by Kevin Tinto
Not long ago, planet Earth, cradle of all life, protected by a benevolent atmosphere and magnetic field, with neighbors like Jupiter absorbing most of the killer asteroids that might otherwise have struck home, had seemed impenetrable, invulnerable, infinite.
Lovely Earth. Safe Earth. Orbiting a smallish but stable star, located out in the galactic version of the boondocks—it had nothing to worry about.
No longer.
One of the young fierce femmes approached her and smiled.
Wow, that’s a first, Leah thought, both startled and delighted.
Aside from K’aalógii, the Ancients kept their distance. Of course, Leah knew all of them in detail, right down to blood type. The young women who stood beside her had originally been called Number Twelve, having been the 12th Ancient examined by Gordo. Numbers were the easiest way to keep track, so each Ancient had been given a standard, hospital-issue plastic medical ID bracelet with a number and a chip that contained all of their medical data.
Leah had tried speaking to each individual in hopes of finding out more about them, including their actual names. Because Navajo was the only language Leah was even close to fluent in, she’d tried communicating in that language. Most of the Ancients were conversant in Navajo and Pueblo, a necessity of having been jammed together in a crowded cliff dwelling for months, perhaps even years.
This particular young lady had sat frozen at first, when Leah met her. After several attempts to communicate with Twelve, Leah noticed that she’d begun touching her face, her hair, even running her fingers over her teeth, performing what seemed like a self-inventory.
Perfectly normal, she’d thought. Waking from stasis was similar to waking from an extended coma after a bad car accident.
When Twelve finally spoke, it wasn’t in Navajo, but Apache. With some tricky translation work, Leah had discovered that her name was Dahteste: Warrior Woman. That small breakthrough felt like eons ago.
Once Leah had learned all of their names, tribal affiliations, and languages, she’d insisted that their true names replace their identification numbers. The sooner Gordo and his minions saw the Ancients as individuals, not lab rats, the sooner they’d be treated like humans. Another memory that felt like years ago, not weeks.
Now Dahteste came closer to Leah than ever before. She hesitated a moment, then reached up and brushed Leah’s hair lightly with the back of her hand. “De'nzhone'” she said softly.
‘De'nzhone'.
For a moment, Leah sat motionless, in shock. Even with her rudimentary knowledge of Apache, Leah understood Dahteste had called her ‘beautiful.’ The kind word provoked an unexpected rush of emotion.
The shaman abruptly stood from his log throne at the Basilica fire and strode over to the communal fire. He nodded at Leah. “Sa’ah naaghaii bik’eh Hózhó.”
Garrett, who’d also been warming himself at the fire, told Leah, “The lodge. He won’t let that go”
“Yeah, I got the Hózhó, part,” Leah said. Hózhó, in the Navajo language was a single word that described perfection. A spiritual declaration of everything good, versus bad, even evil. A state of living and a state of being: balance, order, beauty, harmony, goodness, success in every realm. “So, the sweat lodge is his idea of a path to perfection—even beyond purity?”
Appanoose pointed at the lodge again. “Inipi—hózhó.
“Have to give him points for stubbornness,” Leah said, feeling a shiver. She also knew the Lakota word for sweat lodge: Inipi. In their language, it also meant 'to live again.’
Clearly, the shaman was dead-set on making her live up to her agreement to enter the sweat lodge—and doing so in front of the entire Settlement. Unprepared to respond in this public forum, Leah wasn’t sure how to respond. She was about to tell Garrett to say that they’d would discuss her ‘agreement’ in the morning, when Dahteste, who had been standing beside her, grasped her wrist with enough strength that she couldn’t move her arm in any direction.
She was so shocked and alarmed, she hadn’t noticed that K’aalógii had come up to her opposite side and grasped her wrist in the same manner and with similar force. Garrett came closer, suddenly realizing that Leah was struggling to free herself. Before he was able to take a second step, two warriors came up from behind him and restrained him in the same manner.
Appanoose spun on his heels and walked back to the entrance to the sweat lodge. He disappeared inside as Leah and Garrett were walked over and held near the small fire in which the Ancients continued heating stones. K’aalógii and Dahteste released her wrists, and she rubbed them, working the circulation back into her hands. She was thankful they had brought her near the fire.
As best she could, Leah tried asking K’aalógii and Dahteste whether she was being forced into the sweat lodge. Neither replied, although both smiled, K’aalógii with a gleam in her eye, as if she’d just bought the greatest gift in the world for Leah and couldn’t wait until it was opened.
Leah stared into the stone-heating fire, absorbing the life-giving warmth while a multiplicity of scenarios played out in her mind’s eye. Was this a bluff? The story of the POW being knelt down while a guard fired an unloaded pistol against the prisoner’s head, simply for the mental anguish it caused? Would he shove her into the sweat lodge and make Leah beg before allowing her to leave? Yeah, and maybe after some celebratory backslaps with his fellow Ancients, Appanoose would dump a bucket of Gatorade over her head, sit down, and, in perfect English, provide a bullet-point list of beefs and non-negotiable demands.
When Appanoose flipped the door flap up and exited the sweat lodge, Garrett went off. The warriors released him as he repeated the phrase over and over again: “Doo yáʼáshǫ́ǫ da.” He formed a closed fist and thrust it forward with power, just short of striking the shaman’s chest and repeated the phrase, punching out each time he did. It was disrespectful; No—it was more than that, Leah thought. A threat and a promise.
Doo yáʼáshǫ́ǫ da meant intending harm, to do evil, even malevolence. Not in the context of Appanoose doing harm to Leah, but what would happen should harm come to her. Garrett told Appanoose in carefully enunciated language: If you hurt Leah, you have no idea of the magnitude of the evil shit-storm that will be aimed squarely at your ass.
The shaman nodded in his sharp, single-nod style, a gesture she’d come to associate with Appanoose being in a relatively agreeable mood.
Garrett said, “He understands and says that no harm will come to the Bóhólníhígíí.”
Leah’s eyes opened wide. “He called me the boss?”
“Well, he has a few nicknames for you. He uses Náátsʼǫ́ʼoołdísii, when he doesn’t think you’re listening.”
Leah cocked her head. “What does that mean?”
“Dust devil would be the best translation.”
“Bastard.” Leah shook her head, glancing at Appanoose, who had begun speaking again.
He spoke in clipped Navajo and Lakota. Leah even caught a word or two of Apache. A less-than-subtle reminder that he was in charge.
That’s when all hell broke loose. Garrett had first protested in Navajo. Now he shouted a string of good-old fashioned four-letter swear words…in English. At the same time, Dahteste began to gently tug Leah toward the sweat lodge.
“T’ahálo!” Leah said. T’ahálo roughly translated as ‘Wait!’ in Navajo.
Dahteste and K’aalógii stopped. Leah turned and watched as the warriors restrained Garrett again, seemingly without effort no matter how hard he struggled.
“Garrett! Stop.” Something about the way both Dahteste and K’aalógii held her hands, or maybe it was the look in their eyes, had disarmed Leah.
“That bastard. I told him what would happened if he tested me.” Normally serene and stoic, Garrett Moon was furious. The veins stuck out on his neck, and his muscles, always toned, bulged as he struggled.
“It’s all right. I’ll be all right.”
Garrett’s fury had dissolved. “Leah. Don’t,” he pleaded
.
“It’ll be okay,” she said. “I believe that.” Leah squeezed the hands of her young captors and stepped toward the door flap, where Appanoose already waited, inside.
Chapter 29
Leah sat cross-legged across from Appanoose, both on the same side of the pyramid-shaped stack of scorching hot rock separating one side of the sweat lodge from the other. Beside her was a large clay pot, filled to the brim with water, containing a clay cup that had sunk to the bottom. She didn’t wait for permission but lifted out the cup and dipped it into the pot, filling it with water, then drank deeply. It was blistering hot inside the lodge, but the water was icy cold.
She was just beginning to understand how much work went into one of these rituals. It must have included making sure that a pot contained ice-cold river water inside the superheated lodge.
She dropped the empty cup back into the pot, feeling the ambient heat searing her skin from the outside in. Her eyes watered freely from the lingering smoke. At least the lodge’s temperature, while quite hot, wasn’t the broiler-set-on-high, skin-burning, scorch she’d experienced the first time she got a look inside.
It didn’t take long to figure out what Appanoose did while alone inside the lodge. He handed her a clay cup, now filled to the brim with a steaming brew. All it took was one whiff to suspect what he had concocted. The bitter smell was a reminder of the one or two times she’d eaten the peyote buttons—a recreational drug she’d given up long ago, largely because it was, without a doubt, the most god-awful tasting substance she’d ever had to gag down. Its bitter residue lingered on her tongue for hours afterward.
She held the cup and said, “Peyōtl.”
Peyōtl was the Nahuatl name for peyote, which meant there was a ninety-percent chance he had no idea what she’d just said. Still, it was worth a shot.
He simply replied, “Hosh.” He lifted an imaginary cup to his mouth and tipped his head back, the said, “Bitoo.”
The translation for Hosh from Navajo to English meant cactus, which was close enough. There was no doubt from the bitter smell that he’d steeped a powerful hallucinogen in the water, and she was expected to drink.
‘Bitoo.’ Yeah, right, just drink. She couldn’t help but think of the grape Kool-Aid served by Jim Jones in Guyana.
She had two choices now: storm out of the sweat lodge, or drink the Kool-Aid and explore whatever ‘trip’ he had in store for her. Appanoose didn’t make any move to prevent her from setting the cup down and exiting.
Leah drew a deep breath. Gone this far with these people—might as well take the plunge.
She lifted the cup to her lips, held her nose, and gulped. While it didn’t taste like tea served at Her Majesty’s annual summer Queen’s Garden Party, it was far from the dreadful flavor of raw peyote buttons. It tasted bitter, yes, but she also detected sweet notes, as well as other flavors that she couldn’t identify. One thing was for sure—it was more than simply peyote buttons boiled down over a fire. Still, she had to assume it included the same ingredient found in various desert flora that contained psychoactive alkaloids: mescaline.
Leah sipped until the cup was empty and handed it back to Appanoose. For the first time, she saw honest-to-God respect in the proud man’s expression.
The peyote blend might kill me but, damn it, I finally won the bastard over.…
Thirty-minutes later, she was back to cursing the shaman under her breath. Leah was experiencing classic side-effects. Nausea and flu-like symptoms, made all the worse by the lodge’s heat and the lingering smoke from the outside fire pit. The side-effects lasted one, maybe two hours, as she recalled, but it was pure misery every second it lasted.
Appanoose had been chanting in a low tone the entire time, well aware of what Leah was experiencing. Leah locked him up in a ‘This really sucks—thanks so much’ expression, not expecting a reaction.
Wait. Did he just wink? It seemed the cynical of wink you got from a toothless carny when you asked if the spinning whirly-gig ride would make you vomit. Or maybe he hadn’t winked at all. The hallucinogen was kicking in.…
This isn’t your first rodeo. Suck it up, girl. Leah drew in one deep breath after another, resisting the urge to spew in her lap.
Appanoose bowed his head then slowly lifted his hands with palms up and began to chant in a language Leah couldn’t translate. It sounded like a combination of Lakota and Apache.
Her knowledge of shamanic rituals told her that the shaman would continue lowering himself deeper into a trance. Leah struggled to do exactly the opposite. She wasn’t exactly the designated driver, but if she were going to learn anything, she couldn’t allow herself to stare at the river stones, waiting for one to engage her in a lively conversation.
As the shaman’s chanting grew louder, she lost peripheral vision first. Once, Jack had gifted her a ride on a High-G aerobatic plane ride. When the pilot pulled the biplane into an impossibly tight turn, she’d felt a similar sensation. Her vision was tunneling, until the image of Appanoose condensed, like coal under a millions of tons of pressure, transforming into a magnificent diamond.
A diamond-like brilliance, at first barely a pinpoint of white light, grew, and soon unfolded, pushing back then overtaking the blackness.
Leah burrowed her fingernails into her thighs, hoping the discomfort might counteract the loss of her wits. As she did so, though, an internal voice encouraged her to unwind, maintain focus on the shaman, ignore the outside world, look inwardly. Her last physical sensation was not digging her fingernails into her thighs, but digging them into the palms of the shaman, as he held her hands tight and continued to chant.
She hadn’t understood a word of the chanting, but now a voice in her head said, “Šóka.”
The light grew in brilliance. She wanted nothing more but to shut and shield her mind’s eye from the starburst, but she already felt herself tumbling away, dissolving into a million miniature diamonds....
✽✽✽
Leah was flying over the mesas and the landscapes with such an intense and vivid awareness that she felt tears streaming down her face, her hair twisting into knots, smelled the scent of pine and sage brush, and heard a river rushing below her. Suddenly, the water’s sounds were replaced by silence. Her speed increased and she raced over the landscape until the mesa tops, the valleys, rivers and canyons, all blurred into a kaleidoscope of color.
Chapter 30
The landscape was clearly New Mexican, but she knew it was not the modern day. The desert appeared too lush, too green. The mountain peaks were thick with snow and ice, appearing almost glacier-like.
If it were a vision, this trip was beyond her wildest imagination. The suffocating heat and pungent odor of the sweat lodge—gone. Smoke rising in the distance caught Leah’s attention. What had appeared at first, to be miles away, was beneath her. It was a prehistoric village next to a river. The Ancients appeared like a scene out of a painting, representing Indian life as Leah would have expected it to look thousands of years in the past.
A flash of light on the horizon caught her attention. The Ancients on the mesa ran toward the protection of the mesa cliffs amid shouts and warnings.
Oh my God, thought Leah, as the small village was attacked from above. It was something she had imagined and pondered endlessly after rescuing the Ancients from stasis. Now she was witnessing it in real time. A beam of light so bright that Leah had to press her palms into her eyes to stop the pain, that had come out of nowhere. When she pulled her hands away and her vision recovered, Ancients lay scattered around the village and the base of the mesa.
Had they all been killed?
She screamed in anger, until feeling a light touch on her forearm. She turned, to find nothing there—still the unseen touch filled her heart with serenity and calm.
When she looked down at the Ancients once again, they no longer lay on the ground beneath the mesa cliffs. Instead, they lay encased in the same stasis units she’d found at the Antarctic complex.
The vision dissolved as quickly as it had appeared, and she found herself looking at a field of brilliant stars, surrounding her, engulfing her, streaming through her—she’d become the center of a cosmic snow globe, shaken until not one star remained stationary.
Just as she was beginning to relax and marvel in the indescribable experience of floating within the snow globe, she felt something like cold liquid metal flowing down her spine and toward her legs. She was paralyzed, unable to move—and the blackness returned.
Leah was no longer looking at an infinite field of stars. She was flying again, but over an unfamiliar landscape. This one featured mountainous terrain. Snaking through the mountains were deep canyons, in which water flowed and greenery grew thick on the banks and cliffs. The only terrain that remotely resembled this was the mountains of the southern island of New Zealand.
Leah felt cold, her exposed skin already porcelain in color from exposure. Her focus on the cold was drawn away by a sudden inability to draw a deep breath. No matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t fill her lungs with enough oxygen necessary to satisfy her body.
A village appeared below, with hundreds of Ancients walking up and down a mosaic of paths leading from the deep, rich canyons, to the mountain glacier, where a massive village stood. Wood lodges, some the size of cathedrals, were anchored into the ice; smoke from a multitude of chimneys rose above the structures.
It was a city like Leah had never explored, seen, or studied in her archeological career.
The people looked familiar, but not their clothing. They wore what appeared to be an organic weave, like a hemp, but richer.
Leah scanned the horizon and identified at least three more of these cities in the distance. Where was this place? Something only the shaman could answer, she knew. She looked left and right, sweeping the horizon, hoping he might appear, and explain, but she was alone within the vision.
“Where is this?” Leah shouted. “Who are these people?”