Читать книгу Anasazi Exile - Eric G. Swedin - Страница 6

CHAPTER ONE

PRESENT DAY, NEW MEXICO

The day they found the tomb began like any other day for Harry Deacon. He usually only needed four or five hours of sleep a night, so he woke before dawn and, as was his habit, he climbed a nearby bluff. Laying his jacket on a sandstone outcropping, he went through three Kenpo forms. The last dregs of sleep faded before his disciplined breathing and the controlled sharp thrusts of his feet and fists.

Born in Puerto Rico, raised on the cold streets of Minneapolis, Harry had spent much of his adult life in the desert. He knew five deserts intimately: he had trained in the Mojave and the Sahara, fought in the rocky sands of Iraq and in the high desert of Afghanistan and Pakistan, and now he dug for pottery shards in Chaco Canyon. A thin sheen of perspiration meeting the morning air sent a chill through him.

He finished his last form and automatically reached for his jacket and weapon. Only the jacket was there, of course. Even after five years of retirement, the ingrained habits of twenty years popped up at the oddest moments. He tossed the jacket across his shoulders and sat down on the outcrop. He was proud of his service, but the memories still tormented him. Maybe that’s why he never slept the whole night through. He usually didn’t dream of what he had done, but of what he had seen, and what he had failed to do.

The sun peeped over the horizon, sending slivers of light searching among the ruins of Chaco Canyon. Casa Ángeles, the house of angels, stood near the dig. Two large walls met in a corner, sheltering the ruins of what must have been fifty or sixty rooms and the foundations of two kivas, large circular rooms that served as sacred clan centers. As a great house, Casa Ángeles was smaller than most in the Canyon, but it was the ruin near where they had a permit to dig, so Harry thought of it fondly as their house.

Harry rested his hands on his knees, palms up, closed his eyes and let the sunrise wash over him. In a sense, he prayed; not to the God he had learned to love in Sunday School, or to the vague New Age paganism that his ex-wife embraced, but simply to a higher power, one beyond the mundane concerns of everyday life, one who cared about him. The prayer had no words, just a sense of calm and at peace.

“Room for two up here?”

He recognized the familiar voice of Brenda Finnigan and was surprised that he had not heard her approach. He must have truly been someplace else.

“Cost you twenty bucks,” he said, not opening his eyes.

He felt her sit down next to him.

“I’ll have to owe you on that. I’ll pay you when I become a famous archaeologist and the money comes rolling in.”

“I’ll add it to your tab.”

She fell silent and he imagined that she too was sitting peacefully, eyes closed, welcoming the sun and the morning. She didn’t usually join him; like most college students, she found rising early an ordeal. He felt her hand settle gently on his hand. Even after a month of digging, her skin still felt softer than his roughened calluses. She lightly held his palm, her fingers wrapped around his thumb, like a small child.

She was a short woman, only twenty-one, fair-skinned, freckled, and blessed with the red hair of her Irish ancestors. When he first saw her, he was attracted to her vitality, quick energy, and voluptuous hips and breasts. He was twice her age, so he did nothing but look—not like a lecherous old man, but with subtle appreciation. To his surprise, they became friends, without even the subdued sexual charge that often underlay friendships between men and women. Theirs was the friendship of a father and daughter.

She had once even called him “Dad,” a slip of the tongue that would have delighted Sigmund Freud. He had pretended to not hear, not wanting to embarrass her, but it reminded him of calling his second-grade teacher “Mom.” He knew that Brenda’s own father was often gone from her life, and he himself had never had a daughter. His own son was sixteen years old and living in Chicago. At least Harry thought it was Chicago, maybe James and his mother had moved back to Minneapolis.

The sun rose higher, warming his face, creating a golden glow behind his closed eyelids. He prayed to be a better person, to improve himself each day.

“Okay,” she announced. “I’m bored and hungry. Let’s go eat.”

“You’ve been here, what, five minutes?”

Her hand left his palm. “Four minutes, twenty-two seconds.”

Harry turned his head toward her and opened his eyes, blinking to adjust his vision. Her hair was pulled back into a ponytail and her face had that aching smoothness that came from youth. In another few years, especially if she spent enough time on digs or other outdoor activities, lines would start to carve their way over those freckles.

“Okay, let’s go,” he said. “It’s your turn to cook and mine to clean.”

“Wheaties, then.”

“I think that cooking means that you actually have to turn on the stove. Besides, we’re out of milk.”

“Okay,” she said. “Dry Wheaties and sausages.”

“You’re lucky that I remember too many MREs. Wheaties and sausage are good enough.”

* * * *

Their camp had five tents: one for Dr. Bancroft, one for Harry, one for the three male graduate students, one shared by Brenda and a female graduate student, and the last—a huge ten-man Army surplus tent with floorboards, used as a common area for eating, meetings, and work. The green canvas sides of the main tent were rolled up to let the breeze pass through. No one complained about the camp, or how sand and dirt got into everything, since everyone but Brenda had already lived in worse conditions on digs, and Brenda was not the type to complain.

This dig was a curious affair. An obscure foundation from New York had paid for an earlier survey team to take soundings using ground-penetrating radar all over Chaco Canyon, seeking buried formations and larger objects. Dr. Bancroft had been hired as the principal investigator to dig at the more promising soundings. She was the grand dame of Chaco Canyon, having scraped at the ground and dutifully cataloged every detail ever since arriving in the 1950s as part of her father’s team. As always, the dig served as a way to train her students. Harry was the only post-doc on the dig and acted as supervisor.

It was obvious that her heart was not in digging at the whim of some distant foundation and Dr. Bancroft had used some of the grant money to fly with the other students to a conference in Scotland. Harry could have gone, but then they would have had to shut down the dig. Harry had spent two tours in Europe and only slightly envied the sight-seeing of castles, grassy highlands, and the like that the professor and students were certainly touring between conference panels. It would have been nice to look up some old pals, but if he had gone then Brenda would have been forced to return to Maine because she had some odd passport problems that prevented her from flying to Europe. So he had chosen to stay and keep Brenda working.

The first hole that morning was a bust, just a rocky outcropping buried under two feet of dirt. Brenda tossed aside her shovel and sat down to suck on her water bottle. Harry bent to shovel the dirt back into the hole. The Park Service demanded that their digs be as unobtrusive as possible, and that meant not leaving holes everywhere. Briefly he envied the great archaeologists of the past who had excavated places like Troy and Assyria, hiring native laborers for pennies a day to do their digging for them.

It was only nine in the morning, so they moved to the next spot on the list. The radar had revealed a large mass with no protrusions. Not promising, but the grant contract required a visual inspection of every possible object.

An hour crept by as they dug down three feet. Though they weren’t passing the dirt through a sieve to make absolutely sure, they found no artifacts. No pottery shards, no obsidian flakes, and no rocks that might have once been some sort of tools. The sun had risen far enough to make digging an ordeal in sweat and dust. Brenda’s shovel hit the rock first.

They both dug in rhythm, avoiding each other’s shovels as they widened the hole. Harry exhaled in frustration. Just another damn rock. An annoying piece of basalt, black and porous with gas bubbles formed when it had cooled from lava millions of years ago. Sand was firmly embedded in its pores.

Brenda announced the obvious conclusion. “This shouldn’t be here. Almost all the rocks around here are from the Menefee Formation and the Cliff House Formation, mostly sandstone, some shale, a bit of coal. All seashore deposits. No basalts at all. That requires volcanic activity.”

Harry was weak on geology, preferring to read history books and science fiction novels. Brenda often sat up late and pored over textbooks by lantern light, marker in hand, hair hanging down, lips moving as she crammed every last scientific nugget into her mind.

“So it doesn’t belong here,” he said, encouraging her, remembering that this dig was part of her education.

“That means that it was brought here by someone. Probably the Chacoans. That makes it an artifact.”

They dug all day, taking time out for a siesta during the hottest hours. By sunset they had enlarged their three-foot-deep excavation to the edges of the square-shaped dark rock, about six feet on a side.

Brenda was excited, and even Harry was intrigued. The shape was not natural. Why had the Chacoans taken the time to chip away at a piece of basalt and form it into a square, and then buried it?

“Maybe it’s a tomb,” Brenda suggested as they ate their dinner. “Though it’s not like anything else the Chacoans ever made.” She had taken the time to cook hamburgers for them. Harry lathered enough mustard on his to make small beads of perspiration break out on his forehead as he ate.

Harry shrugged. “Maybe. If we were somewhere else, like Egypt, I’d agree that it was a lid to a tomb.”

“Very curious. I’ve always been disappointed with how the Chacoans buried their dead. I mean, they apparently didn’t fear their dead, not like the Navajo, so we do have some burials. But they usually buried the dead in shallow graves in the midden, as if they were part of the other garbage. Does that mean that they saw the flesh as not important, once the spirit had flown?”

“Not all burials are in middens,” Harry said. “Some are in cists. Those chambers were normally made of stone and used to store food. It cost them something to give up that sort of useful construction to make it a burial site.”

“There must have been social value to the burials. They were often buried with everyday tools.” She pursed her lips in annoyance. “And we see gender boundaries there—food preparation items for women, hunting tools for men.”

“Would you prefer to be a hunter or a gardener, Brenda?”

“I don’t like hunting, so I guess a gardener.”

“But you object to Chacoan women being gardeners, not hunters?”

“I object that they didn’t have a choice, not what they did. They provided most of the food through their farming.”

“It’s true,” Harry said. “But we have only artifacts, so we can only guess about how their social structures actually worked.”

“Women have always gardened, and men have hunted. That’s the way it’s been for thousands of years.”

“True,” he said. “But back to the main topic, which is Chacoan burial customs.”

“Okay. No tombs have ever been found. And few graves have been found with valuables, like jewelry, or what we would recognize as high-value items.”

“Do you buy into the interpretation that this means that the Chacoans had a relatively egalitarian society, with shallow social classes?” Harry asked.

“No, I don’t. I mean, it could be true, but most societies have a strong hierarchy. Maybe we just don’t see it in their burial customs.”

“Maybe there aren’t so many graves because they just ate ’em.”

She slapped his shoulder. “You always have to bring that up, don’t you? It’s disgusting.”

“There’s been lots of evidence of cannibalism found,” he said. “And we know that the Aztecs practiced it.”

“It’s racist to think that the ancient Indians ate each other. Besides, that evidence is all disputed.”

“Calling something racist just shuts down the conversation.”

“The Pueblo people think cannibalism is one of the worst sins that anyone can commit.”

They had argued over this same topic so many times that the conversation had taken on the nature of a script. “Yes,” Harry said, “but maybe they think that because they are so horrified by what their ancestors did, and they just want to keep it a secret.”

“That kind of argument can’t be refuted because you want to have it both ways,” she said. “If the Pueblo people thought cannibalism was okay, then you would use that fact as evidence. Since they despise cannibalism, the exact opposite attitude, you use that fact as evidence instead. What would convince you that the Chacoans and other ancient Pueblo peoples didn’t eat each other?”

“I don’t know the answer, but I try to not love the people of the past so much that I blind myself to their more unsavory aspects.”

The argument continued and they both enjoyed it immensely. The moon rose, half-lit by the sun and half in shadow, and Brenda finally announced her intention to go to bed. Harry quickly cleaned the dishes and the conversation wound down.

“What are we going to do now?” Brenda asked.

“First thing tomorrow, drive into Bloomfield and rent a brace and hoist. We’re going to lift that sucker up.”