The Fifth Sacred Thing

by Starhawk

  Walking on the sand of the dunes strained Bird’s sore muscles, but he pushed on. At times, they could follow a trail over bluffs that looked out on the water. Bird had tried, in the hills, to steer away from the sprawling vines of poison oak, but by the third day he was itching and miserable.

  “It never affected me before,” Bird complained. “I used to be able to roll in the stuff, and it never bothered me.”

  “Piss on it,” Littlejohn said. “That’ll take away the itching.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Anyway, it’ll help. Can’t you heal it?”

  “I’m doing my best. But I’m not really a healer. When there’s a life-and-death situation, sometimes something comes over me, but it seems to have deserted me now. If Sandy were here, he’d have an herb for the itch, and Madrone—she can make you feel better with a wave of her hand.”

  “Who are they?”

  “My family. My lovers. If they’re still alive.”

  They were silent. The long rush and hiss of the waves reached them where they sat, concealed under the sheltering branches of a live oak.

  “What’s going to happen when we get to your home?” Littlejohn asked suddenly.

  “You’ll be welcome there.”

  “Yeah? We’ll see.”

  “I mean it.”

  “Sure. Your family’s going to be real happy to see you come home dragging some faggot you picked up in the Pit.”

  “Littlejohn, when I say my family, I mean all my lovers and all their lovers and kids and ex-lovers and everyone—and half of them are faggots, at least half the time. We consider it a word to be proud of.”

  “They’re going to welcome competition?”

  “We don’t think like that.”

  “Sure you don’t.”

  “I’m not saying nobody ever gets jealous. But we work it out.”

  “Yeah, sure. Look, Charlie, what we done in the Pit don’t necessarily carry over outside. I understand that.”

  “I don’t.”

  “We come from different worlds. You’re a real Witch. You’ve got powers. Me, the only thing I really know about magic is it makes you fair game for every demonfucker who takes it into his head to kill you. When you get back with your own kind, you won’t want to hang around with me.”

  “I’ll teach you,” Bird said. “We’ll all teach you.” But he was trying to convince himself, because he suspected maybe Littlejohn was right. Their bodies joined, but barriers remained that Bird couldn’t cross and maybe feared to. Littlejohn was opaque to him.

  “Hell, Charlie. When you get to know me outside the joint, you won’t even like me.”

  “Don’t say that.”

  “It’s the truth.”

  Some part of Littlejohn had already passed judgment on himself, or had accepted the judgment of a world that never really wanted him anything but dead or as something to use and throw away, a rag to wipe a dripping cock with. Bird wanted to do battle with that thing, Littlejohn’s demon, but he couldn’t say the words of challenge or reassurance because he did not know if they were true. He didn’t know Littlejohn, not really, not down in the soul where it counted, and he ached for people he did know, who opened at his touch and shared the same ground.

  “Well, there’s not much point in worrying about it,” Bird said finally. “We may never get to my home. And there may be nobody still alive there if we do.”

  “Yeah, there’s always that possibility,” Littlejohn said. “But somehow I think you’ll find your people.”

  “Thanks.”

  “If they’re anything like you, they’ll be damn hard to kill.”

  They slept curled up together against the cold, burrowed into the roots of trees. Bird cast a circle of protection around them and set wards, going through the forms of the ritual although he didn’t feel much power. But power follows practice, Maya always said. The more he used his magic, the stronger it would become.

  In his dreams that night, he became a hawk, soaring over the hills to the north. The hills were green, as if it were early spring after a wet winter. In a blue cove squatted a domed structure, the old nuclear power plant that had been refurbished in the early twenties. Bird could see its energy field, like a living thing, and the small sparks within it that were the spirits of the men who operated it. One by one, the sparks winked out. The dome began to glow, and the grass and trees began to die.

  He awoke shivering and sweating. He had had that dream before. When?

  “What’s wrong?” Littlejohn asked.

  “Just a dream. An old dream. Nothing.”

  “You’re shaking.”

  “I think it’s part of what I still can’t remember. How I got down here in the first place. What I did.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” Littlejohn said. “We’re getting out. That’s enough to occupy your mind.”

  As they made their way farther north, Bird got more and more nervous. They would soon reach the place where the coastline curved eastward to meet the convergence of the old Coast Road with the Inland Highway. The road ran right along the beach for nearly ten miles, Hijohn had warned them, with no cover. He could feel the road closing in on them, trapping them in a narrow cul-de-sac. If they were being hunted, they were approaching the perfect spot for an ambush. But the crow urged them on.

  As dusk fell, Bird could make out a silver line of fencing. He felt the aura of an electronic barrier.

  “Let’s stop,” he said. They waited for nightfall. The fenced-in land ahead of them was posted with military signs. Where the road curved to the edge of the coast and the fence began was a gate and checkpoint where armed guards patrolled.

  Maybe he could kill the electricity long enough for them to get over the fence, but that might alert the guards to their presence, and they would still have miles to go on a road with little cover, where more vehicles than he ever remembered seeing at one time sped up and down, headlights glaring.

  Bird looked thoughtfully at the water, where searchlights played at regular intervals. He grimaced. It could be contaminated with anything from sewage to radiation. But what choice did they have?

  “Can you swim?” he asked Littlejohn.

  “No, sorry.”

  Bird considered. The fence ran down to the water, but he didn’t know how far into the water it ran. He stripped off his clothes.

  “Wait here,” he said. A searchlight played on the front of the fence, but he timed it and ran out during its shadow, hitting the ground and rolling when the light returned. He crawled along the edge of the fence and lowered himself into the water. It was bone-numbing cold. The waves sucked at his legs, trying to pull him under. But the fence ended before he got out of his depth. They could do it—barely.

  Cautiously, he made his way back to Littlejohn, had him take off his clothes and follow. Bird rolled their clothes into a tight bundle and balanced it on his head as he led Littlejohn into the waves. For one awful moment, the searchlight caught them. They froze, kneeling down in the frigid water, listening for shouts. But the light passed, and no one came after them.

  They crawled out on the other side. The barrier at the highway’s edge formed a line of shadow just deep enough for them to lie in, side by side, huddling together to restore some warmth to their cold bodies. Bird’s plan was to move in that shadow, crawling if necessary, running when the searchlights let them. A thick bank of fog covered the sky, offering some concealment even though the moon was nearly full, shedding a diffused, pearly light. They couldn’t wait for moonset, which wouldn’t come until nearly dawn. They needed to hurry; they had to be off the base or well hidden by daylight, so he urged Littlejohn to put on his pants and ragged shirt, and they set off.

  If they stayed on their hands and knees, the searchlights and headlights passed over them. During the dark periods, they could run for it, throwing themselves down on the rough ground when the light returned. It was a hard way to travel. Bird thought about pilgrims, crawling to sacred places for penitence. His knee
s were soon bleeding and his hands scraped, but they had no choice except to go on.

  After several hours, Bird began to wonder how long he could continue to force his body to move. He had no idea how much ground they had covered. Eight miles? Nine? The eastern sky began to glow with a dim gray light, and the stars were disappearing. He urged Littlejohn on. He thought he could see another line of fence ahead of them, maybe a mile away, where the road curved inland and the coastal hills bulged out to the west. They would find cover there, if they were over the fence before daylight came.

  Gray turned to pink, and the black faded to blue. They were making good time, but not good enough. “Let’s run for it,” he said to Littlejohn, who nodded. They abandoned their cautious crawl and ran, flat out. Bird felt his body obeyed him only because he refused to consider the possibility that it wouldn’t. There was no real strength or speed left in him, but somehow they made it to the fence. It was marked with a skull and crossbones and a sign WARNING: TOXIC TERRITORY.

  Whatever lay on the other side couldn’t be nearly as toxic as that road would be to them in a few minutes. Bird laid his hand on the fence and sent an energy spark to cut the electricity. It no longer mattered if they alerted the guards; as long as they got over the fence they could hide in the thick brush across the way. Littlejohn climbed quickly to the top and Bird moved to follow. He made it up a few feet and then his bad leg froze. His muscles refused to work.

  Bird was stuck halfway up, sweating. Littlejohn looked back and saw him. “Come on,” he whispered.

  “Go on,” Bird said. “I can’t make it over.”

  Littlejohn turned, climbed back over the fence, grabbed Bird, and hoisted him over the top. They fell down together on the other side, landing heavily with the breath knocked out of them. After a moment, Bird felt himself. He was bruised, but nothing was broken.

  “You okay?” he asked Littlejohn.

  “Yeah.”

  “Thanks. Let’s get out of here.”

  Only a small side road separated them from a new range of hills. They were soon across it and into the underbrush. They made it another mile from the gate before Bird’s body finally gave out. He had just enough strength to crawl into the shelter of a grove of oaks and draw a magic circle around them. Then he collapsed. The sun shone down through the leaves, dried their clothes, and warmed their bodies, but they were unaware. They slept.

  The day passed and the sun passed, drawing a line of shadow in its wake. Bird felt the chill in his sleep, stirred, and opened his eyes. Littlejohn was still asleep. Bird wanted to get up but his muscles were so stiff that he found he could only roll over very slowly and push himself up with his arms into a kneeling position. As he raised his head, he found himself staring into the barrel of an ancient shotgun.

  For one moment, everything he could see seemed sharply outlined in light. A leaf, a branch, a patch of ground were imprinted on his retinas, last images to take with him into the spirit world. He knew he couldn’t run; he must have pulled every muscle in his back and hips, and his neck was so sore he could only continue to raise his head very slowly. If he couldn’t run, he would have to die; it was as simple as that. He would never go back to imprisonment.

  But as his eyes traveled up the gun barrel, he became aware that he was not facing a guard. The hands on the gun were brown, cracked and dirty, with broken nails, but undeniably female. The arms connected to a body that had breasts under a ragged cotton shift. And the face—but when he reached the face, he froze again. The face was like nothing he had ever seen before. At first it seemed to be one gaping hole; then he discerned a lower lip, capped by an upper lip split in two around an open gash where a nose should have been. The face was framed in wild, uncombed dreadlocks. And the eyes …

  But the eyes caught him. They were brown, wide-set under well-shaped brows, and as he looked at them he fell into their depths. He hadn’t looked into eyes like that for years, but now he could stare, lingeringly, at eyes that opened to him and entered into him, that read exactly what he was thinking and feeling, that remained steady under his first shock. He wondered what it was like to live behind that face with those knowing eyes. They would never misread revulsion or rejection. But what he felt, in their depths, was compassion.

  “Who’s our mother?” a man’s voice said behind him.

  He pushed himself up to his feet and turned. No one was there. Am I hearing things now? he wondered, but then he looked down at a pistol trained on him, held by a man who ended at the hips. He was muscularly built and handsome, with round blue eyes and a thick, curling black beard covering most of his oak-brown face, but where his legs should be, Bird saw nothing, as if his trunk had sprung up out of the ground.

  “Who’s our mother?” the man said again.

  Maybe this was an aftereffect of the drugs they’d been given. Littlejohn began to stir and Bird remembered, suddenly, his first meeting with Hijohn.

  “The earth is our mother,” Bird said.

  “We must take care of her,” came a voice from off to his left.

  Littlejohn looked up. They were surrounded by a ring of armed figures, some with faces oddly distorted, others missing a hand or an arm or with some withered limb dangling. Bird counted seven of them.

  “Who are you?” The first woman spoke. Her voice was thick and somewhat distorted, but it rang with a tone of confidence and authority. Bird turned to her again. He realized, looking again into those eyes, that he couldn’t lie to her. She was reading him as well as any Witch might.

  “My name is Bird,” he said. “Bird Lavender Black Dragon.” His own name tasted sweet on his tongue, and unfamiliar. It had been so many years since he had spoken it aloud. He felt something from Littlejohn, a small spark of hurt, and he realized he had never told him his real name. There was no help for that now. “This is Littlejohn.”

  “From?”

  “We’ve escaped from the South, from a work crew. But I come from the North—from the City.”

  There was an excited murmur around them.

  The woman said something that Bird couldn’t quite understand. The legless man repeated it more clearly.

  “You are Witches.”

  “Right.”

  “From the North?”

  “He is,” Littlejohn said.

  “Are you being tracked?”

  “No,” Bird said.

  “Hell,” Littlejohn added, “if we were being tracked, we wouldn’t be here; we’d be dead. Say, don’t you think you could put those guns down?”

  “We’re fairly harmless, really,” Bird said.

  The woman’s eyes held his, searching. She reminded him of Maya; he felt known to the core and, after a moment, accepted.

  “Not harmless,” she said, “but I will trust you.”

  Another murmur, and the guns were lowered. The woman stepped forward and held out her hands to Bird. He reached out, and she clasped his hands between hers warmly.

  “Welcome,” she said, and pointed to her own breast. “I am Rhea.”

  Bird felt her touch go through him like an electric shock. Suddenly he wanted to be taken into those arms, enfolded in that touch, to fall into the wells of those eyes. He felt the possibility in her of contact, and the need for it possessed him more strongly than hunger.

  The man with no legs tucked the gun into his belt. He came forward, moving gracefully by balancing on his palms and swinging his torso between his arms.

  “I’m Morton,” he said. “Welcome to the dancing ground of the Monsters.”

  “Monsters?” Littlejohn asked.

  Morton grinned. “That’s us. Fits, don’t you think?”

  “They can’t possibly answer that and be both honest and polite,” a slender young woman said. Her long black hair was arranged in a mass of tiny braids that framed a catlike triangular face. Her left hand was shaped like a claw. “I’m Dana. Welcome.”

  “But who are you?” Bird asked. “And what are you doing here?”

  “We live here,” R
hea said.

  “Isn’t the land poisoned?”

  “Look us over closely,” Morton said. “We’re all natives of Slotown and the Irish Hills, all born back when the old reactor was still running, probably leaking like crazy but what the hell did they care? Of course, you don’t see the ones who died of cancer.”

  “And you still live here?” Littlejohn asked.

  “We got to live somewhere,” Dana said.

  “It’s livable,” Morton said. “For us. Yeah, there’s probably still radiation. It doesn’t go away. But it’s better now than it was. Ten years ago, in the big epidemic, the Witches from the North sent down a raiding party. Shut the thing down, smashed the controls. Died doing it too.”

  “Goddess give them peace,” Dana murmured.

  Above their heads, a crow called. A shell broke open somewhere in Bird’s spine, sending shivers of energy climbing to the top of his head. A jumble of images flashed through his mind: long white corridors, and a round pit of a room lined with dials and switches, and most of all a presence like a living thing with its own strange beauty: matter liberating itself into pure power. A presence that did not want to die.

  But he had killed it.

  “It’s been better since then,” Morton went on. “The Millennialists had purged so many tecchies that the Stewards didn’t have the know-how left to repair the reactor or start it up again. The land feels better now, and there’ve been some kids born that are okay. Not to us—but there’s some others in the town, deserters from the army.”

  “We work to heal the land,” Rhea said. “On the moons and the festivals.”

  Bird barely heard what she said. He remembered the cold feel of a gun in his hand, an old-fashioned revolver Tom had brought them from the Forest Communities. And if he followed the aim of the gun he saw a dough-white face slimed with fear and a pasty hand pulling switch after switch to move control rods in between fuel rods in patterned sequence, shutting the reactor down. It had taken a long, long time. They had spelled each other, he and Cleis and Zorah and Tom, holding the guns, forcing the man to do their will, standing guard.