Summer of the Dragon, page 22
The sun had passed the zenith and reached boiling point as we stumbled across a rocky 284 / Elizabeth Peters
plateau and saw the twin peaks slide into a familiar perspective. I realized then that the landmark was not a mountain, or anything that high. It’s hard to gauge the sizes of natural objects unless you have something whose dimensions are known for comparison. That’s why archaeologists put rulers or meter sticks in their photographs of antiquities—so you can tell how large they are. I had had nothing with which to compare our twin-topped rock until we got fairly close to it.
Then I saw that it was only about forty feet high.
It marked the entrance to another of those cursed arroyos. I had seen at least a hundred and fifty of them that day, and the sight of another did not particularly thrill me. The rock did. It was such a delight to find something we had been looking for. In my rapture I forgot the first rule of hiking, which is, keep your eyes on where you are going. While gaping at the peak I stumbled and hit the ground with a bone-wrenching smack.
Tom turned. Our success had wiped out any linger-ing traces of sentimentality about round, well-shaped young women. “Get up,” he said irritably. “What the hell are you doing?”
I didn’t answer, partly because the fall had knocked the wind out of me, and partly because I had just seen something. It stood out against the brownish-gray dirt like a piece of fallen sky—a spot of heavenly, exquisite blue.
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I slithered forward on my stomach and picked it up.
It was turquoise, all right—a polished oval piece several inches long, with the sensuous glow I had learned to recognize as Bisbee Blue.
“Look,” I croaked, holding it out to Tom. Even at that moment I was conscious of the lure of the gleaming azure.
“It’s Hank’s!” Tom grabbed it. “He lost a stone out of a concha belt a couple of weeks ago…. Yes, this is the same turquoise. He’s been here. D.J., we’ve found it!”
Dragging me to my feet, he grabbed me and swung me around, yelling like a—Comanche, I believe, is the conventional simile. I found enough breath to yell too, though it wasn’t easy. After we had worked off a little steam, he put me down and grabbed my hand and we started to run toward the arroyo.
High above our heads, ponderosa pine and Douglas fir raised green fingers toward the clouds; but if there had ever been water in this narrow canyon it had dried up long ago. The spiny leaves of yucca and cholla cactus jutted out from ledges on the rocky walls. At first that was all I could see. I was looking for a pueblo, like the one Joe and Edna had found, or perhaps for a cave. I was convinced that Hank’s great discovery must be an archaeological site of some sort, and a cave was a good bet; the Anasazi didn’t live in caves, but their remote ancestors did. Sandia 286 / Elizabeth Peters
Cave, in New Mexico, was one of the first places to yield the sequence of early prehistoric hunting cultures.
I saw no caves, and no pueblos; only ragged rocks.
We had slowed to a walk; like me, Tom was staring from one side to the other, as if he expected to see a Martian pop its head out of a hole. There was not the slightest trace of a human presence, not even a beer can.
Then I saw it. I don’t think I would have noticed it if I had not seen so many other similar shapes, many of them embedded, as this was, in rock that was virtually the same shade of brownish tan. That’s what fossils are—rocks. Once-living tissue, turned to stone by the slow passage of millennia.
Tom and I were still holding hands. I dug in my heels and dragged him to a stop.
“Lift me,” I said.
“What?”
“Lift me! No, wait. Kneel down. I want to stand on your shoulders.”
No wonder I was beginning to like that man. He could exchange insults and wisecracks with the best of them, but when action was necessary, he moved. After one look at my intent face, he dropped to one knee and helped me climb onto his shoulders. I clutched his hair as he rose carefully to his feet; then he held my ankles and I stood up, steadying myself against the canyon wall.
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Even then the bones were several feet above my up-raised hands. But they were bones, all right—the biggest bones I had ever seen, considerably larger than any of the fossils I had studied. Mammoth bones….
All mammalian bones have certain features in common.
Unless I had wasted my hours of study, these were leg bones—femurs. Lying right next to one of them, still partially embedded, was a beautifully fluted stone point.
The find was exciting enough right there. Prehistorians have found several sites with mammoth bones and the hunting points of early man, but they aren’t common. Any university in the country would consider this find worth investigating. Mammoths have been extinct for a good many centuries; according to the carbon-14 dating method, the mammoths slaughtered by Folsom man go back to about 10,000 B.C.
No wonder Hank had been so amused at the mention of dragons. When the first fossils of giant extinct animals were discovered, learned European scholars had solemnly declared them to be the remains of mythological monsters. They were dinosaur bones, reptiles, not mammals, and millions of years older than the hairy mammoths contemporary with prehistoric man; but all the giant extinct animals have formed the matter of legends.
I was about to direct my human ladder to let me down when I saw something else. It was just a dusty curve of rock, a little rounder and smoother 288 / Elizabeth Peters
than the rocks around it; and if I had not spent months looking at and touching similar curves, I might not have seen it.
My breath literally stopped. I told myself my eyes must be playing tricks on me, but when I stretched as high as I could—producing a grunt of protest from Tom—the shape did not change. It looked like a skull—a human skull.
I don’t know whether I can explain in a few words what that meant. I know I can’t possibly convey the surge of wonder that gripped me.
As I have said, we have found a number of the sites where the American hunters of the Pleistocene Era slaughtered their prey. Scholars call this the “Big-Game Hunting tradition,” and it’s a good name; the animals these men killed with their fluted flint blades were mammoths and camels and giant bison. It wasn’t quite like the mental pictures you might have, though—the great hairy beast, bigger than the largest elephant, trumpeting and stamping as the intrepid warriors rush in to stab it with their puny stone weapons. Probably the beasts which were slaughtered and eaten on the spot were old and weak, or young and weak, or dis-abled in some way. Even so, it took courage for naked men to attack a wandering mountain of steaks and roasts. Before the 1920’s American prehistorians would have denied it ever happened. In fact, they would have denied that men lived in the Americans as early as the era of the mammoths. Then a wandering cow Summer of the Dragon / 289
boy spotted some fossil bones with a lance point right in among them. American prehistory had to be revised.
Other finds followed.
But—and this is the reason why my breath was still coming quickly, why I doubted the evidence of my own eyes—nowhere had excavators found human bones to go with the lance points of Clovis and Folsom man. It’s not surprising that they would fail to do so; ancient men hunted in packs, like dogs. If one of them fell under the tusks or the trampling feet, his comrades would probably carry his body away for burial. Yet if my eyes were not playing tricks on me, some Paleolithic warrior had never found a proper grave. There was the rounded curve of his stony skull.
Hank had made a find, all right. Scholars jeered at him, but he knew enough to realize what he had found, and to know he needed a certified “bone man”—me.
Dragons couldn’t have been more exciting.
CHAPTER 12
I was brought back to reality by a groan from Tom.
“Aren’t you about through up there?”
“What? Oh. Yes, you can let me down.”
He returned me to terra firma and then stepped back to have a look himself.
“Looks like bones,” he said. “Mammoth?”
“Tom,” I said. “I think there’s a human skull up there.”
For a classical archaeologist he caught on quickly.
As I had recently realized, he had been studying on his own; he probably knew as much about the subject as I did. It’s marvelous to communicate with someone who shares your field, who doesn’t require long labor-ious explanations. When I mentioned the skull, Tom’s face took on the same look of wonder I felt on my own.
“Are you sure?”
“Not absolutely. But I definitely saw a flint point among the mammoth bones. Brace yourself
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for company. When I report to Bancroft, this place will be swarming with anthropologists.”
Tom nodded. We stood staring up at the insignificant-looking gray lumps that held so much promise; and finally Tom said in a peculiar voice, “Then this is Hank’s great discovery.”
“It’s as great as a discovery can get,” I said, in surprise. “And I don’t blame him for wanting to keep quiet about it until someone verified it. If he had announced he had discovered the bones of Folsom or Clovis man, scholars like Bancroft would have laughed it off as another of Hank’s hoaxes. The only thing I don’t get is why he wanted that damned magnetometer. The bones are right there in plain sight; wind and rain and running water must have uncovered them….”
“Forget the magnetometer. Hank is gadget happy; he’ll snatch at any excuse to play with a new machine.
The thing I don’t understand is why anyone would commit mayhem to keep this site from being investigated.”
“Oh.” I was still excited, but as the first feeling of awe subsided I realized, with shame, that I had forgotten our major purpose in coming here. Then I said, “Oh!” again, in another tone, and grabbed Tom’s arm.
“Tom, this does provide a motive. What wouldn’t Joe Stockwell give to announce a find like this, and claim it for his own discovery?”
Again I was glad of Tom’s quick, trained mind. Some people, like Sheriff Walsh, might find it hard to believe a man would commit assault and 292 / Elizabeth Peters
battery and kidnapping over a pile of brown bones. I didn’t have to convince Tom. He knew that a lure like this one could twist some peoples’ moral sense faster than gold.
“We keep coming back to Joe and Edna,” he muttered. “First opportunity, and now motive…. Damn it, D.J., some part of my mind just doesn’t believe it.”
“If we rule out the crackpots, they are the only people in the house who did have the opportunity. Yesterday and the day before they vanished early in the morning and were gone the whole day. Together they could handle Hank; Edna is a lot stronger than she looks, she’s spent her whole life acting as a pack mule for Joe. People like that, who have practically no imagination, and no sense of humor, are able to justify any terrible action to themselves. I can just see Joe pointing out to Edna that Hank doesn’t deserve to find a prize like this.”
“I don’t doubt his callousness; I doubt his guts,”
Tom said.
I didn’t mean to, but I couldn’t help glancing at his bruised jaw, which had assumed a pretty purple shade by this time. A wave of angry red went over his face.
“I owe him one,” he said. “I wasn’t ready for that, and besides—”
“You weren’t yourself,” I agreed. “I think Joe and Edna are prime suspects, and I suggest we get back to the house and give them the third degree. I will guarantee to break Edna in fifteen minutes. I can always hypnotize her.”
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“I guess you’re right. We’ll rest for a few minutes before we start back; it’s going to be a long walk.” He added sarcastically, “Have a bite to keep your strength up. Unless you’ve eaten all the food.”
I hadn’t, of course. There was still half a sandwich and a cherry tart left.
I applied myself to this scanty snack and to the canteen, still bemused by the discovery and by our prospects of locating Hank. Instead of sitting down, as he had suggested I do, Tom prowled like a big cat, peering into cracks in the rock and pushing bushes aside. I couldn’t imagine what he was looking for. It seemed to me that we had already succeeded beyond our wildest hopes.
I was eating the cherry tart when I looked up and realized he had disappeared.
I leaped to my feet, scattering cherries in all directions.
“Tom!”
“Here.” His voice came rumbling back, weirdly amplified and distorted.
“Where are you?” I screamed.
“Here.”
That wasn’t much help, since he didn’t show himself.
I started running in the only possible direction—toward the end of the arroyo we had not yet explored.
A smaller side canyon opened out of the first one—a baby, miniature canyon. The first interesting sight I beheld were Tom’s boots sticking out 294 / Elizabeth Peters
of the side of the cliff, rather like the mammoth bones, only lower down.
“What the hell are you doing?” I shouted angrily.
The boots kicked, groping for a foothold. They were eventually followed by the rest of Tom. He slid down to the floor of the canyon, accompanied by a regular hail of loose rock. I threw up my arm to protect my face.
“For God’s sake stop yelling,” he said, as I opened my mouth to expostulate with him. “There’s material for a dozen avalanches up there, and the rock is dangerously loose.”
“So I noticed. I suppose that’s why you were crawling into holes—such convenient places to be buried alive if there was a rock fall.”
Tom’s reply was an imbecilic grin. He was, if possible, even dirtier than he had been, and a pungent, peculiar smell had been added to his other charms.
Sweat tracked runnels through the caked dust on his face; his arms were bleeding from innumerable small scratches; and he kept grinning like a happy idiot. He held out a clenched fist and slowly folded his fingers back.
For a moment I thought he was showing me Hank’s turquoise. Then I realized that this one was bigger and rougher, and that the color was subtly different. But it had the same sensuous glow—that elusive quality called “zat.”
“Up there?” I gurgled, pointing.
Tom opened his other hand. The cupped palm Summer of the Dragon / 295
was filled with small beads of the same glowing blue.
They had been pierced, as if for stringing.
“I spotted the big one halfway up, as if it had fallen from somebody’s pocket,” Tom said. “The beads were loose, on the floor of the cave. There used to be bats in there; the floor is knee deep in droppings.”
“But what are they?” I stirred the handful of beads with a respectful finger. “They aren’t just nuggets; they’ve been worked. How did they get there?”
“Buried treasure, my girl.” Tom’s breathing was fast and ragged. He inhaled deeply, trying to calm himself.
“People think of gold and silver when they talk of treasure. Do you know how much turquoise is worth today, even the raw ore? The top quality is getting more and more rare. These pieces have additional value because of their age. I figure some tribe hid its entire collection up there when they were under attack, by Spaniards or by later white predators. Or maybe it was a ceremonial deposit. Turquoise was sacred, and it was sometimes buried in the kivas as offerings to the gods.”
“So this is why Hank was kidnapped,” I said. “Why I wasn’t supposed to find the mammoth bones. Why, this whole area will be swarming with people before long; they’ll explore every crack in the cliffs looking for more fossils—”
“You’re slow, but you’re sure,” Tom said. “Damn it, I knew there must be something else 296 / Elizabeth Peters
out here besides archaeological remains. The kidnappers needed time to clear out the cache. It’s impossible to work for long in that hole. It’s filled with stinking dust that billows up at the slightest touch and makes breathing very hard. The ceiling is low and unstable; looks as if part of it had collapsed recently. We won’t be able to get to the far end without doing some extensive digging and shoring up.”
I held out my hand. Tom opened his fingers and poured a stream of moving blue into my palm.
“Talk about dragons,” I said. “Traditionally the guardians of buried treasure….”
“That’s not the half of it,” Tom said. “I know turquoise fairly well, and I don’t recognize this variety.
There may be a mine around here somewhere. If the rest of the ore is of this quality….”
“You are too smart to live,” said a voice.
I spun around, dropping the beads. Tom grabbed me by the shoulders.
“Stand still,” he said. “He’ll shoot if you move. What a damn-fool stupid jackass I am! I should have known he wouldn’t believe me…that he’d follow….”
He had Tom’s gun. Tom told me that later; you couldn’t have proved it by me at the time since, one, I had never seen the weapon the kidnapper had stolen from Tom, and, two, when a gun is pointing at me I do not notice details, only that round black hole. I was surprised to see him, but I Summer of the Dragon / 297
wasn’t surprised to see who he was, if you follow that distinction. I had been too bemused to think logically, but my mind had begun working on that term “buried treasure” as soon as Tom pronounced it. He had suspected for some time, apparently.
“I hadn’t planned to commit murder,” Jesse went on in an irritated voice. “It’s stupid and inefficient. But you leave me no choice. If you hadn’t figured out about the mine, I might have been able to clear out this cache tonight and tomorrow. However, I can’t persuade Hank to lease me a piece of his property if he knows there is turquoise on it. So you two will have to go.”
“I’m not ready to go,” I protested.
Jesse smiled, flashing those pretty white teeth. For a moment my mind reeled with disbelief. He looked so normal and handsome and pleasant standing there, lightly balanced on top of one of the big boulders at the base of the cliff. He hadn’t followed us, he had been here all along. He didn’t care where we went so long as we didn’t find this place.
