The Fifth Sacred Thing

by Starhawk

  If he survived this, he had to be a Witch, he thought, as he went into the starsong for healing. He couldn’t make the bones go back quite right, but he could knit them together and put the pain into an arrow and shoot it off to disintegrate somewhere else.

  They would come for him again, he knew that. He didn’t want to let the fear in because he sensed, now, that it was big enough to eat him alive. But he knew he couldn’t block it out indefinitely. He needed a plan. He wanted to be able to walk through walls, to pass invisible through the corridors and out into the night air. He wanted to go home.

  Well, he could walk. He had learned that much. Not easily or long or well, but part of that was lack of practice. The muscles had atrophied. But he would work on them, and he would make himself walk around this cell, three paces one way, three paces back, until he had the use of his legs again.

  It was his mind that was the problem. Sooner or later they’d break him and pick it. They’d find the pain he couldn’t resist or they’d get tired of cruder methods and drug him. Did it really matter, he wondered, what he told them? They asked him questions about magic. What could they do if they knew how much or how little he had? And they asked him about the North, how the city was governed and defended. Were they planning a war? If he told them the truth, that the North had not armed itself or prepared for war, would they invade?

  He paced, and he worried. The fear crept in, chink by chink. He thought maybe he was going to lose his mind.

  Or maybe that was the answer.

  When they came for him again, he was ready. A good thing, too, he thought, when they laid him down on a hospital cot and came toward him with a syringe. He remembered a story about the stone they called the desert rose, pink, with ridged and striated surfaces. Maya had told him some people called it Witches’ Brains. The legend was the old Witches had locked their secrets inside it when they were taken to be tortured, to keep them safe from the Witch burners until the Remembering time would come again. Inside his mind was a stone like an egg. He took a deep breath, let it out, and imagined that his mind and his memories were inside the rock. He set a ward, the tiniest speck of mindstuff, to watch and wait and bring him out again when it was safe or necessary. Then the fear got him, for one stark moment of absolute terror. They found his vein; the syringe emptied the drug into his arm, and he took the crystal egg of his mind and his memories, of what was in him that he believed made him, and fled. The more they came after him with drugs and questions, the farther away he hid. And the stone was buried deep, deep, underground. Where his mind had been was something opaque and resilient that memory bounced away from.

  Littlejohn was in bed beside him, rubbing against him. Bird came alert instantly, the fear still clinging to him. Where was he? In the barracks. Who was he? Bird. How long had he been here?

  Ten years? Ten years.

  And the pain he was awash in was Hijohn’s pain. Not his own.

  Clarity. Boundaries. He remembered the lessons of his childhood. Always draw the magic circle before you step between the worlds. Don’t get lost.

  “I once was lost, but now I’m found.” His father had liked to sing that old hymn.

  “Fuck me,” Littlejohn whispered.

  “No, wait. I can’t now.” He could still hear Hijohn moaning, and he could still feel the power flooding through him. Funny, he had never been a healer, or much wanted to be. But his hands, broken, had found unsuspected powers. He imagined reaching out with them to Hijohn, imagined lifting him with his hands, as if he could lift the man up out of his broken body. They stood together somewhere on the slopes of a mountain. He smelled sage.

  “Do you want to live or die?” Bird asked.

  “I want to die. But I’ve got to live, if I can.”

  Bird’s own body was an instrument of the great music; it could sing through him and charm Hijohn’s life back into his broken bones, smooth his torn flesh. And then Littlejohn was doing something to Bird’s body: he could dimly feel his cock rising with a hot stab of need. Cautiously, Bird lowered a barrier in his mind and felt for the younger man, to draw him into the link. Littlejohn drew away, with an electric shock of panic.

  “Don’t Witch me,” he said. “Let’s just fuck.”

  Bird felt shock ring through the harmony, like a door slamming in the middle of a symphony. He was almost thrown out of contact, but he reached for Hijohn and held on. Ground, he said to himself, letting the power run back to earth. Let the earth hold it, Maya used to say. She won’t lose it for you, and you’ll always know where to find her.

  Ground.

  “Come on,” Littlejohn urged.

  “That is how Witches fuck,” Bird breathed in his ear. “I can’t do it any other way.”

  “Sure you can, like you used to. Please, let’s just do it like we always used to.”

  The boy feared him, Bird sensed. He feared Bird would reach into his mind, grab something there he didn’t want to face, take it, and then hate him and discard him. Maybe he preferred Bird mindless, a force like raging nature he could submit to but that wasn’t capable of controlling him. Maybe forms of control were all he’d ever known.

  Bird started to draw back. He could still feel Hijohn, a spirit trapped in a shell of pain, just on the edge of bearable, now. He wanted to stay with him, not to be distracted. But then Littlejohn’s mouth was on his cock and the need in him was raging and building. The boy’s fingers drummed on his chest, and Bird could hear him make soft little sounds of imprecation and submission. He had never before, in his memory, used a body without opening to the mind, and the thought repelled him but something in it also excited him, seemed to fit the kind of cold comfort he needed in this place, as if the very bars around him could become erotic dreams. Hijohn moaned somewhere, and Littlejohn moaned in his ear, and then the sex and the healing and the power and the pain were all mixed up together, all building and vibrating in strange dissonances that finally peaked. He came, and then he owed it to the boy to make him come too.

  In the stillness, he felt a silence where Hijohn was. Was he dead? Then the door opened and the guards dropped Hijohn’s body back into the corner bunk. When they were gone, Bird slid out of bed and placed his hand lightly on the man’s chest. No, sleeping. Healing. Imperfectly; all Bird had really been able to do was feed him the energy necessary for survival. He was damaged and in pain, but alive. Thank the Goddess.

  Bird returned to his bunk. And then he lay awake, remembering, for a long, long time while Littlejohn curled up and slept. He was remembering tall, silent Tom, how making love to him was like falling into a mirror, as mind opened to mind and they could feel each other’s pleasure and rise with each other’s heat. He was remembering Sandy, the sensitive one, who could suck his sadness away from him, and he was remembering Cleis and Zorah and Madrone.

  He had never imagined that sex could make him feel ashamed.

  What would they do in the morning, when Hijohn still lived? Would they beat him up again the next night? How many times could Bird bring him back from the dead before they caught on? Before he wore himself out?

  He had to get them out of there.

  But he didn’t see any way out.

  3

  Maya awoke most mornings surprised to find herself still alive when so many she loved were dead. Often they visited her in the early morning, as the sun’s rays filtered through the upper bay window where her bed nestled. She had always loved being awakened by the sun. Many years ago she made herself curtains, beautiful curtains, balloon shades of raw silk dyed turquoise and trimmed with French lace. They disintegrated and she never replaced them. She no longer feared exposure.

  From her bed, Maya could look through the south-facing bay of her window when the trees were bare and see the green winter slopes of Ritual Hill. If her door were open, she could look down the long hallway, through the glass door of the kitchen, and out the back window to the rising curve of Twin Peaks. Los Pechos, the young ones called them, the Breasts: Breasts of the Virgin, Breas
ts of the Goddess, depending on your persuasion. It didn’t matter to her. The Goddess always was a virgin, complete in herself, untamed, unmated. She had been a virgin herself once, but then she met Rio.

  “You were not. You were not a virgin when you met me. I remember it clearly. You were quite experienced.”

  Suddenly he was there, sitting on the edge of her bed, blond and bearded and sexy in his tight, faded jeans like he was when he was nineteen years old.

  “You’re blocking the view, you old crow,” she said to him. “Move over. Where’ve you been the last couple of weeks?”

  “Places. But don’t change the subject. We were discussing your unlamented virginity, which as I recall you’d unburdened yourself of at fifteen or so.”

  “I’m not talking about my hymen. I’m talking about my state of being. I allowed you to mate me.”

  “Was that so bad?”

  “Well, it had its moments. Good and bad.”

  “The best and the worst,” Rio said. “You know I never do things halfway.”

  “Once I would have said it took years off my life. But I guess I can’t complain on that score.”

  “Pure luck,” Johanna said. She made a fairly substantial ghost, sitting next to Rio on the side of Maya’s bed, her molasses-dark skin gleaming in the warm light, her washed-silk shirt glowing in soft shades of green. But no weight depressed the bedclothes and mattress. “Happenstance. Not for any great virtue the rest of us don’t possess.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “You. Why you’re still alive and the rest of us are dead.”

  “Jealous?”

  Johanna snorted, a sound characteristic of her in life. “Not of you, girlfriend. There are a few pleasures that compensate for the discomforts and petty humiliations of corporeality, but I’m afraid you are long past them.”

  “Don’t count on that. And watch out. Dwell too much on the pleasures of the flesh, and you’ll find yourself reincarnating.”

  “I intend to, at the earliest opportunity, in your line if not my own.”

  “My line seems to have faded out.”

  “Don’t give up on Bird yet,” Rio said.

  “Why not? Do you know something I don’t know?”

  “The dead are forbidden to tell all we know,” Johanna informed her.

  “Oh, screw you,” Maya said, but her tone was affectionate.

  “That, I’m afraid, is no longer possible between us.” Johanna smiled, tilting her head down to look up from under raised brows, a seductive gesture Maya remembered well. “But you wait. Someday we’ll both be back in young nubile bodies again, and it’ll be like it was that first time, when we got stoned on all that acid and ended up surprising ourselves on the locker-room floor. Not to mention those two gym teachers who found us.”

  “Even dead, you’re incorrigible.”

  “I am a daughter of the river, of Oshun, the Goddess of Love.”

  Maya turned back to Rio. “Do you or do you not know anything about Bird?”

  “Can’t say.”

  “Well, I’m not sure I want either of you in my line anyway.”

  “Why not? Didn’t I act as a perfect father to your kid?”

  “You were a great father to every kid except your own.”

  “And whose fault was that? If you or Johanna had told me she existed, I would have fathered her too.”

  “Never mind that,” Maya said. “I’m not quarreling with your talent for paternity. The point is, as a son you were hell on wheels. Do you think I want to inflict that on my descendants? Wait for Madrone to breed, you and Johanna both. She’s your granddaughter. Not that she has any plans in that direction right now, not since Sandy died.”

  “My line doesn’t plan these things,” Johanna said. “We have fortuitous accidents.”

  “Like the fortuitous accident you had after carrying on with Mr. Superstud here?” Maya kicked her foot toward Rio’s ghost. “Who was, may I remind you, my boyfriend at the time?”

  “That was no accident. That was an ancestor knocking at the door, wanting to be Rachel.” Johanna stretched, yawned, and winked. “Maybe ‘accident’ isn’t the operative term here. Maybe I’d better just say that my line is susceptible to intervention from the dead. Otherwise how do you explain Rachel herself, a fifty-year-old medical doctor, no doubt acquainted with the facts of life, getting knocked up by a twenty-six-year-old combatiente in the Guadalupano Liberation Front?”

  “She was following the bad example of her elders.”

  “Speak for yourself, girlfriend.”

  “I was quite youthful when I had Brigid. In my mid-forties. And I would have had her by you”—she turned to Rio—“if you hadn’t had that vasectomy in prison.”

  “You were practically menopausal,” Johanna said. “But that’s beside the point, which is that Rachel’s little dalliance gave us Madrone, and your fling with—what was his name?”

  “Carlos.”

  “Right. Anyway, he gave you Brigid and, through her, Marley, rest his soul, and Bird. And without them all, the odds would be even worse.”

  “The odds of what?”

  “The odds that our next lifetime will be the restful, pleasurable, tropical idyll that I am in the process of planning instead of a miserable starved sojourn in some Millennialist-infested breeding pen.”

  “Our next lifetime?”

  “You, me, and Rio, our little karmic trio. That rhymes, did you notice?”

  Maya looked at Johanna with suspicion. For just a moment, she seemed to have a sheaf of colored brochures in her hand, as if she’d just come from some astral travel agency. Were there agents in the afterlife who could get you special deals on accommodations in the next? Did they offer group rates?

  “How can you be making plans for my next life,” Maya asked, “when I’m still in the middle of this one?”

  “I’d say tail end, not middle,” Johanna countered. “You’re winding down.”

  “I’m not dead yet. Anyway, haven’t we stored up enough karmic good points in this life to have assured some comfort in the next?”

  “That is exactly what nobody seems to grasp about this karma business. It’s not a simple matter of cause and effect, reward and punishment. It’s a question of what’s available. You see, as long as life for the majority of souls on this planet is just a long round of starvation, misery, torture, and early death—and believe me, outside this fortunate watershed that is an apt description of the state of affairs—as long as only a few live in comfort while the masses scrape along in want, then all us returning souls have to take our fair share of shifts among the hungry. You think this life you’ve lived was tough? Let me tell you, it was just R and R between the ones where you never get a solid meal two days running or you die before your first birthday from drinking bad water.”

  “Johanna, you’re not cheering me up.”

  “I didn’t come to cheer you up. I came to warn you. This next year is a pivotal time, one of those hinges that open or close the doors of fate. Watch out!”

  “What do you mean?” Maya asked. She sat up and opened her eyes, but the room was empty.

  Madrone quietly pushed open the door and entered Maya’s room, bearing a very old tray commemorating the marriage of Prince Charles to Lady Diana, back in the last century. Upon it rested two of Maya’s favorite Chinese cups, eggshell-thin, grass-green, with a pattern of butterflies on them, and a brown chipped teapot.

  Maya observed her closely. She looked rested, but there was still a pale undertone to the hue of her warm skin that spoke of deep fatigue.

  “How are you this morning?” Madrone asked.

  “I’m still alive. What do you think of that?”

  “I’m glad somebody is,” Madrone said, carefully placing the tray and settling herself on the edge of the bed. “You’ve been talking to the dead again?”

  “How can you tell?”

  “A certain faraway look you get in your eye, a little cloudy, like cataracts.” Mad
rone smiled and handed Maya her tea. “Any good news from the other side?”

  “The dead are annoyingly cryptic.”

  “They’re probably swamped with new arrivals.”

  Maya sipped her tea. It was the herb they called Mystery Mint, from some spontaneous miscegenation of peppermint and spearmint in the Black Dragon garden. She wished it were good old caffeinated black tea. Twinings English Breakfast: that was what she used to like. With a little milk. They never saw that anymore. She had outlasted Twinings too. Or maybe it still existed, out in some corner of that vast world they no longer moved in. Maybe, in some air-filtered sunless enclave, the Stewards drank it every day.

  “You’re really worried about this new disease, aren’t you?” Maya observed.

  Madrone swirled the tea in her cup, as if looking for her fate in the dregs. Her voice was soft, controlled, but Maya could hear the pain concealed in it. “It just hit me again, about Consuelo.”

  “How did it happen?”

  “Her fever spiked up suddenly, triggered premature labor. She was fine the day before. There was nothing to indicate a problem, no fetal distress, no signs of toxemia. Just that odd low-grade temperature and the slight headache. Like Sandy had, before he fell off the roof.”

  “You think he fell because of the fever?”

  “I know he did. I could feel it, this whatever it is. Like a presence in his blood, a certain color in his aura. I can feel it, but I can’t see it or get hold of it. We don’t know what it is or how it’s spreading or what to expect. I’m afraid, madrina.”

  What to say? Maya wondered. Wasn’t she supposed to be old and wise and comforting? When did this highly touted wisdom suddenly descend? Was it like tongues of fire, or the holy dove of the Christians? Would she ever feel its claws digging into her scalp?

  “I wish I could help you,” she said at last. “You carry too many burdens for somebody your age.”