The Fifth Sacred Thing

by Starhawk

  “We all come here, eventually,” Sandy said. “But don’t rush it, Madrone. You just have to bear the time of being alive. Enjoy it, even. I want you to enjoy it.”

  “I do,” Madrone said. “I will.”

  “It’s a hard road, the road to the Southlands. You can survive it, but not if you take it because you’re trying to die. Your death won’t change anything. Your life might.”

  “I don’t want to die,” she said. “I only wanted to stay in the cold place because the light was so beautiful there. But no more. I don’t want that anymore.”

  “Bird has grounded you.”

  “That sounds funny.”

  “I’m glad for you. I bless you,” Sandy said. “I’m only just the slightest hair jealous.”

  “Sandy, I’m scared shitless. I don’t want to go to the Southlands. I’m a healer, not a hera.”

  “If it’s really your road, if you are really meant to take it, you’ll find the courage.”

  “Where?” Madrone asked.

  He bent over her, draping her with his waterfall of black hair, and kissed her. Then he was gone.

  When they opened the circle, they shared pomegranates from the Delta.

  “What did you see?” Maya asked them.

  “I saw myself going to the South,” Madrone said. “I don’t want to go. I’m afraid. But that was my vision.”

  Bird took her hand and gripped it tightly. They sat silently together, staring into the heart of a candle flame in the dark.

  12

  The Healers’ Council met in a small conference room at the hospital. The walls were decorated with colorful murals, herbs grew in pots under the window, but the room still looked like what it was, a square box, product of the sterile architecture of the past century. Madrone sighed and helped herself to a muffin from the plate on the low table in the center of the room. Bird had been speaking, telling the story of his journeys in the Southlands. Sam and the others had quizzed him thoroughly on everything he knew about the epidemics and their origins, which wasn’t much. Today’s meeting was unusually crowded, fifteen or twenty people crammed onto couches or sprawled on the floor. Now they were all silent, considering.

  “The Web asked for a healer,” Bird said. “They need help. The Stewards control the antidotes and the boosters, and without them people die.”

  “I wish I could get a look at one of their boosters in my lab,” said a slim woman wearing a dragon-embossed robe of a style popular on the north side of the city.

  “We all wish that,” Sam said. “The question is, is it worth risking somebody’s life to go down there and try to bring some back?”

  “They need a healer,” Bird said again. “I’m willing to go, but I’m not one.”

  Sam looked at him, frowned, and turned away in silent dismissal. Fuck you, Bird wanted to say. I’m no cripple. I can do whatever I need to do. But he held his tongue.

  “Do we owe them anything?” Lou asked.

  “I do,” Bird said firmly.

  “I think we do,” Sam said slowly. “First, out of simple humanity. And strategically, there’s no better deterrent to foreign wars than rebellion at home. If the Stewards are tied up fighting in the Southlands, that might keep them from invading us, or lessen their forces if they do come.”

  “But who could we send?” Aviva asked.

  “Someone who could work with the supplies and the resources the hill people have,” Sam said.

  “Which are?” Lou asked.

  “Pretty much nothing, as far as I could tell,” Bird said reluctantly. “They don’t need a doctor so much as a miracle worker, a shaman who can cure with her or his hands alone.”

  Nobody looked at Madrone. They all stared down at the rug or picked apart the remains of their muffins.

  “I don’t want to go,” Madrone said. “I’m not crazy. I want to stay here, where I’m useful and needed.”

  “You have every right to that choice,” Sam said.

  “But I will go,” she went on, “if you all think I should. I’m willing to go. It comes into my visions and my dreams at night. Maybe I’m meant to go.”

  “No!” Lourdes and Aviva exclaimed together. Sam turned to look at her, the lines in his face deepening.

  “It seems a waste,” he said.

  “Are you well enough?” Lou asked.

  “Not today,” Madrone admitted. “But in another couple of weeks—before Yule, anyway. Honestly, Lou, I’m not overestimating my strength. I could come back to work now. But for hiking down the coast and facing what comes after, I’d need a bit of time to get in shape and prepare.”

  Sam turned to the woman in the dragon robe. “Do you have anyone on the north side who might be willing to go?”

  She shook her head. “We have many specialists, and our research on ch’i mapping is very advanced. But we must have equipment to heal; herbs and pharmaceuticals and facilities to sterilize our acupuncture needles. True psychic healers are scarce, and of those on our team, three are in their sixties and one is blind. I can’t see any of them making that journey.”

  “Same on the west side,” a man said.

  “I don’t like this,” Sam said.

  “I don’t like it either,” Madrone said. “But even less do I like the thought of weathering more and more epidemics until we’re so weak the Stewardship troops can just march in and pick us off. If there’s a chance of preventing that, it seems worth taking.”

  “I especially don’t like you going alone,” Sam went on. “Maybe Defense has someone they could send with you.”

  “I’ll go with her,” Bird said. “I know the way.”

  Sam expelled a long breath through his teeth. “Bird, I’ve already told you this once. You’ve sustained severe damage. Much of it is correctable, with some surgery and a lot of physical therapy, if you start on it soon. If you don’t, if you continue to stress the tendons and ligaments, you’re going to get worse. There is no question of your going back to the Southlands at this time.”

  Bird’s mouth was set in a grim line, but he didn’t answer. Madrone spoke up quickly.

  “I might only go as far as the Monsters, down by Slotown. That should be relatively safe. I can help them out, train some of their people, and maybe they can get me some samples of the boosters. With luck, I’ll be back in a month or two.”

  “Goddess go with you,” Aviva murmured.

  “I don’t like it,” Sam repeated.

  “What does it mean to become a Dreamer?” Madrone asked. She was sitting with Lily at the little table in the clearing outside the house of the Nine. They were drinking some strange astringent tea out of a round black pot. The tea left her tongue feeling stripped and dry, but the colors of the day seemed brighter, more clear.

  “There is the world of physical form,” Lily said. “What we know and can touch. And there are the realms of the ch’i world, realms of energies and spirits that infuse and underlie the physical. The division between the worlds is never absolute. Always there is bleed-through. So a Dreamer stands on the boundary. Did you know the German word for Witch, Hexe, comes from haggibutzu, she who sits on the hedge?”

  “Actually I did know that,” Madrone said. “I read it in one of Maya’s books.” She drummed her fingers restlessly on the table edge. Maybe Lily could not tell her what she needed to know. Will I live or die?

  “In an ordinary dream, the spirit world speaks to us. But a Dreamer can speak back, can make shapes and patterns in that world that later take form in this.”

  “So is that what my dreams are doing? Is that what I did when I was so sick?”

  “There are many different ways to dream. Some do it at night, with their eyes closed, some open-eyed in the light of day. Some, like Maya, tell stories that become the dreams of many.”

  “I have two sets of dreams,” Madrone said. “Often I still dream that I am seeing patients and healing people. I wake up tired, from those. But I have other dreams, now, dreams of a dry landscape, and clouds of dust, and t
hirst, terrible thirst. In those dreams I am always trying to find water, or to bring water to someone. And then I wake.”

  Lily examined her tea, favoring Madrone with only the briefest of glances.

  “The journey to the South is not an easy one. But you have come to the point where you need to gather power, and that is never easy. So this is your challenge—to bring healing to the sick, to bring water to the dry lands.”

  “Is it? Lily, I don’t know what to do. I want to go and I’m afraid to go. I’m afraid to be hurt like Bird’s been hurt. And I’m afraid of other things—things I can’t name or see clearly. Can learning to be a Dreamer help me overcome those fears?”

  Lily rose. “Come, child. I cannot answer those questions for you. I can only give you a few tools to work with.”

  Madrone followed her through the doorway of the round house and down a spiral staircase that seemed to lead straight underground. The air was cool and dark. After a while Lily led her through a low archway into a vaulted hall, lined with doors on either side. She opened one and Madrone followed her into a round dark room. A candle cast a warm glow over the whitewashed walls. Underfoot was soft carpeting.

  “Lie down,” Lily said. Madrone obeyed, letting her body sink into the rug, closing her eyes.

  “Now,” Lily said, “here is the breathing pattern for lucid dreaming.” She led Madrone through a series of meditations, monitoring her breath, moving her hands through Madrone’s aura, weaving new patterns with the energy. Madrone was asleep but not asleep, flying. I am free now, she thought, I can go anywhere, anywhere I want. I want to go home, a child’s voice within her cried. She was rushing on the wind, south, always south, far past the dry Southlands of California, over the deserts and high plateaus of Mexico, south toward the tiny country of Guadalupe, sandwiched between Nicaragua and El Salvador, where a small whitewashed house stood beside a dusty road, its door ripped from its hinges—

  “No!” Madrone sat bolt upright, sweating and shouting. Lily looked at her in alarm.

  “What’s wrong?”

  Madrone shivered. “Lily, I don’t think I can do this.”

  “Where did you go?”

  “I started to go home, the home I was born in, down in Guadalupe, the home where my mother died. I don’t want to see that, Lily. Is that what I have to do, to be a Dreamer?”

  “What you have to do first is learn control,” Lily said in a calm voice. “Although it’s true that a strong Dreamer must not fear to face anything the mind can hold.”

  “But I do fear. I can’t help it.”

  “Where there’s fear, there is power,” Lily said.

  “I’m not sure I want power,” Madrone said. “Sometimes it seems like I already have too much. It weighs me down.”

  “But what you want is not the issue here. Power has chosen you to be its instrument. Would you refuse it? Refuse your own vision?”

  Madrone fought for a moment to slow her own breathing. Her heartbeat steadied.

  “You know the answer to that,” she said. “All right. Better put me down into trance so I can try again, now, before I lose my nerve.”

  Madrone prepared to go. She sorted through Black Dragon’s sixty-year accumulation of camping gear, picking out what she might need and assembling her pack. She harvested the herb gardens, replenished medicines, and made herself a compact kit to take away. She distilled a six-month supply of violet-leaf tincture for Sister Marie’s cancer. Almost daily she went to the island in the lake to meet with Lily and practice her dreaming. She went with Maya to Council to sit beside Bird as he told the city what he had seen in the Southlands and alerted them to the possibility of war. In the ensuing debate, she kept silent about her plan to go south. Lily had advised her not to broadcast her intentions.

  Every day, Madrone took long walks to strengthen herself. She studied old maps until she nearly had them memorized. But each attempt she made to go over routes and plans with Bird ended in a fight.

  Bird was a haunted man. He was haunted by the anticipated silence of the house without Madrone’s presence, and by visions of things happening to her so horrible he could not allow them to reach more than the edges of his mind. As a result, he went around staring into corners, fearing what waited to pounce from the periphery of his vision.

  He knew that he had to go with her. Over and over again she told him no, but she found no one else to take his place. The Council could not spare a second healer. Sage and Nita and Holybear were engaged in work vital to Toxics that could not be abandoned, and there was nobody else she knew and trusted well enough to take into mortal danger. So Bird continued in his stubborn determination to accompany her himself.

  The alternative was unbearable: far easier to bear the physical pain of the journey than the fear and helplessness of staying behind. He practiced by ignoring the considerable pain he was in continuously, as overstressed muscles and ligaments rebelled and went into spasm. He never complained, and he tried hard to hide it, especially from himself. Nevertheless, every time he pulled himself upstairs or clumped downstairs, the very air ached. He insisted on digging in the garden and turning the compost pile even though Holybear yelled at him for half an hour afterward, warning that he was going to do himself serious injury. He went out of his way to bring Maya things she’d left upstairs or downstairs, until she became terrified of ever putting anything down for fear of forgetting it and causing him another trip.

  Madrone finally lost patience with him. They were all in the common room after dinner and she was going over an old geological survey map of Big Sur, asking him if he knew which trails were still good and where they had disappeared.

  “Don’t worry about it,” he said. “I’ll show you when we get there.”

  “Bird,” she said tensely, “I don’t know how to say this to you, because I’ve said it fifty times already and you haven’t seemed to understand, so let me say it again in words of one syllable: You are not going. You no go. No vas a ir. You stay here. Aquí. Home. ¿Comprendes?”

  “You don’t have to be insulting, Madrone. It’s my decision, and I’ve made it. I’m going. I have to go.”

  “Hey, you’re not alone here,” Holybear said.

  “That’s right,” Sage agreed. “This is something that affects all of us. It’s not a decision you get to make on your own.”

  “I’ve made it,” Bird said.

  “I block that decision,” Madrone said.

  “You can’t block me from doing something I need to do.”

  “I can block me from having anything to do with it. Bird, what is the matter with you? Are you out of your mind? Haven’t you noticed that you can barely make it down to the garden, let alone hike back down the coast range? It’s not that I don’t want you to come. Diosa, I’d give anything to have you along on this, if I thought you could do it. But you can’t.”

  “I did it. How the fuck do you think I got back here? Don’t tell me I can’t do it, because I did do it—and I feel a hell of a lot stronger now than I did then.”

  “You don’t look stronger,” Nita said.

  “I am stronger. Every day. You don’t know what my body feels like to me.”

  “We know,” all four of them said at once.

  “Bird, we are Witches. We know things. It’s our business, you know that. You can’t hide pain around here, any more than you could hide a decomposing rat from the dogs. We smell it,” Holybear said.

  “Pain doesn’t bother me.”

  The silence that followed this statement seemed to crackle with the comments everybody held back. Madrone walked out of the room.

  “Well, it doesn’t,” Bird said.

  The silence only deepened. Maya focused carefully on her knitting. Bird looked around for someone to give him reassurance, but they all had their eyes turned down and inward. The atmosphere was heavy; they all sensed that someone was about to get hurt. Madrone came back in, carrying her pack. Her cheeks were flushed and her lips were set.

  “Okay,” she s
aid. “You win. You can come. You can do anything. Mind over matter. I give up. Just one thing, though. I’d like you to show me how you’re going to carry your pack.”

  She held it out toward Bird, with the straps and frame facing him. He looked at her and saw her eyes, hard as little black stones. Then he looked at the rest of them. But they held nothing out to him.

  “Sure,” he said, shrugging his shoulders. Then he slipped his arms into the straps of the pack. Madrone let it go, and as the weight fell on him, his face turned ashy gray. He cinched the waist belt. Beads of sweat stood out on his forehead.

  “It’ll be all right in a minute,” he said, and shifted his weight as if he were trying to walk. Then his leg crumpled under him and he collapsed on the floor with a soft, strangled cry.

  Instantly they were all around him, pulling the pack off and holding and stroking him and each other.

  “Are you hurt?” Sage asked.

  Bird was biting back tears. Maya wondered why he couldn’t just let go and cry. Who taught him to be stoic? she asked, but no one answered. You, Rio? His father? Not me. Not Brigid.

  “You bastards,” he said. Madrone ran her hands over his hip, Sage rubbed his shoulders, Nita ran for an ice pack, and Holybear put his arms around Bird.

  “Just cry,” he said. “Cry it out. You’ll feel better.”

  “I don’t want to cry it out. I don’t want you to comfort me. I just want not to be broken anymore.”

  He did cry then. They were all crying, Maya in her corner and the others in their circle. “You’re healers, damn it—heal me! Give me my body back. Give me my hands!”

  But all they could give him was the touch of their hands, their bodies. It wasn’t enough, but it was something. Quietly Maya got up and left the room.

  Maya lay on her bed, her arms outstretched, holding her breath. “Come and get me, death,” she whispered. “I want to go now.”