The Fifth Sacred Thing

by Starhawk

  There was another way to heal, a dangerous way, a way everyone who had trained her had warned her against. Healers had died, trying it. But she was going to have to do something. She couldn’t bear to go through ’38 again. The city couldn’t outlast another mass epidemic. Even now, their survival was precarious; there was too much work to be done and not enough hands to do it. But more—there were limits to how much people could stand to lose.

  Am I strong enough? she wondered.

  Silence reverberated through all the levels of possibility. No one would answer her. Goddesses and Gods, ancestors and orishas walked these roads, but none would appear and guide her through this choice. It was hers alone, her geis, maybe. In her mind she used the old Celtic word for the dare you have to take, the task you cannot refuse, the taboo that is doomed to be broken.

  The child moaned in her lap. She was about six years old, her long brown braids tied with blue ribbons. Someone loved this child, carefully braided her hair, took pleasure in her prettiness.

  Deliberately, Madrone dropped her protection, envisioning an opening in her own aura, dismissing her wards, taking off her mask. She bent her head down over the child’s midriff to suck the disease from her solar plexus, feeling at the same time the ancient mouth of the Reaper draw the elusive thing she sought out of the child’s body into hers. The girl’s aura flared bright.

  It was one of the oldest forms of healing known, and the most risky. Absorb the disease; then cure it inside yourself.

  Almost instantly, Madrone began to fear she had made a mistake. The sickness moved so quickly. She could feel her ears ring and a feverish flush rise on her skin. She couldn’t see but she sensed something racing inside her, racing toward her brain. If it got there before she did … but already she wasn’t making sense. She felt dizzy and slumped back against the wall as sweat broke out on her forehead. She tried to call in power. Where was La Vieja, the Old One? Now Madrone herself felt old age creeping as an ache through her bones. Her blood was on fire, burning her youth away.

  Diosa, this thing moved fast! Why couldn’t she remember any Goddesses, any names of power? Or how to use her power? Things she’d known since she was a child. She wished she was a child; she wanted her mama, but Mama Rachel had died long ago in faraway Guadalupe. And Rio had come for her and brought her back to California to be safe, but now he was dead, and Johanna was dead, and only she was left with Maya: Yemaya, that was a name of power, that was the ocean, that was the true mother who could save her or drown her.

  I’m drowning, Mama. Help me, send me something, someone to help me.

  There was a sound in her ears like the roaring of the tide, and a light in her eyes like a moon over water, an old moon, Crone moon, crescent scythe of the Reaper. The tide surged at her feet; it was dark, alive, and as it receded it left behind a form that glided and spiraled and reared up with two heads—red-mouthed, gaping, fanged serpent’s heads—that turned to stare at her with their narrow eyes.

  The serpent’s scales gleamed in the moonlight, pearly, iridescent. Madrone approached, hands extended.

  “Coatlicue, Serpent Skirt,” she whispered. “Tiamat, Mother of all the Gods. Let me come into you, hide me, save me.”

  The snake hissed like the tide receding over a gravel shore. The heads arched, turned to regard each other, and fused into one, with one great open mouth, that bent down toward Madrone. She smelled blood and ocean water. She saw the live, darting tongue, as it reached for her, wrapped around her waist. Then darkness closed over her, and she was burning and drowning all at once, until she could open her eyes again and look out over the snake’s broad scaled snout.

  She writhed, she crawled, she glided over a network of shining threads, her nostrils overwhelmed by the sharp smell of death. Something was still chasing her and she had no legs to run, but the muscles in her long belly rippled and she moved on them like waves.

  She had lost her sense of time. She moved through a world of energies and causes that appeared like a forest of many kinds of trees, bordering on the ocean where the moon still rode the waves. She could smell her pursuer somewhere in the woods, getting closer, closing in.

  It came out of the trees on her right. Suddenly it had her by the throat, in the soft place at the base of her triangular chin, and she was strangling and gasping for breath, struggling to free herself from the jaws of something much bigger than she was. She tried to bite, but her mouth clamped down on metal. She writhed and twisted, choking and gasping for breath. Her serpent’s tail whipped back and forth, catching her attacker from behind and knocking it loose for just an instant. She sucked in a quick breath as claws gripped her back. Sharp teeth sank into the skin above her spine; in a moment they would sever the cord and she would die. Gathering her waning strength, she thrashed violently back and forth, but the claws held. Then something ripped loose from her back and she slid free, leaving her discarded skin behind.

  The thing she was facing was like nothing she had ever seen before. She saw it as a giant insect but constructed, bolted together out of gray metal forms. Clamped to its back with an old-fashioned bicycle lock was a huge piece of thistledown, which reminded her of the way the common cold virus appeared on this plane. As she watched, the down rose into the air, lifted the metal thing, and dropped it on top of her. Then she was battling it again, but the more she bit and twisted, the more she hurt herself. The thing grabbed her by the tail and swung her around. She could see the ground spinning, and the trees. In a moment, it would dash out her brains. She was going to die, as Sandy had died, and the others. This thing was bigger than she was and would kill her on a tree. A madrone.

  Madrone. As she said her own name, she shed again, sliding out of her skin and sailing through the air. The snake is kin to the bird, she thought, and shapeshifted, molding the ch’i of her body into scaly legs, wings. As a bird, she soared to the treetops, leaving the thing holding a clawful of snakeskin and colored scales.

  She had no time to find out what kind of bird she was, only that her wings swept low in iridescent blues and greens and her tail was splendidly long. The bird trembled, as in some other realm of reality Madrone’s body shuddered with fever.

  Then the thing attacked again, uprooting the tree where Madrone-the-bird perched. She flew high up, but the higher she flew, the more the thing expanded. As a bird, she could barely escape it. She could not destroy it.

  She was losing energy, too weak to match the thing’s strength or try to grow to its size. She needed to rest. And the power of the serpent, she knew, lies in shedding and changing, one skin for another, letting go and letting go. Giving her own wings one long shake, Madrone squirmed free, out of the bird skin, which fluttered empty to the ground as she shifted again, becoming very, very small, a fly hiding in the thistledown as the thing stumbled blindly about, searching.

  Cautiously, she crawled down to the lock that clamped the thistle to the monster. Finding the keyhole, she made herself smaller and smaller, until she could crawl inside. One by one, she tripped the hasps of the lock. The clasp opened, and the thistledown flew off.

  She could hear the monster roaring in rage. The sound reverberated through her; her body ached and screamed with it, but she slowly crawled out of the keyhole and down the body of the thing, down plates of metal bolted together. It wheeled and turned, hunting for her. The surface was slick but her fly feet clung tight and her wings helped her keep her balance. She moved along its shiny surface until she came to what looked like a large lag bolt in the center of the thing’s back.

  She needed a tool. She thought of the ocean again, the bright crescent moon shining just beyond her grasp. She needed hands to reach with, a form like her own human body that lay somewhere, sweating and gasping, containing this battle. Mujer Serpiente, mother of changes, let me be myself within myself. She shifted again, taking human form, clinging to the thing’s back like a monkey.

  Again, it screamed and twisted, spinning around and around, bucking and leaping, trying to dislodg
e her. She held on but she could do nothing else. She couldn’t reach the moonbow, couldn’t change anything. The monster moved with terrifying force; all around them trees were crashing; the fabric of cause was torn. It leaped up and slammed itself down on its back. Pain shot through her; she was crushed, unable to breathe, head and eyes throbbing. The forest was shattered, the beach pitted with chasms. Some part of her dimly knew what she was seeing: the ch’i-world reflection of her own physical body’s deterioration. Now holes were torn in the ocean, the water was sucked down into whirlpools, carrying the wind down with it, sucking the moon down out of the sky. Soon the light would go out. The ocean floor emerged, dry. But she reached again for the moon as it sank and this time she caught it, gripped it hard in her fist.

  In her hand, the moonbow became a crescent wrench. The thing rose up and began bucking and twisting. Holding on tight to its back with her left hand, she fit the wrench to the bolt with her right hand and began to turn.

  The bolt was frozen in place, and she began to feel despair. She didn’t have the strength to turn it. Her legs were cramping and her grip getting weaker. Sweat poured down her face.

  “Mama, Yemaya, Johanna, somebody, anybody,” she whispered. “Te suplico, I beg you, help me.”

  She called up her last reserves of strength and poured them all into her arm, her grip. The monster threw itself from side to side; her head was shaken back and forth until her neck ached with whiplash. But she kept pressure on the wrench. It seemed to move ever so slightly. The thing smashed down again, flinging itself on top of her. Once again pain shot through her. Her left hand cramped into paralysis, as frozen as the thing’s metallic claw.

  The wrench slipped off the bolt, and with enormous effort she slowly brought it back as the thing rose again, twisting and turning. The wrench kept sliding off the bolt. She wanted to scream with frustration, but when she managed to grasp the bolt again, and turn, she felt definite movement. She pushed harder, and the bolt moved a quarter turn.

  Now suddenly she had hope, and hope gave her energy. She turned the bolt again and again. The thing’s pace began to slacken. It bellowed and thrashed, but its movements lacked something of their force. She hurt all over, but centimeter by centimeter, turn by turn, the bolt came undone.

  The end came suddenly. The bolt turned, the monster’s head fell off and clattered to the ground. She was left sitting in a pile of metallic rubble that smelled of acetone.

  Madrone sat still. She felt cool. In the physical world, her fever must have broken. She had passed the crisis, but she was exhausted on every level of her being, as if her life force had been drained from her. She had won, but she wondered if she were going to be able to come back.

  Slowly she became aware that the landscape had changed. The forest and the ocean were both gone. Instead, she was in a place where all the lines of probability were gathered together, like many threads bundled into rope, like infinite paths converging into roads. Three roads. The crossroads. She was in the place where three roads meet. Facing her, sitting on a three-legged stool in the dust of the crossroads, was an old, old woman. She was dressed in a black cloak that seemed to shift and dissolve around her. She looked like La Vieja but, as Madrone watched, her face began to change, becoming scaly, its bones extending outward and the eyes narrowing into a serpent’s head. Her dress was red and black, like the flag of Guadalupe, Madrone thought. Hearing a soft sound, she looked down. The ground beneath her feet was alive with snakes, their iridescent scales gleaming and flashing as they glided along, their bodies making a soft sound on the dirt, shhh, shhh. And then she could hear them singing, their narrow tongues flicking in and out of gaping mouths.

  Mujer Serpiente, cambia su piel,

  Snake Woman, shedding her skin …

  The sound of the chant wove in and out of a soft hissing that surrounded her, and the serpent’s face that regarded her split down the middle. Beneath, she could see La Vieja, Tiamat, Dragon Lady, Snake Woman—the form of Coatlicue, Mother of the Gods they called Cihuacoatl—the midwives’ patron, her face chalk white as if covered with powdered bone, on her back a cradleboard tied with rainbow straps. Madrone dipped her head in respect. When she raised her eyes, Snake Woman had taken the cradleboard from her back. She held it out to Madrone.

  Madrone reached inside the mouth of the cradleboard, which was suddenly alive, a snake’s mouth, a birth canal pulsing and pushing forth something her skillful hands could guide to light.

  But what she brought forth was not a live child but a bundle wrapped in red and black cloth. Slowly, she unwrapped it. Within was a black obsidian knife.

  Suddenly Madrone felt cold, as if bone dust already were falling on her skin, leaching away blood and life. Is this what it means, then? she thought. Death?

  She reached for the knife, and it changed in her hand to something familiar, a surgical knife, like the one she used after a birth, to cut the cord. To cut the cord was to complete the birth, and to give birth was dar a luz, which meant to give to light, and death itself was a cutting of the cord, too, and a giving to light. Perhaps a greater light.

  She longed for that light, to fall into it, swirling down into depth beyond depth, into a deep, deep stillness where there was nothing but peace.

  From her own navel a cord twined, a pulsing twined spiral of red and a blue so dark it was almost black, a chain that held her. And the knife could free her. In a moment, she would cut the cord and be free. In just a moment. As soon as she remembered something. What?

  She had been in the middle of something; there was something she needed to think about, but what? Somewhere back where she had a body she felt, as from a great distance, a touch. She heard a whisper. Her name. Madrone.

  Why?

  She wanted to be with Sandy. And all the rest of them: Rachel, Johanna, Rio. With Bird. She hadn’t wanted to die at the hands of the monster, but really, she didn’t mind dying at all when La Serpiente offered her peace. Death would be so restful.

  The monster. The thing—that was what she had to think about.

  No, it wasn’t the thing, it was … what? Someone?

  The child in her lap. And the child on the next bed, the woman in the next room, the old man in pain. What did she owe them? Their very existence seemed suddenly to weigh her down.

  The cord twisted in her hands. It had become a snake, a pair of snakes, whose heads facing each other fused into the face of La Vieja/Snake Woman/Tiamat/Hecate/Coatlicue, all with the same challenging pair of eyes: not cold but implacable. The eyes were strands of gray appearing in her hair, wrinkles on the back of her hands. The eyes were a destination.

  Her own hands held the cord and the knife. Choice.

  The crossroads.

  Madrone’s mind moved slowly, like a diver underwater, pushing against all the weight of the ocean. She understood, suddenly, that she was not ready to die. And that it wasn’t death that was implacable but the long arm of life, reaching, always reaching, with the offer of choice.

  She would choose the burden of her vision.

  “Lend me your knife,” Madrone said, “and I will be your instrument.”

  Her eyes were open and someone was looking into them, chafing her hands and calling her name. She blinked and took a breath.

  “Madrone,” the voice said. “It’s Aviva. Madrone, can you hear me? Do you know who I am?”

  Madrone nodded. The motion made her nauseated. “I’m okay.”

  “Thank God!”

  The child on Madrone’s lap was sleeping peacefully. She shifted her gently onto the floor. Every movement made her stomach churn.

  “Up!” she gasped to Aviva, who helped her rise. Then she dashed to the bathroom and vomited.

  She crouched in the bathroom, shaken, shaking. Slowly, she grounded herself, called up earth fire to heal the wounds that didn’t show because they were not in her physical body. Wounds of the spirit.

  She was so tired. But in her palms a fire burned, a power demanding to be used. Gripping the
edge of the sink, she pulled herself up to her feet. Her legs were shaking. She had to steady herself with one hand while she splashed water on her face with the other. Breathe. Ground. She was alive, and that was the first victory. She had won through to this power, and that was another, even while her body screamed out at her for rest. Another breath, and she could balance on her feet. Another, and another, and yes, she could walk, unaided, back out to the ward.

  “What happened?” Aviva was waiting, sponging a sick child. “I thought we’d lost you too, for a moment.”

  “It’s okay,” Madrone said, but it was hard to talk, because she was still mostly in the spiderweb world of the shifting lines of destiny. Her hands were on fire. She could see the child Aviva tended, and when the fire of her hands touched the child’s throat, something shifted. Something fled. Yes, that was the way—and it was so easy now, except that she wanted so much to sleep, but they would die, then, while she slept, and if she could just breathe, and take another step to another bedside, and lay serpent fire on another destiny, and another, and another.…

  If she could just forget sleep, and rest, and food, and time, easy to do here in the timeless center, and let this moment of healing become her dwelling place.…

  Five hours later, she collapsed.

  6

  A black crow became Bird’s guide. He would see it fly up before them, to reveal a way across a ravine, or hear it call, beckoning them down a certain path at a crossroads. He and Littlejohn followed trails and overgrown dirt roads and fire roads, sometimes emerging onto a stretch of broken pavement buckled by tree roots, sometimes losing any semblance of trail and crawling on their hands and knees through the underbrush. The crow led them through the dunes that bordered the hill country and flapped down in an abandoned garden by a flat marshy lake where they were able to gather grapes and self-seeded tomatoes. They were still hungry, but they would survive.