Thunderhead

by Douglas Preston

  Beiyoodzin finally saw the situation clearly, and he was not happy with the role he had played. Sixteen years before, a small imbalance, a minor ugliness—ni zshinitso—had been injected into the small world of his people. They had ignored it. And as a result the small imbalance had become, as they should have known it would, a great evil. As a healer, he should have guided them to doing what was right. It was precisely because of this old imbalance, this absence of truth, that these people were now down in Chilbah, digging. He shuddered. And it was because of this imbalance that the eskizzi, the wolfskin runners, had become active again. And now it had fallen to him to correct the imbalance.

  At last, he reluctantly turned around and gazed toward the storm, amazed to see it still growing and swelling, like some vast malignant beast. Here, as if he needed it, was a physical manifestation of the imbalance. It was releasing ever thicker, blacker, denser columns of rain down onto the Kaiparowits Plateau. It was a tremendous rain, a five-hundred-year rain. Beiyoodzin had never seen its equal.

  His gaze moved over the distant guttered landscape between the thunderhead and the valley, trying to pick out the flash of moving water; but the canyons were too deep. In his mind’s eye he could see the torrential rains falling hard on the slickrock of the Kaiparowits, the drops coalescing into rivulets, the rivulets into streams, the streams into torrents—the torrents into something that no word could adequately describe.

  He untied a small bundle from one of his saddle strings—a drilled piece of turquoise and a mirage stone tied up in horsehair around a small buckskin bag, attached to an eagle feather. He opened the bag, pinched out some cornmeal and pollen, and sprinkled it about, saving the last for his horse’s poll. He brushed first himself, then his horse’s face, with the eagle feather. The horse was prancing now in growing agitation, eyes rolling toward the thunderhead. The leather strings of the saddle slapped restlessly in the growing wind.

  Beiyoodzin chanted softly in his language. Then he repacked his medicine kit, dusted the pollen from his fingers. The landscape was now divided sharply between brilliant sunlight and a spreading black stain. A chill, electrically charged wind eddied around him. He would not, of course, attempt to ride into the second valley, the valley of Quivira, through the slot canyon. The flood would be coming through within minutes. That meant he would have to take the secret Priest’s Trail over the top: the long, difficult rimrock trail that his grandfather had told him of in broken whispers but that he himself had never seen. He thought back, trying to recall his grandfather’s directions precisely. It would be necessary to do so, because of the cleverness with which the trail was hidden: it had been designed to be an optical illusion, its cliff edge cut higher than the edge along the rockface, rendering it practically invisible from more than a few feet away. The trail, he had been told, started up the cliffs some distance from the slot canyon, crossed the wide slickrock plateau, and then descended into the canyon at the far end of the valley of Quivira. It might be very difficult for an old man. Maybe, after all these years, it would be impossible. But he had no choice; the imbalance had to be corrected, the natural symmetry had to be restored.

  He started quickly down into the valley.

  47

  * * *

  NORA PARTED THE CURTAIN OF WEEDS AND glanced upward. The slot canyon snaked ahead of her, the sunshine striated and shadowy in the reddish half-light, the hollows and polished ribs of stone stretching ahead like the throat of some great beast. She eased into the water and breaststroked across the first pool, Smithback following, Aragon bringing up the rear. The water felt cool after the dead, oppressive heat of the valley, and she tried to empty her mind to it, concentrating on the pure physical sensation, refusing for the moment to think of the long trip that lay before them.

  They traveled in silence for a while, going from pool to pool, wading along the shallows, the quiet sounds of their passage whispering off the confined spaces of canyon. Nora hefted the drysack from one shoulder to the other. Despite everything, she felt less troubled than she had over the last three days. It had been her great fear that Black and Sloane would descend the ladder with reports of bad weather brewing. It would have been credible, given the recent rains. And she would have had to decide whether they were telling the truth or giving a phony report in order to remain at Quivira. But the report of good weather—though grudgingly given—proved they were resigned to leaving the city. Now all that remained was the grueling multiple portages out through the slot canyon to the horses.

  No, that was not quite all; her mind had never been far from Holroyd’s remains, waiting for them a quarter mile up the slot canyon. And with those remains came the message that the skinwalkers were close; perhaps watching them right now, waiting to make their next move.

  She glanced back toward Aragon: the man had made it clear he wanted to speak to her about something. Aragon looked up, read the question in her eyes, and merely shook his head. “When we reach the body,” was his only reply.

  Nora swam across another pool, climbed up a pourover, and squeezed sideways through a narrower section. Then the steep walls widened a little around her. In the distance ahead, she could make out the massive cottonwood trunk, suspended like a gigantic spar, wedged across the walls of the canyon. Just above it, in deep shadow, was the narrow ledge that led to the space where Holroyd’s body had been laid.

  Nora’s eyes fell from the ledge, to the jumble of rocks below, to the narrow pool that stretched the eight or ten feet across the canyon’s bottom. Her gaze came to rest at a smear of yellow, floating at the near end. It was Holroyd’s body bag. Gingerly, she came forward. Now she could see a long, ragged gash in one side of the bag. And there was Holroyd’s body, lying on its back half out of the water. He looked strangely plump.

  She stopped dead. “Oh, God,” came Smithback’s voice by her shoulder. Then: “Are we exposing ourselves to some kind of disease, wading about in this water?”

  Aragon heaved himself up behind them. “No,” he said, “I don’t believe we are.” But there was no consolation in his face as he spoke these words.

  Nora remained still, and Smithback, too, hesitated behind her. Aragon gently pushed past them toward the body. Nora watched as the doctor pulled it onto a narrow stone shelf beside the pool. Reluctantly, she forced herself forward.

  Then she stopped again with a sudden gasp.

  Holroyd’s decomposing body was swollen inside its clothes, a grotesque parody of obesity. His skin, protruding from his shirt sleeves, was a strange, milky bluish-white. The fingers were now just pink-edged stubs, having been cut away at the first joints. His boots lay on the rocks, slashed and torn, and his feet, that same pale white against the chocolate rock, were missing their toes. Nora gazed in mingled disgust, horror, and outrage. Even worse was the back of the head: a large circular whorl of hair been scalped off, and the disk of skull directly beneath drilled out. Brain matter bulged from the hole.

  Working swiftly, Aragon donned a pair of plastic gloves, removed a scalpel from his kit, positioned it just below the last rib, and with a short movement opened the body. Reaching inside with a long narrow set of forceps, he twisted his hand sharply, then retracted it. On the end of the scalpel was a small bit of pink flesh that looked to Nora like lung tissue. Aragon dropped it inside a test tube already half filled with a clear liquid. Adding two drops from a separate vial, he stoppered the tube and swirled it around in his hands. Nora watched as the color of the solution turned a light blue.

  Aragon nodded to himself, carefully placed the tube inside a styrofoam case, and repacked his instruments. Then, still kneeling, he turned toward Nora. One gloved hand lay, almost protectively, over the corpse’s chest.

  “Do you know what killed him?” Nora asked.

  “Without more precise tools, I can’t be a hundred percent sure,” Aragon replied slowly. “But one answer does seem to fit. All the crude tests I’ve been able to run verify it.”

  There was a moment of silence. Smithback too
k a seat on a rock a cautious distance from the body.

  Aragon glanced at the writer, then back to Nora. “Before I go into that, I need to tell you some things I’ve discovered about the ruin.”

  “About the ruin?” Smithback asked. “What does that have to do with his death?”

  “Everything. I believe the abandonment of Quivira—indeed, perhaps even the reason for its very existence—is intimately connected with Holroyd’s death.” He wiped his face with the sleeve of his shirt. “No doubt you’ve noticed the cracks in the towers, the collapsed third-story rooms of the city.”

  Nora nodded.

  “And you must have noticed the great rockfall at the far end of the canyon. While you were off searching for the horse killers, I talked with Black about this. He told me that the damage to the city was done by a mild earthquake that struck around the same time the city was abandoned. ‘The dates are statistically equal,’ he said. The landslide, according to Black, also occurred at the same time, no doubt triggered by the earthquake.”

  “So you think an earthquake killed all those people?” Nora asked.

  “No, no. It was just a temblor. But that rockfall, and the collapse of some buildings, was enough to raise a large cloud of dust in the valley.”

  “Very interesting,” Smithback said. “But what does a seven-century-old dustcloud have to do with Holroyd’s death?”

  Aragon gave a wan smile. “A great deal, as it turns out. Because the dust within Quivira is riddled with Coccidioides immitis. It’s a microscopic fungal spore that lives in soil. It’s usually associated with very dry, often remote desert areas, so people don’t come into contact with it much. Which is a very good thing. It’s the cause of a deadly disease known as coccidioidomycosis. Or, as you might know it, valley fever.”

  Nora frowned. “Valley fever?”

  “Wait a minute,” Smithback interjected. “Wasn’t that the disease that killed a bunch of people in California?”

  Aragon nodded. “Valley fever, or San Joaquin fever, named after a town in California. There was an earthquake in the desert near San Joaquin many years ago. That quake triggered a small landslide that raised a cloud of dust, which rolled over the town. Hundreds became ill and twenty died, infected with coccidioidomycosis. Scientists came to call this type of deadly dustcloud a ‘tectonic fungal cloud.’” He frowned. “Only the fungus here in Quivira is a far more virulent strain. In concentrated form, it kills in hours or days, not weeks. You see, to get sick you must inhale the spores—either through dust, or through . . . other means. Mere exposure to a sick person is not enough.”

  He wiped his face again. “At first, Holroyd’s symptoms were baffling to me. They did not seem to be from any infectious agent I knew of. Certainly he died too quickly for any of the more likely suspects. And then I remembered that rust-colored powder from the royal burial.”

  He looked at Nora. “I told you about my discoveries with the bones. But do you recall those two pots, full of reddish dust? You thought they might be a kind of red ochre. I never told you that the dust turned out to be dried, ground-up human flesh and bone.”

  “Why didn’t you tell us?” Nora cried.

  “Let’s just say you were preoccupied with other things. And I wanted to understand it myself before I dangled yet another mystery in front of you. In any case, while puzzling over Holroyd’s death, I remembered that reddish dust. And then I realized exactly what it was. It is a substance known to certain southwestern Indian tribes as ‘corpse powder.’”

  Nora glanced at Smithback and saw her own horror reflected in his eyes.

  “It’s used by witches to kill their intended victims,” Aragon continued. “Corpse powder is still known among some Indian groups today.”

  “I know,” Nora whispered. She could almost see Beiyoodzin’s drawn face in the starlight, telling them of the wolfskin runners.

  “When I examined this powder under the microscope, I found it absolutely packed with Coccidioides immitis. It is, quite literally, corpse powder that really kills.”

  “And you think Holroyd was murdered with it?”

  “Given the huge dose he must have received to die so quickly, I would say yes. Although his illness was surely made worse by constant exposure to dust. He did quite a lot of digging in the rear of the ruin in the days before his death. The fact is, we’ve all been exposed to it.”

  “I did my share of digging,” Smithback said, his voice a little shaky. “How much longer before we get sick, too?”

  “I don’t know. A lot depends on the health of our immune systems, and on the degree of exposure. I believe the fungus is much more concentrated in the rear of the city. But regardless, it’s vital that we get out of here and get treatment as soon as possible.”

  “So there’s a cure?” Smithback asked.

  “Yes. Ketoconazole, or in advanced cases where the fungus has invaded the central nervous system, amphotericin B injected directly into the cerebrospinal fluid. The ironic thing is, ampho is a common antibiotic. I almost brought some along.”

  “How sure are you about this?” asked Nora.

  “As sure I can be without more equipment. I’d need a better microscope to be absolutely sure, because in tissue the spherules are only about fifty microns in diameter. But nothing else explains the onset of symptoms: the cyanosis, dyspnea, the mucopurulent sputum . . . the sudden death. And the simple test I just performed on Peter’s lung tissue confirmed the presence of coccidioidin antibodies.” He sighed. “It’s only in the last day or so that I began putting this together. Late yesterday evening, I spent some time in the ruin, and found other examples of corpse powder stored in pots, as well as various odd types of tools. From this, and from all the trashed bones in the Crawlspace, it became quite clear that the inhabitants of Quivira were actually manufacturing corpse powder. As a result, the whole city is contaminated with it. The entire subsoil of the ruin is full of the spores, its density increasing toward the back. That puts the greatest concentration in the Crawlspace, and especially in the cavern of the Sun Kiva that Black discovered.”

  He paused. “I told you my theory that this city was not really Anasazi after all. It was Aztecan in origin. These people brought human sacrifice and witchcraft to the Anasazi. It’s my belief that they are the marauders, the conquerors, who caused the collapse of Anasazi civilization and the abandonment of the Colorado Plateau. They are the mysterious enemies of the Anasazi that archaeologists have sought all these years. These enemies did not kill and exert control through open warfare, which is why we’ve never found the evidence of violence. Their means of conquest and control were more subtle. Witchcraft and the use of corpse powder. Which leaves little or no trace.”

  His voice fell. “When I first analyzed that burial cyst Sloane uncovered, I felt it to be a result of cannibalism. The marks on the bones seemed to point to that. In fact, Black’s protests to the contrary, it was the obvious deduction to make: Anasazi cannibalism is currently a hot, if controversial, theory. But I no longer think cannibalism is at the bottom of all this. I now believe those marks on the bones tell an even more terrible tale.”

  He looked at Nora with haunted eyes. “I believe the priests of the city were infecting prisoners or slaves with the disease, waiting for them to die, and then processing their bodies to make corpse powder. The trash from that terrible operation lies in the back of the cave. With the powder, these conquerors could maintain their rule through ritual and terror. But in the end, the fungus turned on them. The mild earthquake that damaged the towers and caused the landslide must have raised a tectonic fungal cloud in the valley here, just like in San Joaquin. Except that here, in the confined space of the canyon, the dustcloud had no place to go. It filled the alcove, enshrouded the city of Quivira. All those skeletons, thrown atop the broken bodies in the back of the cave, were its priestly Aztec victims.”

  Aragon stopped speaking and looked away from Nora. His face, she thought, had never looked so drawn, so exhausted.

&
nbsp; “Now, it’s time for me to tell you something,” Nora replied slowly. “Modern-day witches may be the ones trying to drive us out of the valley.” She briefly told Aragon about the attack in the ranch house and the more recent conversation with Beiyoodzin. “They followed us out here,” she concluded. “And now that they’ve found the site, they’re trying to drive us away so they can loot it for themselves.”

  Aragon thought for a moment, then shook his head. “No,” he said. “No, I don’t think they’re here to loot the city.”

  “What are you talking about?” Smithback interjected. “Why else would they be trying to drive us away?”

  “Oh, I don’t dispute they’re trying to drive us away. But it’s not to loot the city.” He glanced once again at Nora. “You’ve been assuming all along that these skinwalkers were trying to find the city. What if they were actually trying to protect it?”

  “I don’t—” Smithback began.

  “Just a minute,” Nora broke in. She was thinking quickly.

  “How else could they have traced us here so quickly?” Aragon asked. “And, if indeed they killed Holroyd with corpse powder, where else could they have gotten it, except from this place?”

  “So they weren’t after the letter to learn Quivira’s location,” Nora murmured. “They wanted to destroy the letter. To keep us from coming here.”

  “Nothing else makes sense to me,” Aragon replied. “Once, I believed that Quivira was a city of priests. Now, I believe it was a city of witches.”

  They sat a moment longer, three figures ranged around the still form of Holroyd. Then a sudden breeze, chill with moisture, stirred the hair on Nora’s forehead.

  “We’d better get going,” she said, rising. “Let’s get Peter’s body out of the canyon.”

  Silently, they began rewrapping the body in the ripped drysack.

  48