Free Jemez Spring by Rudolfo Anaya Page A

didn’t fight back. He knew the game. The homeboys in the barrio played it once in a while to test a vato, push him around to see how much kidding he would take before striking back.
    Bear pushed him hard and Sonny fell face down. One fell on his back and pinned him to the ground.
    They were talking in Towa. Sonny recognized Yang. Coyote. No use protesting; he had interrupted their ritual. Out of the corner of one eye Naomi came into focus, as regal and beautiful as he remembered her.
    They passed something over him, and Sonny was sure he detected the odor of the dead snake, the snake with no charm.
    Bear leaned down and whispered, “Don’t play with snakes. Not your medicine.”
    â€œYang might get bitten,” another said.
    â€œOr get blown up by the white man’s bomb.”
    They laughed then moved away, out of the arbor, their bells jingling and turtle shells rattling. Like a sudden thunderstorm they had struck, leaving behind a dazed Sonny spitting sand.
    He felt bruised. The primos play rough, he thought. What the hell did I stumble into? The fleshy smell of the dead snake hung in the air.
    He knew Bear. La plebe in Ponderosa called him Gordo. He liked to drink beer and dance on Friday nights at the Ponderosa Bar and Grill.
    Sonny turned and looked at the crimson cliffside. He blinked, not believing what he saw. The image of a quincunx appeared on the stone. He held his breath. Above him the sound of the wind moaned as it scraped against the red rocks.
    Before his eyes the Zia glyph glistened like a mirage in the heat of summer. Four quadrants, and in the middle the blazing Zia sun, sun of movement traveling across the four quadrants, now moving into the spring equinox. Four seasons, four spaces, four dimensions, four times in the year the earth circled the sun, and the movement through space became a sacred journey.
    On a flat surface the quincunx would represent the Garden of Eden, earth itself, home. The pueblo. The vertical axis pointed up to the spirit world and down into the world of emergence.
    Sonny blinked again and the image dissolved. He sat up, rubbed his eyes, and groaned. His left eye felt bruised, but otherwise he was okay.
    The Egyptians had carved their esoteric knowledge on the walls of their temples, hieroglyphs that told stories of their gods. Masked gods. Cerebus, Isis, and Horus, the falcon god who delivered whispered messages. The gods, in colorful dress, crossed the river Nile in the sacred raft. The walls of the tombs of the pharaohs were decorated in fantastic murals, images that spoke volumes to a learned acolyte.
    In the land of the Zia Sun, in New Mexico, in the desert land the Aztecs called Aztlán, land the Americanos called the Southwest, land where the bones of the ancient ones were buried, where the wind whispered and crested desert sand into waves, there where the acolyte might follow the zigzag pattern of the rattlesnake, in this land the ancestors had walked, crisscrossing the land that would one day be called America, the earth whose name they kept sacred in their stories and parables, a name with so much power that it could not even be carved into the sand stones of the desert.
    Long ago migrations had spread across the towering breasts and fat belly of the mother, treading with care, taking sustenance from the earth as a baby would suckle at her mother’s breast. Those ancient people had carved the glyph of power on the Zia Stone, thus describing their relationship to a higher, creative power.
    Older civilizations had done the same in their earliest writings. Sumerians, Israelites, and Egyptians, by whatever name in whatever place, the people had described the geography of the sacred. They felt the vibrations of a greater power infusing the earth, and they etched that relationship on wet clay tablets and sandstone pillars.
    The word became the center, a new awareness of the sacred.
    In the deserts and mountains of the Anasazi, the Zia glyph was cut