"Thanks," he said absently. "I don't suppose there's a piece lying around on top with two obtuse angles and a ragged bite out of the third side?"
"Gray? Corrugated? Black on white?"
"Red."
"Really?" she asked, excited. Redware was the most unusual of all the Anasazi pottery. It also came from the last period when they inhabited the northern reaches of their homeland. "Do you think we have enough shards to make a whole pot?"
Ten made a rumble that sounded suspiciously like Pounce at his most satisfied. He leaned over, pulled a large carton from beneath the table and folded back the flaps. With gentle care he lifted pieces of an ancient bowl onto the table. The background color of the pot was brick red. Designs in white and black covered the surface, careful geometrics that spoke of a painstaking artist working patiently over the pot.
A feeling of awe expanded through Diana as she saw the pot lying half-mended on the table. Ten had been as patient and painstaking as the original potter; the fine lines where he had glued shards together were almost invisible.
"You never did tell me why this kind of pot is so rare," Ten said, turning aside to the carton of unmatched shards.
"Polychrome pots are usually found south of here," Diana said absently. Her hands closed delicately around the base and a curving side of the red pot. "Either the potter was an immigrant or the pot was a piece of trade goods. But this pot, plus the surface and regular shape of the sandstone masonry in September Canyon, make it certain that the site is from the Pueblo III period of the Anasazi. Or nearly certain. Since we don't have a time machine, we'll never be one hundred percent positive that we have the true story."
"We know the most important thing."
Diana looked up from the fragment of the past held between her hands.
"They were people like us," Ten said simply.
"'They built, laughed, wept, fought, raised children and died. Most of all, they knew fear."
"Actually," Diana said, frowning over the box of shards, "the most recent theory states that the Anasazi moved into their cliff houses for reasons other than fear."
Ten's left eyebrow arched skeptically. "They just liked the view halfway up the cliff, huh?"
"Urn, no one said anything about that. The theory just states that we were premature in attributing a fortress mentality to the Anasazi. They could just have been preserving the top of the mesa for crops and didn't build on the canyon bottom because of floods. That left the cliffs themselves for housing."
Ten grunted. "What did the professorial types say about the signal towers on top of Mesa Verde? They were used to pass the news of births, right?"
Diana gave Ten a sideways look, but he appeared to be engrossed in the red potshards she was finding and carefully placing in front of him. Already he had found two to glue together and was positioning a third.
"The towers could have been used to welcome visitors," Diana said neutrally, "or to show the way up onto the mesa for people who were from other areas."
"People from other areas tend to be strangers and strangers tend to be unfriendly."
"Perhaps the Anasazi believed that strangers were simply friends they hadn't met yet."
"That would certainly explain how the Anasazi died out so fast," Ten said sardonically.
"In some academic circles, your point of view would be considered philosophically and politically retrograde," Diana said without heat. One of the most pleasurable things about her time with Ten was the discovery of his agile, wide-ranging mind. She had come to look forward to the hours spent sorting shards and talking about the Anasazi almost as much as she enjoyed working on the site itself. "Here's the shard that goes in the middle."
"Thanks," Ten said. "Hang on to it until the glue dries on these two. Whatever made the professors give up on good old common sense to explain the Anasazi cliff dwellings?"
"Such as?"
"Birds don't fly because they like the view up there. Birds fly because cats can't." Diana smiled. "Don't tell Pounce." "I don't have to. He figured that one out all by himself, which is more than I can say for whoever dreamed up that New Age fertilizer about cliff houses being invented for any reason other than self-defense. In a word, fear."
"Logical, but it doesn't explain why there was no increase in burials about the time the Anasazi abandoned the mesa tops and took up living in the cliffs."
"Burials?"
"Self-defense indicates war," Diana explained. "War indicates wounding and death. Death-" "Leads to burials," Ten interrupted. "Right. Even around the time the Anasazi disappeared altogether, there was no increase in burials. Therefore, the theory that hostile tribes forced the Anasazi into cliff houses has a big flaw. No extra deaths, no war. Simple."
"More like simpleminded. Those theorists ought to pull their heads out of their, er, books and have a reality check."
"What do you mean?"
"Only winners bury their dead." The flatness in Ten's voice made a chill move over Diana's skin.
"You sound very certain," she said.
"I've been there. That's as certain as it gets."
"There?"
"On the losing side. It hasn't changed all that much over the centuries. I doubt that it ever will. Pain, fear, death and not enough people left to mourn or bury the dead. But there are always enough vultures."
Ten's narrowed eyes were like splinters of clear glass. Diana could not bear to look at them and think of what they had seen.
He turned and searched through the box of potshards. When he looked up again, his expression was once more relaxed. "In any case," Ten continued, "anybody who's read a little biology could tell your fancy theorists that building Stone Age apartment houses halfway up sheer cliffs took an immense amount of time and energy, which meant that the need driving the society also had to be immense. Survival is the most likely explanation, and the only animal that threatens man's survival is man himself." Ten smiled grimly. "That hasn't changed, either."
"Fear."
"Don't knock it. No animal would survive without it, including man." Ten held a shard up to the light, shrugged and tried it anyway. It fit. "Maybe the Anasazi were no longer actively involved in war. Maybe they just feared it to the point that they retreated to a hole in the cliffs and pulled the hole in after them." Ten looked up. "You can understand that kind of fear, can't you? It's what drew you to the Anasazi in the first place. Like you, they built a shell around themselves to wall out the world. And then they began to shrink and die inside that shell."
Diana concentrated on two shards that had no chance of fitting.
Ten waited a few moments, sighed and continued. "When you retreat to a stone cliff that's accessible only by one or two eyelash trails that a nine-year-old with a sharp stick could defend, it's probably because you don't have much more than nine-year-olds left to defend the village."
"But there's no hard evidence of repeated encounters with a warlike tribe," she said coolly.
"Isn't there? What does Anasazi mean?"
"It's a Navajo word meaning Ancient Ones, or Those Who Came Before."
Ten smiled thinly. "It also means Enemy Ancestor." He picked up an oddly shaped shard and stared at it without really seeing it. "I suspect that at the end of a long, hard period, during which they'd had to cope with war or drought or disease or all three, a kind of madness overtook the northern Anasazi."
The quality of Ten's voice, rippling with something unspoken, caught Diana's attention. "What do you mean?"
"I think a dark kind of shaman cult overtook them, using up everything the society had and demanding even more. Maybe the fears the shaman cult played on had some basis in reality, or maybe they lived only in the Anasazi's own nightmares." Ten shook his head. "Either way, fear ruled the society. The people retreated to the most impossible places they could reach and walled themselves in with rooms and held ceremonies in buried kivas. When they ran out of space in the alcoves, they built bigger and bigger kivas along the base of the cliff."