Thunderhead

by Douglas Preston

  Although not strong, the light of the late afternoon sun beyond seemed dazzling after their journey through the cramped, twisting canyon. As her eyes adjusted, Nora could see a small valley open up below them. The stream tumbled down a defile and spread out into a sandy creek along the valley floor. There was a narrow floodplain, covered with pounded boulders, repeatedly raked by flash floods. Cottonwoods lined the banks of the floodplain, their massive trunks scarred and hung with old flood debris. The creek had cut down through a layer of rock in the center of the valley, creating benchlands on either side that were also dotted with cottonwoods, scrub oak, rabbitbrush, and wildflowers.

  The valley had an intimate feeling: it was only about four hundred yards long by two hundred yards wide, a jeweled pocket in the red sandstone. The mellow sunlight fell upon a riot of color: blooming Apache plumes, Indian paintbrush, scarlet gilia. Puffy cumulus clouds, tinged with the afternoon light, drifted across the narrow patch of sky above the clifftops.

  After the long dark crawl through the slot canyon, arriving at this beautiful valley was like stumbling upon a lost world. Everything about it—its intimate size, its high surrounding walls, its incredible remoteness, the tremendous difficulties involved in attaining it—filled Nora with the sensation of discovering a hidden paradise. As she looked around, enraptured, a breeze began to come up. As the trees rustled, cotton fell from their catkins and drifted in the lazy air like brilliant motes of trapped light.

  After a moment Nora glanced over at Sloane. The woman had a look of intense, suppressed excitement on her face; the amber eyes seemed to blaze as they darted about, scanning first the canyon floor, then its walls.

  Light as a cat, Sloane moved silently down the shallow stream to the canyon floor. Nora lagged behind for a moment. Mingled with her awe of the beauty was a fresh certainty: this was the valley her father had discovered. And with this certainty came another thought, awful in its suddenness. Was the place terrible as well as beautiful? Would she find her father’s remains somewhere down there on the canyon floor, or hidden among the ledges above?

  But as quickly as it had come, the feeling dissipated. Somebody had found and mailed his letter. That in itself was a mystery, which gnawed at her constantly. But at least it meant that, wherever her father’s bones lay, they probably lay somewhere else, closer to civilization. Still, it was several moments before she followed Sloane to the flat sandy benchland, girded with rocks, well above the flash flood zone. A small grove of cottonwoods provided shade.

  “How’s this for a campsite?” Sloane asked, dropping her pack.

  “Couldn’t be more perfect,” Nora replied. She unshouldered her own pack, pulled out her soggy sleeping bag, shook it out, and draped it over a bush.

  Then her eyes turned ineluctably back toward the towering cliffs that surrounded them on four sides. Pulling the waterproof binoculars from her pack, she began scanning the rock faces. The sandstone cliffs rose in steplike fashion from the canyon floor: sheer pitches, interrupted by benchlands of softer strata that had eroded back to form flat areas. Near the far end of the valley, a large rockfall had dropped a pitched tangle of house-sized boulders that lay in a precarious jumble against the cliff face. But the rockfall led up to nothing; and there was no sign in the valley of a trail, a ruin, anything.

  She shook off the sudden cold feeling in her gut, reminding herself that if the ruined city was obvious, it would have been found. Any caves or alcoves formed in those benches above could not be seen from below. It was precisely the kind of spot favored by the Anasazi.

  Her father, however, had seen a clear hand-and-toe trail. Her eyes again swept the lower rock faces, searching for the telltale signs of a trail. She saw nothing but smooth faces of red sandstone.

  Nora glanced around for Sloane. The woman had already abandoned her scrutiny of the walls and was walking along the base of the cliffs, peering intently at the ground. Looking for potsherds or flint chips, Nora thought approvingly: always a good way to locate a hidden ruin above. Every fifty feet, Sloane would stop and squint up the cliff faces at an oblique angle, looking for the telltale shallow notches that would signify a trail.

  Nora shoved her binoculars into her damp jeans and walked along the cutbanks and rock shelves above the stream, examining the soil profile for any cultural evidence. She knew they should be using the last of the light to build a fire and prepare dinner. But, like Sloane, she felt compelled to keep searching.

  It was the work of ten minutes to reach the opposite side of the valley. Here, the stream disappeared into another slot canyon, much narrower even than the one they had crawled through. Narrow stone benches crawled up the red walls on either side, and from the gorge below came the sound of falling water. Carefully, she crept up to its edge. Water fell from the valley in a long stream. A plume of mist rose from where it struck the rocks below, filling the end of the canyon with a watery veil she could barely see through. A small microclimate had developed, and the rocks were thickly covered with moss and ferns. She knew from the maps, though, that the stream ran on through a series of descending waterfalls and pools, each separated by twenty or thirty feet of overhanging rock. It would be impossible to descend without a highly technical climb, and in any case at its bottom the slot seemed too narrow to admit a human being. But there would be no point even in trying: as the maps indicated, the stream ran in this impassable fashion for sixteen miles, until it spilled off the North Rim of Marble Gorge and dropped a thousand feet to the Colorado River. Anyone caught in a flash flood and pushed into this canyon would emerge at the Colorado just so much ground beef.

  She moved on, pausing at the large rockfall. It was cool in the shadow of the cliffs, and she shivered slightly. The rockfall, with its dark holes and hidden spaces between the huge boulders, looked like a lair of ghosts. It appeared too unstable to climb. And, in any case, the cliff face behind it was sheer and unmarked by toeholds.

  She worked her way back up the other side of the creek and encountered Sloane, who had finished her own survey. The almond eyes had lost some of their brilliance.

  “Any luck?” Nora asked.

  Sloane shook her head. “I’m having trouble believing there was a city here. I haven’t found anything.”

  For once, the trademark smile was missing, and she seemed agitated, almost angry. This city is as important to her as it is to me, Nora thought.

  “The Anasazi never built a road to nowhere,” Nora replied. “There’s got to be something here.”

  “Perhaps,” Sloane said slowly, peering again at the cliff faces surrounding them. “But if I hadn’t seen those radar images and the hogback ridge, I’d have a hard time believing we’ve been following any sort of road at all the last two days.”

  The sun had now dipped low enough to bring creeping shadows across the valley floor. “Look, Sloane,” Nora said. “We haven’t even begun to examine this valley. We’ll spend tomorrow morning making a careful survey. And if we still don’t find anything, we’ll bring the proton magnetometer in and scan for structures beneath the sand.”

  Sloane was still looking intently up at the cliffs, as if demanding they give up their secrets. Then she looked at Nora, and gave a slow smile. “Maybe you’re right,” she said. “Let’s get a fire going and see if we can dry out these bags.”

  After she had scooped out a shallow firepit and built a ring of stones, Nora sat by the fire and changed the damp bandages on her fingers. The sleeping bags began to steam slightly in the heat.

  “What do you suppose Bonarotti put in those care packages?” Sloane asked as she piled more logs on the fire.

  “Let’s find out.” Nora retrieved a pot from her daypack, then grabbed the small packet Bonarotti had thrust into her hand. She unwrapped it curiously. Inside were two Ziploc bags, still dry, one containing what looked like tiny pasta and the other a mix of herbs. ADD TO BOILING WATER AND COOK SEVEN MINUTES was written on the first bag in black Magic Marker; REMOVE FROM HEAT, DRAIN, ADD THIS MIXTURE was writ
ten on the second.

  Ten minutes later, they pulled the simmering mixture from the fire, drained off the water, and added the second packet. Instantly, a wonderful aroma rose from the pot.

  “Couscous with savory herbs,” Sloane whispered. “Isn’t Bonarotti a prince?”

  From the couscous, they moved on to Sloane’s dish—lentils with sun-dried vegetables in a curried beef broth—then cleared away the dishes. Nora shook her bag out and laid it in the soft sand, close to the fire. Then, stripping off most of her wet clothes, she climbed in and lay back, breathing the clean air of the canyon, gazing at the dome of stars overhead. Despite the words of encouragement she’d given Sloane—despite the remarkable meal—Nora couldn’t entirely escape a private fear of her own.

  “So what’ll we find tomorrow, Nora?” Sloane’s husky voice, surprisingly close in the near darkness, echoed her own thoughts.

  Nora sat up on one shoulder and glanced over. Sloane was sitting cross-legged on her sleeping bag, combing her hair. Her jeans were drying on a nearby limb, and an oversized shirt spilled across her bare knees. The flickering light threw her wide cheekbones into sharp relief, giving her beautiful face a mysterious, exotic look.

  “I don’t know,” Nora replied. “What do you think we’ll find?”

  “Quivira,” came the reply, almost whispered.

  “You didn’t seem so sure an hour ago.”

  Sloane shrugged. “Oh, it’ll be here,” she said. “My father is never wrong.”

  The woman’s face wore its trademark lazy smile, but something in her voice told Nora it wasn’t entirely a joke.

  “So tell me about your father,” Sloane went on.

  Nora took a long breath. “Well, the truth is, from the outside he was a traditional Irish screwup. He drank too much. He always had schemes and plans. He hated real work. But you know what?” She looked up at Sloane. “He was the best father anyone could have had. He loved us. He told us he loved us ten times a day. It was the first thing he said to us in the morning and the last thing at night. He was the kindest person I ever knew. He took us on almost all of his adventures. We went everywhere with him, looking for lost ruins, digging for treasure, scouring old battlegrounds with metal detectors. Nowadays, the archaeologist in me is horrified at what we used to do. We packed horses into the Superstition Mountains trying to find the Lost Dutchman Mine, we spent a summer in the Gila Wilderness looking for the Adams diggings—that sort of thing. I’m amazed we survived. My mother couldn’t stand it, and she eventually took steps to divorce him. As a way to win her back, he went off to discover Quivira. And we never heard from him again—until this old letter arrived. But he’s the reason I became an archaeologist.”

  “You think he could still be alive?”

  “No,” said Nora. “That’s out of the question. He would never have abandoned us like that.”

  She breathed the fragrant night air as silence settled into the canyon. “You have a pretty remarkable father yourself,” she went on at last.

  A thin trace of light suddenly lanced across the dark sky. “Shooting star,” Sloane said. She was silent for a moment. “You said the same thing, back on the trail. I suppose it’s true. He is a remarkable father. And he expects me to be an even more remarkable daughter.”

  “How so?”

  Sloane continued to stare at the sky. “I guess you could say he’s one of those fathers who holds his child to an almost impossible standard. I was always made to perform, to measure up. I was only allowed to bring home friends who could carry on an intellectual discussion at the dinner table. But nothing I did was ever good enough, and even now he doesn’t trust me to succeed.”

  She shook her head. “I still remember when I was in seventh grade, my piano teacher made all us students attend a recital. I’d worked up this really difficult Bach three-part invention, and I was very proud of myself. But the teacher had this other student, Ursula Rein, who was a true prodigy. She’s teaching at Juilliard now. Anyway, she played right before me, and did this Chopin waltz at about twice normal speed.” Her face hardened. “When my father heard that, he made me get up and leave with him. I was so angry, so embarrassed. I’d practiced for so long, and I thought he’d be proud of me. . . . Oh, he made up some excuse, said his stomach was bothering him or something. But I knew the real reason was he couldn’t stand for me to come in second.” She laughed. “I’m still amazed he wanted me on this expedition.”

  Nora could hear the bitter undertone in the laugh. “It doesn’t seem to have hurt you,” she replied.

  “Because I don’t let it hurt me,” she said, looking at Nora with a defiant flip of her hair.

  Nora realized Sloane might have taken the comment the wrong way. “No, that’s not what I meant. I meant, you’re—”

  “And you know what?” Sloane interrupted, as if she hadn’t heard. “I don’t ever remember my father telling me he loved me.”

  She looked away. Nora, unsure how to answer, decided to change the subject. “I’ve been curious. You’ve got the money, looks, and talent to be anything. So why are you an archaeologist?”

  Sloane turned back to her, the grin returning. “Why? Are archaeologists supposed to be poor, ugly, and dumb?”

  “Of course not.”

  Sloane gave a low laugh. “It’s the family business, isn’t it? The Rothschilds are bankers, the Kennedys are politicians, the Goddards are archaeologists. I’m his only child. He raised me to be an archaeologist and I wasn’t strong enough to deny him.”

  The father again, Nora thought. She looked into Sloane’s face. “Don’t you like archaeology?”

  “I love it,” came the reply, a brief note of passion sounding in the rich contralto. “I never stop thinking about the precious things and the secrets that lie hidden beneath the soil. They’re waiting to teach us something, if only we’re smart enough to find them. But I’ll never be a good enough archaeologist to satisfy him.” She paused a moment, then spoke more briskly. “It’s funny, Nora, but if I find Quivira, you know who’s going to be remembered? You know who’s going to go down in the history books like Wetherill and Earl Morris? Not me. Him.” She punctuated this with a short, harsh laugh. “Isn’t that ironic?”

  Nora could not find an answer to this.

  Sloane uncrossed her legs and lay down atop her sleeping bag. She sighed, teased her hair back with one finger. “Seeing anyone?”

  Nora paused to consider this abrupt change of subject. “Not really,” she replied. “And you? Are you dating someone?”

  “Not anybody I wouldn’t drop in a second if the right person came along.” Sloane was silent for a moment, as if thinking about something. “So what do you think of the men in this group of ours? You know, as men.”

  Nora hesitated again, not feeling entirely comfortable talking like this about people she was leading. But the steamy warmth of the sleeping bag, and the brightness of the stars, somehow conspiratorial in their proximity, relaxed her defenses. “I hadn’t really thought about them as, you know, potential dating material.”

  Sloane gave a low laugh. “Well, I have. I’d pegged you for Smithback.”

  Nora sat up. “Smithback?” she cried. “He’s insufferable.”

  “He’s in a position to do a lot for your career if this all works out. Funny, too, if you like your humor dry as a martini. He’s led a pretty interesting life these last couple of years. Did you ever read that book of his, about the New York museum murders?”

  “He gave me a copy. I haven’t really looked at it.”

  “It’s a hell of a read. And the guy’s not bad looking, either, in a citified sort of way.”

  Nora shook her head. “He’s about as full of himself as they come.”

  “Maybe. But I think part of that is just facade. The guy can take it as well as dish it out.” She paused. “And something about that mouth tells me he’s a great kisser.”

  “If you find out, let me know.” Nora glanced at Sloane. “Got your eyes on anybody?”
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  By way of answering, Sloane fanned herself absently. “Black,” she said at last.

  It took a moment for Nora to digest this. “What?” she asked.

  “If I had to choose somebody, I’d choose Black.”

  Nora shook her head. “I don’t get it.”

  “Oh, I know he can be obnoxious. He’s terrified of being away from civilization. But you wait. When we find Quivira, he’ll come into his own. It’s easy to forget out here in the middle of nowhere that he’s one of the most prominent archaeologists in the country. With good reason. Talk about someone who could do a lot for a career.” She laughed. “And look at that big-boned frame of his. I’ll bet he’s hung like a fire hydrant.”

  And with that she stood up, letting the shirt slide off her arms and fall away to the ground. “Now look what you’ve done,” she said. “I’m going down to the stream to cool off.”

  Nora leaned back. As if at a distance, she heard Sloane down at the stream, splashing softly. In a few moments she returned, her sleek body glistening in the moonlight. She slid noiselessly into her sleeping bag. “Sweet dreams, Nora Kelly,” she murmured.

  Then she turned away, and within moments, Nora could hear her breathing, regular and serene. But Nora lay still, eyes open to the stars, for a long time.

  24

  * * *

  NORA AWOKE WITH A START. SHE HAD slept so deeply, so heavily, that for a moment she did not know where she was. She sat up in panic. Dawn light was just bloodying the rimrock above her head. A throbbing at the ends of her bandaged fingers quickly brought back the memories of the previous day: the terrible struggle on the hogback ridge; the discovery of the slot canyon and this hidden valley beyond; the lack of any signs of a ruin. She looked around. The sleeping bag beside her was empty.

  She rose, sore muscles protesting, and stirred the ashes of the fire. Cutting some dry grass and folding it into a packet, she shoved it in the coals. A thread of smoke came up, then the grass burst into flame. She quickly added sticks. Rummaging in her pack, she filled a tiny two-cup espresso pot with grounds and water, put it on the fire, then went down to the creek to wash. When she returned, the pot was hissing. She poured herself a cup just as Sloane walked up. The perpetual smile was gone.