Sacred Ground

by Mercedes Lackey

  Heck, it was a great time to talk to him; if he felt like talking to her, he wouldn't be inhibited by the presence of a roommate or his wife.

  "Hi," he said, looking up from the paper he was trying to read; from the way he'd been squinting at it, he wasn't having much luck with it. "What can I do for you?"

  He looked interested, at least, and not like she was imposing on him. She took another step that put her in the doorway. Now that she was closer, there was no doubt of his Osage blood. Tall, rangy, with dark brown hair and mild eyes that were probably deceptive, he looked enough like her father to be a cousin. He'd gotten someone to bring him real pajamas, which was just as well, because she figured that, tall as he was, the hospital gown was just long enough to save him from technical exposure.

  "I'm Jennifer Talldeer, and the insurance company that covers Rod Calligan hired me to ask some questions," she said, carefully. "I promise I'm not from Workman's Comp, and nothing you tell me will have any effect on your hospitalization. Do you feel like answering them? If you don't, I'll be happy to leave you in peace, but if you do, it might clear up a lot of things."

  "I feel like just about anything other than watching a rerun or trying to read this paper," he said, giving her a wan but friendly grin. "They gave me a little stuff for the pain, and it makes fine print damn hard to read. Just don't make me laugh or ask me to shake hands, okay?" As he put the paper down, she saw that three of the fingers on his right hand were splinted and bandaged.

  So, I got lucky, Davidwise. Either he doesn't like being bossed around by anyone, whether or not they're an activist, or they just haven't gotten to him yet.

  Encouraged, she entered his room and took a seat beside the bed. "I'd like to start with some questions about some of the guys who quit," she said. "Was there bad blood between them and their boss?"

  Bushyhead thought about her question for a moment, then shook his head. "Not really. A couple of them got better offers from the State, a couple got long-term offers from a road crew, and a couple of them just couldn't stomach plowing up good animal habitat for a stupid mall and went off to see if anyone else had a job opening. But I didn't ever hear any of them badmouthing him; they all got other work, and I hang out with most of them, off and on."

  "So there were no threats against the company that you know of?" she asked.

  "Threats?" His surprise was genuine. "Hell no, not that I ever heard of. Definitely not from the guys that quit."

  "What about outsiders?" she asked. "You know there were a lot of protests over the choice of site."

  He nodded. "I signed the petition. But once the county signed off, there was never anything seriously said or done. No threats, and that's for sure, or I'd have heard about that, too."

  She gave him a skeptical look, and he grinned. "I sweet-talk the secretary; get her lunch sometimes so she'll let me know when something's up. She gets the mail first; if there were threats, I'd have known-these days, you can't be too careful. I worked on a site that got bomb, threats once, and once was enough for me. The wildlife people kept trying to post injunctions, but they never went through, and that is all I ever heard of. You know, what with some of the crazies that are out there, there's a couple of us that'd think twice about working a site with somebody making threats around."

  He could be bluffing-he could simply be ignorant of what was going on. But she didn't think so. He had no reason to lie, and every reason to tell the truth.

  Besides, all of her instincts were telling her he was divulging everything he knew.

  She decided to try a different angle. "Do you think you can remember exactly what happened just before all hell broke loose?" It had occurred to her that he might have noticed something that would tell her what kind of hand had been behind this.

  "Yeah, I think so." He nodded. "I went over this for the cops, though-"

  "I'm not likely to get access to that," she pointed out. "Was there anyone hanging around the site that you noticed?"

  "No, and we kind of watch for that," he told her. "We've had some problems with people pilfering stuff. In fact, the guys told me this afternoon that the dynamite inventory doesn't match the stores-"

  Bet that's where the explosives came from. "Did anything odd happen that day?" she persisted.

  "Uh-I didn't tell the cops this, but, yeah." He was frowning, and she asked why.

  "Well, something really bad happened right before the explosion, only it wasn't the kind of thing the cops would consider bad." He hesitated a moment, then gave her a sharp look. "Can I ask you a question first? About your family?"

  "Sure," she said, wondering what had caused the look, but getting the feeling in her bones that he was about to tell her something very important. "I don't see why not."

  "Is your grandfather the Talldeer that's the Medicine Man?" Despite being fogged by drugs, he was watching her very closely-and the question startled her a little, and increased the feeling of urgency.

  "Well, yes, actually." She wondered where he'd heard of her grandfather, and if she should say anything else, but he said it-for her.

  "So you're the Medicine Woman, the kid he's been teaching-" He sighed and looked relieved. "Okay, you'll understand, then. You know, if this had happened the day before the dozer suicided, I'd have been sure somebody had planted a bomb because of it-but it couldn't have been more than a few minutes before-"

  He was rambling, possibly nerves, possibly the drugs, probably both. But in the ramblings, there were important clues. Suddenly, this wasn't just an insurance job. She suddenly felt like a hunter who has just heard the warning caw of a crow. She stiffened. "So what did happen?" she prompted.

  "We-we dug up bones." He swallowed. "Old bones, pots, you know what I mean?"

  "You're saying you found a burial ground. I mean, one of our grounds," she said, trying to control the feeling of danger that made her skin crawl. There it was. Out in the open. "Not just some old graveyard from around the Land Rush days."

  "Yeah, at least that's what we all think." He shook his head. "It really spooked us, even the white guys. The stuff looked like it might be real old. And you know what digging up sacred ground means. ..."

  He was getting more and more agitated the more he thought about it. "Yes," she told him. "I do. Can I help?"

  He brightened at that. "Yeah, if you get a chance, would you ask your grandfather to come do a cleansing on me? Not that I'm superstitious but-"

  "But you've already had enough trouble; no problem," she replied, mentally hitting a "reset" button and looking at the situation in a whole new light. Now it definitely was no longer just an insurance job. She had a real soul-stake in finding out what had happened, and too bad if the cops didn't like her poking around. "So you-ah-disturbed relics. Then what happened?"

  "We backed off pretty quick, you bet-and we told the foreman we weren't gonna dig there. He got hot; called the boss on the cellular. The boss said we by god were gonna dig, and what was more, we were gonna burn the stuff we found or throw it in the river and not say anything about it." He gritted his teeth, and it didn't take a shaman to sense his anger. "He said if we told anybody, there'd be people from the college and everything coming in and stopping work."

  She grimaced. "And you were mad-"

  "I wasn't the only one!" he said. "We started arguing, and we even got the white guys on our side. I was just about to see if I couldn't sneak off and like, call the college or something, just to delay things, when-" He shrugged.

  She sat silent for a moment. "So, what do you think happened to cause that?" she asked cautiously.

  "Well-I thought it was just faulty equipment, but the guys said it was sabotage. My brains say somebody probably planted a bomb in the dozer, and god only knows why." He shook his head. "Nut cases, who can tell, with them? But my gut-"

  She noticed he was sweating, and she knew why.

  "-you know, I am really glad you're the Medicine Woman and all," he said, and he sounded genuinely grateful; "Anybody else would laugh a
t me for this, but-my gut says it happened because the Little People are after his ass, and they kind of got us because we were involved. You know how they are."

  She did, indeed, know how They were. Mi-ah-luschka had a mixed reputation. Vindictive, vicious at times. "You didn't hear any-owls-did you?" she asked. "Just before the explosion?" The mi-ah-luschka, the Little People, often took the form of owls. ...

  "Not that I'd noticed, but I wasn't noticing a lot except the fight between the foreman and the other dozer driver." He sighed. "That's why I'd really appreciate it if your grandfather could get on over here, you know?"

  "Oh, I know," she assured him. "Uh-wait a minute, let me check on something-"

  She dug into her purse, vaguely remembering that trip to Lyon's and the one to Peace Of Mind earlier this afternoon. Some things she always had with her, of course, but others she didn't necessarily take with her all the time. She'd picked up some herbs for herself and Grandfather, as well as the goodies for her father. Had she taken the packages out of her purse yet?

  No!

  "Would you accept a Medicine Woman instead of a Medicine Man?" she asked him carefully. "I won't be offended if you'd rather it was Grandfather."

  "You mean, you've got stuff with you?" Bushyhead looked ready to kiss her, and a little light-headed with relief. "I don't mind telling you, with the full moon coming up, I've been kind of nervous about sleeping."

  A cleansing was one of the easiest ceremonies to perform. There was just one precaution she was going to have to take. She took a quick glance into the hallway, made certain that the nurse was still deep in her paperwork, and closed the door. Then she climbed up on a chair, and stuffed facial tissue into all the openings of the smoke detector.

  Ten minutes later, the ventilator in the bathroom was clearing out the last of the tobacco-redbud-and-cedar smoke, and the nurse was none the wiser. Larry Bushyhead looked much happier, and Jennifer was back in her chair, her implements neatly stowed back in her purse. Just as if she hadn't been chanting and wafting smoke around with a redtail feather a few minutes ago.

  "If it makes any difference, I didn't feel as if They had tagged you," she told him. "But if I were in your shoes, I'd have wanted someone to do the same. I-I don't suppose you got any kind of a look at what was dug up, did you? Enough to really, honestly, recognize whose ancestors you were messing with?"

  He hesitated, frowning. "I'm not an expert," he said, after a long moment. "And you know how much swapping around there was between the nations, even a long time before the white guys took over."

  "A guess," she urged.

  "Well-it wasn't Cherokee, or Seminole, and it wasn't Cado. If I was guessing-I'd guess it was our people. Osage. That's what I thought at the time." He licked his lips, as if they'd gone dry. "But that's just a guess. Could'a' been Sac and Fox. Could'a'been Creek, or Potawatami."

  "Do you have any idea what happened to those relics?" she asked. "Because no one has mentioned them-and you'd think with cops crawling all over the site, somebody would have."

  "I got two guesses," he told her. "The stuff we first dug up was either blown to bits or buried again. And the stuff that didn't get blown to bits, Calligan probably snuck in and got rid of. If he hasn't yet, I'm betting he will. All he needs to do is bring in a bunch of white guys who don't give a shit, as soon as the cops clear out."

  She nodded, thoughtfully, and looked at her watch. "Oh hell, visiting hours for us nonfamily types are up-" And right on cue, the nurse showed up at the door, to remind her of that fact.

  She stood up, swinging her purse over her shoulder, and gave him her best smile. "Thanks, Larry-you were a really big help."

  He grinned. "So were you, Jennifer."

  She made her way out of the hospital and down to the parking lot, only half aware of her surroundings. A burial ground-well, that certainly explained the "trouble" Sleighbow had mentioned, and why she had the feeling that there had been something there. The problem was, there wasn't supposed to be one there.

  That may not mean anything. We haven't charted all the old burial sites yet, not by a long shot. The Arkansas wandered around a lot before the flood-control and irrigation programs settled it in one bed with all the dredging and dams. But-right on the riverbank is an awfully odd place to put a burial site. Especially an old one. And there should have been cairns, not underground burials; the Old Ones hated underground burials. Shoot, they wouldn't even build the cairns until months after the wind and weather had their way with the dearly departed.

  The ancestors had tried not to put burial grounds anywhere near the Arkansas or any other river for just that reason-there was no telling when it would change its course and wash out the site.

  Still, if it's really old, like when the Osage got forced down here from the north, and they didn't know the Arkansas tended to wander-and if it got buried by some accident or other-

  Without actually seeing any of the artifacts, she had no way of telling how old it was, and if that was a possibility.

  With a start, she realized that she had reached her truck; she opened the door and got in, reflexively locking her door again. But she didn't move; she was still thinking things through.

  Really old grounds that had been "lost" were being rediscovered all the time in the course of development. Some were even uncovered by digging deeper under a building that had just been demolished-that was how they'd found that bat statue in Mexico not long ago. Since there hadn't been anything built on that site before, maybe it wasn't surprising that no one knew anything about it-

  But that felt wrong, somehow. It matched the few facts as she knew them, but not the feel of the place.

  It felt as if there had been some very powerful, very old relics there-but the feeling was-transitory, I guess. As if they hadn't been there long.

  But that wasn't consistent with the idea of it being a burial ground.

  One thing it did explain, though, was the definite scent of Bad Medicine about Rod Calligan. If he'd violated sacred ground and then destroyed bones and relics, he had definitely incurred the anger of the Little People.

  But an Osage burial site-there-it just didn't add up. .

  Maybe if someone ripped the stuff off from another site and cached it there?

  But who, and why would they have chosen that place to leave the loot? And why didn't they come back for it?

  Could there be more caches around the site? Again, if she found anything, she would know right away if it was a cache or a grave-and that would at least put one question to rest.

  Maybe I'd better go run a quick check on the construction area again. And maybe I'd better go check some of the old burial grounds too, the ones out in the boonies.

  One thing was for sure; that feeling she got with just her brief glance at Rod Calligan meant that the Little People were after his hide-and given how vindictive they could be, the hides of everyone else connected -with him.

  She shivered at the thought. That was not a position that she would want even her worst enemy to be in.

  _CHAPTER SEVEN

  it was a good thing that the traffic was light, because she had most of her attention on the possibilities of the mi-ah-luschka being involved in all of this. The prospect was not one she would have guessed when she took this job.

  Mi-ah-luschka. The Little People-different from the other kind of "Little People," the Little Mysteries that stole breath and made people sick-were not something she wanted to get involved with, particularly not if they were very old and very powerful Little People. And if this burial ground was old enough that her people had even forgotten it existed-

  Jeez, I can't even talk about this to anyone but Grandfather without them thinking I've been drinking too much Irish whiskey. Little People. I don't even know what other nations call them; I'd sound like a refugee from a St. Patrick's Day parade.

  "Little People" was a poor translation of mi-ah-luschka, when all was said and done. They were spirits; some of them were the spirits of those who had
not been recognized by Wah-K'on-Tah, who had died without paint, or been buried in such a way that Wah-K'on-Tah could not see them-or worst of all, had perished in a way that kept their spirits earthbound. Executed, murdered, died in cowardice, buried without the proper rites, without paint. . . not happy spirits.

  She had seen them. Once. On Claremore Mound. Grandfather had sent her there specifically to see them; it was part of the trials of becoming a shaman, to recognize spirits on sight, to face down spirits and learn to deal with them. That time, they had been mannerly; but then she was a woman, and it was mostly men who had trouble with the mi-ah-luschka of Claremore Mound, who had perished quite horribly at the hands of a band of renegade scum. Even though they had met her gravely, and had not even played any relatively harmless tricks on her, she had sensed the power and the possible menace in them, and had been glad to accept the token that would tell Grandfather she had passed this trial so that she could get back to safer territory.

  According to Grandfather, there were other kinds of mi-ah-luschka too, that had never been human, but she had never seen any of that kind. Sometimes mi-ah-luschka were only lonely-sometimes they were just interested in making trouble, of a harmless kind.

  But only sometimes.

  Real Jekyll-and-Hyde types. She knew far too many stories about the Little People for her own comfort; especially the ones that ended up with someone dead or driven mad.

  But were there ever any stories with-oh-modern "weapons"? Like blowing up bulldozers? First time I've ever heard of them planting dynamite on something. . . .

  Well, what if they were active around the site, but not responsible directly for the explosion? Or what if they were working through someone, using a person or persons who already had a grudge against Calligan? Pushing that person over the edge enough to make him commit murder?

  It could happen. . . .

  The one thing she had on her side was that it was very difficult for them to work in the daytime, and the time they worked best was during the full moon. That would give her some margin of safety to go check the site out a little more closely.