Sacred Ground

by Mercedes Lackey

He hadn't told Jennie about the incident. He knew what she'd say, and he wasn't in the mood for "I told you so." He hadn't tried anything that might get him the attention of the Tulsa cops again.

  Whenever he suggested she might act along the lines of working Medicine, she just gave him an opaque look. He hadn't dared follow his own suggestions along those lines; for one thing, he didn't even know where to begin, and for another, even if he did, after his one and only experience with the Little People, he wasn't too eager to have anything more to do with the Spirits.

  This list she had given him now-it was all perfectly ordinary stuff. Finding out if any Osage artifacts had been offered to any of the local galleries, antique stores, or collectors in the last six months. Tracking down everyone who was licensed to handle explosives in this area. Finding out everyone in the area who could be considered an expert on Osage culture who wasn't Osage. Interviewing all the men on Calligan's construction crew to find out if they had seen any person or vehicle hanging around the site a great deal, either before or after the explosion.

  It looked like make-work, or something to keep him occupied while Jennie did all the important things. He resented that, but he didn't dare make the accusation that she was sloughing him off.

  Why?

  Because she had scared him, that was why! He had to admit that as well, and he resented both the fact and having to admit it.

  She waited patiently for him to say something. He sighed with disgust.

  "Isn't this more along your line?" he asked, patronizingly. "You could do most of this on the phone-"

  "I could if I had the time, which I don't," she replied, imitating his tone perfectly. "If I could afford a secretary, it would be his job. Since there are things to do that only I can get way with, like trading information with the cops, you're going to have to do the other stuff if you want to get anything accomplished. It's a fair distribution of effort. I have other cases to work on, David-I have to make a living. No P.I. of my small-time stature works full-time on anything. You have the time I don't to do this kind of thing."

  He came very close to wincing when she mentioned the cops, and he hoped she didn't notice. Or had she somehow found out about that little run-in he'd had? Was she rubbing it in?

  It would be just like her, he thought sourly. Every time he tried to get into the dominant position with her, she just put him right back down again-and he had no doubt that if she had learned about the humiliating episode, she was saving it for later use.

  "One of the guys called me this morning," he said, after a moment. "He got his buddy Paul Fry to keep him posted on what's going down out at the site. Calligan is trying to replace all the guys calling in 'sick,' but it seems like everybody who shows up for an interview is either an alkie or a fake."

  "A fake?" Jennie looked up from frantically scribbling something on a pad by the phone. "What do you mean by 'a fake'?"

  He straightened a little, pleased to have some knowledge she didn't have. "According to Fry, all the ones that have gotten callbacks turn out to have given bad phone numbers. Either the numbers have been disconnected, don't exist, or no one on the other end ever heard of the guy who interviewed."

  Jennie tapped her eraser on the desktop in a curious and rhythmic pattern for a moment. "Doesn't that strike you as odd?" she finally asked.

  He made a noncommittal sound. "I don't know. I know Billy said it was another sign of the curse on Calligan."

  Jennie tossed her head, so that her hair whipped over her shoulder, and snorted. "Right. I don't think so. Not unless that particular lot of mi-ah-luschka has learned how to work the phone system. It takes a lot of power to fake out the phone lines, and a lot more knowledge that I don't think they have."

  She didn't add and I should know, but she might just as well have. Both the authoritative tone of her voice and the fact that she mentioned it could be done at all confirmed his hunch that she had somehow messed with the phone system when he had tried to call her to chew her out.

  And a little cold chill ran up his spine for a, moment or two. A Medicine Woman powerful enough to mess with the phone system-what did that take, anyway? Was there anything she couldn't do? Or-

  He caught himself up sharply. Dammit! She did it to me again!

  "So what do you think is happening?" he asked.

  "My best guess is that someone might just be sending ringers over to Calligan to keep him from filling those slots." She gave him a sharp look. "That 'someone' wouldn't be you, would it?"

  He brought his head up indignantly. "Me? Why the hell would I do something like that?"

  "To keep Calligan from filling those slots," she said, logically. "Those are jobs theoretically being taken away from Indians. It would be a good way to preserve them until our guys came off the sick list."

  "Oh." Damn, he wished he had thought of that one! "No, it isn't me."

  "Then maybe I ought to find out if there really is a plot, because I don't think the Little People are behind this one."

  "Neither do I," he told her-and actually, that did agree with the feeling he'd gotten when Billy told him this morning. He was beginning to get a feel for which incidents were caused by the mi-ah-luschka and which by purely human hands.

  Not that the "feeling" made him any more comfortable. He would really rather not have anything to do with Medicine at all, except admire the showmanship from afar...

  Are you a shaman, or are you a showman? one of his friends used to ask the people he suspected of fakery, or of catering to the supermarket psychic crowd. Up until last night he would have said that anyone who claimed to be the former was really the latter.

  Until now. . . .

  "How sure are you about this 'false trail' stuff?" he asked, unwilling to make the concession, but also unwilling to let her get away with putting on a show rather than giving him real facts.

  She snorted, delicately. "Sure enough to bet my life on not following it," she said. "But if you want more-"

  Before he had a chance to protest that no, he really didn't want any more, thank you, she had reached into a drawer in her desk, and had taken out a little bag of something. As she dusted it over her desk-blotter and the cassette that lay there, chanting under her breath, he recognized it as corn pollen.

  The pollen just lay there for a moment, a frosting of yellow specks over the dark brown blotter-but then, as the hair on the back of his neck began to crawl, he saw very clearly that it was moving. It crept across the blotter as if each bit of pollen was a tiny insect, but an insect moving in a purposeful way.

  It formed into symbols even he could read. And last time he had looked, there was no scientific power on earth that would make corn pollen crawl into readable patterns.

  A ragged circle around the tape cassette, with an uneven slash across it. A rough arrow pointing away, to the west.

  Nothing vague or requiring interpretation. If she was calling on Medicine Spirits for advice, she had made certain it was advice he could read as well as she. Once again, his skepticism had been shattered. He looked up from his frozen contemplation of the pollen on the blotter, to see her watching him sardonically.

  "I hope that's enough for you," she said, without inflection. "I asked for something you could understand and see for yourself. Anything more than this, you'd better ask from Grandfather."

  He swallowed, with a little difficulty.

  "I-ah-think that will do," he replied. Suddenly the idea of legwork had a lot more appeal.

  Over the next several days, he had a few more occasions to have his skepticism shattered. Mostly, though, she didn't do it on purpose-but there were plenty of times he saw things-half-seen people and animals-around the house, appearing and disappearing without warning. Once, he heard her talking and heard something else answering, but when he opened the door to her office, there was no one else there. It was unnerving, to say the least, and he kept feeling as if he were off-balance and that everything he had always thought was true had suddenly come into question.

/>   Finally it all became unnerving enough that he couldn't take it anymore. Something was going to have to break, one way or another. Either he was going to have to leave Tulsa, give up on this problem, and go back to his friends in North Dakota, or-

  Or else he was going to have to take a good look at himself and his world and rethink everything he had accepted as true.

  He didn't make a conscious decision; the morning was clear and cool, the sky cloudless-and instead of driving to Jennie's office, he found himself taking the opposite direction. Before long, he found himself on a dirt road, halfway between Catoosa and Claremore, out in the middle of nowhere.

  Without thinking about it, he slowed as he came to an area without planted fields or fences. It seemed the right place to stop, and he pulled over onto the narrow shoulder, then left the car where he parked it. A narrow drainage ditch lined with young cottonwood trees separated the open field from the road; he jumped across it, hiked into a quiet spot, and sat down on a rock in the sun, to think. There was a slight breeze, and birds called off in the distance, but otherwise he might have been completely alone, ringed in with tall, nodding grasses that towered above his head as he sat there, cutting off his sight of anything but their tips and the cloudless blue sky. This might be the tallgrass prairie of the days of the buffalo herds.

  No distractions. It was a good place to do some thinking.

  Hard thinking, in fact.

  He lost all track of time, as he stared at the sky and the grass tips, and thought over everything that had brought him here. Everything, right back to the very day he had left this area in the first place. And he came to some hard conclusions.

  He didn't usually act like such an idiot. Oh, maybe he had back when he was still in school, but he'd had some sense knocked into him since then. There just seemed to be something about this entire situation that had been bringing out the worst in him. Maybe it was being back home. Maybe it was being around Jennie, bringing up old baggage and old habits of behavior. Maybe it was just Jennie herself that both irritated him and made him want to strut and bugle like a young buck in rut. A bad combination, for sure . . . especially given Jennie's opinions of young bucks strutting and acting like fools.

  There was very little doubt in his mind that Jennie was getting a certain amount of enjoyment out of putting him down-but on the other hand, every time she did so, it was because he was trying to pretend he knew more than she did about either P.I. work or Medicine. When he had an opinion on law, politics, or the Movement, he honestly had to admit that she listened and acted on his advice. When he told her what Calligan's ex-employees had told him, she listened and paid attention to what he told her. In fact, any time he voiced a fact or an opinion in an arena where he did have some real knowledge, she listened and used it.

  He didn't deserve the snide way she enjoyed putting him in his place-

  -well, maybe he did, a little-

  -but she only did it when he was making a fool of himself, when it came right down to it.

  She'd changed, like he'd thought, but not in the way that he'd thought; she'd grown up a lot since college, and she had sure learned a lot that you couldn't find in classrooms. And man, it was sure hard to tell that he'd done the same, with the way he'd been acting around her.

  He sat in the sun for a long time, just letting it soak into him, trying to rearrange his thoughts when it came to Jennie, to put everything he thought he knew about her on the back burner and try to look at the past few days and weeks as if she were a total stranger.

  Several observations immediately sprang to mind. She knew her job; really knew it. The cops respected her enough that they often cut her a fair amount of slack. She was making a living at a man's job, and at a job that a lot of men couldn't make a living doing.

  Back when they'd broken up in college, he'd said some pretty unforgivable things. So maybe some of that enjoyment she was getting at putting him in his place was only payback.

  And when it came to Medicine-she was the best he'd ever seen except for her Grandfather, and old man Talldeer was better than anyone he'd ever heard of, outside of stories he'd never believed. He'd watched both of them as they tried to find answers to the questions that baffled them; they went at their medicine-ceremonies with a competence and a calm that reminded him of an expert silversmith that he knew. Twice he'd actually been allowed to participate, in a small way. It had stopped making him shiver and had started fascinating him, even if it wasn't "his" tribal Medicine.

  Maybe it was time to make a fresh start with her. He'd sure taken enough hits to his ego to soften it up for the job. . . .

  Funny thing was, when he opened his eyes on the field of tallgrass, he felt kind of light. And more relaxed. Maybe that ego of his had been heavier than he had thought.

  The feeling of lightness persisted all the way back to town, to the point that even though the rush-hour traffic was horrible, he wasn't upset by it. He simply sat calmly behind the wheel, and let the traffic move when it wanted to; he even let people cut him off without snarling at them.

  He pulled up into the Talldeer driveway and saw that Jennie's little Brat was pulled up under the carport. He felt a momentary twinge, then-

  Come on, you said you were going to do this, now don't back out on it. Go in, apologize, tell her you were being an idiot and why, apologize for being an idiot when you broke up, and ask her to start all over as friends.

  He took a deep breath, took the keys out of the ignition, and went in.

  From that moment on, life became-if not easier, certainly easier to take. Jennie had been surprised by his apology, but he had sensed an air of skepticism, as if she had been certain his change of attitude wouldn't last.

  But these days he wasn't in the habit of treating other women the way he'd treated her since they'd first collided on that doorstep. It wasn't so much a change of attitude as it was reestablishing the appropriate attitude.

  He understood her skepticism, and he was determined to break it down by proving himself. After two days, her skepticism had softened into something like a pleased surprise. After three days, he decided to try dropping the bomb on her.

  He was sitting in her office while she phoned in the results of another one of her investigations to her client/Personnel checks, apparently-these days a lot of people wanted to know if a prospective employee was in the habit of suing his bosses or had an inordinate number of workman's comp claims. The news was good, the client was happy, and Jennie was in a good mood when she hung up and turned to him.

  "Think you can spare me a couple hours?" he asked, before she could say anything.

  She looked surprised, but nodded. Not warily this time, which was a nice change. "Sure-you've been putting in an awful lot of time on our mutual case for me. So, what do you need?"

  He sat back in his chair. "I need-hell, this is really hard for me-" He felt himself actually blushing. "I sound like some retro hippie or something. But-I've been watching you and Grandfather, and I need-I'd like-I-"

  He had planned the whole speech out, and now it deserted him along with his confidence. "Jennie-I mean, maybe I ought to call you by your Osage name for this, but you never told it to me-I want-can you-help me?" He looked up at her hopefully. "I'm Cherokee and you're not, and I know what some of my people did to yours, but you and Grandfather are the only Medicine People I know well enough to ask."

  She blinked at him, and for a long moment, said nothing. Then she took a deep breath, and said, very carefully, "Are you asking me to help you find your spiritual identity?"

  He nodded, grateful beyond words that she had articulated what he had not been able to.

  "Oh my." She blinked again, then suddenly grinned. "You know, your ancestors must be rotating in their graves like high-speed lathes. Have I ever told you what my people called yours?"

  He shook his head.

  Her mouth twitched. "It translates as Thing-On-Its-Head-People,' because you weren't particularly valiant by the arrogant standards of my people
, nor were you particularly outstanding in any other way, and the only way they could think to distinguish you from other nations was by the bandana the Cherokees wrapped around their heads."

  She started giggling then, and after a moment, he saw the joke.

  "Well, if my ancestors are twirling, yours are probably trying to beat a path back from the Summerlands to whup some sense into your head," he replied, with a weak laugh. "That is, if you're even considering it."

  "Considering it?" She giggled again. "Good god, David, Grandfather actually predicted this two days ago, and I didn't believe him! How can I not do my best to help you when he said that he was going to oversee the whole shebang?"

  "The whole shebang" began with a three-day fast, punctuated with sweatlodge ceremonies, which honestly was something he had expected. He wasn't completely ignorant of Medicine Ways after all.

  Grandfather Talldeer-who he was now supposed to refer to as either "Mooncrow" or "Little Old Man"- insisted that he move into Jennie's spare room for the duration of the ceremony. But he was to bring nothing, not even clothing, other than what he had on his back.

  The first day of his fast he didn't see Jennie at all; Mooncrow led him through a special bath, followed by a long stint in the sauna-cum-sweatlodge. The old man was a lot more pragmatic than David had expected, handling things very calmly, as if he did this sort of thing every day.

  "In the old days," Mooncrow said, as he took a seat on the floor of the sauna, and poured a dipperful of water over the heated rocks, "we'd have a drummer and a singer in here, chanting to put your mind on the right path. But these days-well, my drummer's in Talequah running his gas station, and my singer's splitting his time between classes and asking 'do you want fries with that?' So we'll have to make do."

  "Make do?" David asked, wondering what the old man had in mind.

  Mooncrow grinned, and took a towel off a bright yellow sports-model cassette player. "Got to deal with modern ways, sometimes. This thing doesn't mind the heat, and doesn't have a job and a mortgage and kids to feed. Doesn't get tired, either."