The Fifth Sacred Thing

by Starhawk

  The hull scraped on the sand. Madrone ran to grab the painter and haul it up. Before she could touch the rope, a laser rifle stared into her eyes.

  “You move, and I fry your eyes like eggs on a griddle.”

  The voice was deep and resonant but clearly a woman’s. Madrone took a step back. She was shocked but not really frightened; it seemed too strange to her, unreal to be actually facing a real weapon in hostile hands. She stifled an impulse to laugh.

  “Now, who the Jesus are you?” the woman asked. Her skin shone dark like the waves at night, her hair was braided close to her head and studded with gold beads, her eyes were hidden behind dark glasses. Blue pants and a shirt of some soft material hugged the contours of her body. Each slight motion set muscles rippling beneath the cloth.

  “My name is Madrone. I’m a healer from the North. Bird sent me.”

  The woman regarded her for a long moment, without lowering the gun.

  “If that’s true,” she said at last, “then you can tell me my name.”

  Gracias a la Diosa, Bird had prepared her well.

  “Isis,” Madrone said.

  “Haul me in,” Isis said, sitting back as Madrone grabbed the rope and began to pull the heavy load. But in an instant the woman leaped out and dragged the boat up on the beach as if it were weightless.

  She must be incredibly strong, Madrone thought, as the woman stuck out her hand in greeting. Madrone clasped it. She felt a sudden surge of raw attraction, like an electrical charge, exciting and disconcerting.

  How do I act? she asked herself suddenly. What rules apply here? Everyone she knew in her ordinary life was part of too-familiar context, a history. They knew her already, or at least her reputation. They knew her family and her Council and her patients and her history. She was accountable to them all. Here she could be anyone, do anything. There were no expectations; there was no one to disappoint. For just a moment, she savored the possibilities.

  “You alone here?”

  Madrone nodded.

  “No traders been by?”

  “Not in the last few days.”

  “Well, all right then. I’ll try again next week. Climb aboard.”

  Isis rowed them out to the ship. Madrone climbed the rope ladder and hoisted herself over the rail.

  “You do any sailing?” Isis asked.

  “I grew up sailing the Bay.”

  “You know what I mean if I say, ‘Ease the jib halyard’?”

  “Yeah.”

  “ ‘Make fast the sheet’?”

  “You’ll have to show me how she’s rigged, but I really do know how to sail.”

  “Okay, then, sailor, let’s make sail.”

  By nightfall, they were far out to sea. Isis brewed sage tea on a small stove in her compact but complete cabin. A bed nestled under the curving bow, and padded benches along the walls appeared to fold out into other beds. A table folded down, and a sink and cooler completed the galley. They dined on the last of Madrone’s rice and Isis’ fresh-caught sea bass, which Madrone ate with some uneasiness. It tasted delicious, but she couldn’t help but think of Nita’s repeated warnings about toxins in ocean fish. When they were finished, Isis carefully cleared away the dishes, washing them and setting them on shelves behind rails. She pulled out a bottle of wine.

  “You like wine?” she asked. “This is an excellent Cabernet. I raided it myself from the storehouse of the Chief Steward of Long Beach.”

  “We don’t get much wine in the City,” Madrone said. “We’re still rehabilitating most of the old vineyard land—it got so toxed out from pesticides—but I’ve always enjoyed it when I could get it.”

  “You’ll like this,” Isis assured her, pouring out two ruby glasses full.

  They sat facing each other, a little awkwardly. There were a thousand things Madrone wanted to ask, but she didn’t know how to begin.

  “So you’re a healer,” Isis said. “What does that mean? What exactly do you do?”

  “A lot of things,” Madrone said. “I deliver babies and teach women how to stay healthy and eat right when they’re pregnant. I treat diseases, either with medicines, if we have them, or with herbs, or with ch’i, with energy.”

  “And people have to pay you for help?”

  Madrone shook her head. “No. Nobody in the North pays for medical care. It’s free to all. The City pays me a stipend, as it does for most healers. Some of us put in for hours worked instead, but frankly, if I charged for my hours, the City couldn’t afford me.” It was the standard joke in the Council, but Isis looked blank. “I mean, keeping track of the hours is too much trouble.”

  “What about drugs?” Isis asked. “Who pays for the boosters?”

  “Immunoboosters? We don’t have them. The Stewards took all that with them when we rebelled. We’ve had to develop alternatives.”

  “And they work? You really get along without the Stewards’ drugs?”

  “Yes and no,” Madrone said. “We’ve had bad epidemics. We get through each one, but we keep losing people. I’d like to examine some boosters, find out how they work. If we could come up with something similar, it might save a lot of lives.”

  “I can get you some,” Isis said.

  “Really?”

  “No problem. Honey, I am one hot pirate. You want something, I can get it for you.”

  “How did you become a pirate?” Madrone asked.

  “I was a runner. Bred, raised, and trained for it. So the first chance I got, I ran—off.” She laughed. “Stole my sweetstick’s boat. He fell overboard.” She winked.

  I didn’t hear that, Madrone thought, or she didn’t mean what she seemed to mean by it. “What’s a runner?”

  “A racer. See?” Isis extended her leg and hiked her loose trousers up to the top of her thigh. The leg was like a sculpture, each separate muscle delineated, hard, perfectly formed. Madrone had a sudden urge to run her fingers over the dark velvet of Isis’ skin and feel the steel strength ripple under her hands. “I was the pride of the Valley, once.”

  The pirate swiveled in her chair, propping her legs against the opposite wall so that her pants slid down and left them bare to view.

  “More wine?”

  Madrone felt a slight glow, but she nodded. The wine tasted astringent on her tongue but rich in the back of her throat.

  “How much of a healer are you?” Isis asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Can you free me from the drugs?”

  “What drugs? I don’t understand?”

  “Those of us who are bred for runners, we’re raised on certain hormones and steroids. That’s how we develop strength and speed. But you got to keep on them, otherwise you kind of fall apart. That’s why most of us are afraid to leave.”

  “But you did.”

  “I did. But I spend half my godforsaken life raiding pharmacies. I’m not free.”

  Something else was teasing at Madrone.

  “You keep saying ‘bred for it.’ What do you mean?”

  “I mean, bred. You know, engineered. They give our mamas a contract. All the Stewardships have their own teams of racers, their own training farms and breeding contracts. It’s an industry. So is the gambling.”

  “You mean they breed people like you might breed animals? For certain traits?”

  “We’re not exactly people to them.”

  “That’s horrible.”

  “It’s not the worst way to live,” Isis said, admiring her own legs as she crossed the left over the right. “You get treated well. The best quality food, and you never lack for water. Of course you train hard, but I didn’t mind that. And I used to love the racing. It was just servicing the big bettors that I couldn’t get behind.”

  Madrone felt stupid, constantly having to ask things to be explained that Isis assumed were understood.

  “You mean?”

  “I mean fucking them. Sucking them off. And, of course, the older you get, the less running you do and the more fucking. Until you get too
old even for that. I could see the trend, if you follow me. So I split.”

  “I thought fornication was the biggest Millennialist sin,” Madrone said.

  “Oh, it is. They complain all the time about immorality in the Stewardships, but how immoral can it be if there’s money in it? And technically it’s not fornication if one party has no immortal soul.” “What?”

  “Fornication is what you do with another person. We’re not people. Our mamas did something to lose their immortal souls, like getting raped, maybe, or selling their bodies to put some food on the table. And our holy sacred genes have been tampered with. That makes us a sort of higher animal.”

  “That’s insane.”

  “Nobody ever rated the Millennialists high in sanity.”

  “To us,” Madrone said, “everything has a soul. Or a spirit, at least. Consciousness. Animals, plants. Air and fire and water and earth. Like it says in the Declaration of the Four Sacred Things, ‘We are part of the earth life, and so sacred. No one of us stands higher or lower than any other.’ ”

  “But you breed animals, don’t you?” Isis said. “You eat them?”

  “That’s one of the most long-standing debates we have in the City, throughout the watershed, really. It comes up over and over again in Council. A lot of people think we all should be strict vegetarians, not eat any animals, not eat eggs or cheese or drink milk, because you can’t really raise animals for dairy without killing the males. But a lot of us believe we can’t do without the animals—not just for meat but for the part they play in the whole system. We need their wastes for fertilizer; we use every part of the ones we do kill.”

  “So how do you decide?”

  “At this point, every household and every farm pretty much decides for itself. We all believe the animals have to be treated well when they’re alive and killed with the least possible suffering, with rituals to honor their spirits. I don’t know. My household keeps chickens for eggs, and we eat the hens when they get old. We raise fish in tanks for food and for the nutrients in their waste, and the heat that stays trapped in their water keeps our greenhouses warm. We’ve had goats, and on our country land they raise a cow or two.”

  “And what do you believe, personally?”

  “That there’s a qualitative difference between your mind and that of a chicken.”

  “Maybe. But they’re breeding runners stupider every year. And there’s new drugs for that. Really, as far as they’re concerned, intelligence only gets in the way. They get too many like us, the ones who can’t take it. Who get out. Who fight back.”

  “Well, there you have it,” Madrone said. “I have yet to meet a revolutionary chicken.”

  “I eat what I can get,” Isis said. “I often don’t have one whole hell of a lot of choice, if you follow me. But when I do have a choice, I never eat anything raised or bred in captivity.”

  “If you ever come north,” Madrone said, “you’ll have company.”

  There was a long pause. Isis’ eyes seemed to bore into Madrone’s own, and she could neither meet them comfortably nor look away.

  “So, if you’re really a healer,” Isis said slowly, “then get me free of the drugs.”

  “I don’t know,” Madrone said.

  “Try.”

  “Of course I’ll try. That’s what I’m here for.”

  “Try now.”

  There was something unnerving about Isis’ eyes, a steeliness. If I fail, Madrone wondered, do I go overboard? Is this a test? At the same time, she had to clench her fists in her lap to keep her hands from wandering over to Isis’ thigh.

  “Lie down for a minute,” Madrone said, although she couldn’t help but feel the suggestion was—well, suggestive.

  Isis smiled. “Would you like me to take off my clothes?”

  “Uh, that would help,” Madrone admitted.

  Stretching and still smiling, Isis dropped her trousers and slipped out of her shirt, revealing possibilities of the human form Madrone had never imagined. She moved over to the bed and lay down, face up, with a languid grace that seemed to Madrone like an invitation.

  “Just relax. Breathe deep.” Madrone sat next to Isis and laid a hand on her thigh, feeling the firm muscle underneath, and desire like an electric skin. And something more, a sense of the body as a fantastic pet to be cared for and tended and groomed. Great power and great pain.

  “Deeper. Breathe a little deeper. And relax.” Madrone let her own senses sink deeper, down to where she could feel the balance, the chemistry, the hormones that flowed from glands and swam in the blood. She sensed strange things, the drugs maybe, associations she had never encountered before, as if parts of the woman’s biochemistry were heated up, moving at a faster rate than all the rest—and, perhaps, aging just as fast. Burning, burning up, burning out.

  Madrone’s hands traveled to the pirate’s throat and the center of her forehead. An image came, a river in an artificial channel, so wide and deep that without the rushing force of the waters the bed would collapse. Could she change the riverbed? No, but an adjustment to the glands, the pituitary, the ovaries, and, yes, flow could be sustained without the drugs, not at quite the same level, perhaps, but enough to prevent collapse of the system. Probably.

  “I can do something for you,” Madrone said. “Not a complete change—you will have slightly less strength and somewhat less energy. And it won’t lengthen your life. But you won’t be dependent on outside drugs, although there are herbs I’d recommend. And it could be dangerous. I could be wrong about what will happen; there is the possibility that this could bring on a systemic collapse. It’s not likely, but it is possible.”

  “Hell, raiding pharmacies is dangerous,” Isis said, “and unlikely to prolong my life. Make sail.”

  It had been a long time since she’d worked, Madrone realized, as she moved from sensing to sending power. Like pouring a river through a river, light through light. She saw the changes as subtle shifts in color, patterns. Her hands danced through the other woman’s ch’i. It was done. Enough.

  “I’ll check you tomorrow again,” Madrone said, suddenly exhausted. Leaning back on the pillows, she closed her eyes. Was there any food left, she wondered? She needed to be fed, restored.

  Suddenly she felt hands traveling along her body, moving up from her waist, over her breasts. They left a trail of sharp desire, which I should resist, she thought. I don’t know this woman.

  “Now let me do something for you,” Isis whispered.

  Madrone stiffened. “You don’t have to. It’s not fee for service.”

  “I want to.”

  Have I ever made love with a stranger? Madrone thought. All her lovers were old friends, the kids she’d grown up with, the co-workers she’d grown to know over time. The idea frightened and yet excited her. It went with this unexpected gift of freedom, the release from expectations. No, she didn’t know this woman, who was stranger than anyone she had ever encountered before. And Isis didn’t know her, could anticipate nothing of what she might feel. They could do or be anything together.

  “Don’t you want to?” Isis asked. And just for a moment Madrone could feel the other woman’s vulnerability. I could hurt her, Madrone thought, and the realization made her tender.

  “I want to,” Madrone said. She let her own hands slide over Isis’s body, which she knew already so intimately, down to its cellular structure. Isis pulled Madrone’s shirt off and slid her hands down her pants. Madrone felt Isis’ hard belly, her grooved thighs, letting her hands and tongue and the warmth of her own flesh awaken fire from the sculpted form. Under the body lay the mind, the heart, and she searched for it, until she found it, fierce pride and rage that matched her own. Like two lava flows, they converged, erupting, igniting all they touched.

  When they were done and she lay back against the pillows, Madrone half expected the bedclothes to be smoldering.

  They sailed down the coast, past the empty beaches and the hills just blushed silver-green from the early winter rains.
They went slowly, by night, moving only in the hours of darkness until exhaustion claimed them, anchoring in hidden coves by day. Each afternoon Madrone was awakened by Isis’ practiced hands on her body, arousing, caressing, lingering in her most sensitive spots. Sex with Isis was pure art; there was nothing in it of the sweet playfulness she had with Nita or the depths she’d shared with Bird or just the simple everyday happiness of partnership she’d felt with Sandy. Isis made love like she sailed her boat, with great concentration and awareness of every current and shift in the wind. Her fingers maneuvered Madrone through tides of pleasure that rose and receded like the great ocean swells. Again and again she brought Madrone to the hovering weightless place just before the crest; then she liked to ease off, building the tension and pleasure both until, with just a slight change in rhythm or pressure, she’d make Madrone tumble over the edge and come and come and come. Rarely would Isis allow Madrone to reciprocate. She was comfortable giving pleasure, ill at ease receiving it.

  They dodged beacons and searchlights, steering clear of the increasing traffic of boats as they neared Morro Bay. On shore, they could make out gray barracks and roads and machinery. That night they passed the ghostly, weathered domes of a dead nuclear reactor and sailed into the haven of Avalon Bay.

  Bird had prepared her for the Monsters, and so Madrone was not surprised by the appearance of the people who came out to greet them. Everyone seemed to know Isis, and while the men kept a respectful distance, a circle of women and young girls crowded around her, chatting eagerly. An older woman, who bore herself with an air of authority and confidence, came toward Madrone. The woman’s eyes were clear and steady over the gash that ran from her nostrils to her chin. Madrone recognized a badly cleft palate. She felt rage stir in the bottom of her belly, because this could have been corrected when the woman was small. As so much could have been corrected, and wasn’t.

  “I’m Rhea,” the woman said, in a voice resonant although somewhat blurred.

  “Bird spoke of you,” Madrone said. “He sent me here. I’m Madrone. I’m a healer.”

  “Welcome.”