Sacred Ground (14 page)

* * *

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.

“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.”

She closed her eyes in blind fury.
She
would find them. Somehow, she would find the men who did this.

He came all the way in, stood in the semidarkness for a moment, then he said, “I hope you’re satisfied.”

She spun around. Through tear-filled eyes she saw the smears of dirt on his bare chest, the sheen of sweat from having chased after the vandals. There was no mistaking the fury in his eyes as they took in the terrible destruction in the cave.

“What do you mean?” Erica said.

“You exposed this woman when she should have been left alone,” he said. “Before you arrived with your shovels and your brushes, she was safe in her grave, where she expected to rest for eternity.”

She stared at him. He was blaming
her
for this? In the blackness of the cave, Erica saw red.

“Yes, look at her!” she shouted. “And I’m the one who stopped the desecrators! I don’t recall seeing
you
doing anything to ensure the security of this site that you supposedly hold so sacred, Mr. Commissioner. But
I
did something.” She pulled an object out of her pocket and thrust it in his face. “This is just an ordinary baby monitor. I hid the transmitter in the cave and put this receiver by my bed. Sounds of the intruders woke me. I
did
something! What did
you
do?”

Jared stared at her, his mouth partly open, and it looked for a moment as if Erica was going to throw the monitor at him. Instead she shoved it back in her pocket and marched past him to the cave entrance where she found Luke just returning from the camp. “You were right, Erica. Sam was fast asleep.”

She could barely speak. “Luke, I want you to photograph everything inside the cave, exactly as it is, don’t touch or move anything. And don’t—” She began to shake. “Don’t let anyone else in. I am going to have to write up a full report on this mess before I can start to restore order.”

“Hey,” he said. “Are you all right?”

“I just have to get out of here before I kill that man!” And she jerked her thumb over her shoulder toward the cave.

She met Sam at the top of the ridge, one suspender hooked over a shoulder, the other dangling down. His hair looked as if he had been struck by lightning.

“You’re not going to believe it, Sam, when you see what they did.”

“Luke gave me a pretty good idea. The skeleton, how bad?”

Tears streamed down her cheeks and she shook so badly she had to wrap her arms around herself. “Bad. I wish we had done more to protect her.”

Sam looked as stricken as if they were talking about a living person. “Did they get away with much?”

Erica ran the sleeve of her sweater over her face. She sniffed back tears. Then she looked at Sam. “What did you say?”

“Could you see if they got away with much?”

She frowned. She pictured the cave, the vandalized wall and skeleton. Then her look turned to one of surprise. “Sam! They didn’t take anything! They weren’t carrying any sacks or bags when they ran out, and I didn’t see any they might have left behind.”

“That’s odd.”

“No it isn’t,” she said grimly. “Because they weren’t relic hunters. Sam, you’ve seen pillaged sites. The thieves just grab the artifacts and run. They don’t stop to trash the site, any more than a jewel thief would pause to trash a victim’s home. This was intentional vandalism.”

The senior archaeologist squinted in the direction of headlights approaching. The police. “But why? What does vandalism achieve?”

“It renders the cave useless to archaeologists and it gets Native Americans angry enough to have the cave sealed so the homeowners can get their properties back.”

His wiry brows shot up. “You think Zimmerman is behind this?”

“I would bet my credentials on it.” She turned in the direction of the cave, where people were standing at the edge of the cliff, milling uselessly about, like ants whose hill had been kicked. She saw Jared among the crowd, talking to the Native American construction crew. Most of them, like Jared, were shirtless, long black hair streaming down their naked backs. They were angry, some raising fists, like braves preparing for war, Erica thought.

She returned her attention to Sam. “The homeowners want nothing more than to close down the dig. Our excavation is standing in the way of their move against the completion bond. If the court finds in their favor, this canyon can be filled in and their properties restored to them. But not while this is a vital archaeological dig. So what better way to eliminate the obstacle than to trash the cave beyond all usefulness to us? We need security, Sam. I have a feeling we haven’t seen the end of this.”

* * *

Jared had a headache that not even aspirin could touch.

It had been twelve hours since the break-in and his mood was as black as his hair. He hadn’t gotten any more sleep— no one had gone back to sleep after what happened. There were questions to answer for the police, vague descriptions of the vandals, an accounting of damage done inside the cave, a brief talk with Sam Carter, who had conveyed Erica’s theory that the homeowners were behind the attack, followed by Jared’s barely controlled impulse to march over to the homeowners’ camp, drag Zimmerman out by his Adidas, and wring a confession out of him.

Jared had returned to his RV to find his phone lines already ringing— television news stations, reporters, and Native American groups in an uproar over the desecration of a sacred Indian burial site. They accused the Anglo archaeologists of negligence, even though Jared had pointed out that it was Dr. Tyler who had thought to put a monitor in the cave and that it was she who had stopped the vandals before they could do more damage. It didn’t matter. Desecration had taken place. Bad medicine was now at work.

As Jared swallowed another aspirin and wished he could go to the Club, even though his regular nightly session was hours away, he couldn’t stop mentally replaying the scene in the cave when Erica’s tears had stopped him cold.

He had thought she was a hard woman. When he had gone into the cave she had had her back to him. He had said, “I hope you’re satisfied.” But when she spun around and he had seen the amber eyes filled with tears, it had floored him. Erica had unleashed a tirade then and he had been too rooted to the spot to react. All he could think was that she was suddenly exposed and vulnerable, no longer an adversary but a victim, revealing to him a defenseless side that made him wish in that moment he wasn’t a part of all this, that he’d never gotten involved in the activist movement, that he’d never met Netsuya, that he was back in his office in San Francisco, working with his father on deeds, land grants, and contracts.

And then she had marched out and he had still been too stunned to go after her and retract his words. He hadn’t meant to hurt her. His words had come from the anger he carried with him day and night. Netsuya was buried in a Native American cemetery. When he had seen the smashed skull and bones of the medicine woman—

He looked across the sunlit compound at Erica’s tent.
A baby monitor.
She hadn’t gone to Radio Shack and bought high-tech surveillance equipment or impersonal electronic detection devices. She had purchased a simple baby monitor, as if she expected to be wakened during the night by the ancient woman’s soft weeping.

“Commissioner Black?”

He turned and saw a man standing at the screen door of the Winnebago. The day was sunny and mild; Jared had latched his door open. “Yes?” he said, not recognizing the visitor.

The man held out a business card. “Julian Xavier, attorney. May I come in? I have something of a confidential nature I would like to discuss with you.”

After he made himself comfortable in one of the leather club chairs, the tall thin man with gold-rimmed glasses carefully placed his eelskin briefcase on his knees and explained that he was there to speak on behalf of an elite group of medicine men and shamans from various Native American tribes. “They fear that what is happening here at Emerald Hills, Commissioner, is a symptom of the sickness in the world today. They say calamity will befall humankind if the cave is not sealed.”

Jared, who remained standing, waited.

Xavier examined his perfect manicure, a man measuring out his words. “I know you already represent various Native American groups, Commissioner, and that as a member of the NAHC you no doubt have your hands full. But my clients would like to retain your services.”

Jared folded his arms. “But you already represent them, Mr. Xavier. Why would they want to retain me?”

The visitor tugged at French cuffs heavy with gold links. “For one thing, you are closer to the issue than I; your involvement is well-known; you have all the facts, the contacts in Sacramento, and so forth. Advantages, Mr. Black, that my clients feel will help their cause. They also appreciate the way you feel about the archaeologists, since it is their feeling as well.”

“And how do I feel about the archaeologists?”

Xavier cleared his throat. “Well, you believe they are desecrating a sacred site and you would like to see them gone as soon as possible. You have been very public about your opinion, Commissioner.”

“And what exactly is it these clients want me to do?”

“As I said, you are very close to the issue and have certain inside advantages that an outsider like me would not have. Let me hasten to add, Commissioner, that my clients are not without funds for such a special case and are prepared to pay whatever you ask.”

Jared stared at the man. “And who did you say these people were?”

A quick, dry smile. “Well, I’m not at liberty to divulge their identities. Frankly, it isn’t something I totally understand myself. It has to do with tribal laws and taboos, that sort of thing.”

Jared nodded slowly. “But if I should decide to take their case, then I would have a list of their names?”

“Well, ah, no, I’m afraid not. They can’t risk their involvement in this being known because of tribal rivalry and oaths taken. It is very complex, believe me. But again, let me assure you, the funds are in place and can be moved as soon as you say.”

“What exactly is it they want me to do?”

Xavier blinked at him. “Why, to get the cave closed, of course. Cease the desecration by the white archaeologists and protect the body and burial objects of the woman in the grave. This is sacred business, Mr. Black. My clients are holy men who operate at the very top echelon of Native American affairs. You might say they are the Indian equivalent of a college of cardinals.”

Jared thought for a moment as sounds from the camp drifted through his open window. “Well, Mr. Xavier,” he finally said, “you can tell your clients that my services won’t be necessary. The state is most likely going to claim eminent domain, in which case the homeowners will be offered fair market value for their properties. The houses will be torn down and the cave will then come under the protection of the Environmental Protection Agency and in all likelihood will be turned over to tribal representatives. If this doesn’t happen, I am going to petition for a permanent injunction against the canyon being filled in, in which case the homeowners will also lose. In either case, Mr. Xavier, the cave will be protected.”