Read Online Sacred Ground by Barbara Wood - Free Book Online

western sky, her guide, the raven, outlined sharply against it.
    * * *
    Payat noticed the vultures first, circling overhead.
    “Why doesn’t Raven lead us to water?” he asked, his lips parched and cracked.
    “I don’t know,” Marimi said, puffing with the exertion of having to carry the boy on her back. He was too weak to walk. “Maybe he’s looking.”
    “Those birds want to eat us,” Payat said, meaning the vultures.
    “They are just curious. We are strangers in their land. They mean us no harm.” It was only a small lie, enough to comfort the boy.
    Marimi and Payat had traveled far, for many days and nights, along stark jagged cliffs and through deep canyons, across fields of boulders and vast areas of flat sand where they saw cacti taller than a man, always following the raven, who flew westward, ever westward.
    At each nightfall the raven would come to a rest— on a rock or a cactus or a tree— and Marimi and the boy would make camp, to awaken the next morning to follow the raven again in his flight toward the west. Where was Raven leading them? Were they to join another people? Marimi was worried because her child was going to be born soon and it was unthinkable that it should be born without a shaman in attendance to ask the gods for blessings. How would her baby receive protection and beneficence from the gods with no shaman there to speak on its behalf?
    During their long trek Marimi and Payat had survived on beans from the mesquite, wild plum, dates, and cactus buds. When hunting was good, they had feasted on a stew of rabbit, wild onions, and pistachio nuts. For water, when they could not find a stream or a spring, they sucked on the thick stems of prickly pear, which were full of water.
    Wherever they walked, they showed etiquette toward the land. All things were treated with respect and ritual. Taking any part of a tree, killing an animal, using a spring, or entering a cave was prefaced by ceremony, however simple, in the form of a request or an acknowledgment. “Spirit in this spring,” Marimi would say. “I ask pardon for taking your water. May we together complete the circle of life that was given to us by the Creator of All.” She also fashioned snares with bait, and as she and the boy hid behind rocks, she kissed the back of her hand to make a sucking sound, which attracted birds. And when they caught small game thusly, she apologized to the animal and asked that his ghost not take revenge on them.
    Once, when the ground roared and trembled so mightily that she and Payat were thrown off their feet, Marimi shook with terror until she retraced their steps and discovered the cause of the earthquake. She had inadvertently crushed a tortoise burrow. She begged forgiveness of Grandfather Tortoise and cleared the opening to the reptile’s home.
    She never forgot her debt to the moon. When she and Payat had a meal, they never ate the whole of it but always left some behind, an offering to the goddess who had saved them.
    Occasionally they had come upon evidence of people having recently occupied a site— blackened stones, animal bones, shells from nuts. But sometimes the evidence was from long ago, when they would come upon petroglyphs that looked as if they had been carved in the rock back at the beginning of time. Marimi sensed the ghosts of those ancient people all about them as she and Payat crossed the foreign landscape, over the hot sand, in and out of the shade of massive date palms. She wondered what the ghosts thought of these strange intruders trekking over their ancestral land, and she always asked their pardon and assured them she and Payat meant no disrespect.
    The moon had died and renewed herself five times since the night Marimi prayed to her, and in that time Marimi had watched the moon and marveled at her power. Only the moon could die and be reborn in an endless cycle of death and birth, and only the moon cast light during the night when it was needed, whereas the sun shone his