Book #4 of the Mogi Franklin Series
A crazed professor is on a rampage to prove that horrible crimes were committed by the ancient ancestors of today’s Pueblo Indians. His murderous accusations stir the community into anger and violence. Vacationing nearby, Mogi Franklin and his family are suddenly caught up in the turmoil roiling the countryside. In this third book of the exciting Mogi Franklin Mysteries, the young hero must find a sacred object hidden by the ancient people of Acoma Pueblo somewhere in the vast, forbidding lava beds of western New Mexico. To those who lived on the stark, high mesa four hundred years ago, it held a magic that could defeat the Spanish conquistadors despite their steel and steeds. To Mogi, it was an ancient mystery he must solve to stem the rising tide of bloodshed. But the clock is ticking, and his deranged adversary traps Mogi, Jennifer, and their friends in the absolute darkness of an underground cavern, with little hope of escape.
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Library of Congress Control Number 2017946014 Distributed by SCB
Chapter 1
Acoma Pueblo, Late October, 1692
The man snugged a coarse wool blanket around himself and shivered in the cool breeze of the night, but it was more from fear than cold. Were he to be discovered, he would be whipped for disobedience.
Lying on the roof and placing his ear over the ventilation hole of the kiva, the windowless room built for religious and political meetings, he listened to the voices inside. The pueblo leaders had spent several evenings in conversation, but tonight’s talk had an urgency that made the voices sound anxious and animated.
A decision could no longer be delayed; action was needed. The Spanish army had returned to Santa Fe, surrounded those in the village center, and negotiated their surrender. The commander then led his troops to Pecos Pueblo in the east and they had surrendered as well. One by one, other pueblos were visited and, though sometimes needing forceful persuasion, each had given in to the commander’s demands. The army was now marching toward the settlements in the west and would soon arrive at Acoma, the pueblo of the Acoma people—the pueblo of the men gathered within the room below the listening man.
When the soldiers came to them and asked for their surrender and obedience to the Spanish king and his religion, what would their answer be?
The Spanish had come to the country of Nuevo Mexico ninety years earlier, savagely conquering the native people, requiring that they obey the Spanish government, and forcing into slavery those who resisted. Once resistance was put down, the people in the various pueblos along the Rio Grande and other regions were punished for their beliefs and practices, pronounced converted to Christianity, and forced to serve the Catholic priests and missionaries.
After suffering years of tyranny and abuse, the pueblos had banded together and rebelled against the Spanish rule. More than four hundred soldiers, missionaries, priests, men, women, and children were killed. Fields and homes were burned, mission churches were profaned and destroyed, and the government in Santa Fe was overthrown. Any escaping Spaniards fled south to Mexico.
After the revolt, the pueblos should have strengthened the bond created by their common suffering, but they did not. They returned to squabbling and competing, and to tribal politics. They grew disgusted with one another, began new battles among the tribes, and returned to their isolated practices.
Now, twelve years after the rebellion, the Spanish were returning to retake what they considered to be their land and, again, to place the pueblos under their rule. The pueblo leaders knew that no matter how much the Spanish leader might talk about peace and coexistence, the soldiers and settlers would neither forget nor forgive what had happened during the revolt. The Spanish would again become tyrants.
Pulling the blanket tighter over his head, the man outside the kiva focused on the words of the governor, the highest official of the Acoma community.
“We have the blood holder,” he said. “When the blood holder was in the hands of the Spaniards, we suffered shame and hunger and death. When the blood holder was in our hands, we became one people and obeyed only ourselves.”
Alternating between argument and lecture, the governor emphasized the magical power of the blood holder and how that power had helped them. “The blood holder brings us favor in the eyes of the Spanish god. We must not let it go. We must treasure it and protect it and keep it from the Spaniards. It must be taken to a place where they cannot find it.”
The man outside grew angry. Such useless talk! Power was meant to be used, not hidden!
Thinking of what might happen with the return of the Spaniards had brought panic and dread. The Spaniards were vicious and cruel and enjoyed the miseries they caused. With their return, the suffering would begin again. The only hope was that the blood holder would protect them. But no one knew how the magic worked. Must the blood holder be held in the middle of battle or did the magic work from far away? Would it cause the enemy to fall? Would their blood weaken and craziness come upon them? Would the Acoma people grow great strength and turn away the flying metal that spit from the weapons of the soldiers?
What if it were captured by the Spaniards? Would the pain and suffering of the Acoma be greater?
Back and forth, moving from passionate belief to strict reasoning, from hope to fear, the talking went on until the moon passed high overhead. Struggling, still divided on what to do, the urgency for action finally forced a decision: With the coming of the day, the governor would take the blood holder to the Womb of the Mother, the location of their most sacred rituals. It would be safe there. Only he, and the old ones, knew the secret path through the black rocks. Once hidden, the Spaniards would never know that the blood holder even existed.
Fools, the man listening at the vent hole thought. They are all fools! He rose and slipped into the shadows.
* * *
The governor stood proud in the sunrise of the next day. He was now the Honored One, the Guardian, the Deliverer. A wooden box held the blood holder cradled in soft deerskin. Wrapped in a blanket, the box was placed into a sling with food, water, and other essentials he would need on his journey. Going past worried faces, he moved through the winding lanes among the apartment-style adobe houses and picked his way down the steep steps to the valley below. Grave eyes watched from the mesa’s rim as the governor moved across the fields and disappeared into the canyons in the west.
The pueblo, constructed of mud and rock brought from the valley floor, had always been considered safe from its enemies. A few hundred families lived on the flat rock top of a mesa that rose four hundred feet straight up out of the valley. A stranger attempting to enter the village was met with sheer cliffs of solid sandstone. There was only one way to the top, and it was hidden: a series of ladder-like footholds cut into the walls of a crevice between the cliffs, a path where only one person at a time could ascend or descend the mesa’s heights. The villagers watched as their governor passed from their sight, but what they failed to see was that a man had emerged from the shadows of the boulders and rocks of the canyon— the young man who was secretly listening at the kiva the night before—and that he now trailed the governor.
The governor reached the land of hard-walking by late afternoon. He was of one mind, singing under his breath, remembering his prayers and chants. The Womb of the Mother was the most holy place of the Acoma people and was not often visited. Times were bad, indeed, if it now must serve as a hiding place.
But the worry in his mind had vanished with the clean air and the stretching of his legs. The path was clear and the mission understood. He was ready for the next part of his journey, and the air, new and fresh, filled his lungs with expectation. He felt strong.
Moving along the edge of the black rocks until he recognized the faint markings of the trail, he stopped. He removed his moccasins, wrapped his feet in additional layers of deerskin, and laced large yucca sandals around his bundled feet. Then he climbed up and over a ledge and moved into the vastness of the harsh land.
The man following him cursed his luck. He had not expected the journey to take him into the land of hard-walking and had only the leather moccasins he wore daily. Moving onto the unusual rocks to follow his unsuspecting guide, he felt the sharp edges beneath his toes.
It was twilight before the governor found what he was looking for. With a sigh of relief, he placed his sling on the ground and then spread out his blankets. He would spend the night outside the Womb of the Mother and place his precious package on the altar tomorrow.
Even though there was little soil, many grasses, bushes, and trees grew from the sand and dirt brought by the wind. He selected a dry brush with a thick stem and long roots, pulled the plant from the ground, peeled the roots back onto the stem, and used pieces of rawhide to wrap them into a thick rod. With the roots to creating a tight crown on one end, it would serve as a torch to light the dark spaces of the Womb.
He finished three more torches and laid them close to his side. He then slid between his blankets and was soon asleep.
The other man was in pain. The thin hide of his moccasins had ripped within the first mile. He attempted to protect his feet by cutting the fibrous leaves of yucca plants and hastily weaving them into coverings that he tied around his leg with rawhide strips. But, poorly done, the edges caught and frayed, the rawhide pulled from its ties, and the weaving fell apart. He had no choice but to continue on and bear the pain as his feet were cut and bruised.
Thankfully, he was still within sight of the old man as he stopped and prepared his camp for the night. Memorizing the appearance of the hill and the surrounding land, the spy knew he could find it again. Relieved that the chase was over, the exhausted man crept to a better view and then hid himself behind a clump of rabbit brush, settling into a guarded vigil.
Hours later, the darkness of night gave way to dawn. The spy had not wanted to sleep, afraid that the governor might make an unexpected move, but the sun was high when the man snapped awake. Hurrying to look over the bushes, he saw that the older man was gone.
Panicking, the spy anxiously searched the older man’s campsite—the blankets, sling, and footwear all remained, so his adversary had not left and had to be close by. There were faint tracks in a stretch of hard sand, but it was the smell that made him pause and raise his head—the faint aroma of smoke. Slowly scanning his surroundings, he glimpsed a wisp of darkness against the sky and followed it toward a patch of large yucca growing against a line of rocks.
Seeing some of the leaves pushed aside, he discovered that they hid an opening between the rocks and the sand—an opening into a small cave. Kneeling and warily crawling in, he understood the necessity of the torches that the governor had prepared. It was not a cave but an entrance to a passageway that grew larger and darker as it twisted around the rocks. The man could crawl only a few steps before the light behind him grew too dim to go on. If he made torches, he could go farther, but if he were dis- covered, the governor would retrieve the blood holder and return it to the village. That would ruin everything.
He turned around.
Before he was fully out of the entrance, he detected another scent coming from the darkness of the passageway. It was a powerful smell, and it excited his mind. He took a deep breath. The ancient tales were true!
Backing out through the yucca plants, wiping away his own tracks as best he could, the spy picked his way onto the sur- rounding rock and returned to where he had left his pack. Knowing he would not be spending another night, he cut his blanket into strips and wrapped his feet. He would return to the village, bandage his feet properly, make better preparations, and then return to retrieve the magic object that would permit him to lead his people to victory.
He limped off toward the pueblo.
The governor, having entered the sacred place, put the object into the altar and then returned to gather his things to start back. Hours later, he camped that evening in the canyons. He wanted to arrive when the sun of the new day would greet him as he completed his quest.
The next morning, as the governor climbed the steps to the top of the mesa, the people welcomed him with shouts and drums. Following him as he passed by, the villagers moved to the east end of the isolated mesa to celebrate.
They did not see the Spanish soldiers who had camped to the north of the valley floor and had secretly made their way across the fields. As the governor was being hailed in the streets above, soldiers were making their way to the crevice below. The army had come to the Acoma region sooner than expected, and its scouts had watched the governor as he climbed the secret pathway.
Leaving their heavy metal breastplates and other protection stacked at the bottom of the path, the soldiers climbed the steps quietly, their swords and guns cinched on their backs. They numbered less than a hundred, facing a village of more than a thousand. Their intent was not to do battle but to firmly and resolutely offer the terms of Diego de Vargas, their commander and the new Spanish governor of the region.
The first ones up secreted themselves and waited for all the soldiers to ascend the stairway. When together, marshaling their arms, forming into ranks and boldly marching down the streets, the soldiers sang a cadence to their pace. The rhythmic sound was soon heard at the far end of the mesa, and the celebration chants, prayers, and songs of the Acoma people fell into a deathly silence.
Only one man of the pueblo had seen the soldiers and watched as they climbed the steps. It was the spy, the man who had followed the elder to the secret place, and who had returned for supplies. He lay hidden until the soldiers marched by, then grabbed his pack, slipped through an upper door, dropped into the street from a wall, and made quickly down the pathway for the fields below.
This time, he remembered the foot wrappings and yucca sandals.
Once past the fields and into the canyons, he slowed to a hobble, his feet not yet healed. He pushed ahead, desperate to seek the Womb of the Mother, to find the weapon, and to return to save the village.
His escape, however, did not go unnoticed.
The troops spread out as the negotiations began, and a solitary soldier noticed the man scurrying west across the flatlands below the mesa. The man, no doubt, was racing to spread the news of the soldiers’ arrival to the other villages to the west. Reporting the escape to his captain, the sergeant was assigned to retrieve the man after the negotiations were finished. Ac- quainted with the hard land in front of the escaping man, the captain knew it would take him many hours to travel out of their reach. Waiting until morning to begin a chase would be soon enough.
It satisfied the sergeant. An experienced soldier, seasoned in the campaigns of the new world, he knew how to track and he knew how to be patient when chasing slaves. The man was on foot, whereas the soldier would have his horse. And the man even looked to be injured. There was no hurry.
Confident in his skills and his horse’s strength, the soldier never imagined the power he was about to encounter.
Chapter 2
Present Day
"Are you crazy?” a man shouted.
Mogi Franklin jerked up from a slouch in his auditorium seat.
“You’re an idiot! I’m not listening to this garbage!” another man spat at the speaker.
“You have insulted my people!” yelled another.
Half the audience was on its feet. Some people shouted, pointing angrily and shaking their fists while others talked heatedly to those around them.
Mogi yanked out his ear buds and turned to his sister, Jennifer. They were sitting with their mom and dad, having come in from the campground to attend the evening talk hosted by the National Park Service. They were traveling in their RV for a few days of vacation and had camped at El Malpais National Monument south of Grants, New Mexico.
“What? What did he say?”
“He called them cannibals,” she responded. “The ancestors of the Acoma Pueblo, specifically, but basically all the Pueblo Indians. Said they ate the flesh of their enemies and drank their blood.”
In the midst of the audience’s violent reaction, the speaker seemed shocked and insulted. “I understand it might be hard to accept,” he continued, growing more agitated as he spoke. “But my research is good and I’ve done it well. If you can’t be civil, please leave.”
Several people got up and stormed out, slamming their seats and continuing to shout both at the speaker and the monument superintendent. A stream of people walked past the front of the auditorium, calling the speaker blind, stupid, crazy, and many other harsh names. The speaker yelled back at them until the superintendent moved him away from the microphone and calmed him down.
In a few minutes, the remaining audience quieted enough for the speaker—Professor Richard Chandler from the University of Eastern Iowa—to continue. He returned to the microphone. “The truth can be hard sometimes,” he said, his voice rising. “But my goal this summer is to find absolute proof that the ancestors of the present-day Pueblo Indians were both murderers
and cannibals.”
Chandler—tall, thin, and gaunt-looking—was the perfect image of a nerd scientist: rumpled clothes, pants too short, a thin tie off center around an unbuttoned collar, and a shock of unkempt hair offset by eyes half-hidden by thick lenses. After provoking his audience with his introduction, the professor settled down and continued with his talk, showing photographs to explain the basis of his research.
He projected an image of an old Spanish document written in very dense handwriting.
“Examining documents in Mexico City, I found a story written in 1732 that tells of a conversation between a father and his son, both slaves serving the household of Antonio Flores de Salaz, a wealthy Mexican trader who lived north of Mexico City. The father had been born and raised at Acoma Pueblo before he was captured and taken to Mexico.”
This brought a buzz from the audience, several of whom were from Acoma Pueblo, the historical home of the Acoma people, not more than twenty miles away. Spread across a half- million acres with a population of about five thousand living in three separate villages, the original, ancient village of the Pueblo was called Sky City because it had been built high on top of an isolated mesa.
“The writing is hard to read and even harder to translate. I will paraphrase what the father told the son,” Chandler said. “When the Spanish army returned to Santa Fe in 1692 to resettle the area, many of the pueblos believed they would be punished for having participated in the revolt, and several of them prepared for war. But the Acoma Pueblo had a secret object that they believed would protect them. The object had magical powers.
“Not knowing how to use the magic, the Pueblo leaders hid the object in a holy place known only to the elders. But before they could discover its use, the Spanish army came to Acoma, negotiated a peace, and the people were returned to Spanish rule. Still thinking the object might be powerful, they never retrieved it from its hiding place. After a few years, those elders died, and its hiding place was forgotten.
“The conversation between the father and his son continued with the father confessing that he himself had discovered the location of the hiding place and, on the very day that the Spanish soldiers came, set out to retrieve it. He thought he knew how to use its magic. But he never removed the magical object from its hiding place. Instead he was captured by Spanish troops, taken to Mexico City, and given as a servant to the Salaz household.
“After living for decades as a slave, the father told the story to his son, worried that he would die without passing on the knowledge. The father wrote a riddle describing the location, using descriptors that he explained only to his son.
“But the conversation had been overheard and written down by members of the household. Both the slave and the son were executed for keeping secrets from the master of the house. Neither of them revealed the meaning of the riddle.”
The professor displayed an enlargement of another Spanish document. Mogi could make out letters and words even though they were written in very thin script.
“I do not know what the object was or where it was hidden,” the professor continued, pausing to drink from a bottle of water. “However, I believe that the object was a ceremonial bowl used in gathering the blood of an enemy, the drinking of which was believed to give great powers to the person who drank it.”
It was laughter now that rippled across the audience. It wasn’t hard for Mogi to understand why. Not only had Chandler made preposterous statements about a people who lived three hundred years earlier, but he had based his conclusions on an old riddle about something he wouldn’t recognize even if it were in front of him.
He had to be nuts!
“You can laugh all you want,” the professor went on with undisguised arrogance, “but you will eventually have to recognize and accept what your ancestors were capable of.”
I don’t like this guy, Mogi thought, but the mystery’s kind of cool. An ancient bowl with magical powers!
Chandler brought up another image and said, “This shows the English translation of the riddle.”
Mogi leaned forward to read it.
It was in the land of hard-walking.
Into the Womb of the Mother was the blood holder placed,
beneath the hill in the middle of the land of hard-walking.
In my dreams do I see the opening of the Womb and
smell the thick smell of the river.
Mogi whipped out his phone and took a photo before the professor switched to a new image.
“Since the father, in terms of a normal Puebloan’s life, had probably never been far from Acoma, the hiding place must be somewhere close to the mesa. It is my intention to find the ‘Womb of the Mother’ and solve the mystery. You, all of you, are going to have to face up to the fact that your ancestors were flesh-eating savages!”
The crowd reacted as if he had reached out and slapped every one of them. Observing the uproar, Dr. Chandler cracked a haughty smile, gathered his papers, and sat down. The audience was already out of their seats and moving toward the door.
There was no applause.
“I hope this guy has a lock on his door tonight,” Jennifer said, watching the faces of people moving toward the exits. “Might be a good night for a lynching.”
Whack!
A sharp sound came from a few rows in front of them. Mogi’s eyes darted toward the seats. A young woman had leaned over the back of her seat and given a young man a furious slap across the face. The guy looked like a teenager but could have been older, the dark features of his Hispanic face making it hard to guess his age. His hair was slicked back and he wore a handkerchief folded and wrapped into a headband. He was holding his cheek with a wide grin.
In contrast, the girl was certainly not Hispanic, with a full head of blond hair pulled back from a light-skinned “Anglo” face. She, too, wore a grin, but her eyes shone with a daring look.
The guy, still grinning and holding his face, slinked away toward the exit.
Mogi knew the guy was making light of the hit, but it had to hurt. The girl had delivered one colossal slap.
“It’s a bad situation, for sure,” the superintendent said. Bob Toffler had been superintendent of El Malpais National
Monument for about five years. Spanish for “the badlands,” El Malpais was the name given to hundreds of acres of lava flows in west-central New Mexico that abutted the southern edge of Grants, a small city an hour or so west of Albuquerque. After the talk, Mogi’s dad had approached the superintendent, Mr. Toffler, and introduced the Franklin family.
As they shook hands, Mogi noticed a young woman approaching them. It was the same girl who had slapped the boy.
“Hey, welcome to the peaceful city of Grants, everybody,” she said. “Let’s see if we can get an old-fashioned civil war going!” The woman smiled broadly as she joined the group.
“And this,” Mr. Toffler said, “is my daughter, Rachel. I doubt you could visit anywhere in the county and not meet the Shining Star of Grants.”
The girl laughed, flashing gleaming white teeth. Mogi didn’t mean to stare, but felt his face growing warm. She was downright beautiful. Older than Jennifer by one or two years, she was probably eighteen or nineteen.
“She’s obviously capable of holding her own with the local boy population,” Mr.Toffler added, glancing at his daughter.
The girl laughed. “I’m not sure about the shining star part, but I can hold my own,” Rachel said as she greeted the Franklin family. “And I do manage to make sure the bulls stay in their pastures and behave themselves.”
She was especially happy to meet Jennifer. “I’m relieved to find somebody my own age,” Rachel said. “Usually the tourists are a bunch of old-timers who bum around the country looking for clean bathrooms.” Everyone laughed.
“Do you think the professor makes any sense?” Mr. Franklin asked the superintendent.
“Well, I don’t know. I don’t believe the cannibalism part, and the blood-filled magic bowl sounds a little far-fetched to me, but there are stranger stories in the Southwest. We’re still talking more than three hundred years ago, and I don’t think any of us knows all the details of what life was like back then. What I’m more worried about is the stirring-up of feelings.
“This area may have started with separate races, but after three centuries and maybe, what—fifteen generations?— everybody’s family tree is mixed, with Spanish ancestors married to Puebloan ancestors and the like. Around here, marriages between races means there are families descended from both the conquered and the conquerors, and everybody’s ancestors have been, at one time or another, both the abused and the abusers. There’s a natural tension, but people have learned to live with it.
“People ought to be proud that their cultural heritage includes people from different backgrounds and influences. But when someone gets to thinking that their culture is being put down by someone else’s, a lot of emotions rise to the surface. And if someone stirs the pot in a big way—like claiming that one group was routinely murdering another group and then eating them--it could boil over pretty easily, and we’re all in trouble.”
Mogi was half-listening to what his dad and Mr.Toffler were discussing. He was more interested in the gorgeous girl across from him. He was only fourteen, looked older, and was tall for his age, but his muscles had not yet caught up with his bones, so he was gangly and spindly and a little awkward, which is to say, normal for his position in life. Taking after both his mom and his dad, he was way smarter than most of his peer group. Quick-minded, mentally disciplined, and orderly, he had a natural talent for being brainy, which seemed to earn him zero points with the opposite sex; girls seemed totally uninterested in him.
As much as he wished that things were different, he had to accept that he’d have a better time if he paid attention to other things, like the professor’s mystery.
"Are you crazy?” a man shouted.
Mogi Franklin jerked up from a slouch in his auditorium seat.
“You’re an idiot! I’m not listening to this garbage!” another man spat at the speaker.
“You have insulted my people!” yelled another.
Half the audience was on its feet. Some people shouted, pointing angrily and shaking their fists while others talked heatedly to those around them.
Mogi yanked out his ear buds and turned to his sister, Jennifer. They were sitting with their mom and dad, having come in from the campground to attend the evening talk hosted by the National Park Service. They were traveling in their RV for a few days of vacation and had camped at El Malpais National Monument south of Grants, New Mexico.
“What? What did he say?”
“He called them cannibals,” she responded. “The ancestors of the Acoma Pueblo, specifically, but basically all the Pueblo Indians. Said they ate the flesh of their enemies and drank their blood.”
In the midst of the audience’s violent reaction, the speaker seemed shocked and insulted. “I understand it might be hard to accept,” he continued, growing more agitated as he spoke. “But my research is good and I’ve done it well. If you can’t be civil, please leave.”
Several people got up and stormed out, slamming their seats and continuing to shout both at the speaker and the monument superintendent. A stream of people walked past the front of the auditorium, calling the speaker blind, stupid, crazy, and many other harsh names. The speaker yelled back at them until the superintendent moved him away from the microphone and calmed him down.
In a few minutes, the remaining audience quieted enough for the speaker—Professor Richard Chandler from the University of Eastern Iowa—to continue. He returned to the microphone. “The truth can be hard sometimes,” he said, his voice rising. “But my goal this summer is to find absolute proof that the ancestors of the present-day Pueblo Indians were both murderers
and cannibals.”
Chandler—tall, thin, and gaunt-looking—was the perfect image of a nerd scientist: rumpled clothes, pants too short, a thin tie off center around an unbuttoned collar, and a shock of unkempt hair offset by eyes half-hidden by thick lenses. After provoking his audience with his introduction, the professor settled down and continued with his talk, showing photographs to explain the basis of his research.
He projected an image of an old Spanish document written in very dense handwriting.
“Examining documents in Mexico City, I found a story written in 1732 that tells of a conversation between a father and his son, both slaves serving the household of Antonio Flores de Salaz, a wealthy Mexican trader who lived north of Mexico City. The father had been born and raised at Acoma Pueblo before he was captured and taken to Mexico.”
This brought a buzz from the audience, several of whom were from Acoma Pueblo, the historical home of the Acoma people, not more than twenty miles away. Spread across a half- million acres with a population of about five thousand living in three separate villages, the original, ancient village of the Pueblo was called Sky City because it had been built high on top of an isolated mesa.
“The writing is hard to read and even harder to translate. I will paraphrase what the father told the son,” Chandler said. “When the Spanish army returned to Santa Fe in 1692 to resettle the area, many of the pueblos believed they would be punished for having participated in the revolt, and several of them prepared for war. But the Acoma Pueblo had a secret object that they believed would protect them. The object had magical powers.
“Not knowing how to use the magic, the Pueblo leaders hid the object in a holy place known only to the elders. But before they could discover its use, the Spanish army came to Acoma, negotiated a peace, and the people were returned to Spanish rule. Still thinking the object might be powerful, they never retrieved it from its hiding place. After a few years, those elders died, and its hiding place was forgotten.
“The conversation between the father and his son continued with the father confessing that he himself had discovered the location of the hiding place and, on the very day that the Spanish soldiers came, set out to retrieve it. He thought he knew how to use its magic. But he never removed the magical object from its hiding place. Instead he was captured by Spanish troops, taken to Mexico City, and given as a servant to the Salaz household.
“After living for decades as a slave, the father told the story to his son, worried that he would die without passing on the knowledge. The father wrote a riddle describing the location, using descriptors that he explained only to his son.
“But the conversation had been overheard and written down by members of the household. Both the slave and the son were executed for keeping secrets from the master of the house. Neither of them revealed the meaning of the riddle.”
The professor displayed an enlargement of another Spanish document. Mogi could make out letters and words even though they were written in very thin script.
“I do not know what the object was or where it was hidden,” the professor continued, pausing to drink from a bottle of water. “However, I believe that the object was a ceremonial bowl used in gathering the blood of an enemy, the drinking of which was believed to give great powers to the person who drank it.”
It was laughter now that rippled across the audience. It wasn’t hard for Mogi to understand why. Not only had Chandler made preposterous statements about a people who lived three hundred years earlier, but he had based his conclusions on an old riddle about something he wouldn’t recognize even if it were in front of him.
He had to be nuts!
“You can laugh all you want,” the professor went on with undisguised arrogance, “but you will eventually have to recognize and accept what your ancestors were capable of.”
I don’t like this guy, Mogi thought, but the mystery’s kind of cool. An ancient bowl with magical powers!
Chandler brought up another image and said, “This shows the English translation of the riddle.”
Mogi leaned forward to read it.
It was in the land of hard-walking.
Into the Womb of the Mother was the blood holder placed,
beneath the hill in the middle of the land of hard-walking.
In my dreams do I see the opening of the Womb and
smell the thick smell of the river.
Mogi whipped out his phone and took a photo before the professor switched to a new image.
“Since the father, in terms of a normal Puebloan’s life, had probably never been far from Acoma, the hiding place must be somewhere close to the mesa. It is my intention to find the ‘Womb of the Mother’ and solve the mystery. You, all of you, are going to have to face up to the fact that your ancestors were flesh-eating savages!”
The crowd reacted as if he had reached out and slapped every one of them. Observing the uproar, Dr. Chandler cracked a haughty smile, gathered his papers, and sat down. The audience was already out of their seats and moving toward the door.
There was no applause.
“I hope this guy has a lock on his door tonight,” Jennifer said, watching the faces of people moving toward the exits. “Might be a good night for a lynching.”
Whack!
A sharp sound came from a few rows in front of them. Mogi’s eyes darted toward the seats. A young woman had leaned over the back of her seat and given a young man a furious slap across the face. The guy looked like a teenager but could have been older, the dark features of his Hispanic face making it hard to guess his age. His hair was slicked back and he wore a handkerchief folded and wrapped into a headband. He was holding his cheek with a wide grin.
In contrast, the girl was certainly not Hispanic, with a full head of blond hair pulled back from a light-skinned “Anglo” face. She, too, wore a grin, but her eyes shone with a daring look.
The guy, still grinning and holding his face, slinked away toward the exit.
Mogi knew the guy was making light of the hit, but it had to hurt. The girl had delivered one colossal slap.
“It’s a bad situation, for sure,” the superintendent said. Bob Toffler had been superintendent of El Malpais National
Monument for about five years. Spanish for “the badlands,” El Malpais was the name given to hundreds of acres of lava flows in west-central New Mexico that abutted the southern edge of Grants, a small city an hour or so west of Albuquerque. After the talk, Mogi’s dad had approached the superintendent, Mr. Toffler, and introduced the Franklin family.
As they shook hands, Mogi noticed a young woman approaching them. It was the same girl who had slapped the boy.
“Hey, welcome to the peaceful city of Grants, everybody,” she said. “Let’s see if we can get an old-fashioned civil war going!” The woman smiled broadly as she joined the group.
“And this,” Mr. Toffler said, “is my daughter, Rachel. I doubt you could visit anywhere in the county and not meet the Shining Star of Grants.”
The girl laughed, flashing gleaming white teeth. Mogi didn’t mean to stare, but felt his face growing warm. She was downright beautiful. Older than Jennifer by one or two years, she was probably eighteen or nineteen.
“She’s obviously capable of holding her own with the local boy population,” Mr.Toffler added, glancing at his daughter.
The girl laughed. “I’m not sure about the shining star part, but I can hold my own,” Rachel said as she greeted the Franklin family. “And I do manage to make sure the bulls stay in their pastures and behave themselves.”
She was especially happy to meet Jennifer. “I’m relieved to find somebody my own age,” Rachel said. “Usually the tourists are a bunch of old-timers who bum around the country looking for clean bathrooms.” Everyone laughed.
“Do you think the professor makes any sense?” Mr. Franklin asked the superintendent.
“Well, I don’t know. I don’t believe the cannibalism part, and the blood-filled magic bowl sounds a little far-fetched to me, but there are stranger stories in the Southwest. We’re still talking more than three hundred years ago, and I don’t think any of us knows all the details of what life was like back then. What I’m more worried about is the stirring-up of feelings.
“This area may have started with separate races, but after three centuries and maybe, what—fifteen generations?— everybody’s family tree is mixed, with Spanish ancestors married to Puebloan ancestors and the like. Around here, marriages between races means there are families descended from both the conquered and the conquerors, and everybody’s ancestors have been, at one time or another, both the abused and the abusers. There’s a natural tension, but people have learned to live with it.
“People ought to be proud that their cultural heritage includes people from different backgrounds and influences. But when someone gets to thinking that their culture is being put down by someone else’s, a lot of emotions rise to the surface. And if someone stirs the pot in a big way—like claiming that one group was routinely murdering another group and then eating them--it could boil over pretty easily, and we’re all in trouble.”
Mogi was half-listening to what his dad and Mr.Toffler were discussing. He was more interested in the gorgeous girl across from him. He was only fourteen, looked older, and was tall for his age, but his muscles had not yet caught up with his bones, so he was gangly and spindly and a little awkward, which is to say, normal for his position in life. Taking after both his mom and his dad, he was way smarter than most of his peer group. Quick-minded, mentally disciplined, and orderly, he had a natural talent for being brainy, which seemed to earn him zero points with the opposite sex; girls seemed totally uninterested in him.
As much as he wished that things were different, he had to accept that he’d have a better time if he paid attention to other things, like the professor’s mystery.