The Fifth Sacred Thing

by Starhawk

  “And try to have a little fun.”

  The image of Isis rose up in the dreamspace even though Madrone attempted to fix her concentration somewhere else and banish it. Lily’s thin eyebrows made two perfect arcs.

  “Have a lot of fun,” she said. Then Madrone slipped out of the lucid place and into other dreams, where she and Isis lay next to each other, bronze against blue-black skin. But no one is steering the boat, Madrone wanted to cry. Isis placed a hand on Madrone’s lips, covered them with her own. She couldn’t speak, and then she no longer wanted to speak. The ocean rocked them gently as the boat drifted south.

  14

  A dry wind blew down the canyon. Madrone and Littlejohn climbed a trail that wound up the flanks of the hills above the bed of a dry stream. Madrone shifted the load on her back. Besides her own pack, she had slung a five-gallon water container, filled from the solar still at the coast. She wasn’t too sure about the safety of sea water, but Littlejohn claimed the distillation process removed heavy metals and toxins. And anyway, his look had seemed to say, when you’ve been here a bit longer you won’t care.

  She was in the South, at last. For almost three months, she’d stayed with the Monsters, healing and teaching and training. By the end of her second month, the survival rate among deserters was close to ninety percent. The work there would never be done, but it had passed the point of greatest urgency.

  Isis had sailed them down the coast, insisting that Littlejohn sleep on the deck. She was full of dire warnings and gloomy forebodings.

  “You watch your ass,” she said to Madrone. “Don’t do anything brave and stupid.”

  “I’m not stupid, and I’m not very brave, so I should be okay.” In fact Madrone was still afraid, but nobody else knew that, unless her fear leaked through her dreams and alerted Bird, back home. At times she felt him close to her and heard his song playing in her mind.

  The dry air sucked moisture from her cheeks and seared her lips. The straps of her heavy pack dug into her shoulders; she hooked her thumbs underneath to redistribute the weight. They climbed swiftly, hugging the cover of the feathery chamise and the broad-leafed toyon. Here and there the path ducked under the thin shade of a stand of live oaks, their curled, leathery leaves blue-green in the dusty air. Stands of sage anointed them with pungent odors as they brushed by. Overhead, a pair of vultures wheeled in slightly tipsy circles, waiting. She heard no sounds but their own muffled footsteps and the rattling wind.

  After a couple of hours, the streambed branched. They walked on the canyon floor, over the cracked mud of dry pools and the stones deposited by currents long ago.

  “Is there ever water here?” Madrone asked.

  “It flows for a few weeks, in the middle of winter. If the rains are good.”

  The trees were taller, sycamores with their mottled bark and great valley oaks. They were shaded by the walls of the canyon itself, and Madrone blessed the cooler air, which eased, slightly, the painful dryness inside her nostrils. She wanted to stop and drink, but Littlejohn didn’t suggest it, and she felt sensitive about depleting their precious water supplies.

  They were sheltered from view under the trees, and she could see Littlejohn relax, his walk becoming looser, more rhythmic. The canyon narrowed and the streambed wound on and on.

  They rounded a curve at a narrow point, and suddenly Madrone found herself staring down into the barrel of an old rifle. Its bearer looked to be about fourteen years old, a slight brown boy with long greasy hair falling over his eyes. She was impressed. She hadn’t seen him or heard him move.

  “Who is our mother?” the boy asked.

  “The earth is our mother,” Littlejohn replied. “How ya doin’, Begood?”

  “Oldjohn died last night,” the boy said. “We took his body up to the rock. Who’s that you got with you?”

  “The healer.”

  The nose of the rifle dropped abruptly. The boy’s eyes stared at Madrone with a mixture of awe and skepticism that made her uneasy.

  “Drink deep on the day of victory,” he said.

  Madrone was confused, but then she recognized that the phrase was a ritual greeting, like “May you never thirst.”

  “Que nunca tengas hambre. Que nunca tengas sed,” she replied.

  Littlejohn blanched. Begood’s eyes darted quickly around as if searching for someone who might overhear them.

  “That’s Spanish, isn’t it?” Littlejohn said. “I haven’t heard it since I was a kid, except from Bird when he’d get excited.”

  “Watch out,” Begood warned. “Anyone in Angel City hears you talk like that, you be in the pens before you can turn around, with no more claim to a soul to call your own. They don’t hold with foreign devil tongues, the Stewards.”

  He led them on through a barrier of brush, behind another outcropping of rock. There, on a flat stretch of ground where the valley floor widened, about twenty people lay sprawled under the trees. In the center, a ring of stones surrounded cold ashes. Two figures moved among the bodies, and they stepped forward to greet the new arrivals.

  “It’s the healer,” Begood announced.

  A man with a wild gray beard and staring blue eyes introduced himself as Baptist. The second figure was slight and thin, almost genderless in a ragged pair of jeans and a gray length of cotton wrapped round her head and upper body. Her name, she said, was Arachne, but people called her Rocky.

  “Drink deep,” everyone said, but nobody offered any water, and Madrone still felt hesitant to ask, even though her throat was raw and burning. She felt almost obscenely wet, as if every cell in her body was comparatively bloated. These people seemed to be covered with a fine layer of dust. Their skin had a leathery look to it, like the leaves of the live oak or the feather-dry foliage of white sage.

  She chewed her dry tongue and swallowed, which made her thirst seem worse. Looking around, Madrone felt dismayed. Was this the Web, the heart of the resistance, this collection of gasping bodies and old rags? Was this what she had come to serve?

  “Have you had much experience with flu?” Rocky asked.

  Madrone simply nodded.

  “Would you come look at Hijohn? He’s dying.”

  Rocky drew her over to one of the prone bodies. He was naked under the grimy blanket that Madrone drew back. A smell assaulted her, of old shit and dried urine and sweat. Rocky, kneeling beside her, looked up, a faintly defensive note in her voice.

  “We try to keep them clean,” she said. “But there isn’t enough water to wash them very often.”

  “That’s okay.” The man was emaciated, unconscious; his wizened head on his skinny body reminded her of a dried apple on a stick. Hijohn. Was this Bird’s friend? When she felt down the energy lines of the body, she could read traces of old breaks and healed fractures, a history of pain. For a moment, she thought she could almost hear a long sustained note, sung in Bird’s voice. She went deeper, feeling for the cause of his labored breath and weak pulse. Exhaustion. Fever and malnutrition. And, underneath, a virus she recognized as one of the simple ones that in the well-nourished produce a three-day illness, hardly worse than a bad cold.

  “Is he in withdrawal from the boosters?” she asked.

  Rocky shook her head no. “He was never on them.”

  Madrone felt a slight sense of relief, then a deepening of fear as she began to understand the implications. For she could heal, but if what they really needed was food, and rest, and water …?

  An old joke raced through her mind, something about instant water … just add water. She put it aside and began breathing and focusing to draw her spirit helpers, laying her hands on Hijohn. After a moment she stood up, went over to the streambed, and searched until she found a smooth, round stone. She held it to each of the four directions in turn, gathering energy. Then, returning to Hijohn, she passed it over his body, drawing out the sickness and shaking it off onto the ground.

  “His fever’s gone down,” Rocky said, touching his forehead.

  Madrone
nodded. “He’ll be okay. Can we give him some water?”

  Rocky nodded and returned with a small cup. “Hijohn,” she said, “can you sit up?”

  The man groaned and opened his eyes. Rocky supported his head while Madrone held the cup to his lips. She noticed how carefully he drank, first taking a small sip and holding it on his tongue for a long moment, then rolling it in his mouth, and then, after another long moment, swallowing. He repeated the process again. Three of his swallows drained the cup.

  “Can he have more?” Madrone asked. “By rights, he should drink and drink to flush his system.”

  Rocky looked alarmed. “I’ll bring him another cup,” she said. “But it’s been a bad year for water.”

  “We just brought ten gallons up with us.”

  “Yeah, but those are for the cisterns. For summer, when even the wells run dry.”

  “At least one more cup,” Madrone said. She worked on him again with the stone, trying to use energy for the cleansing that should have come from water, trying to still the clamoring panic in her body, which had begun to whisper insidiously, “If this is all he gets, how much will you get?”

  I can survive, she told herself. If they can survive, surely I can survive. But suddenly she was filled with the image of the stream that ran outside Black Dragon House. She could smell the moist earth of the gardens it fed, she could hear its musical voice and feel the slippery coolness on her fingers. What am I doing here? she asked, and then thrust the thought aside. For certainly there was no lack of work here for her.

  She worked on other men with fever and flu. As she looked around the clearing, she realized that she and Rocky were the only women.

  “Aren’t there any other women here?” she asked.

  “There are some. You’ll meet them, when it’s time,” Rocky said. Madrone sensed something concealed in her voice, but she couldn’t read the emotion behind it.

  “Are there any more to look at?” she asked, when she had finished tending all the men.

  Rocky hesitated. “There’s one. But he’s being cared for—differently.”

  “I’d like to see him.”

  Rocky looked at Baptist, who was walking toward them with an armful of firewood. A conversation took place between them in a few gestures, the raising of an eyebrow, the slight shrug of a shoulder. It made Madrone homesick. There was nobody here she could talk to like that, with the change of the set of her head on her shoulders or the soft escape of breath from her lips.

  “This way,” Rocky said. She led Madrone farther down the path, away from camp, to an isolated patch of shade under a sycamore. She pointed down, and Madrone looked at a piece of ground that seemed alive. As they drew closer and she made out the figure that lay there, she drew in a breath in shock. It was a human figure, entirely covered with swarming bees. They were crawling and moving over every inch of the body’s surface, setting up a loud and angry hum, forming in a small cloud of arrivals and departures. She couldn’t tell if the figure was female or male, awake or unconscious, whole or half devoured. She felt sick. It was like an image out of an old horror video brought to life.

  She moved to go to the aid of the figure on the ground, but Rocky grabbed her arm and held her back. “No,” she said, “he’s fine. They’re helping him. But he’s enchanted. Don’t touch him or you’ll make the little sisters angry.”

  Madrone stopped. Ground, she told herself. Listen. When she listened, she heard the hum of bees, businesslike, purposeful. When she felt for the man on the ground, she felt rest after weariness, healing after wounding. There was no horror there and no fear. Only in her own mind.

  “I don’t understand,” Madrone said.

  “The little sisters are our friends. They’re how we live up here. They feed us, and they tend the wounded.”

  Honey was antiseptic, Madrone knew that. There were worse things to put on wounds. And if they smeared wounds with honey, bees would come. But something deeper was happening here.

  “Can I go closer?”

  Rocky shook her head. “It’s not safe, because the sisters don’t know you yet. But soon the Melissa will come to give him water. Then, maybe.”

  They squatted down to wait. The hot sun beat on the back of Madrone’s neck. She could smell the blooming wild lilac; its scent made the air sweet and she could almost feed on it. It could almost ease her thirst.

  It was not long before they saw something appear from behind the trees, a woman wearing a cloud of bees like a cloak. Their buzzing was a sustained hum, like a chant. The air seemed to vibrate in harmony, and Madrone felt it move through her body like a sudden rush of intoxication. She smelled something on the wind, like the distilled essence of wild blossoms: honey. The woman seemed to be wearing no other covering but the bees; they crawled over her body like a second skin.

  “The Melissa,” Rocky whispered.

  The Melissa’s eyes, the only part of her not cloaked by the bodies of insects, gleamed darkly. A single bee broke loose from the mass and flew toward them, circling them a number of times as if sniffing them out.

  “Hold still,” Rocky warned.

  Madrone grounded herself. She had always liked bees, had even worked the hives herself from time to time, and she tried to beam toward this emissary her admiration and good intentions. The bee flew back to the swarm, disappearing among the others. After a moment, a hole seemed to open in the cloud, to reveal the woman’s face. She smiled.

  “Drink deep,” she said. “You are the healer from the North.”

  Madrone nodded. “Never thirst,” she said in English, since Spanish seemed to produce such shock and alarm.

  The Melissa gestured toward the wounded man, inviting Madrone to come closer. “Don’t fear the sisters,” she said. “With me, you are safe.”

  Together they knelt beside the body on the ground. Madrone at first had difficulty seeing an aura around him. The energies and colors were obscured by the flying bees. As she watched for another moment, she realized that the bees were not separate from the man. They had become his aura, his vitality, and their movements were shifting and sustaining his energy field much as she would have used her hands and her own spirit power to strengthen his link to life. As she watched more closely, she saw that the movements of the insects corresponded precisely to the treelike pattern of a healthy energy flow. The inner layer, of those who actually crawled on his skin, was like the etheric body, the most dense layer of the energy field. The others, swarming about a foot away, moved in a circular route from his feet up the center line of his body, branching out along his arms and continuing up over his head, to fan out and touch the ground before returning.

  When she looked closer, she could see his wounds. They looked like laser burns, and she winced in sympathy. There were raw patches over his face and down his left side, and his left arm had apparently suffered a long gash. But that was closed, the edges of the wound bound together with a brown, sticky substance in weblike lines. All the wounded places were covered with honey, and the torn flesh looked clean, pink, and healthy. She could sense no signs of infection.

  “Propylis,” the Melissa said, pointing at the binding on his arm. “And in here.” She indicated the water jug she carried, which she held to the man’s lips, giving him a few careful drops. “Taste?”

  Madrone nodded and opened her own mouth to receive a drop of something wet and sweet and strong. It lay on her tongue, burning like fire but tasting like all the compacted fertilizing power of the spring blossoms. For one moment, before it dissolved, she was no longer hungry or thirsty.

  “That’s wonderful,” Madrone said.

  “It is our way of healing. We don’t have much, here in the hills, but we have learned to use what we have.”

  “I would like to learn your way of healing,” Madrone said. “It’s very strange and wonderful. And maybe I can teach you ours.”

  “Maybe,” said the Melissa. “The sisters work with us to heal wounds, but we who are bonded to them cannot come near the sic
k. They have a horror of illness. In the hive, they kill the sick bees. The wounded, too—but over the years we have been able to teach them to work with us on injuries, as long as they don’t get infected. It was difficult to train them. We have had to enter into the hive mind and become part of it. But it has also become part of us. I don’t know if we can learn your magic. And if you learn ours—well, once you come into the hive, maybe you won’t want to leave. It’s very sweet.”

  Madrone spent the rest of the afternoon rechecking her patients in the grove and scouting the hillside and streambed for herbs. She was allotted a small amount of water for her patients, but fuel was in short supply. They lit fires only at night, Littlejohn said, so she couldn’t brew medicinal teas. She found a few water jugs of clear glass and filled them with bruised leaves and blossoms for sun tea. She would have liked to bathe her patients, but that was out of the question. The bees cleaned wounds; as for the rest, when the rains came, everyone would wash.

  But the rains were not expected for the next half year.

  “It’s not so bad,” Rocky told her. “This time of year, you can always hike up to the waterfall.”

  As dusk fell, Littlejohn lit a small fire in the ring of stones and cooked up a broth of stewed acorns. They sat together in a circle, after the sick were fed. Madrone felt her body crying out for something to drink. Baptist handed out cups, and Madrone restrained herself from snatching one from his slow hands. As Rocky poured water, Madrone stared at the clear stream, wondering how she could bear the dryness of her tongue for even another minute.

  When all the cups were filled, they lifted them high.

  “Drink deep on our day of victory,” they said in unison, and sat, gazing at the water for a moment. Madrone had been raised to treat water as sacred, but she sensed in that circle a reverence greater than she had ever imagined, a reverence she was rapidly coming to share. She swirled the water gently in her cup. She had never really appreciated the stuff before, how crystalline and transparent it was, how eager to take the form of its container, how it shaped and molded everything it touched. These hills, this flat bed of land, the course of the stream, the physical properties of the trunks of trees, the rounded shape of the stone in her pocket, her own body’s form and the texture of her skin—everything on earth was some revelation of water. Blessed water.