Sacred Ground by Barbara Wood Read Free Book Online Page A

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