Thunderhead
Page 35
44
* * *
THAT NIGHT, A SOFT BUT STEADY RAIN drummed on the tents of the Quivira expedition, but when morning came the sky was a clear, clean, washed blue, without a cloud in sight. After a long and restless night during which she’d split the guard duty with Smithback, Nora was grateful to step out into the cool morning world. The birds filled the trees with their calls, and the leaves dripped with water that caught and fractured the bright rays of the rising sun.
As she emerged from her tent, her boots sunk into soft wet sand. The creek had risen, she could see, but only slightly—these first rains had been soft enough to soak into the sand without running off. But now the ground was saturated. They had to get out of the canyon before another hard rain, if they didn’t want to be trapped by rising water . . . or, God forbid, something worse.
She glanced toward the row of packed equipment, arranged the night before for transport out of the canyon. They were only taking the minimum they needed to get back to Wahweap Marina—food, tents, essential equipment, documentary records. The rest was being cached in an empty room in the city.
Uncharacteristically, Bonarotti was up early, tending the fire, the espresso pot just signaling its completion with a brief roar. He looked up as Nora came over, rubbing the sleep out of her eyes. “Caffé?” he asked. Nora nodded her thanks as he handed her a steaming cup.
“Is there really gold in that kiva?” Bonarotti asked in a quiet voice.
She eased herself down on the log and drank. Then she shook her head. “No, there isn’t. The Anasazi didn’t have any gold.”
“How can you be so sure?”
Nora sighed. “Trust me. In a century and a half of excavations, not one grain of gold has been found.”
“But what about Black? What he said?”
Nora shook her head again. If I don’t get them out of there today, she thought, I’m never going to get them out. “All I can tell you is, Black’s wrong.”
The cook refilled her cup, then turned back to his fire, silent and dissatisfied. As she sipped her coffee, the rest of the camp began to stir. As they approached, one at a time, it was clear to Nora that the tension of the previous day had not gone away. If anything, it had increased. Black took a seat by the fire and hunched over his coffee, his face dark and inflamed. Smithback gave Nora a tired smile, squeezed her shoulder, then retreated to a rock to scratch quietly in his notebook. Aragon looked distant and absorbed. Sloane was the last to appear. When she did, she refused to meet Nora’s eyes. A resolute silence gripped the camp. Nobody looked like they had slept.
Nora realized she had to establish a momentum, keep things moving toward departure, not allow anyone time to brood. She finished her cup, swallowed, cleared her throat. “This is how it’s going to work,” she said. “Enrique, please secure the medical gear we’ll need. Luigi will pack up the last of the food. Aaron, I want you to climb to the top of the rim and get a weather report.”
“But the sky is blue,” protested Black, with a distasteful look at the dangling ladder.
“Right here, it’s blue,” said Nora. “But the rainy season has started, and this valley drains off the Kaiparowits. If it’s raining there, we could get a flash flood just as sure as if it were raining directly on top of us. Nobody goes through the slot canyon until we get the weather report.”
She looked at Sloane, but the woman hardly registered that she had heard.
“If it’s clear,” Nora continued, “we’ll make the final preparations to leave. Aaron, after you get the weather report, I want you to seal the entrance to the Sun Kiva. You broke into it—you leave it just as you found it. Sloane, you and Smithback will take the last of the drysacks up to the caching spot. As soon as Aaron gets the weather report, I’ll take a load out through the canyon, then make sure the site is secure.”
She looked around. “Is everyone clear on their duties? I want us out of here in two hours.”
Everyone nodded but Sloane, who sat with a dark, unresponsive look on her face. Nora wondered what would happen if, at the last minute, she refused to go. Nora felt sure that Black wouldn’t stay behind—deep down, he was too much of a coward—but Sloane was another matter. We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it, Nora thought.
Just as she was rising, a flash of color caught her eye: Swire, emerging from the mouth of the slot canyon and coming down the valley. Something about the way he was moving toward them filled her with dread. Not more horses, please.
Swire sprinted across the creek and into camp. “Someone got Holroyd’s body,” he said, fighting to catch his breath.
“Someone?” Aragon asked sharply. “Are you sure it wasn’t animals?”
“Unless an animal can scalp a man, cut off his toes and fingers, and drill out a piece of his skull. He’s lying up there in the creek, not far from where we put him.”
The group looked at one another in horror. Nora glanced at Smithback and could tell from his expression that he, too, remembered what Beiyoodzin had said.
“Peter . . .” Nora’s voice faltered. She swallowed. “Did you go on to check the horses?” she heard herself ask.
“Horses are fine,” said Swire.
“Are they ready to take us out?”
“Yes,” he said.
“Then we have no more time to waste,” Nora continued, standing up and placing her cup on the serving table. “I’ll take that load out through the slot canyon, and pick up Peter’s body on the way. We’re just going to have to pack it out on one of the horses. I’ll need someone to give me a hand.”
“I’ll help,” said Smithback quickly.
Nora nodded her thanks.
“I will go, too,” said Aragon. “I would like to examine the corpse.”
Nora glanced at him. “There are things here that you need to do—” The sentence went unfinished as she saw the significant look on his face. She turned away. “Very well. We could use a third hand with the body. And listen, all of you: stay in pairs. I don’t want anyone going anywhere alone. Sloane, you’d better go with Aaron.”
Nobody moved, and she glanced around at the faces. The tension that had drawn her nerves tight as a bowstring—the fear and revulsion she felt at the thought of Peter’s body, broken and violated in death—suddenly coalesced into exasperation.
“Damn it!” she cried out. “What the hell are you waiting for? Let’s move!”
45
* * *
SILENTLY, AARON BLACK FOLLOWED SLOANE toward the rope ladder. Their private discussion the night before had resolved nothing. At the last minute, Sloane would refuse to leave; Black felt certain she would. But when he questioned her, she had been impatient and evasive. Though he would never admit it to her, Black’s own intense desire to stay had been slightly tempered by fear: fear of what killed Holroyd, and, worse, of what had attacked their horses and equipment; and now, added to that, fear of what had mutilated Holroyd’s body.
Reaching the base of the ladder, Sloane pulled up onto the first rung and began to climb. Black, irritated when she did not wait to see him safely into the harness, pulled the reinforced loops into place around his waist and crotch, tested the ropes, and started up. He hated this climb; harness or no harness, it terrified him to be swaying five hundred feet up on a cliff, hanging on to nothing but a flimsy nylon rope.
But as he mounted the ladder, slowly, one painful rung at a time, the terror began to abate. A phrase began running through his mind; a phrase that had never been far from him since he first discovered the Sun Kiva, stuck in his head like a singsong melody. As he climbed, he recited the entire passage, first silently, then under his breath. “And then, widening the hole a little, I inserted the candle and peered in. As my eyes grew accustomed to the light, details of the room emerged slowly from the mist, strange animals, statues, and gold—everywhere the glint of gold.”
Everywhere the glint of gold. It was that final phrase, more than anything else, that kept repeating itself in his mind like a mantra.
Until now. He climbed hand over hand, moving up the ladder, stopping occasionally to check his harness. Now, dirt seemed a poor substitute for gold. He thought about all the gold that Cortéz had melted down into bars and sent back to Spain; all the splendid works of art turned into bullion, lost to the world. Its twin treasure sat in that kiva.
The fever he had felt as a twelve-year-old, first reading that account, now burned in him again. But again he was torn: there was danger here, he knew. And yet, leaving the valley without seeing the inside of the Sun Kiva seemed almost unimaginable to him.
“Sloane, talk to me,” he called. “Are you going to leave the kiva behind, just like that?”
Sloane didn’t answer.
He heaved up the ladder, sweating and grunting. Above, he saw Sloane preparing to make the final climb around the terrifying brow of rock below the summit. Here, the sandstone was still streaked with moisture from the rain, and it glowed a blood-drenched crimson.
“Sloane, say something, please,” he gasped.
“There’s nothing to say,” came the clipped response.
Black shook his head. “How could your father have made a mistake like putting her in charge? If it were you, we’d be making history right now.”
Sloane’s only response was to disappear around the brow of rock. Taking a deep breath, Black followed her up the last pitch. Two minutes later, he struggled up over the rim and threw himself into the sand, exhausted, angry, utterly despondent. He sucked the air deep into his lungs, trying to catch his breath. The air was a lot cooler up here, and a stiff breeze was blowing, smelling of pine and juniper. He sat up, pulling off the annoying harness. “All this way,” he said. “All this work. Just to be cheated out of the greatest discovery at the last minute.”
But Sloane didn’t answer. He was aware of her presence standing to one side, silent and unmoving. Everywhere the glint of gold. . . . Remotely, he was curious why Sloane was just standing there, making no move to get started. With a muttered curse, he stood up and glanced at her.
Sloane’s expression was so unfamiliar, so unexpectedly dramatic, that he simply stared. Her face had lost all its color. She remained where she was, unmoving, staring out over the trees, her lips slightly drawn back from her teeth. In a strange trick of the light he saw her amber eyes deepen to mahogany, as if a sudden shadow had been cast upon them. At last, unlocking his eyes from her face, he slowly turned to follow her gaze.
A dark mass rose above and far beyond the ridge, so enormous and fearsome it took Black a moment to comprehend its true nature. Above the lofty prow of the Kaiparowits Plateau rose a thunderhead the likes of which he had never seen. It looked, he thought distantly, more like an atomic explosion than a storm. Its moiled foot ran at least thirty miles along the spine of the plateau, turning the ridge into a zone of dead black; from this base rose the body of the storm, surging and billowing upward to perhaps forty thousand feet. It flattened itself against the tropopause and sheared off into an anvil-shaped head at least fifty miles across. A heavy, tenebrous curtain of rain dropped from its base, as opaque as steel, obscuring all but the very point of the distant plateau in a veil of water. There was a monstrous play of lightning inside the great thunderhead, vast flickerings and dartings, ominously silent in the distance. As he watched, mesmerized and terrified at once, the thunderhead continued to spread, its dirty tentacles creeping across the blue sky. Even the air on the canyon rim seemed to grow charged with electricity, the scent of violence drifting through the piñons as if from a faraway battleground.
Black remained motionless, transfixed by the awful sight, as Sloane moved slowly, like a sleepwalker, toward the stunted tree that held the weather receiver. There was a snap of a switch, then a low wash of static. As the unit locked onto the preset wavelength, the static gave way to the monotonous, nasal voice of a weather announcer in Page, Arizona, giving a litany of details, statistics, and numbers. Then Black heard, with superhuman clarity, the forecast: “Clear skies and warmer temperatures for the rest of the day, with less than five percent chance of precipitation.”
Black swivelled his eyes from the thunderhead to the sky directly above them: bright, flawless blue. He looked down into the valley of Quivira, peaceful and quiet, the camp awash in morning sunlight. The dichotomy was so extreme that, for a moment, he could not comprehend it.
He stared back at Sloane. Her lips, still withdrawn from her teeth, looked somehow feral. Her whole being was tense with an internal epiphany. Black waited, suddenly breathless, as she snapped off the instrument.
“What—?” Black began to ask, but the look on Sloane’s face silenced him.
“You heard Nora’s orders. Let’s get this disassembled and down into camp.” Sloane’s voice was brisk, businesslike, neutral. She swung up into the stunted juniper and in a moment had unwound the antenna, taken down the receiver, and packed it in a net bag. She glanced at Black.
“Let’s go,” she said.
Without another word, she swung the bag over her shoulder and walked to the ladder. In a moment, she had disappeared down into blue space.
Confused, Black slowly buckled on his harness, took hold of the rope ladder, and began to follow her down.
* * *
Ten minutes later, he stepped off the rope ladder. His distraction was so complete that he only knew he had reached the bottom when his foot sank into the wet sand. He stood there, irresolutely, and again turned his eyes upward. Overhead, the sky was an immaculate azure from rim to rim. There was no hint of the cataclysm taking place twenty miles away, at the head of their watershed. He removed the harness and walked back toward camp, his steps stiff and wooden. Despite the burden of the receiver, Sloane had scuttled down the cliff face like a spider, and she was in camp already, dropping the equipment beside the last pile of drysacks.
Nora’s urgent voice brought Black out of his reverie. “What’s the report?” he heard her ask Sloane.
Sloane didn’t answer.
“Sloane, we have no time. Will you please give me the weather report?” The exasperation in Nora’s voice was unmistakable.
“Clear skies and warmer temperatures for the rest of the day,” Sloane said, in a monotone. “Less than a five percent chance of precipitation.”
Black watched as the strained look on Nora’s face was replaced by a flood of relief. The suspicion and concern vanished from her eyes. “That’s great,” she said with a smile. “Thanks, you two. I’d like everybody to help take the last of the drysacks up to the caching site. Then, Aaron, you can go ahead and seal up the entrance to the hidden cavern. Roscoe, perhaps you should go with him. Keep a close eye on each other. We’ll be back to help you take the last load out in ninety minutes or so.”
A strange, utterly foreign sensation began to creep up Black’s spine. With a growing sense of unreality, he came up beside Sloane and watched as Nora gave a shout and a wave to Smithback. They were quickly joined by Aragon. Then the three walked toward the rows of supplies, shouldered their drysacks, and started for the mouth of the slot canyon.
After a moment, Black tore himself away and turned toward Sloane. “What are you doing?” he asked, his voice cracking.
Sloane met his gaze. “What am I doing? I’m not doing anything, Aaron.”
“But we saw—” Black began, then faltered.
“What did we see?” Sloane hissed suddenly, rounding on him. “All I did was get the weather report and give it to Nora. Just as she demanded. If you saw some
thing, say so now. If not, then shut your mouth about it forever.”
Black stared into her eyes: her whole frame was trembling, her lips white with emotion. He glanced upcanyon, in time to see the group of three cross the stream, toil briefly up the scree slope, and disappear into the dark, terrible slit of rock.
Then he looked back at Sloane. As she read his eyes, the tension in her frame ebbed away. And then, slowly, she nodded.
46
* * *
JOHN BEIYOODZIN HALTED HIS HORSE AT THE top of the hogback ridge and looked down into the valley of Chilbah. The horse had taken the trail well, but he was still trembling, damp with perspiration. Beiyoodzin waited, murmuring soothing words, giving him time to recover. The late morning sun was glinting off the peaceful thread of water winding through the valley bottom, a ribbon of quicksilver amid the lush greenery. On the high benchlands above, the wind stirred the cottonwoods and copses of oaks. He could smell sage and ozone in the air. There was a sudden stirring of wind that pressed at his back, as if urging him over the side. Beiyoodzin restrained an impulse to look; he knew all too well what loomed up behind him.
The buckskin shook out his mane, and Beiyoodzin patted him soothingly on the neck. He closed his eyes a moment, calming himself, trying to reconcile his mind to the confrontation that lay ahead.
But calm would not come. He felt a sudden surge of anger at himself: he should have told the woman everything when he had the chance. She had been honest with him. And she deserved to know. It had been foolish to tell her only half of the story. Worse, it had been unkind and selfish to lie. And now, as a result of his weakness, he found himself on a journey that he would have given almost anything to avoid. He could hardly bring himself to contemplate the terrible nature of the evil he had to confront. And yet he had no choice but to prepare himself for conflict; perhaps, even, for death.