand or elbow, a feeble reenactment of escape or resistance they had failed to make at the time it would have mattered.

Soon the red wraparound cloth hat of The Pochtéca reappeared, the thousand tiny copper bells sewn to his cotton shirt jingling with every step. The other children followed him obediently in the order proscribed by him, eldest boys at his back, youngest in the middle, eldest girls bringing up the rear, each of them bearing a heavy burden.

The Pochtéca stopped the distance of a man’s height from Tuwa and stared into his chest. Tuwa stood as a mirror to him, refusing to be anything but an equal to the man. He and Choovio would break away on their own if they had to. The youngest children dropped their burdens and collapsed to the ground. The elder children craned their necks to see what The Pochtéca would do. Finally, he waved his hand to make camp here, a tilted and rocky place, but the orphans who had not split themselves off as rebels began working together and soon had a fire burning behind a boulder as windbreak. Uncharacteristically, The Pochtéca did not remove his heavy shirt of copper bells, but simply stood with his walking staff and stared into Tuwa’s chest.

Tuwa admired The Pochtéca. He had saved Tuwa and each of these orphans from near-certain death. He was a good and fair man who liked to laugh and tell stories and organize games among the children. But he could be harsh and expelled followers who did not adhere to his rules. He particularly disliked insubordination. Tuwa, however, intended to be respectful, which The Pochtéca deserved. The man had made a life for himself unlike any other Tuwa knew. He forever walked long distances between far-flung villages, taking in children without families to carry his burdens, a combination trader and orphanage. At every village, small and large, the people celebrated The Pochtéca’s arrival. They treated him and the orphans as special visitors, and he told stories and talked late into the night, speaking fluently in tongues that few knew existed, much less had ever heard. Because of his trademark red hat and jingle bell shirt, even those who had never seen him recognized him.

Tuwa stood nearly as tall as The Pochtéca. He was a short man as Tuwa would be when he soon reached his adult height. They each had noses that resembled the hooked beaks of the sacred falcon, swarthy sunbaked skin, and black eyes. But the similarities ended there. Tuwa’s legs were straight and graceful, whereas The Pochtéca’s were excessively bowed, making him walk like a waddling water fowl. And Tuwa preferred quiet and the company of few, whereas The Pochtéca exuded mirth and liked braggadocio and large admiring audiences. Tuwa felt coiled and tense as he watched The Pochtéca stare at his chest but not into his eyes. The meat jar became a dead weight on his shoulder.