The Summoning God: Book II of the Anasazi Mysteries by W. Michael Gear, Kathleen O’Neal Gear Page A
Authors: W. Michael Gear, Kathleen O’Neal Gear
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moment.”
He lightly draws his fingers down my throat.
I stand for a long while staring down at the water, watching the twinkles of morning that reflect in the dead woman’s eyes. They are very beautiful.
“I’m sure she’s the one, Father. Why won’t you answer me?”
I hear him rise. He takes his hand away.
“I’m sorry,” I whisper. “I know we should go before they come. I left your soul pot on the bank above. It’s your favorite, the one with the Flute Player painted in the bottom. Let me get it.”
I wade out of the pond and reach for her cape where it rests on the rocks. The turkey feathers are soft against my skin, and fragrant, as though she kept her cape near her herb pots.
I walk up the hill in a sun-drenched dream.
10
E VENING FELL OVER THE DESERT IN SOFT LAVENDER veils and drained the golden hues from the broken hills. The square-topped buttes turned the color of a mourning dove’s wings. Scatters of yellow fell from the cottonwoods that lined the Animas River. In the distance, cattle lowed.
Sitting atop the rubble overlooking the partially excavated tower kiva, Dusty propped his elbows on his knees and watched as sunset streaked the clouds. He wore mud-encrusted cowboy boots and a battered brown cowboy hat. In his hands he cradled a toothless human skull, the bone stained a light shade of umber after centuries in the earth. The wind had cooled the temperature down into the sixties. He flipped up the collar of his canvas coat.
Beyond the borders of the ruin, his archaeological field crew sat around the nightly campfire. Steve Sanders said something Dusty couldn’t hear, and Sylvia Rhone laughed. Steve’s rich black skin gleamed in the firelight, contrasting sharply with Sylvia’s freckled face. Steve was up from the University of Arizona on the pretext that he was adding to his dissertation research. In reality, he’d caved in to Dale’s abject pleading. He had aced his comps last June and just had his dissertation to finish before being awarded his Ph.D.
They’d set up their four green tents in a semicircle around a central fire pit with Dale’s old Holiday Rambler camp trailer parked to the west. Along with the small grove of juniper trees behind the camp, it created a decent windbreak. Sunset gleamed off the windshields on the crew vehicles parked in a line behind the tents.
The collapsed walls of the ancient pueblo seemed to glow an unearthly blue in the twilight. Two-by-two-meter excavation units created black squares in the tower kiva. When they’d quit work at sunset, they’d covered the units with black plastic and lined the
edges with every heavy object within reach: shovels, picks, screens, rocks. The idea was to keep the bone from drying and splitting.
The bone. God, they had bone everywhere. It covered the kiva bottom in a layer twenty centimeters deep, not a surface scatter like he’d first thought. Their finds today had included the elaborately etched skull in his lap, the skull of a girl, and a handful of what appeared to be ceremonial Mesa Verde black-on-white potsherds.
He looked down at the skull. The delicacy of the brow probably meant it had belonged to a woman, though he couldn’t be certain. He was an archaeologist, not a physical anthropologist. He didn’t see as much in bones as other people did. Artifacts told him a whole lot more about a people’s behavior than skeletons.
He tipped the skull to study the quarter-sized hole that gaped in the middle of the left coronal suture. Someone had drilled seven small holes, etched the spaces between them with a stone tool, then lifted out the circlet of skull. A surgical incision, clean, precise. Four lightning bolts zigzagged out from the hole. In modern-day Puebloan mythology, lightning bolts signified spiritual power.
Metal clanked and Dusty saw Steve empty a can of something into the big stew pot hanging on the tripod at the edge of the flames. When the wind gusted just right, he could smell coffee
He lightly draws his fingers down my throat.
I stand for a long while staring down at the water, watching the twinkles of morning that reflect in the dead woman’s eyes. They are very beautiful.
“I’m sure she’s the one, Father. Why won’t you answer me?”
I hear him rise. He takes his hand away.
“I’m sorry,” I whisper. “I know we should go before they come. I left your soul pot on the bank above. It’s your favorite, the one with the Flute Player painted in the bottom. Let me get it.”
I wade out of the pond and reach for her cape where it rests on the rocks. The turkey feathers are soft against my skin, and fragrant, as though she kept her cape near her herb pots.
I walk up the hill in a sun-drenched dream.
10
E VENING FELL OVER THE DESERT IN SOFT LAVENDER veils and drained the golden hues from the broken hills. The square-topped buttes turned the color of a mourning dove’s wings. Scatters of yellow fell from the cottonwoods that lined the Animas River. In the distance, cattle lowed.
Sitting atop the rubble overlooking the partially excavated tower kiva, Dusty propped his elbows on his knees and watched as sunset streaked the clouds. He wore mud-encrusted cowboy boots and a battered brown cowboy hat. In his hands he cradled a toothless human skull, the bone stained a light shade of umber after centuries in the earth. The wind had cooled the temperature down into the sixties. He flipped up the collar of his canvas coat.
Beyond the borders of the ruin, his archaeological field crew sat around the nightly campfire. Steve Sanders said something Dusty couldn’t hear, and Sylvia Rhone laughed. Steve’s rich black skin gleamed in the firelight, contrasting sharply with Sylvia’s freckled face. Steve was up from the University of Arizona on the pretext that he was adding to his dissertation research. In reality, he’d caved in to Dale’s abject pleading. He had aced his comps last June and just had his dissertation to finish before being awarded his Ph.D.
They’d set up their four green tents in a semicircle around a central fire pit with Dale’s old Holiday Rambler camp trailer parked to the west. Along with the small grove of juniper trees behind the camp, it created a decent windbreak. Sunset gleamed off the windshields on the crew vehicles parked in a line behind the tents.
The collapsed walls of the ancient pueblo seemed to glow an unearthly blue in the twilight. Two-by-two-meter excavation units created black squares in the tower kiva. When they’d quit work at sunset, they’d covered the units with black plastic and lined the
edges with every heavy object within reach: shovels, picks, screens, rocks. The idea was to keep the bone from drying and splitting.
The bone. God, they had bone everywhere. It covered the kiva bottom in a layer twenty centimeters deep, not a surface scatter like he’d first thought. Their finds today had included the elaborately etched skull in his lap, the skull of a girl, and a handful of what appeared to be ceremonial Mesa Verde black-on-white potsherds.
He looked down at the skull. The delicacy of the brow probably meant it had belonged to a woman, though he couldn’t be certain. He was an archaeologist, not a physical anthropologist. He didn’t see as much in bones as other people did. Artifacts told him a whole lot more about a people’s behavior than skeletons.
He tipped the skull to study the quarter-sized hole that gaped in the middle of the left coronal suture. Someone had drilled seven small holes, etched the spaces between them with a stone tool, then lifted out the circlet of skull. A surgical incision, clean, precise. Four lightning bolts zigzagged out from the hole. In modern-day Puebloan mythology, lightning bolts signified spiritual power.
Metal clanked and Dusty saw Steve empty a can of something into the big stew pot hanging on the tripod at the edge of the flames. When the wind gusted just right, he could smell coffee
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