The Next Skywatcher: Prequel to The Last Skywatcher Triple Trilogy Series (The Last Skywatcher, Anasazi Historical Thrillers with a Hint of Romance Book 1) (36 page)

Why did I write a novel
about these people when I’m so obviously not one, even a distant descendant?

Because I saw a ghost. Sort of. I’m not a guy who sees ghosts, so I tend to demean what happened, but taking a tour through the Chimney Rock Archaeological Area (before it became a national monument) with my son, a boy ran across the trail in front of us. I put my arm out to stop my son from colliding with him. The boy ran to the cliff’s edge and vaulted over one-handed, and I hurried to see. Below the rock where he placed his hand lay a landing place, a narrow shelf padded thick with pine needles, the steep slope of forest plunging off below that. I nodded. Of course boys would do that.

It left me stunned as if from a head injury. I couldn’t stop thinking about that boy.
What if
scenarios kept playing in my head. But the ones that played most went like this: What if this boy changed everything about Anasazi society for just a little while? What if the Crab Nebula Supernova of 1054 set off a riot of violence, and this boy somehow stopped it?

This story started my career as a novelist, and I’m continuing the it as a triple trilogy, nine books in the
Last Skywatcher Series
, in which Tuwa is in his sixties. Thank you for starting the progression with me.

To learn more,
see his books at 
HotWaterPress.com
 and his ever-growing collection of Anasazi-inspired author notes at
JeffPosey.net
.

1094 A.D. near Pueblo Alto, above the north rim of Chaco Canyon, New Mexico:
High House

In bright moonlight
a man carried a bulging pack on his back. The black-and-white shadows he cast were in the form of a stick-figure humpbacked flute player, though no musical notes graced the air nor were any spells cast. The vast star-strewn sky, the blazing moon a day shy of full, dominated the landscape, which undulated with a covering of prickly vegetation and sudden drops into dark canyons. Snakes were a danger, but torn and battered feet were of greater concern, which is why the man wore elk-hide leggings and double-thick soles of woven yucca fiber wrapped in bison leather, a loop for three toes anchored firmly to the sole. He walked and ran for a living, so he insisted on the best for his feet.

The man knew this way, had traveled it many times, and already caught a glimpse of the flickering signal fire at the last-stop pilgrim trap an easy day’s climb above the great stone palaces on the floor of the sacred canyon. Vingta intended to stay for a short while, hole up in a side canyon to think about how he fit into this world that had gotten drier and hotter and more difficult each year of the last several. For the moment, he just wanted to trade his load of precious shiny cubes that weighed two-thirds as much as himself, and then hide for a while. Maybe find a woman and make a child. He liked the idea of having a boy around. He might even adopt a whole gang of them like the fabled orphan army of the old days. It made him smile as he walked. The power of children warriors and angry women with sharp sticks still obscured the masculine dominance rising again in the canyon.

The shiny heavy cubes were his ticket to the good life. He’d traced them to their source where a family lived who beat the mineral from the rocks, sorted, and traded the pieces in bulk. Those children had a hard life. He felt sorry for them and slipped them treats of pressed meat cakes and fresh game a few times. His children wouldn’t live like that. But to live well meant he had to trade well, so he struggled with his sack full of the best shiny cubes, paid for with four equally heavy loads of piñon nuts that took every bit of trading skill he had to accumulate, and required a half-dozen arduous trips out of and back into the high and remote mountains of the north.

The final long trip from the mountains to the sacred canyon proved exhausting. The cubes were compact, but enormously heavy. For the first time in his life, Vingta wished for an entourage of orphans or women burden bearers, like every trader he knew who ventured to the distant South. Instead, he worked alone, carried heavy loads, and walked with little rest as if he were on a mission for the High Priest. The thought of using unfortunate orphan children as beasts of burden offended him too much to consider beyond the fleeting desire born of exhaustion. And the idea of traveling with women worried him as much as flute music worried the canyon warriors of old. He’d never been lucky with women. The only ones he encountered were old hags intent on cheating at trade, or young women selling their bodies for bare sustenance. They disgusted him, though the desires of his own loins made him think about them from time to time. He always avoided them by leaving. That, he discovered, was the best way to have a good relationship with a woman: run away. Even though, in the depths of his consciousness, he knew he would someday need a woman to complete his life and give him children. Unless, of course, he simply acquired children already born. He could avoid women altogether if he did that. It was an intriguing possibility.

At first, he didn’t intend to trade his shiny cubes in the sacred canyon. His long experience there made him want to avoid the place. He walked out of the mountains to the east until grasslands flat as water stretched to the horizon. Using small cubes as trade, he bought food and new inferior sandals along the way. He saw many things he could trade for much larger sums in the canyon, but nothing more valuable or easier to carry than the cubes on his back. His options grew increasingly limited. He could travel far to the northeast and trade with the earth-mound builders, rumored to be as rich but less violent than the people in the South, but the dark canyon of rock-stacking Sun worshippers was much closer if more dangerous. Nowhere else could he get enough value for his load to set him up for the rest of his life.

To get that much, he would have to entice the fickle wives of the canyon’s High Priest and his bloated court of advisors and warriors. If they started a bidding war against each other, the women of the various palaces and temples, he could get rich indeed. As long as no one recognized and remembered him. It was a risk, but it was a risk he knew from his years of having served there, which is why he chose to approach at night.

He paused and admired the rising moon, imagining the coming ceremony at the Twins, said to be the twin war gods themselves frozen in stone. The master skywatcher there had proclaimed the full moon would rise on the evening of the longest day (and shortest night) of the year. Vingta had attended a ceremony at the Twins when the full moon rose between the Twins on what was said to be the skywatcher’s birthday. He had been the official emissary from the High Priest in the canyon, two summers after he became an official messenger. He ran, as he had countless times, without rest from the temple in the canyon all the way to the Twins wearing a plume of feathers that made him stagger in the wind. It was more than a full day’s strenuous effort along the arrow-straight road that ran through rolling desert grasslands from the canyon to North Town, and then east up the big river and northeast up the last big tributary into the foothills where the Twins rose like two giant fingers pointing to the sky. That was his life before his unexpected retirement to the easy life of long-distance trader.

He chuckled. Easy life, indeed. Running messages from village leaders to the High Priest and back had been an easy life, by comparison, for twelve summers, four longer than the eldest storytellers remembered any runner before. Most boys who became runners quit during their first year because of the long distances with little rest and no home to speak of. The best usually lasted three or four years at most. An elder told Vingta he remembered one who lasted eight. Vingta wanted to double that. Not for any good reason, but because nothing else particularly interested him. He liked being on his own, jogging long distances, and being pampered and respected everywhere he went. But a new warlord rose through the ranks who insisted all runners report to him rather than the High Priest. Vingta refused a little too vehemently. He had always had the direct ear of the High Priest, and it was unimaginable that he would whisper into the ear of the new chief warrior, a runt of a man with an arrogance that grated on Vingta. He would not tolerate being demoted to serve a man like that.

The warlord, wanting to make an example of Vingta to secure his own new position, sent only two men to kill him, large and unkempt Southerners who knew nothing of Vingta’s training and had no finesse of their own. He didn’t just run errands. He was trusted with protecting deep secrets, which meant he trained at hand-to-hand fighting harder and longer than any warrior. An overbearing lizard-faced captain in the canyon picked him out for special instruction, and Vingta relentlessly sought and practiced with the best warriors in every village, every clan, every garrison he visited. He mastered the best knife-and-club-fighting techniques from the entire region north of the canyon, yet used his weapons rarely. He studiously avoided creating a reputation that would make reckless young warriors want to challenge him. He found that restraining himself from using his abilities proved more difficult than actually fighting.

But the two giant Southerners were easy. Vingta knew their intent immediately and wasted no time. He drew their last blood before they even raised their clumsy weapons. The memory made him shake his head in disgust. He considered all Southern warriors inferior in skill and intelligence, but nevertheless dangerous because of their great numbers, their proclivity for ultra-violence and torture, and their taste for human flesh, cooked or raw. He detested them as rattling snakes in human form. Deadly if you step on them or back them into a corner. Best to kill them quickly without thought, though the High Priest decreed it an offense against the gods of shadow and light to resist them. He couldn’t stay in the canyon after he dispatched the two assassin goons, so he had taken what he could carry and ran north into the mountains.

For two years he worked as a stonemason’s helper at the Twins where a building boom kept everyone busy and well-fed preparing for the next moonrise between the Twins a year from the coming fall. And then he noticed the tiny, heavy cubes that shine like a smoke-darkened sun, sacred and valuable to all who possess them. They called to him as if they had their own separate spirit, and he laboriously traced the mineral to their source in perpetually snow-covered mountains far to the north. Now he returned with his small but heavy treasure, and he would find a way to make the High Priest pay dearly. Or maybe even Póktu, the arrogant warrior chief who ordered Vingta’s execution four summers ago. That would be justice, and Vingta grinned thinking about getting rich off the very man who tried to end his life. But his plans would work only if their wives wanted them, bickered over them, and drove up the price. If not, there were always rich pilgrims, or fat men who ran the hidden markets, though their value would go down if the canyon women didn’t want them.