The Fifth Sacred Thing

by Starhawk

  “You want some more food, Poppy?” she asked.

  One of the blonds at the door spoke.

  “You gave her a name?”

  “Yeah.”

  “It’s not an Angel name. It don’t come from the book.”

  “What book?” Madrone asked.

  “They take their names from the list of Fallen Angels in the Book of Repudiation,” Katy explained.

  “She ought to have an Angel name.”

  “She’s got a flower name,” Katy said. “It’s a beautiful name. You didn’t keep her with the Angels; you brought her here. So leave her be, now.”

  “What kind of name is Madrone?” a small boy asked.

  “I’m named for a tree,” Madrone said, “a very beautiful tree that grows in the hills and canyons by the coast.”

  “Do trees grow where you come from?” a small boy asked Madrone.

  “Lots of trees,” Madrone said. “We go up to the mountains every year and plant thousands of them. We plant fruit trees along all the walkways in our city, so in the spring when they blossom it’s beautiful with pink and white flowers, and in the summer, when they ripen, you can reach out your hand anywhere and taste something sweet. And no, we don’t worry about people stealing the fruit, because it belongs to everybody, and there’s so much of it that everyone has more than enough.”

  Her words fell into an aching silence.

  “Will we have trees someday?” the same young boy asked.

  “Yes,” Katy said with certainty. “We will have trees everywhere, and so much fruit we’ll have to bottle it for jam. That’s sweet stuff you put on bread; we used to have it when I was a kid.”

  Really, Madrone thought, it wasn’t good to remember fruit, sweet juicy plums and crisp apples and velvet, dripping apricots. And strawberries nestled among the green leaves at the foot of the rosebushes. Better to savor the beans and water. And she wondered, suddenly, about Katy, suffering the fierce hunger of pregnancy. What nourishment was that child receiving in the womb? Was there any way to get her some fruit and vegetables?

  When the remains of dinner were completely cleared away, they all gathered in an inner room. Madrone faced a roomful of hopeful eyes, dark eyes, light eyes, in faces of every shade from porcelain to ebony. The weight of their expectations felt suddenly almost too heavy to bear. She was supposed to transform them all into healers? How?

  At the back of the room, the blonds stood poised for flight, the lines of their bodies suggesting a detached cynicism. They refused to sit, but they listened.

  Where to start? She had often trained healers, but they had started from the same assumptions and understandings of the world. She had no idea what these people believed. She was only barely beginning to understand the world they lived in. But they were waiting for her, and she would have to begin somewhere. At the beginning, Johanna would say. She took a deep breath and spoke.

  “There are many ways to be a healer, but this is what we believe about it and what I was taught when I began. We say that there are Four Sacred Things, and the fifth is spirit. And when you live in right relation to the four, you gain the power to contact the fifth. The four are earth, air, fire, and water. They live in the four directions, north, east, south, and west. No one can own them or put a price on them. To live in right relation is to preserve them and protect them, never to waste them, always to share what we have of them and to return all we take from them to the cycles of regeneration. Together they form the magic circle, which is the circle of life. And the understanding of that circle is the beginning of all healing.

  “So let’s begin by putting that circle inside ourselves. We call it grounding, touching the four within us and around us. Close your eyes and feel your breath. That’s the first sacred thing inside us, the breath, which opens the roads of the mind and the imagination. Let it come in and out of our lungs, bring it down deep. We can’t live without it, but when it’s there, there’s always as much as we need. You know, you may not have enough to eat or drink. But they haven’t figured out yet how to charge you for the air.”

  “Give them time,” someone murmured, and everybody laughed.

  “That’s good,” Madrone said. “Spirits like laughter. And they like you to breathe deep. Your breath is the beginning of power. And when it’s strong in you, let it awaken the second sacred thing, your fire, your energy. You can feel it first by noticing how you do feel. Strong or weak, awake or tired? Imagine your energy like a force flowing through you, as if you were a tree and you had roots going down into the earth. Can everyone picture a tree?”

  “No,” several of them called out. Madrone stopped for a moment, shaken.

  “Come on up to the hills, man,” someone else called out, and again there was laughter.

  “Imagine yourself as a rat,” another voice called. “Sneaking around in the city streets, living off garbage.”

  “Imagine yourself as a buzzard, looking down on the hills looking for something to eat, and you see these little hulks of people and you pass right on by, because they’re so dried up and bloodless you can’t even smell them.”

  “Oh, shut up!” someone else called. “Let her go on. If you want to argue rats and hillboys, take it outside.”

  “A plant, then,” Madrone said quickly. “Any kind of plant—with roots that go down into the earth. And those roots are your energy, your life force, and they go down through the dirt and the dust and the soil, and down through the rock, and down through the third sacred thing, the water that is hidden under the earth, and let them flow down to the fire in the earth’s heart. And the earth is the fourth sacred thing, and the fire that is her blood becomes the source of your energy. That’s the power you draw on, and it’s always there. You can use your breath to draw it up, and it flows through you, like water.…”

  She went on, leading them through the visualization of the treelike energy flow in the body, teaching them to fill the branches and leaves of their auras with earth fire, to draw down the power of the stars and become whole.

  Afterward, they talked about what each of them had felt. She set them to work in pairs, feeling each other’s auras, and wandered among them to answer questions. This project she had undertaken seemed daunting now. There was so much for them to learn—for anyone to learn, really. About energies, and then all the simple, physical, practical things: first aid, the dressing of wounds, herbs. Maybe that would be a good way to end for tonight, a balance to the esoteric stuff. She would teach them artificial respiration and, tomorrow, how to stanch a flow of blood. Mix the spiritual and the practical, so that everybody would learn something, no matter what their talents or deficiencies. And the hillboys, at least, could learn the uses of white sage and black sage, mugwort and bay laurel and manzanita bark.

  But the great powers, the spirit powers—how were they to be invoked here? She thought about her own vision quest, that journey up into the rugged mountains when she was sixteen, three days and three nights without food or water. Now it seemed the height of luxury to her, to be surrounded by the beauty of the high mountains, to refrain from drinking because water was all around you when you wanted it, springs of it, streams and pools and lakes and bogs. All the things she had taken for granted as the birthright of every person now seemed marks of incredible privilege. What vision quest could they do here, in these streets? Some of them could go to the hills, maybe, but the others, the rats who had never been five miles north to the green belts or ten miles west to the ocean, who had never seen a living tree or a meadow all green with grass or any wild growing things except a few stray cactus and creosote bushes, what about them? And those strange blonds with impenetrable auras, like ice?

  She ended the session, finally, and then she had to fend off thanks for another half an hour, until she could crawl exhausted into her sleeping bag in the corner of the main room.

  She grounded herself, shutting out the sounds of others bedding down for the night, and mentally cleansed herself, imagining clear warm water cascadin
g over her body and washing away the frustrations and pain of the day. Let it go, this feeling of an impossible weight on her shoulders. Let it go, this disbelief in hope. Let it go, the impulse to yell at her own students, insult them, call them stupid only because the depth of their ignorance hurt her so much. Let go, let go, into sleep. Healing sleep.

  She was on the edge of sleep when she felt a small body nestle against her. It was the child, Poppy, and Madrone pulled her close and let her nestle into the warmth of the bag. The child turned and began to fondle Madrone’s breast with her tiny hand. Instantly Madrone jolted awake. Where was she? What was happening?

  Poppy’s hand slid down Madrone’s belly with a practiced, unchildlike gesture. The girl’s limbs trembled.

  Gently, Madrone pulled the child’s hand away from her own body. She felt sick. How do I handle this? she wondered. What do I say? This was not a thing a child would do on her own. Someone had done something terrible to this girl.

  “No, honey, I don’t want you to do that. That’s a grown-up thing to do, not for children.”

  The girl wrenched her hand out of Madrone’s grip and reached for her again, a little mewling sound of fear coming from her lips. Madrone took her hand again and smelled the child’s fear, an acrid perfume pouring over her. She was engulfed in the girl’s terror, like every fear she had ever felt amplified, fear of pain, fear of abandonment and hunger and death, a craving that could never be assuaged, and, in all of it, no center, nothing to hold on to. She wanted to hold the child but she felt blocked—would Poppy feel it only as yet another violation, a demand? Diosa, what had happened to her?

  The girl began screaming out loud and pulled away from Madrone, to run through the crowded room and bang against the wall. Madrone looked on, stunned, but Katy was instantly alert and on her feet. She tossed the child into a blanket and wrapped her in it, tightly, like a swaddling cloth, so tight she couldn’t move, and then she held her and rocked her, crooning softly, “It’s all right. It’s all right. You’re safe here, baby. You’re safe.”

  Poppy had woken the whole room, and Madrone heard the groans and rustlings and sighs as everyone shifted back toward sleep. She was too shaken to relax. Katy stood up and carried the child outside, to the courtyard, and Madrone rose and followed her.

  Outside, the canopies diffused the light of a bright moon, so that the air seemed to glow silver. Katy sat on the bench, a shadowed madonna, and Madrone joined her. The child had stopped screaming, and as Katy rocked and soothed her, her breathing became even and finally took on the slow rhythms of sleep.

  “She’ll be okay,” Katy said. “These ones get the nightmares.”

  “It wasn’t that,” Madrone said. “She—she started to—to feel me. Sexually. And when I stopped her, she panicked.”

  “Ah, well, of course she would, wouldn’t she now?” Katy said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Her life has taught her only one way to secure affection or care. To survive. You blocked that for her.”

  “Damn right. And I would again.”

  “Well, she’ll learn, maybe, that there’s other roads to love. And then again, maybe she won’t. Maybe none of us has the time or the energy or the optimism left to teach her that. She’s so very young, it seems like there should be some hope for her still. Some choice. But maybe she’s already marked for the Angels.”

  “Who or what are the Angels?”

  “You know—the blond ones who hover around the edge of things. Raphael, Ariel, Gabriel, and Uriel. Their gang is called the Avenging Angels. Sometimes the Angels of Death.”

  “They’re separate from your group?”

  “We’re uneasy allies. They’re killers,” Katy said. “Make no mistake about it. Oh, I understand why. Still, they scare me. They’re so cold. It’s like no human warmth can touch them. Maybe it never has. Beautiful monsters, but they’re on our side. It’s dangerous to breed such hate. I can understand why they don’t let many of them grow up. Aside from the turn-on of killing them, of course.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “The blonds. They were toys for rich men. Bred for it. Raised and trained from birth. For sex and pain.”

  “Children?”

  “They say if you’re into it, the younger the better.”

  “But what … why?”

  “They’re little and delicate and beautiful, and you can do anything you want to them. Anything. And when you use one up, well, there’s another, just as little and cute and pretty coming up behind. I’m telling you, Madrone, they breed them. It’s an industry. With catalogs and videos and accessories. Instruments of torture.”

  “I can’t believe that.”

  “It’s true. And in revenge, the Angels steal kids, bust up houses, burn them down. Kill people. They probably take quite a bit of pleasure in doing it, too. I don’t like it, but I can’t blame them. You see, they’re ones who somehow got out. Grew up. God—or Goddess—only knows what happened to them. They don’t tell. They just stare at you with those blue marble eyes.”

  Madrone sat silent for a moment, too shocked to speak. In Katy’s arms, Poppy murmured and wriggled.

  “I wasn’t raised to believe in evil, Katy. But I can’t think of another word for this,” she said finally.

  “There isn’t any other word for it. Where you come from—they don’t have sex shops and torture clubs?”

  “No. Goddess, no! We have a fair amount of sex, privately. I certainly never lacked for it before I came down here. But it’s not—marketed. And that’s what I don’t understand: how can the Millennialists let this go on? They’re so anti-sex.”

  “The Millennialists are the backbone of the industry. All that repression has to find its outlet somewhere. And remember, it’s not fornication if it’s done with the soulless—conveniently defined as anyone who isn’t a good enough Millennialist. Also, it helps if it turns a profit.”

  The moon peaked over the edge of the canopy. Madrone gazed up. Here as at home, la luna was round and white, marked by the same shadows, changing in the same waxing and waning rhythms. Madrone somehow found that hard to believe. How could the same moon shine on such different worlds?

  “There’s so much here I just don’t know about,” she said finally.

  “You can ask me anything, Madrone. I want to help you all I can, because of what you’re bringing to us.”

  “I don’t even know what to ask, because it’s so foreign to everything I expect. And I’m not really bringing that much, I’m afraid. Katy, I don’t really know what I can do here. Can I really teach these people anything that’s worth the effort and the danger of gathering here? Learning to be a healer takes years, and that’s with advantages you can’t even conceive of.”

  “You’ve already achieved more than you realize.”

  “What? If you’ve noticed anything, please tell me.”

  “First of all, you’ve got the hillboys and the rats and the Angels all working together on something. That’s never happened before. Yeah, there’s some tension, but nobody’s pulling knives on each other. Generally, they’re as territorial as the other gangs. In fact, they’re not so different from the other gangs as they’d like to think. That’s really how this all started, you know—street gangs and hill gangs and a few key people with enough vision to mold it into something more.

  “And that’s the other thing you’ve brought—the vision. Talk about the North, Madrone. Tell us about the streams and the fruit trees and how you organize your tree-planting brigades. Because we’ve got to know that things can be different, that they are different somewhere. That’s the only thing that really sets us apart from the street gangs—the vision. Well, the gangs are probably better armed. But you’re living, walking proof that this isn’t the only way things can ever be. All you have to do is walk into a room, and we can see by the set of your head on your shoulders and the way you move in your body that you come from somewhere else.”

  “Is it that obvious?”


  “You move like someone who’s never questioned her right to have a body. To exist, to breathe, to take up space. I’ve been watching you all night. It’s not arrogance, like the rich people. It’s not the hard, elegant gesture, like the Angels. It’s just—solid. Sure. As if you’d never learned to look down on anyone or bend to someone who looks down on you. Oh, I’m jealous. When I look at you, I feel so jealous I could cry, or hate you. But I don’t. I would like, just once in my life, to be in a place where everybody stood and moved and walked like you.”

  “I don’t want to make people feel bad. It’s funny, I almost hate to talk about the North, even though I do, incessantly. It feels like bragging. Flaunting something people can’t have.”

  “Brag about it. Flaunt it, tantalize us with it. Make us eat our hearts out. It’s so much better to be envious than hopeless.”

  “And it makes me homesick,” Madrone said.

  “You’ve made a great sacrifice to come here. Most of us in this fight simply had nothing to lose, but you did. And don’t think we don’t appreciate it, even if some smart-mouths act like assholes.”

  “But I didn’t do it to be appreciated. I don’t want gratitude. I mean, that has nothing to do with why I came or what I’m doing here. It only gets in the way.”

  “Why did you come down here? If I lived in a place where water flowed through the streets, I wouldn’t leave.”

  Madrone laughed. “Maybe I just didn’t know what I was getting myself into. Maybe it’s our family curse. The Goddess picks on us, lays these visions on us. Sends us off to do her dirty work. But what can you do? If you want to be true to your own power, you have to answer the call when it comes.”

  “Are you sorry?”

  “At every meal—or non-meal. But seriously, no, I’m not. What’s going on here is real. There’s no place to escape from it. Even back home, the battle’s on its way. So I don’t mind being on the front lines. But what about you? You seem different from a lot of the others. How did you get into this?”