The Fifth Sacred Thing

by Starhawk

  Marie sat on a bench as the group broke up, stopping in little knots to chat. Rosa stood, looking somewhat shyly at Bird, but before she could approach him Sachiko came over.

  “I don’t suppose, in your busy schedule, you’d have time to come by and lend us your ear for an hour or two. We’re working on the music for May Day, and it’s not coming right.”

  “That’s optimistic,” Bird said. “You think we’ll have a May Day?”

  “The day will certainly come, whatever else does. And we want to be ready for it.”

  Bird sighed. Marie was sitting, exhausted, on a bench, her lips gray. He really ought to make her rest tonight, train the new trainers himself.

  “I just can’t think about it now,” he said to Sachiko. “When this is all over, maybe.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Don’t push me, Sacha. I said no!” Bird’s voice came out more harshly than he had intended, and he turned away from the hurt he saw in Sachiko’s dark eyes. I’m being an asshole, he told himself. I should turn back, apologize. But his rudeness had the desired effect. She went away.

  “Is it nonviolence or psychological warfare?” Bird asked Lily, who had left the seclusion of the island and spent most of her time now in the central city, watching the training, talking to people, wandering through the orchards and the gardens.

  She and Bird were sitting in the back yard of Black Dragon House. He was sweaty from his day in the park, and sore from being tackled by an overly enthusiastic soldier in one of the role plays. Marie was lying down, and he was glad in his hour or two of free time to sit. Lately he found himself so restless that he could only relax when his body had been worked to exhaustion.

  “It’s a question that’s come up in the training. Is our goal to convert the enemy, turn them loving and peaceful and kind, or just to keep them continuously off balance?”

  “Our strategy,” Lily said, “is to refuse to participate in the patterns that perpetuate violence. If we succeed, it is likely that we will do both—knock our opponents off balance and convert some of them.”

  Bird looked at her. She seemed so calm, so sure of her beliefs, so cool and clean in a white silk shirt. While he had dirt under his nails from pulling a few weeds, and his mind was equally encrusted with doubts.

  “Lily, I want to believe we can win this way, but it takes an act of faith on my part, I have to tell you. Even though I spoke for it in Council, and what I said is true: I don’t want to kill. But I’ve been down there, I know what we’ll be facing. Every day I wake up tempted to go beg the Council to reconsider fortifying the San Bruno mountains and mining Highway 101.”

  “That temptation will always be with us. Force seems so clear, so simple and direct. When I was young, one of my brother’s friends had a van with a bumper sticker on it that said, FORCE, IT WORKS! And nobody can deny that it does. But meeting force with force produces nothing but what is already known and planned for and expected. It’s what has already been done, over and over, for thousands of years.”

  “Because it does work,” Bird said.

  Lily brushed a fly off the sleeve of her jacket. “There used to be a saying, ‘Insanity is repeating the same acts and expecting different results.’ ”

  “Yeah, but insanity is also hoping for results that are extremely unlikely from the particular acts you take.”

  Lily stood, smoothed her skirt, and looked down at Bird where he sprawled on the grass.

  “Bird, you are absolutely entitled to your doubts and fears. We all have them. But if we proceed with our plans, not to repeat the same acts but to do something different, a different outcome will happen.”

  “We don’t know what that will be.”

  “Suffering, undoubtedly. Miracles, maybe. Change.”

  While Bird had little appetite for food, he craved sex. The big bed in the ritual room was in use every night. He lay nestled among Sage and Nita and Holybear, soaking up touch. Although he never spoke about fear, they could feel it leak from his skin. He wanted things he had never allowed before: hands on his scars, fingers kneading the strained muscles around his old wounds.

  Downstairs, Maya slept with Doctor Sam. He had appeared late one night and asked to come in. A fresh batch of cookies was in the oven that she had made for Bird, knowing full well he might eat, at most, one of them. Sam devoured a plateful while they sat looking at each other for a long time. His face drooped like a man burdened with too many years, and the lines around his gray eyes were deep and thick. His eyebrows, bushy white sprouts that shot up and furrowed deep when he concentrated, still reminded her of her father. Not a handsome man, but not unattractive.

  He sighed.

  “Hard day?” she inquired.

  “A hell of a day. We’re getting refugees from down the peninsula. Casualties. I’d give a lot to have Madrone back right now.”

  “We all would. Sam, if you don’t mind me asking, why are you here?”

  “You need me, Maya. I’m a grandfather, I know how you feel in a way the young ones can’t. And I need you.”

  “I’m nearly old enough to be your mother,” she said, nibbling delicately at the edge of a cookie.

  He smiled at her. “At our age, that hardly matters.”

  “Sam, I’m practically moribund! Are you some sort of necrophiliac?”

  He reached across the table, took the cookie out of her hand, and held it. “Maya, you are a beautiful, powerful, attractive woman. The lines on your face are the calligraphy of your history.” His thumbs caressed her palms and she began to feel the old pulse in her vulva waken, her breasts as hungry for petting as cats. “Of course, maybe you don’t want an ugly old geezer like me.”

  “You’re not ugly, Sam. I would call you—distinguished.”

  “Ruggedly handsome?”

  She pursed her lips thoughtfully. “Well, rugged, anyway. And I’ve always admired your eyebrows.” She felt an urge to touch them, actually, to pet the wiry and unruly hairs that adorned his eyes, and, having nothing to lose, she removed one hand from his grip and stroked his face. He closed his eyes, basking in her touch.

  “I like that. You’re a very sensual woman.”

  “You don’t know the half of it yet.”

  “I’m eager to learn.” He smiled, opening his eyes and looking into hers with such warmth and friendliness that her better judgment began to melt away.

  “I thought all that was over for me,” Maya said. “Anyway, I’m not sure I remember how.”

  “I remember. I’ll remind you of any salient points you forget.”

  “But I don’t love you, Sam.”

  “You will. Before this is over, Maya, we will need each other so desperately that we will fall in love by default.” He reached out and touched her cheek. His hand was rough, but his moves delicate, sure: a surgeon’s hand, she thought. In some ways he reminded her of Rio in his old age, grizzled but still cocky. How sweet it had been, just to wake in the morning curled up next to him, his back nestled against hers, to turn and hold him and smell his skin and feel his warmth. Yes, it might be nice to have that comfort again.

  “Your skin is soft as flour,” he said.

  “What kind of flower?”

  “No, flour, like baking flour.”

  “What kind of simile is that?”

  “Can you think of anything softer or more sensual than dipping your hands into a mound of fresh white flour?”

  “Maybe one or two things.” She ran her hands over the fringe of hair on the sides of his head and over his bald scalp.

  “Why do you sigh?” he asked her.

  “After such a long wild life, to think I’d end up with a Jewish doctor.”

  “You’ve had worse,” he said. “May I kiss you?”

  “Give it a try.”

  He walked around the table, and she rose to meet him as he slid his hands over her back, pressing his lips to hers. Yes, her body was humming and singing in a way she thought was over long ago.

  “I’ve had wor
se,” she admitted.

  “Come on, let’s go to bed.”

  Bird didn’t talk about fear, but he could smell it in his own sweat. He had to shit, it seemed, ten times a day. When he met with Defense Council, or with Marie and Lan and Roberto, he spoke reassuringly, in a low, calm voice. When he tended Sister Marie during one of her bad nights, his presence was comforting, grounded, soothing.

  “I understand pain,” she’d said through gritted teeth. “That doesn’t scare me—heaven knows I’ve lived through enough of it. But in spite of all the role plays we’ve led, I still can’t really imagine what it’s like, Bird, to face torturers.”

  “Don’t think about it,” he said. “It may never come to that. Maybe we’re making a mistake with all this training and anticipating. Maybe it would be better just to wait until it happens and trust that we’ll have the strength to face it when it comes.”

  “And if I don’t?”

  “Well, chances are by that time you won’t have a whole hell of a lot of choice in the matter.”

  There were things he couldn’t talk about to anyone. Not to Maya, whose own fear and grief was barely contained. Sam was spending his free time with her now, and Bird was glad, because it lessened the intensity of her focus on him. Not to Marie or Roberto or Lan, certainly. Not to Sage and Nita and Holybear. They were worried enough for him and a touch guilty besides, because they were preparing to move to the relative safety of the high mountains.

  “I hate to leave you,” Nita said, as the four of them jostled for position on the big bed in the ritual room. Her head rested under his chin, and he could look over the thatch of her wild hair to meet Holybear’s blue eyes peering anxiously into his own. “But we’ve got six years of work invested in these cultures. The cell lines are irreplaceable.”

  “We argued with Toxics Council,” Sage said, curling her long body against Bird’s back, “but they convinced us not to risk the experiments. If we can really breed a microbe that can break down toxic residues in salt water, we could reclaim the bay.”

  “If the bay is still ours to reclaim,” Holybear said glumly.

  “We have to believe it will be,” Bird said. “We have to act as if we will win, or we’ve already lost. Toxics is right. You’ve got to protect your work, because that’s what we’re fighting for.” He could sound so sure, so strong, as if he believed in the possibility of victory, as if he weren’t afraid. Better than crying “Don’t leave me!” or, worse, begging them to take him along.

  “It doesn’t feel right,” Nita said. “It feels like deserting you.”

  “You’re doing me a favor,” Bird said. “If you’re gone, I won’t have to worry about you. And no one can use you against me.”

  “You really feel okay about us going?” Sage asked.

  “I feel okay about all of us going to sleep. I’ve got a training early tomorrow morning.”

  At three in the morning, Bird woke up moaning from a nightmare. He was trembling, drenched with sweat. Where was he? In the ritual room, with Sage and Nita and Holybear still asleep. He couldn’t remember the dream, but he felt it, like a chill in the air, and quietly he disentangled a blanket, wrapped himself in it, and sat by the window watching the moon. Under the blanket he was shaking. He hoped the rest of them stayed asleep, but then Holybear’s hand was on his shoulder.

  “You’ve got to talk to us about it,” he said. “Even if it hurts us.”

  Bird shook his head. They were around him now, all three of them, holding him in a multi-armed embrace. “There’s nothing to talk about. I’m just scared, is what it comes down to.”

  “What did you dream?” Sage asked.

  It came back to him when she spoke, and he shivered. “I keep dreaming that I wake up someplace dark and cold. I can’t feel the earth, and the air is old and stale and smells of shit. And then I hear footsteps, in the corridor outside, and the rattle of keys. And I know that they’re coming for me—and it’s going to begin again.”

  There was nothing they could say, but they held him tighter.

  “I’m waiting for it now. That’s what’s so hard. When it’s actually happening, it’ll be okay. I mean, it’ll just be what’s happening. But I hate the waiting.”

  “Is it a fear or a memory?” Holybear asked.

  “I don’t know. Both, maybe.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “I wish there were something we could do for you,” Sage said.

  “Talk to Maya for me. I should do it myself, but I just can’t look her in the face around this.”

  “Sure.”

  “Tell her, if something bad comes down, if it looks like something is going to happen to me, to stay home. I don’t want her to come out and watch.”

  “She’ll want to.”

  “I can stand a lot, but I can’t stand that. Having her watch.”

  “Okay,” Holybear said. “I’ll tell her.”

  In the morning, they said goodbye. Bird walked them down to the docks, where they boarded a small sailboat. They would head upriver and, from there, somewhere. He wouldn’t let them tell him; already he knew far too much. He watched the white dot of their sail until it disappeared on the other side of the bridge. And then, for a long time, he watched the emptiness where the boat had been.

  His days were taken up with training and meetings, planning strategies, telling over and over again everything he knew about the ways of the South. The telling brought back memories he had tried to repress. Even the lost years began to yield up incidents and bits of knowledge.

  He came home at night stuffed with pain that he couldn’t bring himself to unload on Maya. Everybody else was gone. Only Rosa still came for her piano lessons, in the late afternoons when training was over for the day. Sometimes he actually forgot his fear, watching her concentrate as she struggled with a new piece of music.

  One night, after she had gone, he found himself absently fingering the keys on the piano. His fingers were stiff, and they ached, but he banged out a few chords, a trickle of melody. Then he grabbed paper and pen and began to write the notes as he heard them pouring through his mind. No, he couldn’t play, except awkwardly and painfully, but he could write the music out and leave it, and maybe, someday, somebody else would play it. Writing out the music was like talking to someone who could understand without guilt or judgment. He forgot time and fear. Afterward he could sleep through the night even though he slept alone.

  He came to depend on the hour each night he spent by himself, picking out on the piano the bones of tunes he heard fully fleshed in his mind. The struggle to capture his music kept him sane, calm, steady. He guarded that time jealously, shutting the door on Maya and Sam, refusing to be distracted. Music had become vital to him, necessary as water.

  21

  The ruined roadbeds of the City of Angels still ran laser straight across the basin, mile after mile, but each route was studded with obstacles, piles of rubble from buildings collapsed in old quakes and never rebuilt. Around their bases clustered shacks thrown together from the reclaimed ruins. Corpses of trees reared their heads at the edges of old crossroads, now swallowed under dead hulks of metal and cardboard shelters.

  Madrone and Hijohn maneuvered their way through the refuse-clogged paths. Children picked through the rubble, fiercely guarding their collections of old cans and broken bottles, glancing up with hungry eyes as they passed. The spring heat had been fierce in the shaded, waterless canyons; here on the asphalt it was brutal. Madrone began to wonder if she had made the right decision. Hijohn had suggested she spend some time teaching healing in the city’s center, where he claimed there was ample water. The plan had seemed good, but now she was not so sure. The canyon had its own beauty, even in austerity; these streets were an assault. Her bee mind buzzed alarm at the stench, and her instincts scented danger everywhere.

  They skirted a solid concrete building where a long line of people waited in the glare of the sun. They looked hungry, and the air around them reeked of hopelessness.

>   “Water line,” Hijohn said. “If you got a ration card, you can line up every day and collect your water. Half a gallon.”

  “That’s not enough. You can barely survive on that in this heat.”

  “Yeah, but you can survive, that’s what makes the difference. The hardliners want to kill the program. Say it’s supporting idleness in the lower classes.”

  A windowless concrete monolith stretched for most of the next block, and they detoured carefully around it.

  “Factory,” Hijohn said. “We’re getting into the industrial area.”

  “It looks like a prison,” Madrone said.

  “Feels like it too. I did a stint in one, one summer. The Web thought we could organize the workers.”

  “What was it like?”

  “Like hell. Punch in, punch out, dock your pay if you’re five minutes late. Then ten hours under white-hot lights, bent over a table monkeying with things so small you could hardly see them. We put together electronic stuff out of scavenged parts. My job was to take apart old radios, tape players. Never did learn how to put anything together.”

  “Did you organize a union?”

  “What they call unions run the factories. They provide the management.”

  “There’s no counter-union? No movement to strike for better conditions?”

  “We tried to get something together, but people are scared. Their pay is shit, but it’s better than being out on the streets with no job at all—and no water. No, we got some recruits for the hills, but that was all. This system can’t be reformed. We got to tear it all down, root it out, and start fresh.… Here’s where we turn. We don’t want to go too deep into the factory zone, because the Corporate Guard checks there for passes.”

  They turned down a street and soon were winding their way through a neighborhood of twisted lanes and shacks. The faces Madrone passed were as withered and dry as her own had become, and on them she saw the look of haggard endurance she felt in her own eyes. I’ve begun to feel at home here, she realized.