by Starhawk
Carefully, she took a small sip on her tongue, as she had seen Hijohn do. Oh, this wasn’t a drink, it was a sacrament. Every gland in her body seemed to leap for joy; her heart was racing. Let it sit for a moment, feel the coolness, swirl it in your mouth to wet every cranny, then let it sit again, until it takes on the temperature of blood. She could flick her tongue and set up miniature currents and waves; in her mouth was an ocean, a whitewater river like the wild streams of the high mountains she and Bird had rafted together. Finally, finally, when she could hold out no longer, she swallowed, dividing that small pool into five or six or ten sections, taking just a little each time to let the dry throat bathe again and again in that blessed sensation of wetness. And then she began all over again.
When the cup was empty, she could have drunk another five. But nobody asked for more. They served her a bowl full of a food that was strange to her: a nut-flour paste mixed with honey. She would have preferred an honest plate of rice and beans, but she ate thankfully and, when her bowl was empty, could have eaten twice as much again. But nobody asked for or offered seconds.
When dinner was over, they sat around the fire, talking as it burned to embers and died to ash. Baptist and Rocky were shelling acorns and grinding them between flat stones, their hands working automatically. Madrone offered to help, but Rocky told her to wait and learn during daylight. Hijohn sat propped up against a boulder, wrapped in his blanket.
“This may sound like a stupid question,” Madrone said, “but what do you do up here? I mean, what’s the purpose of these camps?”
“Different purposes,” Hijohn said. He spoke slowly, wearily, but his face had good color. “First, we’re a refuge for the ones who just can’t take it anymore down below. We give them somewhere to go, mostly west and north of here, where we have larger camps above the beach. Maybe you’ll get up to them one of these days. There’s more women there, and kids even, and more water. But the camps down here, close to the city, they’re for raids. We let the Stewards know that everything ain’t under control. Maybe we blow up a water line one place or cut their communication lines somewhere else. John Brown, that the bees are tending, he got shot bustin’ people out of the pens. Sometimes we raid a food distribution depot, give the stuff away. Steal from the rich, give to the poor, you know.”
“And are you having much success?” Madrone asked. She was trying to keep her voice neutral, but some of her doubts leaked into it.
“Maybe this doesn’t look like much to you, but it’s growing all the time. We’re like fleas on the back of the beast, you know. Or like bees. One sting won’t do you much harm—but enough of them all together can kill you.”
Madrone stared into the firepit, where the last embers were turning from glowing red to gray.
“What do you really want from me?” she asked.
“Three things. It’s true, we need a healer. As you can see. I would probably be dead today myself if not for you, and I’m thankful. But more than that, the people here, we got to learn our own powers. We can’t depend on Witches from the North, we’ve got to have magic of our own. We got some, you’ve seen the bees. But we need more.” Hijohn’s voice sounded weak to her, and she wondered if, as a healer, she was remiss in not insisting he go back to sleep. But he continued.
“And there’s a third thing. The Web is strong, but it’s also divided. We got the camps up here in the hills, but we got houses in the city too. Lots of groups, different groups, and they don’t all know each other or trust each other. They don’t have a sense of being one thing all together.”
“And you think maybe I can provide that?”
“Maybe. You can provide a focus, maybe, that can bring some of them together. That’s why I’m hoping, after you’ve been up here in the hills for a bit and helped us out, that we can send you down to the city.”
The idea made Madrone shudder secretly, but she said simply, “I’m here to help. I’ll go wherever I can be useful.”
“I hate the city, myself,” Hijohn said. “Up here, whatever else is happening, you got earth under your feet, and trees, and air you can actually breathe. Down there, it’s nothing but poison. There’s grown men down there that have never seen a tree. But some like it.”
“What’s your city like?” Rocky asked a little shyly.
“We have lots of trees,” Madrone said. “Trees everywhere, and gardens. Fruit trees and walnut trees and avocados, wherever there’s a sheltered spot. We grow a lot of our own food, right in the city. And there’s water everywhere—not that we have a lot of it, but we conserve it carefully, in cisterns and graywater tanks so we can reuse it, and in the irrigation channels. But as much as possible we let it flow freely, in open streams that crisscross the pathways, so you can always hear it and smell it and sit beside it, watching it play with the light.”
“And people don’t steal it?” Baptist asked.
“Nobody owns it, so nobody can steal it. And everybody has as much as they need, because we all take care of it together.”
“But the poor people, what do they do?”
“There are no poor people. In our city, nobody is thirsty. Nobody goes hungry.”
She knew she was telling the truth, and yet her words began to sound unlikely, a fantasy tale of some mythical place she had invented herself, a dream too good to be true.
“Keep telling us that,” Hijohn said abruptly. “People won’t believe you, but that won’t matter. It don’t even matter if it’s true or not. Just keep telling us it is.”
“It is true,” Madrone said. “It could be like that here. We know a lot about reclaiming dry lands. Rivers could run through the valleys, like they did a long time ago. People could have enough to eat and drink.”
“Just let it be possible,” Hijohn said. “True is great, but possible is enough.”
“A lot of things are possible,” Rocky said, and Madrone agreed. One of the names of the Goddess was All Possibility, and Madrone wished, for one moment, for a more comforting deity, one who would at least claim that only the good possibilities would come to pass.
“All means all,” she heard a voice in her mind whisper. “I proliferate, I don’t discriminate. But you have the knife. I spin a billion billion threads, now, cut some and weave with the rest.”
“I’m a healer, not a weaver,” Madrone answered back.
“Same difference.”
15
It had been too long since Maya had walked out in the City. The hills were still green from the winter rains, the trees growing bushy with the new leaves of spring. The slanting rays of the late-afternoon sun lit leaves and flowers with an inner glow. Rose moon, she liked to call it, when everything was budding, burgeoning, bursting forth with color and scent and the promise of fruit. She felt giddy, attractive—not young, exactly, merely immortal.
She walked slowly, supported by Bird on her left and Holybear on her right. Not bad for an old lady, to be flanked by two such handsome men, she thought. Although Bird still worried her. Sam claimed the operation was a success; the casts had been off for several weeks now and Bird had quickly weaned himself off crutches. He walked with more ease and she seldom saw the pain lines crease his face. But she didn’t trust him. If her weight became a burden, he would never let her know.
Bird caught Maya’s anxious glances and smiled at her. “I’m fine, abuelita,” he said. “You can quit worrying about me.”
“I’ll never quit worrying about you. Especially not on a night when we venture forth to reconnect with our Jewish roots. Worry is an integral part of our heritage, you know.”
“Then worry about fending off Sam’s attentions,” Bird said.
They were invited to celebrate the first night of Passover at Levanah House, a Jewish collective out in the fog belt where Madrone’s friend Aviva lived. Sam would be there too; he had especially requested Maya’s company. She wasn’t sure how she felt about him. Over the last few weeks he had been a frequent visitor at Black Dragon House. Ostensibly, he was checkin
g on Bird’s progress, but he spent much of his time sipping herb tea in the kitchen with Maya.
“What if I don’t want to?”
“Then worry about fending off Rio’s ghost. And Johanna’s too, for that matter.”
“We were always very advanced about such things.”
Bird smiled, hoping she wouldn’t notice that his smile had a forced quality. Yes, he was better, but he still felt like a clumsy approximation of himself, not quite able to walk, or work, or play his music, never able to silence his own worries about what was to come.
The weather is all wrong, he thought. Instead of this ridiculous sunshine, we should have storm clouds, gray skies, gloom. Madrone had been gone for months, with no word but the occasional dreams Lily reported. Defense had sent other scouts south. They brought back word of armies gathering, massing, moving slowly up the old freeways, repairing them as they came.
And yet the rosebushes were still heavy with buds and the city was busy with its usual spring planting and mending and cleaning. That morning he had gone to the central market. Farmers were in from the Delta with bushels of rice and black beans and soybeans, the last winter broccoli and artichokes, the first ripe strawberries. He had maneuvered carefully through the crowds to buy dried apples and raisins and bags of walnuts to make the charoset, the ritual food that would be their contribution to tonight’s meal.
It was a good year, Bird reflected, as he browsed the stalls rich with surpluses. Sam had been encouraging him to walk, but only in the last few days had he felt strong enough to venture very far. He was profoundly relieved to see something besides the familiar walls of the rooms at Black Dragon House.
He hadn’t realized what a toll enforced immobility would take on him. Not the pain, but the nightmares, in which he woke again and again, alone in the dark, abandoned by the living and the dead. He hadn’t wanted to speak of it to the others, but they had sensed something, and after the first few nights Holybear moved a pad into his room and slept at the foot of his bed.
“You don’t have to do that,” Bird said.
“Maybe I want to,” Holybear said, removing the blue silk robe he wore over green silk pajamas and hanging it neatly on the back of the door.
“You want to get woken up five times a night by my stupid dreams?”
“Yeah.” Holybear settled down on the mat, folding his hands behind his head. “When your dreams wake you up, I want to be there. In case you need anything. And so you know you’re not alone.”
The nights passed somewhat better after that, and when Bird’s body had healed enough so that a chance touch no longer jarred and pained him, Holybear moved into his bed. His even breath kept the nightmares at bay.
But Bird was still disturbed by this morning’s encounter in the market. He had walked out of his way to avoid the area where musical instruments were sold. But as he’d turned to skirt the covered section where crafts and hitech products were peddled, he’d heard his name and someone had grabbed him suddenly in a hug so vigorous it nearly upset his precarious balance. He’d wobbled dangerously until hands steadied him from behind.
The small dynamic woman who had grabbed him pulled back with a grin. Her dark eyes were wet crescents under a sheet of black hair that she shook back from her face. “I heard that you’d risen up from the dead, like—who was that dude?”
“Lazarus,” said a deep voice behind him. Its owner moved around into his sight. “Good to see you again, man. ¿Cómo estás?”
“Sachiko, Walker—good to see you too.”
“How come you don’t come around the Guild, hombre? We could use you.”
Bird jerked his chin down toward his hand. “I’m not exactly playing much music these days,” he said.
He had thought he was over the hurt of that but he realized, watching Sachiko’s face register shock, then horror, then pity, and then carefully close to conceal all emotion, that he would never be over it.
“You don’t need to play to have ideas,” Walker said. “Besides, we’re your friends, aren’t we?”
“A long time ago,” Bird said. “I don’t even know who’s in the Guild now.”
Walker proceeded to fill him in on all the woes and triumphs of the Musicians’ Guild over the last decade. Bird tried to smile, but as he listened to accounts of death he felt mostly pain. He was remembering what Madrone had said, that they had lost a third of the city. Yes, it was true, and it hurt.
“Come around,” Sachiko had urged him again. “You can still sing, can’t you, Bird? And write? Any fool can play guitar, but nobody else writes songs like you did.”
Maybe he was needed, after all. Maybe half a musician was better than nothing.
But he couldn’t accept that. Maybe he would never again be more than half himself in every other area of life, but music was too important. Better to let it go than to bring a shoddy offering to the Goddess.
“You used to have a beautiful voice,” Sachiko went on.
“My voice is shot,” Bird said. “Just forget it. There’s no music left in me.” He had thought maybe there would be, when Madrone was still there, and he had tried, for her. But she was gone, and he couldn’t seem to try for himself. Abruptly he turned away from Sachiko and Walker and walked off without saying goodbye.
“You’re awfully quiet,” Maya said to him. “Are you okay?”
“I told you to stop worrying about me. Let me worry myself in peace, all right?”
“So now you’re the one who’s worrying!”
“You bet.”
“Madrone?” Holybear asked softly.
“Of course I’m worried about her. Worried sick. And I’m worried about this city. Council heard our warning, but nobody seems to know what to do. We have no arms worth speaking of, even if we could reach consensus on how to use them. I tell you, I wish I’d gone south again, just because I don’t think I can bear to be here when the armies come north.”
Maya was silent. Although she tried, she could think of nothing to say.
“Everything’s so beautiful,” Bird continued. “The streams are full of water, and the markets are spilling over with food and flowers and crafts. And it all seems unreal to me. What good is it all if we can’t defend it? And how do we defend it without becoming what we’re defending against?”
“I can’t answer that,” Maya said. “But look, tonight is the Seder, when we remember how the Jews were freed from slavery in Egypt. The great liberation holiday. If it happened once, who’s to say it can’t happen again? We have to believe it can, Bird, even if it goes against our common sense. We have to believe in miracles, just as we have to believe that the days will get longer in the springtime, that the rains will return in the fall. What could be more of a miracle than that?”
“I wish the future looked that dependable,” Holybear said.
“It never has been, certainly not in my life,” Maya said. “I remember Johanna and I, when we were about twelve years old, walking home from school during the Cuban missile crisis, wondering if we were going to hear the whistle and see the flash. And yet, against all odds, here I am in a beautiful white dress, walking out in a city where streams run clear through fertile gardens and nobody goes hungry or lacks shelter or companionship or beauty. Worried, mind you, by a possible romantic entanglement in the tenth decade of my life.”
Bird smiled. “You want me to cheer up?”
“Immediately, before I’m forced to reinvent the profession of psychotherapy. Oh, I know you need your depression and despair, certainly you’ve earned your right to wallow in misery, but I’m selfish. This could be my last Seder, and I want to enjoy it.”
Maya, Bird, and Holybear turned a corner and headed for the base of the tower supporting the bright-painted gondolas that would carry them high over the city’s twining paths and gardens. The tower was newly repainted by the Transport Collective so that iridescent colors played in subtle patterns across its struts. The windspinner at its crown was marked with a spiral. As the blades revolved, the spi
ral turned inward, a vortex sucking the eye in and beyond.
“I don’t like that spinner,” Maya said. “It seems ominous, somehow.”
“That’s because you’re a writer,” Holybear said. “You think in symbols. In my case, it’s just a constant reminder of a math class I had to drop my third year at the university. Shall we take the elevator?”
“I can walk,” both Bird and Maya protested in unison, and then laughed.
“I’ll meet you on top,” Holybear said. “Since I’m the one carrying half a ton of charoset, I’m going to take the elevator.”
Levanah House was built for formal entertaining, with high-ceilinged drawing rooms whose French doors opened onto a back patio. Now long plank tables covered with white cloths flanked by an odd assortment of folding chairs filled the gracious rooms. Aviva was bustling about with carafes of wine, a rare treat these days, and plates of matzoh, the flat ritual bread. Sam came forward to greet them. He smiled at Maya, a speculative light in the dark eyes that nestled under his bushy brows, and gripped her in a firm hug that lasted just a beat or two longer than was necessary. All right, Maya admitted to herself, there is an attraction here, if I wanted to get myself mixed up with such an old coot—not that he isn’t two decades younger than myself. But who’s counting? she asked herself as he looked at her with frank appreciation.
Sam greeted them. “Any news of Madrone?”
She shook her head.
“I’m sorry. I hope she’s okay. She’s a rare one, you know. A rare spirit.”
“I know.”
He gave Bird’s legs a professional glance. “How’s the hip?” he asked.
“Better, you old butcher. A lot better.”
“And the hands?”
“Slow,” Bird said, in the voice that warned off further questions. And slow was the word for them, he thought, creaking up and down the piano in labored scales as he attempted to demonstrate some simple exercise for Rosa. Sometimes he regretted agreeing to Sister Marie’s request that he give the girl piano lessons, but she had been so persuasive. “Rosa’s lost her whole family,” Marie had said. “Even the baby died last week. Oh, Bird, it would mean so much to her. She’s very musical, and it would give her back something of her own. And besides, she’s at that age … you know.”