Sivan Va'aki: Arrival and the Sai Jukam

The pull led me to a node.

That is the only word I have for it that works across the four languages I use to think in, which tells you something about what it is: a geographic point where something has been happening for long enough that the land itself carries the memory. A node. The bones of the earth remember differently at a node than they do at ordinary ground - there is a weight to the memory, a concentration, the way water does not distribute itself evenly across a surface but collects in the low places and stays.

I arrived at the ruins in the late hour before morning. The great house stood in the plain: abandoned seventy years, the living Huhugam gone, the roof already open to the stars in the way roofs become open when no one repairs them and the time is long enough. The building itself was not what called me. What called me was underneath it.

I sat at the base of the compound wall and I listened.

I want to be careful about how I describe what I heard, because the dead I found here were not like the dead anywhere else on the road. The Mogollon dead had been old but recognizable - practitioners of ritual, people who had organized their knowledge into a form I could approximate. The Hopi dead had been immediate and decisive. The Navajo leavings had been grief’s remainder. What spoke to me at Sivan Va’aki was something older and stranger than any of those, and in a register I had not encountered in twenty years of the road, and I do not want to reduce it to something it was not by using familiar language.

What I can tell you: they were willing.

That is the distinction. That is the thing the entire road had been denying me since Tenochtitlan, since the six skulls and the long northward walk and the expulsions and the absence and the chindi that spoke only of what it could not finish. Twenty years of finding dead who either named me and expelled me or could not give me what I was looking for. And then: the first layer at Sivan Va’aki, the first voice from below the great house, and the quality of its attention was not wariness and was not verdict and was not residue.

They speak to me, I thought. And then, more slowly: they are speaking to me.

The first layer were the sai jukam - the mountain people, they translate to, the ones who came before the Huhugam who built the great house, who came from I’itoi’s own tradition in a way I did not yet have the language to understand. Strange dead. The strangest I had met. Not because of hostility but because of the way their register worked - not the below-language pressure-register of the very old dead, not the image-and-weight of the Mogollon; something else. Something that used a cosmological map I did not have.

I did not understand most of what they said. I want to be honest about this. Understanding is not required to listen. I had been alone for twenty years on a road where most of the dead either could not speak to me or would not, and what the sai jukam offered was the opportunity to be in the presence of the willing-to-speak. I took the opportunity.

I sat with my back against the compound wall and I let the voices accumulate. I did not plan to stay. I was traveling north because north was where the road went, where the stars pulled, where I had not yet been. I thought: I will listen until I understand what they are saying and then I will continue.

I listened until the stars completed their arc and the sky went gray and I moved inside the ruined walls for the day. I told myself: tomorrow I continue north.

The next night I sat down at the same wall and listened again.

I did not go north for three hundred years.