Thunderhead

by Douglas Preston

  Without hesitating, Swire jumped down into the muck beside the horse, drew his knife, and with two deft strokes cut through the diamond hitch. As Nora watched, two hundred pounds worth of provisions slid off the horse’s back into the mud. Swire grabbed the lead rope and pulled the horse’s head to the side, simultaneously quirting him on the rump. With a great sucking noise the horse struggled free. Swire labored out of the mud himself, dragging the pack behind him. Resheathing his knife, he collected the shaking animal’s lead rope and wordlessly handed it to Holroyd.

  “Sorry,” said the young man sheepishly, throwing a deeply embarrassed glance at Nora.

  Swire stuffed a plug of tobacco into his already full cheek. “No problem. Coulda happened to anyone.”

  Both Swire and the pack were liberally covered in vile-smelling muck. “Maybe this is a good time to stop for lunch,” Nora said.

  After a quick meal, with the horses watered and the canteens full of purified water, they set out again. The growing heat had baked the canyon into a kind of oppressive somnolence, and all was quiet save for the clatter of horses’ hooves and the occasional muttered imprecations from Smithback to his pack horse.

  “Goddammit, Elmer,” he finally cried, “get your hairy lips off me!”

  “He likes you,” Swire said. “And his name’s Beetlebum.”

  “Soon as we get back to civilization, it’s going to be Elmer,” Smithback said. “I’m going to personally escort this nag to the nearest glue factory.”

  “Now don’t go hurtin’ his feelings,” Swire drawled, punctuating the sentence with a spit of tobacco juice.

  Their route branched again into an unnamed canyon. Here, the walls were narrower and well scoured by flash floods, but there was less brush and the riding grew a little easier. At one broad bend, where the canyon temporarily widened, Nora reined in her horse and waited for Sloane to catch up. Looking around idly, she suddenly tensed, pointing toward a cutbank on the inside of the bend where flash floods had sliced through the old streambed.

  “See that?” she asked, indicating a long thin swale of stained soil beside what looked like a linear arrangement of stones.

  “Charcoal,” Sloane nodded as she rode up.

  They dismounted and examined the layer. Her breath coming fast with excitement, Nora picked up some tiny fragments of charcoal with a pair of tweezers and placed them in a test tube. “Just like the Great North Road to Chaco,” she murmured.

  Then she straightened up and looked at Sloane. “I think we’ve finally found it. The road my father was following.”

  Sloane smiled. “Never doubted it.”

  They moved on. Now, wherever the canyon took a sharp bend and the old floor was exposed as a bench high above the stream, they could see charcoal-stained ground and, infrequently, lines of stones. Time and again, Nora found herself picturing her father: riding along this same trail, seeing these same sights. It gave her a feeling of connection she hadn’t felt since he died.

  Around three o’clock they stopped to rest the horses, taking refuge under an overhang.

  “Hey, look,” Holroyd said, pointing to a large green plant growing out of the sand, covered with huge, funnel-shaped white flowers. “Datura meteloides. Its roots are saturated with atropine—the same poison in belladonna.”

  “Don’t let Bonarotti see it,” Smithback said.

  “Some Indian tribes eat the roots to induce visions,” said Nora.

  “Along with permanent brain damage,” replied Holroyd.

  As they sat with their backs to the rock, eating handfuls of dried fruits and nuts, Sloane retrieved her binoculars and began scanning a series of alcoves in a blind canyon opposite them.

  After a minute she turned to Nora. “I thought so. There’s a small cliff dwelling up there. First one I’ve seen since we started out.”

  Taking the binoculars, Nora peered at the small ruin, perched high on the cliff face. It was set into a shallow alcove, oriented to the south in the Anasazi way, ensuring shade in the summer and warmth in the winter. She could see a low retaining wall along the bottom of the alcove, with what looked like several rooms built in the rear and a circular granary to one side.

  “Let me see,” Holroyd said. He gazed at the ruin, motionless. “Incredible,” he breathed at last.

  “There’s thousands of little ruins like that in the Utah canyon country,” Nora said.

  “How did they live?” Holroyd asked, still peering up with the binoculars.

  “They probably farmed the canyon bottom—corn, squash, and beans. They hunted and gathered plants. I’d guess it housed a single extended family.”

  “I can’t believe they raised kids up there,” Holroyd said. “You have to be pretty brave to live in a cliff face like that.”

  “Or nervous,” said Nora. “There’s a lot of controversy over why the Anasazi suddenly abandoned their pueblos on the flats and retreated into those inaccessible cliff dwellings. Some say it was for defense.”

  “Looks like a no-brainer to me,” Smithback said, grabbing the binoculars from Holroyd. “Who’d live up there if they didn’t have to? No elevators, and Pizza Hut sure as hell doesn’t deliver.”

  Nora looked at him. “What makes it strange is that there’s no overt evidence of warfare or invasion. All we really know is that the Anasazi suddenly retreated to these cliff sites, stayed there for a while, and then abandoned the Four Corners area entirely. Some archaeologists think it was caused by a total social breakdown.”

  Sloane had been scanning the cliffs with a shaded hand. Now she took the binoculars from Smithback and examined the rock more carefully. “I think I can see a way up,” she said. “If you climb that talus slope, there’s a hand-and-toe trail pecked up the slickrock which goes all the way to the ledge. From there you can edge over.” She lowered the binoculars and looked at Nora, amber eyes lit up with mild excitement. “Do we have time to try it?”

  Nora glanced at her watch. They were already hopelessly behind schedule—one more hour wouldn’t matter, and they did have an obligation to survey as many ruins as they could. Besides, it might revive some flagging spirits. She gazed up at the little ruin, feeling her own curiosity aroused. There was always the chance her father had explored this ruin, maybe even left his scrawled initials on a rockface to record his presence. “All right,” she said, reaching for her camera. “It doesn’t look technical.”

  “I’d like to go, too,” said Holroyd excitedly. “I did some rock climbing in college.”

  Nora looked at the flushed, eager face. Why not?

  “I’m sure Mr. Swire would be happy to give the horses an extra rest.” Nora looked at the group. “Anybody else want to come?”

  Black gave a short laugh. “No thanks,” he said. “I value my life.”

  Aragon glanced up from his notebook and shook his head. Bonarotti had gone off to gather mushrooms. Smithback pushed away from the rock wall and stretched luxuriously. “Guess I’d better tag along with you, Madame Chairman,” he said. “It wouldn’t do to have you find an Anasazi Rosetta stone while I was loafing around down here.”

  They crossed the stream, scrambled over boulders and up the talus slope, loose rocks clattering behind them. The sandstone ahead sloped upward at a forty-five-degree angle, notched with a series of eroded dimples set into the rock.

  “That’s the hand-and-toe trail.” Nora pointed. “The Anasazi pounded them out with quartzite hammerstones.”

  “I’ll go first,” said Sloane. To Nora’s surprise she shot nimbly upward, limbs tawny in the sunlight, hands and feet finding the holds with the instinctive assurance of a veteran rock climber. “Come on up!” she said a minute later, kneeling on the ledge above their heads. Holroyd followed. Then Nora watched Smithback creep cautiously up the slickrock face, gangly limbs clutching at the narrow holds, his face covered with sweat. Something about him made her smile. She waited until he had safely completed the climb, then brought up the rear herself.

  In a few moments they wer
e all sitting on the ledge, catching their breath. Nora looked at the camp spread out below their feet, the horses grazing along an apron of sand, the humans looking like splotches of color resting against the red cliffs.

  Sloane rose. “Ready?”

  “Go for it,” said Nora.

  They crept along the narrow ledge. It was about two feet wide, but the bottom was canted slightly and scattered with fragments of sandstone, which rattled off into space as they inched along. After a short distance the ledge broadened out, curved around a corner, and the ruin came into view.

  Nora made a quick visual inspection. The alcove was perhaps fifty feet long, ten feet high at its highest point, and about fifteen feet deep. A low masonry retaining wall had been built at the lip of the alcove and filled with rubble, leveling the surface. Behind were four small roomblocks of flat stones mortared with mud; one with a keyhole door, the rest with tiny windows. The builders had used the natural sandstone roof of the alcove as their ceiling.

  Nora turned to Holroyd and Smithback. “I think Sloane and I should make an initial survey. You wouldn’t mind waiting here for a few minutes?”

  “Only if you promise not to find anything,” Smithback replied.

  Nora unbuckled the hood of her camera and walked gingerly along the facade, photographing the exterior of the dwelling. Although Sloane’s expertise with the large 4x5 Graflex made her the expedition’s official photographer, Nora liked to keep her own record of all the sites she studied.

  She stopped to peer more closely at the plastered wall. Here, she could see the actual handprints of the person who had smeared the adobe. Raising her camera again, she took a careful closeup, then another when she noticed a clear set of fingerprints. It was not unusual to find prints preserved in Anasazi plaster and corrugated pottery, but she always liked to document them when she could. They helped serve as a reminder that archaeology was the study, ultimately, of people, not artifacts—something she felt many of her colleagues seemed to forget.

  There was the usual littering of potsherds on the ground—mostly Pueblo III Mesa Verde whiteware and some late Tusayan-style corrugated grayware. A.D. 1240, Nora thought without surprise.

  Sloane, who had been sketching a quick plan of the ruin, now removed a pair of tweezers and some Ziploc bags from her rucksack. Labeling the bags with a marker, she moved carefully forward, picking up a sampling of potsherds and some scattered corncobs with the tweezers. She placed them in the bags, then marked their positions in her sketchbook. She worked quickly and deftly, and Nora watched with growing surprise. Sloane seemed to know exactly what to do. In fact, she worked as if she had been on many professional surveys before.

  Reaching into her bag again, Sloane pulled out a small, battery-powered chrome instrument and moved to a viga that projected from one of the roomblocks. There was a small whining sound, and Nora realized she was taking a core from the roofbeam for tree-ring dating. By studying the growth pattern of the rings, a specialist in dendrochronology such as Black could tell the exact year the tree was cut. As the whining ended abruptly and silence returned, Nora felt a sudden annoyance at this mechanized disturbance of the site—or, perhaps, with the fact that Sloane had done it so blithely, without her permission. She instinctively moved forward.

  Looking over, Sloane read her face in an instant. “This all right?” she asked, raising her dark eyebrows inquiringly.

  “Next time, let’s discuss something like this first.”

  “Sorry,” Sloane said, in a tone even more annoying for its apparent lack of sincerity. “I just thought it might be useful—”

  “It will be useful,” Nora said, trying to moderate her voice. “That’s not the point.”

  Sloane glanced at her more closely, a cool, appraising glance that bordered on insolence. Then the lazy grin returned. “I promise,” she said.

  Nora turned and moved to the doorway. She realized her irritation was partly based on a vague, irrational threat she felt to her leadership. She hadn’t realized Sloane was so experienced in fieldwork, spoiling Nora’s earlier assumption that she would be leading Goddard’s daughter through the basics. She immediately felt sorry for showing her feelings; she had to admit that the pencil-thin core probably contained the most useful piece of information they would take from the ancient ruin.

  She shined a penlight inside the first roomblock and found the interior relatively well preserved. The walls were plastered, still showing traces of painted decoration. She angled the beam toward the floor, covered with sand and dust that had blown in over the centuries. In one corner she could see the edge of a metate—a grinding stone—protruding from the dirt, beside a broken mano.

  Opening her flash, she took another sequence of pictures in the room and the one beyond, which was exceptionally dusty and—very unusually—seemed at one time to have been painted with thick, heavy black paint. Or perhaps it was from cooking. Moving through a low doorway, she advanced into the third room. It, too, was empty, save for a hearth with several firedogs still propping up a comal, or polished cooking stone. The sandstone ceiling was blackened with crusted smoke, and she could still smell the faint odor of charcoal. A series of holes in the plaster wall might have been the anchor for a loom.

  Moving back through the rooms, Nora leaned out into the sudden warmth of the sun and beckoned the waiting Holroyd and Smithback. They followed her into the roomblock, stooping through the low doorways.

  “This is incredible,” Holroyd said in a reverential whisper. “I’ve never seen anything like it. I still can’t believe people lived up here.”

  “Neither can I,” said Smithback. “No cable.”

  “There’s nothing like the feeling of one of these ancient ruins,” Nora replied. “Even an unremarkable one like this.”

  “Unremarkable to you, maybe,” Holroyd said.

  Nora looked at him. “You’ve never been in an Anasazi ruin before?”

  Holroyd shook his head as they stepped into the second room. “Only Mesa Verde, as a kid. But I’ve read all the books. Wetherill, Bandelier, you name it. As an adult, I never had the time or money to travel.”

  “We’ll call it Pete’s Ruin, then.”

  Holroyd flushed deeply. “Really?”

  “Sure,” said Nora, with a grin. “We’re the Institute: we can name it anything we want.”

  Holroyd looked at her a long moment, eyes gleaming. Then he took her hand and pressed it briefly between his. Nora smiled and gently withdrew her hand. Maybe that wasn’t such a good idea, she thought.

  Sloane came from the back of the ruin, shouldering her rucksack.

  “Find anything?” Nora asked, taking a swig from her canteen and offering it around. She knew that most rock art was found behind cliff dwellings.

  Sloane nodded. “A dozen or so pictographs. Including three reversed spirals.”

  Nora looked up in surprise to meet the woman’s glance.

  Holroyd caught the look. “What?” he asked.

  Nora sighed. “It’s just that, in Anasazi iconography, the counterclockwise direction is usually associated with negative supernatural forces. Clockwise or ‘sunwise’ was considered to be the direction of travel of the sun across the sky. Counterclockwise was therefore considered a perversion of nature, a reversal of the normal balance.”

  “A perversion of nature?” Smithback asked with sudden interest.

  “Yes. In some Indian cultures today, the reversed spiral is still associated with witchcraft and sorcery.”

  “And I found this,” Sloane said, lifting one hand. In it she held a small, broken, human skull.

  Nora turned, uncomprehending at first, and Sloane’s grin widened lazily.

  “Where did you find that?” Nora asked sharply.

  Sloane’s smile did not falter. “Back there, next to the granary.”

  “And you just picked it up?”

  “Why not?” Sloane asked, her eyes narrowing. The slight movement reminded Nora of a cat when threatened.

  �
�For one thing,” Nora snapped, “we don’t disturb human remains unless it’s absolutely critical for our research. And you’ve touched it, which means we can’t do bone collagen DNA on it. Worst of all, you didn’t even photograph it in situ.”

  “All I did was pick it up,” Sloane said, her voice suddenly low.

  “I thought I made it clear we were to discuss these things first.”

  There was a tense silence. Then Nora heard a scratching sound behind her and she glanced at Smithback. “What the hell are you doing?” she demanded. The journalist had his notebook out and was scribbling away.

  “Taking notes,” he said defensively, pulling the notebook toward his chest.

  “You’re writing down our discussion?” Nora cried.

  “Hey, why not?” Smithback said. “I mean, the human drama’s as much a part of this expedition as—”

  Holroyd advanced and snatched the notebook away. “This was a private conversation,” he said, ripping out the page and handing the notebook back.

  “That’s censorship,” Smithback protested.

  Suddenly Nora heard a low, throaty purr that swelled into a mellifluous laugh. She turned to see Sloane still holding up the skull, looking at the three of them, amusement glittering in her amber eyes.

  Nora took a breath and ignored the laugh. Don’t lose your cool. “Now that it’s been disturbed,” she said in a quiet voice, “we’ll bring it back for Aragon to analyze. Being a ZST type, he may object, but the deed’s been done. Sloane, I don’t want you ever doing any invasive procedures without my express permission. Is that understood?”

  “Understood,” said Sloane, looking suddenly contrite as she handed the skull to Nora. “I wasn’t thinking. The excitement of the moment, I guess.”

  Nora slipped the skull into a sample bag and tucked it in her pack. It seemed to her there had been something challenging in the way Sloane had come forward holding the skull, and Nora momentarily wondered if it hadn’t been a deliberate provocation. After all, it was clear that Sloane was well versed in the protocol of fieldwork. But then she told herself she was being paranoid. Nora remembered infelicitously seizing a gorgeous Folsom point she once uncovered at a dig, pulling it out of the stratum, and then seeing the horrified looks of everyone around her.