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

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BOOK: The Summoning God: Book II of the Anasazi Mysteries
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“Maybe she sent the girl up the western trail with instructions to
hide in the forest. After I left, the woman could have gone to find the child and run away.”
Browser finished his tea, set the cup down, and pulled a strip of jerky from his pouch. As he ate, his eyes searched the rain-drenched forest. Juniper branches trembled in the wind, rattling like old bones, and the rich pungent fragrance of wet cedar enveloped them. His gaze roamed the tufts of cloud on the distant hilltops.
“I think I’ve told you everything important,” he said, and looked back at her. “Now. What of your night? The wounded woman crawled up and told you I was in the kiva. What else did you see?”
Pale blue flames danced at the base of the largest log. Catkin focused on them, remembering: “I spent a good deal of time examining the mummy. I think they forced her to walk through fire, Browser. She had burn scars on her feet and legs, and her toes were gone. At first, I assumed someone had cut them off, then stanched the blood with fire. But”—she shook her head—“it would have taken more than that to cause such hideous scars. I think they made her walk through fire until it burned off her toes and roasted her legs.”
Irritated, he said, “What does that have to do with Aspen village?”
She shrugged.
He propped his sandal on one of the warm hearthstones and gestured with his jerky. “Remember everything you can. Matron Flame Carrier will wish to hear the details when we return.”
Lightning flashed right over their heads and they both hit the ground on their bellies, their clubs in hard fists, ready to strike the first thing that moved. Rain dripped into Catkin’s eyes.
When the Thunderbirds flew away, Browser got to his knees and gave Catkin a disgruntled look. Mud coated his chin and the front of his coat. He said, “We should leave before we kill each other by mistake.”
She pulled herself up and brushed at the mud on her cape. “If we run straight through, we might make it home before dawn tomorrow. Perhaps Matron Flame Carrier and the other elders will understand these things better than we do.”
Determination lit Browser’s eyes. “On my souls, Catkin, I will gather the village elders as quickly as possible to ask them. I
will
find the answers.”
T
HE HOT WIND WAS UNUSUAL FOR THE MIDDLE OF OCTOBER, bearing with it the smells of sage, dry earth, and the tang of coal dust from the Four Corners power plants. Showers of yellow leaves blew from the cottonwoods and spiraled away in the murky river current.
Dusty stood chest-deep in the kiva, balancing precariously on the uneven footing. Beside him, Steve Sanders stopped and wiped sweat from his ebony face. He had doffed his shirt a little before ten; now, at two-thirty, the temperature had reached the high eighties. Mud mottled Sanders dark skin and accented the rippling muscles in his back and shoulders.
“Gimme a hand, boss,” Steve called, bending down to grasp a protruding rock.
Dusty found a grip and levered the big square chunk of sandstone from the ground. Together, he and Steve tossed it up into the wheelbarrow four feet above their heads; it landed with a hollow clunk.
“Charcoal,” Dusty said, squinting down into the hole left by the rock. He looked around the curving walls that hemmed them. “About time.”
“Got that right, massa.”
Dusty’s mouth pursed distastefully. “Did I ever tell you how much I hate that?”
“Don’ worry, boss. If’n I find myself offensive, I’ll report myself to the NAACP.” Steve grinned.
Dusty said, “You know, a man with an IQ of one hundred and seventy-six, a GPA of four point three, who’s finishing his Ph.D. dissertation on an analysis of Chacoan religious philosophy within a Jungian context shouldn’t talk like Uncle Remus all the time.”
“I’ll keep dat in mind.” Steve bent down and frowned at the ground. “Is that what I think it is?”
“Roof beam, I’d say.” They were finally coming down on the bottom. Excavating kiva fill was one of the least favorite things in archaeological excavation. The only thing he anticipated with more dread was backfilling. Kivas, as a matter of course, were large holes in the ground. Gravity had a thing about holes; it spent all of its time filling them back up again. In this case, collapsed walls, wind-borne dust and sand, bits of twigs and seeds, and anything that seven hundred and fifty years of rain could wash in had collected over the collapsed roof, and the cultural level on the original kiva floor.
Dusty surveyed the rock-stippled brown earth and the one broken section of charred beam. “I think this is going to be a son of a gun.”
Steve nodded. “In the old days, they would have just chunked that stuff out.”
“Yeah, well.” Dusty looked up at the shiny steel datum stake they’d driven into the ground. “We’d better get an elevation on that charred beam. If we do this right, we can have the rest of the fill out of here by quitting time.”
Instead, it took until noon the next day before Dusty and Steve had removed the last of the wall rubble. Dusty crouched on one of the pilasters overlooking the floor and updated his notes while Steve used a flat shovel to begin scraping through the silty sand that had trickled down over the collapsed roof. Because they’d been burned, the heavy beams had been preserved, and the actual shape of the roof could be determined.
“Whoa!” Steve laid his shovel aside and reached into his back pocket for his trowel. “I’ve got bone here, Dusty.”
Dusty arched an eyebrow as he put the finishing touches on a sketch map of the kiva floor. A slight red discoloration of the soil was the only discernible feature beyond the scattered charcoal and root casts from long dead plants. “What kind?”
Steve dropped to his hands and knees, his trowel ringing as he scraped away the surrounding soil. “Better come look; this is weird.”
Dusty lowered himself from the pilaster and crowded next to Steve. Where the shovel edge had cut the bone surface, it gleamed oddly yellow against the dark, ash-filled soil.
Dusty took a brush from his back pocket and whisked the dirt away. The bone had a mottled look. “Burned. Probably the same time the kiva went up. Small, though. Maybe a deer or antelope?”
“I don’t think so.” Steve shifted to allow the slanting sunlight to shine on the bone. “Cortex isn’t thick enough for deer.”
“Well, it’s not an adult.” Dusty had worked on burials not so long ago. He could imagine Maureen’s black eyes narrowing as she examined the bone, knowing with certainty what it was.
Steve said, “I’m guessing this is a humerus, an arm bone. But it’s missing the condyle. Epiphyseal line hasn’t ossified.”
“Right.” Dusty gave Steve a disgusted glance. “Sounds Greek to me.”
“Very good, Mr. Principal Investigator, sir.” Steve turned it over in his hand. “But I can’t even guess as to age, sex, or any of that other stuff.”
“It’s one bone,” Dusty said, straightening and clapping the dust from his hands. “Shoot it in, photograph it, record it, and let’s get on with life.”
“Yassuh, massa.”
“Quit that.”
Steve saluted.
Dusty climbed back up, balanced on the ladder that allowed them access in and out of the kiva, and levered his butt onto the pilaster, where he reopened his notebook to the level form and began a notation of the burned fragment of humerus.
Steve yelled, “Whoa! Dusty, you’d better get back down here.”
“Why?” Dusty scrambled down and stood over Steve as he carefully scooped back the moist black dirt from yet another bit of bone, this one irregular, also mottled. The thing looked like a big flat cashew nut that a giant’s foot had squashed. “Innominate,” Dusty said.
“Illium,” Steve agreed. “A child’s hip. I’d guess a kid about six or seven.” He used the tip of the trowel to pull back the soil below the end of the bone. “Yep, here’s the swell of the ischial tuberosity.” He tapped the soil. “Pubis bone ought to be right under here.” He scraped away more dirt. “Right there. Damn, I’m good.”
Dusty dropped to his knees and pulled his own trowel from his back pocket. “Let’s peel this back. If we’ve got more than just a single kid, I want to know about it sooner rather than later.”
The trowel cut thin shavings of rich dark soil. Bits of root snapped and popped, while gravel and spalled sandstone rang against the tempered steel. In three passes, the rounded curve of a skull lay exposed. Dusty grunted and worked faster, freeing the brow ridge from
the layer of earth. Two eye sockets stared at him from plugs of black earth. “Adult. A woman—”
“I don’t believe it!” Steve breathed. “Look at this. It looks like I’ve got another skull. Younger, though, a little girl, I think. Bone is coming up all over!”
Dusty shoved his hat back on his head and expelled a breath. “Contrary to what I told Dale, I don’t think I can throw all of this out with the back dirt.”
Tentatively, Steve said, “Looks like we need a physical anthropologist. Talked to Dr. Cole lately?”
“God forbid,” Dusty said, and grimaced at the thought. “But my future isn’t looking as bright.”
M
ATRON FLAME CARRIER ROLLED ONTO HER SIDE, AND long gray hair streamed across her red blanket. Wind Baby fluttered the prayer feathers that framed her door, then swept into her chamber, sniffed at the pots and baskets along the white plastered walls, and rattled the dried corn hanging from the ceiling rafters. The brittle scent of autumn filled the air.
She rubbed her tired eyes.
“Great Ancestors, I haven’t slept well in nine moons.”
Not since she’d led the Katsinas’ People away from the horrors in Straight Path Canyon.
Where were Browser and Catkin tonight? Still protecting Aspen village, or on their way home? She prayed the latter. Twice in the past seven days they’d seen warriors approaching, grabbed their bows, and taken refuge in the village. The warriors had turned out to be refugees looking for food, but some day soon they would be enemy raiders, and she would need to muster every person in their small village who could shoot a bow or swing a war club.
Flame Carrier took a deep breath and let it out slowly. It had to be five or six hands of time before dawn. Around the swaying door curtain she could see the Evening People glittering.
“You’re not sleeping,” she whispered gruffly to herself. “You may as well rise.”
She sat up and frowned at her reflection in the polished pyrite mirror on the wall to her left. A few kinky gray hairs curled over her small, narrow eyes. They didn’t much look like eyebrows anymore, and her bulbous nose resembled a brown plum stuck in a nest of deep wrinkles.
The fire pit had burned down to coals and cast a crimson gleam over the Blessed Katsinas painted on the walls. Her heart swelled at
the sight. Larger than life, the gods wore dark, feathered masks and carried lances in their hands. White dots of stars covered their black arms and legs, and red streaks of rain adorned their tan kirtles. Each god had a foot lifted, preparing to step off the wall and into her world. Many times in the past moons, when Flame Carrier had been fasting and praying for guidance, the katsinas had done that. They had walked right out of the walls and crowded around her, whispering and advising, their tall bodies scented with rain.
“I wish you would speak with me tonight. I’d like to know what’s happening in Aspen village.”
They peered at her through glistening eyes, but remained silent.
The entire country was on fire. Refugees flooded the roads heading south and east. Every evening she hobbled to the highest point behind Longtail village and counted the lines of fleeing people.
The number of refugees grew steadily. Soon, there would no one left to fight for the katsinas.
The Flute Player Believers would never let them rest. They struck like locusts, cleaned out food stores, took women and children as slaves, and burned the villages before they disappeared into the hills.
Starving war victims kept straggling in, begging for food and shelter. Flame Carrier would take in anyone. Mothers and fathers often brought their children to her to guard while they went off to fight. Most never returned. The orphans took a toll on their scant resources, but what else could she do? In the past four moons, they’d adopted twenty-four children. That meant they had a total of seventy children in the village, fifty under the age of six summers.
Flame Carrier had formed the Katsinas’ People four sun cycles ago, after the death of her mother, Spider Silk. Spider Silk, the daughter of Born-of-Water and Golden Fawn, had been raised with two of the greatest holy people in history, the Blessed Cornsilk and the Blessed Poor Singer. Just before Spider Silk died, Poor Singer had come to her in a Dream and told her that she must find the legendary white palaces of the First People. Poor Singer had proclaimed that if Spider Silk could find the First People’s original kiva, the hole where they had actually emerged from the underworlds—and she could restore and resanctify it—the wars would end, and the evil Spirits who roamed the land would disappear. Spider Silk had said that the restoration
would open the sacred doorway to the underworlds again and allow ordinary humans to descend and seek the advice of the ancestors in the Land of the Dead.
Spider Silk had related the story to Flame Carrier only moments before her death, and Flame Carrier had known immediately what she had to do.
Since that time the Katsinas’ People had restored several dilapidated kivas, but no doorway had opened. It tore Flame Carrier’s heart. She
believed
the prophecy. Why couldn’t they find the right kiva?
Flame Carrier slipped her moccasins onto her socked feet and hobbled across the floor to where her brown-and-white turkey feather cape hung on the peg by the door.
Her slave, Redcrop, slept in the next room. Usually, Flame Carrier would have asked the girl to accompany her on her walk, but she didn’t wish to wake her. The Falling River Moon was one of the hardest times for her people. Redcrop had been working from dawn until well after dusk, picking the last of the corn and reverently carrying it back to the village where it would be dried. Each evening Redcrop helped husk the corn, selected and set aside the best ears for spring seed, and finally, well after dark, Redcrop and the other children spread the remainder of the day’s crop out on the roofs to dry. By the time Redcrop came home for supper, she resembled a bedraggled wraith.
The girl needed her rest far more than Flame Carrier needed company.
She swung her turkey feather cape around her bony old shoulders, then grabbed her walking stick and ducked beneath the twisting prayer feathers and out into the darkness.
The night mesmerized her. A red hue of reflected firelight tinted the smoke that hung over Longtail village. Two stories tall, the village spread around Flame Carrier in a gigantic “E.” Her chamber sat in the eastern half of the village. To her right, the tower kiva, a circular ceremonial chamber, made up the center part of the E. The kiva’s roof stood taller than any other part of the village. Flame Carrier could see the guard standing on the roof. A woman stood next to him.
Probably Water Snake and Obsidian.
Flame Carrier’s eyes narrowed. She shook her head. In the past few days, she had learned things about Obsidian that left her feeling
anxious and angry. The young woman flaunted a status that no longer existed in this world, and for that, Flame Carrier could not forgive her. Such foolishness could endanger them all.
Laughter drifted from the kiva’s roof, but Flame Carrier refused to look.
She had heard nothing from Browser or Catkin in the past eight days and feared they might be dead. Gods, what a blow that would be.
When Flame Carrier’s people had first approached this village, the Longtail Clan Matron, Crossbill, had run out to meet them and begged them to stay. Less than a moon before their arrival, the healthy men over the age of thirteen summers had gone out to meet an enemy war party. All had been lost. Longtail village had needed warriors, and especially an experienced War Chief, as badly as Flame Carrier and the Katsinas’ People had needed a new home.
Flame Carrier walked out into the starlit plaza. From her left came the sound of gobbles and ruffling feathers. They kept thirty turkeys penned in the long rectangular room on the southeastern corner of the village. Dust wafted through the rooftop entry and glittered in the soft evening glow. Somewhere in the distance, an owl
hoo-hooed.
She followed the sound.
Flame Carrier stopped near the great kiva, which sank into the southwestern corner of the plaza. The subterranean ceremonial chamber stretched seven body lengths across. They had re-roofed the kiva three moons ago. The entrance was on the north side, to Flame Carrier’s right. The circular roof groaned beneath stacks of yellow, red, black, and blue corn ears. In the daylight the kernels glittered like a wealth of jewels, but night had drained their colors away, leaving only a shimmering sea of black and white.
Her feathered cape waffled around her legs as she stepped onto the trail that led down to the Prancing Spirit River. A black tracery of shadows enveloped her, and Flame Carrier’s feet
shish-shished
in fallen leaves. She used her walking stick to brace herself as she waded through them. The pungent scent of the river, of wet earth and soaked wood, filled her nostrils. Starlight illuminated the trembling leaves of the cottonwoods.
It felt good to walk alone. She could think, and she didn’t have to worry about how someone else felt. If Redcrop had been here, the
girl would have insisted on supporting Flame Carrier’s elbow and speaking to her in soft soothing tones. Flame Carrier loved Redcrop with all her heart, but she needed to do things by herself now and then.
The trail angled down toward the river bottom.
Flame Carrier planted her walking stick and carefully made her way to the sandy shore. Every fallen leaf and grain of sand glimmered. Light twinkled where the water swirled over rocks and pieces of driftwood.
If only she could remain in this tranquil place forever. If only the wars would end. If only …
Too much longing strangled the heart. Poor Singer had said those words more than a hundred sun cycles ago. But Flame Carrier had been filled with longing all of her life. She couldn’t stop now. Not when everywhere she looked she saw suffering.
The traditionalists among the Straight Path Nation, including the group who called themselves the Flute Player Believers, hated the new Katsina religion. They considered it evil, and killed every member of the faith they could. As more and more villages converted, more were destroyed, and the sizes of the few remaining villages increased dramatically. Clan matrons willingly took in refugees. It made sense. The more warriors a village possessed, the greater the likelihood it would survive; but as different clans were thrown together, people began to feel like strips of rawhide stretched over a drum. The strain frayed nerves.
Just last moon Obsidian had gotten into a fistfight with an exhausted young woman who had dragged into Longtail village asking for food. Obsidian had shouted, “If we give away any more food we won’t have enough to feed our own children! Go beg somewhere else!” The dispute had grown ugly. War Chief Browser had broken it up, but the sight had wounded Flame Carrier. She’d taken the weeping young woman aside, given her bags of cornmeal, beans, and giant wild rye seeds, and pleaded with her to stay with them where she’d be safe. The woman had taken one look at Obsidian’s hateful face, thanked Flame Carrier, and left.
Wind Baby frolicked along the river bottom, slapping at the brush, and whipping the autumn leaves into tiny tornadoes. Flame Carrier watched them careen down the shore, then kicked at a pile of leaves.
“If you’d had the wits of a mosquito, you’d have ordered your people to pack and gone with her, you old fool.”
They couldn’t fight the Traditionalists. She knew it, but leaving would mean giving up the prophecy. The kivas of the First People were here, in this land, not far to the south. If the Katsinas’ People left …
“Grandmother?
”
Flame Carrier turned.
The whisper seemed to come from everywhere at once—the sky, the water, the swaying trees.
“Redcrop? Is that you?”
The brush across the river rustled, and Flame Carrier took a tentative step toward it. “Who’s there?”
An odd shadow hunched at the edge of the brush, but it didn’t move.
Flame Carrier looked behind her at the leaf-covered trail and trees.
Whimpers seeped from the brush, soft and pathetic. Flame Carrier turned back. It sounded like a hurt little girl. Another orphan?
“Child?” Flame Carrier called. “Let me see you? I won’t hurt you.”
The black shape moved, wavering as if winged and preparing to take flight.
“Don’t be afraid. Please, come out.” Flame Carrier kept her voice soft and soothing. “You are welcome here.”
The shadow blossomed into something tall and dark.
Flame Carrier stopped breathing. She could see a woman’s fringed buckskin dress, but long ears and gray fur gleamed in the starlight. The figure wore the mask of the Wolf Katsina. Among their people, only Cloudblower, the sacred Man-Woman, had the right to don that mask. Wolf had led the First People up from the underworlds. He had taught them to make fire, and to hunt. The mask of the Wolf Katsina was the most powerful mask of all. Usually the katsina’s soul slept in the mask, but when someone put it on, the soul awoke and stalked the night.
“Cloudblower?” she called. “Is that you? Why are you masked?”
The figure tiptoed toward Flame Carrier.
“I am not Cloudblower. I am the Summoning God. You have been summoned, Grandmother.”
A woman. Her soft voice strained against tears.
Flame Carrier’s heart pounded. “What do you want? Who are you?”
“Don’t you remember me?
”
The katsina tiptoed into the river and waded toward Flame Carrier.
Shadows filled the hollows of her eyes, turning them into huge black abysses. In a sobbing voice, the woman mewed,
“Grandmother, I loved you. Why did you hurt me?
”
A haunted sensation tingled through Flame Carrier’s body. “Tell me your name, child!”
BOOK: The Summoning God: Book II of the Anasazi Mysteries
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