The Fifth Sacred Thing

by Starhawk

  By the third day, Bird began to feel his energy returning. He sat up as the sun dipped into the water, laying a track of liquid gold at his feet. He wished he could walk that track to go home. And someday he would.

  “Another day or two, and I think I’ll be ready to push on,” he said to Littlejohn. “How about you?”

  Littlejohn shook his head. “I’m not going with you. I’m staying here.”

  “Why?” Bird asked, although he was not, in his heart, surprised.

  “You never told me your name.”

  Bird had no answer. He couldn’t even honestly say he was sorry. “Littlejohn, no matter what they say, this place can’t be healthy to live in. I’m telling you, you’d be welcome at my home.”

  “I’m welcome here. And I am here.”

  “I can’t argue with that.”

  “It’s okay, Bird. You don’t owe me anything.”

  “My life.”

  Littlejohn shrugged. “I owe you mine about five times over. Call it even, and quit while we’re ahead, okay?”

  “I’ll miss you,” Bird said.

  “You’ll know where I am. Maybe you’ll be back.”

  That night Bird was eating a late dinner with Rhea when they heard a knock on the door. When Rhea opened it, two men walked in. One had brown skin and sandy blond hair, and the other was lighter of skin but with dark coiled African hair like Bird’s. They both had the wiry look of those who survived on short rations, and although they seemed young, maybe in their mid-twenties, their faces were deeply wrinkled, like those of old men. Rhea let them in, and they came and sat at the table with Bird, nodding hello. Rhea offered them food, but they declined.

  “Water will do us fine, if you’ve got it,” the light-haired man said.

  They sat and looked Bird over, closely. He looked back at them, wondering what was strange about them. Finally he realized: nothing. Aside from their wizened faces, they seemed completely sound. What were they doing with the Monsters? They reminded him of Hijohn. Bird wondered how he was getting along, if he’d found his friends and the way back to the precarious safety of his hills.

  “You’re the Witch from the North,” the light-haired one said, finally.

  Bird nodded.

  The man stuck out his hand. “My name’s John. Johnny Appleseed, you can call me. Apple, for short. This here’s my friend John.”

  “Johnnycake,” he said.

  Bird suppressed a smile and told them who he was.

  “I think maybe I know a friend of yours,” he said. “A man named Hijohn.”

  They glanced sharply at each other.

  “Where’d you meet him?”

  “In prison.” Bird told them the story.

  “So you left him in the hills south of the dunes?”

  “Five, maybe six days ago.”

  They exchanged glances. “That’s good to know.”

  They fell silent while Bird finished his dinner. Rhea came back in with four glasses of water. The two men held theirs reverently for a moment, as if speaking a silent prayer.

  They drank slowly and then stood up. “What kind of shape are you in?” Apple asked. “You up for a walk?”

  “Sure,” Bird said. “Why?”

  “We’ve got some things to show you,” Apple said. “Over the mountain.”

  They hiked up into the hills, following snaky trails and overgrown dirt roads. Bird’s leg hurt, but he told himself it didn’t and almost believed it. They seemed to climb up and up endlessly. Twilight had faded to dark, but the two men found their way by scent and touch and starlight, with Bird stumbling behind.

  At last they halted below the crest of a hill. Sliding on their bellies for cover, they inched their way over to the edge of the ridge and peered out. Below them, they could see the whole valley that divided the Irish Hills from the Santa Lucias in the north. As they watched, the waning moon rose, spilling silver over a gridlike pattern of lights. Vehicles moved on the roadways, and searchlights rotated to train their glare on the hills.

  “There it is,” Johnnycake said. “Slo Valley.”

  “All of that’s military,” Apple said. “Troops, weapons, transport. Take a good look.”

  Bird looked. He didn’t know how to make sense of what he saw, unless they were planning some major assault. Otherwise why mass so many troops and so much equipment together? And what was there to assault but the North?

  After a few moments, he felt Johnnycake’s hand on his shoulder, urging him back. They crept down into a ravine and sheltered under a scrub oak. Probably in a stand of poison oak, Bird thought. Maybe he could learn to change his body chemistry to resist the stuff.

  “So now you see what we’re up against,” Apple said. “You see why we need someone like you.”

  “Who’s us?” Bird asked. “Who are you?”

  “We’re the Web,” Apple said.

  “Like—the Resistance?” Bird asked.

  “You’re a Witch from the North. You see much of Angel City when you were down there in the Pit?”

  “Just the inside of a cellblock,” Bird said.

  “It’s dry down there, man. Dry. Rains maybe two, three weeks out of the year. And the Corporation owns all the water.”

  “Which corporation?” Bird asked.

  “Does it matter? They’ve merged and remerged and taken each other over so many times they’re really all the same thing. They own Angel City, pretty much. Own all the farmlands, all the seeds, all the farm equipment.”

  “They own the Millennialist preachers and the vid networks,” Johnnycake said. “They own the Stewards and the government—what’s left of it.”

  “And like I said, they own the water,” Apple added.

  “Charge heavy for it, too,” Johnnycake said.

  “You can tell the rich parts of town from twenty miles away. They’re green. Everywhere else is brown, dead, thirsty.”

  “We’ve got Circles there,” Johnnycake said. “We’ve got Circles everywhere. Down in the valley and hidden away in the hills. And they’re thirsty. And sick.”

  “The Stewards control the antidotes. And the immunobooster drugs.”

  “Antidotes?”

  “You had epidemics up north?” Apple asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “Some are natural. Some ain’t.”

  “There’s plenty people don’t like the Stewards, don’t believe the Millennialists’ bullshit,” Johnnycake said. “There’s plenty that would come to us, that do come to us.”

  “But they die,” Apple said. “Without the boosters, they mostly die. That’s why we need you. We need a healer.”

  “I’m not a healer,” Bird said. “I’m a musician. Or I was, once.”

  “If you’re not a healer, you’re the closest thing to it we’ve seen,” Apple said. “Littlejohn’s told us about you. And you need us. We know you want to get back to your people; we can understand that. But think about what you seen tonight. Where do you think that army is planning to march to?”

  “You need us,” Johnnycake repeated. “You need us to be taking care of business down here. We need to work together.”

  “But why?” Bird asked. “Why invade us now, when they’ve left us alone for twenty years?”

  “How much do you know about the history of the Southlands in those twenty years?” Apple asked.

  “Not much,” Bird admitted.

  “You know that after the Hunger that began in the drought of ’25, and the Collapse in ’28, the Stewards’ party declared martial law and suspended elections.”

  “That was when we threw them out, up north,” Bird said.

  “Well, down here it wasn’t so easy. The Millennialists had a huge following, and they backed the Stewards. Anyway, they took power, and one of the first things they did was the Expulsion of Foreign Interests Act, in ’29. See, one of the main Millennialist campaigns was against the Euros and Arabs and Asians and other foreign investors who they thought owned too much of the country. So they passed a law con
fiscating the property of all those who weren’t born citizens and deported a lot of them.

  “You can imagine that didn’t go down too well. In Panasia, particularly. They nearly declared war, but they settled on a trade embargo, thinking that would bring us to our knees. It nearly did. Our economy is a wreck. We survive by scavenging parts of old machines and patching them back together.”

  “We do a lot of that too,” Bird said. “But we’ve created some new technologies in the last twenty years. We do things with crystals that are hard to believe, and we’ve made some great advances in wind and solar power.”

  “We haven’t done shit, except carry on so the rich can still believe they’re rich and powerful. But even that is slowly crumbling away. We can’t make new parts, for computers or vidsets or anything, only cannibalize old ones. Now we’re running out. It used to be any poor asshole could afford a vidset to plug into; then it got to cost more and more: a month’s pay, two months’, six months’. This year, you can’t buy one at any price. Things are desperate.

  “So Waggoner, he’s the head of the Stewards’ party, he sent a diplomat to talk to the Panasians. And it seems they’re willing to trade with us again, if we acknowledge our debt for the confiscations. But the thing is, what do we have that they want? Like I said, we don’t manufacture much. We used to export a lot of vidfilms and widescreens and audiodiscs, but since the Millennialists ‘cleaned up’ the industry, there’s nothing much anyone would want to watch. We sell some drugs, and there’s a good trade in porn, but strictly black market. But there is something Panasia wants bad, always has.”

  “What?”

  “Wood. That’s where you come in, with the northern forests and the Golden Gate as a harbor to ship from.”

  “Never,” Bird said. “We give years of our lives to those trees, planting them with our own hands. We’ll die before we let them be cut down and shipped away.”

  “You may do that very thing,” Apple said. “Think about what you saw down there. The Southlands may not be an economic power, but the Stewards can still mobilize the biggest military machine left on this end of the planet. All they lack is aircraft.”

  “So you don’t think they’ll bomb us?”

  “They would if they could, but nobody has that level of technology anymore. And they won’t need to. Easier to let a few bugs loose, pump up their army with the antidotes, move in, and mop up. Who’s gonna stop them?”

  “We might stop them,” Johnnycake said. “An uprising down in the Southlands could stop them. That’s why we need someone like you.”

  “I need to go home,” Bird said. He repeated it to himself, like a mantra. Home, take me home. If what they said was true, and he believed it was, then more than ever he had to go back and warn the North. “I need to go home. But I will come back. Maybe with someone better than me at healing. I will come back. And we will work together.”

  “You’ll need our help to get home,” Johnnycake said. “There’s no other way around Morro Bay. And we’ll help you.”

  “But don’t be too long coming back,” Apple said. “You wait too long, and it’ll be too late.”

  Rhea gave him a small pack stuffed with dried meat, cheese, and fruit, with a rolled blanket tied on. He said goodbye to her and to Littlejohn, and then Apple and Johnnycake put him aboard a smuggler’s boat to take him up past Morro Bay. The captain was a woman who called herself Isis. Her skin was the color of blackstrap molasses, her nails were painted silver and red, her hair was plaited with hundreds of gold beads, and every single muscle on her body was sculpted and separately defined. Bird found her awesomely beautiful but Rhea had warned him that she didn’t like men much, and this seemed to be true; she ignored him completely once he was safely stowed aboard. The ship was a strange pastiche of sails and a jerry-rigged engine powered by solar panels that leaned at crazy angles off the deck and masts. But Isis guided it skillfully past the old navy radar, which worked only sporadically, and left him at the old San Simeon pier.

  He walked on through the rest of the night, following the old Coast Road north. As daylight approached, he hid and slept. The next day, he headed up into the mountainous country of Big Sur. After a few hours, the Coast Road disappeared, long ago crumbled into the sea. He picked his way north, following old trails or streams, eating berries and the dried meat and fruit from his pack.

  Until his imprisonment, Bird had never thought much about his body except to appreciate its strength, its swift grace, its unending capacities for pleasure. He had never imagined that his body might be unequal to any challenge he gave it.

  Now pain became the constant factor that permeated every move, every moment of time, the sharp counterpoint that in some odd way intensified the beauty of the rugged country. The shape of the ridges etched themselves in his aching ligaments and strained muscles. One sort of pain arose from the effort of pulling his body groaning and sweating up the long climbs, and another sort of pain was evoked by the stresses on his thighs and knees as he tried to brake his momentum on the long downhill stretches.

  He kept heading north. Sometimes he toiled over the outflung arms of the mountains, catching glimpses of the ocean far over the green peaks. Much of the time he followed streams and rivers, making his way from rock to rock, crossing and crisscrossing, steadying himself with his walking stick or sliding and falling, wetting his ankles and banging his knees. Walking was harder by the rivers, but often he could find no trails and at least the streams offered him water. When the sun was hot on the ridges he sweated water as fast as he could drink it, and the small bottle he had brought from Avalon didn’t hold enough to keep him from thirst.

  His progress was slow, a matter of carrying on until he reached the end of endurance, then pushing on some more, ten more steps, twenty. Or pausing, finally, giving himself the space of ten breaths to rest, then pushing on before he was ready because if he waited to feel ready he might never move again. He tried every magical trick he knew to heal, to bind the pain, to distract himself, to focus on the iridescent green of the sycamore leaves, or the slightly tipsy flight of the soaring vultures. In the end, he just had to keep on, putting one foot in front of the other, pumping breath in and out of his lungs.

  The mountains were thickly forested; only rarely did the trees thin out and reveal a long vista or a far-off view. Stands of giant redwoods gave way to groves of live oak, bay laurel, and madrone. In the underbrush, thickets of blackberries were interlaced with poison oak. His hands and arms bubbled and blistered and itched, but he ate the blackberries after the food in his pack gave out and carried on, stumbling on river stones that etched bruises onto his feet, missing leaps he once could have taken easily, falling and pulling himself back up again, bruised and sore. He slept wrapped up in his blanket, taking shelter under the trees from the searching winds that came up from the ocean.

  He had lost track of how many days he had been traveling: maybe a week, maybe more. He made his way down a river so deep that he had to wade in up to his waist to cross. The cold numbed the ache in his muscles.

  From the left bank, an odor rose that was somehow familiar, that reminded him of something. He sniffed again. What was it? Then he looked toward the bank and saw a series of crescent-shaped pools marked off from the stream with stones. He went over and touched the water. It was warm. Hot. Hot springs, he thought, and recognized the smell as sulfur. Suddenly he knew where he was. There was only one place in the interior of the mountains where the water seeped naturally hot up from the earth. He had been there, in the good years, backpacking with Madrone and the others.

  Stripping off his clothes, he climbed into a pool where water trickled into a hollow bowl of rock. The bottom of the pool was slippery with green and black algae, and he slid down, resting his head on the edge, letting the heat soothe his legs. He closed his eyes and let the pain in his bones drain away.

  He rested for a long while, his body melting into the rocks and the water, until finally he opened his eyes and became aware of hi
s surroundings. First he noticed that the springs were well maintained; the rock walls that contained the pools were freshly repaired and patched with cement. In the branches of the madrone that overlooked the pool hung offerings: bright ribbons, cloth dolls, feathers, clay images of the Goddess with big hips and breasts and bellies and round eyes, images of the God, the stag with the sun between his horns, locks of hair tied with colored threads, stumps of wax from candles, dead flowers. He felt protected, welcomed, and he drifted into a healing trance.

  When he awoke, the skin on his fingertips had shriveled and he knew it was time to get out. He climbed down and waded into the river, letting the icy shock of the cold water wake him and run through him. His body felt almost good.

  It occurred to him that since this place was obviously visited and used, the trail must be maintained. As he remembered it, the Coast Road was twelve miles away, an easy day’s walk for him once and still a distance he could cover in two days, if not one. And where there was a well-used trail, there would be people, friendly from the look of things, who might feed him and shelter him and help him out.

  Maybe he was near the end of his road.

  7

  Really, Maya thought between breaths, when you came right down to it Madrone was as bad as the rest of them. Maya placed her left foot on the next step, paused for a moment, and then pulled herself up. She was old, but she refused to feel decrepit. I’m not in bad shape, she thought, it’s just on the steps. Of course, it would be her luck to live out the end of her days in a house that rose up three stories above the basement, and where they had placed the kitchen on the second floor to catch the light. She shifted the basket of greens to her opposite arm. We should have put in an elevator when we were younger and rich. But no, that would have been indulgent. Wasteful of energy. Politically incorrect.

  Laboriously, she hauled herself up another few steps. Thank Goddess we at least had sense enough to put in a dishwasher. And the compost toilets. Well, they were correct enough—and years ahead of everyone else.