Sacred Ground

by Barbara Wood

  She could not go, she said tearfully, and he must never again speak of his desire for her, for it was taboo and would bring bad luck to the tribe.

  A wildness entered Godfredo that night, and when sleep could not keep him on his mat, he struck out into the foul-smelling night and paced the black beach of the stench-ridden tar pits, mindless of a few insomniacs who watched him. He paced and gestured and occasionally cried out in a language none of his casual audience understood. The people from Cahuilla and Mojave and the pueblos and beyond tended their fires and watched the tortured white man wrestle with demons.

  That was when the idea came to him: he was going to teach the Topaa about the modern world. By teaching them how to make paper and mine metal, the use of the wheel and the draft animal, to build houses of stone and live by clocks he would open Marimi’s eyes and make her see how benightedly she was living and make her want with all her heart to go back with him.

  * * *

  His plan failed.

  Each project, though drawing an interested audience at first, soon lost its novelty and the people drifted away. Don Godfredo managed to make candles, which the Topaa marveled at, but when the candles burned down, Marimi’s people had no desire to make more. When he manufactured a crude soap, they happily lathered themselves in the surf but lost interest when the soap was all gone. He planted a small garden of sunflowers and showed them how they could have seeds all year round, but when the flowers died because of lack of care, so did interest in them. Why should they change, the people asked Godfredo, when they had lived this way since the beginning of time, and their ways had always been good for the Topaa? “Change is progress,” he tried to explain. But to his exasperation, progress was a concept they could not understand.

  He went to Marimi’s hut and asked her again if she could be released from her vows.

  She said, “In your land, are there women who have dedicated themselves and their virginity to the gods?”

  “Yes, the convent sisters.”

  “And if you desired one of them, would you try to persuade her to give up her vows?”

  He took hold of her shoulders. “Marimi, celibacy is man’s law, not God’s!”

  “Do you speak to your god?”

  His hands fell away. “I do not even believe in him.”

  She reached for the gold crucifix around his neck. “And this man Jesus. Do you believe in him?”

  “Jesus is a myth. God is a myth.”

  Marimi’s black eyes filled with sadness then, and she regarded him for a long sorrowful moment. The sickness that gripped Godfredo’s honest soul was no mystery: he needed to believe in something.

  * * *

  It took two days to follow the ancient animal trail from the tar pits to the canyon in Topaangna.

  When they arrived at the mountains, Godfredo and Marimi followed a trail through thick chaparral and wild lilac. Here, they came upon a patch of open ground, where they saw a female coyote performing a crazy dance: she lowered herself to the ground, muzzle turned up, and then with a sudden upward and sideways lunge, snapped her jaws and then landed to suddenly madly dig into the dirt. As she did this over and over, Godfredo drew back, fearing they had come upon a mad dog. But Marimi laughed, explaining how the coyote was simply hunting for rain beetles. Her people called the coyote “The Trickster” because he was known to lie down and play dead to lure vultures close enough to snatch and eat them.

  When they reached a cave in a small canyon, Marimi paused, and said, “It is forbidden for anyone but me and other medicine people to enter this cave. This law applies to all Topaa, and members of other tribes. But you are different, your ancestors dwell in a faraway place, and I think, Godfredo, that with your spectacles that make you see things others cannot, and which cause fire to miraculously appear, that you must be a shaman in your own world. So it is not taboo for you to enter this sacred cave.”

  As she led him inside, her voice dropped to a reverent whisper. “Our First Mother sleeps here.”

  Godfredo saw that the grave was ancient, perhaps a thousand years or more, and when Marimi laid flowers upon it, she said, “We always bring a gift to the First Mother.” Then she showed him the painting on the wall and told him the story of the first Marimi.

  “I tell you this, Godfredo, because you have an emptiness here.” She laid her hand on his chest. “This is not good for a man, because without faith to fill the emptiness, evil spirits will find a home here. The spirits of sadness and bitterness, jealousy and hate. I brought you here to fill this emptiness, Godfredo, with the wisdom of the First Mother.”

  Godfredo looked down at the copper-skinned hand against his shirt that had once been white. He looked into the innocent yet wise eyes of the Indian girl, felt the weight of the mountain all around him, heard strange whisperings in the darkness, felt shadows shift and move, watchful and waiting. The cave reminded him of a grotto he had visited as a child, where it was said a saint had found healing waters. Perhaps there were such things as magical caves after all, perhaps Marimi’s First Mother truly was here.

  Godfredo had learned to carry implements with him as the Topaa men did, and he now brought out of the leather pouch that hung from his waist a piece of obsidian, black and shiny. With its sharp edge he carved into a clear, clean space on the rock wall: La Primera Madre. Then he said with a smile, “Now all future generations will know who sleeps here.”

  Marimi gazed in wonder at the strange shapes. While Godfredo had drawn his map and written his chronicle, he had tried to teach her to read. But the symbols remained only symbols. Now, as she gazed at the freshly engraved letters, a light dawned in her mind. Reaching out, she touched the carvings with her fingertips, and traced each one, pronouncing each in sudden understanding.

  As Godfredo watched her, listened to her soft voice whisper the words, he was overcome. Here was the miracle he had longed for, the realization of his daydreams: he had taught Marimi something from his world. And in that instant he felt his lust turn into a more tender emotion. He fell in love with her.

  Taking her hands, he drew her around to face him. “You are a virgin because of this first mother?”

  “Yes.”

  “Just like the sisters in Spain who dedicate their virginity to the Mother of God. Marimi, I cannot believe in your first mother any more than I can believe in another first mother named Mary. But I respect your belief and your vows. I will no longer ask you to come away with me, for I see now that it is wrong. Nor can I live any longer with you among your people. The pain is greater than any mortal man can bear. I will leave.”

  When she started to cry he drew her into his arms and held her, shuddering within as he realized this would be the last he would ever see of her.

  He drew back while he still had the willpower, and said, “You said that we never visit the First Mother without leaving a gift.” Removing his spectacles and handing them to her, he said, “This is my gift to her.” And suddenly he had a vision of the future. “Men will come and destroy you,” he said with passion. “I have seen this happen to the empires in the south. They will come with their scribes and their priests and their learned men and their soldiers, and they will take what little you have and give you nothing in return except subjugation, as they did the Aztecs and the Incas and all other places civilized man has set foot. So I am going to walk south to Baja California and I am going to tell them that there is nothing up here for them, and with luck, you and your people will be left alone, for a while at least.”

  Marimi stayed in the cave after he left, feeling her heart break in two. For the first time in her life, she did not want to be the chosen servant of the First Mother. She wanted Godfredo.

  She looked at the spectacles in her hand, these marvelous eyes that allowed one to see into other worlds. Wedging them onto her nose, she looked first at the letters that spelled First Mother, and then at the painting. She gasped. The pictographs had grown! They filled her vision and now revealed tiny details and imperfections she
had never seen before. And when she moved her head, the symbols seemed to move!

  Suddenly a pain shot through her skull. She cried out and fell to her knees, and then collapsed onto her side as the familiar sickness swept over her, first engulfing her in blackness and then in deep unconsciousness.

  In her brief sleep, the First Mother came to her, an indistinct, shimmering vision that spoke silently, communicating through meanings rather than words, and what she told her servant Marimi was that celibacy was a law of men, not of gods. The First Mother wanted her daughters to be fruitful.

  When Marimi awoke, the pain gone from her head, she removed God fredo’s magical eyes and, realizing in excitement and awe that they had enabled her to travel to the supernatural world where she had received a message from the First Mother, ran out of the cave and down the canyon, catching up with Godfredo where the boulders were carved with the symbols of the raven and the moon. “I will be your wife,” she said.

  * * *

  Because the First Mother had spoken to Marimi, and because Godfredo was no ordinary man, having come from the West over the ocean where the ancestors dwelled, the chiefs and subchiefs and shamans believed that they should be permitted to marry. But because this was taboo, the spirit world must be consulted. The shamans stayed in the sweat lodge for five days, consuming jimsonweed and interpreting their visions, and in the meantime, Marimi and Godfredo fasted and prayed and kept themselves pure. When the elders came out, they declared Godfredo a reincarnated ancestor, a special man sent from the gods to be partner to their medicine woman and that sexual union with him would in fact increase Marimi’s power and therefore the tribe’s.

  The tribe celebrated the wedding for five days, feasting and dancing and gambling, and when the final night culminated in a fertility ritual beneath the full moon, with all tribal members participating in ways Godfredo had once thought immoral, he lay in Marimi’s arms and knew contentment for the first time in his life.

  * * *

  The day came when runners from the coast exclaimed that sails were seen on the horizon. Godfredo quickly gathered up his maps and his chronicle and ran excitedly to the beach from where he saw the distinct outlines of canvas against the blue. Marimi joined him, their first child in her arms. Soon the whole tribe stood on the dunes and Marimi brought out her fire-starter to light the bonfire. But as her hands spun the spindle, Godfredo stopped her. He suddenly realized something that had not occurred to him before: that if he took Marimi with him to Spain she would be a novelty, as Columbus’s savages had been in Isabella’s court, an object to examine, perhaps to laugh at. They would rob her of her dignity and her soul. And she would wilt and perish, a flower away from its native habitat. Nor, he realized in sudden clarity, could he go either. He could not leave his beloved Marimi and their son.

  Godfredo tossed his maps and chronicle onto the unlit bonfire, where the parchment would eventually dampen and rot and be carried away by the tide, and then, taking Marimi’s hand, Godfredo turned away from the sails on the horizon and led her away from the beach, back to their home.

  Over the weeks and months that followed, and finally the years, a strange thing happened to Godfredo: he began to feel a curious comfort in listening to the stories around the campfire at night, tales that had been handed down from generation to generation, thrilling an audience who sighed and smiled and clapped with glee to hear the brave exploits of their forebears, to hear how Tortoise tricked Coyote, how the world was made, how the stars enabled the souls of the dead to look down upon their sons and daughters. Don Godfredo saw in the storyteller’s words an invisible thread that ribboned back in time, weaving the present with the past until it became unclear whether the teller of tales was recounting something that had happened long ago or only yesterday. It didn’t matter. The stories were good. They entertained. And they created a feeling of belonging and connection, both to the others in the audiences and to those who had come before.

  He also came to see the uselessness of his European finery, that they were no symbol of status here among naked people, that in fact the padded velvets and constricting cotton were impractical in a land where the summers were hot and dry, the winters mild. Godfredo had become as comfortable in his skin as the Topaa men were, so he put away his doublet and jerkin and hose and walked as Adam had, so long ago.

  Don Godfredo also realized he no longer missed his timepieces and days of the week or the number of the year. He began to feel a new rhythm of time in his bones. No longer did he look for a sundial to tell him the hour of day but to the sun itself, arcing the sky. And the names of days weren’t important, nor were the months, only the seasons, which a man knew instinctively, he discovered, as if his own inner body were turning with the seasons, waxing and waning with the moon, ebbing and flowing with the tides. The man of science was beginning to understand the Topaa’s connection to the land and to nature. He saw that humankind wasn’t separate from the beasts and the trees as he and his friends back home had thought. There was a universal net, woven by a cosmic weaver, and every man, every woman, every deer and hawk and mollusk, every bush and flower and tree were inextricably intertwined.

  Where he had once felt alone and cut off, Godfredo was beginning to feel more belonging than he ever had before. His home in Castile became a dream. His books and instruments, clocks and quills lost importance. And ultimately he did not teach the Topaa of the wheel and metal, nor did he give them an alphabet and mathematics. If it was God’s will to keep them as innocent as Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, then who was Don Godfredo to offer them fruit from the Tree of Knowledge?

  Don Godfredo de Alvarez lived among the Topaa as Marimi’s husband for twenty-three summers. He gave her twelve children and when he died they dressed him in his original clothes, with the gold crucifix about his neck, and cremated him with great ceremony. Then, in a magnificent canoe, they took his ashes out to sea to scatter them upon the waves whence he had come. His second pair of eyes, which had given Marimi a magical look at the world and which he had bequeathed to her as a reminder of his love, she buried with the First Mother in the cave, a gift from the man who had come from the sea.

  Chapter Five

  Footsteps. Heavy breathing. The sound of shovels digging into dirt.

  Erica’s eyes snapped open. Holding her breath, she listened to the stillness of the night.

  Metal striking earth. A pickax clanging against stone. A whispered curse. Labored respiration. One— no, two people.

  “Oh my God!” she cried, jumping out of bed and reaching in the darkness for her clothes. She flew out of her tent and ran across the compound to where Luke slept in an old Army camouflage shelter. Pushing her way inside and nearly falling over him as he slept in his sleeping bag, she shook his shoulder, and hissed, “Luke! Wake up! There’s someone in the cave! People! Digging!”

  He rubbed his eyes. “Wha—? Erica?”

  “Alert the others. Hurry!”

  He sat up. “Erica?”

  But she was already gone.

  * * *

  “Wait!” whispered one of the men, putting a hand on his partner’s arm. “Listen! Someone’s coming.”

  “Impossible,” growled the other, his face glowing from the sweat of his labor. “No one can hear us in here. Keep digging.”

  But before his pickax could make the next solid contact with stone, a light suddenly flooded the cave, and a woman shouted, “What are you doing in here?” And then, before they could react, she was flying at them with a shovel, bringing it down on their heads as she screamed at the top of her lungs.

  One of the intruders managed to push past her and get out of the cave where he scrambled down the scaffolding, away from the sounds of footsteps now thudding toward the excavation site. But the other man was still inside, crying, “Hold it! Jesus!” as he tried to ward off the blows from Erica’s shovel. When she raised her arms again, he charged at her with his head down, knocked her off her feet, then spun around and bolted for the entrance.
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  “Stop!” Erica shouted, scrambling after him. “Someone stop them!”

  There were other shouts now, and the sound of feet on the scaffolding outside. When Erica came running out, she collided with Jared who, like everyone else, was only half-dressed and looking bewildered from having been startled awake.

  “Those two men!” Erica said breathlessly, pointing down into the crater of the Zimmerman pool. “Don’t let them get away!” Jared took off down the scaffolding.

  Security lights snapped on around the compound. Figures were seen running in the darkness: people in pursuit of the trespassers.

  Luke came scrambling down the ladder, long blond hair wild about his head. “I called the police, Erica. What happened? Did they get away?”

  But she was already going back into the cave, the beam from her flashlight sweeping the floor and walls.

  She stopped and stared in disbelief. The skeleton—

  She dropped to her knees and reached out with a tremulous hand. Skull crushed. Bones shattered. Pelvis cracked like an egg.

  “Holy shit,” Luke whispered. “What the hell were they doing?”

  “Get Sam,” she said in a tight voice. The Lady’s skull. In pieces. Jawbone snapped. “He’s a heavy sleeper. Go wake him up.”

  “Erica—”

  “Go!”

  She rose shakily to her feet and lifted her flashlight to the painting. Obscene gouges in the rock. The intruders had hacked away at the pictographs.

  Erica was barely aware of the sound of boots coming up the ladder outside, the heavy breathing of someone who had run a distance. She heard him come inside, sensed him standing there. And then she heard Jared say, “They got away.”