Sacred Ground

by Mercedes Lackey

  "That's it" he said, slamming his hand down on the tabletop, making them all jump. "No more cable TV unless I'm here to supervise what you're watching."

  Jill opened her mouth to protest, but fortunately Toni managed to silence her with a look. Poor Jill; no more afterschool Nickelodeon.

  "What are we allowed-" Ryan began timidly.

  Rod hit his head with the heel of his hand. "Do I have to tell you kids everything? You can go outside and play, dammit! You kids spend too much time in front of that thing, anyway. You can play Nintendo if it's bad. You can even watch a movie from your special cabinet." His voice became heavy with irony. "You might even actually read a book/or fun. I know that may sound impossible, but people do read for fun. But no matter what, no more cable TV unless I'm here to supervise!"

  Toni carefully refrained from pointing out that there were horror books, too. And it was hardly fair to take that tone with Ryan, who, if not a bookworm, was certainly a good reader. She just bowed her head submissively, and murmured something conciliatory.

  Rod Junior kept right on with his breakfast, ignoring the whole thing. Rod finally turned to him after a moment and asked, "And what about you, son? Any stupid nightmares?"

  Rod looked up, first at her, then at his younger siblings, and shook his head. "Nightmares are for babies," he said contemptuously, polishing off the last of his eggs.

  Rod gave her a there, you see! kind of triumphant glance, as if that had proved something. Presumably that she should have somehow trained the younger kids out of nightmares by now, weaned them away from bad dreams as if she were toilet-training them.

  All it proves is that Rod is his father's child.

  And that Rod Junior knew how to say the things that his father wanted to hear. Young Rod was Rod's unconcealed favorite. He succeeded at the things Rod Senior thought were important; he had learned how to parrot every opinion his father had, whether he understood it or not. But most of all, it proved that he hadn't a gram of imagination.

  Of course he doesn 't have nightmares. He doesn't have enough imagination to produce them. But she could hardly say that to Rod, who spoiled the boy something awful. Or even if she did-imagination wasn't the kind of thing that Rod valued. "Guts," "smarts," "brains," "gumption,"-all those mattered. Not sensitivity or imagination.

  She wondered what that little "I don't believe in nightmares" remark was going to earn Rod Junior this time. Every time he came up with some comment that showed how much like his father he was, he generally got a reward by the end of the day. Probably the CD player he'd been wanting. Not that the other two had any real use for a CD player, but Rod Junior's room was stuffed full of the toys and treats his father brought him every time he said something his father considered clever. Or, in other words, proved himself to be a copy of Rod. It happened at least once a week, and it wasn't fair to the other two.

  She sighed, though strictly internally. But life isn't fair. They're just learning that a little early. I think it's time to change the subject before he starts in on Ryan and Jill

  "Rod, I hate to bother you"-she always began her requests with that phrase-"but the dryer is getting unreliable. I'd really like to call a repairman to come and look at-"

  "Is it still running?" he asked, folding his paper neatly. Next he would get up, put on his suit jacket and tuck the paper in the inside pocket, then head for the office.

  She made a little grimace of doubt. "Well, yes, it is, but-"

  "Is it making any noises?" he continued, standing up, his own face reflecting his impatience.

  Again she hesitated. "Well, no, but-last night, I thought I smelled-"

  "You didn't smell anything," he said, interrupting impatiently. "You imagined it. I was right here last night, and I didn't smell anything. If I didn't smell anything, then neither did you. Or if you did, it was probably just some lint overheating. Clean the lint-catcher once in a while. I'll look at it later."

  "Yes, Rod," she sighed, as he shrugged on his coat and headed out the door. A moment later, he pulled his car out of the garage, down the driveway, and was gone. She began picking up the breakfast dishes and setting them into the dishwasher. School had only been out for about a week, but already the kids had established their summer routines. Jill wandered back down the hall to her room; Rod Junior went out to ride his bike. Ryan stayed with her to help. She smiled at him, and hugged him comfortingly. He still looked disturbed and unhappy, and not just from his father's unkind words.

  But her mind was on other things now. It's a good thing I turned off the dryer last night when I thought I smelled something burning, and remembered to unplug it first thing this morning, she thought, closing the dishwasher and starting it. With an electric dryer, you can't always be sure it's off unless you unplug it. I guess I'll just have to dry clothes on the line outside until he gets around to looking at it. I wish he'd let me call a repairman. . . .

  Actually, she wished he'd let her buy a new dryer. One with some of those special settings for delicate things like Rod's silk shirts, and a door rack for the kids' sneakers. There was always enough money for new suits, but never anything for a new dryer. Probably because he didn't have anything to do with the dryer-

  "Mommy!"

  She jumped, as if shocked. The shriek was Jill's and it was full of terror. "Mommy! Fire!"

  Her heart bounded into her throat; she came out of her trance of shock, dropped the butter-dish she'd been holding, and ran for the utility room. But Ryan streaked past her and into the hall, something large and red in his hands.

  The fire extinguisher from the kitchen, under the sink- he'd been closest to it-

  The smoke alarm went off, shrilling in her ears, galvanizing her with fear, as Jill broke into a wail of her own.

  "Mom-EEEEEEEEEEEE!"

  Her mind was stuck on hold, but her hands and body acted without any direction from her gibbering mind. As she reached the utility room and grabbed the extinguisher beside the door, Ryan was already emptying his own extinguisher on the blaze eating into the wallboard behind the dryer. Jill wailed in terror, plastered against the back wall of the utility room, clutching her stuffed bunny.

  That's right, the bunny was still in the dryer. My God, she could have been electrocuted!

  Toni joined her son, playing the chemicals from the extinguisher on the blaze, amazed that her hands and his were so steady. Doubly amazed that he had such enormous presence of mind for a ten-year-old. If he had just been a little taller, he could have reached over the dryer as she was doing and sprayed down behind it; from the looks of things, he'd actually tried, then given up, keeping his spray on the areas he could reach. But he had given her the extra few seconds she needed, confining the fire to the area in back of the dryer, keeping it from spreading any further until she could really put it out.

  The last of the flames died. The plug, still in the wall socket, spat a spark; she dropped her now empty extinguisher, wrapped a rubber glove around the cord, and yanked, pulling it free of the wall.

  Then she fell to her knees, gathered both her precious babies in her arms, and the three of them laughed and cried in fear and relief.

  Then she called the fire department, told them what had happened, and had them send a truck over to make certain that the fire hadn't somehow gotten in between the walls. It made for quite a bit of excitement in the normally quiet neighborhood; Rod Junior came streaking in on his bike after the truck, and was nearly beside himself when he realized it was coming to his house. The first thing he wanted to know was if his room was all right. And predictably, by the time the truck left, Rod Junior had usurped Ryan's place in the tale of how the fire had been extinguished, at least where his peers were concerned.

  It was only after the firemen had checked and found the house safe, only after they had made certain that it was the dryer plug and not the outlet that had shorted out, and only after she had called and left a message with Rod's service about the "accident," that she had time to think. And remember.

&nbs
p; She had pulled the plug out of the wall this morning, just before she started sorting laundry. Rod never went into the utility room, and the kids couldn't possibly have reached it to plug it back in.

  She had pulled the plug out of the wall. She had made absolutely certain to do so, in case one of the kids might go swimming at the neighbor's and throw a wet bathing suit into the dryer before she got a chance to stop them.

  So who had plugged it back in?

  Jennifer loved driving in the early morning at this time of the year. Mornings in June were just warm enough to be comfortable, and not so hot that you needed the air conditioner. In July-in July you would; the temperature often didn't drop below eighty, and sometimes stayed in the nineties until two or three in the morning.

  But in June-the air was full of flower scent and bird song. Scissor-tailed flycatchers were performing wild acrobatic maneuvers in pursuit of bugs, and mockingbirds informed the rest of the universe that they knew every bird's song there was. Cows grazed placidly, knee-deep in ridiculously green grass, with adorable calves frisking alongside.

  In June, the entire state looked like a travel brochure, or scenes from Green Grow the Lilacs. Not from the musical Oklahoma! that came from the play, though; the musical had been filmed by people who knew nothing about Oklahoma, and had perpetuated the myth of Oklahoma, Land of Flat and Treeless.

  Where did they think all the wood came from to build all those wooden farmhouses, anyway? Hollywood. I'm surprised they didn 't film Lawrence of Arabia in the middle of the Serengeti Plain.

  It was going to be such a nice day that she had packed a lunch; half a dozen apples and some cheese.

  Not only was this part of Oklahoma anything but flat and treeless, once Jennifer got outside the city limits of Tulsa, the landscape looked a lot more like Brown County in Indiana than anything in Oklahoma!, the movie. Long, rolling hills; high, sandstone ridges topped with blackjack oaks; redtail hawks soaring above the highway, looking for road-kill. ... She tuned her radio to something she could sing along with, and resolutely enjoyed the drive, because she was probably not going to enjoy the march across country to get to the burial ground.

  The farther north of Tulsa she got, the more rugged the country became, and the fewer the inhabited farmhouses. A lot of farmers had given up in the last ten or twenty years; had sold out to bigger ranchers, or just let the land go to the bank. This kind of land was no good for anything but cattle, really; full of stones, hard to clear, hard to plow, and utterly unforgiving in the years without much rain. Selfishly, she was pleased. The cattle could graze under the blackjacks without disturbing the general balance of nature too much; the land was going back to the kind of territory her people had known and roamed. There seemed to be more redtails this spring than ever before; she saw them perched every mile or so, on top of telephone poles, or in the tops of snags, the old, dead blackjacks that simply hadn't fallen down yet.

  This was not "farmland" as people in the north or east, or even south, were used to thinking of farming land. Even during the Dust Bowl, this part of Oklahoma had not been affected much, because it had not been cleared much. This was almost all grazing land, wild and hilly, overgrown with poison ivy, sumac, tangles of wild blackberry vines, and wild plum thickets with thorns as long as a thumb. The blackjack oak reigned supreme here; a tree that was as tough and hard to kill as the Osage that used to call this land their home. Blackjacks seldom grew tall enough to attract lightning, except on the sandstone ridges; their thick, rutted bark resisted penetration, and the tannin in their leaves and bark discouraged insects. Their allies were the woodpeckers, red-bellied and downy, who probed their bark for boring insects persistent enough to stomach a bellyful of bitter tannin. In return, they sheltered birds of all kinds all through the winter, with leaves that turned brown but didn't fall until they were pushed off in the spring by new growth, and branches that bent down toward the ground in a prickly snarled tangle that left protected, predator-free spaces around the trunks.

  It was hard to penetrate country like this, on foot. Jennifer wished she knew someone out here with a horse- unfortunately, the owner of the property didn't have one. If groves of blackjacks didn't block your way, in the open spaces between the groves, huge thickets of wild plum made it impossible to pass, and where they didn't grow, vines of honeysuckle waited to trip you, and wild blackberry bushes were perfectly prepared to act like tangles of barbed wire.

  It looked lovely from the car, but Jennifer was not looking forward to forcing her way in to where the burial ground lay. In all probability, if it had been raided, the farmer on whose land it lay would not know. Out here, people often didn't bother checking over rough parts of their wooded pasturage on foot, unless there was an animal missing. And even then-well, ranchers and farmers weren't dumb; they quickly adopted every technological aid they could afford and get their hands on, and these days there were plenty of folks who checked over their herds from treetop level, in ultralight aircraft. You could even do some limited herding with an ultralight, she'd been told. The cattle didn't much like their noisy two-stroke engines, and would often move away from a circling farmer.

  /'// ask at the house, she thought with resignation, as she approached the tiny village of Rose (population less than one hundred), hut he'll probably just tell me I'd better check for myself.

  Tom Ware was home, and getting ready to clean out his henhouse and spray for mites when she pulled into his driveway. And he said exactly what she thought he'd say.

  "Shoot, haven't been anywhere near that section since deer season," he replied, his eyes crinkling up with worry. He pushed his hat back with his thumb, and squinted in the direction of the burial ground, grimacing. "I didn't put any cows out there this year; figured I'd let the ground rest for a year. Shoot, the Ancestors aren't gonna like it if someone's been gettin' in there."

  Ware was Osage, although his family had long since adopted Christianity. But even though he didn't follow the Old Ways, he respected them, and respected Jennifer and Mooncrow. Part of the reason he'd bought the ridge when it came up for sale years ago was to protect the old burial ground. While Jennifer shrugged, and made an answering grimace, he seemed to be making up his mind about something. "Look," he said, finally, "it's not easy gettin' back in there. I just broke a ridin' mule last fall for deer huntin'. "

  You want to saddle her up and use her, I reckon she could use the exercise."

  Well, that was going to make her job a hundred times easier!

  "Thanks, Tom, I would really appreciate that," she said gratefully. "Just tell me where the tack is, I'm not so green I can't round her up and saddle her myself."

  Tom's eyes crinkled up again, but this time with amusement. "I dunno about that, Miz Talldeer," he said, clearly holding in chuckles at the idea of her bringing in his mule. "She hasn't been under saddle much since fall."

  She went ahead and laughed. "But I'm my grandfather's granddaughter," she pointed out. "I'll save you some work if I can, and if she won't behave, I promise at least that I won't spook her and send her into the next county."

  Still looking amused and dubious, Tom Ware showed her where he kept the saddle, blanket, and bridle, then went on with his planned work. Jennifer took only the bridle with her when she went out into the field where the mule stood, ears up, under a tree, watching her from the middle of a cluster of very pregnant nanny goats.

  Jennifer looked fixedly at the mule's tail-it being bad manners to stare any animal directly in the eyes-and relaxed, putting her mind in that peculiar state where she saw not only the mule, but Mule.

  Sister, she thought, when Mule flicked her ears in acknowledgement of Kestrel's presence. Sister, will you help me? I need this younger sister's strong back and thick skin to get to the Sacred Ground.

  Mule considered this for a moment. Will there be an apple? she asked, finally, on behalf of Tom's real-world mule; practical, like all mules.

  Two apples, Jennifer promised, upping the ante. Mule's jaw worked at the
thought.

  Yes, Mule replied, after time to think about the effort involved in terms of reward. That was, after all, how mules operated, and why they had such a reputation for stubbornness.

  As Mule walked forward out of the herd of goats, she dwindled, and became Tom Ware's old riding mule, responding to Jennifer's whistling and coaxing. She bent her head to take the bridle, and even accepted the bit with good graces. As Jennifer led her to the shed that held the rest of the tack, Tom Ware came out of the chicken coop, and his eyes widened.

  "Well, I'll be!" he said, with admiration. "You are the Old Man's granddaughter! Never could see a critter that could resist him!"

  "I just promised her apples," Jennifer replied, laughing. "Good thing I brought some with me!"

  The mule remained well mannered, mindful of the promised apples, and didn't even blow herself up to keep the girth loose-an all-too-common trick mules and horses alike liked to play on inexperienced riders. Within ten minutes, Jennifer was in the saddle, guiding the mule in the general direction of the ridge but letting her pick her own way. Mules were better at avoiding tangles than any human, and had more experience threading their way through dense undergrowth.

  Ask anyone who's tried to catch one that didn't want to be caught. It was just a good thing that since time immemorial, Mule never could resist a bribe.

  She had more than enough to worry about at the moment, because there was one particular section of this burial land that only she and Grandfather knew about. There was only one, very ancient, cairn there--and even someone who knew about this site would probably not know about this particular grave.

  Her vision had not been specific last night; it had only indicated that resting places had been looted, and not whose. She was hoping against hope that this one had not been found.

  It was a very special cairn, covering a very special person. Moh-shon-ah-ke-ta. Watches-Over-The-Land. Her ancestor, from the days when Heavy Eyebrows first came up the river. The shaman who had a vision of things to come that was not believed. Or, if you used Kestrel's interpretation, the shaman who had seen so far forward in time that no one believed what he had seen, simply because their visions had not been of a future so distant and so wide.