Ancient Enemy (20 page)

It came out with a snap. I held it in my right palm while I fished the others I had collected from beneath the snow on my front porch out of my pocket and laid them side-by-side. The front teeth were broken at the roots, but the nubs were still plainly visible. The canines were different, though. Their upper surfaces had been carved so that they fit like plugs into the sockets in the jaw.

I tucked them all into my pocket again. Then, with a glance back at the face of the man with the ram’s horns, I headed toward the surface. This was where I would display the body of the man in the blanket, beside the head of his father. He would be my contribution to the saga.

It was time to write the end of the story.

THIRTY

I sat in the chair beside my grandfather’s bed, with the light from around the board bisecting his bony frame, for a long time before I finally looked into his eyes. There was so much I wanted to say; I just couldn’t find the words. So I did the only thing I could think to do.

I held out the handful of teeth so he could see them. There was so much sadness in his eyes that it nearly broke my heart. What he had done for me…my feelings were more complicated than I’d be able to resolve in a dozen lifetimes.

“My mother doesn’t know, does she?”

My grandfather blinked his affirmation, releasing the tears to roll down his cheeks.

I looked at the portraits on the wall above the head of his bed. There was a good reason there were no pictures of me with my parents when I was a baby, and it wasn’t because my mother chose not to relive those moments. There simply weren’t any to relive.

“That’s why you brought us here. It was your fault my father left and you wanted to try to make things right.”

He deliberately blinked again and looked away. Not in an effort to direct me to anything on his shelf, but out of shame.

I’d always wondered how my father could live his life without ever growing curious enough about how I was doing to come looking for me. I mean, if I’d had a son, I would have wanted to know he was safe and that he was being properly cared for, if nothing else. And yet mine had made no effort to do so. I guess now I knew the reason why.

“I never would have suspected you were anything other than my grandfather by blood. You taught me everything I know. You were there for me when no one else was. You were like both my mom and my dad put together. You were my best friend.”

He looked back at me and I could see how badly he wanted to tell me what happened, but he no longer possessed the ability. And never would again.

“You should have told me the truth. Instead, you trained me to kill them. All of those hunting trips. They’d been designed to give me the skills I would need to murder…to murder my own…”

I couldn’t bring myself to say the words out loud.

I didn’t want to think about how similar the two warring bloodlines were. Or how I’d been the one to end that war.

I took his hand and rested my forehead against it. There were so many things I wanted to know. Where did he find me? Why did he take me instead of just killing me? But I knew those were answers he would never be able to tell me and the only man who potentially could would probably take them to his grave rather than share space with a boy he thought of as a monster. I wondered if he’d known all along when he agreed to help raise me or if he’d bought whatever fabrication my grandfather concocted, until he eventually figured it out and took off, of course.

I imagined my grandfather inside of that mountain with a trowel and buckets full of concrete, scraping the gray sludge onto the cavern wall and smoothing it flat.

Scrape, smooth.

Scrape, smooth.

He hears a sound from deep within the earth and at first tries to ignore it, but it grows more and more insistent. Against his better judgment he sets aside the concrete and crawls into the orifice he’d been sealing. Listens. He recognizes the sound and grabs his trowel. Crawls into the darkness. The sound becomes louder with each step, distorted by the strange acoustics and echoing from the honeycomb of passages. He follows it to where he finds a small child. Naked and alone. Starving. Dehydrated. Crying for his mother.

My grandfather raises his trowel, the sharp tip pointed straight down at the child’s unfused fontanels. And he sees the child’s skull is not yet artificially deformed, nor have horns been grafted to his head. His canine teeth are still years away from being replaced by those of a mountain lion. His fingernails are as dainty as his tiny hands.

My grandfather slowly lowers the trowel and stares at this filthy child, and does the only thing he can think to do, the one thing that comes naturally to him. Because, at heart, he is a good man. He is the kind of man who would bring home the innocent child of his enemy rather than leave him to die. And he thinks his son-in-law is a good man, too. He’s too old to suddenly have a young child. There would be questions. Questions for which there would have to be answers. Questions that would never even be asked of the young couple whose marriage he had inadvertently destroyed.

And since my grandfather was a good man, he’d accepted the responsibility for his role and raised me like his own son. I knew him better than anyone else on the planet. He wasn’t the kind of man who would groom me to wage war upon my ancestors. He wouldn’t have taught me his skills as a form of trickery. That wasn’t who he was. His portion of the storyline in the cave should have told me as much. He was a man who believed in the truth and shouldered his share of the burden for his involvement in the war. For better or worse, his portrayal of himself and his role was honest. It showed his shame and regret for the violent actions he had taken and that he’d done the only thing in the world he could do to try to make things right.

He hadn’t deliberately misled me. He would never do something devious like that.

“You thought they were all dead. You didn’t tell me because you didn’t want to hurt me. You wanted me to believe that I was your blood, that I was just like everyone else. But you would have, wouldn’t you? When the time was right. You just needed to make sure that I would be able to take care of myself first. In case I didn’t handle it very well when you told me the truth. That I wasn’t your grandson and you’d killed my entire race.”

The corners of his lips pulled back into the hint of a smile and his eyes fixed on the far distance. I could no longer see him inside of them.

“Thank you,” I whispered.

I set down his hand, closed his eyelids, and softly kissed him on the cheek.

* * *

There were many times when I wanted to ask my mother what my grandfather had told her about me. Was I the child of some cousin who’d abandoned me to run off to Hollywood? Had I been passed off as one of my mother’s cousins who’d actually been killed when their homes came under attack? Was I my father’s by some previous relationship with a woman who left me on their doorstep?

In the end, I decided it didn’t matter. What did was that she needed me as much as I needed her. And if she was willing to invest the time and effort, then who was I not to reciprocate?

As far as my father was concerned, he was nothing to me. The adoptive one who’d never even tried to love me before splitting, anyway. As far as my real one—the one whose blood flowed through my veins—I sealed him inside of the cavern behind the kiva with the body of the man whose face looked like mine, the man who had worn the horns of a ram, like his father before him, when he attacked my horse and then me. A man who very well might have been my brother. I laid his body to rest in a recess in the cavern wall above which I’d hung a close-up photograph of his face next to mine. I hoped the message came through loud and clear. It was the same message the man who was and always would be my grandfather had hoped to convey. So there would be no confusion, I carved three words above the pictures.

NO MORE BLOOD.

* * *

I sat on the ledge outside of the tiny hole high up in Fewkes Canyon, below the Sun Temple. The ice was gone and it was only a matter of time before the last of the snow, which clung to the shade of the pines, would be too. Yanaba grazed in the damp grass. I could barely look at her without starting to cry. Her neck and chest were shaved and covered with thick, Frankenstein-like stitches that held the puckered skin closed. Her right side was deformed where they’d been forced to remove two ribs in an effort to stop the bleeding where she’d been gored. She’d lost a large chunk of her liver and several feet of her small intestines, but she was going to survive her injuries. She wouldn’t be doing any galloping with the damage to her muscles, at least not for the foreseeable future. Not that I cared. I was so happy she was alive that I’d carry her on my back if I had to. There were simply some bonds that were stronger than blood, and even some that crossed the border between species.

She looked up at me and huffed impatiently.

“I know, I know.”

I didn’t blame her for wanting to hurry me along. This place didn’t hold the fondest of memories for me, either, but I owed a debt to my family—both of them—and I intended to repay it.

I squirmed through the tunnel, navigated the caverns, passed between the bodies encased in flowstone, and crouched before the hole beside the centuries-old stone plug. I listened for several minutes before clicking on my flashlight, palming my compass, and opening the notebook I intended to use to create a map.

If any of them had survived, I wasn’t about to wait for them to mature so we could fight a battle neither side could win.

Like I said, this war was over, and if there were any more of them down there in the darkness, I would help them see the light.

AUTHOR’S NOTES

Lost Tribes

No one truly knows how many undocumented and uncontacted tribes remain hidden in the jungles and caves of some of the most geographically isolated regions on the planet. According to Survival International, an organization that advocates for the rights of indigenous peoples, there are more than 100 uncontacted tribes in the world, the majority of them in Amazonia and New Guinea. The government of Brazil has identified 77—a full third of which were discovered within the last decade alone—through satellite surveys of the rainforest and interviews with the more Westernized neighboring tribes.

The unpredictable nature of first contact makes it nearly impossible to determine how many tribes are out there, how many individuals constitute each, and whether they’re peaceful communal farmers, hunter-gatherers, or outright hostile warriors. In addition, initiating contact can prove devastating. Encounters can easily trigger a violent response by territorial tribespeople who have existed in utter isolation for countless generations. These are populations for whom exposure to even our most innocuous diseases—against which our bodies have developed natural immunities—could prove catastrophic.

Experts believe there are no more lost tribes in the United States, despite the preponderance of uncontacted peoples throughout the remainder of both the Old and New World. If these tribes actively seek to avoid contact with the outside world at all costs, is it impossible to believe they can successfully do so, especially considering how long they’ve already remained hidden? Consider the Ruc people of Vietnam, who lived in the caves of the Quang Binh province until North Vietnamese soldiers blindly stumbled upon them during the war, or the Tasaday of the Philippine island of Mindanao, who were only tracked to their concealed caves within the last forty years by utilizing largely anecdotal evidence. Is it so hard to believe that another such tribe could live undetected in the vast subterranean karst formations that positively riddle the ground beneath this continent, especially in the American Southwest, where in 1909 the Phoenix Gazette detailed a Smithsonian-led expedition into an enormous abandoned stone citadel nearly fifteen hundred feet straight down a sheer stone escarpment in the heart of the Grand Canyon, mere miles from where this story was set?

The Ceremonial Rattle

The Uncompahgre Ute are credited with being the first to use the principles of mechanoluminescence to generate light from crystals by taking advantage an optical phenomenon known as triboluminescence, which results from the breaking of chemical bonds in a material when it’s pulled apart, scratched, crushed, or rubbed. They created their rattles from buffalo rawhide stretched to a state of translucence and filled them with quartz harvested from the mountains of Colorado.

The Desana and Warao Indians of South America independently discovered the same principles and used them in their shamanic rattles.

This concept can be demonstrated with everyday objects. Scotch tape produces a glowing line (and x-rays in a vacuum) where the end of the tape is being pulled away from the roll and Wint O Green Life Savers produce blue light when chewed.

Artificial Human Deformation

Humans have been artificially deforming their bodies since the beginning of time. The earliest instance predates recorded history, as evidenced by a carbon-dated 47,000 year-old Neanderthal skull with artificial cranial deformation discovered in Shanidar Cave in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq.