The Fifth Sacred Thing

by Starhawk

  “I want to look at you,” he said. “I want to look into your eyes and talk to you.”

  She let out her breath slowly. “Yes.”

  “I want to say I’m sorry. Lo siento. Sorry I didn’t make love to you one last time before I went.”

  She could see just a suspicion of dampness around his eyes, and she bent forward and kissed them lightly. “It would have been unbearable, knowing it was the last time. Anyway, if you recall, I was being rather a bitch, yelling at you. I’m sorry for that.”

  “I was so scared. I didn’t want to die. I couldn’t bear hearing you tell me why I shouldn’t go.”

  “I kept trying and trying to reach you after. Did you ever feel me?”

  “Si, I felt you. I feel you now.”

  “But you were right,” Madrone said. “I guess I believe now that you were right to go.”

  “I don’t know. Right and wrong somehow don’t seem to apply. I only know I had to do it.”

  “Do you regret it now?”

  “It was so different from what I imagined. I was afraid of dying. But dying would have been over quick, and this just went on and on and on. The other three all died, you know. Sometimes I regretted surviving. But not now.”

  “No, not now.”

  He took her face in his hands and kissed her, and then the spark was back between them, the aching and the wanting. He pulled back.

  “Madrone, I’ve been with all sorts of people, done things I can’t even remember. I don’t know if this is safe for you.”

  Her eyes seemed to lose focus as she observed the spirit colors that played around his body. “You’re safe,” she said.

  “How can you be sure? Shouldn’t I have a blood test or something?”

  “A blood test only works if you know what you’re looking for. I trust my psychic vision more. My wards would warn me if you were carrying a disease. I’d smell it.”

  She slid out of her shirt and her pants and held him. She wanted him with an intensity she had forgotten existed. He was the elusive stranger from an unfamiliar world and at the same time the most familiar, the most loved and safe and innocent part of her own past. When he touched her it was like the tracings of fire on her skin, and she wrapped her arms around him and twined her legs around his, wanting to encompass him, to take him into the dark core where everything melted and he could be made new again.

  He was hard. He had been dying of thirst and she was a sweet well of water. He held himself back, taking time to touch her and stroke her, but she pushed his hand away. She wanted to be filled with him; later there would be time for all the intricacies of orgasm.

  “Come into me,” she whispered. “I want you there.”

  She guided him into her. He felt her open to him, body and mind, and he could hold nothing back.

  After a while, they pulled apart. “Lo siento,” he whispered. “I came too fast. It wasn’t very good for you.”

  “Don’t be an asshole,” she said gently. “It was wonderful. Being with you again is wonderful. And we have plenty of time.” She began kissing him, starting from his forehead and his soft hair, working gently and thoroughly down, to his eyes, the bridge of his nose, lingering a long time on his lips. By the time she reached his throat, he was hard again.

  This time she could feel him holding back, taking his time, remembering his practiced skill at the art of touch. She remembered his fingers as feather-light, almost fluid. Now, through the faint tremor in their tips she could feel the underlying stiffness and the pain, the pain he carried in his body and the rage at the core, so like her own. And she could feel his power, pressing against the edges of her mind, a deeper and broader stream than she had known in him before, with hard stones in the center she could sense but not feel, and deep currents that ran into chambers underground. As her own power was deeper now, forged out of sadness and pain and anger. They were not elf children anymore, and that had to be, but something delicate and sweet was gone. Pleasure and pain swirled through her, bittersweet, pooled in her hollow places, swelled, and burst forth in a flight of birds released from some tight cage into the open air. She slid down onto him, and his hard thrust inside her kept the great wings beating until, after a long time, he began to throb and moan and spill. And then she just wanted to hold him, as if he were a great bird, slowly shivering to stillness in her arms.

  Bird brought the rain with him. Or so it seemed. The sky began to cloud over while Maya cooked dinner. She had lit every candle in the house so that the common room blazed with fire, and set the table with her best lace cloth and the old china that had belonged to her grandmother. She prepared ratatouille and salad, soup and bread—a real feast. Sudden unexpected happiness had made her feel light. It had been a long time since they’d had a reason for celebration, and she wanted to make the most of it.

  They ate slowly, savoring the food, the candlelight, their mutual presence. As they finished dinner, they heard the first drops, an unmistakable drumbeat on the roof. Madrone opened a window, and the blessed smell of damp earth rose up. It was the odor of returning life, the earth’s yearly promise of renewal.

  “It’s an omen,” Madrone said. “The rains have come.”

  They rushed out the front door, Madrone clearing the steps of candles and offerings so Bird wouldn’t stumble. Up and down the pathways, doors were opening and people were running out to dance deliriously. Children dashed about with bowls and pots to catch the first rainwater. Next door, the Sisters knelt in the mud to give the prayer of thanksgiving. Even Maya danced, skipping, albeit somewhat stiffly, down the path to join the crowd of people streaming into the park around the corner. They caught hands and were whirled into the snake dance, the spiral, the long chain turning on itself and winding back out, like the renewal of generations, Maya always thought, passing face after face of neighbors and friends in the mad dance. It seemed to her that she could feel Rio’s hand clasping hers on the left, Johanna’s on the right.

  Fireworks exploded and rained down in colors that mingled bright fire with the drops. Soon everyone’s hair and clothes were damp and streaming, but they only laughed. The rain had come, even a bit early this year, and they welcomed it in the hope that it would return again and again through the winter, turning the brown hills green, filling the cisterns and replenishing the aquifers, feeding the life in the gardens and fields that fed the people.

  They danced until they were too exhausted to dance anymore. When they left, the spiral was still winding, and the high, carrying voice of the main singer sent the words of the litany after them:

  Rain is our sister, our mother,

  our father, our brother,

  our sweetest, most missed,

  and longed-for lover.

  So if you’ve ever loved anyone,

  If you’ve ever missed someone

  and longed to see that face

  and cried for the touch of those hands,

  lift your hands to the rain, now,

  turn your face to the rain, now,

  and feel your beloved come

  in rain.…

  9

  Bird slept for three days, waking only to eat or piss. Then he got up from the bed and went to work. He needed to feel tools in his hands, to look back at a row of freshly turned earth or a new patch on a rotted piece of siding and know that his hands could still make food and shelter, if not music.

  The first thing he fixed was the roof, where Sandy had been working when the virus struck him down. Bird found a pile of shingles and a hammer, right where Sandy had dropped them when the seizure hit. For a moment, he had an eerie sense that if he turned his head he’d find Sandy sitting beside him, ready to complete the task. A wave of sadness passed over him. They had been close friends and, occasionally, lovers, usually in odd moments and adventurous places. Like this one. He could imagine Sandy turning to him, a glint in his eye, and saying, “You ever tried it on the roof? No? Want to?” And then after a steamy interval, they would go back to work. And later, someone wo
uld be sure to make some remark about odd sounds coming from the roof in the middle of the day and were there tomcats prowling up there, or what?

  They would have shared secrets. Or maybe not. The Sandy in his mind was still eighteen years old, as the Bird in his mind was nineteen. He’d never celebrated his twentieth birthday, on the Day of the Reaper. He’d never celebrated his twenty-ninth, or any of the ones in between. Sometimes it seemed only a few months had passed since he went away, because the intervening years were gone from his memory, a glitch in the fabric of reality. Yet so much had happened, so much had changed, that at other times he felt he had been gone for centuries.

  A lot had been neglected since Sandy died. Bird fixed the wind generator and weeded the garden, planted the winter beds of greens and broccoli. The fish had died in one of the big aquaculture tanks that warmed the greenhouse with the heat stored in their water. Bird drained the tank and shoveled the stinking mass of dead fish and foliage into the compost pile.

  “Thanks,” Madrone said. “That tank was weighing on my mind; I just couldn’t face it. But really, Bird, you don’t have to do every single one of the dirtiest and nastiest jobs. I’ll take care of some of that—in a few days. I just need a little more time to rest up.”

  They were lying in her bed, basking in the early morning sun streaming in through the skylight. He raised himself up on one elbow and let his finger trace the pattern light made on her skin. She didn’t look almost well to him; she looked thin, delicate, exhausted. He wanted to hold her in his arms and shelter her, pour strength into her even though he wasn’t sure where it would come from, maybe from the sheer effort he put into barricading his own body’s pain.

  “No te preocupes,” he said. “Not to worry. Even the shit in the compost toilets here smells sweet to me, now.”

  “At least you should go to Neighborhood Council, get back on the Boards,” Madrone said. “You might as well get your work credits for all this.”

  “I went yesterday,” Bird said.

  Madrone could feel some part of him shrink back inside, withdrawing from her. She rolled over on her side, to look into his eyes.

  “¿Qué pasó?” she asked.

  “Nothing. At first they were surprised that I was still alive. Then they offered to give me back my Musician’s stipend. I turned it down.”

  “Why?”

  For an answer, he showed her his hand. She took it, kissed it tenderly and placed it against her cheek. Under the skin she could feel the stiffness, and against her closed lids she saw lines of fiery energy around the scarred joints.

  “You don’t know what you can do with practice yet, Bird. And acupuncture can help those joints.”

  “Well, when I’ve practiced they can give me a stipend. In the meantime I’d rather be useful than subsidized.”

  “Maya kept all your guitars. They’re in the storeroom.”

  “How sentimental,” Bird said. Madrone could feel his emotions close up like a sow bug rolling away from a probing finger. She sighed and didn’t press him further.

  There was a lot he didn’t speak about. At times Madrone felt the two of them in a common glow; at other moments the glow clouded over: she heard silent rolls of thunder and waited for lightning to flash.

  She sighed again, wondering why she still felt so tired, why she wasn’t happier. She should be happy. True, Sandy was dead but she couldn’t mourn for him forever. She had encouraged Bird to take his room and given Bird his clothes, since his own had disappeared long ago. Maybe that was a mistake. She was always catching sight of a familiar sweater on a distant figure, feeling her heart leap and then crash when the figure turned and was Bird. Well, not crash, exactly, because she couldn’t look at Bird and not feel lifted, lifted like a kite dodging and dipping through joy and pain. Bird was his own miracle but he was still not-Sandy, as in a way everything in the world had become not-Sandy at his death, flat, dull, joyless.

  But that wasn’t fair to Bird. She loved Bird. And yet Bird in his own way was also not-Bird, not the Bird she remembered, who was clear and open as the blue spring-fed pool of her power place high in the mountains. Making love had been like falling into clear water, opening under opening, sinking to depth after glassy depth. They had had nothing to hide. But this Bird was half a stranger, who dragged around an aching body and concealed his pain, who covered secrets he wouldn’t talk about under stone silence. And she held her own secrets too, and her worries.

  “I’m going to go back to work tomorrow,” Madrone said.

  “Are you sure you’re well enough?”

  “I’ll take it easy.”

  Bird snorted.

  “I will. But there’s still so much to be done right now, even with the epidemic on the wane. I can’t lie around forever.”

  Madrone knew something was wrong by the quality of silence that descended on the meeting room at the hospital as she entered. The group was small that morning, just Sam and Lou and Aviva, along with Lourdes, the young midwife, and Rick, the herbalist who had taken Sandy’s place. They all turned to look at her as she sank gratefully into one of the big old armchairs that furnished the healers’ lounge. The short walk to the hospital had tired her more than she wanted to admit.

  “What are you doing here?” Sam asked bluntly.

  “I feel ready to come back to work,” Madrone said.

  “If I thought you meant that,” Sam said, “I’d have serious questions about your professional judgment.”

  “Light work,” Madrone said. “I thought I could ease back into it.”

  “Ease?” Lou said. “Madrone, love, you don’t know how to ease into a lawn chair on a sunny day. Your throttle has only one setting that I’ve ever observed, and that’s full speed ahead.”

  “I know you’re anxious to come back to work, but you need more convalescent time.” Aviva smiled at her kindly.

  “We’re not so short-handed,” Sam said. “The epidemic’s pretty much over, never really got going. Luck was with us, on this one. So we’re back to our normal level of chaos.”

  “But I miss work,” Madrone said. “I even miss all of you.”

  “Good. Then when you do come back, maybe you’ll appreciate us at our true value,” Lou said.

  “Seriously, Madrone,” Sam said. “If you sent a patient in your condition back to work, I’d call it criminal neglect.”

  They were right. Madrone knew it, but still she fought back tears. She was so tired of being sick, tired of being tired. She wanted to be her old self again.

  “Since she’s here, why shouldn’t she at least stay for the meeting?” Rick suggested. He was a handsome man, with warm black eyes and a curling black beard, and Madrone suspected she would like working with him.

  “Sure, let her stay,” Lourdes added, smiling at Madrone shyly.

  She looks up to me too much, Madrone thought. It will hold her back from developing the confidence she should have. I’ll have to work on that, when I’m better.

  “Actually, I’d like to have your input on this discussion,” Sam said. “We’re back on the same old question again.”

  “What same old question?”

  “The question of whether this last epidemic amounts to germ warfare and, if so, what we should do about it.”

  “Defense Council has been riding our asses,” Lou said. “They think it’s an attack, but they want some definitive answer from us.”

  “That was what it looked like to me,” Madrone said. “When I saw it, it was like something constructed from metal and bolts and bicycle locks.”

  “Can you diagram it?” Aviva asked. “That might help Flore work up a computer model, figure out the morphic field equations. Because if new attacks come, they’re likely to be constructed along similar lines.”

  “I can’t diagram the molecular structure,” Madrone said. “I wish I could. But that isn’t how it works. The mind translates patterns of energy and ch’i and molecular structure into symbols, things. I could draw them, but it’d look pretty silly
.”

  “You should sit down and talk to Flore anyway,” Sam said. “What seems silly to you might make some kind of sense to her, once she runs it by the crystals in the big computer.”

  “I could do that,” Madrone said.

  “If only one of us could go down there, take a look for ourselves,” Sam said. “It galls me, you know. I remember when there used to be two, three flights an hour to LA, right out of San Francisco International Airport. International, they called it, because you could hop on a plane and go anywhere: Paris, Bali, Honolulu, Detroit. Or I could have picked up the telephone and made a call to a colleague.…”

  “It must have been wonderful to fly,” Aviva said dreamily, “back when you didn’t have to worry about ozone sinkholes or a freak Haravatski wind knocking the plane out of the sky. I’d love to be able to take off for anywhere in the world I wanted to go.”

  “We’re losing our focus,” Lou said. “It’s not 1998 anymore, it’s 2048. Unless you and Sam sprout wings, we can’t fly. We can’t even walk into the Southlands and hope to come back alive. I don’t think anyone’s visited there in twenty years and lived to tell the tale.”

  “That’s not true,” Madrone said. “Bird was down there for almost ten years. And now he’s back.”

  “Bird?” Lou asked.

  “Maya’s grandson. My compa from long ago. He came back two weeks ago.”

  “Madrone, that’s wonderful news!” Aviva said.

  “Does he have any information about the diseases?” Sam asked. “Have you talked to him about them?”

  Madrone shook her head. “He drops hints, but he won’t say much about it.”

  “Would he come talk to us?” Sam asked.

  “I’m sure he would. In fact, that would be one way to get him to come see you. He had some injuries that weren’t treated and didn’t heal right. But every time I suggest a consultation, he blows up at me.”