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artistic enough to set them free.
    He is silent for a while. A coyote howls somewhere on the plain, and it is a reminder of the wild things that roam everywhere around them. But the man seems not to hear the creature –
in fact, seems tohear nothing save the voice of his own speaking, constant, inexhaustible, evened to a single level as if it were a thing forged in fire and hammered over time into something long
and flat and unbendable. It is a voice that continues even when he has stopped speaking – for him and for the listeners too – a voice of mortar and steel, like the framework that
remains when a building crumbles. Itis a structural element that endures, even though it holds up nothing at all.
    Don’t get me wrong, he continues finally. I knew women in my time. Them and their flowery effulgence dropping like pollen on all the world. It’s a powerful dust – like
fairies – it gets in your eyes and blinds you from things. And why have we always got to see anyway? Aren’t there times where we shut our eyes fullwillingly? The truth. They used to
say that beauty and truth were the same thing. But from what I seen, the two are at deep odds. You try for the truth, try to fill your heart up with it. It’s the action of an honourable man,
ain’t it?
    He is quiet again for a moment, and no one moves.
    But this other woman, he says, this redhead, this priestess, this Vestal, whatever she was – she wasbeautiful in a different way, like she lived in that beauty the way other people
live in houses. Did the beauty belong to her or did she belong to it? You can’t tell such things. She was all of a beauty, and there was no name invented by human tongue could check her. But
she was other things too.
    He pauses as if to line up his words in proper order.
    It ain’t exactly right to say shewas a trickster, ain’t exactly right to say she wore masks. Instead it was like one single mask handed off to a whole host of people for each of
them to wear it for a little while. You spoke to her, and you weren’t never sure who it was behind that face. Not that it mattered none. The face itself was the thing. The face was the thing
in the end. It made you love it – and whatever shams it perpetrated,well, you loved them too.
    *
    They drive on. In a place called Shiprock, they see signs for the Four Corners Monument where the miracle is that four states meet at a single point.
    Let’s go there, says the Vestal Amata.
    You’re just tryin to delay our trip, Moses says.
    Maybe I am and maybe I ain’t, but don’t you want to see it?
    Moses considers. Eventually, he says:

    I reckon I do.
    So they drive fifteen miles west and find the monument, which is just a big granite platform in the middle of the desert covered over almost entirely by years of collected dirt and weed.
There’s a corpse half buried in the dirt, in the middle of the platform, its skin mummified black and leathery by the sun. Moses drags the corpse away.
    At first they aren’t sure whatthey’re looking for, and then Moses kicks away the layers of dirt on the platform where the corpse was until he finds a bronze disc the size of a
saucer embedded in the middle of it. What the disc says is:
    US DEPARTMENT OF THE INTERIOR
    CADASTRAL SURVEY
    BUREAU OF LAND MANAGEMENT
    1992
    And in the middle of the disc is something that looks like an addition signwith the names of the four states in each of the quadrants: Utah, Colorado, Arizona, New Mexico.
    Here we are, says Moses Todd.
    Yep, says his brother.
    Sort of makes you feel like you’re at the centre of things, doesn’t it? says the Vestal Amata.
    It does at that, says Moses Todd.
    Someone went to all that trouble, says the Vestal, to locate that exact point in the dirt.
    Andfor what? says Abraham. Now it don’t mean anything.
    But Moses thinks differently.
    It never meant anything, Moses says. Not to the god above it and not to the earth below it. It never did. Not even when they first did it. But it’s the doin it that counts. It’s
something. You draw imaginary lines. That’s what you do.
    The Vestal looks at him kindly, a smile on her lips that seems affectionate– even maybe admiring.
    Then what do you do with the lines? she asks.
    And Moses looks at her straight and true. He says:
    Then you pick one side or the other and you stand there.

Part Two
    SANCTUARY

Six
    Snow » Dolores » Historic Rio Grande Southern » USB » The Trials of Bitchery » Breakdown » A Clearing, a Cabin » A