Effigy (2 page)

PART I

Wednesday, May 16, 2012

“You have graciously arrived...may our lords come on earth.”

Moctezuma II

Moab

Shaman Juan Joaquin Gaspar’s arthritic fingers trembled as he dialed the phone. The line was slow to connect. He found himself anxiously pacing to the end of the old knotted cord.

The line rang once. Twice. His heart felt like a jackhammer pounding in his chest. Finally, someone at the other end picked up.

“Yeah.”

Gaspar stopped. “Acatzalan?”

A groggy yawn replied across the line. “Christ, old man. It’s two in the morning.”

“Have you seen the magazine?”

There was a pause. Shaman Gaspar pictured him sitting up in bed, clearing his head.

“What magazine?”

Gaspar sighed impatiently. He didn’t have time for Acatzalan’s arrogance. The boy knew exactly what magazine he was talking about, but he reminded him anyway.

“
Modern Archaeology.
What else?”

“Yeah. What about it?”

“The cover,” Gaspar said irritably. “Did you see what’s on the cover?”

“Let me guess. It’s that Quetzalcoatl artifact, isn’t it.”

Shaman Gaspar felt his face heat with anger as he glanced at his fresh copy of
Modern Archaeology.
The main headline blazed in bold white lettering against a dark background to make its explicit announcement: “MESOAMERICAN ARTIFACT DISCOVERED IN UTAH!”

Gaspar didn’t need the headline to know what he was looking at. There was no mistaking the artifact displayed in the photo. The blocky, dragon-shaped head carved out of jade, the bared teeth snarling at the camera lens, the penetrating depths of polished obsidian pupils centering mother-of-pearl eyes.

The very simplicity of the effigy’s shape was captivating but its appeal didn’t end there. A collar of mosaic turquoise petals bloomed from the back of the head. The photographer’s light glazed the artifact in a dazzling glow, flowing over emerald edges as smooth and rounded as polished river stone. The contrast of blue and green reminded Gaspar of a clear sky reflecting off the waters of a reed pond.

He’d never seen anything so magnificent.

“Of course it’s Quetzalcoatl,” he snapped into the phone. “Why else would I be asking about it?”

“I don’t know.
You
called me.”

“How long have you known about this?”

Acatzalan released a sarcastic snort. “The local papers have been publishing articles about it for weeks now.”

“You should have informed me about this. Quetzalcoatl is central to my teachings.”

It was Acatzalan’s turn to sound impatient. “So I’ve noticed.”

Gaspar sighed, mentally regrouping. Acatzalan was known to be infuriating at times, but to casually brush off a major archaeological find like this was downright insubordinate.

“You don’t understand,” Gaspar insisted. “That artifact could be very important to the new age. I must see it.”

Acatzalan’s voice turned sour. “If you’d watched the news you’d know the university’s still studying it.”

“I need to study it myself. It could take days.”

There was a long pause at the other end. Gaspar was growing anxious. The trembling in his hands expanded to a general quaking throughout his body.

“What are you driving at, old man?”

Gaspar cleared his throat. His words had never been clearer.

“I need you to bring it to me.”

University
of
Utah

Dr. Terence Snead sat expectantly at his polished cherry desk as Lori stepped into the sterile domain of his office. The department dean looked small and smug behind the large expanse of his gleaming barren desktop. Two Chinese vases with their charming blue and white enamel glaze were perched on the shelf behind him like bookends to his bony head, and he gave a big toothy grin when Lori approached his desk.

“Welcome, Miss Dewson,” he said, turning in his barrel-backed leather chair to admire the vases himself. “I see you’ve noticed my collection.”

It would be hard to miss, Lori thought. The impressive length of an elegantly tempered Samurai sword stretched high across the wall. Together with the delicate vases and an ivory Buddha centering the shelf, the cultural mix of Asian artifacts offered the only color to the room.

“Those vases come from the fifteenth century,” Snead continued. “Early Ching dynasty.” He spun his chair back around. “I don’t believe there’s another culture in the world that can match the artistry of the Chinese. Don’t you agree?”

Lori nodded stiffly. The ceramic designs were unarguably beautiful. “The vases must have been important to the culture,” she said.

Snead smiled. The brightness of his teeth nearly resembled the florescent lights glowing off the pale skin of his expanding brow.

“Indeed. They cost me a fortune at auction.”

“I imagine the cost is greater to the Chinese.”

Snead’s smile faded as though he was questioning an insult to his decorum. Lori instantly regretted her observation. Having moved on to acquire her Doctorate degree, she’d left behind all those haughty, know-it-all professors of self-glorified wisdom. She’d reached a peculiar stage in her academic career where she’d bloomed into an equal among her instructors who now seemed more willing to aid her research than inflict their endless knowledge. But here, sitting in the dean’s office, she felt that old submissive shell of inferiority returning. Among the ranks of higher education, she wasn’t in the company of a knowledgeable colleague, but complying with the summons of a man accustomed to supervising those accustomed to knowing it all.

Snead abruptly cleared his throat and pushed his glasses up the bridge of his roman nose. “Won’t you have a seat?”

Lori eased herself onto the edge of a tasteful leather chair angling into the ominous span of cherry wood. The tidiness of Snead’s office had the intimidating feel of a lavish art gallery and for an awkward moment she wasn’t sure if she was sitting in part of the exhibit.

Her book bag slipped to her feet.

“You wanted to see me?”

Snead folded his hands neatly upon the flawless desktop. He cleared his throat, the skin around his pencil-thin jugular tightening and then falling loose like a rooster’s wattle.

“I wanted to speak with you regarding the effigy.”

Lori brightened. “Is it back from
Arizona
State
?”

“It arrived yesterday.”

“That’s great! I’ve been waiting for my chance to work with it ever since Dr. Friedman took over the study.”

Actually, Lori had been waiting ever since she and Dr. Peet retrieved it from her father’s
San Juan
County
ranch. Even then she’d anticipated the opportunity to sit down with her find in the lab, but the moment the effigy reached the university it had been whisked away for meticulous cleaning and restoration. Word of its discovery spread quickly and caught the attention of archaeologists across the country. It had even brought Dr. John Friedman, renowned archaeo-astronomer and Mesoamerican expert, momentarily out of retirement. Within weeks he confirmed what Dr. Peet had suspected all along—they’d found a Mesoamerican artifact in
Utah
.

“What more is there to study?” Snead asked. “All of the experts agree that the effigy was traded from ancient
Mexico
. How else could it have been interred into an Anasazi grave?”

“That’s why I want to study it,” Lori said. “Exploring southern trade routes could benefit my dissertation.”

Trade relations had inadvertently become the focus of Lori’s study in Anasazi ceramics. She’d been absorbed with the culture ever since she was a little girl, when she first saw the ghostly ruins of a cliff dwelling. Throw in a few potsherds and the seven hundred year old mystery of the civilization’s disappearance from the southwest, and Lori was hooked. She wanted in on the research and her dissertation on ceramics was a mere stepping stone into the debate.

By tracking the dispersion of Anasazi pottery across the southwest, Lori hoped to discover trade lines or migration routes that might reveal the culture’s movements. Not only did she want to see how the Anasazi people interacted with each other, she hoped to discover where they went after abandoning their great pueblos and cliff dwellings.

Ultimately, she realized, she might simply confirm a widely accepted theory that the Anasazi were mere ancestors of the modern Hopi. No matter the result, she found herself immersed into a complicated study that involved locating each pot’s place of origin through analyses of construction and design styles. It required knowledge of area soils and the composition of organic materials, and accounting for firing methods that had evolved over time.

Now, with her discovery of a Mesoamerican effigy buried within Anasazi territory, a new element had been added to the equation. Just as a granule of sand might contain information about a pot, Lori hoped the effigy might offer similar insight into the Anasazi trade.

“I think there’s a bigger story behind the effigy,” she said.

Snead rolled his eyes. “Now you sound like Dr. Peet.”

Lori took that as a compliment. Dr. Peet was more than just her professor. He was a mentor. It only seemed fitting to hear his words echoing through her studies.

Find the story behind the find
.

Every artifact had a story, whether it be its very creation, its uses in the past, or its final deposit into the present. Stories could be exhumed through scientific theory and discovery. An object’s history invariably contrasted with its significance in modern time, and Lori, like Dr. Peet, believed archaeology brought equilibrium to its multi-generational existence.

Ironically, Dr. Snead, dean of the anthropology department, seemed less inclined to accept such a tedious and time-consuming quest.

“Why can’t we let artifacts simply be the beautiful specimens that they are?” he asked. His fingers impatiently tapped on the desk. “Which brings me to the purpose of our little meeting.”