Sacred Ground (3 page)

Despite her impulse to rush inside and see the painting, Erica remained at the entrance and methodically swept her flashlight over the floor, walls, ceiling. When she had satisfied herself that there was no surface archaeological material, nothing they might inadvertently destroy, she said, “All right, gentlemen, we can go in. Be careful where you walk.” Her flashlight beam swept up the stone walls and across the vaulted ceiling. “As we proceed, what we must do is send ourselves back in time and try to imagine the things that people are likely to have done here and the traces that these activities might have left behind.”

They moved slowly forward, booted feet careful of where they trod while eight circles of light danced like white moths over sandstone formations. Erica observed quietly: “We’re lucky this cave is in the north slope of the mountains, which is drier than the south slope, which gets the brunt of Pacific storms. Shelter from the rain is what helped to preserve the painting. And possibly other artifacts.”

They explored in silence, beams slithering over the smooth contours of rock, illuminating blackened surfaces and patches of lichen, all four intruders alert, senses sharpened, watchful, until finally they arrived at the far end.

“There,” said the climber, meaning the painting.

Erica approached with apprehension, one foot placed meticulously in front of the other. When the carbide lamp on her helmet shone on the pictographs, her breath caught. The vibrant colors of the circles, the reds and yellows, like blazing sunsets! They were beautiful, fantastic, lifelike. They were also—

“Do you know what these symbols mean, Dr. Tyler?” the climber asked, tilting his head this way and that as he tried to make sense of what appeared to be a nonsensical collage of lines, circles, shapes, and colors.

Erica didn’t respond. She stood transfixed before the painting, eyes unblinking, as if the luminous suns and moons on the wall had hypnotized her.

“Dr. Tyler?” he repeated. Jared and Luke exchanged a glance. “Dr. Tyler,” Luke said, “are you okay?” He tapped her on the shoulder and she jumped.

“What?” she gave him a perplexed look. Then, recovering, said, “I was just… I hadn’t expected to find such an intact painting. No graffiti…” She was a little breathless. “To answer your question about these symbols,” her voice a little stronger, a little forced, as if she had to remind herself where she was, “the heart of religious belief in this area was shamanism, a form of worship based on personal interaction between a shaman and the supernatural. The shaman would eat jimsonweed, or in other ways enter a trance, and walk in the spirit world. This was called a vision quest. And when he came out of the trance he would record his visions on rocks. This is called trance-derived art. At least that is one of the theories explaining Southwest rock art.”

The climber leaned close. “How do you figure this is the work of a shaman?” he asked. “I mean, couldn’t it just be graffiti and not really mean anything at all?”

Erica stared at the largest circle, which was blood-red with curious points emanating from it.
This means something all right.
“There have been laboratory studies of this phenomenon, it’s called the neuropsychology of altered states. And what the studies have discovered is that there are universal images described by people in different cultures, whether they be Native Americans, Australian Aborigines, or natives of African cultures. They are believed to be luminous geometric forms somehow spontaneously generated in the optical system. You can try it yourself. Stare briefly at a bright light and then quickly close your eyes. You will generate these same patterns— dots, parallel lines, zigzags, and spirals. What we call metaphors of trance.”

He frowned. “But they don’t
look
like anything.”

“They’re not supposed to. These symbols are images of a feeling or of a spiritual plane, something that in reality has no corporeal structure and therefore no image. However…” She frowned when her flashlight illuminated an unidentifiable figure, elongated with what appeared to be arms or antlers stretching out. “There are other elements that are puzzling.”

Luke turned to her, momentarily blinding her with his helmet lamp. “Puzzling? Like what?”

“Notice that some of these features don’t conform to the known record of trance imagery. This symbol here. I’ve never seen it before, not in all the rock art I’ve studied. Most of these symbols you will find in other pictographs and petroglyphs scattered around the Southwest. These handprints, for example. In fact, the handprint in rock art is universal and found all over the world. It reflects the belief that the rock face was a permeable boundary between the natural and the supernatural worlds. It’s the door through which the shaman entered to visit the spirits. But these other symbols” —she pointed, being careful not to touch the surface— “are completely new to me.” She paused, her soft respirations sounding in the cave like a breeze. “There is something else puzzling about this painting.”

Her companions waited.

“While it contains pictographs that are characteristic of the ethnographic cultures of this area, this mural also contains motifs that are typical of Puebloan rock art. In fact, this art reflects a mix of cultures. Southern Paiute, Shoshonean. Somewhere in southern Nevada.”

“Can you date the painting, Dr. Tyler?” asked Luke in an awed tone.

“We can place an immediate date of before 500 C.E. because of the atlatls depicted— these objects here, spear throwers— instead of bows and arrows, which came into use in the New World around the year five hundred. For more definitive dating, we would need to use electron microprobe analysis and radiocarbon dating. But for now I would say this painting is around two thousand years old.”

Jared Black spoke for the first time. “If the artist came from southern Nevada, that’s quite a trek, considering he would have had to walk across Death Valley.”

“The bigger question is
why
did he do it? The Shoshone and Paiute never ventured beyond their tribal lands. Although they moved around according to food availability, they were very territorial and stayed within the limits of their ancestral grounds. What was it that made this person break away from the clan and come all this way, making what can only have been a very treacherous journey?”

Jared’s eyes were shadowed beneath his helmet, but Erica sensed his piercing gaze. “So this is possibly Shoshone?” he said.

“It’s only a guess. According to studies of drought cycles, about fifteen hundred years ago environmental changes in the eastern California deserts brought the ancestors of the Gabrielino Indians to Los Angles, a Shoshonean-speaking language group. However, if these people had a tribal name for themselves, it has been lost over time.”

Jared pressed: “But this
was
done by one of those ancestors?”

She tried to keep her impatience in check. Jared Black was a man who demanded instant answers. “I’m not sure because I believe this is older than fifteen hundred years. And keep in mind that ‘Gabrielino’ was a general catch-all name given by the Franciscans to the diverse tribes in this area.” She gave him a pointed look. “So we have to be very careful with our terms here.”

“Are you sure you don’t know?”

She felt her irritation with him start to shift to anger. She knew what he was implying, he had made the same accusation during the Reddman case when she had said she needed more time to identify the tribal affiliation of the bones and artifacts. In that instance, Jared had been right: Erica
had
been stalling for time. But in this case, she was telling the truth. She had no idea which tribe was responsible for the painting.

Stepping back from the wall, Erica noticed that directly beneath the painting the floor was different from the rest of the cave floor. It rose up in a contour that didn’t strike her as a natural formation. She looked up at the ceiling. There was no evidence of breakdown. Then she squatted in several places and rubbed the soil between her fingertips. It was the same all over, uniformly deposited by winds blowing into the cave. “Since the painting doesn’t pinpoint a specific tribe,” she said, “then I suggest we look elsewhere for our evidence. This curious mound, for instance.”

Luke’s blond eyebrows arched, his eyes bright with hope. “You think there’s something buried here, Dr. Tyler?”

“Possibly. The smoke residue on the walls indicates that campfires or torches were burned in here, which might mean this mound is levels of habitation over centuries. I want to explore this raised area.”

“So now the locusts descend,” Jared murmured.

“No locusts, Mr. Black. Just me. I’ll be the only one working here to ensure the least possible destruction to the mound.”

“Excavation
is
destruction, Dr. Tyler.”

“Believe it or not, Mr. Black, there
are
archaeologists who don’t believe in excavating a site simply because it’s there. It must be a threatened site. Or, as in this case, there is a need to determine the tribal identity of our cave artist. We might have stumbled upon a fabulous repository of history.”

“Or graves that shouldn’t be disturbed.”

She looked at Jared, his face cast in sharp planes by the chiaroscuro lighting, then she turned to Luke. “First we’ll run a geochemical analysis of the soil and measure the phosphate content. This at least will tell us if this was once an inhabited site. In the meantime, I think it would be a good idea if you cleared some of this wall. Under all that soot might be more pictographs.”

As she turned to say something further to Jared Black, she saw to her surprise that he had gone to stand at the cave’s entrance, a tall, broad-shouldered figure silhouetted against the morning sunshine, one hand resting on the wall, the other holding his helmet, which he had removed. Jared Black seemed poised at the edge of the cliff as if ready to fly away.

There was a surreal aspect to the moment, the darkness of the cave with the feeling of the weight of the mountain pressing down, the closeness of the sandstone walls, the silence that was a kind of peace, and yet there was the opening to bright Pacific sunlight and beyond it the sounds of work crews, police, news choppers whirring overhead. Why was he standing there? What was he looking at?

And then Erica wondered: why had he arrived here with such a large chip on his shoulder? Jared Black seemed to have come with all the open mindedness of a grizzly bear protecting its cub. If only there were some way she could make him see that it was possible for them to work together, that they did not have to be adversaries. But for some unfathomable reason he seemed determined to make her the enemy. The Reddman case was four years ago, yet it was almost as if, she couldn’t help thinking, the adrenaline from that battle and the high from the subsequent victory were still fueling his passion. Jared Black was a man preparing himself for a fight and Erica had no idea why.

She continued to scan the cave with her flashlight, until her beam caught on something on the floor. “Luke, what do you make of this?”

He looked down and saw that earth had been dislodged, exposing something grayish white on the cave floor. “It’s fresh. Looks like the earthquake disturbed the soil here.”

Erica dropped to her knees and, using a whisk brush, gently cleared away the loose soil.

“My God,” Luke said, his eyes widening.

Jared came back in and stood in silence as Erica uncovered something with her brush, an object that looked like a rock with a hole in it. And then another hole. And then… teeth.

It was a human skull.

“This is a grave!” Luke whispered in awe.

“Whose?” said the climber nervously.

Erica, feeling a sudden rush of adrenaline and excitement, didn’t respond. But she knew. Somehow, before excavating, before finding proof, she knew that they had found the remains of the artist of the sun painting.

Chapter Two

Marimi

Two Thousand Years Ago

As Marimi watched the dancers performing in the center of the circle, she knew that tonight was going to be a night of magic.

She could already feel the magic in her fingers as she skillfully wove the oval cradle board, laying the tender willow branches crosswise in preparation to support her newborn child; the surface would later be covered with buckskin and a basket sunshade added above the baby’s head. She could feel the magic in her womb as the new life stirred there, her first child, due to be bom in the spring. She saw the magic in the supple limbs of her young husband as he danced in celebration of the annual pine nut harvest, a handsome, virile hunter who had introduced her to the ecstasy of physical love between a man and a woman. Marimi heard magic in the laughter of the men as they danced, or gambled, or told stories while smoking their clay pipes; she heard it in the music of the musicians as they blew whistles made of hollowed bird bones and flutes made of elderberry wood; there was magic in the merry gossip of the women as they wove their brilliant baskets by the light of many campfires; in the children’s squeals as they played hoop and pole games or wrestled on the damp forest floor; and there was magic, too, in the faces of the young people falling in love, smiling behind their hands as they chose future mates. A “spirit” night, her mother called it, when the ghosts of ancestors were called forth by the souls of the trees and the rocks and the rivers to celebrate the Oneness of All Things. A time of great joy, a good night, a special night, Marimi thought.

Except that Marimi’s joy on this night of celebration was laced with unexpected fear.

Across the great circle around which the families watched the dancers, a pair of hard black eyes were fixed on her— Old Opaka, clan shaman-woman, magnificent in her buckskins and beads and precious eagle feathers. Marimi shivered beneath the piercing gaze and felt bumps of fear sprout on her skin. Opaka terrified everyone, including the chiefs and the hunters, with her vast and mysterious knowledge of magic and because she spoke to the gods, because she alone out of all the clan knew the secret of communing with the sun and the moon and all the earth’s spirits and how to invoke their powers.

Ordinary persons were unable to speak to the gods. If a clan member wished a favor of the gods, the intercession of a shaman was required: a barren wife wishing for a child, a homely virgin desperate for a husband, an aging hunter whose skills were fading, a grandmother whose fingers could no longer weave baskets, a pregnant woman seeking protection from the evil eye, a father wondering if the dried-up creek beside his family’s shelter would ever run with water again— they shyly and with great reverence approached the shaman of the clan and humbly presented their case. Each petition was accompanied by payment, which was why the shamans were so wealthy, their huts the most richly adorned, their buckskins the softest, their beads the most elegant. The poorest families could offer only seeds while the richest brought sheep’s horn and elk hides. But all were allowed to approach the shaman, and all received an answer from the gods through the shaman’s mouth. In this case she was Opaka, the most powerful figure in Marimi’s clan. Marimi had once seen the old woman make a man sicken and die, simply by pointing at him; Opaka was that powerful.

But why was she now watching Marimi especially, out of all the people, her eyes like pinpoints of black fire?

Trying not to let her fear show, the young wife returned her attention to her basketry, reminding herself again that tonight was a special night.

This was the time of the annual gathering, when once a year all the families of the People— who called themselves Topaa— came from the four points of the world, from as far away as where the earth supports the sky, leaving their summer homes to meet in the mountains for the pine nut harvest— a gathering of some five hundred families, each with its own round grass shelter and campfire. Using long poles to remove the cones from the trees, they roasted the nuts and ate them, or ground them into a meal which they mixed with deer meat and gravy, and then they stored what was left over for the coming winter months. While the women gathered the nuts, the men conducted a communal hunt for rabbits, driving them into nets and clubbing what they needed for winter food supply.

Marriages were arranged at this time, no simple matter since the rules governing who could marry whom were complex— the lineages had to be examined and considered, the gods must be invoked, the omens read. Although the Topaa were all of the same tribe, they were members of different clans, which in turn were divided into families, second and first. The clans had an animal totem: Cougar, Hawk, Tortoise. The second family, comprised of grandparents, aunts and uncles and cousins, called themselves after their lineage: People From Cold River, People In Salt Desert. The first family consisted of mother and father and siblings, and the family’s name was based on their local food source, occupation, or geographic feature— “eaters of buffalo berry,” “creek dwellers,” or “white knives” because they made cutting tools from a local white rock quarry. Marimi was of the Red-Tailed Hawk Clan, her second family were People From the Black Mesa, her first family was “hunt jackrabbit.” The young man who had chosen her for his mate was of the Tortoise Clan, the Dust Valley People, “pipe makers.” He had delighted Marimi with his antics at the last harvest, prancing and preening in front of her shelter, playing his flute, miming his skill at spear throwing, but not speaking to her for that was taboo. And when she had set out a basket of sweet roots, to indicate her interest, he had arranged for his father to meet with hers, and the two men had conferred with the headmen of their clans to work out the complex negotiations, to determine gifts, and whether the bride should go to the groom’s family, or the other way around. If the husband came from a family of few women, then his wife went with him. If the wife came from a family of widows and unmarried sisters, then the husband went with her. In Marimi’s case, her father was the only male among eight women. He gladly welcomed Marimi’s new husband as a son.

Also at the harvest, the people were reminded of the boundaries of the tribal land, and the children were taught to memorize the rivers, the forests, the mountain ranges that separated Topaa land from that of neighboring tribes— Shoshone to the north, Paiute to the south, and with whom the Topaa neither traded, nor intermarried, nor waged war— and the children were made to remember that it was strictly taboo to hunt, collect seeds, or to take water from the land of another tribe.

At each pine nut harvest the families erected shelters on their ancestral plots, where their family had been meeting and harvesting since the beginning of time. The very spot where Marimi had spread her mat and where she now wove her baby basket was the same place her mother and grandmother and grandmothers all the way back to the beginning had also spread their mats and woven baby baskets. And someday, her first born daughter would sit in this same place and weave her baskets as she watched the same dances, the same games. In this way did the yearly pine nut harvest serve as more than merely to collect winter food. Here was where the people learned the stories of their ancestors, because the way of the Topaa was bound to the past, thus ensuring that what went before was so today, and would be tomorrow until the end of time. The annual gathering taught a person where he or she stood in Creation. It showed a man or woman that he or she was part of a Great Design, that the Topaa and the land, the animals and the plants, the wind and the water were all connected and intertwined like the complex baskets the women wove.

After the pine nut harvest, the clans would stay and winter in the mountains, and when the first green shoots came up from the ground, the enormous settlement would break up, with the families dispersing to their ancestral homes until the next harvest. Marimi and her husband, her mother and father, and six sisters would return to their land, where they hunted jackrabbits, and where Marimi’s family had lived since the time of Creation. There she would bear her first child, becoming a mother, thus raising her status in the clan so that next year when they returned to the pine forest, the people would address her with new respect and deference.

It was upon this happy future that Marimi tried to focus her thoughts while the chill from Opaka’s enigmatic gaze crept into her flesh like a dread. Why was the shaman-woman staring at her?

The ways of the clan shamans were mysterious and deep, and taboo for anyone to even contemplate let alone talk about, for the shamans alone possessed the power to move between the real world and that of the supernatural. Always, before the harvest began, before the first family erected its first shelter, the shamans’ god-huts were built. Everyone participated, even children and the elderly, cutting the best branches and twigs, offering the best skins and kindling so that the god-hut would welcome the gods and bring blessings to the harvest and to the people through their shamans’ vision quests. The world being the uncertain and terrifying place that it was, bountiful harvests could never be predicted nor counted upon, and so it was imperative that before the first cone was dislodged from the first tree, the shamans went into the god-huts and journeyed in their trance states to communicate with the supernatural powers, to receive instructions and prophecies and sometimes new laws.

This was why Marimi was suddenly afraid on this night of celebration. Opaka had the power of the gods, and Marimi was certain there was malevolence in her gaze. Why? Marimi could not recall what she might have done to incur the elder’s wrath. If the source of the rancor were another tribe member, Marimi would go to her clan shaman and beseech her to ask the gods for protection from that person. But in this case it was the shaman herself who was casting an evil eye upon Marimi!

And then suddenly she was remembering Tika, and Marimi was filled with a blinding panic.

Tika had been Marimi’s mother’s sister’s first daughter, and ever since they were little she and Marimi had been like sisters. They had undergone the sacred puberty rites together, and when Tika and twelve other girls had run in the initiates’ race, and Marimi had won, reaching the shaman’s hut before the others, Tika had been the only one to cheer. It was Tika, at the last harvest, who had carried secret messages back and forth between Marimi and the young hunter, since it was taboo for them to speak while marriage negotiations were in progress. And it was Tika who had given Marimi and her new husband the gift of a basket so magnificent in design that it was the talk of the whole clan.

And then misfortune befell Tika. She had fallen in love with a boy Opaka intended for her sister’s granddaughter. If it had been any other boy she had lain with, Tika would not have been made outcast, Marimi was certain. But when the two were found together in an uncle’s grass shelter, the medicine men and women sat in counsel and smoked their wisdom pipes and decreed that the girl should be outcast, although not the boy, since they decided it was the girl who had seduced him into breaking tribal law. As the tribe didn’t execute any of its members for even the severest crime, because they feared retribution from the ghost, the guilty were condemned to a living death. Their name, possessions and food were taken from them and they were cast out of the protective circle. Once declared outcast, a person could never be brought back in. No one was to speak to or look at the outcast, nor to give food or water or shelter. The family members cut off their hair and mourned as if their loved one had truly died. When Tika became one of the Nameless Ones Marimi’s heart wept for her. She recalled seeing her friend at the edge of the pine trees, hovering like a lost soul. Marimi wanted to go out to Tika, to cross the protective circle and take food and warm blankets. But that would have made Marimi an outcast, too.

Because they were already “dead,” outcasts did not live long. It was not just the difficulty in obtaining food, or exposure to the elements, it was because the spirit inside them died when they were pronounced outcast. With the will to live gone, death was not far behind. After a few days, Tika was no longer glimpsed at the edge of the camp.

“Mother,” Marimi said quietly now to the woman who sat cross-legged at her side, singing as she wove an intricate basket. The singing gave life, and therefore a spirit, to the basket. The song also enabled the fingers to spin a myth or a magical tale into the pattern. Marimi’s mother, using a pattern of diamond shapes, was imbuing her basket with the story of how the stars were created long ago. “Mother,” Marimi said a little louder. “Opaka is watching me.”

“I know, daughter! Take care. Avert your eyes.”

Marimi’s gaze flickered nervously about the noisy settlement, where the smoke of five hundred campfires rose to the sky. Her summer home was in the high desert, where the common vegetation was sagebrush, but these mountains were forested with pine and juniper, and this leafy haunt of ghosts would otherwise have terrified Marimi if she and her people were not within the protection of the circle. At night, as families lay on their fur blankets listening in fear to the sounds of ghosts moaning in the trees, they hoped that the shamans’ talismans that had been set out around the perimeter of the settlement were strong enough to keep the spirits out. This was why no one begrudged payment to the shaman, because a powerful shaman meant that the clan was safe and that the gods watched over them. Everyone remembered the terrible fate of the Owl Clan, whose shaman had accidentally fallen to his death from a steep precipice, leaving thirty-six families without someone to represent them in the spirit world and to speak to the gods on their behalf. Before one cycle of the moon, every man, woman, and child had sickened and died so that Owl Clan no longer was.

With her feeling of dread growing, Marimi forced herself to concentrate on her baby basket. But now her fingers worked stiffly and without grace as she realized in dismay that the magic she had sensed this night was not necessarily
good
magic…