Sacred Ground (4 page)

* * *

As Opaka kept her eyes on Marimi across the circle of dancers, she recalled a time when she herself had been that pleasing to look upon. Sitting on her rich buffalo hide, surrounded by gifts of food, beads, and feathers brought by people seeking favors and blessings from the gods, Opaka thought bitterly that Marimi’s round face, laughing eyes, sensuous mouth, and hair like a shining black waterfall— which had caught the attention of more than just the young hunter who had married her— had once been Opaka’s features, before age and too many soul-journeys out of her body had worn her down. Now Opaka was bent, white-haired, and nearly toothless.

But this was not why she hated the girl.

The poison that flowed in Opaka’s aged veins had sprung up six winters ago, during the Season of No Pine Nuts, when the families had arrived at the forest to find the pinecones already fallen and rotting on the ground. When they realized the gods had made the season come too soon so now the people would starve, a great wailing arose, and the shamans had retreated into the god-huts to burn fires of sacred mesquite and to fast and swallow jimsonweed and chant and sing and pray for visions from the gods that would show the people where pine nuts were. But the gods had not answered the shamans’ prayers and so it appeared that a dreadful famine was upon the Topaa.

And then Marimi’s mother had come to Opaka with the most extraordinary tale.

Her daughter, then nine summers old, had fallen victim to a terrible affliction that filled her head with pain and blinded her eyes and deafened her ears. The mother had bathed the child’s head in cool water and kept her in the shade of the trees, and when the sickness passed Marimi told her mother about a pine forest on the other side of the river. It was only a dream, her mother said, brought on by hunger and the strange head sickness. And she cautioned her daughter to keep silent about her vision, for it was up to Opaka to tell the clan where to find food. But Marimi persisted in her vision of a woodland of pine trees, in a land beyond the Topaa boundaries where no other people dwelled and no ancestors had lived, so it would not be taboo to journey there and to harvest the abundant pine nuts.

And so when the shamans emerged from their hut and said that there would be no pine nuts this season and that there would be no rabbit hunt since no one had seen rabbits in the forest, that the woodland was barren because the gods had turned their backs on the people, Marimi’s mother had thought she should seek Opaka’s counsel regarding her daughter’s vision. The woodland, the child had said, lay in the direction of the rising sun, across a river and atop a fertile ridge.

But Opaka said that the land she spoke of lay beyond their tribal boundaries. It was taboo for the people to go there. Yet the child insisted it wasn’t taboo. The spirit in the dream had told her so. Instructing the woman to speak of this to no one else, Opaka had quietly gone on a journey of her own and sure enough had found the forest with plentiful pine nuts. Returning to the camp, she had gone into the shaman’s god-hut to undergo a spiritual journey and had emerged to announce that the gods had led her in a vision to a place of bountiful pine nuts, a place where no other ancestors had lived.

Four brave young men were chosen and given spears. They were instructed to run toward the sun, but if they entered taboo ground, they were not to return.

While they were gone, the people danced and sustained themselves on bee larvae and honey and on such pine nuts as could be scavenged from the terrible waste. And when the hunters returned, they told of a bountiful woodland on the other side of the river where no people and no ancestors had lived.

It had turned out to be a good season, the Season of No Pine Nuts, and was talked about at every gathering and around every campfire. The tribe had feasted well and had returned to their summer homes with baskets filled with nuts. The girl was not mentioned. The vision was credited to the shamans, who could speak to the gods, thus proving the power of the shamans, proving the power of Opaka.

Opaka had kept her eye on the girl since, noting the occasions when Marimi was stricken with head pains and spoke of visions. When the girl entered womanhood and won the race at her puberty ritual two summers ago, a victory which awarded her a place of honor in the eyes of the tribe and which Opaka had hoped would go to her sister’s granddaughter, Opaka having no granddaughter of her own, Opaka had intensified her vigil. When the girls emerged from the final puberty rite, spent in a ceremonial hut where they had undergone vision quests, and each had declared that the rattlesnake was her spirit guide— the snake being a strong masculine symbol and good luck for virgins hoping to become fertile mothers— Marimi had announced that the
raven
was her spirit guide, defying tradition.

But what alarmed Opaka most was that the girl was able to have visions without the benefit of jimsonweed, which the shamans required. What would happen to the social structure of the tribe if just anyone could commune with the gods? Chaos, savagery, lawlessness would result. Only those specially chosen and initiated into the secret shamanic rites might communicate with the Other World. In this way did the universe remain in balance, in this way was order kept. Opaka saw the girl as a threat to the future stability of the tribe. Especially now that she was pregnant and soon to have her status elevated to that of a mother.

A privilege Opaka had never known.

Chosen when she was only a baby, taken from her mother and sent to live in seclusion with the clan shaman, Opaka had been raised and instructed by the old woman in the ways of mysteries and secrets, medicine and healing, and how to talk to the gods. It had been an initiation of endurance and trial, with grueling months of loneliness and sacrifice as she was trained in hardship and without love, to think not of herself but of the tribe, to live a husbandless life, childless, a virgin even in her old age. Opaka was unable to recognize the emotion of envy, having been raised to become the richest and most powerful person in the clan, so what had she to be envious of? Jealousy was also a foreign concept to her and so she couldn’t recognize it when she felt it. Opaka would also not have believed, had anyone told her, that she could be afraid of a simple girl. People who spoke directly to the gods didn’t suffer from petty human frailties. And so, blind to her inner rancor and bitterness and her deep terror that one day Marimi might compete with her for god-power, Opaka told herself now that the secret she plotted against the girl was for the good of the tribe.

* * *

A group of young women came by, Marimi’s unmarried friends, to tease her about not getting cold tonight when the winter chill invaded their shelters.
They
only had their furs and hides to keep them warm, whereas lucky Marimi had the heat of a man. “If we hear your cries,” said one girl who was soon to be married to a hunter from the Falcon Clan, “shall we come and rescue you?”

“But what if the cries are
his
?” teased another. “Shall we come and take your husband away?”

Marimi blushed and laughed and chided her friends for being silly virgins, but she loved the attention and was indeed looking forward to her husband’s lusty embrace that coming night.

As she was about to offer her friends a basket of berries, which she had picked that afternoon, a woman suddenly broke into the circle, pushing aside the dancers, screaming as she carried an unconscious child. She flung herself before Opaka, beseeching the medicine woman to save her son.

The encampment fell silent, leaving only the sounds of flames crackling in campfires and babies wailing in distant huts.

Marimi recognized the boy. He was Payat, of the Mountain Lion Clan, his second family were the People From The Red Canyon, his first family were “lives by the salt flat.” A dreadful hush descended upon the encampment as Opaka struggled to her feet and went to bend over the boy, who was moaning in pain. She touched various points of his body, laid a hand on his forehead, closed her eyes, and held her hands out, palms downward, over his writhing form. And all the while she murmured a mystical chant which no one understood.

Finally, she opened her eyes, straightened as best she could, and declared that the boy had broken a taboo and now there was an evil spirit in him.

A collective gasp rose from the crowd. People shifted nervously and some even backed away. Women who were menstruating or breastfeeding rushed inside the protection of their shelters, while men handled their spears nervously. A person possessed by an evil spirit was a frightening thing, for the spirit could fly from the possessed one at any moment and enter the body of anyone nearby.

Opaka declared the boy Untouchable, that he was as good as dead and beyond the help of the gods, and then she conferred with the chief and subchiefs over what to do with him— he certainly could not be allowed to remain among the people. In the meantime, Marimi edged closer to the scene.

Payat’s mother was bent over him, sobbing and begging for the evil spirit to leave his body. Two hunters were ordered to lift her away from the boy, for Opaka had declared it taboo to touch him. While everyone’s attention was on the hysterical woman, Marimi moved yet closer, curious to know what had happened. She knew she should keep away, because she was pregnant and should not be in the presence of a taboo person, but she had never seen a possessed person before. But as she drew near, she saw only a little boy who was grimacing in pain and of shocking pallor. What terrible crime could so young a child have committed, she wondered, to deserve the infliction of an evil spirit?

Then Marimi saw something that the others seemed not to— in the boy’s hands, crushed yellow blossoms. And suddenly she knew: the child had eaten buttercup leaves. That was how the evil spirit had entered Payat! Everyone knew that the buttercup plant housed an evil spirit and that to ingest it caused sickness and death. If the leaves were still in his stomach, Marimi wondered with sudden insight, mightn’t it be possible to expel the spirit?

Without thinking, she rushed forward and before anyone could react, lifted the boy, turned him over, and stuck a finger down his throat. He started at once to vomit.

The onlookers cried out when they saw an arc of green liquid spew from Payat’s belly, and when it pooled on the ground they all exclaimed that it was in the shape of a beast. The evil spirit had left the boy’s body!

Immediately men rushed forward to throw ashes upon the green devil, thereby smothering it before it could find another host.

When Marimi gently laid the boy on the ground, he groaned and asked for his mother. The woman quickly gathered Payat in her arms, sobbing and laughing at the same time, and held him tight to her bosom as the onlookers murmured and remarked about the miracle. In all their memory, they couldn’t recall such an event. They looked at Marimi with new eyes, some in admiration, others in wonder, a few in wariness.

When Payat coughed and opened his eyes, and everyone saw that the color was already returning to his face, they began talking at once, lifting Marimi’s name up to the night sky.

“Silence!” Opaka cried suddenly, raising her medicine stick, which was decorated with feathers and beads.

The crowd fell back. All eyes were fixed upon the white-haired medicine woman who, though small and frail-looking, was a powerful vision. And every tribe member knew, in the terrible moment of silence that followed, that the most serous crime a Topaa could commit had taken place before their eyes: a girl had defied the edict of a shaman.

* * *

The shamans of all the clans gathered in the god-hut, where their mystical smoke was seen spiraling up through the opening in the roof. A somber mood befell the settlement. Marimi cried fearfully in her mother’s lap while her young husband paced angrily in front of the shelter as everyone awaited the verdict.

When the shamans emerged, Opaka solemnly declared Marimi and the boy outcast. They were dead.

“No!” Marimi cried. “We did no wrong!”

Marimi’s husband spat at her and turned his back.

She flung herself at her mother’s feet, begging for help. But her mother turned her back and commenced the keening that would not let up for five days and five nights.

With great ceremony, while the tribe stood in a circle, their backs to Marimi and the boy, Opaka divested them of their names, their clothes, and their possessions. They would have no spear to catch food, no basket to carry seeds, no fur to keep out the cold. They were to live beyond the encampment, beyond the circle, on their own, ghosts in bodies, with no one looking at them or speaking to them, their fleshly fates in the hands of the gods.

* * *

They were dying.

As Marimi and the boy sat huddled at the edge of the settlement, not crossing the boundary marked by Opaka’s talismans and the mystical symbols she had carved into tree trunks, they listlessly watched the dancing in the clearing, the women at their basket weaving, the men at their games of chance. The first and second families of Marimi and Payat were in mourning. They had cut off their hair and smeared mud on their chests and faces and would refrain from eating meat for one full cycle of the moon. All the aunts and female cousins were forbidden to weave, the uncles and male cousins were barred from the dance, and Payat’s brothers and Marimi’s widowed husband would not be allowed to hunt for one moon. Nor were any in the families to engage in sexual intercourse, to eat with nonfamily members, to walk across the shadow of Opaka or any of the shamans.

For seven nights, the outcast pair had struggled to survive. With pangs of hunger constricting their bellies, Marimi and the boy had managed to find a place to sleep for the night, a hollow in the ground which Marimi lined with leaves. She had drawn Payat against her to share warmth, but both had shivered all through the night, and the little boy had cried in his sleep. During that first long night, Marimi had gazed up at the stars, feeling a strange numbness creep up her limbs. It was not the loss of her own life that filled her with despair, but that of her unborn child. She had placed her hands on her abdomen and felt the fitful life within. How was she going to nourish herself enough to feed the child? If Marimi shivered from cold, then did not her baby also? And when its time came, in the spring, would it be born dead from Opaka’s curse?