Sacred Ground

by Barbara Wood

  Marimi came up to him and took his hands in hers, turning them up so that she could see the palms. She said something but he could only shake his head. “I don’t understand you.”

  She pointed to the canoes on the beach, the harpoons and fishnets. She named fishermen whose acquaintance he had made. She pointed to the hut of the man who made flint knives, then to the shelter of the elderly woman who fashioned shell-beads. She lifted Godfredo’s hands before his face and asked a question.

  “What do I do? Is that what you are asking?” Godfredo had tried, over the weeks to explain to her his profession, but how to explain to a girl who had no concept of the alphabet or of writing that he was a diarist?

  And then it struck him. “Christ’s blood! Now I know what you are telling me! This is what I set out to sea for! To chronicle the journeys and discoveries of exploring men! And what am I doing? Sitting on my backside waiting to be rescued!”

  He could have kissed her right there and then, and almost did were it not for a sudden look in her eyes, as if she had understood his intent, for she quickly drew back, beyond his reach.

  Godfredo’s somber mood changed to one of excitement as he set upon his new endeavor, trading his fine velvet hat for a handful of the chief’s headdress feathers to fashion quills from them. When a hunter brought a deer down from the mountains Godfredo traded his padded jacket for the hide, and for days, while the tribe feasted on venison, people watched him work away at the deerskin, scraping it, stretching it, rubbing it with chalk and pumice until he had something he called parchment. Finally, out of squid juice, he manufactured ink.

  He was ready to begin his chronicle. But first, he needed to know where he was.

  When the Spaniards had seen this plain as they sailed northward, they had named it the Valley of Smoke. It wasn’t just the many campfires dotting the plain, but also the purposely set brushfires. The Indians had a habit of continually burning off the brush, which Marimi explained helped new growth and prevented major disastrous fires. Godfredo had witnessed one such devastating fire that had raged for days because the old undergrowth was so thick and dry. But the Indians knew that to prevent major fires it was necessary to cause fires periodically. The result was that with mountain ranges embracing the basin, holding the smoke in, the basin was filled with smoke almost all the time; there were even days when one couldn’t see the mountain peaks above the brown air.

  Godfredo decided to make a map.

  Marimi was his guide. She went ahead of him on trails, her generous hips swaying before his eyes, and once in a while, through the grass skirt, he glimpsed a smooth, bronze thigh. Then she would pause on hillcrests and point out places, naming them. On the north side of the Topaangna Mountains were the Chumash, who called their village Maliwu, which Godfredo mispronounced as Malibu, making Marimi laugh. The Topaa and Chumash were enemies and did not commingle. Their border was Maliwu Creek and they had different languages, which at first Godfredo found odd. “But they live just over the mountains there.” And then he remembered the French living just over the mountains from Spain. Marimi pointed out other settlements: Kawengna and Simi. They trekked over the peaks to where Godfredo saw a valley filled with oaks. It had no name so he called it Los Encinos.

  During his exploration, as they passed through other Topaa villages and then through the settlements of other tribes, Don Godfredo noticed the absence of a warrior class. Spears and arrows seemed designed mainly for hunting rather than for war. Disputes between tribes, Marimi explained, were small and usually resolved quickly. The inhabitants of this Valley of Smoke, it seemed, were generally peaceable and unaggressive, unlike the Aztecs, with their advanced civilization who, before their conquest, had been an aggressive, bloodthirsty race. And then Godfredo thought of the history of his own people, the Europeans, written in blood. And a new thought occurred to him: did knowledge breed aggression?

  Godfredo noticed how the girl showed constant etiquette toward the land. Everything was treated with respect and with ritual. Taking fruit from a tree or drawing water from a spring was prefaced by some sort of ceremony, however simple, in the form of a request or an acknowledgment. Godfredo had seen how the Indians apologized to the animals they killed. “Spirit in this rabbit, I ask pardon for eating your flesh. May we together complete the circle of life that was given to us by the Creator of All.” Marimi explained that they believed the hunted animal submitted to the hunter willingly if the people made the proper respectful observances.

  Their mapmaking sojourn was brief because Marimi did not want to travel far from her tribe, nor Godfredo from the ocean. And when they returned and his map was done, Godfredo began in earnest to write his chronicle, which he envisioned as being the talk of Spain, of all Europe, upon his return. He inscribed at the top of the parchment: Here Beginneth The Chronicle and History Of My Sojourn Among The Savage Indios Of California. And he set to with quill and ink in the deadly earnestness of a man so intent upon his task that there was room in his head for no other thoughts. Godfredo did this in the hopes of saving himself from a fate worse than being put to sea on a wooden plank: he was starting to lust after a girl vowed to chastity.

  * * *

  He wanted to begin with science, but as science here was nonexistent, he chose medicine as the next best thing. Godfredo recorded such healings and rituals Marimi allowed him to witness. For teething babies she took the petals of wild rose, dried them, then boiled them, and then applied the petals to the baby’s gums. In treating jaundice, while the acorn soup was still boiling from the hot stones, Marimi combed her hair over it, dropping lice into the soup. Godfredo was impressed for this was a remedy commonly used in Spain, where everyone knew that drinking water containing lice was the best cure for liver ailments.

  But he witnessed healings that were not so clear-cut or scientific, when herbs and medicines did no good and magic must be invoked. Godfredo knew it was not the “power” in the eagle feather that cured, or the coyote fangs, or the rattlesnake skin, rather it was the combined power of the belief of the sick person in the healer, and the healer in herself. They both believed she could cure him and somehow the patient’s own will effected the cure. Godfredo almost admired the system. Would that such belief were found in Europe, where most doctors were charlatans! And if not the patient, then the will of the clan caused the healing, because Godfredo witnessed such a miracle himself when one day an injured seal hunter was brought ashore. The man had been gored by a spear, and his wound was festering, causing him to burn with fever. Marimi ritualistically lighted a campfire next to the dying man while his first family stood in a tight circle around him, and then his second family, which consisted of cousins, uncles, aunts. Marimi shook rattles to the four cardinal points, invoking their power. She sang up to the moon. She scattered powdered seaweed on the man’s body, and drew mystical symbols with seal fat and pigments upon his burning skin. Then she held up a stone upon which images of centipedes had been etched. She showed it to the moon, to the four winds, and then she splashed a dollop of hot asphalt on the stone, obliterating the images, “killing” the centipedes, which were symbols of death. At once the man started to breathe more easily, the fever left his face, and after another round of songs from his family, opened his eyes and asked for water.

  Godfredo declared it magic while Marimi said it was simply the work of spirits. And what Marimi did consider magic, Godfredo said was simply science. When he finally persuaded her to try his spectacles, she cried out that the magic in them caused her to see a different world. When he tried to explain about glass and lenses, Marimi would not hear of it. Especially when he demonstrated how he could make fire with his spectacles, just holding them in the sunlight without needing to drill a stick into a piece of wood.

  He recorded their religious practices. At the winter solstice, the Topaa gathered in a sacred canyon where the whole tribe waited for Marimi to come out of a cave. When she did, she tapped the stone on her sun-staff three times and then lifted the staff to the
sky and “pulled” the sun back northward, signifying the end of winter and the commencement of the sun’s return. Everyone cheered and Godfredo wrote it down.

  Godfredo recorded their social customs. When he watched Marimi cook acorn mush in a basket, dropping hot stones in the watery meal and stirring vigorously to keep the basket from burning, Godfredo said, “Why don’t you use a pot?”

  She looked at him blankly and he realized he had seen no pottery in the village. Aside from a few pieces of stoneware, which Marimi explained had been traded from the island people for asphalt, the Topaa created no clay pottery of any kind. They cooked their meals, stored their seeds, and carried water all in baskets.

  Don Godfredo noted in his chronicle that, among the elderly, the teeth of the Topaa were all worn down to the gums— not broken or missing, but worn down. He found his answer after his first meals: there was grit in the acorn gruel, and stone powder which found its way into the ground-up seeds, and dirt that adhered to roots and bulbs that were eaten raw.

  Don Godfredo recorded that there were no crops growing anywhere, just small plots of tobacco, the only plant the Topaa cultivated. The tobacco was gathered, dried on heated rocks, and then pounded up in small mortars for smoking in pipes.

  But mostly his chronicle was about Marimi, who was growing in his heart. He observed her duties to the gods, her interaction with the tribe, the way she laughed, her lively intelligence, and a monthly mystery when she would retire for five days to a small hut at the edge of the village where she lived in solitude, speaking to no one, seeing no one, receiving food and water from female relatives. Godfredo learned that this was the practice of all menstruating girls and women in the tribe, the monthly flow containing tremendous moon power that needed to be curbed. If a woman spoke to another tribal member during her time, or touched their food, or walked across their shadow, she could cause them to sicken and die. Women were also considered to be vulnerable to sickness at this time and so were forbidden to wash their hair, to eat meat, to exert themselves at work, to sleep with their husbands.

  Finally, the day came when Godfredo could no longer keep silent the question that burned in his heart. He asked Marimi what would happen if she should sleep with a man. “It would cause me to sicken and die, and the whole tribe as well.”

  “And what of the man?”

  “The tribe would put him to death.”

  * * *

  He awoke to the sounds of industry and the smell of smoke.

  Stepping outside, he saw the settlement alive with activity as people piled fish into baskets and tied otter skins into packs. They were also setting their huts on fire. Marimi explained that it was their annual journey inland to trade with other tribes, a time also to burn down their dwellings and build new ones upon their return, on fresh ground.

  When Godfredo saw men bearing heavy loads by laying baskets on their backs and hooking the straps across their foreheads, Godfredo said to himself: I will teach them how to make wheels and carts. And as they started walking eastward, like common peasants, he wondered if there were horses anywhere in this land, or possibly donkeys, anything that he could tame to use as beasts of burden. The journey took two days, and in that time Godfredo gave his thoughts wing.

  During his time among the Topaa his hair had grown. There was nothing to cut it with since the Topaa didn’t have scissors or razors or combs. Their flint knives could only do a hack job. Also, his beard had started to grow wild and so he learned to shave it off every day with sharpened clam shells. Now, in his daydream during the trek eastward he imagined teaching the Topaa how to extract metal from the earth and fashion it into useful objects such as knives and razors and stewpots.

  He fantasized about many things as they followed the ancient animal trail, a mass exodus of people on foot with not a single animal among them. They passed other settlements, some of which were also being dismantled for the great gathering up ahead on the trail. They were now farther east than Godfredo had traveled, roughly fifteen miles inland, and although he found tribal customs similar, the languages were as varied as any in Europe. Marimi explained that the track they followed was the path the First Mother had followed when she first came to this plain many generations ago. The people believed it had been here since the beginning of time.

  Finally, they reached their destination, the massive encampment of many tribes, all with shelters pitched on a flat plain. Marimi told God fredo that this was where they obtained the substance they used to waterproof their canoes and water baskets. “La brea,” he said, giving her the Spanish name of the pools of black, bubbling tar in the midst of the encampment.

  Marimi explained that they were here to deal with traders from tribes in the east, from as far away as the village of Cucamonga and even farther. When Godfredo saw that the ancient path continued due east, he asked where it went. “Yang-na,” she said, and by her gestures he surmised she had never been there.

  Marimi had never been farther than these tar pits.

  “Don’t you want to know what lies beyond?” Godfredo asked when they erected shelters from boughs and sticks they had brought with them.

  “Why?”

  “To see what is there.”

  She looked at him. “Why?”

  For the first time, Don Godfredo, who had journeyed thousands of miles to this place, was astonished that this girl had no idea of the vastness of the world, was unaware that she lived on a globe spinning in space, that man-made cathedrals rose up and pierced the sky in lands far across the water. These miserable pools of stinking tar were the easternmost border of her world. To the north, her land was bounded by a ridge where sacred oaks grew and she did not traverse it, and to the west and south lay an ocean which she believed supported the sky!

  But we have known now these fifty years, he wanted to cry, that the world is not flat. And it certainly is not the size of a common dishpan as is your limited world, but is vast and terrifying and awesome in its wonders. He tried to tell her, drew sketches in the earth, described grandeur with his hands, but it was no use. Marimi only laughed at his antics and thought it was a nice myth.

  In that moment, Godfredo knew what he had to do. As Marimi’s people engaged in bartering acorns, soapstone, seafood, otter and seal skins for fired clay pottery, mesquite seeds and deerskins, rattling their strings of shell-beads, which was the universal currency, Godfredo formulated his secret plan. When Spanish ships returned, as he was certain they someday must, he was going to take this girl back with him and show her the splendors of his world. He was going to delight her with the feel of silk and pearls against her brown skin, show her the towering monuments of man, the works of art, the perfumes and tapestries and plates of silver and gold, and take her for rides on his horse and astonish her with marvels that her primitive mind could not even begin to dream of.

  That night, he watched her over her grinding stone, breasts swaying seductively. Marimi had spread herself with red ochre paint, giving her body a glossy look, highlighting the delectable hills and valleys of her lush form. The sight of her filled him with growing lust. What was it about this savage creature that enchanted him so? For one, she had saved his life. When he had first washed ashore, many months ago, no one had wanted to touch him. But Marimi bravely did. But there was more to her allure than that. There was something in the way she moved so graciously among her people. He had seen women of similar status in his own society, nuns with power, ladies with money and connections, but few were gracious and many abused their rank and privilege.

  There was also a vulnerability about her. Those strange spells that occasionally struck her down. It could be anywhere at any time, and the first time he witnessed it it alarmed him. She had cried out in pain and crumpled to the ground. The men drew back while women rushed forward to gather her up and carry her to her hut. There, Godfredo had stood in the doorway while he had watched her head roll from side to side in silent agony. She then went into a deep sleep and later reported seeing visions. The women told hi
m it was a holy sickness and that it enabled her to communicate with the gods. He had seen such people in Spain, holy monks and nuns. But those were Christians who spoke to saints, and this heathen woman was no Christian.

  Finally, there was her loneliness. Even though Marimi was an integral part of the tribe and was in fact the focal point for a lot of their religion, she was also at the same time separate from the tribe, living alone. In the evenings, in the other huts Godfredo heard talking and laughter, the music of flutes, the sound of sticks as games of chance were being played, men laughing as they competed vigorously. Women’s laughter, the squeals of children. But Marimi’s hut was always silent. Her solitude reminded him of his own, the one he had carried in his heart after leaving the three graves behind in Spain, his wife and sons taken from him when fever had swept through the town.

  “Oh, maiden,” he cried in silent agony, “dost thou not know how I burn for thee?”

  * * *

  On the final night of the encampment at the tar pits Godfredo finally found the courage to tell Marimi what was in his heart. He told her of the wonders of his world and how he longed to take her to see them. To his astonishment, she wept bitterly, and confessed that the same desire was in her heart. She would like nothing more than to be his wife and go where he went, but it could never be. She had been dedicated to her people, she must keep her vow of chastity.

  Godfredo reeled from this unexpected declaration. In all his carnal achings for the girl it had never occurred to him to wonder how she might feel about him. That she should desire him had not entered his mind. But now that the confession was out, his desire seemed to burn out of his skin and up to the stars. “I cannot bear to go without you,” he cried, “but if I stay I can’t have you either! Marimi, if you come with me the rules that keep you celibate will no longer apply. We will be free to marry.”