Outlaw m-3

by Elizabeth Lowell

  Ten made a rumble that sounded suspiciously like Pounce at his most satisfied. He leaned over, pulled a large carton from beneath the table and folded back the flaps. With gentle care he lifted pieces of an ancient bowl onto the table. The background color of the pot was brick red. Designs in white and black covered the surface, careful geometrics that spoke of a painstaking artist working patiently over the pot.

  A feeling of awe expanded through Diana as she saw the pot lying half-mended on the table. Ten had been as patient and painstaking as the original potter; the fine lines where he had glued shards together were almost invisible.

  “You never did tell me why this kind of pot is so rare,” Ten said, turning aside to the carton of unmatched shards.

  “Polychrome pots are usually found south of here,” Diana said absently. Her hands closed delicately around the base and a curving side of the red pot. “Either the potter was an immigrant or the pot was a piece of trade goods. But this pot, plus the surface and regular shape of the sandstone masonry in September Canyon, make it certain that the site is from the Pueblo III period of the Anasazi. Or nearly certain. Since we don’t have a time machine, we’ll never be one hundred percent positive that we have the true story.”

  “We know the most important thing.”

  Diana looked up from the fragment of the past held between her hands.

  “They were people like us,” Ten said simply.

  “‘They built, laughed, wept, fought, raised children and died. Most of all, they knew fear.”

  “Actually,” Diana said, frowning over the box of shards, “the most recent theory states that the Anasazi moved into their cliff houses for reasons other than fear.”

  Ten’s left eyebrow arched skeptically. “They just liked the view halfway up the cliff, huh?”

  “Urn, no one said anything about that. The theory just states that we were premature in attributing a fortress mentality to the Anasazi. They could just have been preserving the top of the mesa for crops and didn’t build on the canyon bottom because of floods. That left the cliffs themselves for housing.”

  Ten grunted. “What did the professorial types say about the signal towers on top of Mesa Verde? They were used to pass the news of births, right?”

  Diana gave Ten a sideways look, but he appeared to be engrossed in the red potshards she was finding and carefully placing in front of him. Already he had found two to glue together and was positioning a third.

  “The towers could have been used to welcome visitors,” Diana said neutrally, “or to show the way up onto the mesa for people who were from other areas.”

  “People from other areas tend to be strangers and strangers tend to be unfriendly.”

  “Perhaps the Anasazi believed that strangers were simply friends they hadn’t met yet.”

  “That would certainly explain how the Anasazi died out so fast,” Ten said sardonically.

  “In some academic circles, your point of view would be considered philosophically and politically retrograde,” Diana said without heat. One of the most pleasurable things about her time with Ten was the discovery of his agile, wide-ranging mind. She had come to look forward to the hours spent sorting shards and talking about the Anasazi almost as much as she enjoyed working on the site itself. “Here’s the shard that goes in the middle.”

  “Thanks,” Ten said. “Hang on to it until the glue dries on these two. Whatever made the professors give up on good old common sense to explain the Anasazi cliff dwellings?”

  “Such as?”

  “Birds don’t fly because they like the view up there. Birds fly because cats can’t.” Diana smiled. “Don’t tell Pounce.” “I don’t have to. He figured that one out all by himself, which is more than I can say for whoever dreamed up that New Age fertilizer about cliff houses being invented for any reason other than self-defense. In a word, fear.”

  “Logical, but it doesn’t explain why there was no increase in burials about the time the Anasazi abandoned the mesa tops and took up living in the cliffs.”

  “Burials?”

  “Self-defense indicates war,” Diana explained. “War indicates wounding and death. Death-” “Leads to burials,” Ten interrupted. “Right. Even around the time the Anasazi disappeared altogether, there was no increase in burials. Therefore, the theory that hostile tribes forced the Anasazi into cliff houses has a big flaw. No extra deaths, no war. Simple.”

  “More like simpleminded. Those theorists ought to pull their heads out of their, er, books and have a reality check.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Only winners bury their dead.” The flatness in Ten’s voice made a chill move over Diana’s skin.

  “You sound very certain,” she said.

  “I’ve been there. That’s as certain as it gets.”

  “There?”

  “On the losing side. It hasn’t changed all that much over the centuries. I doubt that it ever will. Pain, fear, death and not enough people left to mourn or bury the dead. But there are always enough vultures.”

  Ten’s narrowed eyes were like splinters of clear glass. Diana could not bear to look at them and think of what they had seen.

  He turned and searched through the box of potshards. When he looked up again, his expression was once more relaxed. “In any case,” Ten continued, “anybody who’s read a little biology could tell your fancy theorists that building Stone Age apartment houses halfway up sheer cliffs took an immense amount of time and energy, which meant that the need driving the society also had to be immense. Survival is the most likely explanation, and the only animal that threatens man’s survival is man himself.” Ten smiled grimly. “That hasn’t changed, either.”

  “Fear.”

  “Don’t knock it. No animal would survive without it, including man.” Ten held a shard up to the light, shrugged and tried it anyway. It fit. “Maybe the Anasazi were no longer actively involved in war. Maybe they just feared it to the point that they retreated to a hole in the cliffs and pulled the hole in after them.” Ten looked up. “You can understand that kind of fear, can’t you? It’s what drew you to the Anasazi in the first place. Like you, they built a shell around themselves to wall out the world. And then they began to shrink and die inside that shell.”

  Diana concentrated on two shards that had no chance of fitting.

  Ten waited a few moments, sighed and continued. “When you retreat to a stone cliff that’s accessible only by one or two eyelash trails that a nine-year-old with a sharp stick could defend, it’s probably because you don’t have much more than nine-year-olds left to defend the village.”

  “But there’s no hard evidence of repeated encounters with a warlike tribe,” she said coolly.

  “Isn’t there? What does Anasazi mean?”

  “It’s a Navajo word meaning Ancient Ones, or Those Who Came Before.”

  Ten smiled thinly. “It also means Enemy Ancestor.” He picked up an oddly shaped shard and stared at it without really seeing it. “I suspect that at the end of a long, hard period, during which they’d had to cope with war or drought or disease or all three, a kind of madness overtook the northern Anasazi.”

  The quality of Ten’s voice, rippling with something unspoken, caught Diana’s attention. “What do you mean?”

  “I think a dark kind of shaman cult overtook them, using up everything the society had and demanding even more. Maybe the fears the shaman cult played on had some basis in reality, or maybe they lived only in the Anasazi’s own nightmares.” Ten shook his head. “Either way, fear ruled the society. The people retreated to the most impossible places they could reach and walled themselves in with rooms and held ceremonies in buried kivas. When they ran out of space in the alcoves, they built bigger and bigger kivas along the base of the cliff.”

  Ten’s voice shifted, becoming subtly different, more resonant yet softer.

  “Their rituals became more and more elaborate,” he continued quietly, “more demanding of the people’s mental and physi
cal resources. Darker. It’s possible for a culture to exist like that, but not for long. It goes against the deepest grain of survival to huddle in a stone crypt.”

  “Is that what you think happened? The Anasazi died in the city crypts they built for themselves?”

  “Some did. Some escaped.” The odd timbre of Ten’s voice made the hair on Diana’s scalp stir in primal response, the same stirring she had felt with Ten once before, when she had stood on a desolate mesa top and felt centuries like cards being shuffled, revealing glimpses of a time when reality had been very different, and so had she and Ten.

  “How did they escape?” Diana asked, her voice strange even to her own ears.

  For a long time there was only silence punctuated by the sounds of the wind sweeping over the ancient land. Just when Diana had decided that Ten wasn’t going to say any more, he began speaking again.

  “Another shaman came down from the north, an outlaw shaman with a vision that swept through the Anasazi, a vision that spoke of light as well as darkness, life as well as death.” Ten looked up suddenly, catching and holding Diana with eyes as clear as rain. “The Anasazi who believed the outlaw shaman climbed down out of their beautiful, dangerous, futile cliff cities and never went back again.”

  10

  Luke leaned toward little Logan, smiling, speaking in a deep, gentle voice to the baby who studied him so intently.

  “Definitely your eyes, Carla,” Luke said, running his fingertip over his wife’s cheek.

  “The mouth is yours, though,” she said, smoothing her cheek over his hand.

  “We’re in trouble then. He’ll have half the state mad at him as soon as he learns to talk.”

  Carla laughed softly, brushed her lips over Luke’s palm and settled back against his chest. The nursing shawl slipped to one side, revealing the milk-swollen curve of her breast. With a slow caress Luke adjusted the shawl, then resumed the gentle back-and-forth motion of the big rocking chair he had made before Logan had been born.

  Despite its size, the chair was still a snug fit for the three of them-Logan, Carla and Luke-but no one had any intention of giving it up for the couch. The quiet evenings when Carla nursed the baby while sitting in Luke’s lap had become the highlight of the day for everyone involved.

  “Hi,” Carla said, looking up as Diana came from the kitchen into the living room. “Ten was asking about you a few minutes ago. Something about a box from 11-C?”

  “More red shards. He hopes. He has this theory about where the rest of the red pot is. So far he has been right.”

  A night of broken sleep and restless dreams had convinced Diana that Ten had been right about more than the pot, but she didn’t know how to reopen the subject with him, any more than she had known how to respond last night, when he had spoken about fear and the Anasazi and one Diana Saxton. Instead of speaking then, she had handed him another shard and the conversation had disintegrated into elliptical phrases describing pieces of broken pots.

  “Is Ten in the bunkhouse?” Diana asked.

  “He’s in the barn checking on a lame horse.”

  Diana hid her feeling of disappointment. Whether in September Canyon or at the ranch headquarters, she looked forward to the evenings with Ten despite the tension that came from her increasing awareness of him as a man. She noticed him in ways that she had never noticed any man at all. The dense black of his eyelashes, the equally dense beard shadow that lay beneath his skin no matter how recently he had shaved, the springy thatch of hair that showed beneath his open collar, the endless flex and play of muscles beneath his skin, the easy stride of a man who was at home in and confident of his body.

  But most of all, Diana noticed the frank masculinity of Ten, the male sensuality that was both subtle and pervasive. It compelled her senses in the same way that his intelligence compelled her mind.

  “If you see Ten,” Diana said to Carla, “tell him I’ve cleaned the calcium deposits from the 11-C shards, given them permanent labels, and they’re ready for his magic touch.”

  “Sure. Want to stay for pie? We’re having some as soon as we put our greedy son to bed.”

  “No thanks. Your cooking is straining the seams of my jeans as it is. It’s getting indecent.”

  “Haven’t heard any of the men complaining about the fit of your jeans,” Luke drawled.

  “Luke!” Carla said, laughing.

  “Well, have you heard them complaining?” he asked innocently before switching his attention to Logan. “Hurry up, son. Your old man is ready for dessert.”

  Carla laughed and murmured something Diana couldn’t hear. Silently she retreated from the living room doorway, heading for the kitchen. It wasn’t that she felt unwelcome, for she knew that the opposite was the case. Carla and Luke loved to question Diana about the progress of the dig and the pots that Ten and she together had proven to be so adept at assembling from shards. It was just that she wasn’t sure she could look at Luke and Carla and their baby without letting her own hunger show.

  What a pity it takes a man to make a baby. It wasn’t the first time the thought had occurred to Diana, but the strength of her yearning for a baby was growing. Tonight it had shaken her, making it hard for her to think.

  But then, that wasn’t new, either. Diana hadn’t been thinking too well around Ten lately. A look from him, a phrase, a slight lift of the corner of his mouth, and she would begin thinking all over again about how gentle he had been with the kitten, how patient he was with the fragile, brittle shards, how easy and yet how exciting he was to be with.

  Stop it. Next thing you know you’ll be asking him to kiss you.

  A curious sensation prickled through Diana, making her shiver lightly. She wasn’t sure what it was that had caused her reaction. She knew what it wasn’t, however.

  It wasn’t fear.

  Diana let herself out into the night. Overhead the Milky Way was a river of light flowing silently across the sky. There was no moon to pale the glitter of the stars, no clouds to blur the razor edges of MacKenzie Ridge’s silhouette. Nothing moved but the wind. It infused the night, filling it with whispers that could have been her own thoughts or echoes of ancient Anasazi prayers chanted to unknown gods.

  When Diana opened the door to the old ranch house, Pounce materialized from the nearby bushes and slipped into the house ahead of her. She closed the door, bent down and lifted the big tomcat into her arms.

  “Hello, Pounce. How was mouse hunting tonight?”

  The cat purred and began kneading Diana’s chest.

  “That good, hmm?” Diana murmured, rubbing the supple body and sleek fur. “Then I won’t bother putting out that dry cat food Carla gave me yesterday.”

  Pounce purred his agreement.

  “Yeah, that’s what she said. You only eat the dry stuff when nothing else is available.”

  Sure enough, Pounce ignored the kibble that Diana prepared with one hand while she held on to the cat with the other. Even a saucer of milk didn’t interest him. All he wanted was what he was getting-a chance to snuggle with his favorite human being.

  Carrying Pounce, Diana walked through the workroom to her bedroom. The carefully made bed looked uninviting. It was too early to sleep. Even if the hour had been right, her frame of mind was not. She was too restless to sleep.

  Unfortunately she was also too restless to work on the shards. She tried, but for once the lure of putting together an ancient puzzle couldn’t hold her attention. After fitting a few pieces together, she turned off the big gooseneck lamp and sat at the worktable with no more illumination than that provided by the lamp in the far corner of the room. The shadows cast by that lamp were soft and inviting, making velvet distinctions between light and dark.

  Pounce leaped into Diana’s lap and yeowed in soft demand. Absently she stroked the cat, drawing forth a ripple of purrs. For a long time there was no other sound. Then a knock came on the front door and Ten called out. Hearing Ten’s deep voice sent another curious frisson through Diana.

/>   “I’m in the workroom,” she answered. Her voice was unusually husky, but the words carried well enough. The door opened and closed and Ten walked into the room. With a gesture that had become familiar to her, he removed his hat and set it on the small table beneath the lamp.

  “That old mouser must think he’s died and gone to heaven,” Ten said.

  The corner of his mouth tugged up, sending another glimmer of heat through Diana.

  “Did you mean what you said?” she asked before she could think of all the reasons to be silent.

  “I always mean what I say. When it comes to you and that cat, I’m damned certain.”

  Diana took a deep breath. “Would you really trade places with Pounce?”

  This time the curve at the corner of Ten’s mouth expanded into a true smile. “Why? You have some mice that he’s too lazy to catch?”

  Her lips tried to smile but were trembling too hard. She could barely find the courage to force out her next question.

  “Would you really like to be touched by me?” she asked. “I mean, do I…attract you?”

  “Sure,” Ten said offhandedly, reaching for the switch on the gooseneck lamp.

  “Would you… kiss me?”

  Ten’s hand froze in midair. Amusement vanished from his expression. His eyes narrowed until there was little left but a silver glitter as he turned and looked at the woman who was only a few feet away.

  “You’re serious, aren’t you,” he said.

  She nodded because her throat was too tight for words.

  “What happened to all the No Trespassing signs?”

  Diana opened her mouth. No words came from her constricted throat. She licked her lips. Ten watched the motion with a heavy-lidded, sensual intensity that would have frightened her once. Now it came as a relief. It gave her the courage to put into words the realization that had been growing in her mind for a long time.

  “Watching Carla and Luke and their baby has made me understand that I’m missing something wonderful and-and vital.” Diana’s voice shifted, becoming even lower, more husky. She spoke swiftly, as though afraid of being interrupted and then not having the courage to continue. “But until I get over being afraid of men, I won’t have a chance for the kind of life I want. Men want sex. I have to be able to give a man what he wants in order to get what I really want-a baby of my own.”