could cover ground so quickly without appearing to expend any effort at all. “Friday’s gone walkabout, and I don’t want to lose him.”
“It’s about the dig.” Joe paused, as if remembering what he had come to say.
“Yeah, with you so far,” she said, giving him a sideways glance. She saw a cloud pass over his usually sunny features. “Gosh, it must be some kind of important if it has you at a loss for words.”
“It’s just… ” He sighed. “There’s no good way to say this.”
“Then say it in a bad way,” she urged. “Just say it already.”
“There’s trouble.”
“Okay… and?” Before he could reply, she went on. “Don’t tell me the department is cutting back on our grant money again.” She stopped walking and turned to him. “I don’t believe this! After all I’ve done to convince-”
“No, no,” he said quickly. “The grant is fine. The committee is delighted with the results.”
“Okay, then.” She shrugged and started walking again.
“It’s the Indians,” he blurted.
“Native Americans.”
“They’re on the warpath.”
“Why? What did you say to them this time?” She skirted a large prickly pear and stepped lightly over a fallen saguaro limb. The university’s assurances and goodwill notwithstanding, the Arizona Native American Council had long ago decided to take a dim view of any archaeological activity in the region. So far, the project directors had been able to placate the ANAC by hiring local people to help with the dig and consult on indigenous culture-which was somewhat outside the remit of a palaeontology project, but helped keep the peace.
“Nothing to do with me,” Joe protested. “Apparently there’s a major celebration coming up-a holy day or something. The tribal elders are claiming the entire valley as a site of special cultural significance-a sacred landscape.”
“Is it?”
“Who knows?” Joe shrugged. “Anyway, they have a state senator on their side. He’s up for reelection soon, so he’s got a bee in his bonnet. Senator Rodriguez-he’s on the squawk box giving interviews about how we’re all a bunch of cold, heartless scientists tearing up the countryside and defiling Indian burial grounds.”
“This was never an Indian burial ground,” Cass pointed out. “Anyway, we’re not digging up the whole valley, only a few specific locations-the same ones we’ve been working for the past two years. Did you tell them that?”
Joe regarded her with a pitying expression. “You think logic and reason have anything to do with this? It’s political, and it’s gone septic.”
“Well, that’s just dandy,” she huffed. “As if we didn’t already have enough trouble with the Sedona Tourist Bureau and the New Agers. This isn’t going to help one little bit.”
“Tell me about it. I’ve arranged to speak to the editor over at the Sedona Observer tomorrow and put our case on record.”
“Hold that thought,” she said, and resumed her pursuit of the wayward Friday, who had passed from view behind a boulder at the foot of a washout.
“We have to stop digging until this is settled,” he called after her. “Get Friday and his crew to help you tie things down and put a tarp over the trench.”
“Can’t hear you!” she replied.
Dodging a pumpkin-sized barrel cactus, she hurried on, leaving Greenough behind. Keeping an eye peeled for rattlesnakes-the constant bugaboo of desert digs-she clipped along, dodging the bristles, spines, and saw-toothed edges of the local flora, all of which seemed to have been designed to puncture, slash, tear, or otherwise discourage progress one way or another. Strange, she thought, how quiet it became, and how quickly.
The thought was no sooner through her head than she heard that rarest of desert sounds: thunder. The distant rumble, clear and present on the hot dry air, brought her up short.
She glanced up to see that the sky above the towering red-rock hills and canyons of the Verde Valley had grown dark with heavy, black, angry-looking clouds. Oblivious, with her head in the ground, she had failed to notice the fast-changing weather. The wind lifted, and Cassandra smelled rain. A thunderstorm in the desert was not unheard of, but rare enough to be fascinating and fragrant. The smell of washed desert air tinged with ozone was unlike anything else. It would be, she considered, less fascinating to be caught out in a lightning storm. She picked up her pace and called to the swiftly retreating figure ahead, “Friday!”
The echo of her cry came winging back to her from the surrounding canyon walls. Directly ahead rose a towering rock stack-a multibanded heap of the distinctive ruddy sandstone of the Sedona region. “Gotcha!” she muttered, certain that her quarry had ducked out of sight behind the massive wind-sculpted block of stone. She hurried on. The sky continued to lower; the mumbling, grumbling thunder grew louder and more insistent. The freshening wind sent dust devils spinning away through the sagebrush and mesquite.
As Cassandra rounded the base of the sandstone stack, she saw that it opened into one of the many feeder gullies of the larger system the locals called Secret Canyon. She thought she glimpsed a figure flitting through the shadows of the gulch some distance ahead. She shouted again, but received no answer; she sped on, moving deeper into the enormous crevice.
Her Yavapai colleague was in most significant ways the stereotypical red man: work-shy, taciturn to the point of monosyllabic, arrogant, furtive, given to odd moods. Habitually dressed in faded jeans with the cuffs stuffed into the tops of his scuffed cowboy boots, he wore his straight black hair scraped back into a single braid that fell down the back of his sun-bleached blue shirt, and bound the end with a leather strap decorated with a bit of red rag or a quail feather. In both dress and demeanour he presented an image so patently cliched that Cass had come to believe that it was purposefully studied, and one he worked very hard to maintain. No one could have combined so many of these dime-novel qualities by accident.
Friday, she concluded, wanted to be seen as the quintessential Native American of popular romance. He chased it-to the point of standing outside the Walgreens on Main Street on the weekends dressed in a fringed deerskin vest and beaded moccasins, with two eagle feathers in his hair, posing for pictures with tourists for tips: Sedona’s very own drugstore Indian. All he lacked was a fistful of cigars.
As to why he did it, she as yet had no clue. Why play a part so obviously derisory and beneath him? Why perpetrate a demeaning cliche that belonged to a backward, less enlightened time? Was it masochism, or some kind of elaborate joke? Cass could not begin to guess.
“Friday!” she shouted, still moving forward. “Come out! I know you’re in here.” She paused, then added, “You’re not in trouble. I just want to talk to you.”
The rock walls of undulating stone, layered in alternating bands of colour, rose sheer from the floor of the gulley, which upon closer inspection appeared unnaturally straight: a curious quality Cassandra noticed but put down to a trick of the uncertain light and oddly shaped stone walls. A sudden gust of wind sent loose pebbles falling from the heights above and, with them, the first drops of rain.
“Friday!”
The sound of her voice pinged along the sandstone walls, but there was no reply from the deepening shadows ahead. The sky grew dark and angry as a bruise, the low clouds churning. The air tingled with pent energy; it felt alive, as if lightning was about to strike.
With a hand flattened over her head to protect herself from the scattershot of pebbles, Cassandra raced on, taking the straight path through the canyon to avoid the loose debris from above. The wind shrieked a withering note, sending a sheet of rain down the length of the gulley, drenching everything in its path.
Cassandra was caught. The wind, funnelled by the canyon, surged over her, dashing cold water into her face. Blinded by the rain, she scooped water from her eyes and dived for whatever cover the overhanging ledges of stone could provide. A blast of icy wind slammed into her with the force of a jet engine, stealing the breath from her lungs and driving her along the canyon floor. She staggered forward, tripped, put out her hands to break her fall, and gritted her teeth.. but the expected jolt did not come.
To her horror, the ground gave out beneath her, and she continued to tumble.
Between one step and the next she was airborne, plunging into an unseen void. The landing, when it came, was abrupt, but not the bone-breaking shock she instinctively feared. The ground on which she landed had an odd spongy granularity she could not have anticipated.
Her first thought was that she had somehow fallen through the roof of a kiva-one of the underground ritual
