The Spider Stone

by Alex Archer

  Annja understood that. She kept journals herself, and her handwriting and illustrations were points of pride for her.

  "This book was rewritten from the texts that Franklin Dickerson wrote," Mildred continued. "I've got most of the original papers, but some of them have faded over the years. This book wasn't prepared until just before Franklin's death in 1886. He was buried on five acres of ground that he managed to buy and raise a family on." She smiled. "I've had offers from universities that want this book."

  "I can imagine. It's quite an impressive document," Annja said.

  "It's about my family. That's why I'm not giving it up. But I've allowed copies to be made. They tell me it's not the same as having the original."

  "It's not," Annja replied. "There's a lot you can read from the original document that a copy just won't reproduce."

  "Anyway, let me show you the parts I wanted you to see." Mildred thumbed through the book. On page thirty-two, neatly numbered in the upper right-hand corner, she stopped.

  An illustration in the center of the page drew Annja's attention immediately. The drawing showed a stone with a spider on it. Unconsciously, Annja reached for the drawing, tracing the spider with her finger as her mind jerked into high gear. The paper felt thick and grainy and had yellowed considerably with age.

  "Is this it, then? Is this the stone the rumors say you found?" Mildred's voice tightened in excitement.

  Annja studied the stone, noticing only then that it rested in someone's palm in the illustration. Judging from the comparison she was able to make, the Spider Stone was about the size of her thumb.

  "Is that the stone you found?" Mildred repeated.

  "No," Annja said, thinking of hausaboy's announcement that the stone she'd asked about was a copy of another stone. "It was much bigger than this one."

  "This was the original stone, according to Franklin," the older woman said. "The second stone, the larger one that you found, is a copy of the true stone."

  Annja didn't let her excitement betray her. She knew that sometimes when archaeologists interacted with someone who had a story to tell, that person would elaborate or guess at what the listener wanted to hear. The storyteller wouldn't knowingly lie, but could embellish or twist the truth. "Why was the stone copied?" she asked calmly.

  "Because people had heard of it. Once people started talking about the Spider Stone, a second one had to be created. In the early days, no one knew. But as Yohance started to pull others to his side and give them their histories, more people knew about the Spider Stone."

  "Do you know what the Spider Stone is?" Annja asked.

  Mildred looked at her. "In this book, Franklin says that the Spider Stone has magic. An old magic given to the Hausa people by an African god."

  "Anansi."

  Mildred nodded and smiled. "The spider god. Now, I don't believe in such foolishness myself. I'm a Christian. I go to the Baptist church right down the street from my house in Augusta. But I'm reminded that sometimes God works in mysterious ways. I believe that He could have revealed Himself to Yohance's people in another way. And God has been making promises since the Ark of the Covenant."

  "Was there anything specific the Spider Stone was supposed to do?" Annja asked.

  "It was supposed to protect the Hausa village that it was given to. Not protect them from the things that happened to them, but make sure that village would never die. Not as long as the stone existed. That's what Yohance told Franklin."

  "Who was Yohance?"

  "Well, now," Mildred said, "that's a story."

  ****

  Tafari strode toward the old witch woman. Some called her a healer and a seer, and believed she did only good things with her powers. A thrill of fear wormed up his spine. He stopped fifteen feet away when he'd intended to walk up close to her and make her back away fearfully.

  Jaineba didn't move.

  In fact, Tafari's approach also caused the woman standing beside the old witch to step forward. He stopped and grinned, lifting the assault rifle meaningfully.

  Most of the villagers drew back at the gesture, but a few of the men stood their ground and held their weapons. A handful of others took a step forward.

  "Stupid woman," Tafari spit. "You tempt the gods with your foolishness. My trouble isn't with you. I've no wish to kill you." But he wouldn't hesitate to kill her if it became necessary.

  The younger woman said nothing, but her eyes remained focused on him. She was afraid. Tafari saw that in her. She was afraid but she didn't give in to her fear.

  "She doesn't understand you." Jaineba's voice was calm and held no hint of trepidation.

  Tafari took in her clothing. "She's a foreigner." His words dripped with disgust.

  "She's my friend," Jaineba declared.

  Those words, Tafari knew, were intended as a warning.

  "As my friend, she is also under my protection." The old woman fixed him with her fierce gaze.

  Tafari held up a hand. In response, the gunner in the back of the jeep aimed the light machine gun mounted on a tripod at the two women.

  The handful of men who'd found the courage to act moved forward again and started objecting to Tafari's presence. The machine gunner swept his weapon toward them and fired a line of bullets into the ground at their feet. Tafari had specified that no one was to be hurt unless he ordered it or they were attacked. He wasn't afraid of the men of the village, but he was afraid of the witch.

  The foreign woman caught the witch's arm and tried to drag her back. With surprising strength, Jaineba resisted. The woman looked confused.

  "You can't stay here," Tanisha said.

  "I will." Jaineba never took her eyes from Tafari. "He will not hurt me. And he will hurt no one in this village, either."

  Tafari smiled. "You're too sure of yourself, witch."

  "I know how to treat a carrion feeder."

  Anger stirred inside Tafari, but he made himself stand steady when he itched to curl his finger around the assault rifle's trigger and blow the witch's head from her shoulders.

  Only he couldn't be sure that even that would kill her.

  All his life Tafari had heard stories about Jaineba's powers, how she had made the dead live, though not in the same fashion as the bokors who practiced voodoo and made the living dead walk. Jaineba's grandmother, the one she had learned her skills from, had risen from the dead three times after drowning, being shot by a white man and being struck by lightning. She hadn't died until she'd decided her granddaughter was fully trained.

  "You're an American," Tafari told the woman in her own tongue.

  "I'm not. I'm English."

  "I am Tafari." He was smug about himself, trusting that the name would leave an impression on her. He wasn't disappointed. Fear glinted a little more sharply in her eyes.

  "What are you doing here?" the woman demanded.

  "Tanisha," the witch said, "let me handle this. He is here to see me." Jaineba locked eyes with Tafari. "Aren't you?"

  Tanisha. Tafari committed the woman's name to memory. She was a beautiful woman. He had left beautiful women dead and dying behind him.

  "I am," Tafari agreed. "You're involving yourself where you're not wanted."

  "I do what I want," Jaineba declared in an imperious voice. "No man may ever tell me what to do."

  "Maybe you're protected by the gods, witch," Tafari said in his own language so the people of the village would understand, "but the people you're turning against me aren't."

  "They are protected by me."

  "Even when you're not there?"

  Jaineba stepped forward, leaning on her staff.

  Tafari resisted the impulse to raise the assault rifle and fire. His second impulse was to step back from the woman. He stood his ground, but he was aware that he leaned back from her.

  "Harm any person under my protection and I will place a curse on you, Tafari. By the bones of my grandmother, I promise you that. You will never know peace. You will never know a time when you are not in fe
ar for your life." Jaineba drew a calm breath and never blinked. "Do you understand me?"

  Everything in Tafari screamed at him to break eye contact and look away from the old woman. She had powers that he could only guess at. He believed that. She had the power to curse a person.

  An ivory poacher she had crossed paths with a few years ago had laughed in her face and shot a young warrior who had tried to avenge the disrespect. As Jaineba held the dying warrior, she cursed the poacher. Three days later, the poacher was killed by a leopard in an area where the big cats hadn't been seen in years. Leopards didn't usually attack men. It was later found and killed, but by all accounts it was far north of its usual hunting grounds.

  Even before that had happened, people who knew Jaineba told several stories about the powers the witch wielded.

  "You can't save everyone, witch," Tafari said.

  "That remains to be seen," Jaineba snarled. "Don't presume to threaten me. I won't permit it."

  Tafari searched her for fear. He couldn't see any, couldn't hear it in her voice and couldn't smell it on her the way he could with so many men who feared him.

  "Your time is almost up," Tafari said. "You're old. You never had children of your own. Your last apprentice died from a sickness you failed to cure in time." He shook his head and smiled. "After you, there is no one to carry on your traditions." He smiled again, wider this time. "Perhaps I can wait."

  She had no reply to make.

  Leaving her standing there, Tafari walked back to the jeep that had brought him, pulled himself into the passenger seat and sat with his assault rifle across his knees. He was still afraid of the witch, but he felt certain that would soon pass. When it did, he would kill her.

  He told Zifa to get them out of there. As Zifa turned the jeep around, Tafari looked at the Land Rover. It was nearly new, an expensive piece of equipment. He couldn't read the lettering on the side, but was familiar with it from past experience. Childress Construction, Inc. seemed to be everywhere these days.

  But now he knew where to find the woman, if he ever wanted her. Sharp hunger rose up in him as he glanced back at her.

  Like the other villagers, the woman couldn't stay under the witch's protection forever.

  ****

  "The boy who brought the Spider Stone to America was named Yohance," Mildred said.

  "I thought you said the boy your ancestor talked to was named Yohance." Annja took notes in her hardbound notebook. It was five inches wide and ten inches tall, fitting comfortably in her hand. That was important because often when she was out in the field at a dig she didn't have a desk or even a flat surface to write on.

  In her loft, she had scores of notebooks. Most of them had been scanned onto disks and placed into storage. Even then, she hadn't been able to get rid of the original notebooks. They represented her work, her time and her love of what she explored.

  The book she worked in now was new, but already she'd filled up several pages with notes, questions and illustrations. Several of the pages had tabs stuck to them, marking areas where she'd devoted a large amount of time to wrapping her brain around something.

  "Franklin knew a Yohance," Mildred explained. "But all of the Keepers were named Yohance, even when that hadn't been the birth name their mothers had given them. They changed their names when they became the Keepers."

  "Who were the Keepers?"

  "The Keepers of the Spider Stone, of course. It's covered here in Franklin's book." Mildred turned the page and found a drawing of a young boy in chains. He looked scared but determined.

  "Franklin was quite an artist," Annja said.

  "You should see the pictures he's drawn in here." Mildred's eyes gleamed with pride. "This book, it's the most precious thing I own."

  "This Yohance was a slave?"

  "He wasn't born into slavery like the rest of the Keepers were." Mildred gazed at the small boy. "The first Yohance came from West Africa. His village was destroyed by Arab raiders."

  "When did that happen?"

  Mildred shook her head. "I don't know. It's not written in this book. I don't think Franklin knew."

  Annja wrote, "First Yohance?" then added, "Check slave rolls." Over the years, databases had been created that listed some of the slaves who were brought over on the slave ships. There was a chance the boy might be listed there. Of course, she was well-aware there was also the chance that the ship's captain had simply renamed the boy when he'd sold him.

  "The Keeper was supposed to protect the Spider Stone," Mildred went on.

  "Slaves weren't allowed possessions except those given to them by their masters," Annja said.

  "Yohance hid the Spider Stone."

  "How?"

  "He swallowed it. The Spider Stone was small enough to permit that. When he excreted it, he would clean it and swallow it again." Mildred looked at Annja. "Can you imagine what that must have been like?"

  "No," Annja answered. She honestly couldn't.

  "When the first Yohance realized that he wasn't going to live long enough to escape, he groomed another boy to be the next Keeper."

  "Any boy?"

  "It had to be a Hausa boy," Mildred replied. "Franklin wrote that the first Yohance kept track of bloodlines. He tried to keep the stone in the hands of the purest Hausa he could find, someone who had a link to his village. Otherwise the Spider Stone's power would be lost, you see."

  Annja nodded, fascinated with the story.

  "As I said, Franklin and Mose were close. They were lucky enough to be kept on the same plantation not far from this town. Farther to the south. I've been out that way and walked over the fields they used to farm when they were boys." Mildred smiled and shook her head. "It made me feel closer to them, made me feel like I almost knew those two boys. Like I could just reach out and touch them. But I'm sure that was just my imagination."

  "I don't know," Annja said. "Sometimes when I'm at a site, I can close my eyes and almost hear the people who once lived there. That could be a thousand years ago."

  "Maybe we just both have overactive imaginations," Mildred said.

  "And maybe we're just sensitive to things other people miss," Annja replied. Since the sword had come into her possession, she'd discovered that sometimes those feelings within her were even stronger.

  "It was Yohance who separated Franklin and Mose when nothing else would do it," Mildred said.

  "What happened?"

  "Franklin sought Yohance out. By this time, Yohance – the Yohance Franklin and Mose came to know – had gathered men to his side."

  "Who were the men?"

  "Other slaves. But they were all of the Hausa bloodline. As were Franklin and Mose."

  "You're of Hausa blood?"

  Mildred nodded. "I didn't know that till my daddy read Franklin's book to me when I was a little girl. It wasn't until I was in college that I was even able to look up the Hausa people and find out who they were."

  "They were traders," Annja said. "During their time they were fierce, noble and intelligent."

  "I know. I take a lot of pride in coming from people like that. But it doesn't matter to my kids. I tried to introduce them to the history of the Hausa people, but they didn't care. They told me they had to live in this world, and it wasn't such a good place." Mildred shook her head. "None of them live around here anymore. I guess they all finally followed the North Star out of here."

  "How did Yohance separate Franklin and Mose?" Annja asked.

  "Yohance and his bodyguards – "

  "Bodyguards?" Annja was startled.

  "Franklin called them Yohance's protectors in his book. Yohance had another name for them, but Franklin didn't even try to spell it. He used protectors, and you can tell it was a young man trying to show off his vocabulary. Anyway, they had decided that they were going to try to escape the plantation. This was in 1861."

  "The Civil War was starting," Annja said.

  Mildred nodded. "It was. Franklin had kept up his reading. He'd read several abolitionist
papers that said the North would have an easy victory over the South. Franklin believed that. Yohance believed that the early months of the war would provide the most confusion and they could take advantage of that to slip away."

  "They were on a plantation owned by Jedidiah Tatum," Annja said.

  Mildred looked surprised. "How did you know that?"

  "The textile mill where the bodies were found," Annja explained, "was once owned by Jedidiah Tatum."

  "I didn't know that."

  Annja decided not to tell the woman that Horace Tatum had dynamited the men in the underground furnace. Eventually that news would come out, but the longer that was kept out of the news, the less complicated things at the dig would be.

  "Yohance wanted to escape," Annja prompted.

  "He did. He believed that they could reach Canada, and from there they could join a ship bound for West Africa."

  "Why would he want to go there?"

  "Because of Anansi's promise. Yohance had been told by the Yohance before him, and so the story had been told, that their village would rise again if the stone found its way home."

  "By magic?" Annja asked.

  "Well," Mildred said, "there was some talk of a treasure, as well."

  Chapter 9

  "I thought you weren't coming."

  Annja handed one of the takeout food containers to Professor Hallinger. She was later than she'd wanted to be. She felt as if most of the morning had escaped her, but the conversation with Mildred Teasdale had left her with excitement thrumming in her veins.

  "I hear we have quite a crowd out there again." Hallinger sliced into a thick stack of pancakes.

  "We do." The darkness in the furnace room was complete. Only the lanterns strung along the wall allowed the dig crew to work.

  "You'd think the possibility of getting shot would have scared some of them out of it," the professor said.

  "Not necessarily," Amber, one of the college students, said. "It brings out the gawker gene."

  Hallinger looked at her and smiled in confusion. "What?"

  Amber shrugged. "Call it the stupid factor if you want. It's the same thing that happens when there's a car wreck or a really bad tornado or fire. People just naturally wander out to see what's going on, never realizing that they could get swept up in it."