The Fifth Sacred Thing

by Starhawk

  “You mean if I’d sung the right song to those guys, or said the magic words, they would have changed just like that?”

  “Who is to say? I have heard that you are a fine musician.”

  “I was once. Not anymore.”

  “Then you have denied the gift that perhaps was meant to be your true weapon. I’m sorry to hear it.”

  “I haven’t denied it. It was taken from me.”

  “No. A gift like that cannot be taken.”

  “It can be destroyed.”

  “No. If you think so, it is because you have not yet truly learned to use it. And when you do, who knows? It may prove to be a weapon more powerful than all their bombs and rifles.”

  “It doesn’t sound very practical to me, Lily,” Bird said. “I’m sorry to say so. But I’ve seen it, down there. You haven’t.”

  “Bird, child, like your grandmother we Nine are of another era. We have stood, eye to gun barrel, with the greatest military machine the world has ever produced. The forces of the Stewards are nothing but the last vestiges of its power. We are not naive about armies and military power. On the contrary.

  “But I ask you, what is practical? Would it have been practical for us to devote our scarce resources and human energies to building weapons and recruiting a standing army, when we needed every scrap of earth and drop of water and the power of every human hand for survival, for healing the earth’s wounds? War is the great waster, as much in the preparations for it as in the waging of it. We learned that, at least, from the last century, as that same military drained the country and destroyed our true wealth. But we have nothing left to waste. We would have traded an uncertain future for sure misery and still not have been able to withstand the armed might of the Stewards.”

  “And where does that leave us, when armies come marching up the peninsula?” Maya asked.

  “It leaves us with what we have built of this city and this watershed, which is in itself a possibility not counted on by those who would attack us. That is where our hope lies. We are what we wanted to become,” Lily said.

  “But can we preserve what we are?” Maya asked.

  “To wage war, one must believe in an enemy. If we refuse to be enemies, how can they fight us?” Lily said.

  “Easily,” Bird said. “They can walk right over us.”

  “I don’t deny it’s a gamble. None of us, even the strongest Dreamers, knows what will happen. Only that there is hope but no certainty. We must continue to listen,” Lily said. “And heal. You must heal, Bird. You’ve been to war. You’ve spilled blood, and you’ve suffered. You need cleansing.”

  “I’m sure I do.”

  “Do you have a power place you can go to?”

  “I did ten years ago,” Bird said. “This time of year, you’d need skis to get anywhere near it. And I have to admit I’m not quite up to skis.”

  “I’m glad you admit there’s something you’re not up to,” Madrone murmured.

  “Go somewhere,” Lily said.

  “Where I need to go, where I’m promised to go, is back. Back to the South.”

  Lily closed her eyes, listening deeply to an inner voice. Golden motes of dust swarmed in the late-afternoon sun.

  “Yes, someone must go there. But not you. That road is not for you now.”

  “That remains to be seen,” Bird said.

  “It has been foreseen.”

  “They asked for a healer,” Madrone said. “Maybe we can find somebody from the Healers’ Council. There’s a lot we’d like to know about their biotechnology.”

  “Ah, Madrone.” Lily turned and gave her a searching look, then smiled. “What do you dream these days?”

  Madrone sat silent, reluctant to answer the question. “In my dreams, I do what I should be doing awake,” she said finally. “I take care of people.”

  “And do they get better? In waking life?”

  “Apparently so.”

  “Cheater,” Maya said. “You’re supposed to be resting.”

  “I can’t control my dreams.”

  “The hell you can’t.”

  “Leave the girl alone, Maya,” Lily said. “As Bird has said, these diseases are attacks. Well, how do you think we work? She’s already a healer; now she’s becoming a Dreamer.”

  “She shouldn’t be working at all,” Maya said. “She should be regaining her health.”

  “But she is deeply entwined with the city’s group soul. To regain her health, she must help us all regain our health.”

  “She needs to learn to take care of herself,” Maya said.

  “Would you please stop discussing me in the third person?” Madrone interrupted. “I’m right here, lucid and fully functional.”

  “Notice what you dream, Madrone,” Lily said. “The road to the South may be for you.”

  “The hell it will,” Bird said. “If you think I’m not strong enough to go, look at her. She can barely climb a hill without gasping.”

  Madrone gave him what he called her “fuck you” look, but respect for Lily’s presence kept her silent. I’ll end up going out of stubbornness, she thought, because I resent Bird’s attempts to protect me, even though the thought of going terrifies me. I’ll end up going to prove I’m not afraid, when I am. But no, it’s not even thinkable. I’m needed here.

  “This all should be discussed in full Council,” Maya said, rising to her feet.

  “Of course,” Lily agreed.

  “But we wanted to consult you first,” Bird said.

  “Naturally.” Lily smiled. “What else is Defense Council for? And if you’re smart, you’ll have a private word with the Water Council first. Cress would be good. Don’t tell him I suggested it.”

  “Thank you, Lily,” Bird said. “Please give our respects to the others of the Nine.”

  “Given and received,” Lily said.

  11

  In late October, or Ancestor Moon as some liked to call it, Black Dragon House became a shrine to the dead. Over the years Halloween, now called by its original Celtic name of Samhain, had merged with the Mexican Day of the Dead, El Día de los Muertos, celebrated on November 2. Now the holiday season extended for weeks. Families set up altares in memory of loved ones. Children sucked on sugar skulls and played with toy skeletons. Dancers, musicians, and artists prepared the most elaborate Pagan rituals of the year, while the Sisters next door celebrated masses for All Souls and All Saints. On the final night, half the city turned out in skeleton masks to parade through the streets.

  Bird flatly refused to attend any public gatherings. “You all go ahead,” he said. “I’m just not ready. I’ll be fine by myself.”

  “Don’t be stupid,” Madrone said. “We can celebrate at home this year.”

  “You don’t have to for my sake.”

  “Maybe we want to,” Holybear said. “Maybe we’re grateful you’re back among the living, not ranked with the Beloved Dead.”

  They prepared the house for their private celebration. Up in the ritual room, votive candles burned continuously before old photos. Sage and Nita cut banners out of thin colored paper and tacked them along ceiling beams and table edges. Holybear raided the garden for marigolds, the flower traditionally used for offerings to the ancestors.

  Maya made an altar for Johanna and Rio that commandeered one corner of the living room. In Johanna’s favorite chair, she placed a stack of needlepoint pillows and a rainbow-colored knitted afghan. On Rio’s she folded the stained sleeping bag he’d carried on so many trips. On the table between them she placed books, along with the brightly painted skeletons she had bought in Mexico long ago—a female skeleton addressing a group of children for Johanna, a male skeleton carrying a basket of food for Rio. And candles, votive candles in glass jars with inscriptions to High John the Conqueror and the Seven African Powers, the orishas. And shells, small cowrie shells on a basketry plate for reading oracles, large cowries for abundance, conch shells with their openings carved for blowing, beach shells and rocks from the coast. Alo
ng the table’s edge, redwood boughs and pine cones surrounded big mugs that would once have held coffee but now held the substitute brewed from grains.

  “One more epidemic, one more round of deaths,” Maya sighed, “and the living are going to be crowded out of the house between Samhain and Yule. As it is, there’s no free horizontal surface to set down so much as a teacup.”

  Madrone set up a small altar for Sandy next to the door of the room that was now Bird’s. She covered a low table with red cloth, and beside his picture she placed a collection of herbs and tinctures, his flute, a bowl of rice, his poetry books, and his stained gardening gloves. She stood a vase of chrysanthemums between a carved statue of the Irish Goddess Brigid, for his Celtic great-grandmother, and a small statue of the Goddess of Compassion, Kuan Yin, to honor his ancestors from China. Then she sat in the hallway and cried. After a while she heard Bird’s heavy footsteps clumping up the stairs. He came and sat down beside her and put his arm around her shoulder, not saying anything, just sharing her grief. She felt comforted to have him there. These were the good moments, when they could just be together, without arguing, without worrying about what was going to come. Finally she stopped crying, and he kissed her.

  “Did you set up an altar for me when I was gone?” he asked.

  “I tried. Maya would never let me. She said it was bad magic; it was wishing you dead. We had terrible fights about it.”

  “What would you have put on it?”

  She hesitated for a moment, then said, “Your guitar, of course. I tried to set it up on top of the piano. I had a miniature windsurfing board and a pair of skis and candles and flowers.”

  His silence intensified so deeply that if she hadn’t been touching him she would have believed he had disappeared.

  “Where did you go?” she asked. “What are you thinking?”

  “I was thinking you might just as well have set the altar up. That Bird is dead.”

  Best not to respond to that remark, Madrone told herself. Instead she asked him what altares he was planning.

  “Maya and I did a small one for my mother in Maya’s room,” he said. “You should come see it—it’s beautiful. Maya saved all of Mom’s rock collections, from the time she was a girl, and her notebooks where she worked out the original theorems for intelligent crystal technology.”

  “Maya is the world’s worst pack rat. She can’t get rid of anything.”

  “The whole time we worked on the altar, Maya kept grumbling, ‘I named her Brigid, for the Goddess of Poetry, and what did she like? Rocks, nothing but rocks. Other girls played with dolls; she played with rocks, talking to them, dressing them up, giving them little rock tea parties, counting them over and over again. How did I produce a child like that?’ ”

  Madrone laughed. “She ought to be grateful. If it wasn’t for your mother’s way with crystals, we wouldn’t have the Net, and Maya would be writing longhand instead of tapping away on her keyboard. What are you going to do for your dad and Marley?”

  “Just play their music. I fixed the speakers on the sound system, and Maya has a whole collection of discs, every saxophone solo my dad ever blew and all of Marley’s percussion recordings.”

  “I should do an altar for my mother,” Madrone said. “But somehow when it comes to the point I never can. I don’t know why. Holybear did a nice one for his mom, dripping in lace. And with a nice picture of her—I don’t remember her ever looking so beautiful in life. But then she already had cancer when I first knew her. We’re lucky we come of African and Indio stock; that milk-white skin is a real liability.”

  She’s chattering, Bird thought, dodging something.

  “Do you remember your mother clearly?”

  Madrone looked up at him. “Why do you want to know?”

  “Memories are precious. Even bad ones. They make us who we are.”

  She sighed, nestling deeper into the shelter of his arm. “Sometimes I remember her rocking me and singing to me. And the way she smelled after a day in the clinic, of medicines and disinfectant and just a little tang of the sour smell of the poor. And once, I remember, she took me into the jungle with her to gather plants. She told me not to be afraid of snakes, to sit quietly and listen to the animals and plants and try to understand what they were telling us. Mostly I just remember a feeling, a sense of safety and warmth and everything being okay. And then …”

  She stopped speaking. She could never remember what had happened, only a sickness in her stomach, a pressure in the back of her eyes. Bird tightened his arm around her. It’s there in your touch too, Madrone wanted to say. The same warmth, the same peace, the little crawling worm of fear.…

  “Then what, querida?”

  Why was he probing this wound? Did she ask him how he felt about Brigid coughing her lungs out in the big epidemic? Or seeing his father shot down in the street during the Uprising? Did Nita talk about the day she went home from the university to find both her parents gasping for breath and dying almost in unison? No, they were all a bunch of orphans, except for Sage, whose father was still hale and hearty up in the mountains. They had all been bereaved. Better not to whine about it.

  He patted her gently. “What happened?”

  “Then I remember this bare little room in a bare little house, where there wasn’t much to eat but I couldn’t complain, because everybody was so afraid there. I never saw her again, but somehow I knew she was dead.”

  He held her closer, for a moment, but she pulled away.

  “Then Rio came,” she went on quickly. “I’d never seen a man who looked like him before, with such white bushy hair and eyebrows and a big white beard. Like the pictures of Santa Claus in one of my books. Although not as fat. So I trusted him. I thought he was going to take me to the North Pole.”

  Bird laughed. “Was it a disappointment to land here instead?”

  “A bit,” Madrone admitted. “I wanted to see the reindeer.”

  “I remember when you arrived, that first night when we all came over here for dinner to meet you, my mom and dad and Marley and me. How old were you? Six? Seven? You were so little and pretty and sad.”

  “You were nice to me,” Madrone said. “You and Marley went outside to play ball, and you asked me to come along. And you spoke Spanish to me, because I wasn’t used to so much English. Your accent sounded pretty funny, though.”

  “I fell madly in love with you,” Bird said. “You awakened some instinctive male protective urge in me.”

  Madrone stiffened abruptly. “Well, you can curb it now,” she snapped. “We’re not seven years old anymore.”

  He pulled back from her. Where did that come from? he wondered. We were so close just a minute ago, but she’s like a cat with a wound, who lashes out when you stroke too close to the sore place. And aren’t you the same? a voice asked him. We could fight now, he thought, but instead he grinned at her.

  “But I’m still madly in love with you.”

  She stuck her tongue out at him, and he caught it between his lips and wrapped his arms around her and kissed her tenderly.

  Here is the peace, the safety, that was shattered long ago, Madrone thought. In his arms. I should let him shelter me a bit, stop jabbing at him, leave my own fear behind.

  But the fear remained.

  Samhain night was Madrone’s twenty-ninth birthday, and they spent it cooking. By family tradition, the birthday celebrant was allowed to request a favorite meal. Because Halloween was the night the ancestors returned to visit, they combined her birthday feast with an ancestor feast, each making a dish that would be pleasing to their own ancestors. Madrone’s favorite food was the mole Maya had learned to cook long ago in Mexico that took twenty-four spices and seven different kinds of chiles and three days to prepare.

  “That’s bound to please somebody dead,” Madrone said.

  “Rio always liked it,” Maya admitted, “even if all his ancestors were Irish and Cockney. I’ll mash up some potatoes on the side.”

  Madrone insiste
d on cooking too, even though it was her birthday. She made pupusas in the style of Guadalupe, to placate the ghost of the father she never knew. Holybear baked challah, Nita made rice and beans, and Sage made an English trifle with pound cake, strawberry jam, and real cream.

  “What should I cook?” Bird asked, feeling a little superfluous in the flurry of activity that filled the kitchen.

  “A salad?” Nita suggested.

  “Yeah, I could do that.” He didn’t sound excited.

  “What did your dad like?”

  “Greens, black-eyed peas, corn bread, sushi, Thai shrimp soup, and that cream of carrot soup that Johanna taught my mom to make.”

  “Well,” Maya said, “you cook up a mess of greens in vinegar, and Johanna may well materialize.”

  When dinner was ready, they placed small portions of each dish on plates and set them out on all the altars to the dead.

  “Another feast of staggering variety, if questionable digestibility,” Holybear said. “Here’s to Madrone! May she live, if not forever, at least for a good long time yet!”

  Over dessert, they told stories about the dead. Madrone told the one story she knew about her father: how he had been a student in the University of Guadalupe until one morning he stepped out of his front door and tripped over the body of a child who had died in the night from hunger. Instead of going to class that day, he had gone to the mountains to join the revolution.

  Bird talked of his brother, Marley, how in the drought of ’33 he had gone up on Twin Peaks and drummed for four days without stopping, until the rain came. Nita spoke of her great-grandmother, who had come over from the Philippines after World War II and raised eight children alone after their father disappeared with another woman. Sage told about the night her great-uncle Seth, an itinerant Louisiana preacher, stopped a lynching by talking in tongues until he went into convulsions, giving the intended victim a chance to escape. Maya was unusually quiet, concentrating on her knitting even when Holybear told the story of his grandfather Ben’s most famous political trial, an event she had witnessed personally.