The Fifth Sacred Thing

by Starhawk

  A woman in a yellow headcloth who Madrone recognized from the central market spoke. “And not just the healers. The sick need help, too, and their households. I don’t know about you all, but coming in this morning I noticed a fair number of raggedy-ass gardens. We should be organizing in the neighborhoods to take care of people better.”

  “If this becomes a full-scale epidemic, we’re going to really need organization,” said one of the men from the Fairies, the gay men’s enclave in the center of the city.

  “Let’s think about that,” Salal said. “Let’s not shove it to the back of our minds, because we don’t want to face that possibility. Who has ideas about what to do?”

  “I think everyone in every work group should have a backup. Everyone who has an essential skill or piece of information should share it with at least three others. Every household should have two sister households to share in the workload if necessary,” a pale blond woman said.

  There was a general murmur of agreement.

  “Are there concerns?” Salal asked.

  “Yeah, are people going to panic about this?”

  “It depends how we put it out. It doesn’t have to come down as a Directive of Doom.”

  “Most of these things we’re suggesting are just common sense. We should do them even if there weren’t an epidemic. Anyone can die at any time, but the work needs to go on.”

  “We have done some of them. At least in the Transport Collective, we do. Every Tower Maintenance team has a backup. Every coordinator has two helpers who share all vital information and rotate into that position in turn. I thought every work group was organized that way.”

  “Toxics is, more or less.”

  They had moved into problem-solving mode, and Madrone felt her attention beginning to drift away. They were good, these people. She trusted them. If there was any best way to handle this crisis, they would find it. If there was anything to be done, they would do it. And maybe just for five minutes, she could rest her eyes.…

  The Speaker began to pound his staff on the floor, the sign that one of the Voices had something to say. Opening her eyes, Madrone could see the energy of the room being stirred and swirled, changing. They waited, as the Speaker leaned his ear to the opening of Salmon’s mouth and nodded.

  “Friend Salmon says this: This matter concerns the waters. Human beings must survive to clean up the mess they’ve made.”

  “Well, that’s helpful,” another Fairy man murmured. “Does Friend Salmon have any ideas for us on how to do it?”

  “Survival is in the rivers of your blood. So is death. Open to what you fear.”

  Life and death swam together through the currents in the great domed room. What could Madrone open to? Fear was not what she felt—more a leaden exhaustion, her eyelids too heavy to prop up. What did it all matter, after all? Maybe they were all going to die, but the forces around them would remain. And why should she take advice from a fish that couldn’t even speak comprehensibly? Was there some reason oracles had to be obscure? Diosa, she needed more sleep.

  “Madrone? There’s a question directed at you.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “I’m from the Defense Council,” a woman said. She was an older woman, her straight hair a gleaming white over skin like wrinkled cream-yellow parchment. With a start, Madrone realized she was looking at Lily Fong, one of the almost mythic Cuatro Viejas. Madrone remembered her, standing with an upraised pickax on the day of the Uprising, her face calm but alight, the muscles of her arms, old even then, bunching and tensing in her shoulders as she swung.

  “This is what we want to know,” Lily said. “Do you think this disease is a natural thing, or do you think it is a weapon?”

  Madrone looked at her in surprise. “You should know, if anyone does.” Lily was a Listener, who rarely left the island in the lake in the center of the park, where the Deep Listeners maintained a constant protective vigil in the spirit world, alert for threats to the people. Couldn’t they hear the answer to that question?

  “You mean as in biological warfare?” the woman next to Madrone asked.

  “That’s what I mean. You work with these things directly, Madrone. We see only their reverberations in the ch’i worlds.”

  “I wish I knew.” Madrone was tired, tired. Did she really have to go around with this one again? “We argue this one all the time in the Healers’ Council.” Actually she argued it back and forth daily with herself. “From the evidence of the computer models, some of us suspect it is engineered. But until we can find it and analyze it, there’s no real way of knowing. Does it matter?”

  “Of course it matters. How can we defend ourselves if we don’t recognize an attack?”

  “Well, it’s like this,” Madrone went on. “Essentially, we’re living in a toxic stew.” That was Nita’s metaphor, and Sage and Holybear concurred. “Don’t let the flourishing of the gardens and the clarity of the waters delude you. There are still chemicals in the Bay we may never be able to analyze, let alone neutralize. The atmosphere is suffering from an ozone depletion that won’t begin to reverse itself for at least another twenty to thirty years—and that depends on what’s happened to the rain forests and the consumption of fossil fuels on the rest of the planet, which we don’t even know. There’s low-level radiation left over from the last century, and who knows what’s being pumped into the atmosphere now? And there were biological weapons developed years ago, and maybe some of them have been mutating ever since. Plus some pretty uncontrolled experiments in genetic engineering. Put that all together, and it’s not surprising we have recurring epidemics. If anything’s surprising, it’s that we’re doing as well as we are.”

  “What you’re saying is that maybe we can’t afford to continue our blessed isolation?” said the woman from the Transport Collective. Madrone knew how eager they were to build a ship that could sail out beyond the confines of the bay and go exploring. It had come up time and time again. Not that Council would stop them—it was just that nobody wanted to devote their scarce resources to the project yet.

  “What she’s saying is that we still aren’t taking our toxics programs seriously enough,” said one of Nita’s protégés from the Toxics Council.

  “Let me speak for myself,” Madrone snapped. “I don’t want to get caught up in political battles. The truth is, there are times when I’ve seen one of the viruses, and I can’t deny that it’s looked to me like something—constructed.”

  “And this one?”

  “The problem with this one is that we haven’t been able to find it. Not with magic, and not with a microscope. We aren’t even sure it is a virus.”

  “We believe it’s a weapon,” Lily Fong said. “And we thought you should know that. Possibly the forerunner of a direct assault.”

  Complete silence fell on the group.

  “Isn’t it possible that the Defense Council, just by virtue of being concerned with Defense, might have a bias toward seeing things in terms of attack?” Cress, from the Water Council, pushed a hand through the thick black brush of his hair and stared straight at Lily. He reminded Madrone of a male dog asking for a fight. She expected to hear him growl.

  Lily drew herself up. “We’re not unaware of that possibility, young man. Don’t you think we take that into account? All of us on the Defense Council are old, and we’re all women—for that very reason. So that we’ll be less likely to be led astray by our hormones and our paranoias.”

  “With all due respect for the members of Defense Council, may I say even old women are not infallible.”

  “And weren’t we going to review that policy this summer?” another man asked. “How is it that Defense is the only council allowed to be restricted by gender?”

  “Maybe when we’ve fully recovered from five thousand years of patriarchy, we can trust men enough to empower them for Defense,” the blond woman said.

  “And maybe we could argue that we need a few more generations to recover from thousands of years of racism b
efore we let white people on Defense,” a dark-skinned man snapped back.

  “The policy came from the Voices,” the woman retorted.

  “The Voices aren’t infallible either. There’s people under those masks, and some of them have their own agendas,” Cress said.

  “Are you trying to say—?”

  “I’m saying we work by consensus, and that has to hold for the Four Sacred Things as well,” Cress said. “Otherwise it’s meaningless. They can make suggestions, but I for one don’t feel compelled to take orders from a bird or a fish or my great-aunt in a Coyote mask. We have an obligation to think for ourselves.”

  “Why don’t we all just shut up for a moment,” Salal said forcefully. “We’re getting distracted by personal arguments.”

  In the quiet, the Speaker consulted with the Deer mask.

  “Friend Deer suggests we remember our connection to the earth. Deer says, the earth is bigger than any one of us.”

  There was silence. Some rebel in Madrone wanted to consider not her relationship to earth but to this Council, her lack of patience with meetings and process, possibly stemming from her lack of sleep. Or from her sense of urgency—her feeling that even as she sat there listening to arguments, people were dying. And it wasn’t that the questions weren’t important, and the facilitation excellent, even if this conflict between Defense and Water had been going on for years. But was it important that she listen to it? Or was she just impatient, trying to set herself up as somehow special, Superhealer, exempt from ordinary responsibilities?

  “Friend Deer says, ‘Madrone, beware the cold place.’ ”

  And what the hell does Friend Deer mean by that? she thought irritably, but she nodded her head in acknowledgment.

  “Important issues have been raised here,” Salal said. “Clearly there are some strong feelings in this Council about the way Defense has been set up. And maybe some questions about the Voices. Are we giving over too much power to them? These are things we can’t ignore. We can put them on the agenda, for later or next week. But right now we’re still talking about the epidemic. And I have to say that maybe none of us want to look it in the face. I don’t. I’d much rather argue.” This elicited mild laughter. “But we’ve got to face it if we’re going to survive.”

  “I wouldn’t have brought this question of germ warfare here to the Council if we hadn’t examined it thoroughly,” Lily said. “Unfortunately, it is not just paranoia. If I were to share our paranoias, none of you would sleep again for a week. No, we believe it is a real possibility, and one of fairly high probability.”

  “You believe, but how can we know?”

  There was a stirring in the east. Speaker leaned to the mouth of the Hawk.

  “Bird knows,” he said.

  “The birds?” Salal asked.

  “That wasn’t what Hawk said. Hawk said Bird.”

  “Who’s Bird?”

  “There was a Bird from our household,” Madrone said. What was it with Bird lately? Like a haunting, he had become a presence who plagued her. “He disappeared almost ten years ago. We can’t find him. Can Hawk?”

  “Hawk isn’t saying any more,” the Speaker said.

  A wave of desolation hit Madrone. Just for a moment, she had allowed herself to hope that he had been found, that the Voices or the Listeners or somebody had made contact with him. And hope was wrong and dangerous. Like allowing a little bit of atmosphere to seep into a vacuum, and then, when she felt it sucked out again, the hollow place it left seemed newly and sharply empty. Much to her own self-disgust, she began to cry.

  Several people moved to put their arms around her. The woman beside her handed her a handkerchief.

  “I’m sorry,” Madrone said. “I’m just tired. Ignore me.” Healers’ Council meetings were usually awash with tears, interspersed with gallows humor, but she always hated people who cried in Full Council. It was so self-serving. But she couldn’t seem to stop crying. Surya gathered Madrone up and hid her tearstained face against her skinny shoulder.

  “Oh, hell,” Salal said. “We all want to cry. I do. Why don’t we take a little break? And Madrone, why don’t you go home and get some sleep?”

  Madrone made a great effort of will and raised her head. “There’s so much work to do,” Madrone said. “But it’s my day to be here.”

  “Don’t send her home,” Lily said. “She won’t rest there. Go to the beach, young woman. Take some strength from the ocean. Your work will go better.”

  “That’s a special request of Council,” Salal said. “Do we have consensus on that?”

  Madrone stood outside the Council Hall, looking west. From the high peaks, she could see the ocean shining silver, invitingly. For one long moment, she let herself feel the temptation to take the Council’s advice, to duck out of work, catch the gondola west, and spend the day walking beside the rushing and retreating waves, filling her pockets with shells and stones. It had been too long since she’d spent a day like that. Bird was still on her mind. He had loved the water. When he was fourteen he’d spent days and days windsurfing on the bay. She’d tried to keep up with him but kept wiping out on the board, inhaling salt water, and Johanna had yelled at her about pollution and cancer. Suddenly she had a strong sensation of Bird standing beside her, so physical she could almost have put her arm around his shoulder, let him lean on her. He seemed confused, in pain. It seemed to her that if she went to the beach, he would accompany her. They could walk beside each other, letting the waves wash their feet, and lie on the sand, holding each other. She could almost hold him now, reaching out to gather in this sense of contact, transform it into breathing physicality. The golden dome of the Council Hall gleamed behind her. Her arm moved through empty air.

  4

  It was strange, Bird thought, pushing his broom down the day’s blank corridor, how the power that flooded through him at night ebbed by day, leaving him hollow. His reawakened intuition screamed inside him, Get out! Get out! They had left Hijohn alone for the last two nights, but it was only a matter of time before they started in on him again. And Bird wasn’t sure how much longer he could maintain his façade of mindlessness. More and more of his memory returned each day, still patchy, like those early explorer’s maps with vast spaces left blank. But enough detail had returned that he knew who he was and where he had come from. What would the guards do if they recognized that he was conscious again?

  No, the three of them had to escape, and he would have to figure out how. Littlejohn was too resigned, Hijohn too battered, enclosed behind a wall of chronic pain. While he managed to drag himself up each day for count, for work, afterward he collapsed into sleep. But Bird was a Witch, with a Witch’s will to apply to the matter. He was determined to save Hijohn; they had bonded so deeply, sharing pain, that abandoning him was unthinkable. And he was determined to save Littlejohn, for only by giving him the solidarity due a lover could Bird redeem their relationship for himself.

  If they could escape, maybe they could reach the hills, where Hijohn came from. If they could escape, maybe he could somehow get back to the home that daily became more clear in his memory. His mind raced around like a fly at a windowpane. He had to get out, but he could not find a way.

  “Use your magic,” he could hear his grandmother say. But he only seemed to be able to find his magic in the night, stewing in a cauldron of pain. By day his power seemed drained, the cord that connected him to the source severed. Maybe he’d been locked away from the earth and the free air too long. The elements seemed shadowy to him, something invented or remembered but not quite real, as his own home seemed at times to be a made-up fantasy, too good to be true. He stood all day, a Witch with a broom in his hand, but the bristles were made of orange plastic and he didn’t know how to fly.

  “Does anyone ever get out of here?” he asked Littlejohn that night as they lay together.

  Littlejohn shifted uneasily, rolling over to look at Bird with a slightly wary expression in his eyes. He’s afraid of me, Bird realiz
ed. As accustomed as our bodies are to each other, I’m a stranger to him, now that I can remember and plan.

  “Some serve their sentences and get released,” Littlejohn said. “Some die. Some get taken for the work levees.”

  “What are they? Tell me about them.”

  “You don’t want that, believe me. You’re a hell of a lot safer here, even with Harris riding your ass. They’re all the jobs no free man wants to do—because they’re too dangerous. Mostly salvage, sometimes toxic cleanup. They keep you drugged all the time and guarded. Lots of accidents. Average survival time is about three months.”

  “How do you get picked for them? Can you volunteer?”

  “Don’t make me laugh. It’s like everything else around here—you don’t choose it; one day it just happens to you.”

  “Maybe it could happen to us. There might be more of a chance of escape, anyway.”

  “Don’t bet on it.”

  He resorted at last to the simplest magic he could think of. He cast a spell. He lacked all materials but the most basic: a pubic hair of Littlejohn’s and one of his own, some of their mingled semen, and a hair from Hijohn’s head. He dipped the hairs in the sperm and rolled them into a ball, which he secreted under his left thumbnail. He hid the charm all through breakfast and waited until he was left alone to sweep the corridor.

  Nobody noticed that his sweeping pattern took him in a clockwise circle, pausing at each of the four directions, not that he knew where they were in that featureless space but he made his best guess. He called in earth, air, fire, water, his allies and his helpers, not as he could remember calling, with power running through him like phosphorescent fire, but simply with words and a heartfelt sense of need.

  He called the Mother, the first aspect of the Goddess every child knew, the Caring One, whose second name was abundance. The full moon was her breast; her milk poured out as light on the earth to bring life and fertility to every growing thing. He prayed to see her again, to feel that light on his face, to feel earth under his feet. He could hardly frame the prayer in words, beyond the very simplest.