Outlaw (12 page)

"Hello, you old reprobate," she said, opening the window and holding out her arms.

On a gust of air, the tiger-striped cat flowed into Diana's arms. Pounce's fur smelled cool, fresh, washed by the clean wind. Smiling, rubbing her face against the cat's sleek head, she settled back into her chair. Pounce's rumbling, vibrating approval rippled out, blending with the fitful sound of the wind.

"King of the Rocking M, aren't you?" she asked, smiling. "Think you can trade a few dead mice for some time in my lap, hmm?"

Ten looked up again. Diana was kneading gently down the cat's big back, rubbing her cheek against Pounce's head while he rubbed his head against her in turn. The old mouser's purring was like continuous, distant thunder, but it was Diana's clear enjoyment of the cat's textures and responses that brought every one of Ten's masculine senses alert. He had kept his distance from her very carefully since the first day at the site; he would never forget the raw terror that he had seen in her eyes the first time he had reached for her in the gloom of the ancient kiva.

No matter how carefully Diana tried to conceal it, Ten sensed that she was still afraid of him. Perhaps it was because the first time she had seen him, he was the victor in a brief, brutal fight. Perhaps it was the way he had handled the pothunters. Perhaps it was his commando training. Perhaps it was simply himself, Tennessee Blackthorn, a man who never had worn well on women—and vice versa. An outlaw, not a lover or a husband.

Pounce purred loudly from Diana's lap, proclaiming his satisfaction with life, himself and the woman who was stroking his sleek body.

"If I thought you'd give me a rubdown like that, I'd go out and catch mice, too."

Diana gave Ten a startled look.

"Don't know that I'd eat them, though," Ten added blandly, measuring a shard against the bright lamplight. "A man has to draw the line somewhere."

Uncertainly Diana laughed. The idea of Ten purring beneath her hands made odd sensations shiver through her. Surely he was joking. But if he weren't...

Shadows of old fear rose in Diana. When she spoke her voice was tight and the words came out in a torrent, for she was afraid of being interrupted before she got everything said that had to be said.

"You'd be better off eating Carla's wonderful chicken than trading dead mice for a pat from me. I'm not the sensual type. Sex is for men, not women. In the jargon, I'm frigid, if frigid defines a woman who can live very well without sex."

Ten looked up sharply, caught as much by the palpable resonances of fear in Diana's voice as he was by her words. He started to speak but she was still talking, words spilling out like water from a river finally freed of its lid of winter ice.

"A man must have thought up the word
frigid,"
Diana continued quickly. "A woman would just say she isn't a masochist, that she feels no need of pain, self-inflicted or otherwise. But no matter what label you put on it—and me—the result is the same. Thanks but no thanks."

The words echoed in the quiet room. Their defensiveness made Diana cringe inside, but she wouldn't have taken back a single blunt syllable. Ten had to know.

"I don't recall asking you for sex," Ten said. For a long minute Diana's hands kneaded through Pounce's fur, soothing the cat and herself at the same time, drawing forth a lifting and falling ramble of purrs.

"No, you haven't," she said finally, sighing, feeling herself relax now that the worst of it was over. Ten knew. He could never accuse her now. "But I've learned the hard way that it's better to be honest than to be quiet and then be accused of being a tease."

"Don't worry, Diana. Like the moon goddess you're named after, you've got No Trespassing signs posted all over you. Any man who doesn't see them would have to be as blind as you are." "What?"

Ten looked up from the shards he had assembled. "You're stone-blind to your own basic nature. You're not frigid. You have a rare sensuality. You drink storm winds and nuzzle Logan's tiny hands and touch pieces of pottery with fingertips that are so sensitive you don't even have to look to tell what kind of edge there is. You rub that old tomcat until he's a vibrating pudding of pleasure, and you enjoy it just as much as he does. That's all sensuality is—taking pleasure in your own senses. And sex, good sex, is the most pleasure your senses can stand."

Diana sat transfixed, caught within the diamond clarity of Ten's eyes watching her, the black velvet certainty of his voice caressing her. Then he looked back to the shards, releasing her.

"Did a new box come in from the site?" Ten asked in a calm voice, as though they had never discussed anything more personal than potshards. "I've been waiting for one from 10-B. I think part of this red pot might have washed down to that spot on the grid. A long time ago, of course."

Her mind in turmoil, Diana grabbed the question, grateful to have something neutral to talk about. "Yes, it's over there. I'll get it."

If Ten noticed the rapid-fire style of Diana's speech, he didn't comment.

Releasing a reluctant Pounce, Diana went to the corner of the room where recently cleaned, permanently numbered shards were stored in hope of future assembling. The carton collected from 10-B on the site grid was on top of the pile. She brought the box to the long table where Ten worked by the light of a powerful gooseneck lamp.

"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."