The Fifth Sacred Thing

by Starhawk

  “I think we’re safe here tonight,” he said. “I say we don’t try to push on. What do you think?”

  Hijohn laughed. “If you expect me to say we should move, forget it. I’m not sure I could if I wanted to.”

  “Let me rest just a bit, and I’ll work on you,” Bird said. “What do you think, Littlejohn?”

  “Push on to where?”

  “I’m sorry,” Bird said. “I guess I just instinctively headed toward home. We should have discussed it.”

  “And where is your home?” Hijohn asked.

  “In the north. San Francisco. And don’t, for Goddess’s sake, tell me to call it Saint Francis or Frankie’s Place or any of that shit. Although some of us have taken to calling it Hierba Buena, since the Uprising.”

  Hijohn looked at him thoughtfully. “And just what kind of place is that?”

  “It’s a city,” Bird said. “And the land around it, the watershed. All the way up to the High Sierras in the east. And north up the coast. It’s beautiful there. Redwood country.”

  “I’ve heard about redwoods,” Hijohn said. “What are they like?”

  “They’re like … guardians. When you’re around them you feel protected. Watched over. They collect fog in their branches, way above your head. People say the spirits of your beloved dead hang out there.”

  He felt good, remembering the redwoods of Mount Tamalpais, the damp earth smell when you were down in a grove of them, the soft, rough, ridged bark, and the bay laurel trees raising graceful limbs in between and wafting their pungent perfume around you. A tune he had forgotten came back to him, and he sang it for them.

  “That’s the redwood song,” he said. “It kind of sounds like they are.”

  The music sang itself inside his head, and his hands ached for an instrument to chase it with. They ached of old wounds, too, and he felt a sudden stab of loss, looking down at them. But the music is still inside me, he told himself. I will find it again, somehow. I’ll have to.

  The sun was gone and the indigo air began to take on the chill tang of night. Bird considered building a fire. They had no matches, but he could always make a fire drill. It was a pain in the ass, but he knew he could do it. He’d done it often enough as a kid, the year they’d studied fire. That was the way Johanna ran the schools; she believed children should be taught about things from beginning to end. So they learned to make fire from sticks, and how to put out fires, and then studied all the chemistry and physics involved as they built steam engines and solar panels and tracked the course of the sun. He supposed it was a good way to learn; certainly they had never been bored, and he was always coming across bits of useful knowledge. Thanks, Johanna, Bird said silently. I wish you were still alive for me to say that to. But she had died, the same year his mother died, in the same epidemic. What would you advise me now about fire?

  “Don’t tempt your luck.”

  Maybe the voice was Johanna’s ghost, maybe just his own sense of caution, but he had to agree that a fire seemed unwise. He felt safe where they were—but not that safe.

  “It’s getting cold,” Littlejohn said.

  “Let’s get close together, under this bank,” Bird said. “We’ll keep each other warm.”

  They huddled together, letting the rise in ground behind them break the force of the wind. But the earth under them was damp, and Littlejohn shivered.

  “Don’t think about the cold,” Hijohn said. “There’s nothing we can do about it. Think about something else. Tell us more about your home, Charlie. Who owns the water?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean the water. Like, to drink and grow your food. Who owns it?”

  “Nobody owns it. You can’t own water where I come from.”

  “Somebody’s got to own it,” Littlejohn said. “Somebody always does.”

  “We believe there are Four Sacred Things that can’t be owned,” Bird said. “Water is one of them. The others are earth and air and fire. They can’t be owned because they belong to everybody. Because everybody’s life depends on them.”

  “But that would make them the best kind of thing to own,” Littlejohn said. “Because if your life depends on it, you’ve got to have it. You’ll pay any price for it. You’ll steal or lie or kill to get it.”

  “That’s why we don’t let anybody own them,” Bird said.

  “So if nobody owns the water, who decides who gets it and who doesn’t?” Hijohn asked.

  “Everyone decides together. Four times a year, each household sends a representative to the Neighborhood Councils to discuss water issues. Water Council coordinates distribution and arranges for the work that’s needed to maintain the system. Each house has its own cistern that fills with the winter rains. But that doesn’t give us enough for the whole summer. We draw from the streams and reservoirs and bring down water from the Sierras.”

  “What if you don’t agree?”

  “We keep talking about it until we do agree. It works out.”

  “What if it doesn’t?”

  “It always does. It has to, because we know what the alternative is.”

  “What?”

  “The Stewards, or something like them.”

  In the silence, they could hear the call of the night birds. The sun was gone but the wind had dropped.

  “Well, where we come from, you pay,” Hijohn said. “The Stewards control the water supplies; that’s how they took control of the government in ’28. The Millennialists backed them with funds and religious prophecies, and in return they put into law most everything the Millennialists believe. You’ve got to work for the Stewards and obey the Millennialist Purities, or you can’t even buy water and you lose your right to eat.”

  Bird sighed. “We studied the Millennialists in school. They were part of the history that led to our Uprising. Back in the twenties they had a lot of political clout. But it’s hard to imagine that people take them seriously. All that stuff about Jesus returning in 1999 and then repudiating the world because of sin.”

  “He came and left,” Littlejohn said. “Leaving us to fight sin, which is most things worth doing.”

  “And people really believe that?”

  “Plenty do,” Hijohn said. “Or pretend to, now. They have to, if they want a job and a roof and a full belly every now and then. Or they join us up in the hills and fight.”

  “It’s hard to imagine,” Bird said. “Even after where we’ve been.”

  “It’s harder to imagine a city where nobody’s thirsty,” Hijohn said. “That’s what we’re fighting for, but it’s still hard to believe it might really be true.”

  “Nobody’s thirsty in my city,” Bird said. “Nobody goes hungry. Nobody’s in prison.” Even to him, the words sounded unlikely, an article of faith more than a solid memory. “But we were hard hit by the epidemic. I don’t know what’s left, now. That’s why I’ve got to get back, to find out.”

  “I don’t suppose you’d change your mind, come back south to the hills?” Hijohn asked. “We could sure use someone like you. I’d always heard stories about Witches from the north with supernatural powers. But now that I’ve met you, man, I believe them.”

  Bird laughed. “My powers aren’t supernatural. In fact, as powers go, they’re fairly mediocre.”

  “Then I’m not sure I want to meet the ones you’d consider well endowed.”

  “Tell me about the hills. Who do you mean when you say ‘we’?”

  “Come and see for yourself. We’re fighting for what you’ve got. Fighting the Stewards and the Millennialists. It’s not so easy down here.”

  “It wasn’t so easy up there. People died. But we did it. We got free.”

  “For a while,” Hijohn said.

  “For a while,” Bird agreed. “We know they could come back any time, and I don’t know what we’d do if they came.”

  “What we do,” Hijohn said. “Fight. Go thirsty. Die. Maybe win a few small battles, once in a while. But if we had someone like you, to teach us wh
at you know—”

  “I haven’t seen my home in ten years, man. I don’t know who’s alive anymore or who’s dead. Probably all my folks think I’m dead.”

  “So they’re done mourning for you, years ago,” Hijohn said. “Why reopen old wounds? Come south, just for a while.”

  “I’ll think about it,” Bird said, to quiet him. “But there’s something else I want to know.”

  “What?”

  “Why are you both named John?”

  “It’s a tradition,” Hijohn said. “When you go to the hills, you leave your name behind. You become anonymous: John Doe. And it’s to do honor to John the Conqueror, the spirit who came over from Africa with the slaves, who brings hope to the hopeless. Because, to be honest, we don’t have too much hope of winning. But we’re fighting anyway.”

  Bird heard what he didn’t say: We are desperate. He felt Hijohn’s will like a physical pull. The man’s eyes were on him; even in the dark Bird could feel their glow. But he had to go home. He had to find out if he still had a home.

  Hijohn was silent. Bird could smell the sage wind off the land rise and blow out to sea.

  Littlejohn yawned. “I’m wiped out. You two must be really beat.”

  “Yeah, let’s sleep now,” Bird said. “In the morning, we can decide where to go.”

  When the sun rose, the night chill had seeped into every muscle and bone in Bird’s body. He was one solid ache, and he was sure Hijohn felt worse. But the cool wind that blew in over the water tasted of unfettered tides. Bird offered up gratitude to the spirits, for the moist fog on his face, for the absence of walls between him and the elements. They ate apples and the last of the berries.

  “You still determined to go north?” Hijohn asked.

  “Yeah,” Bird said. “And you? Still heading south?”

  “Yeah.”

  “How are you going to get around the camp if you head back where we just came from?”

  “Look.” Hijohn bent down and scratched a rough map into the dirt with a stick. “I can guess roughly where we are. Here’s the work camp, down in that flat area, and here’s these hills to the north of it. But all of it’s on this kind of bulge that juts out from the coast. I’m going to head east until I pick up the South Coastal Hills—the Motherrocks, we call them. They run all the way back down to Angel City.”

  “Can you make it that far? Alone?”

  “I won’t have to. I know where to find friends in these mountains. But north of here there isn’t much. You’ll run into the dunes, where there isn’t too much cover, and then hills again. Farther up, when you get close to Slotown, there’s one stretch where the old Coast Road runs right up next to the beach. The army still uses the road, and you can’t bypass it to the east; they’ve got the area mined. If you get through, into the Irish Hills west of Slotown, you’ll meet up with friends of ours who can help you.”

  “Thanks,” Bird said. “What about you, Littlejohn?”

  He shrugged. “There’s nobody waiting for me down south. I guess I’ll stick with you for a while.”

  “Well, then, this is goodbye,” Hijohn said. “It doesn’t seem enough somehow, just to say thanks, but there it is.”

  “De nada,” Bird said. He put his hands on Hijohn’s shoulders, sending him one last flood of energy that eased his own muscles as he drew it up from the earth. “Que te vaya bien, que vayas con Diosa. Que nunca tengas hambre. Que nunca tengas sed.”

  “What does that mean?” Littlejohn asked.

  “May it go well for you, may you go with the Goddess. May you never hunger. May you never thirst.”

  “Never thirst,” Hijohn said, as if he was considering the idea.

  “Merry meet, and merry part,” Bird said. “That’s what Witches say.”

  “I remember my folks saying that,” Littlejohn said. “And merry meet again.”

  “Take care,” Hijohn said.

  Bird filled Hijohn’s pockets with apples and acorns. They watched as Hijohn made his slow and careful way up the streambed. He rounded a curve, and vanished.

  “Vamonos,” Bird said. “Let’s get going.”

  5

  Above the sink in the small scrub room next to the epidemic ward someone had posted a sign: WEAR YOUR MASKS; PREVENT THE SPREAD OF DISEASES. Underneath, in handwriting she recognized as Sam’s, was a penciled note: This means you, Madrone! Madrone felt a strong temptation to scrawl something nasty back, but she restrained herself. No matter how many times she explained, he couldn’t seem to understand that she had other ways of protecting herself. And if they failed, gauze was useless.

  She placed her hands on the sink and drew in a long breath, renewing her grounding, her connection with the earth. Silently, she checked her own aura and renewed her wards, the guardians she had created for herself in the ch’i worlds. She pictured them buzzing around her like a swarm of spirit bees. Then she waited, watching the mirror until broken patterns of light came together as an image, a reflection from some other realm. After a moment, she saw a face take form: female, old. The lines that crisscrossed the face became a net of light, like a spiderweb glinting under the moon above a dark pool. Madrone felt hands behind her hands, power she could lean on. She turned and entered the ward.

  The big room was crowded with beds. Most of them were filled with children, who were especially vulnerable to the disease. Down the hall were wards for older people and pregnant women; she would visit them later. She stood for a moment, breathing in the air that carried the sweetish odor of death. Above it floated the pungent odor of moxa, the herb Lou was burning at the side of a young boy who lay still, his back full of acupuncture needles. She watched as Lou removed the needles, patting the boy on the shoulder and covering him with the blanket.

  She couldn’t look at Lou without thinking of Sandy. They had the same black silk hair, although Lou cropped his short and Sandy had let his grow down nearly to his waist. Usually he had worn it neatly wrapped and tucked at the nape of his neck, but when they were making love he would let it down to drape her like a tent. She had lain many times with her head nestled close to his, letting her fingers play with that hair, each separate shaft so thick and straight and spaced far from the others, a forest she could wander in.

  Lou’s eyes observed her quizzically over the white mask that concealed the rest of his face.

  “You missed the meeting, love,” he said. “Sam promised that if he caught you or anyone else without a mask, he’d give us all a demonstration of in vivo dissection.”

  “In other words, he’ll skin you alive,” Aviva said, coming up behind her. “He’s serious, Madrone. This time he’s really on a rampage.” Her own bushy curls were covered with a cap, and her white gown was spotless.

  Madrone shook her head. “He knows that’s not how I work. Since when does he make the rules for us?”

  “We all agreed to this one,” Lou said.

  “When? I never did.”

  “If you miss the meetings, you miss the decisions,” Lou said.

  “It was my day at Council. I can’t be in two places at once.”

  “No?” Lou raised his eyebrows. “What kind of Witch are you?”

  “The Wicked Witch of the West,” Madrone said, but she went and got a mask from the scrub room and put it on. With it covering her mouth, she felt removed, isolated. “I hate this.”

  “So who likes it?” Aviva asked.

  “You look tired,” Lou said. “Had any sleep?”

  “Have you?”

  “You’re working too hard,” Aviva said.

  “And you aren’t? You’re just lounging around here, the two of you, from six in the morning until midnight?”

  “Languishing on our bloated healers’ stipends,” Lou said. “How was Council?”

  “People are starting to get scared,” Madrone told them, filling them in on the decisions that had been made.

  “We’re all scared,” Aviva said. “What do you think about the disease? Do you think it’s a weapon?”


  “I for one don’t care,” Lou said. “I don’t care if it’s a Stewardship plot, a judgment by a vengeful God, or a misguided attempt at communication from space aliens. I just want to get rid of it. And I don’t want to discuss it.”

  “What do you need from me here?” Madrone asked.

  “A miracle cure,” Lou replied.

  “And while I’m working on it?”

  They conferred for a few moments about the progress of their cases. Then Lou and Aviva moved on, while Madrone stood still for a moment and scanned the room, letting herself sink one level down into trance, so that the bodies disappeared into an interplay of lights. She was looking for an opening, someone or something that would call to her. There’s got to be some way to find this thing, she thought. Goddess, show it to me and I will go wherever it leads, give whatever it takes.

  Bright lights and dim lights, lines and shadows pulled and danced. At last she picked out the form of a young girl, lying on a bed in the corner. She went over, picked the child up, and sat down, propping her back against the wall. The child was semiconscious, and Madrone could smell the sweetness of decay on her breath. She let her own breath take her down, down. Down to where sounds and smells disappeared, down to the level where everything was energy, ch’i, and, below that, through the place where fear and pain and the light of spirits moving across the veil gave way to something even deeper. The level of cause.

  Automatically Madrone’s hands soothed the child, moved energy to reduce her fever. But behind Madrone’s hands were other hands; behind her face hid the face of the Crone, the Old One, La Vieja, whose other name was the Reaper. Where Madrone was now, the upper world seemed dim. She was in the belly of Spider Woman, where the lines of probability were spun out into webs and nets. She could see them, some glowing and shining, some dim and broken, some filled with a sweet fragrance like fresh herbs, and some smelling of the sweet ketone stink of death.

  In this place, patterns of probability were laid out like shifts in a landscape, hills and hollowed valleys and curving roads. But she had been here before, time after time, gone down road after shining road, hunting, finding neither cause nor cure for the fever. There had to be another way.