Douglas Preston - Mount Dragon

Carson looked over at de Vaca. Her face was flushed, and her hair wild. A fleck of foam from the sweaty horse lay across her thigh. She grinned. “Not bad,” she said. “You almost caught me.”

Carson flicked his reins. “You cheated,” he said, hearing the peevishness in his own voice. “You got the jump on me.”

“You have the better horse,” she said.

“You’re lighter.”

She smirked. “Face it, cabrón , you lost.”

Carson smiled grimly. “I’ll catch you next time.”

“Nobody catches me.”

Reaching the ruin, they dismounted, tying their horses to a rock. “The Great Kiva was usually in the very center of the pueblo, or else far outside its borders,” de Vaca said. “Let’s hope it hasn’t collapsed completely.”

The ravens circled far overhead, their distant cries hanging in the dry air.

Carson looked around curiously. The walls were formed from stones of shaped lava, cemented together with adobe. Walls and room blocks rose on three sides of the U-shaped ruin, the fourth side opening onto a central plaza. Potsherds and pieces of flint littered the ground beneath their feet. Much of it was covered by sand.

They walked into the plaza, long overgrown with yucca and mesquite. De Vaca knelt down by a large fire-ant hill. The ants had fled inside to escape the noonday heat, and she carefully smoothed the gravel with her ringers, examining it closely.

“What are you doing?” Carson asked.

Instead of answering, de Vaca picked something off the mound and held it between thumb and forefinger. “Take a look,” she said.

She placed something in his palm, and he squinted at it: a perfect little turquoise bead, with a hole no wider than a human hair drilled through its center.

“They polished their turquoises using blades of grass,” she said. “No one is really sure how they got the holes so small and perfect, without the use of metal. Perhaps by twirling a tiny sliver of bone against the turquoise for hours.” She stood up. “Come on, let’s find that kiva.”

They moved to the center of the plaza. “There’s nothing here,” Carson said.

“We’ll separate and search beyond the perimeter,” de Vaca replied. “I’ll take the northern semicircle, you take the southern.”

Carson moved out beyond the edge of the ruin, tracing a widening arc, scanning the desert as he did so. The huge storm and drying winds had erased any signs of footprints; it was impossible to tell whether Burt had been there or not. Centuries before, the subterranean kiva would have had a roof flush with the desert floor, with only a smoke hole on the surface revealing its presence. While it was likely the roof had collapsed long ago, there was a chance that it had remained intact and was now completely concealed by the shifting sands.

Carson found the kiva about one hundred yards to the southwest. The roof had collapsed, and the kiva was now nothing but a circular depression in the desert, thirty feet across and perhaps seven feet deep. Its walls were of shaped rock, from which projected a few stubs of ancient roof timbers. De Vaca came running at his call, and together they stood at its edge. Near the bottom, Carson could make out places where the walls were still plastered in adobe mud and red paint. At the base, the wind had piled up a crescent of sand, completely burying the floor.

“So where’s this sipapu?” Carson asked.

“It was always in the exact center of the kiva,” said de Vaca. “Here, help me down.” She scrambled down the side, paced off the center, then knelt, digging in the sand with her fingers. Carson dropped down and began to help. Six inches into the sand, their hands scraped against flat rock. De Vaca brushed the sand away excitedly, moving the stone aside.

There, in the sipapu hole, sat a large plastic specimen jar, its GeneDyne label still intact. Inside the jar was a small book with dented corners, bound in a stained, olive-colored canvas.

“ Madre de Dios ,” de Vaca whispered. She lifted the jar out of the sipapu, pried open the lid, and pulled out the journal, opening it as Carson looked on.

The first page was headed May 18 . Below the date, the page was covered in dense, precise handwriting, so tiny that two lines were written in each ruled space.

Carson watched as de Vaca flipped through the pages incredulously. “We can’t bring this back to Mount Dragon,” he said.

“I know. So let’s get started.”

She turned to the beginning.

May 18

Dearest Amiko,

I write to you from the ruins of a sacred Anasazi kiva, not far from my laboratory.

When we were packing my things, that last morning before I flew to Albuquerque, I stuck this old journal into the pocket of my jacket, on impulse. I’d always planned to use it for bird sightings. But I think now I’ve found a better use for it.

I miss you so terribly. The people here are friendly, for the most part. Some, like the director, John Singer, I think I can even count as friends. But we are associates before we are friends here, all pushing toward one common goal. There is pressure upon us; tremendous pressure to move ahead, to succeed. I feel myself drawing inward under such pressure. The endless desolation of this awful desert magnifies my loneliness. It is as if we have stepped off the edge of the world.

Paper and pencil are forbidden here. Brent wants to keep track of everything we do. Sometimes, I believe he even wants to keep track of what we think. I’ll use this small journal as my lifeline to you. There are things I want to tell you, in good time. Things that will never appear in the on-line records at GeneDyne. Brent is, in many ways, still a boy, with boyish ideas; and one of those ideas is that he can control what others do and think.

I hope you will not worry when I tell you such things. But I forget; when you read this, it will be with me by your side. And these will be but memories. Perhaps the passage of time will allow me to laugh at myself and my petty complaints. Or feel pride at what we have accomplished here.

It’s a long walk out to this kiva, and you know how poor a rider I am. But I think it does me good, to spend this time with you. The journal will be safe here, under the sand. Nobody leaves the facility except the security director, and he seems to have his own strange desert business to attend to.

I will come again, soon.

May 25

My darling wife,

It is a terribly hot day. I keep forgetting how much water one needs in this frightful desert. I will have to bring two canteens next time.

It is no wonder, in this waterless landscape, that the entire religion of the Anasazi was directed at the control of nature. Here, in the kiva, is where the rain priests called on the Thunderbird to bring the rain.

Oh, male divinity!

With your moccasins of dark cloud, come to us,

With the zigzag lightning flung out on high over your head, come to us soaring,

With these I wish the foam floating on the flowing water over the roots of the great corn,

Happily abundant dark clouds I desire,

Happily abundant dark mists I desire,

Happily may fair blue corn, to the ends of the earth, come with you.

This was how they prayed. It is a very ancient desire, this thirst for knowledge and power, this hunger to control the secrets of nature, to bring the rain.

But the rain did not come. Just as it does not come today.

What would they think if they could see us now, laboring day after day, in our warrens beneath the earth, working not only to control nature, but to shape it to our will?

I can write no more today. The problem I’ve been given is demanding all my time and energy. It’s hard to escape it, even here. But I will return soon, my love.