"Mercedes Lackey - Sacred Ground" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lackey Mercedes)

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Mercedes Lackey

Sacred Ground



To those who were here first

Mitaque oyasin



CHAPTER 1



she poured adipperful of water over the hot rocks in the heaterbox, and steam hissed up in sudden
clouds, saturating the dimly lit sauna with moisture. The smoke of cedar and sweetgrass joined the steam,
the humidity making both scents so vivid she tasted them in the back of her throat.

She sat down cross-legged on the wooden floor, boards that had been sanded as smooth as satin
underneath her bare thighs. It didn't matter to her—or more importantly, to Grandfather—that this
sweatlodge was really a commercially made portable sauna; that the rocks were heated by electricity and
not in a fire; that the sweetgrass and cedar smoke were from incense bought at an esoteric bookstore in
Tulsa. Or even that the sweatlodge as a place for meditation was more common among the Lakotah
Sioux than the Osage; Grandfather had borrowed judiciously from other nations to remake the ways of
the Little Old Men into something that worked again.The destination is what matters, he had told her a
thousand times,and the path you take to get there. Not whether your ritual clothing is of tradecloth
or buckskin, the water you drink from a streamer a spring —or even the kitchen tap. Sometimes
ancient ways are not particularly wise, just old.

So they had this contrivance of theI'n-Shta-Heh, the "Heavy Eyebrows," installed in what had been the
useless half-bath at the back of the house she and Grandfather shared. Most of the time it served as
nothing more esoteric than anyone else's sauna, useful for aching muscles and staving off colds.

Sometimes it served purposes theI'n-Shta-Heh who built it would never have dreamed of.

She closed her eyes, sweat salty on her upper lip, and stripped off the layers of her working self the way
she had stripped the layers of her working clothing before she had taken her ritual bath and entered the
now-sanctified wooden box. There were layers towho she was, like an onion, each layer both hiding the
one beneath and keeping the one beneath from reaching outward,

Jennifer Talldeer.The face that the white world saw; ironic name for a woman a shade less than five feet
in height. Doubly ironic considering how tall Osage men and women tended to be.Your mother's genes,
was what her father said, when she asked him why she was the runt of the litter.That sneaky Cherokee