Thunderhead (Nora Kelly #0)

by Douglas Preston

It was into this desolate triangle, sixteen years before, that her father had disappeared.

A letter from her dead father to her dead mother, written and stamped sixteen years ago.

This is unbelievably remote canyon country, Liz, and when you’re in the bottom of a canyon you can’t see any landmarks to orient yourself. It’s almost like hiking in a tunnel.

“Ever hear of Coronado, the Spanish explorer? He came into the Southwest in 1540, looking for the Seven Cities of Gold. A friar had gone north years before, looking for souls to save, and he returned with a huge, drilled emerald crystal and stories of lost cities. But when Coronado himself came northward, he found only the mud pueblos of the Indian tribes of New Mexico,

It was never clear from the rest exactly what lay to the west that caused such strong emotion. One spoke of a great city, destroyed because the priests there had enslaved the world, and tried to usurp the power of the sun itself. Others hinted darkly of a slumbering evil which they dared not awaken.

“Whenever archaeologists don’t understand something, they cop out by saying it served a religious purpose. That’s what they say about the roads. They think they might have been spirit pathways, rather than roads for living beings to travel on. Roads to guide the spirits of the dead back to the underworld.”

When the Mimbres buried a pot with their dead, they punched a hole in the bottom to release the spirit of the pot, so it could join the deceased in the underworld. Archaeologists call it killing the pot.” He replaced the bowl on the table. “All these pots have been killed. So you see they must have come from graves, no matter what the provenience says.”

No less than three early Spanish explorers in the Southwest heard these stories about a fabulous golden city: Cabeza de Vaca in the 1530s, Fray Marcos in 1538, and Coronado in 1540.

Her father’s old Ruger lay at the bottom, shoved into a battered holster. “What do you want it for, anyway?” Skip asked. “Some academic rivalry that needs settling?”

Calaveras Mesa had not always been uninhabited. In the fourteenth century, Anasazi Indians had moved into its south-facing cliffs and hollowed out caves in the soft volcanic tuff. But the site had proved uncongenial, and the caves had been abandoned for half a millennium. In this distant part of El Malpaís, there were no roads and no trails; the caves remained undisturbed and unexcavated.

Pulling them out of the glare of the fire, she rubbed them together, watching the miraculous internal sparks light up the hearts of the stones, flickering fiercely in the dark. Watching her, Goddard nodded. “Anasazi lightning stones,” he said in his quiet voice. “Are they real?” asked Holroyd, taking them from Nora and holding them to the firelight. “Of course,” said Goddard. “They come from a medicine cache found in the great kiva at Keet Seel. We used to believe the Anasazi used them in rain ceremonies to symbolize the generation of lightning. But we aren’t sure anymore. The carved spiral represents the sipapu. But then again, it might represent a water spring. Again, nobody knows for sure.”

we realize that we know next to nothing about the Anasazi. We don’t understand their culture, we don’t understand their religion. We cannot read their petroglyphs and pictographs. We do not know what languages they might have spoken. We do not know why they covered the Southwest with lighthouses, shrines, roads, and signaling stations. We do not know why, in 1150, they suddenly abandoned Chaco Canyon, burned the roads, and retreated to the most remote, inaccessible canyons in the Southwest, building mighty fortresses in the cliff faces.

Thirty-five years before, this had been Glen Canyon, which John Wesley Powell had called the most beautiful canyon in the world. Then the Glen Canyon dam was built, and the waters of the Colorado River slowly rose to form Lake Powell.

Lake of the Ozarks

“Did I do something wrong?” Smithback said, looking innocent, and holding a book up to his chest like a shield. “Wrong? You arrive here in a limo, like some kind of movie star—” “I got it cheap at the airport.

“Back in the early sixties I was an assistant on an expedition that tried to document sites here in Glen Canyon, before it was drowned by Lake Powell.” Suddenly, Nora understood. “Were there many?” “We were able to document perhaps thirty-five, and partially excavate twelve, before the water engulfed them. But the estimate of total sites ran to about six thousand.

“Roscoe Swire, right?” Sloane called out, following Nora’s eyes. “My father’s told me all about you, but I don’t think we’ve ever met.” “No reason we should have,” came the gruff answer. “I’m just a cowboy trying to keep a bunch of greenhorns from breaking their necks out here in slickrock country.”

“Yeah. A horse-sized problem. Beetlebum over there keeps trying to bite me.” The horse tossed its head in a mighty nod, then nickered evilly. “Likes the taste of ham, I guess,” said Swire. “That’s Mr. Prosciutto to you, pal.” “He’s just kidding around. If he really wanted to bite, you’d know it. Like I said, he’s got a sense of humor, just like you.”

Raising her camera again, she took a careful closeup, then another when she noticed a clear set of fingerprints. It was not unusual to find prints preserved in Anasazi plaster and corrugated pottery,

she took another sequence of pictures in the room and the one beyond, which was exceptionally dusty and—very unusually—seemed at one time to have been painted with thick, heavy black paint. Or perhaps it was from cooking.

“A dozen or so pictographs. Including three reversed spirals.” Nora looked up in surprise to meet the woman’s glance. Holroyd caught the look. “What?” he asked. Nora sighed. “It’s just that, in Anasazi iconography, the counterclockwise direction is usually associated with negative supernatural forces. Clockwise or ‘sunwise’ was considered to be the direction of travel of the sun across the sky. Counterclockwise was therefore considered a perversion of nature, a reversal of the normal balance.”

There, lying half-buried in sand, was a perfect arrowhead, pressure-flaked out of a snow-white agate flecked with pinpoints of red.

“It’s a simple test used by forensic anthropologists. And police. It identifies the presence of human blood.” He gazed at her, his dark eyes in shadow. “That wasn’t paint you saw. It was human blood. But not just blood: layers upon layers upon layers of crusted, dried blood.” “My God,” Nora said. The passage from the Coronado report came back to her unbidden: “Quivira in their language means ‘The House of the Bloody Cliff.’”

At first, the work seemed both boring and confusing, and the heap of questionable sherds began to pile up. But then, almost imperceptibly, he grew more sure in his identification: it was instinctive, almost, the way the shape, condition, even composition of the sherds could speak as loudly as the design itself. Memories of long afternoons spent with his father, pacing over some ruin in the middle of nowhere, came back with a bittersweet tang.

A vast complex of canyons started on the flanks of the Kaiparowits wilderness and spread out through the slickrock country, eventually coalescing into the valley that swept down in front of them. A peaceful stream flowed down its center, belying the great scarred plain to either side that told of innumerable flash floods. Scattered across the floodplain were boulders, some as large as houses, which had clearly been swept down from the higher reaches of the watershed. Beyond, the valley stepped up through several benchlands, eventually ending in sheer redrock cliffs, pinnacles, and towers. It looked to Nora as if the valley concentrated the entire watershed of the Kaiparowits Plateau in one hideous floodplain.

Such narrow canyons—known as slot canyons—were common among these southwestern wastes but practically unheard of elsewhere. They were thin alleys, sometimes only a few feet across, caused by the action of water against sandstone over countless years. Despite their narrowness, they were often several hundred feet deep, and could go on for miles before widening into more conventional canyons.

Nora looked at him. “So you all think I’m lost?” Swire nodded, pulled on his cigarette. “All except Holroyd. But that boy would follow you into a live volcano.”

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.

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.”

The morning sun shone in at a perfect angle, shooting a wedge of pale light into the recesses below the huge arch. Tucked inside was a ruined city. Four great towers rose from the corners of the city, and between them lay a complicated arrangement of roomblocks and circular kivas, dotted with black windows and doorways. The morning sun gilded the walls and towers into a dream-city: insubstantial, airy, ready to evaporate into the desert air. It was the most perfect Anasazi city Nora had ever seen;

She rose to her feet inside a cramped space. Before her sat Aragon. Nora drew in her breath: beyond him lay a sea of human bones, their knobby surfaces thrown into sharp relief by the light.

Nora glanced from him to the bones. There were many complete skeletons lying on the top of the pile, but beneath them appeared to be a thick scattering of disarticulated bones, most of them broken, including countless crushed skulls. Punched into the stone walls at the back of the cave were dozens of holes, a few rotten timbers still jutting out of them.

As with all kivas, it was entered from a hole in the roof. Protruding from the opening were the two ends of a ladder, leading down into the interior.

It was the cosmography that still ran through most present-day southwestern Native American religions: the black mountain in the north, the yellow mountain in the west, the white mountain in the east, and the blue mountain in the south.

“How revolting,” Smithback said, writing eagerly. “The individuals were also scalped, and their brains extracted and made into a kind of—how does one say it?—a compote, a mousse, spiced with chiles. I found the . . . the substance placed inside each of the skulls.” As if on a macabre cue, the cook emerged from his tent, fastidiously zipped up the flap, then approached the fire.

“After the villagers of Awatovi were converted to Christianity by the Spanish, the surrounding Indian towns massacred them. Their bones were found thirty years ago, and they bear the same kind of marks Aragon found here.”

All the evidence I’ve found at Quivira demonstrates one thing: a group of Aztecs, or rather their Toltec predecessors, invaded the Anasazi civilization around A.D. 950 and established themselves here as a priestly nobility. Perhaps they were even responsible for the great building projects at Chaco and elsewhere.” “I’ve never heard anything so ridiculous,” Black said. “There’s never been any sign of Aztec influence on the Anasazi, let alone enslavement.

“If you call coming out here, praying, and even fasting for a while, a vision quest, then I suppose that’s what it is. I don’t do it for visions, but for spiritual healing. To remind myself that we don’t need much to be happy. That’s all.”

“To become a witch, you have to kill someone you love. Someone close, brother or sister, mother or father. You kill them, to get the power. Then, when that person is buried, you secretly dig the body up.” He lit the cigarette. “Then you turn the life force of that person to evil.”

“When life is created, Wind, liehei, the life force, enters the body. Where the Wind enters the body, it leaves a little eddy, like a ripple in water. It leaves these marks on the tips of the fingers, toes, the back of the head. The witch cuts these off the corpse. They dry them, grind them up, make a kind of powder. And they drill out the skull behind and make a disk, for throwing spells. If it is a murdered sister, the witch has sex with the dead body. He uses the fluids to make another powder. It’s called Alchi’bin lehh tsal. Incest corpse powder.”

“Behind the Crawlspace is a narrow passageway that leads into another cavern behind the city. And, Nora, there’s a whole secret city hidden back there. Right in front is a Great Kiva, a sealed kiva. It’s like nothing we’ve seen before.” “Let me get this straight,” Nora said slowly. “You broke through a wall?” Black nodded, his smile broadening. Nora felt sudden anger course through her. “I specifically forbade any disturbance like that. My God, Aaron, all you’ve done is open up a new area to be looted. Have you forgotten we’re about to leave?”

“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 thought of Hurricane Deck: his three-day chase, the spirit of that magnificent horse. Arbuckles: dim, friendly, capable. He thought of all the horses he had lost on this trip, each one with its own personality, and of all the little things that had made up his life with them. The quirks, the peculiar habits, the trails they had ridden . . . it was almost more than he could bear.

Most who went to the city came back with ghost sickness and soon died.

“Why didn’t you just destroy the letter and notebook?” Nora asked. He lit the cigarette, inhaled. “We believe that it is extremely dangerous to handle the effects of the dead. It is a sure way to get ghost sickness. And we all knew what the white man had died from. So, for sixteen years, the body lay there. Unburied.