Painted Horses (35 page)

At the top she emerged blinking into sunshine, peering through a V in the wall of the canyon where the same broken fault inverted onto its edge. She heard a commotion, glanced back down the chute to see Jack Allen clear the first rim and hoist himself onto the ledge. She stepped into the V and hoped he hadn’t spotted her.

The same trail that vanished into the knob down below seemed remarkably to resume up here. She practically ran now, winding through a jumble of boulders until she cleared the constricted aperture and found herself at the border of a small valley, a bowl with steep variegated walls and a floor littered with an inhospitable stone jumble. The sun menaced at the edge of a needle-like formation to the west, the final core of a mountain or butte, desolate now in the sky and reminding her for an instant of the spindly brick corners of London buildings, connecting walls blasted to rubble around them.

She shielded her eyes and scanned the bowl. She looked for a stir of dust on the air, the flash of sunlight on a flank, anything to give away a horse. She saw nothing but stone.

She climbed a stairway of boulders to the shadow beneath a sandstone lip, a horizontal slash not unlike the wide mouth of Inscription Cave outside Billings though shallower still, the shaded back wall faintly visible even at a distance. She crossed a span of hot cap rock, got into the blessed shade and went nearly blind in the cool dim light.

When her eyes adjusted she looked back on the valley. The higher vantage gave a wider view, but still no horses. In fact the valley didn’t seem a likely place for any animal, with boulder upon boulder and barely a splash of vegetation anywhere. God the glare. She had a sudden, welling pang of homesickness, a craving for droplets and green leaves and damp gardens. The roses at her parents’ Tudor.

She turned back into the overhang and its dim light. The composition of the wall reoccurred to her up close, the layers of colored rock one atop the other, like bands of a spectrum bleeding one into another, lavender and pink and red. The only flaw in these long even stripes cut in from one side to run diagonally across the lot of them, interrupting order and flow like a mustache on the
Mona Lisa
. A jagged, misplaced black band.

Or a braid. A flint deposit. She whirled back to the opening and saw again the stone needle thrusting darkly for the sun, a nest of rocks in the shadow of the spire. She thought,
How can I be this stupid
.

She exhausted the interior and moved back into the sunlight, eyes poring over the stone wall by the cave mouth so intently she wasn’t aware of the others until they climbed onto the cap rock with her.

“See anything?” Miriam asked.

“What? No. Not a thing.”

“Hush up,” said Allen. He faced the rock-littered expanse and cupped both hands behind his ears, stood that way for a full minute. Catherine turned back toward the wall, her eyes darting frantically over the stone. “Well, hell’s bells,” Allen finally muttered. “They here or ain’t they.”

Catherine glanced across her shoulder, saw him shift a few steps and scan the upper end of the valley with binoculars. She glanced downward and her eye caught a lazy fault in the stone, a ghost of a scrape that tapered to a point and turned back to snake right in front of her. Etched parallel lines, cut and scribed into the granite with some primitive element. She followed the lines to a blunt forehead, the hump of shoulders. She was looking at an elephant. She stood on its trunk.

Her heart walloped like a fighter’s jab, again again again. She wanted to drop to her knees and worship this thing, wanted to chortle and scream. She forced herself steady, looked away from the etching and over at Allen. He remained a study in the long view, eyes trained on the distance. The cap rock wouldn’t yield to a hoof so he wouldn’t think to look at the cap rock. This much she knew.

She let her own eyes roam. Above the figure at her feet she saw another, smaller likeness of the same creature. Off to the side lay a separate series of lines that she couldn’t quite put together. She knelt and made to check her bootlace, ran her fingers over the mammoth’s trunk, the grooves worn so faint she could barely feel them, the stone itself hot as a skillet.

Behind her she heard a gasp and she shot a glare at the girl and wagged her head sharply. Miriam stared back, eyes and mouth wide around with wonder. Catherine wanted to laugh and hug her tight at the same time but instead touched a finger to her lips, crooked the same finger at Allen’s back. She shook her head again. Miriam nodded, shifted uncertainly and moved into the shadow of the overhang.

Jack Allen turned toward the cliff, looked at the rim overhead. “I halfway figured you’d come through that notch and run smack into something,” he said.

Catherine’s brain raced. Her camera was with the horses. So was the map. Above all she needed to steer him back out of the valley. “I was sort of hopeful myself,” she said. “Apparently it’s not my lucky day.”

He took a few steps forward, eyes still roving across everything but the stone he walked upon. He stopped with one boot just a toe away from the smaller mammoth, finally granted Catherine a glance as though this alone constituted some grudging reward. “I was all set to try and beat you to it, missy.”

Catherine begged a hawk into the sky, a curious cloud, anything to keep him looking up. Nothing presented itself. She said, “That’s exactly what I was thinking.”

He laughed, that insolent show of humor. “You and me, we ain’t all that different. Practically a team by now.”

“Practically.” She took a tentative step away from the overhang, back toward the notch in the ridge, hoping he’d start that way as well. He went exactly opposite, moving toward Miriam and the shade beneath the cliff’s great lip. Catherine could just see her, a darker specter in the shadowy light, could not tell whether Miriam faced the colored stripes or looked out here into the hard bright shine.

Allen was nearly to the shade. Catherine began to writhe. Despite the heat she went frigid with sweat, rivers of it running beneath her hair and welling on her skin beneath her clothes. Her abdomen twisted with cramps, sharp as a skewer. When she tried to speak her own voice clogged in her throat like a thing disgorged.

Fluid rolled between her legs and for a horrifying moment she thought her bladder had slipped. She came to her senses.

“Oh cripes. I just got my period.”

“Ho, whoa,” Allen yelped. He diverted his course as though on a marching drill, made a beeline for the notch.

Catherine was a little amazed. She pivoted her backside toward the overhang, craned her neck around to try to see. “Miriam, did I just bleed through my pants?”

“All right already,” Allen bellowed. “Can we just get back down the hill please?” He strode through the notch and though he muttered under his breath, some strange trick of the rocks vectored words like
loony
and
god awful
and
female
right back to Catherine’s ears.

Miriam caught her at the edge. “That was clever.”

Catherine shook her head, still a little mystified. She rubbed at the knots low in her trunk, deep in her pelvis. “I wish it were. I haven’t been very regular since I got here. I think it just unleashed with a vengeance.”

Miriam took one look back at the spire, the wide slash in the cliff. “So,” she said, “I guess this is your lucky day.”

They reached Fort Ransom well after midnight, most of the day spent backtracking to a reliable trail. Now they danced around the kitchen like ecstatics, half-mad with release.

“It’s real it’s real it’s real—”

“I looked down and my heart just skipped, and I looked up at you and I knew I wasn’t seeing things—”

“What all did you make out, exactly?”

Miriam thought a moment. “At first just scratchings, little patterns, parallel lines and what looked like
v
’s, like what kids draw to show birds in the sky—”

“Chevrons,” Catherine supplied. “I’m guessing, of course. Did you see the mammoths? My God.” On the way out just before they entered the chute they spied as well one other haunting thing—a U-shaped cluster of rock just large enough to hold a person, its opening facing east.

“No. But I saw another animal, or at least its head and neck. It was faint, but I think it was a horse.”

“Ha. Wouldn’t that be ironic. Although I don’t know if the joke is on me, or on good Mr. Allen.”

“It’s not on you.” Miriam laughed. “You sure got his goat today. For all his bluster, he went downright lily-livered. It was like somebody threw a switch.”

Catherine snickered. “That’s men in general, in my experience. Although I have to admit, I never quite pictured him flustered like that.”

“He’ll never live it down,” said Miriam. “Think of the fun we’ll have tormenting him.” Now she draped herself very low in a chair, head lolling, brown arms flowing to the floor.

Catherine popped the cap on a bottle from the icebox, handed it across the table and popped another for herself. She noticed how lean Miriam had become these past months, the last soft traces of her childhood melted away by sun and sweat and sheer exertion. Low in the chair like she was, her legs knocked together at the knee, she had the awkward, angular grace of a water bird. She wanted to think of the right way to tell Miriam how thankful she was, and how proud, and how this was Miriam’s discovery as much as her own. Some clear but unmawkish way. But Miriam spoke first.

“So,” she said. “What now?” Ever so practical.

Catherine took a breath. “Now we go back. By ourselves.”

Miriam nodded. “That’s what I thought you’d say.”

Catherine dug in her pack, found the thin creased edge of the map. “Is that okay?”

“If it was something else I’d quit on the spot.”

“Miriam, you do me proud,” said Catherine, and she felt her voice rush a little and forced back the mist that sprung to her eyes. This was as close as she could get without a real scene. Euphoria and exhaustion and probably hormones. Miriam kept her own eyes averted, made room on the tabletop for the map.

“Here’s our last camp; here’s the gorge we tried to ride out of. Right? So the stone quarry has to be about here?”

Miriam nodded. “In that neighborhood, anyway. This map’s not exactly back-of-the-hand reliable.” She leaned away from the table, took off her glasses, and squinted through the lenses at the ceiling bulb. “So how do we pull this off?”

“I’ve been thinking about that. If we can come up with horses and a trailer, we can certainly get in and out of there in two days. We don’t need a lot of time, we just need solid proof.”

“I’m sure I can wrangle horses and a trailer.”

“Good. So otherwise, the trick is doing it without tipping anybody off.”

“Oh, I can be sneaky. All I need to know is when.”

“The sooner the better. Tomorrow. The next day. We’ll let you-know-who assume I’m indisposed with bodily function for a few days. By the time I recover, we’ll be back and he won’t have a clue.”

Miriam stared at the light in the ceiling, her head lolled back in the chair again and her glasses back on her face. “This is it, isn’t it?”

“It’s . . . wow. Stunning. Unprecedented. We’ll be sort of famous, after this.” Catherine could smell the sweat and the livestock on herself and had a sudden, urgent ache for the hot water in the shower. “You should go to school, study archaeology yourself. Come back east with me. We’re a team by now, anyway.”

“I mean this is it for the dam. It’s over.”

Catherine nodded. “I can’t imagine otherwise.”

Miriam gave Catherine a tired little half smile. “Guess we can’t will history to change itself.”

Catherine raised her beer in a little salute, and Miriam sat up and reached across the table with her own bottle to clink glass to glass. Before either could seal the pact with a swallow a footfall thumped the front porch, a heavy rapping rattled the door.

“What on earth?” Catherine wondered. “It’s one in the morning, for God’s sake.”

“Maybe it’s Jack. Maybe one of us forgot something.”

Catherine cringed. “These windows are wide open. I’m an idiot.”

She opened the door not to Jack Allen but Mr. Caldwell. He squeezed his cap in his hands, looked bandy-legged and otherwise out of character in a pair of cutoff trousers and white undershirt and house slippers. “Oh,” said Catherine. “Hello.”

“I know it’s late,” he said. “I’ve been checking for you for a few days and finally noticed the lights on.”

“Is something wrong?”

Mr. Caldwell looked past Catherine and found Miriam. “I’m supposed to have you call your grandfather, miss.”

“What happened?”

“Well—”

“Just tell me. Please.”

“It’s your grandmother. She took ill, while you all were away.” His eyes flashed back and forth, unable to land for long on either of them. “I’m sure sorry. I’m afraid she’s no longer with us.”

Pieces of God

The diggers bear down from above, shovel by shovel and scrape by scrape. Not a block away modern London bustles and honks but to Catherine the Walbrook dig possesses the fertile reek of an estuary, the damp soil rich with magical old decay, refuse and waste cycling round again.