Thunderhead

by Douglas Preston

  She glanced at Sloane. The woman had recovered her composure and was scratching in her sketchbook. Her calm presence was reassuring.

  She turned back to the tower. On the back side, at the second-story level, she could now see a small keyhole doorway, partly collapsed. It was accessible from a flat roof, against which leaned a pole ladder, perfectly preserved. She moved to the ladder and carefully climbed to the roof. Closing her sketchbook, Sloane followed. A moment later, they ducked beneath the doorway and were staring up into the gloom of the tower.

  As she had expected, there was no staircase inside. Instead, running up the center, was a series of notched poles, resting on shelves. Stones projected from the inner walls, providing footholds. Nora had seen this type of arrangement before, at a ruin in New Mexico called Shaft House. In order to ascend the tower, one had to climb spraddle-legged, one foot using the notches in the poles, and the other foot using the stones fastened into the wall. It was a deliberately precarious and exposed method of climbing, keeping all four of the climber’s limbs occupied. From above, defenders could knock off climbing invaders with rocks or arrows. At the very top of the tower, the last pole ladder went through a small hole into a tiny room beneath the roof: the last redoubt in case of attack.

  Nora looked at the huge cracks in the walls, and at the pole ladders, flimsy and brittle with dry rot. Even when first built, it would have been a terrifying climb; now, it was unthinkable. She nodded to Sloane, and they ducked back through the door and climbed down to the stepped-back facade of the city itself. Any exploration of the towers would have to wait.

  Walking away from the tower, Nora approached the foot of the nearest roomblock. Over the centuries, windblown sand had drifted up against the front of the houses. In places, the drifts were so high a person could climb to the flat roofs that led to the upper stories, and from there into the second-floor houses themselves. Beyond the roomblocks, she could see the circular form of the Great Kiva and the stylized blue disk incised into its facade, a white band at its top.

  Sloane drifted over silently, glancing first at Nora, then the sandpile. Again, Nora realized that protocol dictated they return for the others, establish a formal pattern of discovery. But she also realized that nobody, not even Richard Wetherill, had found an Anasazi city like this one. The urge to explore was too strong to resist.

  They scrambled up the sandpile to the first-story roofs. Ahead of them lay a row of darkened, keyhole doorways. As Nora glanced around, she saw, arrayed along the edge of the roof, partly buried in sand, eight gorgeous St. John’s Polychrome pots in perfect condition. Three of them still had their sandstone lids.

  The women paused at the nearest doorway, once again feeling the strange hesitation. “Let’s go inside,” Sloane said at last.

  Nora ducked through the doorway. Gradually, as her eyes adjusted to the dim light, she could see the room was not empty. On the far side was a firepit with a stone comal. Beside it were two corrugated cooking pots, blackened with smoke. One had broken open, spilling tiny Anasazi corncobs across the floor. Packrats had built a nest in one corner, a junk heap of sticks and cactus husks thickly laid with dung. The acrid scent of their urine permeated the room. As Nora stepped forward, she saw, hanging on a peg near the door, a pair of sandals made from woven yucca fibers.

  Sloane switched on her flashlight and played its beam toward a dark doorway that beckoned on the far wall. Stepping through, Nora saw that the second room had a complicated painted design running like a border around the plastered walls. “It’s a snake,” she said. “A stylized rattlesnake.”

  “Unbelievable.” Sloane ran the beam along the design. “As if it was painted yesterday.” The light came to rest in a niche on one wall. “Look, Nora, there’s something there.”

  Nora stepped over. It was bundle of buckskin, about the size of a fist, tightly rolled and tied.

  “It’s a medicine bundle,” she whispered. “A mountain soil bundle, from the look of it.”

  Sloane stared at her. “Do you know of anyone finding an intact Anasazi medicine bundle?” she asked.

  “No,” said Nora. “I think this is the first.”

  They stood in the room for a few moments, breathing in the ancient air. Then Nora found her eyes drawn to a third doorway. It was smaller than the others, and appeared to lead to a storage room.

  “You first,” Sloane said.

  Nora dropped to her hands and knees, crawled through the low doorway, and stood inside a stuffy space. Sloane followed. The yellow pool of light moved about, stabbing through a veil of dust raised by their entry. Gradually, objects and color emerged from the dimness, and Nora’s mind began to make sense of the chaos.

  Against the back wall, a row of extraordinary pots was arrayed: smooth, polished, painted with fantastical geometric designs. Sticking out of the mouth of one pot was a bundle of prayer sticks, carved, feathered, and painted, gleaming with color even in the dull light. Beside them was a long stone palette shaped like a huge leaf, on which had been placed a dozen fetishes of different animals fashioned from semiprecious stones, each with an arrowhead tied to its back with a string of sinew. Next sat a bowl filled with perfect, tiny bird points, all flaked out of the blackest obsidian. Nearby was a stone banco, on which a number of artifacts had been carefully arranged. As Nora’s eyes roamed the dimness with growing disbelief, she could see a rotten buckskin bag from which spilled a collection of mirage stones, some cradleboards, and several exquisite bags woven from apocynum fiber and filled with red ochre.

  The silence, here in the bowels of the ruined city, was absolute. There’s more in this one room, Nora thought, than the greatest museums have in their entire collections.

  She followed the beam of light as it revealed ever more remarkable objects. The skull of a grizzly bear, decorated with blue and red stripes of paint, bundles of sweetgrass stuffed into its eye sockets. The rattles of a rattlesnake tied to the end of a painted stick, human scalp attached. A large sheet of mica, cut into the outline of a hideously grinning skull, its teeth inlaid with blood-red carnelians. A quartz crystal carved in the shape of a corn beetle. A delicately woven basket, its outside feathered with hundreds of tiny, iridescent hummingbird breasts.

  Instinctively, she sought out Sloane’s face in the dim light. Sloane looked back, amber eyes wild. The composure that had returned so quickly was gone again.

  “This must have been the storage room for the family who occupied these roomblocks,” Sloane finally said, voice trembling. “Just one family. There could be dozens of other rooms like this in this city. Maybe hundreds.”

  “I believe it,” Nora replied. “But what I can’t believe is the wealth. Even in Anasazi days, this would represent an inconceivable fortune.”

  The dust raised by their entry drifted in layers through the cool, heavy air, scattering the yellow light. Nora took a deep breath, and then another, trying to clear her mind.

  “Nora,” Sloane murmured at last. “Do you realize what we’ve found?”

  Nora tore her eyes away from the clutter of dim objects. “I’m working on it,” she said.

  “We’ve just made one of the greatest archaeological discoveries of all time.”

  Nora swallowed, opened her mouth to reply. But no sound would come, and in the end she simply nodded.

  26

  * * *

  TWELVE HOURS LATER, THE CITY OF QUIVIRA lay in shadow, the late afternoon sun blazing its last on the valley cliffs opposite the ruin. Nora rested on the ancient retaining wall below what they’d come to call the Planetarium, feeling as drained as she had ever felt in her life. She could hear the excited voices of the rest of the expedition ringing out of the city, distorted and magnified by the vast pregnant hollow of rock in which Quivira stood. She glanced down at the rope ladder and pulley system, rigged by Sloane to provide quick access to the ruin. Far below, in the grove of cottonwood trees where they had made their camp, she could see the smoke of Bonarotti’s campfire and the gray rectangle t
hat was his folding serving table. The cook had promised them medallions of wild javelina with coffee barbecue sauce and—amazingly—two bottles of Château Pétrus in celebration. It had been, she thought, the longest—and greatest—day of her life: “that day of days,” as Howard Carter had described it when he first entered King Tutankhamen’s tomb. And they had yet to enter the Great Kiva. That, she had decreed, would be delayed until they had made a rough survey and recovered some sense of their perspective.

  From time to time, during the course of the day, Nora had found herself searching among the sandy ruins for footprints, inscriptions, excavations—anything that would prove her father actually reached the city. But the rational part of her knew that the constant currents of wind and animal tracks would have long ago erased any marks of his passing. And it could well be that he, like Nora herself, had been so overwhelmed by the majesty of the city as to feel any modern inscription to be a sacrilege.

  The group emerged from the ruin, Sloane bringing up the rear. Swire and Smithback came toward Nora and the rope ladder. Swire simply slumped down, flushed beneath his leathery tan, but Smithback remained behind, talking animatedly. “Unbelievable,” he was saying, his voice loud and grating in the ruin’s stillness. “Oh, God, what a find. This is going to make the discovery of King Tut’s tomb look like a . . .” He stopped, temporarily speechless. Nora felt inexplicably annoyed that his thoughts would coincide with her own. “You know, I did some work in the New York Museum of Natural History,” he began again, “and their collection couldn’t begin to hold a candle to this place. There’s more stuff here than in all the museums in the world, for chrissakes. When my agent hears about this, she’s going to get such a—”

  Nora’s sudden glare silenced the writer.

  “Sorry, Madame Chairman.” Smithback settled back, looking only momentarily put out. He whipped out a small spiral-bound notebook from a back pocket and began jotting notes.

  Aragon, Holroyd, and Black joined them along the wall, followed by Sloane. “This is the discovery of the century,” Black boomed. “What a cap to a career.”

  Holroyd sat down by the retaining wall, slowly and unsteadily, like an old man. Nora could see his face was dirty and streaked, as if he had wept at the sight.

  “How are you doing, Peter?” she asked quietly.

  He looked at her with a weak smile. “Ask me tomorrow.”

  Nora turned to Aragon, glancing curiously at his face, wondering if the magnitude of the discovery would break his usual dour reserve. What she saw was a face covered with a sheen of sweat, and a pair of eyes that had grown as dark and glittery as the obsidian the city was full of.

  He looked back at Nora. And then—for the first time since she’d met him at the fire circle—he smiled, widely and genuinely, white teeth huge in the brown face. “It’s fantastic,” he said as he took her hand and pressed it. “Almost beyond belief. We all have a lot to thank you for. Perhaps myself more than the rest.” There was a curious force in his low, vibrant voice. “Over the years I’d come to believe, as much as I believed anything, that the secrets of the Anasazi would never be ours. But this city holds the key. I know it. And I feel fortunate to be part of it.” He removed his knapsack, placed it on the ground, and sat down next to her.

  “There’s something I must tell you,” he said. “Perhaps now isn’t the right time, but it will only become more difficult the longer we are here.”

  She looked at him. “Yes?”

  “You know my belief in Zero Site Trauma. I’m not as zealous as some, but I still feel it would be a terrible crime to disturb this city, to remove its essence and squirrel it away in museum storage rooms.”

  Black snorted. “Don’t tell me you’re a sucker for that bullshit. Zero Site Trauma is a passing fad of political correctness. The real crime would be to leave this place unexplored. Think of all we can learn.”

  Aragon looked at him steadily. “We can learn everything we need to know without looting the city.”

  “Since when is a disciplined archaeological excavation called looting?” Sloane asked mildly.

  “Today’s archaeology is tomorrow’s plundering,” Aragon replied. “Look what Schliemann did to the site of Troy a hundred years ago, in the name of science. He practically bulldozed the place, destroyed it for future generations. And that, for its day, was a disciplined excavation.”

  “Well, you can tiptoe around all you want, taking pictures and touching nothing,” said Black, raising his voice. “But I for one can’t wait to tuck into that midden.” He turned toward Smithback. “To the uneducated mind, all these treasures are amazing—but nothing tells you what you want to know like a trash mound. You’d do well to remember that for your book.”

  Nora looked from one member of the group to the other. She’d expected this discussion, although not quite so soon. “There’s no way,” she said slowly, “that we can really begin to excavate this city, even if we wanted to. All we can hope to do in the next few weeks is to survey and inventory.”

  Black began to protest, and she raised her hand. “If we are to properly date and analyze the city, it’s necessary to be a little invasive. That’s Black’s job, and he’ll confine any site disturbance to test trenching in the trash mound. No part of the city itself will be excavated, and no artifacts will be shifted or removed, unless absolutely necessary, and with my express permission.”

  “Site disturbance,” Black echoed sarcastically, but he sat back with a satisfied air.

  “We’ll have to bring back a few type specimens for further analysis at the Institute,” she went on. “But we will only bring back inferior artifacts that are duplicated elsewhere in the city. Long-term, the Institute will have to decide what to do with the site. But I promise you, Enrique, that I’ll recommend they leave Quivira untouched and intact.” She glanced pointedly at Sloane, who had been listening intently. “Do you agree?”

  After a brief pause, Sloane nodded.

  Aragon glanced from one to the other. “Under the circumstances, that will have to be acceptable.” Then he smiled again, suddenly, and stood up. A hush fell on the group.

  “Nora,” he said, “you have the congratulations of all of us.”

  Nora felt a sudden flush of pleasure as she listened to the chorus of clapping punctuated by a long loud whistle from Black. Then Smithback too was on his feet, hoisting a canteen.

  “And I’d like to propose a toast to Padraic Kelly. If it weren’t for him, we’d never be here.”

  This sudden reference to her father, coming from a source as unexpected as Smithback, brought a sudden welling of emotion that closed Nora’s throat. Her father had never been far from her thoughts all day. But in the end, she had seen no trace of him, and she felt grateful for Smithback’s remembrance.

  “Thank you,” she said. Smithback took a drink and passed the canteen.

  The group fell silent. Light was draining fast from the valley, and it was time they made their way down the rope ladder to supper. And yet everyone seemed reluctant to leave the magical place.

  “What I can’t figure out is why the hell they left all that stuff behind,” Smithback said. “It’s like walking away from Fort Knox.”

  “A lot of Anasazi sites show a similar abandonment,” Nora replied. “These people were on foot, they had no beasts of burden. It made more sense to leave your goods behind and make fresh ones when you arrived at your new home. When the Anasazi moved, they usually only carried their most sacred items and turquoise.”

  “But it looks like even the turquoise was left behind here. I mean, the place is full of it.”

  “True,” Nora said after a moment. “This was not a typical abandonment. It’s like they left everything. That’s part of what makes this site unique.”

  “The sheer wealth of the city, and the many ceremonial artifacts, makes me think it must have been a religious center that overshadowed even Chaco,” said Aragon. “A city of priests.”

  “A city of priests?” Black repea
ted skeptically. “Why would a city of priests be located way out here, at the very edge of the Anasazi realm? What I found more interesting was the amazingly defensive nature of the place. Even the site itself, hidden so perfectly in this isolated canyon—it’s damn near impregnable. You’d almost think these people were paranoid.”

  “I’d be paranoid if I had the kind of wealth they had,” Sloane murmured.

  “If they were impregnable, then why did they abandon the city?” Holroyd asked.

  “They probably overfarmed the valley below,” Black replied with a shrug. “Simple soil exhaustion. The Anasazi didn’t know the art of fertilization.”

  Nora shook her head. “There’s no way, given its size, that the farmland in the valley could support the city to begin with. There must be a hundred granaries back there. They had to have been importing tons of food from someplace else. But all this begs the question: why put such a huge city here in the first place? In the middle of nowhere, at the end of a circuitous road, at the end of a narrow slot canyon? During the rainy season, that canyon would have been impassable half the time.”

  “As I said,” Aragon replied. “A city of priests, at the end of a difficult ritual journey. Nothing else makes sense.”

  “Of course,” Black said scornfully. “When in doubt, blame it on religion. Besides, the Anasazi were egalitarian. They didn’t believe in a social hierarchy. The idea of them having a priestly city, or a ruling class, is absurd.”

  There was another silence.

  “What really intrigues me,” Smithback said, notebook once again in hand, “is the idea of gold and silver.”