The Fifth Sacred Thing

by Starhawk

  “You’re cooperating with them?” Cress asked. “You’ve betrayed our strategy!”

  “I know.” Don’t apologize, don’t explain. Apologies could not help.

  “You were the one who made the glorious speeches about nonviolence in Council! You didn’t want to kill, you said, and everybody got so damn offended when I raised questions. And now you’re wearing their uniform!”

  “I told you,” Bird said, his voice toneless, “I’m working for them. I don’t defend it, it’s just what is.”

  There was a long silence in the circle. Bird’s two guards watched warily from the bench behind them.

  “Are you okay?” Sam asked. The lines on his face had deepened; he had aged in the last weeks.

  Bird wasn’t sure how to answer him. “They didn’t break anything this time,” he said finally. Except me.

  “Did they hurt you?”

  “That’s what they do, Sam. They hurt people. They’re good at what they do.”

  “You look okay,” Cress said suspiciously.

  “So do you,” Bird replied. He was mad, and that was a relief from feeling simply wretched. But he understood now what had puzzled him at the time, why they had been so careful with him, leaving no marks. They didn’t want another visible victim. No, they had cast him as a traitor.

  “Lay off him, Cress,” Sam said. “We trust you, Bird.”

  Bird shook his head, and let his eyes glance up to his guards. “I’m working for them now.” Don’t trust me. That’s why I’m wearing this damn outfit, so you remember not to trust me.

  “You’re on their side?” Cress said. “Is that what you’re saying?”

  “You heard what I said.”

  “They broke you down, and you gave in to them.”

  He had to say it out loud, Bird thought. He had to name it, rub my nose in the shit. But it didn’t really matter.

  “What do you want, Cress?” he asked.

  “Tell your keepers—”

  “Cress!” Lily broke in. “If we can practice nonviolence toward our enemy, we can at least show a little common courtesy toward each other.”

  “I apologize, Lily. I just can’t work up a whole lot of sympathy toward a collaborator, especially one who talked us into this whole miserable losing plan to begin with. How do we know when he first started working for them? How do we know he wasn’t collaborating all along, talking us out of armed resistance?”

  “Shut up, Cress,” Sam said. “This is getting us nowhere.”

  “Half of Water Council was arrested last night at the dam. They shot them this morning,” Lily said to Bird.

  Bird said nothing. He could hear a stream flowing somewhere behind them, but he imagined that it would be stopped again, before long.

  “Are you here to accept the ration cards?” he asked tonelessly, for the benefit of the guards’ recorders.

  “No,” Lily said.

  “Never,” Cress said. Sam shook his head no.

  “I’m Ming Pei from Toxics,” the young woman said. Bird didn’t recognize her, and surely he would have remembered that triangular cat’s face if he’d seen her before. “We’re very concerned about the filtration systems. They’re not going to work properly with the streams only flowing intermittently. Can’t you explain to them why we need to maintain the flow of water? It’s to their own benefit.”

  “It won’t do any good to explain,” Bird said.

  “Surely some of them, at least, must be reasonable human beings,” Ming Pei said. “Try.”

  “You don’t understand,” Bird said. “The General isn’t interested in filtration systems or stream ecology, he’s interested in taking control of the city. And he knows how to go about doing that. Believe me, he’s an expert. A third of his troops are bred and raised purely for the army.” Would they catch the information in that? “The Elite Corps. They don’t know anything different, and they’re not susceptible to nonviolent persuasion. The others, the ones they scrape up off the streets, they’re way high on doomdust half the time, and anyway they’re all hooked on the boosters. You can’t reach any of them with reason. Or with anything I can think of.”

  “They’re human beings,” Lily said.

  “That’s debatable,” Bird said.

  “They are capable of transformation.”

  “Maybe.”

  There was a long silence. “You want the ration cards?” Bird asked again. “I’ll be here every morning. Tell people.”

  “Shove them up your ass!” Cress said. The others remained silent.

  Finally Sam spoke. “We’re getting nowhere here. Perhaps it’s time to end this conversation. If you like, Bird, I’ll take a message to Maya for you.”

  Oh, shut up, shut up, shut up! Diosa, Sam, don’t you know any better than that? Bird shook his head, glancing back at his guards.

  “Sure, take Yemaya an offering for me,” Bird said, deliberately mispronouncing the name, accenting the second syllable so that it sounded like “Maya.” “Give the Goddess of the Ocean a shell. It won’t do any good.” Maybe that would cover it, maybe not.

  “You can come home, you know,” Lily said. “We know you are trying to do your best in a bad situation, Bird, but this hurts us. It hurts us all.”

  Bird shook his head. “I can’t. If it wasn’t me doing this, they’d just put someone else through it.” And send Rosa to the pens, and probably kill all of you.

  “That’s accepting their terms and letting them define the situation,” Cress blurted out. “Even if they kill us all, one by one, we should continue resisting. Anything else is just a rationalization for betrayal!”

  “Then I’m a traitor, all right, Cress? Would you like to shoot me yourself, or call in the Wild Boar People to do it? Go ahead, go right the fuck ahead!”

  “No, Bird. We won’t shoot you,” Lily said, laying a restraining hand on Cress’s shoulder, as he opened his mouth to respond. “Hush, Cress. I believe this meeting is over. Bird, there is a place for you at our table when you join us again.”

  He couldn’t hold back the tears that leaked down onto his face. Abruptly, he turned and walked away, his guards trailing like alert dogs. He could barely keep himself from dissolving into sobs, and Sam and Lily would have comforted him and taken him back in, and then his guards would have shot them all. Or worse. And then what would happen to Rosa? What would happen to her anyway? Was he just kidding himself to believe his actions had any impact at all on her fate? Oh, it was the oldest trap in the world, and he knew it, and yet he could not get himself out.

  People passed him by; he didn’t look at them or meet their eyes. His guards followed him but kept their distance, leaving him to walk alone in a bubble of inviolate air.

  26

  “Today,” Madrone said, “we’re going to work on anchoring.” Her students looked up at her expectantly. They were spread out over the courtyard, the light gauze shading them from the midsummer heat that made the inner rooms unbearable. The child Poppy was curled up in one corner, napping with a few other young ones.

  Summer Solstice had barely come and gone. She shuddered to think of what the heat would be like in August. Better not to anticipate, just to trust that she would endure as already she had endured more than she would have imagined possible. They had celebrated the holiday, although Madrone had stretched her imagination to create a ritual from their meager resources. Solstice was a time for offerings, for flower-decked spirit boats to be set ablaze as they drifted across the bay, for all-night bonfires and wreaths of roses and midnight outdoor feasts. Here they could not risk fire, and no flowers grew. Instead they had made a sun in the open court, with kernels of corn, and offered it to the marauding birds.

  How had they celebrated at home, she wondered? The vidnets were reporting the invasion as a stunning success, but there were no reporters allowed to cover the war in person, only press dispatches from the military Madrone tried her best to disbelieve. Nevertheless she feared they were, in essence, true. Her dreams were cloudy and
full of gunshots and sudden endings. Lily’s face appeared preoccupied, when she appeared at all, and she wouldn’t speak.

  I should go home, she thought. What is happening to Maya and Bird and the others? I should be there to share their suffering, to take care of them. But I’m needed here. I cannot drop this work now, half done.

  Over the weeks and months that Madrone had been training this gathering at Katy’s, many had dropped away. But many remained, from a spectrum of groups: city gangs and Angels and hill gangs escaping the summer heat. Littlejohn was down from the hills, along with Begood, who showed a strong talent for healing. Rafe and Gabriel, cool Angel blonds, had sensitive, skillful hands.

  Madrone was surprised with what she had accomplished. Her students understood basic sanitation and first aid, they knew acupressure points for relieving pain and strengthening ch’i, how to administer many of the drugs they acquired on raids and how to ease withdrawal from the boosters. Now she was guiding them deeper into the mysteries of healing, teaching them to feel and move the subtle energies that underlie the physical body.

  “Anchoring is a way to get quickly in and out of particular levels of trance,” she went on, “by keying each level to its own image and phrase and to a physical touch on a part of the body. So find yourself a partner now, and take a moment to acquaint yourself with your partner’s basic energy pattern, their aura. You can use any of the methods we learned before—whatever works best for you—your eyes or your hands.”

  They worked well together now, seldom needing her help. She squatted against the wall of the building, her knees drawn up to her chest, and let her eyes close. Katy was working with Rafe at the far side of the courtyard, but Madrone could feel her pain and anger like waves pressing her own body into the concrete. She wished she had never touched Hijohn, or had let him lie to Katy, who walked around now with a stricken look in her large dark eyes.

  Madrone had tried to talk to her about it, catching her outside in the courtyard after the others went to bed. “Katy, I’m sorry,” she’d said. “I really, truly, honestly didn’t know how hurt you’d be by this.”

  “Didn’t you?” Katy’s eyes were black sparks in the dark. “Or didn’t you care?”

  “Katy, I’m from a different place. A different world. Maybe I should have stopped to think it out—but it never occurred to me that what we did could hurt you.”

  “Don’t lie to me, Madrone. That just makes it worse.”

  “I’m not lying!” Now don’t get mad, Madrone told herself. If you get pulled into her anger, you’ll cut the last cord that swings across this gap, and she’ll be alone on the other side with the baby coming, and you’ll be alone here with all your skills, unable to help. “Katy, please, I’m asking you to try to believe me—or, if not believe, at least imagine that I might be telling you the truth. I didn’t know. I would never willingly have done something to hurt you.”

  She stopped, because there were corollaries she didn’t wish to pursue. Hijohn had known how hurt Katy would be, and it hadn’t stopped him. Which was, Madrone suspected, the real source of Katy’s pain.

  “Hijohn is a man,” Katy said, as if she were following Madrone’s thoughts. “And the best of them are all the same when it comes to sex. But women ought to stick together.”

  There’s a lifetime of assumptions here, Madrone thought, assumptions I don’t share and can’t even identify. She felt tired, suddenly, too tired to argue. I am alone now, she thought. Katy was as close as I had to a friend here, and now that’s gone. Hijohn was as close as I’ve come to a lover in a long while, and he’s cut off too.

  “Now that I know how you feel, I would never do it again,” Madrone said. “It’s not like we’re going to carry it on, or threaten what you and he have. It was just—one moment. An impulse. I was scared, Katy. I needed comfort, and he responded.”

  “That’s the problem with you, Madrone. Everything you need, you think you have a right to reach for and take. Every impulse you have, you follow. You get an impulse to take a swim in broad daylight in some rich woman’s pool, for Jesus’ sake, and endanger everybody’s life and everything we’ve built here. You get an impulse to have sex, you have sex. You’re like some animal! Arrogant as the rich people!”

  “That’s not fair!”

  “Anyway, it doesn’t matter to me whether you carry on or not. I’m through with him. You’ve changed him, and now you’ve poisoned what we had. I’ll always feel you in the midst of our lovemaking, if ever we do again.”

  Ah, Madrone thought, there’s a slight contradiction here. She’s through with him, yet still thinking about making love with him. Maybe there’s hope. Because they need each other so much in this place where love is as scarce as water. I would really hate to think I’ve wrecked what they had together.

  “Do you have to take it that way?” Madrone asked, her voice very low and neutral. “Can’t you take it as a gift?”

  “Don’t be patronizing.”

  “I just mean that every new lover expands the range of our possibilities, we say.”

  “That’s sick. Love is a feeling, a commitment, not a—a craft.”

  “A little skill doesn’t hurt.”

  “Maybe I liked him the way he was.”

  “Katy, you couldn’t have, honestly.”

  “How can you say that? What do you know about me or what I want?”

  “I know anatomy.”

  “You’re just being insulting.”

  I will try one more time, Madrone thought, and then let it go. “Katy, listen to the blessing we say to our lovers on Beltane Eve:

  ‘My love, you are a river fed by many streams.

  I bless all who have shaped you,

  The lovers whose delights still dance patterns on your back,

  Those who carved your channels deeper, broader, wider,

  Whitewater and backwater lovers,

  Swamp lovers, sun-warmed estuary lovers,

  Lovers with surface tension,

  Lovers like boulders,

  Like ice forming and breaking,

  Lovers that fill and spill with the tides.

  I bless those who have taught you

  and those who have pleased you

  and those who have hurt you,

  All those who have made you who you are.’ ”

  “Now I know I’m glad to be a Christian,” Katy said.

  Madrone roused herself and led the group into the next phase of the exercise.

  “Now find an anchor for this state, a place you can touch, as you breathe, to bring you back, a word you can say, an image to hold in your mind. Concentrate, make it strong.” She gave them a moment and then began a soft whispered chant to guide them into trance, down toward the level where emotions translated to plays of color and sound and energy. Yes, she could see Katy’s rage there, red lights flickering over a brown ball of pain. She could hear it, like a vibration, a thrumming that seemed to penetrate from outside her.

  Rafe was out of trance, alert, worried. Something was wrong.

  “Come back now,” Madrone said. “Use your anchors. That’s right. Bring yourselves up and out.”

  A shadow fell cold on the back of her neck. “Copter!” someone screamed. Everyone began to run frantically around the courtyard. A red stain blossomed on the heart of a child, she opened her mouth to scream and blood streamed out. Then Madrone heard the gunfire, ripping through the canopies, tearing into flesh and stucco and the tender bodies of spindly plants.

  “Inside!” someone yelled.

  “No! Don’t get trapped!”

  But they were already trapped. Madrone could see troops emerge from both passageways into the square. She tried to run, but there was no place to go. Where was Katy? And Poppy? The gunfire was loud in her ears. She expected that, at any moment, the red blossom would burst forth in her. A laser beam hit the canopies and they burst into flame, filling the air with smoke and drifting pieces of ash. She was beyond fear, only saddened, somehow, as she watched bullets
rip through the brave, struggling plants along the wall. So much work, so much care. All gone.

  Then someone grabbed her arm and jerked her roughly into motion. It was Rafe.

  “Come on!” he yelled, grabbing her arm as he pulled her over to the far edge of the courtyard. He shoved her behind him. She could see armed soldiers in a passageway so narrow that only one could fit through at a time. As the first soldier emerged, Rafe let something fly from his hand with a subtle, almost casual motion. Madrone heard a thud, and the soldier fell, a knife through his heart. While she stood, shocked, Rafe grabbed the laser rifle that clattered to the ground, shot the next two soldiers who emerged, and tossed a second rifle into the hands of Littlejohn, who dropped to his knees and began firing at the fuselage of the helicopter.

  “Let’s go!” Rafe shouted at her. The soldiers had dropped back from the corridor.

  “Katy!” she screamed, but he grabbed her arm and pulled.

  “You can’t help her. And it’s you they really want.”

  Behind her, she heard a dull moan and a sharp crack. She turned, to see Littlejohn twist and fall, the side of his head shattered, flecks of bone and brain plastered to the wall.

  “Come on!” Rafe grabbed her arm. They squeezed down the narrow passageway, emerging behind a spray of laser fire from Rafe’s rifle. The soldiers were stationed behind a barrier directly outside the opening, waiting to pick them off. Rafe halted. Inside Madrone’s gut, liquid fire churned. We’re still trapped, she thought. We’ll never get out of here.

  Then behind them they heard a whine of metal in air and a thundering crash. The helicopter went down, bursting into flames in the courtyard. She could feel the heat behind her and hear screams.

  “Outa here!” the lead soldier yelled to his men. “Take cover before the fuel tank explodes!” The soldiers turned and ran around the corner, to another entrance. Rafe held his fire, and when they were gone, Madrone followed him into the street.