his. Nora smiled and gently withdrew her hand.
Sloane came from the back of the ruin, shouldering her rucksack.
“Find anything?” Nora asked, taking a swig from her canteen and offering it around. She knew that most rock art was found behind cliff dwellings.
Sloane nodded. “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.”
“A perversion of nature?” Smithback asked with sudden interest.
“Yes. In some Indian cultures today, the reversed spiral is still associated with witchcraft and sorcery.”
“And I found this,” Sloane said, lifting one hand. In it she held a small, broken, human skull.
Nora turned, uncomprehending at first, and Sloane’s grin widened lazily.
“Where did you find that?” Nora asked sharply.
Sloane’s smile did not falter. “Back there, next to the granary.”
“And you just picked it up?”
“Why not?” Sloane asked, her eyes narrowing. The slight movement reminded Nora of a cat when threatened.
“For one thing,” Nora snapped, “we don’t disturb human remains unless it’s absolutely critical for our research. And you’ve touched it, which means we can’t do bone collagen DNA on it. Worst of all, you didn’t even photograph it
“All I did was pick it up,” Sloane said, her voice suddenly low.
“I thought I made it clear we were to discuss these things first.”
There was a tense silence. Then Nora heard a scratching sound behind her and she glanced at Smithback. “What the hell are you doing?” she demanded. The journalist had his notebook out and was scribbling away.
“Taking notes,” he said defensively, pulling the notebook toward his chest.
“You’re writing down our discussion?” Nora cried.
“Hey, why not?” Smithback said. “I mean, the human drama’s as much a part of this expedition as—”
Holroyd advanced and snatched the notebook away. “This was a private conversation,” he said, ripping out the page and handing the notebook back.
“That’s censorship,” Smithback protested.
Suddenly Nora heard a low, throaty purr that swelled into a mellifluous laugh. She turned to see Sloane still holding up the skull, looking at the three of them, amusement glittering in her amber eyes.
Nora took a breath and ignored the laugh.
“Understood,” said Sloane, looking suddenly contrite as she handed the skull to Nora. “I wasn’t thinking. The excitement of the moment, I guess.”
Nora slipped the skull into a sample bag and tucked it in her pack. It seemed to her there had been something challenging in the way Sloane had come forward holding the skull, and Nora momentarily wondered if it hadn’t been a deliberate provocation. After all, it was clear that Sloane was well versed in the protocol of fieldwork. But then she told herself she was being paranoid. Nora remembered infelicitously seizing a gorgeous Folsom point she once uncovered at a dig, pulling it out of the stratum, and then seeing the horrified looks of everyone around her.
“What’s a ZST?” the unrepentant Smithback asked. “Some kind of birth control?”
Nora shook her head. “It stands for Zero Site Trauma. The idea that an archaeological site should never be physically disturbed. People like Aragon believe any intrusion, no matter how careful or subtle, destroys it for future archaeologists who might come along with more sophisticated tools. They tend to work with artifacts that have already been excavated by others.”
“ZST groupies consider traditional archaeologists to be artifact whores, digging for relics instead of reconstructing cultures,” Sloane added.
“If Aragon feels that way, why did he come along?” Holroyd asked.
“He’s not a total purist. I suppose that on a project as potentially important as this, he’s willing to put his personal feelings aside to some extent. I think he feels that if anyone is going to touch Quivira, it should be him.” Nora looked around. “What do you make of these walls?” she asked Sloane. “It’s not soot, it’s some kind of thick dried substance, like paint. But I’ve never seen an Anasazi room painted black before.”
“Beats me,” Sloane replied. She removed a small glass tube and a dentist’s pick from her pack. Then she glanced with a quick smile at Nora. “May I take a sample?” she paused. “Madame Chairman?”
The sun was now low in the sky, painting long contrasting stripes along the ancient walls. “Let’s get back,” Nora said. As they turned to walk out on the ledge, Nora glanced back at the reverse spirals on the wall behind the ruin. She shivered briefly in spite of the heat.
19
THEY WERE FORCED TO MAKE A DRY CAMP that night. The horses were thirsty and off their feed, and by sundown the expedition had made serious inroads into their own supplies of water. Aragon received the skull with the wordless disapproval that Nora had expected. They turned in early, saddle sore and weary, and slept hard.
Shortly after starting out the following morning, they arrived at a triple intersection of narrow canyons. Despite careful examination, Nora and Sloane could find no more traces of the ancient road here; it was either buried or had washed away. The GPS laptop was still not functioning, and Holroyd’s map was of little help: at this point of the journey, the underlying topographical elevations on the map were ludicrously off. The radar data became a confusing maze of color.
Nor could Nora find any sign that her father had ever come this way. In the tradition of Frank Wetherill and the other early explorers, Nora knew her father sometimes marked his trail by scratching his initials and a date into the rock. Yet, to her mounting anxiety, she had yet to see any graffiti by him or anyone else, save the occasional petroglyphs of the long-vanished Anasazi.
For the rest of the day, the group toiled up through a warren of fractured canyons, moving deeper into a surreal world that seemed more a landscape of dream than anything of the earth. The mute stone halls spoke of eons of fury: uplift and erosion, floods, earthquakes, and the endless scouring of the wind. At every turn, Nora realized her dead reckoning grew more difficult and prone to error. Each fall of the horses’ hooves took them farther from civilization, from the comfortable and the known, deeper into an alien landscape of mystery. Cliff dwellings became more numerous, tucked slyly into the canyon walls, remote and inaccessible. Nora had the irrational feeling, as she stopped for the tenth time to pore over the map, that they were intruding onto forbidden ground.
By evening they were so exhausted that dinner was a cold, silent, impromptu affair. The lack of water had compelled Nora to institute severe rationing. Bonarotti, forced to cook with no water and dirty dishes, grew sullen.
After dinner, the group gravitated apathetically toward the campfire. Swire joined them after giving the horses a final check.
He sat down beside Nora and spat. “Come morning, these horses won’t have had decent water for thirty-six hours. Don’t know how much longer they can last.”
