Sacred Ground

by Barbara Wood

  Erica looked down the dark, deserted street. There were houses only on one side. Across the way were trees and then a gentle slope down into the next canyon. Beautiful homes, but the lawns were becoming choked with weeds, roses growing wild. The whole look was one of neglect, like Sleeping Beauty’s castle, Erica thought. The maiden fell asleep and nature was reclaiming her kingdom. And it would take more than a handsome prince to rescue this situation. The entire neighborhood had been declared unsafe. The city soils engineers had drilled the length of the street and found that the whole canyon from its blind end at the north to its opening to the south was all liquefying and spilling out into lower canyons. It was almost as if, Erica thought, the canyon were restoring itself to its original state, after humans had interfered with it and tried to alter its natural formation.

  Cyclone fencing had been put up around Emerald Hills Estates and the only access in and out was through gates that were locked at night. Despite this precaution, as well as private security guards, the homes were prime targets for looters. Even though all furnishings had been moved out, they still contained valuable accessories. The police had already caught two men trying to steal the gold bathroom fixtures in one house, and one homeowner had dropped by to check on his house only to discover all the kitchen appliances gone, imported marble stripped from the bathroom walls, copper wiring and piping ripped out. All without a sound, without a trace of when and how the thieves had done it.

  So the homeowners had decided they were going to move back into their residences despite the fact that the city wouldn’t allow them to because of the ground instability and that there were no utilities. Zimmerman and the others were demanding that the original developer refill the canyon and properly compact it, and reinforce it with steel and concrete supports, rebuilding the development to make it stable again.

  “We thought this would be resolved weeks ago,” Zimmerman, spokesman for the irate homeowners, continued, “and that we’d be moving back in. This is dragging on indefinitely.” He poked Jared in the shoulder. “You with your Indians” —and then poked the air in front of Erica— “and you with your bones—”

  The police, who had parked their cruisers outside the fence, were now running in on foot.

  “We’re not leaving!” shouted the magazine publisher, who owned a nine-thousand-square-foot Tudor-style mansion where the tennis court had sunk three feet into the ground.

  Zimmerman crossed his arms, and said, “We’re not moving. This is where we live and this is where we’re staying.”

  Jared said, “This area is unstable, it isn’t safe.”

  “You know how much that house cost me? Three million. Before the pool and the expensive rose garden, which is now totally ruined I might add because of everyone tramping through. The insurance isn’t paying, and it’s sure as hell I can’t sell. So you think I’m just gonna walk away from it? We’ve all been strung along and pushed around enough. There you are, hotshot from Sacramento, hawking Indian rights. But what about our rights? Some of us, our life savings went into these homes. Some of us came here to retire. Where do we go? You tell me that. No sir, here is where we take a stand and nobody’s going to move us off our property.”

  Erica stepped in and said, “Mr. Zimmerman, I promise you we are moving as fast as—”

  “And I’m promising you something, lady. I’ve already got my lawyers on this. We are going to have that cave sealed, this canyon filled in, and our properties restored to us. And you can take your Indians and your bones and shove ‘em. You got that?”

  * * *

  The dental tweezers and surgical blade lay ready for Erica to cut open the mysterious rabbit fur bundle. Sam was there, perched on a stool, his stomach growling because he had put himself on a diet— again. And Luke was checking his film, lighting, and shutter speed.

  “Gentlemen?” Erica said. “Are we ready?”

  Before either could respond, Jared came into the trailer, snapping the aluminum door shut behind him to block out the cold night wind. He had stayed behind to get further information from Zimmerman. “It’s what I expected. They’re going to move against the developer’s completion bond, asserting that the development wasn’t graded properly. If the court finds in their favor and orders completion of the project, then the builder will have no choice but to fill in the canyon.”

  “Can you stop them?”

  “I’m sure as hell going to try.” Jared looked at the tray and frowned. “Is that an animal?”

  “No, it’s something wrapped in an animal skin.”

  “Old?”

  “I’d estimate about three hundred years. Dr. Fredericks, our dendrochronologist, took core samples from nearby indigenous trees and determined that a terrible fire devastated much of this area three centuries ago. Microscopic and chemical analysis of a thin layer of soot and ash on the cave floor matched bark material in those cores. This fur bundle came from beneath that layer, which means it was left there at least three hundred years ago. It could be Chumash. These beads are similar to the ones they used as currency.”

  Drawing the light closer and adjusting the gooseneck lamp so that it spotlighted the object, Erica applied the very fine tweezers and dissecting blade to the sinews that tied the rabbit skin. Luke took pictures at each step of the procedure.

  Beyond the thin walls of the trailer they heard sounds of people walking by, laughing, calling out to one another, while inside, Jared, Sam, and Luke stood behind Erica, softly breathing.

  She snipped the sinews and painstakingly drew them aside. Then she gently clasped the edges of the brittle fur as if she were working on a living human being. Finally, the last layer of skin came away.

  They stared in shock. “What the heck!” Luke blurted. “How did those get here?”

  “Good Lord,” Sam murmured, sweeping back his mane of hair.

  “At what level did you say you found this?” Jared asked in disbelief.

  Erica’s voice was filled with wonder. “Just below the year sixteen hundred.” She blinked in amazement. “I’m not an expert in this area, I would have to consult a historian, but judging by the craftsmanship and materials, I would hazard a guess that these were probably made around four hundred years ago. Of Dutch manufacture, I believe.”

  “But that’s impossible,” Luke protested, “there weren’t any Europeans in California yet! Not for another two hundred years.”

  “So history tells us, Luke, but there is no doubt as to its age. Just as there is no doubt,” she said as she lifted the surprising object to the light, “that this is a pair of eyeglasses.”

  Chapter Four

  Marimi

  1542 C.E.

  “Sea monster! A sea monster!”

  Everyone ran to the shore to see where the boy was pointing. Sure enough, out on the waves, floated an animal no one had ever seen before.

  The medicine woman was sent for. She arrived with her magic smoke and special sun-staff, a tall young woman wearing a fine skirt of woven grass and a small cape of sea otter skins, with tubes of pelican leg bone decorated with quail feathers piercing her earlobes, and between her bare breasts many strands of shell-bead necklaces, among them a leather thong at the end of which was a small leather pouch containing the raven’s spirit-stone, handed down through the ages from the First Mother. She was Marimi, so named because she was the Guardian of the Sacred Cave in Topaangna. When she was younger she had been called something else, but when she had started to exhibit symptoms of the spirit gift— pains in her head, visions, and trances— she had been chosen to be the successor to the old medicine woman, also called Marimi, and dedicated to the service of the Topaa and the First Mother. It was the greatest honor a clan member could receive, and Marimi was daily thankful for having been blessed with the gift, even though her service to the First Mother meant the renunciation of marriage and sexual congress with men. If at times, late at night alone in her hut, thoughts of love and children should creep into her mind, or when she counted her seasons and r
ealized she was still very young and faced a lifetime of chastity, she reminded herself that the virginal state was necessary to keep herself and her spirit pure and that it was but a small sacrifice to make for the privilege of serving the First Mother.

  She squinted out over the water. “Not a sea monster,” she pronounced. “A man.”

  Voices buzzed like flies. “A man? One of our own? But no, no one is missing. All the boats came back today. The sea-hunters are all accounted for. What is a man doing on the water?” And then gasps and whispered speculations: “A member of the tribe to the north? The dreaded Chumash? He has come to cast spells on us! Send him back out to sea.”

  Marimi raised her arms and the crowd on the beach fell silent. Standing majestically on a dune, with gulls wheeling overhead against the bright blue sky, and the fresh wind blowing from the sea stirring her long black hair, Marimi watched the lifeless man out on the water and came to a decision. She called for a boat and immediately everyone ran back to the village to hoist upon their shoulders one of the big oceangoing hunting canoes made of driftwood planks sewn together and caulked with asphalt. In these impressive vessels, able to hold more than a dozen men, the Topaa hunters went out daily with their spears, nets, and hooks to hunt whale, porpoise, seal, and ray. But now they pushed their canoe through the waves to go after different prey. Everyone watched as the oars dipped into the water in unison until they reached the floating man where, using a whale hook, the hunters snared him and hauled him in.

  The tide swept the canoe ashore, depositing also the mystery upon the wet sand, revealing that it was indeed a man, lying prone and unmoving on a wooden plank. The people gasped again. “Not Chumash! Look at the skins on his body! And his feet are the size of a bear’s!” They drew back, afraid.

  The chief came forward to confer with Marimi. While powerful in his own right, the chief’s power was of a different nature from Marimi’s. Together they would decide how to deal with this unexpected turn.

  In the past weeks the people had sighted strange creatures far out to sea, with massive square wings and fat bloated bodies. Hunters had paddled out and come back to report that they were not creatures at all but seagoing boats unlike any the Topaa had ever seen. Members of a southern tribe passing through, who had gone north to trade with the Chumash, reported that white-skinned men had landed on the islands in the channel, and there they had traded and feasted with tribal elders and then had set out upon the water again in their marvelous canoes.

  Friendly visitors, they said, whose ancestors lived far away.

  Was this one of those visitors? Marimi wondered as she took in the salt-crusted body clad in the strangest skins she had ever seen. The man was lying facedown on a wooden plank. Why had he been put out of his canoe?

  She gave a command and two men rolled the stranger over. Everyone cried out. He had two sets of eyes! “A monster!” “A devil!” “Throw him back to the sea!”

  Marimi called again for silence as she studied the stranger. She could see that he was very tall with a curiously narrow face, large arched nose, and pale skin. And those eyes! She wondered if he was an ancestor since he had come from where the spirits of the dead dwell, out in the West over the ocean. Perhaps after death, the spirit was given a second pair of eyes.

  Marimi knelt and placed her fingertips to his cold neck. She felt, just barely, the faint throb of life. She would have preferred to retreat to her cave and seek the counsel of the First Mother, but the stranger was at the threshold of death, there was no time.

  Marimi straightened up and ordered five strong men to carry him to her shelter at the edge of the village.

  * * *

  She recited a mental prayer. That second pair of eyes! Were they magic? Could he see her even though his eyelids were down? Was he some sort of monster?

  But he came from the West, where the ancestors dwell….

  “They are friendly visitors,” the southern traders had said.

  First, she must undress him. She started with his peculiar hat, which was not made of grass as Topaa hats were but of a foreign skin, and when she gingerly peeled it back she cried out. His head was on fire! She frowned. But how could his hair be aflame and yet not consume his scalp? She looked closer. Then she cautiously touched the sunset-colored curls. He had sailed out too far in his ship and his head had brushed the sun. That could be the only explanation. The strange flaming hair was also very short, trimmed almost to his scalp, yet his chin and upper lip had long hair, pointy and curled! Topaa men wore their hair long and had no hair on their faces.

  She contemplated the layers of skins covering his body from neck to toe, leaving only his face and hands exposed. She could not imagine what she was going to find underneath. The men of her own tribe wore nothing save for a rope around their waists from which they hung food and tools. Was this visitor the same under his skins?

  Marimi didn’t know that his skins had names, or that she was in fact peeling away some of the finest fabrics made in Europe, or that the fashion and design of these layers were intended to broadcast the nobility and wealth of the wearer. First there was a black padded velvet doublet with slashed sleeves to show off the fine white linen shirt underneath; over the doublet was a belted jerkin of red brocade that went to the knees in a pleated skirt, through which a red velvet codpiece protruded. The hose were white and gartered at the knee, the heavily padded breeches were of black velvet. His hat, which she had set aside, was low-crowned and wide-brimmed black velvet trimmed with fur and pearls. The shirtsleeves ended in ruffled cuffs at the wrists and the shirt was pleated at the neck. Finally, when she freed his feet from their strange bindings, she found them to be soft and without calluses, as his hands were also soft and smooth, like a child’s— yet he was a grown man.

  When all the skins were off and he was completely naked, she saw the sun-fire hair at his loins as well. How had the sun touched him there? His skin was soft and pale, as white as the foam that rides the morning tide. And then she saw the angry color along his legs and arms and in a scalding ring around his neck. She knew at once what afflicted him.

  But first water, which she managed to drip between his chapped, cracked lips while she cradled him, her strong arm beneath his shoulders. When he was able to swallow without coughing, she laid him back down and brought her healing kit to his side: a case made of bulrushes containing a small pestle and a mortar made of a transparent crystal rock, flint knives, a fire-starter, and various healing talismans. She retrieved a stone believed to be alive because it had been treated with herbs containing tremendous life power and then smeared with hummingbird blood and oil from an eel and then wrapped in downy, white feathers. She placed this on the stranger’s forehead. Then she laid across his chest a necklace strung with beads fashioned from eagle and falcon bones. She saw that he already wore a necklace made from a yellow, glittery substance she had never seen before, almost the color of his hair, and the charm at the end of this necklace looked like two sticks tied at angles, and she could see the tiniest figure of a man on it.

  Going to one of her many baskets, she selected a handful of dried, flowering shoots. After steeping them in hot water, she allowed the tea to cool and then bathed his rashy skin with it. He awoke briefly, muttering in his delirium, “Pox, pox,” and tried to push her away. For the bruises he had received while being buffeted about on the wooden plank and the merciless tide, Marimi boiled the leaves and branches of chaparral to make a moist poultice. She also made a tea of the leaves and gave it to him as a tonic.

  She was fascinated by his hairline. It wasn’t straight across his forehead, like her own, but grew back from an arrowhead-shaped point, making her think of an eagle she had once seen when she had gone up in the hills to visit the cave of the First Mother. His fiery golden eyebrows emphasized the eagle look, but when on occasion his first set of eyes fluttered open in delirium, Marimi saw no eyes that were those of a bird. Mother Moon, they were the color of the sky! Had he stared too long at the heavens and now t
hey were caught there?

  But she didn’t touch his second pair of eyes, for to do so might be taboo.

  He had moments when he was able to take nourishment, and Marimi fed him a healthful gruel of acorns and rabbit meat. When he looked at her his eyes didn’t focus, so long had he been upon the waves and so long without water that his senses had not been restored. But she was able to feed him and give him water, and bathe his flaming limbs in the cool, herbal tea until gradually his color improved, his breathing grew tranquil, and she knew his health was returning.

  * * *

  When he came to the first thing his eyes set upon were two plump, brown breasts. “God’s bones!” he exclaimed. Then he looked down at himself and saw that he was naked. “Mother of God!” he boomed, jumping to his feet and suddenly clutching his head in dizziness.

  When the spell passed and his head was clear, he looked at the bronze girl sitting in the center of the hut with a basket of leaves in her lap. She wore a grass skirt and nothing else. She was looking up at him with a startled expression.

  “Where are my clothes?” he shouted, snatching up the fur blanket and wrapping it around his waist. “Where’s my crew?” And then he froze. “But wait. I was dying.” He examined his arms and legs, where only a trace of the rash remained. “The pox is gone. And I am not dead.”

  To his astonishment, the girl started to giggle. Hiding her mouth behind her hands, she laughed with glee, which only infuriated him all the more. “What’s the matter with you? Are you a half-wit? And where in the name of all the saints and angels am I?”

  He strode to the opening of the shelter and looked out at a soupy dawn, where tendrils of fog snaked along the ground and the air was filled with the salty smell of the sea. Through the mist he saw other round huts like the one he stood in, and people crouched at cookfires.