Thunderhead

“Not on the whole skeletons on top.”

“And the bones underneath?”

There was a short pause. “I’m still analyzing them,” Aragon replied.

Nora looked around, feeling an unpleasant gnawing in the pit of her stomach. She was far from squeamish, but the charnel-house nature of the place made her uncomfortable. “What could it mean?” she asked.

Aragon glanced up at her. “A large number of simultaneous burials usually means a single cause,” he said. “Famine, disease, war . . .” He paused. “Or sacrifice.”

At that moment her radio crackled. “Nora, this is Sloane. Are you there?”

Nora pulled her radio from her side. “I’m with Aragon. What is it?”

“There’s something you need to see. Both of you.” Through the microphone, the quiver of suppressed excitement in Sloane’s voice was clear. “Meet me at the central plaza.”

A few minutes later, Sloane was leading them through a complicated series of second-story roomblocks at the far end of the ruin. “We were doing a routine survey,” she was saying, “and then Peter found a large cavity in one of the floors with the proton magnetometer.” They stepped beneath a doorway and entered a large room, only dimly lit by the portable lantern. Unlike most of the other rooms she had seen at the ruin, this one was strangely empty. Holroyd stood in a far corner, tinkering with the magnetometer: a flat box rolling on sliding wheels, the long handle projecting from its side ending in an LCD screen.

But Nora wasn’t looking at Holroyd. She was gazing into the center of the room, where a section of floor had been removed, exposing a slab-lined cyst. The enormous flat stone that had covered it lay tipped up carefully against one wall.

“Who opened this grave?” she heard Aragon ask sharply.

Nora stepped forward, anger at this breach of authority flooding through her. Then she looked down and stopped short.

Within the cyst was a double burial. But it was no ordinary Anasazi burial, graced perhaps with a few pots and a turquoise pendant. The two completely disarticulated skeletons lay in the center of the grave, the broken bones of each arranged in a circular pattern in its own large painted bowl, surmounted by their broken skulls. Over each bowl had been draped cotton mantles, which had rotted down to the warp. Enough shreds remained, however, to see that they had once been extraordinarily fine, a pattern of gri

Nora stared in astonishment. The bodies were surrounded by an unheard-of wealth of grave goods: pots filled with salt, turquoise, quartz crystals, fetishes, and ground pigments. There were also two small bowls, carved of quartz, filled to the brim with some kind of fine reddish powder—more red ochre, perhaps. Nora’s eyes moved over the cyst, picking out bundles of arrows, buffalo robes, soft buckskins, mummified parrots and macaws, elaborate prayer sticks. The entire burial was covered with a thick layer of yellow dust.

“I examined that dust under the stereozoom,” said Sloane. “It’s pollen, from at least fifteen different species of flowers.”

Nora stared at her in disbelief. “Why pollen?”

“The entire cyst was once filled with hundreds of pounds of flowers.”

Nora shook her head in disbelief. “The Anasazi never buried their dead like that. And I’ve never seen inlaid teeth like that before.”

Suddenly, Aragon knelt by the grave. At first, Nora had the odd notion he was going to pray. But then he bent down, shining a flashlight over the bones, scrutinizing them from a very close distance. As he probed the two pots of bones with his light, Nora noticed that many of the bones had been broken, and some showed signs of charring at their ends. Then Nora heard a sharp intake of breath, and Aragon quickly straightened up. His expression had suddenly changed.

“I would like permission to temporarily remove several bones for examination,” he said, his voice coldly formal.

More than anything else, this request, coming from Aragon, capped Nora’s mystification. “After we photograph and document everything, of course,” she heard herself say.

“Naturally. And I’d like to take a sample of that reddish powder.”

He departed wordlessly, but Nora continued to stand at the edge of the cyst, staring down into the dark hole in the floor. Sloane began setting up the 4x5 camera at the edge of the gravesite, while Holroyd powered down the magnetometer. Then he came over to Nora.

“Incredible, isn’t it?” he murmured in her ear.

But Nora paid no attention to this, or to the excited undercurrent of Sloane’s voice in the background. She was thinking of Aragon, and the sudden look that had come over his face. She felt it too: there was something odd, even wrong, about the burial. In some ways, she thought, it wasn’t like a burial at all. True, some Pueblo IV cultures cremated their dead, and others dug up and reburied their dead in pots. But this: the bones broken and burned; the thick flower dust; the grave goods ranged so carefully.

“I wonder what Black will make of this burial,” came Sloane’s voice, intruding on her reverie.

I don’t think this is a burial at all, Nora thought to herself. I think it’s an offering.

* * *

As they stepped out onto the first-floor roof, its farthest edges tipped in noontime sun, Nora gently laid a hand on Sloane’s arm.

“I thought we had an agreement,” she said.

Sloane turned to look at her. “What are you talking about?”

“You shouldn’t have opened that grave without consulting me first. That was a major violation of the ground rules for this dig.”

The amber color of Sloane’s eyes seemed to deepen as she listened to Nora. “And you don’t think opening the burial was a good idea?” she replied, her voice suddenly low, an almost feline susurrus.

“No, I don’t. We have a whole city to survey and catalog, and burials are particularly sensitive. But like I told you at Pete’s Ruin, that’s not the point. This isn’t how a professional archaeologist should work, simply digging up what interests her.”

“You’re saying I’m not a professional?” Sloane asked.

Nora took a deep breath. “You’re not as experienced as I thought you were.”

“I had to open that cyst,” said Sloane abruptly.

“Why?” asked Nora, failing to keep the sarcasm from her voice. “Were you looking for something?”

Sloane started to answer, then stopped short. She moved closer, so close that Nora could feel the heat and anger radiating from her. “You, Nora Kelly, are a control freak. You’re just like my father. You’ve been breathing down my neck, hoping for mistakes, ever since I first flew in. I did nothing wrong in opening that burial. The magnetometer showed a cavity and all I did was lift the stone. I touched nothing. It was no more invasive than walking through a doorway.”

Nora struggled to maintain her composure. “If you can’t abide by the rules,” she said as evenly as she could, “I’ll place you under Aragon, where you can learn respect for the integrity of an archaeological site. And obedience to the expedition director.”

“Director?” Sloane sneered. “By all rights, I should be the expedition director. Don’t forget who’s paying for all this.”

“I haven’t forgotten,” Nora said, voice steady despite the heat of her anger. “Just one more example of your father not trusting you, isn’t it?”

For a moment, Sloane stood before her speechlessly, limbs taut, face dark under the deep tan. Then, wordlessly, she pivoted on her heel. Nora watched her descend the ladder and walk deliberately away, erect and proud, her dark hair burned violet by the sun.