"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."
Ten's voice shifted, becoming subtly different, more resonant yet softer.
"Their rituals became more and more elaborate," he continued quietly, "more demanding of the people's mental and physical resources. Darker. It's possible for a culture to exist like that, but not for long. It goes against the deepest grain of survival to huddle in a stone crypt."
"Is that what you think happened? The Anasazi died in the city crypts they built for themselves?"
"Some did. Some escaped." The odd timbre of Ten's voice made the hair on Diana's scalp stir in primal response, the same stirring she had felt with Ten once before, when she had stood on a desolate mesa top and felt centuries like cards being shuffled, revealing glimpses of a time when reality had been very different, and so had she and Ten.
"How did they escape?" Diana asked, her voice strange even to her own ears.
For a long time there was only silence punctuated by the sounds of the wind sweeping over the ancient land. Just when Diana had decided that Ten wasn't going to say any more, he began speaking again.
"Another shaman came down from the north, an outlaw shaman with a vision that swept through the Anasazi, a vision that spoke of light as well as darkness, life as well as death." Ten looked up suddenly, catching and holding Diana with eyes as clear as rain. "The Anasazi who believed the outlaw shaman climbed down out of their beautiful, dangerous, futile cliff cities and never went back again."
10
Luke leaned toward little Logan, smiling, speaking in a deep, gentle voice to the baby who studied him so intently.
"Definitely your eyes, Carla," Luke said, running his fingertip over his wife's cheek.
"The mouth is yours, though," she said, smoothing her cheek over his hand.
"We're in trouble then. He'll have half the state mad at him as soon as he learns to talk."
Carla laughed softly, brushed her lips over Luke's palm and settled back against his chest. The nursing shawl slipped to one side, revealing the milk-swollen curve of her breast. With a slow caress Luke adjusted the shawl, then resumed the gentle back-and-forth motion of the big rocking chair he had made before Logan had been born.
Despite its size, the chair was still a snug fit for the three of them-Logan, Carla and Luke-but no one had any intention of giving it up for the couch. The quiet evenings when Carla nursed the baby while sitting in Luke's lap had become the highlight of the day for everyone involved.
"Hi," Carla said, looking up as Diana came from the kitchen into the living room. "Ten was asking about you a few minutes ago. Something about a box from 11-C?"
"More red shards. He hopes. He has this theory about where the rest of the red pot is. So far he has been right."
A night of broken sleep and restless dreams had convinced Diana that Ten had been right about more than the pot, but she didn't know how to reopen the subject with him, any more than she had known how to respond last night, when he had spoken about fear and the Anasazi and one Diana Saxton. Instead of speaking then, she had handed him another shard and the conversation had disintegrated into elliptical phrases describing pieces of broken pots.