Thunderhead

“Frankly, I couldn’t give a damn about the horses,” Black said from across the fire. “I’m wondering when we’re going to die of thirst.”

Swire turned to him, his face flickering in the light. “Maybe you don’t realize it, but if the horses die, we die. It ain’t any more complicated than that.”

Nora glanced in Black’s direction. In the firelight his face was haggard, a look of incipient panic in his eyes.

“Is everything all right, Aaron?” she asked.

“You said we were going to reach Quivira tomorrow,” he said huskily.

“That was only an estimate. It’s taking longer than I anticipated.”

“Bullshit.” Black sniffed. “I’ve been watching you all afternoon, struggling with those maps and trying to get that useless GPS unit to work. I think we’re lost.”

“No,” Nora replied. “I don’t believe we’re lost.”

Black leaned back, his voice growing louder. “Is that supposed to be encouraging? And where’s this road? We saw it yesterday. Maybe. But now it’s vanished.”

Nora had seen this kind of reaction to the wilderness before. It was never pleasant. “All I can say is we’ll get there, probably tomorrow, certainly by the next day.”

“Probably!” he repeated derisively, slapping his hands on his knees. “Probably!”

In the flickering light, Nora looked around at the rest of the group. Everyone was filthy from the lack of water and badly scratched from heavy brush. Only Sloane, sifting sand thoughtfully through her fingers, and Aragon, wearing his usual distant expression, appeared unconcerned. Holroyd was staring into the campfire, for once without a book at his side. Smithback’s hair was wilder than ever, his bony knees covered with dirt. Earlier in the afternoon he had complained, eloquently and at great length, about how if God had meant man to ride a horse he would have put a Barcalounger on the animal’s back. Even the fact that the apathetic Beetlebum had stopped trying to bite him had been little comfort.

It was a desperate-looking group, and it was hard to believe that the change had taken place in less than forty-eight hours of difficult travel. Jesus, Nora thought, if they look like that, what must I look like?

“I understand how concerned you all are,” she said slowly. “I’m doing the best I can. If any of you have any constructive ideas, I’d like to hear them.”

“The answer is to keep going,” said Aragon with a quiet vehemence. “And to stop complaining. Twentieth- century humans are unused to any real physical challenge. The people who lived in these canyons dealt with this kind of thirst and heat every day, without complaint.” He cast his dark, sardonic eyes around the group.

“Oh, now I feel better,” said Black. “And here I thought I was suffering from thirst.”

Aragon turned his dark eyes on Black. “You are suffering more from an undifferentiated personality disorder than from thirst, Dr. Black.”

Black turned to look at him, speechless with rage. Then he stood up on trembling limbs and made his way silently toward his tent.

Nora watched him walk away. What was happening here? What seemed so simple on paper—the Anasazi road, the descriptions in her father’s letter—had grown hopelessly complicated on the ground. It would only get worse: tomorrow afternoon, if her navigation was correct, they would hit the Devil’s Backbone, the massive hogback ridge that separated their canyon system from the even more remote and isolated system in which Quivira was hidden. On the map, it looked impassable. Yet her father had ridden over it. He must have. Why didn’t he leave any signs behind? But as she asked the question, she realized the answer: he wanted to keep the location of Quivira a secret known only to himself. For the first time, she understood the vagueness in his letter had been deliberate.

The group began to break up, leaving Smithback restlessly dozing and Aragon gazing thoughtfully into the fire. Nora felt movement nearby, then Sloane sat down beside her.

“This campsite isn’t all bad,” she said. “Look what I just uncovered.”

Nora glanced down in the direction Sloane indicated. There, lying half-buried in sand, was a perfect arrowhead, pressure-flaked out of a snow-white agate flecked with pinpoints of red.

Nora picked it up with great care, examining it closely in the light of the fire. “Amazing, isn’t it, how much they loved beauty? They always chose the loveliest materials for their stone tools. That’s Lobo Mesa agate, from an outcrop in New Mexico about three hundred miles southeast of here. Think of how far they were willing to trade to get the really nice stuff.”

She handed it to Sloane, who was looking at her curiously. “That’s quite a nice piece of identification,” she said with real admiration. She took the point and carefully laid it back in the dust. “Maybe it should lie here, after all.”

Aragon smiled. “It is always more fulfilling,” he said, “to leave something in its natural place than to lock it in a museum basement.” All three fell silent, staring into the dying flames.

“I’m glad you spoke up like that,” Nora said at last to Aragon.

“Perhaps I should have done it long before.” There was a pause. “What do you plan to do about him?”

“Black?” Nora thought. “Nothing, for the moment.”

Aragon nodded. “I’ve known him for a long while, and he’s always been full of himself. With good reason— there’s no better geochronologist in the country. But this is a side I hadn’t seen before. I think it’s fear. Some people fall apart psychologically when removed from civilization, from telephones, hospitals, cars, electric power.”

“I was thinking the same thing,” Nora said. “If that’s the case, once we’ve made camp and set up communications with the outside world, he’ll calm down.”

“I think so. But then again, he might not.”

There was another silence.

“So?” Sloane prompted at last.

“So what?”

“Are we lost?” she asked gently.

Nora sighed. “I don’t know. Guess we’ll find out tomorrow.”

Aragon grunted. “If this is indeed an Anasazi road, it’s unlike any other I’ve encountered. It’s as if the Anasazi wanted to eradicate any trace of its existence.” He shook his head. “I sense a darkness, a malignancy, about this road.”

Nora looked at him. “Why do you say that?”

Silently, the Mexican reached into the pack and removed the test tube containing the flakes of black paint, cradling it in his palm. “I performed a PBT with luminol on one of these samples,” he said quietly. “It came up positive.”

“I’ve never heard of that test,” Nora said.

“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.’” Perhaps “bloody cliff” was not merely symbolic, after all . . .

Aragon removed a small padded bag and carefully pulled out the small skull they had discovered at Pete’s Ruin. He handed it to Nora. “After I discovered that, I decided to take a closer look at the skull you found. I reassembled the pieces in my tent last night. It belongs to a young girl, maybe nine or ten years old. Definitely Anasazi: you can see how the back of the skull was flattened by a hard cradleboard when the child was a baby.” He turned it over carefully in his hands. “At first, I thought she had died an accidental death, perhaps hit by a falling stone. But when I looked more closely, I noticed these.” He pointed to a series of grooves on the back of the skull, near the center. “These were made with a flint knife.”

“No,” Sloane whispered.

“Oh, yes. This little girl was scalped.”