Sacred Ground

by Mercedes Lackey

  And there were those pesky bills to pay-

  "Well, Mr. Sleighbow, I guess you've just hired yourself a P.I.," she said slowly. "I'd rather it was me than someone with a prejudicial axe to grind."

  "So would we, Miss Talldeer." Yes, that was relief in his voice too. "This way no one can be accused of not giving the Native Americans under suspicion the benefit of the doubt. Send your invoices to me, directly-"

  He dictated an address, which she noted down; while this seemed to be a perfectly legitimate job, she would be taking no chances. She'd be checking both the job and Sleighbow, tonight and tomorrow before she actually did anything at all on the case. There had been cases of people pretending to an authority they did not have; there had been hoaxes perpetrated on P.I.'s too.

  They both made polite if hurried good-byes, and she hung up the phone. But she did not return to the living room; instead, she remained at the desk, thinking hard, absently doodling on her notepad. Dust danced in the golden light coming in through the miniblinds at her office window, and there was a pair of blue jays pigging out at the feeder just outside.

  She had to think this thing through, very carefully. She had to be absolutely sure of her own feelings and motivations before she found herself tangled in something she was not prepared to handle, emotionally and mentally.

  If there was a conspiracy-if it was activists-

  Her own people. Possibly a cause she had been involved in herself. One she was emotionally supporting-

  I still have to turn them in. This was murder, terrorism. I can't play cute little semantics games and call them "freedom fighters."

  Yes, that was it. There was a line that had to be drawn. What was the old saying? "The freedom to swing your fist ends at my nose." The freedom to be passionate about a cause ended when people could be hurt because of that passion.

  People who murder innocent people in the name of a cause are still terrorists, no matter how noble that cause is. She had drawn that line for herself; now she must stick to it.

  I hate terrorists. I hate them and everything they are. They're cowards who won't face the enemy honorably. They 're like the cowards who used to scalp women and claim they had taken warriors' scalps-like the ones who attacked villages when the men were on the buffalo hunts.

  That was another line of demarcation; the line between "warrior" and "terrorist." A warrior was one who fought an enemy who knew he was the enemy-who fought other warriors, openly. There had been times in Osage warfare when coups were not even counted by taking a warrior's scalp, but by merely touching him and getting away again. That was the purest form of warfare.....

  But there had been times when the enemy did not abide by the rules, when he too became a terrorist. There was a site not that far from her home in Claremore where that had happened, where a band of mixed Heavy Eyebrows scum, renegade Cherokee, and rejects from other tribes had overrun an Osage village, killing, torturing, and raping the women, old men, and children left behind. Claremore Mound, it was called now. She could never come near the site without feeling rage overcome her, a rage triggered by all that helpless blood spilled-by the powerful grief and fear and pain left behind by the victims.

  Anyone who sets bombs in bulldozers is no warrior, and he deserves to die like a poisoned dog, without honor, without a way for Wah-Ko'n-Tah to recognize him, so that his spirit joins the mi-ah-luschka and he wanders forever-

  She felt that old rage building in her and stifled it.

  You can't just condemn an entire race for things people who weren't even their ancestors did. That was why she had broken with the more ardent activists back in college. You can't shove everyone into the same pile just because of their bloodlines. She wanted her rights, and the rights for all of the Native Peoples, just as much as any of them did-they'd all been cheated and lied to for too long, deprived of homes, of religion, of heritage-

  Even her family, who had only kept their ways at the cost of hiding them, who had not until her father's generation been able to be Osage openly.

  But she could not take those rights like a thief and an assassin; not at the cost of murder. Not at the cost of the lives of people who had nothing to do with the problem.

  Because you couldn't put all Heavy Eyebrows into the same category, any more than you could every Indian, or even (and this could get her in a world of trouble from some of her own people, or those of other nations, who had their own little sets of prejudices) every member of a nation or tribe. Pawnees weren't Osage, who weren't Cherokee, who weren't Apache, who weren't Algonquin, who weren't Mohawk-

  There were people of every type in every nation; no one was Noble and Honorable just because he (or she) was Native American. There were people from nations traditionally her "enemies" that she would trust to cover her in a life-or-death situation, and people of her own nation she wouldn't trust as far as she could throw them. You couldn't even pigeonhole people by their professions, for not every Indian made a living on the reservation weaving blankets and making jewelry. There were Mohawks who couldn't stand heights, Navaho physicists, and Algonquin computer programmers.

  There were people like Gail, who had tried in her way to right the wrong that had been done by her ancestors, and people like her husband, whose ancestors had never seen an Indian, who had been quite prepared to continue that wrong.

  So just because someone's grandfather did something awful to my grandfather, that doesn't make him responsible, unless he decides to continue the wrong. Yeah, better me in charge here than someone else. Seems to me that occasionally it was. one of the duties of the shaman to play judge and executioner-or at least cop-

  "You still didn't tell me why you were afraid of the box."

  Grandfather's voice behind her made her jump; she hadn't heard him come up behind her, and she hadn't heard the door to her office open, either.

  She pushed off from the desk, turning her chair to face him. He stood there with his "teaching" face on, which meant that he wasn't going to leave until she said out loud what it was that had so troubled her.

  "Because there was a sacred pipe in there, that's why." She frowned at him, angry at being forced to admit her own weakness and her own deficiencies. "Not just any pipe, either, but a powerful one, created by and for a Lakotah shaman's use. Dammit, Grandfather, you know I'm not a pipebearer! You know why, too; you know I'm not strong enough, I'm not good enough to handle it safely if it had remembered that the Lakotah and the Osage weren't exactly best buddies, and decided I was a threat!" She stared him straight in the eyes, all her bitterness there for him to see for himself. "You've told me that often enough, and you know you have."

  But Grandfather did not seem in the least disturbed, not by her half-accusations, nor by her bitterness. "I've told you that you'll be ready only when you stop thinking you should be ready. You should listen to what I say, not what you think you hear."

  And with that, he calmly turned and went back into the living room. Back to his Nintendo, no doubt.

  She counted to ten, slowly, in English, Osage, and Cherokee. Useful, to have three languages to do it in. Four, if you counted her rudimentary Spanish-so for good measure, she did it in Spanish, too.

  Well, now that he'd gotten that out of the way, he'd probably leave her alone about it. Sometimes she wondered just what he thought he was doing when he asked her things like that. ...

  No, he knows what he's doing. I just don't understand it. She sighed, and picked up the little table-fetish one of her clients had sent her as a gift. Bear, and she wasn't Bear clan-and Zuni, and she wasn't Zuni-but the thought had been kindly and the gift had meaning because of that. She cradled it in her hand, a lovely cool piece of soapstone, comforting to hold because of its gentle curves.

  She had been the only one in the family to have Medicine Power; she would be the only one he had time to train before he died. Was he feeling frustrated too, having to work with a flawed tool?

  After all, he'd been teaching her so many things that she was not, by trad
ition, "permitted" to know. The Medicine of all the other gentes, for instance; and men's Medicine as well as woman's-and Warrior's Medicine.

  Well, he's always been pretty contrary-what do the Lakotah call it? Heyoka, I think. Part of that comes with the territory, I suppose, and part of it comes with being a changer and not just a traditionalist. Still. You put what you have in the only pot you have, I guess, even if the pot is flawed. And you hope the flaw isn't going to be a fatal one.

  Oh yes, part of the shamanic training was to be able to put yourself in the place of another, to see if you could understand what he must be going through. And she could understand it-

  But why couldn't he understand her? Why couldn't he just tell her what it was that was holding her back?

  Kestrel still hadn't heard him, although she had listened to him. She had paid no heed to what he had said; she had only heard what she expected to hear.

  Mooncrow reminded himself not to grind his teeth; it made his jaw ache afterwards. That girl; that incredibly stubborn girl! For all of his years and patience, there were times-

  There would have been times with any pupil, but it was all the more frustrating with his granddaughter. She had not been the only choice to be his successor in the family-no, there had been others, including a cousin or two. But after he had seen her with Rabbit, and had seen how fearlessly and effortlessly she had dealt with the Spirit World, there had not been anyone else in the running. She was, in fact, the best apprentice he had seen in all of his life, and she had no idea just how good she really was. Things it had taken him until late in adulthood to master she had achieved in her early twenties. But he would not tell her that; it would not help her to know that, and might harm her. It would certainly reinforce her certainty that she was "ready" to be a pipebearer, and that would do her no good at all.

  It might also harm her to know just how strong she was, for that might either frighten her or make her try even harder for control. She would command more Power than he ever had, once she loosened up a little, and got over this current fixation of hers with how she must be the one who held the reins and guided everything.

  As he contemplated his own frustration in dealing with Kestrel, he closed his eyes and told himself to relax. He remembered a car-enthusiast friend of his seething with a similar frustration during a televised race. When Mooncrow had asked why, the friend had explained how the power of the particular car he favored had been deliberately lessened by restrictive devices placed on it by "rules". Now Mooncrow understood that frustration, watching Kestrel flounder. All that potential-and until she stopped making up the rules that restricted her power, the potential would never be fully freed.

  No matter how he tried to tell her this, she simply did not understand, because she would not understand. To understand what he was trying to tell her would mean that she must give up some of her control, and put herself in the hands of Wah-K'on-Tah and all the mysteries. She wanted things, concrete things-"if a, then b and c"-not times and places where there were no rules, or where she would have to find the new ones.

  And he could only relieve his frustration by stacking little electronic blocks. . , Jennifer had succumbed to the cable temptation some time ago, mostly for the news, but also to give Grandfather a little more choice in what he watched. Interestingly, what he watched was, in order, CNN, Discovery, and MTV. Sleigh-bow had been right; it was a relatively slow news day, and the explosion not only made the local news, it made the networks as well as CNN. In fact, the national coverage was better than the local, probably because the big guys were a bit less squeamish about gore than the three local stations.

  Not that she blamed the local folk. The pictures, even "sanitized" for general viewing, were pretty ugly, and the local news people knew that there would be friends and relatives watching tonight. The local anchors hadn't gotten around to listing the victims yet; CNN had. And one thing hit her immediately when she heard the names-most of the victims had been Indians, presumably the ones who hadn't quit. Not whites.

  That made her sit back in her chair and stare at the screen, ignoring the flash-flood story from Arizona that followed. Most of the victims were our people. Would an activist, even a fanatic, have planted an explosive, then triggered it, under conditions where most of the victims were his own people? You killed the enemy, not your own warriors. You killed "The Man," not the presumed victims of his oppression.

  It didn't make sense. It didn't even make sense if you figured in the possibility that he might have counted anyone working for this developer as a traitor. He would know how other Indians would feel about deaths in their own ranks. Especially very insular types who still harbored prejudices against any Indian from another nation. She'd heard enough stories about treacherous Blackfeet and-from her own folk-traitorous Cherokees to know that. An incident like this would not foster solidarity, it would create divisions.

  No. No, this was not adding up. This made no sense whatsoever.

  Time to call home again. Dad's got the best grapevine in the county; maybe he's heard something. If he hasn't, and I ask him to keep his ear to the ground, he might.

  She dialed the familiar number without even looking at the buttons, and waited. It was picked up on the first ring this time.

  "Talldeer residence, Sarah Talldeer speaking. Can I help you?"

  Jennifer grinned to herself, and replied in Cherokee, "Beloved Mother, you are going to get yourself stolen by a marauding Japanese seller-of-goods if you continue to answer the telephone that way. We shall have to go on the war trail in order to steal you back, and you know the Japanese have no good horses to take! How shall we get your worth in raiding with no horses to carry off?"

  "Jennie darling, you are going to confuse the hell out of the nice FBI man tapping the phone if you keep speaking foreign languages," her mother countered, this time in English. She laughed, and so did Jennie.

  That was a family joke, although at one point there probably had been a tap on the phone, either because of Jennifer's activism or because of her current occupation. There might be again. Oddly enough, no one in the family really cared. Sarah Talldeer's attitude was that since no one in her family had anything to hide, there was no reason to worry. Jennifer, although she would have been outraged when she had been in college, was now fairly philosophical about it. And both her brothers and her father took a kind of puckish pleasure in the idea that some poor fool might be listening in.

  Sarah thought the whole idea of a phone tap was rather stupid. If someone really wanted to listen to long conversations with her real estate clients, or the trials and tribulations of the adolescent and college-age Talldeers, they were welcome, so far as she was concerned. And heaven help them if they weren't also fluent in Osage and Cherokee; the family used all three languages, as they had all their lives, to make certain that their, children were fluent in the tongues of their heritage.

  "By now they probably have translators," Jennifer told her. Then, in Osage, she made an indecent suggestion about what could be done with the late FBI founder's body- just in case someone was listening.

  "If your Grandfather taught you that one, I don't think I want that translated, honey," Sarah replied serenely. "It has to be something obscene. Poor Mr. Hoover, he must be spinning in his grave like a high-speed lathe. Your brother told me you'd called; has something come up?"

  "Sort of." She licked her lips. She might as well come straight to the point. "Have you - ah - seen the news yet? Any news?"

  Although Sarah was not strictly a Medicine Woman, Grandfather had hinted that at least part of Kestrel's ability might have come from her mother's side of the family. Kestrel didn't doubt that at all, for Sarah had an uncanny ability to cut straight to the subject someone wanted to discuss, whether or not it had even been mentioned.

  That ability did not fail her this time. "You mean the explosion? The one where the bulldozer blew up and all those poor men were killed?" Her voice sharpened with anxiety. "Isn't that a police thing? How did you get
involved?"

  "Obliquely. Don't worry, I'm not going to get underfoot with the cops, I don't think." Quickly, she explained as much as she could without betraying client confidentiality, then continued. "Basically, I need to know if Dad's heard anything that might apply - you know, young hotheads shooting their mouths off just before they shoot themselves in the foot - or if the Principal Chief has."

  "Hang on a moment, I've got my real estate books and mortgage calculation sheets spread out all over the table, and I want to write all this down so I get it right." She listened to the background sound of paper shuffling for a moment, as her mother re-stacked her work and reached for something she could take notes in. "All right, would you take it from the top for me?"

  Jennifer repeated it all, carefully. Sarah had been a secretary and kept her shorthand up; a skill she had taught Jennifer. It had come in useful in college, and both of them still used it, although Jennifer had augmented her note-taking with a microcassette recorder.

  "Dear, this developer-can you tell me his name? I might get something, if I nose around a little." Sarah's offer came as something of a surprise, and Jennifer found herself staring at the wall with her eyebrows lifted. She hadn't considered her mother as a possible information source, but Sarah was right-if it had anything to do with land, real estate agents heard about it, and they talked. She could have hit herself for not thinking of it, too. Normally she was a bit better at thinking of the obvious.

  "Mother, that would be fabulous," she said honestly. "And yes, I can tell you, since it's pretty well public knowledge. They'll probably say something about it on the ten o'clock news; they might even have an interview with him. It's a fellow named Rod Calligan. And I would love to hear every juicy little rumor you have on him."