by Alex Archer
Annja was familiar with Anansi. As a trickster god, Anansi had been a neutral figure, working always for his own ends as much as for the gods or men. According to legend, Anansi was the son of Nyame, the sky god, and taught mankind the skills of agriculture. He also negotiated rain, which put out wildfires that ravaged the countryside. One of his chief duties was acting as intermediary for mankind with other gods.
From what Annja had managed to translate from the stone, Anansi was praised as being an intermediary for whoever had told the tale.
She wrote a quick thank-you note and closed out of the newsgroup.
She stood, took a deep breath and went through a few tai chi forms to loosen up. Go to bed, she told herself. Get some sleep. You've got a full day tomorrow.
She retreated to the shower long enough to soak for a few minutes and clear her head. When she returned, feeling refreshed and more tired at the same time, her cell phone rang.
She scooped it up from the bed, checked the caller ID – thinking it might be Doug Morrell with a new angle and plea – and saw that it was Bart McGilley. She answered.
"Annja?" Bart was a homicide detective in New York. He was also a good friend and resource. He was always there when she needed a date to go to a function in New York. She sometimes reciprocated for him at police functions, allowing both of them to mix and mingle without getting hit on. Annja realized his recent engagement put an end to that part of their relationship.
"Hey," Annja said.
Despite what was going on in his life or the lateness of the hour, Bart McGilley always sounded positive. If Annja didn't know him so well, didn't know that that was just how Bart was, she would have been instantly suspicious. In fact, when she'd first gotten to know him, she had been suspicious. No one could be that well adjusted. Especially not in New York.
"You called," Bart pointed out.
"I did."
"You said the time didn't matter."
"It doesn't," Annja said.
"So what's up?" For Bart, he sounded tired.
"I take it you haven't been watching CNN," Annja said. The story was already cooling off on the news network, but it was still being given a quick mention in the roundup.
"No. Got called in on a multiple homicide between rival gang members. There are some new players in town who haven't learned that they can't lean on Russian mafiya territory. Have to tread easy with this one – otherwise the media will play it up and we'll have terrorist stories on everybody's radar again."
"Oh." Annja didn't know what to say. Their professional worlds were like oil and water until she needed background information on someone shady or until Bart had a case that involved art or collectors of artifacts.
"You didn't call to find out about my day," Bart prompted.
Quickly, Annja outlined her situation. As always, Bart was a good listener, never asking questions until she'd finished.
"What can I help you with?" Bart asked.
"I just want to make sure McIntosh is who he says he is." Working as an archaeologist meant double-checking every scrap of information that turned up. She'd learned in the early years that she couldn't always trust people. Some lied intentionally, but others assumed they knew the truth or tended to say what they wanted others to hear or hoped to pull someone into line with their thinking.
"I can do that." Bart paused. "But what you're involved in could be dangerous. Any time you throw the race issue into a volatile environment, it doesn't take much to set things off."
"I know. You should try working a dig site when you've got a couple countries interested in whatever you find. Getting torn between the British government and the Roman Catholic Church is no picnic." That had happened while she'd been working near Hadrian's Wall in England, causing days of delays. The find had turned out to be mildly exotic, the grave of a celebrated Roman general who'd disappeared into history and was at first believed to be the source of the legend of King Arthur. That hadn't turned out to be true, but it had been exciting at the time.
"Yeah, but at least they aren't trying to kill you," Bart pointed out.
They talked for a little while, enjoying the easy camaraderie of their friendship. After making tentative arrangements to meet when she got back to New York, they hung up.
Worn out, Annja glanced at the clock. It was almost 5:00 a.m. She set the alarm for eight o'clock and turned out the light. She slept well, but a spider kept weaving webs throughout her dreams, trying to trap her. Thankfully, she had her sword and managed to cut her way free.
****
Annja woke before her alarm sounded. That wasn't unusual. When she was on a dig she never slept for long. She was ready to go again.
She dressed in casual clothes and took a look outside the hotel window. The protesters had returned to the warehouse. There was no sign of the media yet.
She checked the archaeology message boards. There were several new messages. Most of them addressed the mythological nature of Anansi. Annja wasn't too interested in that aspect of the puzzle yet. At best, myths and legends only told part of the story.
But there was a new e-mail from [email protected] dated only a few minutes earlier.
This isn't the stone you should be looking for. According to the writing on the stone you currently have in your possession, there is another. It is the more important stone. It has a map or something on it. This one is just a record and a false lead, IMHO.
In my humble opinion. Annja decided she would take that. The part of the text and pictographs she had deciphered had alluded to something like what hausaboy was describing.
Looking at the time on the e-mail, she decided to take a chance that he might still be online. She quickly drafted an e-mail to him and sent it.
Are you still on-line?
After a few seconds, an offer to go to instant messaging popped up on her screen. Annja accepted immediately.
Good morning, hausaboy wrote.
I was hoping you would still be on, Annja typed.
I've got class in a few minutes, but I'm cool for now, he replied.
I don't want you to be late.
No sweat. I'm setting the curve in the class.
Annja smiled at that. There was nothing wrong with getting a brainiac for a resource.
Good for you! Let me know when you need to go.
Okay. I looked you up on the Internet, too.
Annja didn't know how to respond to that so she didn't. She never paid attention to what was written about her. She had contributed several articles to different Web sites about archaeology. She wondered if he'd read some of them.
Found out about Chasing History's Monsters. That surprised me.
Not my best work. CHM allows me to go places I want to go without paying for it, Annja typed.
That's cool. Checked out a few of your articles. You know your stuff. If I'd thought you were just out looking for freebie research, I'd have taken a pass.
Thanks. Archaeology is what I do. CHM is part of what it takes to get to do it more.
I can respect that. Anyway, what I've translated so far is that there are at least two stones. The one you sent me pictures of and another one.
The smaller one you mentioned, Annja wrote.
Yeah. I think it's the key to this stone or something else.
Annja was intrigued. Why do you think that?
Because of some of the symbols copied to the large stone. It's like whoever inscribed the large stone knew someone else would expect them to be there. They're on there out of context.
Explains why I was having problems with the translation.
LOL. Probably. Bunch of gobbledygook the way it's written now. You kind of have to read between the lines.
Thinking of the war party that had accompanied the Spider Stone, Annja wrote, Do you know who might have been looking for the stones?
No. The text just mentions the enemies of the people.
The people?
The tribe the stones belonged to, hausaboy explained.<
br />
According to what I was able to translate, this Spider Stone was a gift of the gods, Annja typed.
Right. A gift from Anansi. You're familiar with him?
Spider god. Trickster. The myths about Anansi got integrated with a lot of cultures in North and South America.
Exactly. Anyway, this smaller stone was supposed to have been given to this tribe by Anansi. It was a promise.
A promise about what? Annja asked.
That they would always exist. That they wouldn't be destroyed.
That thought settled uneasily in Annja's head. It was a big promise, and one that hadn't been kept. For the stone to have come to the United States meant that at some point that village had been invaded by slavers who had stolen the people away to sell on the slave blocks. It made her sad, but slavery had centuries of sadness tied to it.
Have you ever heard of a stone like this? she typed.
No. But I did a search for it last night. You probably did, too, her translator wrote.
Annja felt chagrined.
No, I didn't. I had to deal with the police last night. Never even thought about it.
She hadn't thought about it. The idea that other people knew about it had never occurred to her.
Look at this Web link, hausaboy wrote.
Annja clicked on it and another page opened up. The header immediately identified the Web site as a collector's market specializing in West African artifacts.
Several pictures showed statues of warriors, gods and animals from different cultures like a four-hundred-year-old wooden Igbo maiden mask, a two-thousand-year-old Nok ceramic sculpture of a lion, colorful djembe and dunan drums, a Benin copper funerary mask almost eight hundred years old and several ivory carvings, as well as wooden ones.
Annja looked for the stone but couldn't find it.
I don't see the stone, she typed.
No pic. Look under Searching For.
Halfway down the page, Annja found a listing for art pieces that collectors were searching for. The entry read:
Looking for Anansi Stone. Hausa design. The stone has an image of a spider (Anansi) on it. Some refer to it as Anansi's Promise.
Information leading to the piece will be rewarded.
Contact Yousou Toure
([email protected])
The instant-messaging box beeped for attention as a new message cycled into it.
Did you find it?
Yes. Just looking at it. The stone's been buried for over 150 years. That means someone has been looking for it for at least that long.
Some families get it into their heads to collect stuff their ancestors were looking for. This could be a case of that.
Annja silently agreed.
Anyway, I thought you might be interested, hausaboy wrote.
I am. Thank you.
Okay, gotta go. I'll keep working on these pics.
Do that. If something comes to fruition out of this, I'll hook you up for a finder's fee, Annja typed.
You don't have to do that, but if you want to, feel free. Tuition isn't getting any cheaper.
Thanks! Annja shut down the instant-message block, then closed her computer.
****
Annja's phone rang when she was in the hotel lobby. She paused, shifted her backpack and retrieved the device from a side pocket. "Annja Creed."
"Did I wake you?" Professor Hallinger's voice sounded chipper and alert.
"No, I've been up for most of an hour."
"So have I. I couldn't sleep anymore, so I finally gave up and came to the dig. Where are you?"
"Leaving the hotel. You'll see me in a few minutes."
"Have you had breakfast?"
"Not yet."
"If you'll stop at Wally's, the small café across the street from the hotel and pick up two breakfasts, I'll buy."
Annja smiled. "You've got a deal, Professor."
"It's the least I can do after everything I've gotten you involved with," he said.
"Are you kidding? I live for this kind of thing."
"Still." Hallinger cleared his throat. "I've got something to show you when you get here."
"Taunt me like that and you may not get breakfast. I may come straight over. Curiosity often gets the better of me."
"You'll want breakfast. I want breakfast. We may work straight through lunch."
"All right. I just finished swapping e-mail with a guy at USC, a student, who knows the Hausa language."
"He's studying it?"
"No. He's from Nigeria and he has an interest in history."
"How fortunate," the professor said.
"Not fortunate," Annja said because she'd seen other information come by way of the newsgroups. "That's just the World Wide Web at work."
Hallinger sighed. "I step into the cyberworld with extreme reluctance. Sometimes I wonder what archaeologists a thousand years from now are going to think of our culture."
"We've got more written for them to study than at any time in history. Just the personal information on MySpace.com and other places would more than fill the library at Alexandria. Much of what we know about life in Restoration England during the seventeenth century comes from the diaries of Samuel Pepys. He covered what happened during the plague as well as the Great Fire of London."
"Yes, but what if an electromagnetic pulse were to strike the earth?" Hallinger asked. "Either from a solar flare or from a smart bomb? All those computer records could be wiped out in the blink of an eye. Everything would be lost. To that future archaeologist, it would appear that we were a culture of wastrels, producing diapers and plastic bottles that will last a thousand years."
"Let's concentrate on what we have here now," Annja suggested.
"You're right, of course." Hallinger sounded embarrassed. "What did your cyber colleague tell you?"
"I'll tell you when I get there." Annja folded the phone and put it away. But before she'd reached the door, she heard someone call her name.
"Miss Creed."
Turning, Annja discovered an old woman sitting in one of the chairs in the hotel lobby.
She was black and looked to be seventy or eighty years old. Dressed in a yellow print dress and wearing thick glasses, she reminded Annja of the nuns who'd raised her at the orphanage. She held a thick bound book against her chest, arms crossed over it protectively.
"Yes?" Annja stepped toward the woman.
"I wanted to talk to you," the woman said. "About the people found in the basement of that building." She paused. "I think I know who they were."
Chapter 7
Jaineba sat cross-legged in the small hut and breathed in the smoke of the white ubulawu coming from the small brazier hanging from the iron chain connected to the spit over the fire. She wore a loose-fitting grand bubu, a big dress popular in Senegal, and a scarf that held her cotton-white hair back from her face. The acrid smoke burned her nasal passages for a short time, then it came easier.
White ubulawu was also called the dream root. A botanist Jaineba had once guided through the savanna had told her the root was called silene capensis. Jaineba had no need for the names educated men gave things. She practiced her magic as her grandmother had taught her. Too many things changed in the world, and it had been that way since she'd been a little girl.
Sometimes when the young children of the villages saw her for the first time – that they remembered, anyway – they tried to guess how old she was. Even Jaineba was no longer certain. No one had marked the year of her birth. They only remembered who had been around when she'd been born. She guessed that she was eighty or ninety. An old woman by anyone's standards.
But her job was not yet done. Sadly, she had no granddaughter to pass her craft to. Some days she found great sadness in that. But the gods were good to her. No matter the sadness, every day she found something to rejoice in. Even after all that she had seen, wondrous and miraculous things like a child being born or a lion passing by her without offering any threat or a desert transforming into a b
eautiful flower garden during the rainy season, there was always something new. Or she could borrow the new eyes of the young and exult in the discoveries children made.
She breathed in the smoke and chanted. She wanted to slip into the dreamworld. That seemed easier these days, as if that world paralleled hers now instead of meeting occasionally like forbidden lovers.
The white ubulawu aided her in her visits to the dreamworld. The smoke's magic also held at bay the evil spirits that feasted on the unwary.
She hunted for the dreams she'd been having, hoping to see more this time. Still, they eluded her.
You're being too selfish, she chided herself. Only seldom do the gods allow you to peek into what they have planned for the world. You can't demand more than they are willing to give.
Footsteps sounded in the doorway.
Jaineba breathed out, releasing her hunt for the dreamworld. She opened her eyes and blinked at the rectangle of harsh morning light. It framed the woman standing there. But she was not the woman Jaineba had seen in her dreams.
This woman was black. The one in the dreams was white.
Her visitor was tall, several inches taller than Jaineba's own five feet, and young, probably no more than thirty. She had clear brown eyes and wore her hair cut short. Her face was slender and strong, an easy face to get to know, and one that turned the heads of men when she passed by. She had a woman's full body, though Jaineba felt the woman was on the thin side. She wore jeans, hiking boots and a white pullover that contrasted sharply with her dark skin.
She was British, speaking in that clipped and rapid accent and having only a few words of the Hausa tongue. Jaineba knew her name was Tanisha Diouf. She was an engineer working for the Childress Corporation exploring for oil.
"Little mother," Tanisha said quietly. "Am I interrupting?"
The young woman's formal manners had surprised Jaineba. Most European, Arab and American people who spoke to her had a habit of dismissing her out of turn because she was old or because they'd heard that she practiced magic.
"No." Jaineba waved her into the hut. "Come. Come."