Mercedes Lackey - Sacred Ground

Rich stared upriver, squinting against the sunlight. The Arkansas was at a low point after three weeks without rain. In fact, it looked as if you could walk across it, with sandbars rising out of the water all across the basin. "Sutton says we're too close to the places those eagles are nesting. They say we're gonna drive 'em away, and there just aren't enough good places for 'em to go, especially where people won't take pot-shots at 'em. My tribal elders say the same thing."

"Huh!" The other man followed Rich's stare, as if he expected to see one of the birds right then and there. "How many of them are there?"

"Eight pairs, at last count," Larry put in. "That's the most nests in fifty years." He sighed. "Here they got a pretty good chance-someplace else, they got odds of ending up in some scumbag's trunk."

Even Cliff nodded at that; eagle-poaching had made the headlines again; a poacher had been caught during a routine traffic-stop, with his trunk full of dead birds. There hadn't been a man or woman on the crew that hadn't been outraged by the discovery.

Larry shrugged. "But Fish and Game says they'll stay, says they're used to us now, and we won't scare them off. I dunno." He looked around the site again. "If you ask me, whoever decided to plant a mall here is dumber than dirt. What happens the next time we get one of those 'hundred-year storms' and the Army Corps of Engineers has to open the floodgates upriver?"

"We get bigtime flood sales down here," laughed the other man. "Seems like we've been getting those 'hundred-year storms' of yours about every three or six months lately!"

Larry nodded. "You got it. Dumb as dirt, man."

The placid Arkansas River, with sandbars rising out of the yellow-brown water like the backs of a pod of beached dolphins, and lower than it had been all year, hardly looked like a candidate for flooding. But before the Army Corps of Engineers had put in their flood-control program, parts of Tulsa had suffered more than one disaster. And it could happen again; if there was too much rain, floodgates would have to be opened, and the Arkansas could turn into the raging devil some old stories painted it. When it did-not "if", but when-this mall could well be underwater.

So why put it here? That was what Larry didn't understand. There had to be a dozen sites that were better candidates, especially given the proximity of this one to the eagles. That particular fight had cost the developers plenty in extra studies and court costs.

He'd had a bad feeling about this place ever since he'd set foot on it-but he knew better than to say anything about that. He got enough ribbing from the guys on the crew about being a superstitious Indian, just because he had a medicine wheel his daughter had made him dangling from the rearview mirror in place of the fuzzy dice from his street-rodder days. He didn't need to give them any more ammo.

Still, there was something creepy about this place-and the boss. Rod Calligan didn't fit the profile, somehow. Larry had seen a lot of developers in his time; some were slimy scum, some were just guys, but Rod was a different breed of cat, all right. Or maybe snake. The man was cold, he had a way of looking at you that made you think he was totaling up your entire net worth right there on the spot. But he was smart, real smart; he could gauge the amount of time a crew would have to spend clearing a particular site right down to the hour, and he had a penalty clause built into the contract that kicked in unless the cause for delay was weather that he said was too bad to work in. Basically, he had to come down to the site, agree that the weather was too rough, and let them go home-then he would go up to the site office and make a note on the contract, extending the due date.

He sure seemed too sharp to have made the mistake of putting a mall on a floodplain.

Larry glanced at his watch and finished his sandwich in a couple of bites. Lunch was about over, and you never knew when Calligan and his Beemer were likely to show up. Bad feeling or no bad feeling, there was more ground to clear before quitting time.

He shooed the rest of the guys off his dozer and started the engine, wondering where he ought to take her when this job was over. The powerful engine roared to life, drowning any other sounds, and filling the air with diesel fumes. The seat vibrated and rocked as he sent the dozer over the little hillocks they hadn't smoothed down yet. There were rumors that Rogers College was thinking of putting up another building-but weighed against rumors of a job around town was the certainty of work on the turnpike up around Miami way. . . .

He swung the dozer around to the place he'd quit, engaged the blade, and put her in motion. It sure was hot out here; he was more or less used to it, but he figured he must go through a couple of gallons of water a day. It kind of made him mad to be plowing up trees just so a bunch of yuppies from Tulsa had more places to spend their money.

Suddenly, the uneasy feeling he'd had built to a crescendo; there was something wrong with the way the earth felt under the blade-

He braked, and killed the motor-and looked down.

And froze, for the treads had stopped a mere inch away from a skull.

A human skull.

It must have been at least ninety-five out in the sun, but Larry still felt cold, chilled right down to his gut, which was in knots. He'd backed the dozer off, you bet, and damn fast when he'd turned up those bones. For one horrible moment, he'd been certain he'd uncovered some kind of dumping place for the victims of a serial killer or something, like the guy in Ok' City. The other guys had come at his yell of surprise and-yes, fear. They clustered around the dozer, and the place where the blade had stopped. There were more bones there, more skulls.

Only a closer look showed that the bones were old, really old, and what was more, there were broken pots and things mixed in with them. It was Keith Pryor, another Osage, who said out loud what had been trying to break out of Larry's own muddy thoughts.

"It's a burial ground," Keith said flatly., "We've been digging up sacred ground."

That was when Larry realized that he had known, from the moment he'd seen them, what those artifacts were. They were Osage. He'd been digging up the graves of his own ancestors. Old tales flitted through his mind; there were terrible things that happened to those who desecrated graves.

"Oh, man," he said, unhappily, wondering if old man Talldeer could be talked into an emergency ceremony. Not that he believed the Little People were going to take revenge for this, and it wasn't as if he'd done it deliberately, but-

-but he didn't care. He was Osage, and the Osage honored their ancestors. He needed someone like Shaman Tall-deer to let the ancestors and the Little People know that he meant no disrespect, no sacrilege. And then, to kill the trail from this desecrated site back to him.

One part of his mind was wondering how the hell you purified a dozer, while the rest of him stood back and watched the ruckus spread. About half the crew was Indian-or "Native American," as some of the activists liked to say-Osage, Creek, and Cherokee blood, mostly. Whatever, they were all Indian enough to be mad as hops about being asked to plow up a burial ground.

The foreman was as-white as you got, though, except for his red neck, and he was ready to fire the lot of them.

Rich was right in the center of it, nose-to-nose with the foreman, giving him hell. "Look, you can't make us doze that lot over!" he yelled, his foghorn voice carrying over everyone's, even the foreman's. "That'd be like asking Tagliono there to plow up the Vatican-or at least, the graveyard at St. Joseph's!"

That shut them up-at least for a minute. And Larry felt some of the chill leaving him as he saw that with that single sentence, Rich had managed to get some of the white guys over on their side. Because the graveyard at St. Joseph's church had been under threat for a while, back in the early eighties and the boomtown days of high-priced oil; and Tagliono and some of the other guys on the crew had been picketing the Skelly Building for wanting to dig up their grandparents and transplant them so they could put up an office complex. Transplant them to a city cemetery, riot a Catholic one; a cemetery without the blessings that old-fashioned people thought absolutely necessary for their rest to be in holy soil. Way to go, Rich! he congratulated, silently, as the dynamics shifted and some of the white guys, Tagliono in particular, took the couple of steps necessary to put them on the other side of the invisible line separating the foreman and the whites from the Indians. And when Tagliono came over, so, eventually, did everyone but the company suck-ups.