The Fifth Sacred Thing

by Starhawk

  Bird felt cold. He could see the muscles tense in the man’s arm, see his eye narrow, and his finger begin to squeeze. If I could only grab the gun, he thought, but if I make a move toward him, she’ll be dead.

  Then there was a loud noise and the officer crumpled, a dark bleeding hole through the back of his neck. Somewhere down the line, a soldier threw down his gun and began running wildly away from the open space around the reservoir. Others ran after him, while the crowd surged between the fleeing man and his pursuers. People were running and screaming, but the crowd around Bird was packed too tight to move. His body wanted to run but his mind said, No, wait. This was what he’d volunteered for. Then there were shots into the crowd, and more screams, and as the people scattered a soldier stuck a gun into Bird’s back, grabbed his arm, and pinned it behind him.

  “Got the little bitch!” someone yelled behind him. Bird twisted his head to catch a glimpse of a struggling Rosa being roughly searched and handcuffed. Then his own hands were cuffed together, and he and Sister Marie were led away.

  “What happened?” Maya prodded Sam. “Bird? Is Bird okay?” She had heard the shots, but the crowd around her blocked her view.

  “I think we’ve got a deserter,” Sam said. “Evidently one of the soldiers shot the guy who had the gun on Rosa.”

  The crowd shifted again. A line of soldiers marched by. Maya glimpsed Bird in their midst and Marie, walking. Rosa, kicking and screaming, was being carried by two big men.

  “Go home,” Sam said to Maya, pressing her hand tightly. “We can’t do anything for them right now. I’m going to stay and see to the wounded.”

  Maya’s body took her home, while her mind ranged the city like a dog, trying to follow Bird. But he was gone. Not dead, she thought, but nowhere she could reach him. It was Rio’s voice she finally heard in her ear.

  “Leave it,” he said. “You can’t help him through this. His ordeal will be that much worse if he feels you present.”

  “Can you help him?”

  “Maybe. I’ll be there, at any rate, for whatever good a ghost can do. But you leave him alone. Leave him his dignity.”

  Sam brought the deserter home with him. The oldest Cooper boy found him crouched behind their compost bin, shaking in fear and shock. The Coopers had exchanged his uniform for a shirt and jeans and brought him to Sam, who had set up an impromptu emergency ward in a nearby house. Several people had been grazed by bullets, and one man had been shot in the shoulder, but Lan and Roberto were the only fatalities. Just before dawn, Sam brought the deserter back through the empty streets to Black Dragon House.

  Maya had not slept. She’d brewed up the roasted grains that Sam claimed resembled coffee, and she served the two men, moving automatically, trying not to think about Bird, trying not to think about bodies falling and waiting for one of them to be his. The young man’s hands were trembling, his dark eyes darted nervously about the kitchen, and his brown skin had an undertone of gray.

  Maya shook herself free of her own worries and smiled at him reassuringly. “It’ll be okay,” she said. “You did a good thing. What’s your name?”

  “Larry, ma’am.”

  “You don’t have to ma’am me. Just call me Maya. What can I fix you to eat? We don’t have the widest variety, but I could fry up some potatoes, and I believe I can offer you an egg.”

  “Anything, anything would be fine, ma’am.”

  “We appreciate what you did.”

  “I had to do it. Couldn’t stand by and watch him kill no little girl. I ain’t from the pens like some of them. I come from a family. Had a mother, sisters.”

  “What are the pens?” Maya asked as she heated oil in a pan. She would minister to this young man, who had saved Bird’s life, out of gratitude and as a little bargain with the fates. I’ll be good to him, Goddess; you be good to Bird.

  “Where they breed soldiers, ma’am.”

  “Breed them?”

  “That’s how they get so many. Half these guys come out of the pens.”

  “You mean, breed them like … cattle?” Sam asked, settling himself next to Larry with a cup of brew.

  “They got no souls, like regular people, so it’s no sin to breed them.”

  “Perhaps you’d better explain a little more.”

  “Say a woman loses her immortal soul—”

  “How would she do that?” Sam asked.

  “Could be anything. Stealing water. Violating the Purities.”

  “I’m afraid we’re quite ignorant,” Maya said. “You’ll have to explain everything to us. What are the Purities?”

  “You know, Moral Purity, Racial Purity, Family Purity, Spiritual Purity. Like say she goes to bed with some guy who isn’t Authorized for her. Or someone overhears her questioning the Incarnation. If she’s young and good-looking, they send her off to entertain the troops. If she’s a bit older, she goes straight to the pens and they breed her for soldiers.”

  “I can’t believe that. How do they justify it?” Maya said.

  “It’s your choice, ma’am, to preserve your immortal soul or throw it away. Unless, of course, you come out of the pens and don’t got one to begin with. But if you destroy your immortal soul with wickedness, then all that’s left of value in you is your body, and your only redemption is to let the state use your body as it sees fit, for the greater good.”

  “Do you believe that?” Sam asked.

  Larry shrugged. “I threw my soul away stealing water for my family. The soul may be immortal, but the body ain’t. It’s got to drink. That’s how I landed in the army. You get caught in peacetime, they throw you in jail or put you on one of the work levees. Get caught in wartime, you join the army. I don’t know if I got an immortal soul or not—I guess if you’re poor, your soul is pretty thin to begin with.”

  “I believe you have a soul,” Maya said, stirring the eggs with a wooden spoon and lifting them off the burner as they congealed. “You’ve proved that tonight.”

  “I got something in me that won’t stand to see a little girl killed,” Larry said. “Don’t know if that’s a soul. Don’t know if there’s a Purity that speaks to that. Don’t much care, to tell the truth.” He flashed a shy grin. Then his face clouded.

  “They say you don’t got the boosters, true?”

  “Immunoboosters? I’m afraid we don’t,” Sam said. “Not for the last twenty years. You’ve been taking them?”

  “We all do. They’re in our rations. They keep us alive, keep us in their power. Afraid to run off, come over to you people. They say we’ll die without them. Is that true?”

  “I hope not,” Sam said. “I’m a doctor, and I will certainly do everything within my power to see that you don’t. But we don’t have much experience with them here in this city. I’ve read all the literature we have, but it’s all more than twenty years old. The current generation of drugs could work quite differently. I’ll want to take a look at your blood chemistry, run some tests. I suspect you’ll be sick for a while, maybe severely. But I have hopes that you can weather the transition period and survive.”

  “They’ll search your houses.”

  “We have a place to hide you,” Maya said. “When we remodeled the house, years ago, we threw in a few hidey-holes, up under the eaves. Not luxurious, but adequate. When you’re ready to sleep, I’ll take you up there.”

  The eggs were done, and Maya set the food in front of the men. Larry ate heartily and fast, like a wary dog, glancing up at them from time to time as if he were afraid they might suddenly turn on him and snatch the food away.

  “This is sure good,” he said. “Real good. This is real food, don’t get it often in the army. We eat the powdered stuff.”

  “Enjoy,” Maya said. “And relax. Take your time. You can have more when that’s done.”

  “Why are you white folks taking all this trouble with me?”

  Maya and Sam exchanged glances. We are both white, she thought, and I never really thought about it, which is shocking, really.
All those years with Johanna, race didn’t exactly divide us but was always present, somehow, an awareness we could never lose because it was necessary for survival. But for twenty years, now, it hasn’t been. Until the Stewards came.

  “In this city,” Maya said, “we don’t judge a person by their race or color or who your ancestors were. That’s not important to us. It’s interesting to know, and to learn the history of your roots, but it doesn’t determine what you can be or how well you’re treated. Besides, you saved the lives of some people whom we love very much. You risked your life for theirs. That makes you one of us.”

  Larry looked up at her thoughtfully. She could see he was trying to understand her words, but she wasn’t sure if they really made sense to him.

  “The day we marched in here, we saw you had all different colors that spoke for you,” he said finally. “We talked about it back at base. Where we come from, you don’t see that. It’s a violation of the Purities.”

  “We have no purities here,” Maya said. “Only the Four Sacred Things, air, fire, water, and earth. And the fifth, the spirit, which is at least sometimes human and cannot be lost.”

  They installed him in the low space behind the cabinets in the big room upstairs. Maya gave him blankets, water from their reserves in the cistern, and a jar to piss in. Downstairs, Sam carefully cleared away all traces of their meal, washing the dishes, drying them, and putting them away.

  “He’s tucked in,” Maya said. “Put the kettle on, will you? I need some tea.”

  “You should try to get some sleep.”

  “In a bit. Is there anything else we need to get rid of?”

  “I think we’re okay. Let them search if they want to.”

  Maya sat down on the sofa. “I’m still in shock, I think. Did we win or lose? Roberto and Lan and Goddess knows how many others are dead.…”

  “Bird is alive.”

  “Maybe that’s worse for him. We are in open war now. Our lines broke, we ran from their guns.…”

  “One of them broke too, and so Rosa is alive, and they know that they cannot necessarily control their own men.”

  “Oh, Sam, I feel responsible, with that dream of mine. I can’t help it. If we were facing an army of Larrys I have no doubt we would win in the end. But troops of bred killers? How are we going to reach them? I wish that vision had come to someone else. I wish I were dead instead of the others.”

  “You don’t really.” Sam sat down next to her, put his arm around her, and kissed the top of her head. “This is hard, Maya, very hard, but there is some sweetness left at the end of life for us. Don’t despair. If we believe in what we say we do, in the essential humanity of every person, then we have to believe that even the born-and-bred psychopaths are somehow reachable.”

  “I’m not despairing, I’m just worried sick.”

  She tipped her face toward his, and he kissed her. They sat together, waiting in silence for a knock on the door.

  When the soldiers came, they searched everywhere. It’s a form of violation, Maya thought, watching them poke through Madrone’s underwear drawer. A rape of one’s possessions. They left papers strewn and scattered over the floor, food spilled from jars, books knocked off shelves, furniture overturned. They searched the cupboards that fronted Larry’s hiding space, pulled boxes out and opened them, ripped doors off their hinges. Maya held her breath, willing them to move on, praying they wouldn’t push too hard at the panels in back, or slide them forward. Not a sound came from behind the wall.

  The soldiers left, finally, and she breathed a sigh of relief. It was okay. They had not found Larry. If only Bird were home, safe, under the wing of her care. How was she going to sleep tonight, and the next night, and the night after that? What were they doing to him?

  “You’re a Witch,” Johanna murmured in her ear. “Don’t revert to that Jewish culture thing, trying to ward off the worst by torturing yourself with worry. Think like a Witch now. Surround him with protection, with your love.”

  Maya tried. She lay in bed, sleepless, visualizing Bird’s face with light around him. But the light wavered and flickered. Her love and protection no longer seemed very powerful.

  The dry streambed gaped like a yellow scar on the city’s green face. Silver trout gasped, flopped, and died, to be gathered by children. A few were rescued, flung into deep pools that had not yet evaporated. The corpses of the others were distributed among the people, consumed for that night’s dinner. Maya and Sam fed trout to their deserter. At midnight they were awakened by a deep rumble and the blast of an explosion. Shortly afterward, the stream began to flow again.

  “Those hotheads on the Water Council,” Sam said. “I bet they’ve blown up the dam. I knew they’d be up to something.”

  “What do you think will happen?” Maya whispered, her throat dry with fear for Bird.

  The next morning, soldiers shot five people taken at random from the streets in the Central Plaza. The army rebuilt the dam and began work to enclose the other streams in the city. Two nights later, another explosion rocked the silence, and again the water flowed. That morning, ten people were shot.

  “How long can this go on?” Maya asked.

  “Till they give up, or we do,” Sam said.

  “Water Council doesn’t have consensus from the full Council to keep blowing the dams.”

  “No, but they won’t get much opposition, either.” “What about the dead?”

  “The dead don’t have a voice on the Council.”

  “That’s an oversight,” Maya said.

  25

  Bird closed his eyes. Mostly he preferred to see what was coming at him, to preserve at least that much control. But he could not bear to look in the eyes of his torturers, to see on their faces that serious, intent, and probing look. It was too much like the look on a lover’s face or, he imagined, in his own eyes, making love to Madrone, when she gaped in ecstasy. Maybe we men need to do this, he thought, one way or another, in order to know we exist. We need to leave our mark on another body, to make it feel our power. He closed his eyes against the mingling of cruelty and sex he saw in the faces above him, so as not to be forever tainted. And yet he could feel himself being changed.

  He had lost count of the days, of how many times they had gone to work on him, of how many hours he had suffered. Certainly weeks had passed since he was arrested—but how many? He had no idea. At first, he’d felt confident. I can get used to this, he thought, I can endure. The neural probes they used on him left no marks. They did no physical damage; they simply stimulated the pain neurons in the body directly. I could even come out of this with no more of me broken, maybe. A dangerous hope, a hope that could be used against him, and Bird tried to put it out of his mind. Hope would make him vulnerable, manipulable. Like fear. Better to resign himself to death.

  But death was far away. That was the catch. As hours lengthened into what seemed like days or eternities, Bird began to understand. If they’d simply been beating him, he would have gone into shock by now, maybe bled to death from internal wounds, at least gone numb. Instead, his body seemed capable of perpetual fresh responses to pain, and he was awed at the intensity and variety of pain the body could produce. What they could do to a finger, or the sensitive skin inside his arm. An eyelid, a toe, a nipple, the ridge of skin that rimmed his cock. This is what being raped is like, he thought. He was exposed, violated, and he couldn’t seem to lift himself out of his body, to escape, even for a moment, from wide-open consciousness of the pain. When he began to weaken, from thirst and hunger, they jammed a tube down his throat and poured in gruel. When he threw it back up, trying but failing to inhale the vomit and choke and die, they stuck a tube in his arm and fed him intravenously.

  They are taking good care of me, he realized, and that thought made him afraid in a new way. Why? What do they want to use me for? He could feel himself approaching the limits of his ability to resist. He could hold out a long time, but even he could not hold out forever. Let me die, let me die, l
et me die, he prayed. They called the Reaper the Implacable One, but that was wrong. She was mercy, grace, the release that would not come to him. No, what was implacable was life, his life, that kept his lungs breathing and his heart pumping against his will. His body betrayed him, responding with such a full orchestra of agonies to what? To nothing, a beam of photons, the tickling of a laser a few atoms wide. He would never trust it again.

  The moment came when he could not tolerate one more descent and emergence into the extremities of pain. Something shifted in him, some ground of himself that he thought was solid dissolved and melted away. I am going to break, he realized. Behind his closed eyes he saw a face, like an old woman with serpent skin. La Serpiente, La Segadora, the Reaper. Mama, this is as far as I can go. In one more breath, I will give way, and open my mouth, and be gone.

  “Talk to us. Answer our questions.”

  He couldn’t stand it. Whatever will of his own was left was contradicted by every impulse of his body. He was going to talk, to make some sound, say something, anything to stave off pain. And once he began, how would he be able to stop, to force his lips to say certain words, not others? He couldn’t seem to die, and even if he did they would only drag someone new into this dilemma. Anything he did to escape the pain would only visit it on someone else. No, they had to break somebody. Let it be him, he was already half ruined. Or was he just making excuses? Maya, abuela, Lily, Madrone, I’m sorry.

  He talked. Once he began, he told them whatever they wanted to know. What was the point of suffering over one question or another, when he knew he would tell them all in the end? Only to buy a little more time—for what? For nothing. He told them that the real Defense Council was nine old women hidden somewhere. He did not know where, and all the pain they applied could not make him know, for which he was glad because if he had known he would surely have told them. He explained to them the city’s strategy of noncooperation. He told them how the city was organized, how work was divided and credits were assigned, how the power grids were operated, how fish were bred in the aquaculture tanks. Anything, everything. What he knew about healing. How the city had thrown off the last epidemic. Name names, he was told. He named Madrone—after all, she was gone and they would never find her.