Found him, Andrew!”

Warren’s voice floated up from below the dike. His quad was parked on the lip of the creek bed, and as Andrew pulled up, he saw the old cowboy kneeling in the mud, cradling a lamb in his arms. It shook with cold and terror, bawling its distress in a weak voice. Somewhere over the hill, its mother returned her own anxious bleating.

A look from Warren was enough; the lamb’s leg was broken.

Would have been more merciful if the poor thing had drowned, he thought.

Warren laid the lamb on its side, pulled out his knife, and handed it to Andrew. Everyone on the ranch wore one, except for him; he wasn’t that country yet.

“Does it have to be?”

“You can see for yourself."

“But--” he paused. There was no but. He took the knife gingerly in his forefingers, then wrapped his grip firmly around the handle before kneeling next to the lamb. It jerked away, its good legs beating wildly out at him. Its breathing was frantic, and its eyes darted back and forth, seeking escape.

He reached for its head and it kicked out, bleating in panic. Its mother answered from farther up the hill. He could see her watching them, occasionally stamping a hoof, waiting for them to leave so she could go to her offspring. He tried again, grabbing a handful of the lamb’s silky wool. Its flailing hoof slammed into his shoulder. It was too small to hurt, but it knocked him off balance, sending him flailing in the dirt. It kicked pebbles at him as it futilely scrambled to escape.

Warren picked up the fallen blade. He shot a contemptuous glance at the younger man, then slit the lamb’s throat in one smooth, mechanical motion. He moved with expert quickness, and not a single drop of blood got on him, although it sprayed across the rocks of the stream bed with every arterial gush. And all over Andrew.

The animal wheezed as it ran out of air. Warren didn’t wait for it to stop moving before lifting it by its hind feet and carrying it over to the ATV. One-armed, he draped it across the rear of the vehicle and slapped its side.

“Now you know,” he said. His face was a map of the land, a rugged, sunburned topography whose edges drew inevitably downward. The contempt in his voice said he didn’t think the lesson had sunk in. “One more to go.”

Under his breath, Andrew cursed Warren, cursed his job, cursed the county, and most of all cursed the late summer storm that had scattered the flock across half the countryside. Seven of the newborns had been lost, panicked by the thunder. They’d found the mothers in the morning, running distraught through the fields, calling in desperate terror for their prodigal calves. It had taken them all day to round up the six, leaving one still unaccounted for.

They rode in silence, not daring to speak. Finally, Warren said, “Part of life.”

“Spare me your philosophy. Please.”

“Out here is real,” Warren went on.

“I’m here, aren’t I?” Andrew said.

“For a while, at least. When you leavin’ again?”

“Week after next.” He’d already told Warren twice, but nothing seemed to stick for long with the old man.

Warren shook his graying head. “That’s right during haying season. We could use the extra hands.”

“I need time to get ready for class,” Andrew said. “And frankly, if I don’t set eyes on something besides prairie soon, I might lose my mind.”

Warren stopped his ATV and shaded his eyes, looking up at the clouds. “Better get back.”

“Still got one more,” Andrew reminded him.

“Not gonna find him in this light. Just get ourselves lost if we try.”

“Coyotes might get him if we wait until tomorrow.”

“If that’s what’s meant to be,” Warren said.

Andrew gritted his teeth, knowing what was coming.

“Everything happens for a reason,” Warren continued. “We needed the rain. Could use more, to be honest. It was a bad summer. And a mild winter. Whole damn county’s gonna burn up, we ain’t careful.”

*     *     *
Let it burn, Andrew thought as he drove through town the next day, his economy car dwarfed by the diesel-powered pickups that loomed around him. He crawled along at the thirty miles an hour that was the highest speed permitted off the highway. Even that was dangerous: dogs ran free through the streets, and children darted out from between parked cars, invisible until they were right in front of him. It was a street made for parades, not traffic.

The banner stretched across the road advertised the last one of the year:

FANDANGO DAYS
Oct 21–24
Modoc County Fairgrounds

Below that was a cartoon of the high school mascot: a grinning Native American, incongruously white against a purple background.

Political correctness is for city folk, he thought, then grimaced as he realized the irony: they’d made a mascot of the same people they’d driven from the land and onto the Rez, where they’d continued the job with alcohol, methamphetamine, and fentanyl.

He parked in front of the town’s only grocery store and tried to ignore the eyes that followed him as he went in. He likewise ignored the suddenly silenced conversations that heralded his passage down the aisles. He dropped a box of cereal in the cart, followed it with milk, and decided, at the last minute, to add a bottle of rum. Drinking numbed the grinding days amid the sagebrush and unceasing wind. Andrew’s friends were all off on digs in Iraq and Egypt, but he was too poor to waste a summer on an unpaid internship.

The desert sun was blinding as he went outside, and he didn’t see the man until a pair of massive hands shoved him up against his car. A fist followed; he raised his arm to try to block it; he might as well have dodged a meteor. He saw stars, heard a brass band playing in his head.

He shook his head, and instinct made him duck to the left, barely avoiding the second swing. As his vision cleared, he looked up into Ronnie Gonzales’s alcohol-splotched face. Andrew stumbled backward, trying to edge his way to the car. With surprising dexterity, Ronnie sidestepped him, cutting off his retreat.

“Told you to stay off our land,” he said.

“How’d you—”

“Shut up! You’re lucky I caught you here, and not on the Rez. We gotta lotta room to hide bodies out there.”

Andrew scuttled sideways out of Ronnie’s range, still clutching his grocery bag. He wished now he’d carried a knife. He produced the bottle, holding it like an unwieldy club.

“Don’t come any closer,” Andrew said.

To his surprise and worry, Ronnie grinned and stepped forward.

“Boys! Please, let’s all settle down, now. We’re friends, right?” Tina’s warbling contralto came from behind him, but Andrew didn’t dare turn.

“No,” the two men said simultaneously.

“Ok,” Tina said. She edged slowly between them and put one soft hand on Andrew’s upraised arm, another on Ronnie’s fist, keeping her eyes locked with Ronnie. “Andrew, can you give me a ride back? Traci had to go to work.”

“Sure,” he muttered, not moving.

“He ain’t gonna be in a condition to give nobody a ride,” Ronnie said as he shook off her grip.

“Right,” Tina said. “You wanna go back to jail, Ronnie?”

He shrugged, as if it made no difference to him.

“Third strike,” she reminded him, and he deflated. He raised a calloused finger and waved it in Andrew’s face.

“Stay off the Rez, you understand? Your people already took enough from us.”

Andrew forced himself to nod, swallowing the rage that bellowed up inside.

Ronnie turned and stalked off.

“Come on,” Tina hissed, tugging at his arm. “We need to go. Right now!”

*     *     *
His hands trembled on the wheel, and he took his time backing out. Beside him, Tina was calm, her features placid, a mirror of the sky. Around one finger, she twirled auburn hair turned the color of wheat fields from long hours in the summer sun. She stared out the window, seemingly unconcerned how close they’d come to violence, as if it were nothing special. For her, it’s not, he realized.

They passed the last few bedraggled buildings marking the outskirts of town and passed onto the plain proper. The sky was threatening again, flat and gray, and he knew in another couple of weeks they’d get the first snow.

Tina began humming a nursery rhyme, the same one she always hummed when her mind was running on idle; he doubted she was even aware she was doing it:

“Mary had a little lamb, little lamb, little lamb ...”

“It’s so flat and empty,” he said, mostly as a way of breaking that flow of noise.

She looked his way, startled out of her reverie.

“I think it’s peaceful,” she said.

“Or desolate. Maybe that’s why everybody’s so angry all the time. It’s no wonder they put the internment camp up here. Where would you run to, even if you got out?”

“This is an old lakebed, you know.”

“Is that why they call it Tule Lake when there’s no lake?”

“There used to be. They say it disappeared.”

He snorted. “Lakes don’t just disappear, Tina. It’s not like you see them on the back of milk cartons.”

“They were blasting, or something or other. When they took down the internment camp, after the suicides. They didn’t find all those bodies, either. There’s lava caves all over these parts.”

He nodded. “I looked up the USGS survey maps when I took this job.”

“The what? Never mind. They say it must’ve drained into the old tunnels, but nobody was ever able to figure out where it went. Not even the government men.”

He glanced out the window at the sullen earth. Beside him, Tina resumed singing.

“I shall spend a season below the earth, with my sister Ereshkigal,” he muttered to himself.

“Huh?”

“Just something from my research.”

“About Isis?”

“Inanna,” he corrected. At her baffled look, he continued: “She was the goddess of love and war. Her sister ruled the realm of death.”

Tina laughed. “Sounds like she would have fit in up here.”

“Heh. Yeah, probably. She really knew how to party. She banished her first husband to the Underworld when he didn’t mourn for her.”

“Sounds like he deserved it. Men,” she said with a snort.

He looked to see if she was joking, but she was staring at the crowns of the mountains, slate gray against the gray sky. “Does that mean you don’t want to have dinner with me?”

“Ask me again tomorrow. We women are fickle creatures.”

*     *     *
“In case you didn’t cotton on, the white man ain’t welcome on the Rez,” Sal said.

Andrew gesticulated angrily, his waving hands cutting a hole in the smoky air. “You think they’d be happy to have someone volunteer. It’s not like they do much conservation as it is. How many artifacts are still out there, waiting to be discovered?”

“Maybe they want to leave them there,” Tina said. She sat beside him at a battered kitchen table, rolling a marijuana cigarette with a dexterity borne of long practice. Her lips moved silently as she worked: Mary had a little lamb ...

“That’s ...” he struggled for words. “You can’t just leave artifacts! They belong in a museum!”

Sal snorted. “Sure, Dr. Jones.”

“But it’s the truth!”

“What’s going to happen to them out there? They’re going to, what, get dirtier?”

Tina took a long puff on the finished joint. She offered it to Andrew, who waved it away. She frowned and passed it to Sal, who took it between his thin, nimble fingers. He already looked half-asleep, with his lowered eyes framed by dark lashes and long hair. But he always looked like he was on the verge of passing out.

“Are you coming to Fandango Days?” Tina asked. She coughed and waved the smoke away from her face.

“I don’t even know what it is. I’m new around here, remember?”

“I just thought everyone knew.”

“Only if you’re born here. Which everyone is quick to remind me I wasn’t.”

“They do it to all the newcomers. Took me years to finally fit in,” Sal said.

“It’s only in another couple weeks,” Tina said. “You’ll still be here then, right? Shearing season isn’t done until mid-October.”

“I’ve already talked to Warren. My classes start mid-September.”

“Oh.”

“What?”

“Nothing. I just thought, maybe, once you got to know the place better ...”

He couldn't help his laughter, though he could see the hurt in her face. “Sorry. It’s beautiful up here—” a gentle lie couldn’t hurt—“but my career is somewhere else. You can still tell me about it though,” he said by way of apology. “Was it some kind of rodeo? What’s a Fandango?”

She brightened once more, or at least pretended to. “That’s the pass. Where the first settlers crossed over the mountains into Modoc County.”

“Or where they were massacred by the Modoc,” Sal said.

Tina slapped his arm, then gestured for the joint again. “Spoilsport.”

“That’s not even right, anyway. They crossed in early spring. But half the time it’s still snowing up here then, so they celebrate it now.”

“Wait, there was a massacre?” Andrew asked. “I hadn’t heard about this.”

“They didn’t want you white people here,” Sal said. “Like you could blame them—smallpox, whiskey, resettlement ... ask me, they had the right idea. So they caught them at the top of the pass and wiped them out. Every one of them; didn’t even leave the children.”

“That’s not true,” Tina said. “They took the children. Did things to ’em.” She gave a gruesome, exaggerated shudder.

“But—same old story—the white man kept coming. Drove them off the land, tried to resettle them up in Tule Lake. You never heard of the Modoc War?”

“No! And I’ve lived here like the whole summer.”

Sal shrugged. “You don’t get out much. There’s a museum up there.”

“Now you tell me.”

“You know about the lava tunnels?” Andrew nodded. “That’s where they held off the Army. There’s a monument now. They go on for miles, down there, and the Army never would have found ’em.”

“Then what happened?”

“They surrendered.”

“Just like that?”

“I dunno, man. Maybe they ran out of food. Captain Jack—that’s what they called him, Captain Jack—he just walked into camp and gave himself up. Never talked about why. Some people say they found things down there, things they didn’t want to talk about.”

Andrew sputtered with laughter. “Sounds like a ghost story to me. It’s probably just some recycled harvest festival.”

“A say what now?” Tina asked.

“A harvest festival, like Thanksgiving. Or Sukkot, or the Heb-Sed. They’re all just harvest festivals. Fertility rituals, really. In Sumeria, they called it the Feast of Tammuz. Tammuz—Osiris—Jesus—they’re all dying and reborn gods. Corn gods, we call them.”

Sal looked out the window, where the rest of the ranch hands were gathered around the fire cooking dinner. “You might not want to say that too loudly ’round these parts.”

“That’s why I’m in here,” Andrew said. He helped himself to the joint. “The god dies, and his ashes are spread on the fields to renew the life. Those old rituals still survive. Like Halloween. But here you call it ... Fandango Days?” He grinned. “That’s why I love archaeology. The stories never go away, they just change.”

“Maybe, but Captain Jack is real,” Sal said. “I’ve seen some of the artifacts.”

“You’re making that up,” Andrew said, with a smile to take the sting out.

“Oh, they’re out there. You have to know where to look.”

“Like where, Dr. Carter?”

“A lot of it’s on Indian land. Obsidian arrowheads, stuff from the early ranchers. Even old army stuff from the cavalry outposts.”

“There’s even older things out there, too,” Tina said. “Older than the Indians, they say. Writing nobody can read. And places that, that don’t work right.” She ran down, looking around with suddenly sheepish eyes at the two men staring at her. “At least, that’s what my daddy told me.”

“There’s no story I haven’t already heard about ancient aliens.”

“I don’t think it’s aliens. I think it’s things that were here ... before ...” she trailed off, and they looked at her expectantly, but her gaze was focused on some farther horizon. After a moment, Andrew laughed to break the tension.

“Well, then, I’ll have my career made, won’t I?” he said.

Sal laughed. “If they don’t kill you and rebury it.” He slapped the table and rose. “Come on, I think dinner’s ready.”

*     *     *
The light took its time in leaving the high country, but the cold was already creeping in. Andrew savored the warmth of the fire, suddenly hungry after the alcohol and smoke.

Warren’s son Hank squatted by the fire pit, building tacos out of the roast. Andrew hesitated; Hank had made it clear he felt there was nothing a city boy could do that a country boy couldn’t do better. But tonight, he merely nodded and handed Andrew a plate.

He folded the taco in his hands and took a bite, savoring the greasy flakiness of the Indian bread as the hot juice gushed into his mouth.

“Hey city, know what that is?” Hank asked.

Andrew shook his head, indicating through his throaty moan that he didn’t know and, just at that point, didn’t care.

“That’s your little lost lamb from this morning.”

The grease congealed in his throat. He noticed all the old timers had gathered in a semi-circle facing him, waiting to see his reaction.

“Baaaaa, baaaaa,” Hank said. “Eat up, city boy.”

Andrew locked eyes with the other man and forced himself to chew, moving the food around in his mouth despite his desire to gag. He took a dramatic swallow. The laughter died down.

“It’s good,” Andrew said, to roars of approving laughter.

He moved on, dumping the plate as soon as he knew no one was watching. He headed back to the ranch house, hoping for another beer to wash out his mouth. He noticed Warren, sitting in the darkness of the porch shadow, smoking and staring at him.

“What’s this, pick on the new kid night?” Andrew demanded.

“Well, if I had to guess, I’d say it was dinner. Waste not, want not. Poor thing had to die, no two ways about that, but we can still respect it. Its death can sustain us. For a little while.” He sighed. “Always for a little while.”

That flat truth blunted the edge of Andrew’s anger. “They still could have warned me,” he said.

“Barely rained last winter. Hard snow the two before that. Lost a lot of stock then, especially among the lambs.”

“So you add cruelty to cruelty? As if the world didn’t serve up enough?”

“It takes a lot of gettin’ through to live up here. This land will eat you up, son. Eat you up.” He dropped the dog-end of his cigarette and crushed it out with the toe of his boot. “Gotta do something to take the stress off. Hell, it’s why I smoke. The other stuff, too,” he said, waving his hand at the ill-defined sins that roiled the portent darkness. “Don’t tell me they never did nothing like that at your school.”

“Well, maybe,” he admitted. “But you’ll have to do better than that for scary stories, old man. I work with the dead for a living.”

“What tall tales?”

“Captain Jack? Ghosts in the tunnels? Scary stuff. For a kid, maybe.”

Strangely, Warren’s brow wrinkled in apparent confusion. “Who’s been telling you all that?” he asked.

Andrew recounted the evening’s discussion. As he finished, Warren took off his broad-brimmed hat and ran his calloused hand down his craggy face, making a sour face as if he’d just bit into a lemon.

“Stay off the Rez, you understand me?”

“Of course. Just like yesterday, and the day before.”

“Way I heard it, you didn’t listen so good the first time. You know why they gave them the Rez?”

“Because it was theirs to begin with?”

Warren grimaced. “You’re still young enough to think life is fair.” He sighed and took a deep breath, chewing on his words. “Everything she told you was true. But she didn’t tell you all of it. About Captain Jack.” He lit another cigarette, stared off into the blackness of the hills. “All they wanted was to go home.”

“The settlers?”

“The Modoc. They’d sent ’em up to the Klamath Reservation, but those weren’t their people. Home belonged to the white man now, but they went anyway. The Army was waiting for them at Tule Lake.”

“I thought that lake vanished.”

“That was later. But still before the camps. It was the government men who thought of putting the camps here. Damn ’em to hell.”

“Right, wouldn’t want the government to get poking around.”

Warren stared at him for a long while.

“Folks don’t know how it is in the country,” he said. “We do things different out here. We’d be a lot better off if the government men would leave us alone.”

“Except for the farm subsidies, right?”

“They pay your wages, city boy.” He settled himself once more. “Anyway, Kintpuash—”

“Was that his real name? Captain Jack makes him sound like a joke.”

Warren shrugged. “Not to the settlers, he wasn’t. He killed General Canby and burned homesteads all along the Lost River, trying to make life hard enough the whites would up and leave. But more soldiers came instead. They drove the Modoc into the lava caves. They might have held out there for years, but Kintpuash was sold out by his men. The Left-Hand Man, they called him.”

“What, nobody bothered to ask his name?”

“As if they cared about a bunch of Indians?”

“No more than you do,” Andrew shot back. Warren continued as if he hadn’t heard. “He was their Judas. Sold them out to the Indian Agents. They hung Kintpuash and sent his body East. Denied him burial on his own land, even. The rest of them went peaceably after that. Later, they told the government men of strange things in the deep caverns, things that were worse than what the white man could do to them.”

The silence was heavy as Warren wound down. Andrew scuffed a foot along the deck, weighing his response.

“Good try, Warren, but I’m not buying that part either. Any more than the curse of the pharaohs killed Carnarvon.”

Warren rose and put his hat back on. “I don’t really give two flips if you believe it or not. Just do what I say, and you’ll be out of here soon enough.”

Warren went inside just as wobbling footsteps tottered around the corner. Tina staggered up, sipping something pink and—from the smell—alcoholic. She put her hand on Andrew’s chest, formed her fingers into a claw. She raked them down to his waist, let them linger there. She took a sip of her drink, leaving a lipstick stain on the rim, and offered it up to him.

“If you drink there, it’s almost like a kiss,” she said, the corner of her lip tilting up in a smile. She was close enough he could feel her heat.

He held the glass out away from him and reached for the door; she stepped into the circle formed by his arms. She tilted her head up and closed her eyes.

He pushed her away.

“I’ve had enough of this for tonight,” he said.

She opened her eyes. “Enough of what?”

“Sorry, Tina, but I’m not playing anymore. Fairy tales and tricks. Why don’t you go see if Sal is interested?”

“Fairy tales?” she repeated, her voice calm and dangerous. “Is that what you think?” She pranced away from him with tiny, skittering steps. She whirled on him, and the fury in her eye made him take an unwilling step back. “Tell you what. You know where Chimney Rock is?”

He nodded.

“Meet me up on the ridge tomorrow at noon. I’ll show you a fairy tale.”

“How come you get to be on the Rez?”

“Guess you’ll find out,” she said, slamming the door behind her.

*     *     *
The black basalt mass of Chimney Rock eclipsed the noon sun as Andrew stood before it, contemplating the sign warning that the land beyond was held in trust by the Modoc Indian Reservation. The wire fence it hung on was decrepit; it took no effort at all for him to slip through.

The ground here was rough and uneven, a thin scree of dirt upon masses of volcanic rock, and what low shrubs grew were scabrous and thorny. His lungs grew hot, and he glanced up to gauge his progress. There—against the glare of the sky—movement. Near a cluster of ridge-topping stones, by a lone juniper, two figures stood together. Andrew thought at first it might be Tina, and was about to wave. Then he saw, from their silhouetted profiles, that one wore a cowboy hat, the other some stranger headgear.

He ducked behind the cover offered by a strand of aspen, then began working his way uphill along the bank of the dry creek bed. He didn’t know if the others were with Tina, and until he determined more, he wanted to stay out of sight. His hand dropped to the hilt of the knife he’d decided, finally, to wear; Tina might be in danger, too.

It was tough going in the underbrush, and he soon found himself more climbing than walking. It was impossible to be stealthy, but he hoped the trees blocked some of the sound. As he came near the crest, he moved to his left, where the trees ran along the ridge line, and looked again for the two men.

Only one was visible, moving slowly along a switchback on the far side, his cowboy hat bobbing up and down. There was no sign of Tina, and Andrew crept closer, trying to keep the rocks between them as best he could. When he popped his head back up, the man was gone.

Cursing, he worked his way down the opposing side of the hill, trying to catch up.

This was a view he’d never seen before. The landscape stretched out below him, a patchwork of green fields and hills rolling out across the valley floor—and, along the far side, rows of white hydroponic tents that stretched along the shore of the ancient lakebed.

A marijuana grow? That’s what they were hiding up here? Andrew would have laughed if it hadn’t been so pathetic. It was legal in the state, and probably soon in the country. Whatever money they’d hoped to make, the law had impoverished them. Again.

None of this was helping him find Tina. He wondered if he should return to the gate and wait; she might have been running late. In the hangover morning, she might have forgotten completely.

But he’d never get to see this again.

Might as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb ... he made his way along the ridgeline, studying the topography with an archaeologist’s trained eye. All this land had bubbled up from the earth below, and the pockmarks of ancient lava flows were still obvious. Then, like a stereoscopic photo, what he was seeing finally leapt out at him.

“Not this far West,” he mumbled to himself, but there was no denying the crumbling, weatherworn green slope of what must once have been a vast earthen mound. His hands shook as he fumbled for his cell phone. A connection with the Mound Builders would make his career, and he wouldn’t need to afford airfare to the Middle East.

“Hey, white boy!”

A shower of dust billowed over Andrew as Ronnie slid down the hill toward him. In his right hand he dangled a deer’s head, and Andrew realized the strange headgear of the second silhouette had been antlers.

There was no way he could make it up slope before Ronnie’s massive hands closed on him. He dashed into the trees, where he could easily dodge the other’s slow, clumsy swings. He crept backward, using the wood for cover, looking for a place he could break and run.

“Andrew!”

Tina’s voice echoed from the top of the ridge. He glanced up, searching for her, and in that moment of distraction, Ronnie fell upon him like an avalanche. His first blow knocked the breath from him, and the second shoved him backward. He stumbled, and lightning flared in his head as he cracked his skull against the limb of a juniper. He turned to run and saw more people gathered behind him, dressed in skins and staring at him through the dead eyes of animal heads.

Grasping hands snatched at him.

He tried to shove past them, but, half-stunned from Ronnie’s blow, they caught him easily. He yanked his fist free and struck out, knocking one of them in the chin. That one’s decaying animal face sloughed off with the blow, revealing Hank’s tousled, greasy hair. He slapped Andrew hard on the ear as he wiped the blood from his lip.

“Never should have come here, city,” he snarled. He drew his blade, until another—older, and crowned with a ram’s horns—laid a restraining arm upon him.

“Everything happens for a reason,” Warren said. “And god knows, we need the rain.”

“If She chose this one, she ain’t much of a god.”

Warren’s slap echoed across the clearing. “You mind your tongue.”

Andrew’s arms were dragged behind him and he was bound with rough rope. Warren reached out and took Andrew’s shirt in both hands, tearing it open to reveal his undershirt. He reached out for this as well, and in a moment of panic Andrew jerked backwards. Warren caught two fingers in the material and pulled, and the thin cotton tore.

“Wait, hey, Warren, I’m sorry—” he began, trying to fight down his rising panic. Instead, Warren appeared to lose interest in him, turning away and rummaging in his bag. Then he raised a closed fist and blew a handful of fine powder in Andrew’s face.

Gagging, Andrew kicked backward, trying to escape the granular mist as he fought for breath. The fine powder—bitter as it fell upon his tongue—seemed to wring the moisture from his body. His knees buckled, but he was supported from behind by two faceless men.

Warren spent a moment studying him, then nodded and walked toward the mound as the others dragged Andrew along behind them. Warren murmured something—the cadence had the rhythm of a chant, or a lullaby—but Andrew’s ears were ringing, and noises sounded like they came from far away.

“Where are we going?” he tried to ask, but his tongue wouldn’t obey, and all that came out were a series of moaning grunts.

The rhythm of Warren’s song was getting to him, and he found himself humming along.

Mary had a little lamb ...

He coughed, and his throat closed tighter.

They drew close to the mound, though it wavered now in the haze, blurring in Andrew’s vision until it looked like it was composed of a series of terraces. He realized he was thinking of ziggurats. He blinked, trying to clear his vision, but the vision persisted.

It couldn’t be a ziggurat, he realized, because ziggurats were solid, while this had a yawning cavern of a mouth toward which they were headed.

They were going underground.

Andrew kicked and bucked, but the only response was to grasp him tighter. Day gave way to the gloom of a hypostyle hall, and still they went onward, down the sloping corridor toward deeper earth. There were pictographs on the walls, ochre animals dancing to the rhythm of a music Andrew could almost hear.

He let himself sag in his captor’s grip. The sudden heft of dead weight made Hank stumble, and Andrew squirmed from his grasp and dashed down the hall, blind as a newborn kitten in the cloying dark.

“Dammit! Gonna truss him like a pig when I catch him!”

Andrew’s pounding feet found only air. He threw his arms before his face to break the impact.

Just before he fell, Andrew heard Warren respond: “He made his choice. Soon he’ll remember his name ...”

Then the earth hit him, and black on black, the world went away.

*     *     *
Andrew woke in darkness, stiff from lying on the hard rock. His throat was dry as the summer prairie, his mouth thick with the bitter grit of Warren’s powder. Gingerly, he felt his head. It ached, but he felt no tender spots. He rose to his knees, fighting a wave of dizziness. After a few moments, he climbed slowly to his feet.

Short-lived hope soared and died in his chest as his cell phone flickered, then faded to permanent black. Above him, a grayish square of light hinted at a world beyond his reach. He jumped anyway, and failed. He tried again. And again.

On the third try, his foot came down on a rock and a bolt of agony shot through his ankle. He fell and lay there, his breath coming fast and loud in that small space.

Calm, he thought. They’ll hear me. But trying to hold his breath made a fire kindle in his chest, threatening to turn into a supernova. He gasped for breath, struggling to draw anything in through the grit in his lungs.

He felt a coolness on his cheek.

Shock. I’m going into shock.

He felt it again, and realized it was a trickle of cool air tickling his face. He squinted into the gloom, raising one hand to block out the thin glow above him. There was another, feebler glow ahead.

He walked toward it, one arm extended, tentatively testing each step before putting his full weight down. Darkness surrounded him as he entered a tunnel whose roughly chiseled sides glowed faintly: red, blue, green ... he examined them. Whoever had found or built this place had covered the walls in pictograms, and luminescent fungi had colonized these exposed scratches. The figures danced and shivered with the play of light along their lines, and they depicted feathered and horned humans, antelope, bison, and ... sheep?

They must have hunted wild sheep, Andrew thought. Sheep had come with the Europeans.

The mushrooms’ glow did little to light the path before him. As he put distance between him and the chamber, he thought he could make out, below him, a faint murmuring.

“There might be a subterranean river. It would explain the tubes.” He realized he’d spoken aloud and swallowed down a moment of panic. He paused as a wave of dizziness rolled over him.

The glowing figures stretched on into the distance, becoming less distinct, a series of dots and triangles that, as he studied them, reminded him of letters.

“Hi,” the wall said.

He stumbled backward, nearly falling before he caught himself on the far wall.

“You might as well kill yourself now,” it said.

He whirled around. A face hovered before him, and though he blinked, it didn’t change the fact that he was staring at the grinning Native face of the high school mascot. It even glowed purple, each tooth in its absurdly grinning face outlined in violet, as was the feather that protruded from its headband. As he studied it, it winked at him.

“What are you?” Andrew whispered.

“Huh. The kids these days,” it said, rolling its eyes. The face ... tensed ... was the only word Andrew could think of, and popped free from the wall to hover before him in space. “They used to tell ’em a thing or two before they sent ’em down here. Name’s Captain Jack.”

Andrew shook his head. I’m ahlucninating. Hacculinate ... he couldn’t even pronounce the word right in his mind.

“Good guess, but no,” the other figure said as it too emerged. This one was a full human, but that didn’t help; he was still glowing, green and blue and crimson. His somber scowl eclipsed the twin suns of his eyes. Captain Jack stuck a neon tongue out at it.

“Oh, lighten up, Lefty! It’s Festival Time!”

Andrew stumbled away, dragging himself further down the tunnel. He moved faster, pushing himself along as quickly as he dared in the darkness. When he was finally out of earshot, he allowed himself to collapse, resting his cheek against the smooth stone of the chamber floor.

Kintpuash chuckled behind Andrew’s right ear. “These tunnels go on for miles, you know. Chew through the whole plateau. Maybe more than that, even. They put up that monument yonder, but this is where the real deal went down.”

“No, no,” Andrew protested. “You're not real. I'm just reading the words on the wall.”

“Yep. In the dark. In a cave. In a new language. Under a pyramid. Makes sense to me.” He began humming, and after a moment, Andrew found himself following along.

“Mary had a little lamb, little lamb ...”

“Won’t be long now.”

Andrew craned his neck up. “You must be the Left-Hand Man.”

The figure knelt next to Andrew. The glowing lines of his body cast strange shadows on the floor. “Funny the places we think of as home. We died to get to the place they died to get away from. But in the end, we all died.” He rose once more. “So will you. Might as well make it quick, hey city?”

“Still angry, Lefty? You just need a little fun’s, all. We ain’t had nobody to play with since the camp.” He turned to Andrew. “What’s your name, boy?”

“Why don’t you tell me how to get out of here?” Andrew said.

“Already did,” the ghost of Left-Hand Man said.

“Really. Not. Helpful,” Andrew said.

“Fine then. Go on. See where it gets you.”

Andrew dragged himself further along, doing his best to ignore the thirst that gripped his throat, the dizziness that made up feel like sideways. He found himself humming to drown out the drumbeat of panic in his mind:

Mary had a little lamb, little lamb, little lamb ...

Mary had a little sin ...

“That ain’t right,” Left-Hand Man said.

“Don’t tell him!” Kintpuash said. “You’re always spoiling everything!”

“It wasn’t her sin; it was yours.”

Faint memories, like the sound of his breath, began to echo in his mind.

The water sounds were clearer now, along with a faint susurration that teased the ragged edges of his perception. He paused, listening, and the susurrus became a whispering.

Kintpuash’s head bobbed before him like a floating tobacco ad.

“The army drove us into the caves, but that was ok, because that’s where we found Her. I made a deal, see. Not like my grandpa did; none of that beads and pelts stuff for me. But we did what She asked us—”

“Including the sacrifices,” Left-Hand Man said, but Kintpuash continued over him.

“—and we listened to her secrets. That’s where I learned about the secret tunnels. Hoo! Then we killed us some white folks. Killed ’em like flies in a bad horse summer!”

“And our own, Kintpuash.”

“And so? I brought life to this place, Lefty.”

“And death.”

The grinning face winked and nodded. “Same thing. She gets hungrier, you know. Sometimes the world turns from life to death. But you know that. And we were dead anyway. Hard enough up here. You remember that summer, Lefty? No rain for two seasons. The earth was dry, and the lambs cried out in the night.”

“We could have used the rain,” the other admitted.

“But you whites, you were like the stars in the sky. And you gotta sleep sometime.”

“We won,” Andrew said. Petulant, but Kintpuash’s manic grin was getting on his nerves.

“The war’s still goin’ on, son. The sins of the first days follow us. Sins of the father, dressed all in yellow.”

Andrew was wheezing now. The dust felt like it had dried out his insides too.

“You said ... my name ...”

“You figured it out yet?”

He furrowed his brow, trying to tease out the knowledge that seemed to linger on the edge of his awareness. Instead, he found that damned tune running through his mind.

“Mary had a little lamb ...”

Kintpuash guffawed. “That ain’t your name, it’s one of hers Try again.”

His accusation miffed Andrew. “Be quiet. You’re dead anyway. They hanged you.” Hanged? Hung? He couldn't remember.

“So they did, so they did. But while the soul takes the shape, the water ain’t the bottle.”

“He'll see what you mean soon enough,” Left-Hand Man said. “Unless he decides to do what’s right for once.”

“Throw himself off a cliff? Not many of those down here.”

“He’s got a knife; he could use it.”

“And waste all that life on nothing? Ain’t that right, boy? You came here to study us, didn’t you? Time to learn.”

Andrew kept crawling, and for a while there was only the darkness, and the muffled sound of his labored breath; in, out, a rhythmic rising and falling that contrasted with the path he crawled, which went only further down.

*     *     *
His hand hit stone, and the pain jerked him back to consciousness. He felt the solid wall before him and realized he could go no further. His head spun, and hunger gnawed his belly. He lay on the floor of the earth, too tired to kneel, and coughed in a vain attempt to clear the dust from his throat.

He tried to speak, but only a croaking whisper came:

Mary had a little sin, a little sin, a little sin ...

Mary had a little sin, she dressed it all in yellow ...

Mary? Surely it was Inanna that he loved ...

“And Isis and Astarte and all her Thousand Names,” the Left-Hand Man said.

He craned his head and saw the two faces shimmering above him; behind them, the sky filled with stars. He blinked and saw the cave roof once more. In the phosphorescent glow, he saw that it was pinpricked with thousands of small, circular openings. He laid his head down again, and caught the susurrating whisper all around him. He realized it was voices, each a whispered litany—

What’s happened with General Canby?

They took my home.

We need the rain.

They took my baby!

Why’d they put us in this camp?

We need the rain.

We’re not Japanese, we’re American.

There’s nowhere to run.

We need the rain.

And over and above them all, Left-Hand Man’s urgent insistent plea:

kill yourself kill yourself kill yourself

The whispers flowed around and past him, upwards through the openings that spread through the rock, then outward across the secret tunnels that undermined the country’s foundation.

“That was the deal she made with us,” Kintpuash said. “And I took it gladly enough. These fields grow despair.” He chuckled, and his great purple eye winked. “And they think it’s a harvest festival!”

“Where am I?”

“This is the belly of the world, son. Or its womb; can’t really tell. And maybe they’re the same thing for Her. It gets kinda crazy, down here in the Underworld.”

“In the earliest myths, the Earth eats her children,” Andrew muttered. He coughed feebly, but the dust was part of him now. “I’m so tired ...”

“And we’ll thank you for that energy spent. There’s just one little thing we need.”

“My blood.”

“Well, ain’t you a smart one.” The face grew closer, whispered in Andrew’s ear. “She tol’ me a secret, you know. She said when she stood naked before her sister—”

“Ereshkigal.”

“Yep, Her. But She said it was her own eyes she looked into.”

Andrew nodded weakly. “I know. That’s why I ran from her. In the ... in the first city.”

The grinning face grew translucent as it faded. “Time to get moving, city.”

Rough hands grabbed him. Hank and Warren hoisted Andrew between them and dragged him toward the petroglyph of a door that had been carved on the wall. As they approached, a blackness grew from within it. They stepped through, into a larger chamber.

They began chanting in unison, their high, singsong voices strangely androgynous.

Move on toward your city, Inanna

We will take Dumuzi in your place.

“No. Do not want,” Andrew said. The words felt wrong on his thick and desiccated tongue. It hurt to form the syllables, simultaneously alien and intimate as milk. “This is not of my desiring,” he said at last.

“Do not let the priestess of heaven be put to death in the underworld! We offer you the river gift, the blood in its rising.”

“This is not of my desiring.”

“We offer you the grain-gift, the sprinkling of ashes.”

“This is not of my desiring.”

They emerged into a vast space, smelling of chill, filthy, slopping water. In the distance a lake, heavy with time and sediment, stretched to the far edges of the cavern.

Andrew chuckled. “So that’s why they never found it.”

A boat awaited at the shore. They stepped aboard the rope-lashed wood and it began to move across the water, toward an island in the center.

He heard chanting, fragments of what he knew to be Coptic, Aramaic, and even older tongues.

My queen, here is the choice of your heart

The king, your beloved bridegroom

Mary, here is your lamb.

“Let, oh let my name be returned to me,” Andrew said, for he had no choice.

From the edges of the island, other figures gathered about the altar in the island’s center. Some he recognized: the ranch hands, Ronnie, Sal. Others wore fragments of cloth that might once have been buckskin tunics or cavalry uniforms.

Andrew tried to turn away, but the genetic memory of muscles older than his own moved his feet for him, and at last he recalled his name, the one they chanted in that ancient, familiar tongue:

Walk on toward your fields, Inanna

We will take Dumuzi in your place.

Warren grasped Andrew’s arm, and led him up the slope.

“He ran from Her,” he announced.

“He always runs,” they echoed in their sing-song litany.

I’m always running, he thought, though they weren’t his memories. Running from the horror in the temple, and the bleating of the lambs in the night ... it was always night, here, and the graves went on and on ...

“Still, everything happens for a reason.”

“... a reason.”

“And we could use the rain,” he said.

“Bring the rain, Inanna,” the others echoed.

They arrived at the crest, where a stone crypt stood; before it, a stained stone slab.

There was movement from within as Tina, naked, emerged, squirming, writhing her body in a way that shouldn’t have been possible for a creature with bones. She swayed from side to side as her body wavered, dissolved, and became a cow, with the moon between her horns, then a woman again, but with wings dripping gore, and a hooved, tentacled creature that stomped its hairy feet into the earth, then Tina once more, head lolling, eyes staring into nothingness, wearing a harlot’s smile.

“Father, give me the Bull of Heaven,” she said, licking her lips with the tip of her tongue.

Warren forced Andrew to his knees before the altar that was the world.

From the corner of his eye, he saw the flickering form of the Left-Hand Man.

“Last chance,” that apparition said.

“I can’t,” Andrew tried to say, but all that emerged was a guttural burble—he had no moisture left to give the air.

“You want this to keep going?”

Andrew struggled to move his arms, fighting the inert weight of his own tissue.

Tina bent over to touch a finger to Andrew’s lips. Her breathing ragged, she sang:

Here is the choice of my heart

My king, my beloved bridegroom.

Though his arms were hot coals, he managed to raise his hands to the arching vault above him. As he did, his fingers brushed, then curled around the handle of his knife. He moaned through chapped lips. “Utu, you are a just god, you are a merciful god. Let me escape from my demons, let them not hold me.”

For just one moment, he was free. He lunged forward, plunging the knife deep into Tina’s chest. She stopped, glanced down the handle, shrugged, and stepped back, dragging the knife from his hands. No blood flowed from the wound, for the land was dry, and the lambs cried out in the night.

Spent, Andrew rolled off the altar slab, collapsing into a boneless heap on the ground. Warren, Hank, and Sal crowded around him. Strong, calloused hands grasped his legs and lifted him back up. He kicked out, but his blows had no strength. Writhing, he locked eyes with Sal, cursed, and found moisture enough to spit at him.

“Et tu, Brute?”

Sal blinked his great, dark, sleepy eyes. As they sang

Walk on toward your fields, Inanna

We shall take Dumuzi in your place.

Sal angled his body so the others couldn’t see and pressed his own blade into Andrew’s palm.

“Ten years up here, and they still call me ‘New Kid.’ Said I still needed to ‘prove myself.’ The hell with them. Do the right thing, city. For once.” As Sal stepped away, Andrew thought he saw the Left-Hand Man’s stern and solemn face flicker below that placid expression.

Tina bent low over him, her arms arching above his body, her body stretching hideously to eclipse his own.

He turned the blade and plunged it into his own heart.

The singing descended into wails. Tina stumbled, lurched back, and clutched her body, which tried to melt into its every form at once, sprouting tentacles from hairy breasts as hooves erupted from where her face once was. She staggered backwards, her protean form jerking her left and right as new limbs—wings, arms, tentacles—sprouted, were absorbed, and grew forth elsewhere.

“My Lady!” Warren screamed, rushing to her. As he approached, a looping tentacle snared him, lifted him on high, and hurled him into the lake. Tina turned her back on her worshippers and tottered on uncertain legs into the darkness of the crypt.

Andrew lay on the rock, surprised he felt no pain as each weakening beat of his heart spattered red geysers—feebler, now—onto his drenched clothes, from whence it pooled and dripped uselessly onto the rocks that trembled below him. He heard screaming, but he was too tired to see who it was. The cavern was quaking as it came apart, and he let the motion lull him to sleep as the tithing cup of the heartland’s fury ran finally dry.