The Fifth Sacred Thing

by Starhawk

  He leaned over and brushed her lips with his. “That’s why you are so important to us,” he murmured. There was a suggestion of heat in the millimeter of air between their lips. What about Katy? Madrone wondered, imperceptibly pulling back from Hijohn. But how could she begrudge me this brief moment of comfort? Then they were pressed together, their bodies clinging, nursing, drinking each other as their lips fused. They broke apart to wriggle out of their clothes. Madrone slid her hands down his back, over his buttocks, over the traces of healed wounds and the hardened ridges of old scars, and then up to touch his small, proud cock. He moaned, as his fingers found the lips of her vulva, and then in one motion he guided himself into her. She was surprised, wet but not really ready yet, still expecting more touch, a longer ascension. But he was pumping furiously, and then moaning, and in a moment it was over. He groaned aloud, and she felt him gush and shrink.

  Hijohn rolled off her and looked anxiously into her face.

  “Okay for you?” he asked.

  She lay on her back, stunned into silence. Didn’t he know? Couldn’t he feel? Was it possible to be both such a hero and so ignorant?

  Evidently so. It was the gap again, the chasm that opened continuously before her feet each time she thought she was getting close to someone down here. Different worlds, different lives.

  Who would have taught him how to please a woman, answered his questions, as Maya and Johanna and Rio had answered hers? When would he have had the luxury of the forest year she’d shared with Bird and the others, the time to experiment and taste and play? And while they had learned young to open up, he had survived by closing down.

  “Wasn’t too good for you, was it?” he asked.

  She sighed. “Hijohn, there’s some things I need to teach you.”

  “You like it better with women, maybe?”

  “Not necessarily. It’s the person I care about, not the form of their genitals. But it helps to have a little bit of—well, technique.”

  “Show me.”

  She instructed him slowly, gently. They had all day, and a little water, and the lesson kept her mind from imagining horrors she was helpless to prevent, wounds she was too far away to heal. She showed him the secret pleasure points of her body, and how to build the intensity from light and delicate touch to wild animal release. He learned eagerly, if a bit awkwardly. Bird’s fingers had once had a musician’s assured touch, Sandy’s hands held the heat of a healer, Nita’s moved with the delicate grace of a scientist. Hijohn was merely direct but willing. Still, the day passed rapidly.

  “Would Katy like this?” he asked, when they lay, satiated at last, stewing in their mingled sweat.

  “Try it with her and see.”

  “I don’t know. She’s bound to wonder why I’ve suddenly changed my style.”

  “Tell her it’s my gift to her.”

  He pulled away suddenly and looked down at her in alarm. “You don’t think I mean to tell her about this, do you?”

  The gap was there again. Suddenly he was miles away, in some other world.

  “You mean you wouldn’t tell her?” Madrone asked. “You’d keep it a secret?”

  “Why would I tell her? It would only hurt her.”

  “Would it really?”

  “Sure it would.”

  “But why?”

  “What do you mean, why?”

  “Why should it hurt her that we took pleasure together, here where there’s so much hardship and so little comfort to take?”

  “It would, believe me.”

  “Then why did you do it if you knew it would hurt her?”

  “Won’t hurt her if she don’t know about it.”

  “But how can you keep it from her? Won’t she know when she looks at you, or me, or sees how the energy has changed between us? Won’t she feel it?”

  “We aren’t all Witches like you, sweet. She won’t know unless you tell her.”

  “But how can I lie to her and be her friend? We talk about you—women do talk about these things, you know. How can you lie to her and be her lover?”

  “You mean you don’t ever lie to your lovers?”

  “What would be the point? They’d know I was lying.”

  “You’d just go home from here and say, ‘Hey, Charlie, I got lonesome for you but I fucked Hijohn, and here’s a few tricks he taught me’?”

  “Yes.”

  “And he’d say, ‘Next time you see him, tell him thanks’?”

  “Yes, more or less.”

  “Now I know you’re lying. You must get jealous.”

  “Of course we do. I’ve been jealous myself, like once when Bird was infatuated with this other woman and stopped paying attention to me. But it doesn’t hurt me to think of him taking pleasure with other people now, when I’m not even there. I assume he is. Unless he’s deathly ill, or locked up, or severely injured, I know he is.”

  “Well, that’s the way I believe, myself. But Katy sees it differently. So you won’t tell her, will you? Promise?”

  “Hijohn, I can’t promise that. I don’t know what I’ll do.”

  “You’ve got to promise.”

  “I’ve got to do what feels right to me at the time.”

  “Shit.”

  He turned away from her, staring up at the sky behind the cupped, prickly leaves.

  “Then I’ll have to tell her,” he said. The energy between them was gone. They lay next to each other, but separated by a void as sullen as oak’s blue shade.

  “That might be a good idea.”

  “Oh, shit.”

  “Are you mad?”

  “I never get mad. It’s a waste of food.”

  “I’m sorry if it makes trouble between you and Katy. I wouldn’t want to do that.”

  He patted her hand absently, his face closed, his touch heavy as wet clay.

  “Let’s get some sleep now, okay?” he said. “We’ve got a lot of ground to cover tonight.”

  He rolled over, his back to her, and dozed, but Madrone lay awake a long time, watching the blistering sun move across a white, empty sky.

  24

  An unaccustomed silence woke Maya in the middle of the night. At first she couldn’t identify what was wrong, only that, as she emerged out of a disturbed dream, she felt disoriented, not sure where she was.

  “Sam,” she said, poking him gently. “Wake up, Sam. Something’s wrong.”

  He woke instantly, a legacy of his years of training on emergency wards. “Are you okay? Where does it hurt?”

  “Nothing hurts. But something’s wrong—something doesn’t feel right. Listen.”

  He listened. “I don’t hear anything.”

  “That’s right. The stream—it’s silent.” For twenty years she had slept lulled by that music, since they had first blocked the street and liberated the water from its underground pipeways back to its restored bed. The sound of water was her security, her healing. No one, they said in the City, could be wholly ill or sad near the sound of running water, and so they had created nets of streams and pools and little waterfalls that sang almost as sweetly as falling rain. And now the song was gone.

  “Sam, what’s happened? Where is the stream?”

  “Soldiers must have dammed it,” Sam said.

  Maya threw off the covers. “Let’s go see.”

  The walkways that ran in front of the house gleamed under the moonlight. The moon was waning, Crone’s moon, time of ending and dissolving, Maya thought. The soldiers had imposed a curfew after dusk. For a week, people had obeyed. But tonight Maya and Sam were not the only ones out: others had apparently been woken by the stilling of the accustomed sound or by networks sounding the alarm. Door after door opened and people thronged the walkways, heading silently, grimly, up toward the slopes of the hill where the reservoir lay.

  Maya walked slowly, leaning on Sam’s arm. She was afraid. This was the confrontation; this was war at last. Bird, she thought, will he survive this? He had not been sleeping in his room. Often he stayed all n
ight after a meeting with the Council to avoid the risk of running the curfew. But he would come for this battle, she was sure of it.

  The crowd climbing the hill grew, a dark tide rising to the level shelf of land where a deep pool held the spring water that fed the streams. A group of soldiers was closing the floodgates with sandbags and cement. A much larger platoon stood guard, laser rifles trained on the crowd. Old Salvia Westin from the Water Council was addressing the guards, her silver-wire hair flashing under the moon as she tossed her head.

  “You don’t understand,” she said. “I’ve worked fifteen years perfecting that stream. It’s not just water, it’s a living community of incredible complexity and beauty. Fish and insects and plants and birds depend on it. To dam it is to destroy it, to take its life! You are murderers. Murderers!” Her voice was rising in pitch and a young man stepped forward, put a hand on her arm, and whispered something in her ear. She shook free of his arm, but he spoke to her again, and reluctantly she moved away. The soldiers stood expressionless.

  “There is still a place for you at our table, if you will choose to join us,” the young man said.

  “Yes,” people chorused, “even now, there is a place for you.”

  But Maya could hear other mutterings, and even a few shouts and threats. Tension rippled through the line of soldiers.

  “We will never let you take our water!” someone shouted, too far back for Maya to see.

  “Try and stop us,” one of the soldiers taunted, and there was a surge in the crowd that might have pushed them all forward onto the rifles of the soldiers when suddenly Maya heard the beat of a drum. The sound was soft, hardly audible to the ears but more of a pulse in the body, a heartbeat, at once insistent and utterly calm. Two women and one man walked up to the edge of the floodgates and sat down, their bodies just in the spot where the next load of cement was due to be dumped.

  The commander of the guards walked over to them. He was a young man who strutted with his shoulders thrust back and his chest ballooned out.

  “Move,” he said. “Or we’ll make you move.”

  They sat, impassive, silent.

  “We’ve been easy on you people so far, but we’re cracking down now. Game time is over.”

  “You will have to take our lives to take our water,” one of the women said. The silence in the crowd was absolute.

  “There is a place set for you at our table, if you will choose to join us,” the man said.

  The officer gestured to his men. “Carry on building. If they don’t get out of the way, cement them in.”

  The men moved hesitantly forward with a hose attached to a mixing machine. The machine began to roar. The crowd surged forward, and suddenly twenty or thirty people were crowded around the floodgates, between the soldiers and their objective. Instead of sitting like the first three, they kept moving in a writhing mass. Plastocement spewed out of the hose, and they tromped through it, keeping it from setting.

  “I give you ten seconds, and then we shoot,” the officer yelled. “This is no game! Ten. Nine. Eight.…”

  There was a sudden flare of lights and the screech of a phalanx of motorcycles coming to a halt behind him.

  “Attention!” a voice thundered.

  A large man dismounted from the sidecar of the lead cycle. Instantly the soldiers formed an honor guard on either side of him. He wore an elaborate uniform decorated with stripes and gold braid and medals hanging from colored ribbons. The gray of his clothing leached color from his bone-pale skin, but mottled red and blue veins tinted his cheeks and nose and forehead. His body was solid, robust, although he carried a paunch that protruded over his gunbelt, and his gray eyes gleamed like bullets.

  “What goes on here, Jones?” he asked.

  “General Alexander, sir, these people are obstructing the work. Request permission to execute, sir.”

  “Request permission? What the hell do you think we issue you rifles for? Is this how you carry out your command?”

  “Sir—”

  Behind Maya the crowd stirred and parted. Through the opening came Bird and Lan and Roberto, led by Marie. Bird looked grim, remote. His eyes never turned to greet Maya.

  “General,” Marie said, her musical voice pitched to carry, “as the elected representatives of this city, we are here to lodge a formal protest.”

  “Lodge your ass!” came a voice from the back of the crowd. Somebody hushed him, and the drumbeat intensified.

  “Water runs free in this city,” Marie went on, “and belongs to everybody. Indeed, water is one of the Four Sacred Things that nobody can own or desecrate. No one in this city goes thirsty. No one begs for water or has ever had to steal it.” She was speaking, Maya realized, not to the General but to the lines of ordinary soldiers behind him. “We are pledged to see that this does not change. Because we preserve our waters, there is plenty for everyone, even for you. Living in our way, none of you need ever thirst again. And there is a place already set for you at our table, if you will choose to join us.”

  Bird stood behind Marie, to back her up. They had agreed that she would speak first. Everything seemed etched in glass, translucent, already fading. This is exactly like one of the role plays we set up in the training, he thought. Maybe when it’s over we’ll all sit down and process together, ask the General how he feels? He almost wanted to laugh, but he bit his lips. Somewhere behind him was the drumbeat, and the sound steadied him.

  General Alexander looked at the four of them. He seemed unsure as to which one of them he should address. Marie was white, but a woman; Roberto was the oldest and largest male, but brown. In the space of time his quandary bought, more people joined those massed by the floodgates.

  Finally he seized on Roberto, looking him in the eye.

  “Understand this,” he said. “All water belongs to the Corporation by executive order. Water is a scarce and precious natural resource, made more scarce by the wasteful squanderings of the greedy and ignorant. For this reason, the Stewards have assumed control of all water resources, for their better preservation and distribution. Now either you order your followers to cease obstructing our lawful work here or, I’m warning you, there will be bloodshed. And you will be responsible.”

  Roberto’s face was calm and composed. He looked into the General’s eyes and said mildly, “You misunderstand. We cannot order anyone to do anything. We are the ears and voice of the people; we express their will. We cannot command them to do ours, even if we wanted to cooperate with you. But we of this city will never cooperate in the theft of our own waters. Water is sacred, one of the things we will risk our lives for. And still there is a place set for you at our table, if you will choose to join us.”

  The General drew his pistol and shot Roberto through the temple.

  Roberto made no sound. His eyes opened wide; then blood burst from his nostrils, a dark stain in the dark night, as he fell. The crowd gasped.

  General Alexander turned to Lan.

  “Do you understand me now when I say we are not playing games here? I’m not asking you for cooperation, I’m telling you you don’t have a choice. If you want to die for your right to waste water, we can provide the opportunity. Now, boy, what do you say?”

  Now it comes, Bird thought, and oddly enough he wasn’t afraid any longer. There was nothing more he had to do, except stand there and, when his turn came, say one phrase. Easy, and then it would be over quickly. No long-drawn-out waiting, no agony. He would die out here, in the moonlight, in this perfect clarity that settled over him. Suddenly it seemed he could see every face in the crowd, gleaming silver under the moon, could feel the green gardens still alive below them, and hear the singing of the wind in the spinners above and the drumbeat like the city’s phantom heart. To die in this moment was not so bad. Maya was nearby; he wished he could meet her eyes and smile, but he was not that brave.

  “There is a place set for you at our table, if you will choose to join us,” Lan said, and died.

  My turn now, Bird
thought, as the General turned to him. He was barely aware of what the man was saying, as he thought, one by one, of the people he loved. Adiosa, Madrone. I wish I could have seen you one more time. Goodbye, Maya. I’m sorry I can’t kiss you goodbye. Adiosa, Sage and Manzanita and you, too, Holybear.

  Alexander was waiting. Bird opened his mouth to speak.

  Suddenly there was a stir in the crowd. A flock of children, led by Rosa, dodged through the masses of stunned people. Before anyone could move, they had surrounded Bird and Marie and the two bodies on the ground. The officers stepped back in surprise, while Bird was barricaded by a ring of children five deep.

  “There is a place for you at our table,” Rosa said to the General, smiling her brightest and most engaging smile, “if you will choose to join us.” She favored the whole line of men with a broad and friendly grin. Some of them were sweating visibly.

  Bird felt sick with the sudden descent of terror. Damn those kids! Damn their emulation and their hero worship and those stupid trainings that made them think they were prepared for this. If something happened to Rosa …

  The General looked amused.

  “Okay, Jones, this is about your speed. Let’s see you handle this.”

  Jones stepped forward. “You kids get out of here,” he said. “I don’t want to hurt no kids, but I will if I have to.”

  They remained, silent and smiling. How could they smile? Bird wondered. He couldn’t, even if it would have saved their lives.

  “I’m counting to three. One, two …”

  A young boy Bird didn’t know stepped up next to Rosa.

  “Three.”

  Nobody moved. Jones looked at the kids, back to his men, back to the kids again.

  “I warned you. I don’t want to do this, but I will if you don’t move. Now I’m giving you one more chance. One, two, three.”

  “There’s a place set for you at our table, if you will choose to join us,” the boy said.

  The soldier slowly drew his gun, pointed it at Rosa.

  “Move.”

  The line of children held firm.

  He took a step forward, thrust the nose of the pistol under her chin, and said, again, “Move.”