Sacred Ground by Barbara Wood Read Free Book Online Page B

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?
    Without her buckskin skirt and rabbit fur cape, without the comfort of the campfire and the fur blankets inside the shelter, Marimi had been gripped with the fiercest cold she could ever have imagined. Her fingers and toes were numb, her blood felt like frost. She had never shivered so violently as she had when clinging to little Payat, whose tears froze on his face as he cried and cried for his mother.
    Marimi hadn’t known which was worse, the cold or the terror.
    Every morning, when the sun rose, the shamans of the clans would say the proper prayers and send sacred smoke to the sky, scattering seeds to the four points in order to placate the gods, to show respect and gratitude. Powerful talismans, blessed by shamans, hung in the doorways of family shelters to keep evil and sickness out. The huts were built in the shapes of circles, the most sacred of symbols, and then arranged in a circle around the great circular dancing ground. The whole encampment of hundreds of families formed a circle for as far as the eye could see, and there was safety inside the circle.
    But Marimi and the boy were expelled from the circle, forced to fend for themselves in the hostile and dangerous land beyond the protection of the shamans.
    There were ghosts everywhere in this strange and terrifying wilderness— they lived in the loamy soil and in the menacing shadows, they lurked in the brambles and briars, they hovered overhead in the branches, watching the unprotected humans, ready to descend and possess their bodies. Marimi had never been in the woods alone, she had always been in the company of her family, with the shamans going ahead with their sacred smoke and rattles to make the way safe. But now she was naked and alone, beyond the circle, in a dark place where she heard the whispers and rustlings of ghosts and spirits as they skittered and flitted past her, teasing, taunting, threatening.
    Worse even than this, she and the boy were cut off from the stories. It was the tales told at the campfires that connected the Topaa to one another; it was the myths and histories recited at night that joined one generation to another, all the way back to the beginning of time. Marimi’s father, like all Topaa fathers, passed along the stories that he had learned at his father’s campfire, where they had been learned from earlier fathers, all the way back starting with the first story and the first father to tell that story. But Marimi and Payat had been severed from the stories and therefore from their clans and their families, never to be brought back into the embrace of the tribe. They haunted the edge of the encampment, living on juniper berries and such pine nuts as had been overlooked by the harvesters. But these were not enough, so that Marimi and the boy soon grew weak from hunger. Days and nights came and went, until they had no strength even to find berries. Marimi knew that she and Payat were now facing death, and there was no shaman they could ask to intercede with the gods on their behalf.
    * * *
    She watched the moon through the branches. It was taboo to stare at the moon, for that was the privilege of the shamans. The clan still talked about the cousin who had stared at the moon for so long that he had been punished by fits in which he foamed at the mouth and thrashed his limbs on the ground. But the moon could be generous also. When Tika’s older sister could not get pregnant, she presented a gift of rare kestrel feathers to Opaka, who went into her god-hut and beseeched the moon for the favor of a child. The sister was blessed with a boy the next spring.
    Knowing that she should avert her gaze from the celestial orb, Marimi could not. Weak and faint from hunger, her soul