Chapter 4

She started the purification ceremony the day after Michelle left for Japan since the ritual took four days to complete. On the fifth day she gathered the clay and shaped it. She made the jar devoid of handles which would be broken when it was buried. The jar resembled the body of an ant: a bulging body that melded into a thin neck which flared out at the mouth. Around the neck she had painted stylized water consisting of a thick line that circled all around the jar's neck to represent the sea surface and, from the surface, squared off spirals for waves. On the jar's body she painted a version of Mother Earth. It looked like backward concentric c's with the ends of the outer figure moving towards each other to embrace the smaller c's. At the mouth of the figure was a cross.

She ran her finger over the lip of the jar. The easy part was done, and now she was left with the prospect of finding an unmarried man of perfect character.

'Why not have the ability to walk on water one of the requirements too?' she thought. It was hard enough to find anyone with a perfect character, much less an unmarried man. When a man was looking for both a woman and a field to sow, how could he possibly focus on developing his character?

Julia held up the painted water jar to the light. It had a beautiful burnished despite it lacking a glaze. The clay grains were so fine that Julia had only needed to polish it with a smooth stone. However, searching for the imperfections had been time-consuming and tedious so the polishing took hours. Julia's eyes felt as if they were pointing in different directions. Sighing, she took off her glasses, closed her eyes, and pinched the bridge of her nose. It was eight o'clock at night and she still needed to fire it.

Michelle was scheduled to return in another week. By then the new jar would be done and, with any luck, filled with water in accordance with the legend, so that the water of the ocean would be pulled to the jar and rain would come. Like all the Hopi traditions, there were specific instructions to perform the actions correctly. Julia knew the ritual to fill the water jar with power by heart, but that didn't make it any easier to fulfill its requirements. She still didn't know how she was to find an unmarried man of perfect character, but there was time enough to think about that later.

The phone rang. Julia groaned as she slipped her glasses back on. "What now?" It rang again before she was able to get to it. "Hello? Yes, this is she." Julia forced herself to listen intently to the woman speaking on the other end. It was hard to hear her voice over the music in the background. "Again? I see. I'll come get him now."

Julia tossed the phone back onto the receiver. This was not what she needed now, but he was family. She took the keys from the push pin on the corkboard beside the front door and stepped out into the night. Her uncle's spare pickup truck was parked away from the pueblos so that it wouldn't be in the way for ceremonies and every day village life. The drive down to Flagstaff was long, but uneventful, most of it was on long stretches of highway with hardly any noticeable landmarks or towns along the way. It was nearly ten o'clock by the time she rolled into Flagstaff.

Despite being the end of June when summer vacation for students began, the university town was still alive with the lights and sounds of college students leaving bars to continue partying at fraternity or sorority houses. She turned onto Milton road and her headlights passed over a group of teenagers in a half circle. It looked like they were watching a fight that had been taken to the ground, but the lack of angry taunting indicated that it was decidedly one-sided. Through the gaps in the crowd she could see glimpses of a middle aged man lying on his side, vainly attempting to ward off kicks.

'Just great,' Julia thought as she parked the truck and got out. She pulled on her fingerless, leather gloves and squeezed to the front of the group.

"Where's your big mouth now, Cliff-Shitter?" the leader asked, punctuating his question with another kick. "You so trog that you can't even fight back without government legislation?"

Julia clenched her fists. Why did they always do this to the peaceful people? How big could you think yourself for beating up the defenseless? Blood was running down an abrasion from her uncle's forehead. As the teenager kicking her uncle pulled his foot back again, Julia leapt forward.

By sticking out her left arm, Julia rammed the boy head first into the side of the building. She slammed her forearm into the back of his head and then jerked him back towards the spectators. Widening her stance, Julia prepared for them to rush her. One of the girls, a tall blond, swung a looping right towards Julia. Spinning, Julia got behind the attacker and shoved her against the wall before kicking out her legs and elbowing her in the face. The blond went down.

Two more teenagers jumped in. Julia pivoted so that they couldn't flank her and punched one of them in the gut and pushed him into the path of the other attacker. As they flailed their arms in an attempt to find their balance again, Julia jumped and kicked out both legs, catching each teenager in the face. Her momentum brought her back to her feet when she landed. The other two teenagers stared open-mouthed at her for a few seconds before running. Julia surveyed the damage.

Four teenagers were lying on the ground groaning and unable to move. Good. It would make getting her uncle out of here easier. She turned to him and offered her hand.

He squinted up at her and swatted at her hand but missed. "Get away from me, ya half-breed."

"Don't speak about my mother that way."

Albert slapped his hand over his face. "Aw, what the hell is this? She couldn't come down to get me herself? She sent her bastard daughter after me?"

'Yeah, you're welcome.' Julia thought. Sleeping would be a much better use of her time, more peaceful, and a whole lot cheaper, but someone had to take care of Michelle's drunk half-brother. She tried to remember the uncle he used to be before the injury that forced him away from tending the fields. "Michelle wouldn't like hearing you say that, Uncle Al, but she's in Japan now. Remember?"

"She's a lazy deserter. That's what she is."

"That's not true, Uncle Al."

"Whatever. What took you so long?" He roused himself from the wall his back was pressed against and hunched his head between his knees.

"I came as fast as I could. You know it's more than a 120 miles from the reservation."

"Well, I'm sorry I'm such a goddamn inconvenience to you. What were you doing anyway? Probably sleeping."

"I was making the new water jar."

"That's something your mother should be doing."

"She's in Japan."

"She's a lazy deserter."

Julia sighed. This was going nowhere. They had to get moving before the teenagers recovered or their friends came back with help. Julia fisted her hands in her uncle's shirt and hauled him to his feet.

"Stop manhandling me," he said flopping his arms at her.

"It's time to go." Julia half guided and half shoved him along to the truck. She leaned her uncle against the cab as she opened the door.

"This is the wrong side," he said.

"No, it's not. I'm driving."

"Since when?"

"Since you taught me a year ago and since you are too drunk to even stand up." Julia helped him into his seat despite his protests. By the time, Julia had walked to the other side and started the truck, he had already passed out. Julia looked at him in the light of the street lamps. Somewhere past the alcoholic haze and the stupor of helplessness was the uncle she had known as a child. Lying dormant was the tall, proud Hopi who didn't flinch at the thought of a long day of work under the Arizona sun, the man who ruffled his niece's hair when he returned in the evening from the fields and listened intently on her day's adventures. Like the bald eagle, the symbol of America, Native Americans were a part of this country's history and heritage, but were careless swept aside and eliminated for the sake of progress.

Despite his words, Julia could not put all the blame on him for what he been broken down to. She knew all too well what it was to not be wanted, to be discarded. Julia rolled up her jacket and slipped it behind her uncle's head before starting the truck and beginning the long drive back to the reservation.

* * *

Julia bolted upright in bed as the sweat ran down her face in rivulets. "The pendant," she whispered. "The pendant ... the pendant was there."

Sunlight streamed through the blinds on her window causing the silver of the pendant to sparkle and the turquoise to glow. At least that's what she thought until she cast off the blankets and turned her body from the window and found that it was still glowing.

"What?" Julia took the pendant in her hand and lifted it up so she could examine it. She could feel the warmth from her body draining away. She closed her fingers over the warm turquoise and pulled the necklace taut. 'With just a quick tug,' she thought, 'I could be rid of this curse.' She pulled harder, feeling the metal chain dig into the back of her neck. She let it go. Michelle had told her she must never remove it, that it was important to the survival of her people.

Cradling her head in her hands, she felt her body shaking. There was more to this battle than just what she wanted, more than what her mother anticipated. How could she fight or anyone fight the Ogre? That was what it lived for; fighting was what sustained it. There hasn't been a terror like this in the world since the Hisatsinom, the ancient ones, were destroyed in Chaco Canyon over 800 years ago until the Spider Woman defeated Ogre. This fight would be different though. It would not be limited to just a tribe of natives. 'The tournament shall call it,' that's what Kunimitsu had said. The tournament, according to Michelle, was a gathering of all the best fighters in the world. If they were absorbed by Ogre, then not only would its strength increase, but it will have tasted the blood of people representing almost each nation on earth. Its hunger would not be slaked by any one race.

There would be no avoiding it this time. It would hunt down the best and add them to its growing power. The only way to stop it would be to cut off its supply to souls and defeat it before it was able to gain more strength, but to do that would mean that she would have to leave her people and discover a weakness to Ogre before it could get its momentum started.

Julia stood up and let the blankets slide from her body. There would be time enough later for worries. First things first. She needed to finish the new water jar and provide for the tribe before she ran off. But then, there was no guarantee that she could find a man of perfect character to fill the water jar as required by the ritual to bring the ocean's power to the Hopitu, and even if she did what good would it do to have water only to have Ogre appear and destroy them because she hadn't found a weapon to use against Ogre?

"Mother," she whispered. "What am I to do?"

She picked at the crust anchored to the corner of her eyes and entered the hallway that led to the small living room and kitchen. She froze.

Somehow her uncle had managed to drag himself from out of his drunken stupor on the couch to stand at the kitchen counter. He wavered on his feet, but managed to keep upright as he held the water jar to the light and peered at it, twisting and turning it as though trying to figure out if there were booze inside and, if so, how to get it out short of breaking the container.

"No, get away from that!" Julia crossed the threshold and snatched the jar from her uncle's hands. She turned the container around in a made effort to ensure herself that it remained undamaged.

"Hey, what's the big idea?" her uncle managed as he staggered back from her sudden intrusion. "I was just lookin'."

"Do you understand what this is? It's all that we have left to hope for. This is the life of the Hopitu."

"Then it should be in the hands of a true Hopi. Not in the hands of a bastard daughter of a deserter."

Julia didn't recall moving. All she knew was that her hand had changed positions and that Uncle Albert fell backwards. She didn't even feel the sting in her knuckles until she had left. The only thing she remembered was the pain of his words, her screaming at his prone body that he would never be able to comprehend the sacrifices that Michelle had made for them, and the sound of the Ford's engine as she left the reservation.

* * *

It was always the same in her dreams: the plaza and the people filled with frenzy. For the past three nights she was one of the people below, a single crest among the sea of arms reaching and swaying below the thick morning mist. The people would chant and Julia would chant with them, her mouth knowing words her brain did not; her neck craned up to watch a bronze colored figure, framed against a white robe, materialized to stand upon the air itself. It was a godly figure with something shiny on its chest.

This time in the dream, she found herself at the center of a city built in a large basin bounded on all sides by mountains. When she looked out it was from a high vantage point - some sort of a tiered mountain made of water. Far below, arms swayed and rolled like waves in a trance and, in the distance, heavy drumbeats stomped like a herd of elephants. At times she could make out feline shapes slinking through the haze with cruel smiles, the length of her arm, flashing in the growing light.

Before her, lying flat upon a circular stone, was a dark-skinned man with his limbs held down by feathered serpents. Sweat beaded over his naked skin as he strained against their muscular bodies. Over the wind, Julia could hear someone chanting behind her in an ancient language, but she was unable to turn her head. A hand reached past her and picked up the obsidian knife from the stone, and the prisoner struggled even more fiercely.

The chanting priest stepped into Julia's view, a white cotton robe draped around his broad shoulders. His face looked carved from stone, hard and passive, and he wore a pair of eagle feathers in his headband, a clear symbol of power. He must have been the figure she had seen in her past dreams, hovering in the air. Julia had always believed the shining light she had seen was the pendant she now wore. This time she could clearly see it.

She could see the silver wings, the three layers of feathers on each wing which grew steadily wider as they traveled downward until their tips overlapped at the bottom. Turned sideways, the inner edges of the wings were looked almost like eyelids, and its iris was an oval turquoise stone the size of a human eye. Four talons held the stone in place like a victim on the sacrificial stone. Silvery lines ran across its burnished surface like the veins of a heart.

The priest continued to chant and raised the blade over his head to grasp it with both hands. The prisoner's arms strained against the clasps against his wrist, drawing red lines upon his skin and suddenly Julia was struggling with him. She felt the leathered hands of the guards press her body down to the stone surface, worn smooth from the thousands who was sanded the texture off with their backs, as she looked up through the prisoner's eyes.

With a yell, the priest plunged the knife down and a terrible wail filled the air and ripped the sleep from Julia's mind. She could still hear the screams of the prisoner, could still see the blood spurted with each beat of his racing heart from the hole being cut in his side. She gagged at the memory, her chest tightening with the thought of having her heart torn from her body. Bolting upright, her hand went to her chest but instead of warm and sticky blood, all she felt was the cold, burnished surface of the pendant.

In the instant between sleep and consciousness, Julia traveled across five centuries and hundreds of miles to find herself back in Arizona, and the journey left her drained. She closed her eyes and concentrating on breathing, on bringing her heart rate down. She pushed herself off the blanket she had laid on the cave floor. Hidden within the walls of Canyon de Chelly, the air was almost refrigerated and swished in the closed area like the waves she had once heard when her mom had brought her to San Francisco bay in California.

Like an archaeologist pushing aside spiderwebs, Julia dusted away the last threads of the dream trying to ensnare her thoughts. Warmth slowly returned to her body as she busied herself. Yet there still remained a sense that she had missed its purpose. There had to be more to it than just dreams - visions of a dead past - because there was a sense of foreboding, that it was a warning of the true nature of Ogre.

"Anxiety," she told herself. What would Michelle do when she returned and didn't find Julia in the village? She had turned her back on the Hopitu - deserted the tribe. She had failed in her duty to fill the water jar, worse yet she had taken it away from the Hopitu. If Michelle did return in time for another rain ceremony, they would not have the power of the water jar and time would be wasted in creating a new one.

Maybe she should bring it back, but would they even let her return? Most of the tribe feared the pendant she wore. If the necklace had the power to control spirits, wouldn't it need to call them first? So long as Julia remained in the village, they reasoned, Ogre would have a beacon to follow.

Her thoughts were broken with the feel of pin needles dancing on her right hand. In the half light of the smoldering campfire she looked at her hand where a spider had wandered onto her open palm. It waited at the center as though making sure she was watching before spiraling out to the base of her fingers. It then cut diagonally across her hand in a jagged pattern like a symbolic drawing of lightning. Pausing once more it scuttled to the edge of her hand and slid down a silk thread to disappear into the darkness.

Julia stared at her empty palm. A message? It looked as if the spider had traced out ancient petroglyphs left from the Ancient Ones. She vaguely recalled seeing those two leading to a opening in the walls of Canyon del Muerto, the Canyon of the Dead, which made up the northern part of Canyon de Chelly and was named after two mummies found in the 19th century. The opening was somewhere south of Mummy Cave overlook. She should go there but that would require her to go through Navajo territory as the path leading past the rock painting was directly above their farming land.

The Navajo were very strict, as many native tribes were, about who entered their territory and how. Nobody was even supposed to enter Canyon de Chelly without a park ranger or Navajo guide to accompany them ... but she'd broken plenty of tribal laws just to return to the place where Michelle had first found her - a few more wouldn't make a difference.

* * *

The sandstone spire towered over Canyon de Chelly's floor. From far away, Spider Rock looked like a tree stump that had been stripped of its bark. Its surface was, for the most part, smooth save a few nicks and horizontal lines worn along its circumference. Clinging to the hard packed dirt at the base of the rock formation were Opumtia cati and sagebrush. Spider Rock stood alone in the deep canyon.

'Just like me,' Julia thought. She had left the truck in Chinle and hiked the four miles east to Canyon de Chelly. She didn't want to wear away any more of the fragile environment, and she couldn't risk leaving tire marks for the Dineh to follow as she crossed off-road through their reservation. Usually they charged fees to enter the hiking trails, fees to camp, and often required that a Dineh guide accompany parties who wanted to explore the backcountry. The last thing she needed was to have someone looking over her shoulder. Besides, she was visiting her own origins.

A thin stream of water crossed the pebbled bed rock in front of her. She flicked the water with the toe of her boot. There should have been more water by now. In fact, now was the season where hikers should have had to watch for flash floods. Yet there was nothing in the sky except the sun and an endless ocean of blue as clear as a polished mirror's surface. Julia adjusted her backpack on her shoulders and began the journey to the base of Spider Rock.

* * *

Julia ducked into the cave as a cloud of dust announced the arrival of a tour truck along the upper ridge of the canyon. She watched it from the mouth of the cave, looking for any indication that the tourists or guides had seen her. The truck stopped and tourists stepped towards the edge of the canyon with cameras. Julia backed into the shadows in case the cameras had powerful zoom. Foreigners to the native lands generally could not understand nor appreciate the majesty of Spider Rock or the surrounding natural monuments for more than a few minutes. With no sense of the lore and history, every rock formation looked the same and the only thing that invoked awe in the viewer was the physical aspect instead of the spiritual. Those tourists more in tuned in nature may have been able to sense the mythical power at a low level, but nothing that would match the reverence of a native.

The canyon walls echoed the sound of the engine revving up and truck bounce away on the rough terrain to more exciting stops. Julia peered out to ensure that nobody had stayed behind, and then continued into the cavern. The air was musty - a scent like an old sickness. She ran her flashlight over the walls and cave floor. Nothing seemed out of place in the haunting quiet. She had long passed the petroglyphs that the spider had traced out on her hand. The canyon seemed to call her, leading her onwards. At every turn something had tugged her mind, but why would the spiders bring her here? Maybe she had read too much into the message.

Despite the desert sun outside, the cave was cool. Julia shivered and collapsed to her shaking knees. The pendant glowed, casting the cave in a deep turquoise as though light was reflecting from a pool of tropical water. Julia struggled to breathe as the pendant drew on her strength, to light the walls where petroglyphs burned on the walls like an after-image on the back of eyelids. It was like the pictures she had seen of scorpions lit with ultraviolet light that glowed blue or white with a purple tint at the edges. At the north end of the cave where it curved deeper into the earth was the emblem of the spider-clan.

The pendant dimmed, returning warmth and breath to Julia's body. She sucked the air fiercely and pushed herself to her feet. She nearly grinned. "Thank you, dear spirits." You could ask for no clearer sign than that.

The curve in the cave narrowed down to the point where she had to crawl on her belly to get through. Rocks scraped at her exposed arms and thighs, dust stirred with her breath, until at last the opening widened up into another cavern. To each side, the cavern stretched out into darkness, but she felt a tug in her mind to look in a different direction. Lifting her gaze to the ceiling of the cave, she could barely make out what looked to be hand holds in the rock face, spaced at intervals that a determined climber could use to reach the top. Placing the small flashlight in her mouth, Julia began her ascent.

The trick to rock climbing was to use the legs. Most amateurs focused to much about moving up, and only used their arms to do so. They would dangle their legs or over-extend their bodies and force themselves to pull their full body weight up the wall, when the larger and stronger muscles in their legs went unused. And some times you had to move sideways first before climbing further. Using these simple principles, Julia found herself near the top of the cave within about five minutes.

At the top of the wall was an opening just large enough to slip an arm through. Julia readjusted her grip on the wall and shined the light into the hole. It looked empty, but as Julia tilted her head, she noticed a slight curve in the narrow tunnel. Perhaps something lay just around the corner. Cautiously, she reached in. At first she felt nothing, but as she strained her fingers she felt something round and smooth. It felt like a bowl of some sort, and across the bowl was something thin and sharp.

Julia's arm jerked back as if on its own accord. A stinging pain resonated in her fingertips. The shadows in the tunnel came alive. Dozens of spiders, their dark exoskeletons gleaming in the light, swarmed out. They were on her immediately and, forgetting herself, Julia let go of the wall to brush at the spiders. As she fell, the flashlight beam struck the ceiling. It almost looked like a strand of spider silk - a line of white against the darkness - and Julia's fall ended abruptly.