Kiss of the Bees

“What’s she doing here anyway?” he asked. “I don’t understand.”

“She just came along for the ride, Quentin,” Mitch said jokingly. “For the fun of it. Once we get all these pots out of here, the three of us are going to have a little party.” Mitch paused and patted his shirt pocket. “I brought along a few mood-altering substances, Quentin. When the work’s all done, the three of us can have a blast.”

“You mean Little Miss Perfect here takes drugs, too?” Quentin’s frown dissolved into a grin. “I never would have guessed it. Neither would Dad, I’ll bet. He’ll have a cow if he ever finds out.”

Lani started to reply, but before she could answer, a swift and vicious kick from the toe of Mitch’s hiking boot smashed into her thigh. She said nothing.

“Tripping out is for dessert,” Mitch said quickly. “First let’s worry about the pots.”

“How are we going to carry them out?” Quentin asked.

“In your backpack.”

“But we only have one.”

“You should have thought of that before. I guess you’ll have to do it by yourself then, won’t you?”

“By myself?”

“Sure,” Mitch responded. “You’re the one getting paid for it, aren’t you?”

“But if everybody does their share . . .” Quentin began.

“I said for you to do it,” Mitch said, his voice hardening as he spoke. “If the damned pots don’t get down the mountain to that car of yours, you don’t get your five thousand bucks, understand?”

Obligingly, Quentin slipped off his backpack, went over to the corner, and loaded three of the larger pots into it. “That’s all that’ll fit for right now,” he said.

“That’s all right,” Mitch said. “Make as many trips as you need to. We have all the time in the world.”

As Quentin turned to leave, Mitch breathed a sigh of relief. The drug was still working well enough. With Mitch’s knee acting up, he needed Quentin’s physical strength to haul the pots down the mountain to the car. After that, all bets were off.

As Quentin took flashlight in hand and started back through the passage, Lani sat on the floor of the cave, staring at the bones glowing with an eerie phosphorescence in the indirect haze of moonlight.

Looking at the skeleton, Lani knew immediately that the bones belonged to a woman of some wealth. The pots alone were an indication of that. Most likely there had been baskets once as well, but those, like the woman’s flesh, had long since decayed and melted back into the earth—leaving behind only the harder stuff—the clay pottery and the bones. And one day, Lani’s bones would be found here as well. Unknown and unrelated to one another in life, she and this other woman would be sisters in death. Lani took some small comfort in knowing that she would not be left there alone.

Across from her, Mitch sat down on something hard, something that supported his weight—a rock of some kind. In the moments before he switched off his flashlight, Lani realized he was rubbing his knee, massaging it, as though he had twisted it perhaps. It was a small thing, but nevertheless something to remember.

Sitting cross-legged on the hard ground, Lani reached out one arm, expecting to rest some of her weight on that one hand. Instead of encountering the dirt floor, her hand blundered into one of the remaining pots—one of the smaller ones. As Lani’s exploring fingers strayed silently around the smooth edge of the neck of the pot, a powerful realization shot through her, something that was as much chehchki—dream—as it was understanding.

This pot had once belonged to Oks Gagda—to Betraying Woman. Lani knew the story. She had heard the legend from Nana Dahd and from Davy as well. The legend—the ha’icha ahgidathag—of Betraying Woman—was a cautionary tale that told how a young girl whose birth name had long since disappeared into oblivion had once fallen in love with an Apache—an Ohb. When an enemy war party had attacked her village, the girl had betrayed her people to their dreaded enemy. Much later, the bad girl was brought back home and punished. According to the legend, I’itoi locked her in a cave and then called the mountain down around her, leaving her to die alone and in the dark.

Lani had lived all her life with those beloved I’itoi stories and traditions, but there was a part of her that discounted them. Over the years she had stopped believing in them in much the same way she eventually had stopped believing in Santa Claus. Although legends of Saint Nicholas and the I’itoi stories as well may both have had some distant basis in fact, by age sixteen Lani no longer regarded them as true. The stories and the lessons to be learned from them were part of her culture but not necessarily part of her life.

She had been eight years old when Davy broke the bad news to her, that Santa Claus didn’t exist. Nana Dahd was gone by then, so Lani hadn’t been able to go to her for consolation. For the first time, without Rita there to comfort her, Lani had turned to her mother—to Diana Ladd Walker. And it was in her mother’s arms that she had learned that the wonder and magic of Christmas hadn’t gone out of her life forever.

Feeling the cool, smooth clay under her fingertips, Lani felt the return of another kind of magic. Oks Gagda—Betraying Woman—did exist. She had been locked in a cave by the falling mountain just the way Nana Dahd had said. But now Lani knew something about that story that she had never known before. Betraying Woman had been locked in a cave with two entrances. If she had known about the other entrance, she might have simply walked away, rather than staying to endure her punishment. In a way she would never be able to explain to anyone else, Lani Walker grasped the significance of what had happened. Oks Gagda had willingly chosen to remain where she was, choosing the honor of jehka’ich—of suffering the consequences of her wickedness—rather than taking the coward’s path and running away.

A wave of gooseflesh raced across Lani’s body. She had left her people-hair basket behind, but I’itoi had sent her another talisman to take the basket’s place. Carefully, making as little noise as possible, she lifted the small sturdy pot from where it had sat undisturbed for all those years and placed it, out of sight, in the triangular space formed by her crossed legs.

“What are you doing over there?” Mitch demanded, shining a blinding beam from his flashlight directly in her eyes.