The Fifth Sacred Thing

by Starhawk

  She peeked carefully out of her doorway. Nobody was in the hall. This was fun, in a way, like sneaking out of her mother’s house when she was a kid. Quietly she tiptoed down the stairs, tucking her cane under her arm and gripping the handrail to steady herself. Out the front door and there, she had done it. She was free.

  For a moment Maya stood looking at the door of the house after she closed it behind her. Up these steps she had come, so many years before, to find a home with Johanna when she had tired of Mexico, of being on the run. Here she had brought Rio home. Inside these walls she had told stories to Rachel, Madrone’s mother, and held tiny Brigid’s hand on the steps as she first learned to maneuver her own way up and down. Maybe I will return and walk back through that door, she thought. Maybe I will not. In any case, you’ve been a good house. You’ve sheltered me a long, long time. But you cannot shelter me now.

  She walked on. The summer gardens were parched from lack of rain, and the streambed was dry. The soldiers must have rebuilt the dam again. Oh, whatever came of this, there would be hunger. No children played among the dry brown sticks. No one moved on the walkways, except, here and there, an armed khaki-dressed figure or a ghost in white like her, on a mission of haunting.

  The Transport Collective had immobilized the gondolas, and the soldiers so far had ignored the aerial transport system. Maya would have to walk downtown. That was okay, the exercise would do her good. She would take one last slow look at the city she had loved for so many years. It still shone in her imagination as a place of magic, of gingerbread houses and green-topped hills and fairy spires. Goodbye, labyrinth of winding pathways. Farewell, streams and fruit trees and gardens. Adiosa, you cheerful and confident children who now scurry into your houses, afraid. Perhaps you are waiting for me to free you. Perhaps you already suspect I will fail.

  The morning had passed by the time she reached the old stone mansion atop Nob Hill where the General made his headquarters. The house had been built as a monument to the private wealth of one of the gold barons back in the nineteenth century, had become an exclusive men’s club in the twentieth, and after the Uprising a home for the very old, where they could be cared for in peace and dignity. Maya wondered what had happened to them, who had taken them in, whether any of them were as old as she was, why she was still alive.

  The garden in the grounds was still green and flourishing, she noted. The gracious steps of the house were lined with ghosts, silent and patient in their white cloaks. Maya could discern that in some of the watchers patience had hardened into apathy and desolation. Still they waited. No one emerged.

  She would not wait.

  She mounted the steps, leaning heavily on her cane. The ghosts made way for her, one young woman leaping up and offering her arm. Maya looked into her eyes for a moment, startled, thinking they were her daughter Brigid’s eyes. But no, not Brigid, just another dark-eyed, dark-haired young woman. Brigid was dead anyway, but ghosts should be dead, and Maya was wandering in the confusion of the old.

  The heavy front door was locked. She raised her cane and pounded on it. Silence. She pounded again, harder. The door opened a crack and a dark face peered out at her.

  “Get off the steps, or we’ll clear you off! You can’t come in here!”

  “You cannot keep me out,” Maya said, sliding her cane into the crack and butting against the door with her shoulder. But really it was her eyes that gave her entrance. For now she had slipped out of herself and something larger had slipped in, the Reaper, La Segadora, the Old Crone, the Death Hag. She had become the Implacable One. No boy soldier could withstand her. She pushed the guard out of the way and strode down the hall. He followed after her and tried to grab her arm, but she dangled her cane between his feet and he tripped and fell hard on the marble floor. I’m skirting the edge of nonviolence, she admitted, but while he was gathering himself up again she pushed through a pair of imposing double doors and found herself in the General’s office.

  The sunny room was lined with bay windows facing the north, looking out over the water to Mount Tamalpais across the Bay. The General sat behind a large oak desk, his feet on a faded but still beautiful oriental rug. Three of his staff stood at loose attention around him.

  Maya pounded her cane on the floor, and the General turned and stared. With his soft belly hidden behind the desk, he appeared to be a solid edifice of muscular flesh, topped by straw-colored hair cropped short. He peered up at her with eyes small and hard as buckshot.

  “What in Satan’s name is this? How the hell did she get in here?”

  “Sir—” the breathless soldier from the hallway began, but the General motioned him to be silent. He rose from his desk and came over to Maya, towering above her.

  “Who the Jesus are you?”

  Maya opened her mouth to say something reasonable, but what came out seemed to come through her from somewhere else.

  “Your death,” Maya said. “I am what you have always resisted and what you come to in the end. I am your fate.”

  “My fate is to exterminate the sinners who corrupt this world.”

  He was much taller than she, but suddenly her eyes seemed on a level with his. A voice poured through her, spilling out over him. “Your fate is in your blood and bones, where every person’s fate lies. Your fate is right here, arisen before your very eyes. I stand face to face with you.”

  “Who are you?” the General said again.

  “I am what you cannot escape, the gray in your hair, the lines on the back of your hand. I am the Reaper, the reckoning, the consequences of your actions. Clench tight your hopes and I will pry loose your grip. I am your destination.”

  She was a vessel for the voice as a streambed channels water that comes from some greater source, high and far away.

  “I am fate, and chance, your chance to rise to the great opportunity you have here. Yes, I see who you are, and who you might be. Your ancestors cluster around you. One of them is a small boy who watches as the Inquisitors drag his mother off, strip her naked in the public square, prick her with needles searching for devil’s marks, rape her, burn her alive. Yes, I see his eyes as he watches the flesh that meant his comfort and food crackle and char, as the hands that soothed him blacken. I see him wear that pain as armor, grow into it until it becomes his skin.

  “And now he is a grown man in a faraway place, Africa. Here he is on La Gorée, do you know that name? The Last Door, they called it, an island through which all slaves passed on their way out of the continent. And here he is, your illustrious forefather, in the rape room, violating a black woman while her own small boy is forced to watch. Maybe he leaves his seed in her, seed of pain that grows in her belly and somehow survives the Middle Passage through hell to be born. Not your ancestor, that one, but the father of fathers of someone else, one of these men here, maybe, or my own grandson. And the woman is able to love the child, as women do love, because she understands that what has been planted in her is the pain of a child, until this one too is torn away from her. Oh, it is awesome what human beings are capable of doing to each other and surviving. So many women harboring seeds of pain, nurturing, bringing them to birth so those offspring can enact their pain on some other woman’s body, and always, always with one hope—that somehow, someday, this will change. Someone will refuse to pass the pain on any longer. Who knows? Maybe you are that person?”

  The General was staring at her, transfixed. “Pain forms a man,” he said.

  “Or breaks him.”

  “A man is not made until he has been broken.” Then he seemed to shake himself awake again. “What is your name?”

  Maya took a deep breath. The Reaper deserted her, and she was just a woman again, old and small. She drew herself up to her full height and spoke with dignity.

  “Maya Greenwood.”

  “Aha. The writer?”

  “I wasn’t aware my reputation still survived in the Southlands.”

  “I once had the pleasure of burning a number of your books.”
r />   “A fan,” Maya said. “I’m flattered.”

  “You intrigue me,” the General said. “What did you hope to achieve, coming to me like this? Did you expect to win me over with your blasphemous babbling? I would have thought Maya Greenwood was smarter than that.”

  “I came to warn you,” Maya said, although her voice felt old and tremulous. “You cannot win here.”

  The General laughed. “Your grandson wouldn’t agree with you. He seems to think we can’t lose.”

  Now, Old Bitch, now would be a good moment for Divine Possession to strike. But Maya remained empty. Still, I won’t beg him or plead with him to let me see my grandson. “I have come to share his ordeal,” Maya said.

  “That can be arranged.” The General gestured to his guards. “Lock her up. But don’t work her over. Her heart might go out on us, and I’ve got a special use for her.”

  Maya sat down on the rug. “There is a place set for you at our table, if you will choose to join us,” she said as the soldiers dragged her away.

  The room they locked Maya in had once been an office. It still held a desk, if not a bed or a chair, and she perched on it, swinging her legs. There was no toilet but perhaps she would use one of the drawers as a waste bucket, when the need arose. They had left her water and a hunk of bread, but she would not touch their food. No, she would just close her eyes, and drift. She was close to Bird now; surely she would reach him now.

  But she did not reach Bird, only Johanna, who stood with her hands on her hips, observing Maya disapprovingly. “This is a fine predicament you’ve landed yourself in,” Johanna said.

  “I had to do it,” Maya said.

  “No, you didn’t have to. You wanted to, Goddess only knows why. Some unresolved Jewish guilt complex, maybe.”

  “You just can’t wait to come on over to our side, can you?” asked Rio, who appeared behind her.

  “I’m sorry you made them tear down the jail after the Uprising,” Maya told him. “I could have been locked up in a real cell that had a bunk bed and a toilet.”

  “If it’s creature comforts you were interested in, you should have stayed home, where you had a nice comfy bed and someone to warm it for you,” Rio said.

  “Jealous?” Maya asked.

  “Hah.”

  “Anyway, you know how it is,” Maya said, “when you get all fired up to commit some brave political act, and you feel invulnerable for a while, like you’ll never care about food or sleep again. But then it wears off, leaving you mourning for your bathtub and a hot teakettle.”

  “Maya, we’re with you,” Rio said. “Whatever happens.”

  Suddenly she was very afraid. Really, I’ve been afraid all along, she admitted, but what a good job I’ve done convincing myself that I wasn’t. Goddess, what have I done to myself? What have I done to Bird?

  “What’s going to happen?” she wailed. “What’s going to happen to me?”

  “Oh, you’re going to die, of course,” Johanna said, “Eventually.”

  “I mean now. What’s going to happen now?”

  “Now you’re going to get some sleep,” Johanna said. “See if you can curl up on that desk, and don’t let your Gandhi complex keep you from drinking some of that water.”

  “What do you mean, she’s gone?” Sam said. “Where did she go?” Suddenly he looked every bit of his eighty-some years. His face crumpled, and he gripped Madrone’s shoulder with a shaky hand.

  “She left us notes,” Madrone said, trying to keep her own voice calm. “I guess she slipped out this morning, while I was over at Lily’s and you were asleep on the cot.”

  “But that was hours ago!” Sam protested. “How could I have not noticed that she wasn’t here?”

  They were standing in the kitchen, where Mary Ellen continued chopping greens for supper.

  “I didn’t notice either,” Madrone admitted. “I came home and fell asleep. There were dozens of people here; I didn’t realize she wasn’t one of them. It wasn’t until I went to get her for dinner that I saw the notes.”

  “Let me see,” Sam said. He grabbed his note from Madrone, but his hand was shaking and his eyes were tearing. “Read it to me.”

  “Dear Sam,” Madrone read. “I’ve gone to haunt the General. Don’t get in a flap—it’s what I’m called to do, for better or worse. And the worst will be that they kill me, and really, Sam, at my age death can scarcely be seen as premature. I do love you. You’ve been a great comfort to me in a terrible time, and whatever world I’m in, I will always thank you. I regret leaving you alone. Forgive me, and please try to understand. Love, Maya.”

  “It’s suicide! Sheer bloody stupid suicide!” Sam began to cry. Madrone held him and soothed him, but she was crying herself. “I loved her, Madrone. I really loved her!”

  “I know. I know, Sam.”

  “And if they find out Bird’s her grandson—”

  “Don’t think about it, Sam. There’s no point in torturing yourself. She’s gone, now, and we’re just going to have to let her go. Or follow her with magic, not with worries.” Oh, she could sound so wise and cool. “Lie down a bit, Sam. Rest until supper. I’ll do some magic for her.”

  “Will you?”

  “I will, right now. You rest.”

  Madrone went out into the back garden of Black Dragon House. Unlike the front gardens, the back was still mostly green, although weeds choked the vegetable beds. Honeybees buzzed around the blue stars of prickly borage. Only the lawn was dead, and she lay down on the brown dry grass and closed her eyes.

  Concentrating on her breath, she slipped back into her bee mind. She saw, not the world of visual form as she knew it, but a multifaceted prism of light and shade intertwined with streaks of color. Traces of scent bombarded her, the heady clarity of borage, the perfume of the rose, the pungent pineapple sage. She could get lost in the twining, trailing scents, drifting in for miles—how tempting to pick one and follow it, track a particular sweetness to its source, return to the hive to dance directions.

  Nothing happened in words or even pictures, exactly, but more as an overlay of images and smells and movements and feelings, like the body sense of magnetic north, feelings of rightness or wrongness. And yes, as she approached the hive, disturbance. A buzz of fear and alarm; this was nothing they had ever known. Madrone exuded a calming smell, not the queen smell, which might trigger competition with their own queen, but something just enough akin to it that the bees relaxed. She was not a threat.

  Under their immediate distress was a deeper sense of alarm. Things were not right. Gardens they counted on were dying. So many of the flowers were gone, withered up early, dried on the vine. Everywhere they smelled fear and pain.

  Madrone let the honey of her body well up into the bee spot and began to speak to them, a speech of projected visions and pheromones, molecular scents on the air. Slowly they gathered, touching, tasting, until her body was covered with crawling bees. Help us, she said, and we will grow the green well-watered gardens again, let the borage run rampant, dance for you in summertime. You are part of our powers, our forgotten powers. Help us, please, sisters, help.

  Bird had been alone in the dark with the dead for so long that he was no longer sure he was alive. They had taken him back to this dark bare room, where time no longer passed but left him marooned in a vacuum, without gravity. Occasionally his body intruded itself with its pain, its hungers, its need to relieve itself. At intervals the door was opened, something resembling food was pushed in, the bucket of his wastes was replaced. Once in a while, he tried to remember his muscles, to keep them functioning and exercised, but he was too weak to sustain activity for long. Mostly he drifted, conversing with ghosts until the slender cord of vital energy that held him to his body stretched thin and fragile and frayed.

  He was lost not only in his own pain but the shadowy pain of multitudes of others, awash in guilt and fear and despair that he could no longer separate. Ghosts spoke to him, telling tales of their suffering. “You conjured us
up,” they seemed to say. “Now listen, listen. This is how it was, when the slavers came to my village, when the Nazis broke down the door and took us off to the camps, when the whites broke our temples and sent us to the mines, when everything we knew and cared about was destroyed. Listen to us, feed us, carry our pain.”

  No, I have nothing to feed you, I can’t carry my own pain, let alone the weight of all of yours. Diosa, I have too many ancestors, one history of oppression would be enough to inherit. Leave me alone!

  “Then listen, listen to us, we are your ancestors too. I sold my daughter to the slavers, I loaded the cattle cars, I smashed the temples of the heathens, I applied the lash, I raped. We are your ancestors, we are the unquiet dead. Feed us, heal us, listen to our stories. Or we will feed on you.”

  Go ahead. Eat me, kill me, let me have some peace.

  Maybe he was already dead, caught in the hell the Millennialists warned of. Familiar, it was so familiar, this place, as if he had already spent years and years here, eternity. Often he couldn’t clearly remember who he was and what he had done to merit this punishment. He had been weak, he had betrayed something, he thought, but he was not clear what or how or why or if he could have resisted or whose nightmare he was trapped in. And there were hell worlds after hell worlds to be lost in, too many of them, the underside of the last five thousand years of history, and he could find no way out because he had given in and accepted the power of the killers.

  “No, we want you to sing for us, speak for us, redeem our lives,” the ghosts clamored, victims and victimizers, their voices intertwined.

  But I can’t even redeem my own. I have no voice left, and I am going to die defeated.

  “Then we have no hope.”

  No hope, no hope, buzzed around his brain like a tuneless song. Having no hope, he felt no fear, and that was a small relief. Even when he thought of Rosa, what did it matter, ultimately, what happened to her? She would be just one more victim among legions of the dead.