The Fifth Sacred Thing

by Starhawk

  “I have got to have a bath,” she said finally to Rocky one morning. “I don’t care if I have to hike back down to the coast or I have to commandeer a water truck single-handed. I just can’t live like this!”

  Rocky laughed. “Maybe somebody can take you to the waterfall. It’s a two-, three-hour hike to get there, so it doesn’t often seem worth it to me. But if you want to go, I’ll ask Hijohn to take you. He needs to exercise, build his strength back up before he goes off on a raid again.”

  “That sounds like a long way,” Madrone said doubtfully. “Maybe I shouldn’t.”

  “I guess they can all survive without you for an afternoon. I’ll pack you some acorns.”

  Hijohn came for her a little while later. He had a sack of acorns slung across his back and a rifle over his shoulder.

  “Ready?” he asked.

  Madrone nodded. The rifle made her nervous. Arms were not generally in evidence around camp; she hadn’t seen any since her arrival.

  “Do we really need that?” she asked.

  “I wouldn’t bother to carry it if we didn’t need it. We’ll be going outside the area our scouts keep guard on. We could run into patrols, anything.”

  “And if we did, you’d shoot them?”

  “If they saw us, and we couldn’t get away from them, I might have to. Does that bother you?”

  “Of course it bothers me. It makes me sick to think about it. Doesn’t it bother you?”

  “I try to avoid it,” Hijohn said. “But this is a war, Madrone. And that’s what war is about. Killing or dying.”

  “I know about war,” Madrone snapped. “I was born in Guadalupe, down in Central America. My mother was killed by a death squad. During the Uprising, I saw people shot. I know it happens. But that doesn’t mean I have to accept it or like it.”

  “You don’t have to like it,” Hijohn said. “But you do have to accept it. Unless you know of an alternative, up in your miracle city?”

  Madrone was silent. What was happening in the City? she wondered. Were they carrying offerings of spring flowers down to the Bay and chanting ancient stories of Persephone’s return? What would they do when war came to them?

  “No?” Hijohn asked.

  “We’re not a miracle,” Madrone told him. “We’ve just learned how to live in peace with each other. That’s not so hard to do. But what will happen when war comes to us—I don’t know.”

  “In the meantime,” Hijohn said, “let’s go have our bath. Any trouble, lie flat, let me handle it.”

  Hijohn led Madrone to a path almost invisible in the thick brush. They followed a stream that at first was nothing but a suggestion of damp, a trickle of mud, a string of small puddles covered with the green slime of algae. Farther up, they came upon a slightly deeper pool, maybe the depth of a finger joint, still scummy and stagnant. As they hiked on, they saw the almost imperceptible beginnings of movement in the water, a mere suggestion of ripples. They followed the streambed past rock pools and hollows until the slow trickle became a flow. At last they heard the sweet and musical sound, note upon note, of falling water.

  They scrambled over a ledge of rock and climbed on. Madrone felt she could drink through her ears, she was so thirsty for even the sound of water. At last they reached the pool, knee-deep at most, and the falls only a thin stream sliding down a sheer rock. At home, Madrone thought, we wouldn’t have called this a puddle, let alone a waterfall, but she wasn’t complaining. It was enough of a fall to have a voice, and to have hollowed out a rounded space in the sandstone cliff where reflections danced.

  They knelt and drank. The water tasted slightly of algae but Madrone didn’t care. Diosa, it was good, so good, to drink her fill, all that she wanted. She dipped her hands in the water and splashed it over her face, letting the drops fall back down, laughing. When they finished drinking, they filled their water containers.

  “I’ll wander off, if you like, and let you bathe in peace,” Hijohn said.

  “You don’t really have to,” Madrone said. “I mean, where I come from we’re not shy about nakedness.”

  “You sure?”

  She nodded and slipped out of her shirt and pants. His eyes followed her as she stepped into the pool, squatted, and splashed herself. Maybe this isn’t wise, she thought suddenly. It’s too suggestive. The pool was so small they couldn’t both fit in without rubbing against each other. Hijohn turned away, perching on a rock and turning his back to the pool and looking out over the canyon they’d hiked through. Madrone found herself mildly disappointed. You’re incorrigible, she told herself. Just because you haven’t had any sex for a while. Shame on you. He’s not even really what you’d call attractive, except that clearly in these parts, he’s the alpha male.

  She rubbed sand over her skin to wear away the ingrained dirt, scrubbing hard as if to clean away her thoughts. Water was better than a lover anyway, she thought, it reached more of her intimate places, penetrated her pores more thoroughly, left her clean. She scrubbed her scalp with sand and rinsed her hair, then climbed up on a rock to dry.

  “Your turn,” she said to Hijohn. “I’m afraid it’s a bit muddy, now, though.”

  “I don’t mind.” He smiled at her. Yes, he has a really nice smile, she thought. “Keep watch down the canyon, will you? If you see anything suspicious, give a yell.” He placed the rifle on the ground beside the pool, carefully within his reach.

  Dutifully she turned and looked down canyon. Which will keep my eyes from straying where they ought not to go, she told herself, aware of Hijohn undressing behind her. The bright green of new oak leaves, the blue-green of white sage, and the yellow-green of the budding tops of white-barked sycamore made moving patterns in the gray chaparral. Wild lilacs bloomed in white-blue clusters of tiny star-shaped flowers that sweated perfume, sending the bees into frenzied bouts of work. Orange butterflies darted over black-eyed Susans that bloomed beside vines of the wild white morning glory and other flowers she couldn’t name, silver, purple, blue.

  “I hope you meant what you said about nakedness,” Hijohn said, suddenly appearing behind her on the rock, “because I’ve just washed our clothes.”

  She helped him spread them out to dry. They sat sunning themselves, the rifle lying at Hijohn’s side. A foot of space separated them, and the air between them seemed to press against her bare flesh.

  Madrone’s hair was nearly dry. She sat up and began twisting it into braids.

  “Why don’t you leave it loose?” Hijohn asked. “It looks pretty that way.”

  “It collects things if I don’t braid it. Wraps its little tendrils around leaves and twigs and tries to hang me from branches. Really, I should cut it but I can’t bring myself to, yet. Sandy always liked it long.”

  “Who’s Sandy?”

  “My compañero, partner, lover. He was. He died last summer.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  They sat in a silence that eventually began to feel awkward.

  “Have you always lived like this?” Madrone asked Hijohn. “How did you come to the hills?”

  “You wouldn’t think it to look at me,” Hijohn said, “but my father and mother were both actors in the widescreens. Real good-looking people. When the Stewards took over, they let the Millennialists clean up the industry. They wanted everybody to sign the Millennialist Creed. My dad wouldn’t do it. Neither would my mother. A lot of folks in the industry resisted and wouldn’t sign. One day they rounded them all up, sent the women to the pens. That was the last I saw of my mom. My dad had been out on location with a crew, wrapping up the last shoot he’d been hired for before the crackdown. Some of the guys got word of what was happening, hid out in the desert, armed themselves. My dad snuck into town and grabbed me out of the school where they’d stuck me, and we joined them. I was nine years old. We began raiding the pens, but we never did find my mother.”

  So he’s my age, exactly, Madrone thought. To look at him, he could be forty.

  “What are the pens, exactly?”
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br />   “Some of them are like whorehouses, where they service the soldiers. Some are like farms, where they breed soldiers and runners and other things.”

  “Oh.” It seemed inadequate, but she could think of nothing else to say. These are things too horrible to comprehend, like the African slave trade or the Nazi death camps. They left her numb in response. But they were real, and happening now. They could even happen to her.

  “I’m sorry about your mother,” she said, her words sounding flat and stupid.

  “That was a long time ago. I’m sure she’s dead now. Women don’t survive in the pens for twenty years.”

  He’s gone numb too. How else do you bear the unbearable memory, the image that burns the back of your eyes? Like me, he is a motherless child.

  “So you see why I carry a rifle,” Hijohn went on. “If it was a choice between killing a guy or letting them take you to the pens, which would you rather I did?”

  The pens are real, and they could happen to me. It was a cold thought. Not a new thought—I know what happened to Bird, to Hijohn himself—but it seems so much closer here, so much more real.

  “I can’t answer that.” Madrone turned to meet his eyes, but they were fixed on the trail that led back downstream below them. “I understand why you carry a gun. It’s just that I was always taught that the ends don’t justify the means, that the means determine the ends you can reach. That peace can’t grow out of violence.”

  “No, but violence can clear away some of the underbrush,” Hijohn said. “Make a little space and light.”

  “I’m not from here,” Madrone said, touching his arm lightly and then drawing her hand back. “I can’t presume to tell you how to fight. But I believe there’s got to be another sort of power, somewhere, somehow, different from violence and maybe in its own way stronger, if we can learn how to find it and wield it.” Is that the type of power I’m meant to gather? Can I find it in these dry harsh hills?

  “Get down!” Hijohn said suddenly, shoving her so hard that she rolled off the rock into the brush. In an instant he had the rifle and was lying, prone, gazing into the scope.

  “What’s wrong?” Madrone whispered. She fought to steady her own breath. Her pulse throbbed in her throat. Diosa, we were talking theory and now it is happening. What if he kills someone to protect me? What if he doesn’t? Goddess, Maya, why did I come here?

  “Someone’s coming up the path,” Hijohn whispered. “Back off slowly, behind the rock, so it covers you. I’ll follow.”

  She crawled backward, the stony ground hard on her knees. Hijohn slid gracefully down the rock, his eyes never leaving the path. Madrone could hear no footsteps, only the hum of bees in the bright sunlight.

  A bee circled her face, broke away to nose Hijohn. Oh, Goddess, that’s all we need, to get stung right now, she thought. But Hijohn slowly lowered his gun.

  “I think it’s okay,” he said. “It’s the sisters.”

  Then the sound of bees filled the canyon. Thousands of them seemed to be buzzing and humming and darting out to taste the nectar of her sweat.

  “Come out, Madrone,” the Melissa called. “The sisters have sent for you.”

  Madrone slowly stood and came out from behind the rock, next to Hijohn. The Melissa’s eyes were dark hollows behind the living skin of moving bees that covered her face and body. She looked alien, no longer quite human.

  “What do they want with me?” Madrone asked.

  “It’s time you learned to be one of us.”

  Maybe it was the rush of adrenaline still in her bloodstream, but Madrone’s heart was still thumping, her breath still shallow and tight.

  “What do I have to do?”

  “You must be initiated. Now is the time, while the wild lilac is still in bloom.”

  “What does that involve?”

  “For the next nine days, you will belong to us.”

  “Nine days! I don’t know if I can be away for nine days.” She looked at Hijohn, half begging for an excuse, a way out. Hijohn only shrugged.

  “When the bees call, we don’t argue,” he said.

  “But people will die,” Madrone said, “if I’m not there to tend them and heal them.”

  “Others will live, if you gather power,” the Melissa said. “Come!”

  Madrone could not refuse. Quickly she put on her still-damp clothes and followed the Melissa back down the canyon.

  The Melissa led her on a side trail over a ridge and down to another streambed, this one nearly dry. They hiked up to a rocky outcropping where long ago a river had scoured a small hole in a bank, a dome-shaped cave just large enough for one person to lie curled up inside. Outside the cave sat a group of women, each cloaked in bees like the Melissa. Together, they appeared less like human forms than vortexes of whirling energies, a dance of beating wings that fanned the air around them and threw the brown dust into whirlwinds. They greeted Madrone with a bobbing gesture that set the bees humming even louder. The noise filled Madrone’s head, canceling thought and memory, leaving nothing but a kind of primal fear.

  “What’s going to happen?” Madrone whispered.

  The Melissa did not answer.

  There is nothing to be afraid of, Madrone told herself. Where there’s fear, there’s power. Strangeness, it’s just strangeness, mammal fear of the insect world, breathe it away. But they closed in around her, and for one long moment she fought stark panic.

  She was surrounded by bees, humming and buzzing so that she could no longer think or feel or fear. Hands pulled her shirt over her head, slid her pants down and off her feet, unbraided her long hair. They poured honey over her body and rubbed it all through her hair. When the Melissa brought a shell to her lips, she had one last urge to resist, to hold on to herself unchanged. But the Melissa jerked her head back and poured the liquid down her throat so she had to swallow or choke. She gulped it down, swallow after swallow, tasting fermented honey and something else, feeling her throat and belly catch fire, and the fire shoot through her and change her. Everything around her disappeared and there was nothing left but sweet fire inside her, and outside, the buzzing, fragrant air.

  Sweetness. She was immersed in sweetness. Her sense of smell was augmented. The scent of wild lilacs on the air now became the overriding quality of the universe. Each breath filled her with the promise of food and love and abundant life. Sweetness carried her, launched her on wings. She was suspended in the scented air, following her nose to bury herself deep in the heart of blossoms. Her body felt the magnetic pull of the North Pole just as it felt the pull of gravity. Petals brushed her with their moist velvet touch, and she plunged into their depths, filling her nostrils with scent until her whole body quivered, extending her tongue to sip delicate nectar so that she was all sweetness, inside and out.

  Some human part of her mind cried out, fighting to contain the aromas that moved through her and around her, to name them, describe them, limit them. Sage. Lilac. Those were names she could hold to, and names kept her anchored to herself. Oak. Madrone.

  “Don’t fight the change.” She heard the Melissa’s voice, coming to her not in words but in a rasping vibration, a tone in the air, a scent. “Let go. Let go.”

  She was falling; then she was flying. Lilac was not a name but a realm of the air that called her into places where her whole body throbbed with delight. Sage was a universe, pungent, bracing. Hold on! her human mind cried. “Let go,” the Melissa buzzed and hummed and murmured. Madrone’s own fear was a stench she could hardly bear. The meat of her body stank of blood. “Rise,” the Melissa said. Madrone wanted to clutch her human form but she no longer had hands to grip with, only wings that beat incessantly, gossamer propellers to carry her away from something lying dead below her that she did not want to remember. No, Mama, not now. What are you doing here? You are long ago and far away and I want, and I don’t want, to be pulled down to drown in the warm red milk of your body. The air was filled with a sound that might have been her own voice screaming.


  “Let go,” the Melissa whispered. “Let yourself rise. Follow the sweetness.”

  “Rise,” mumured the voices of the sisters, whether human or bee Madrone could no longer tell. “Rise and fly. Fly away.”

  Yes, and why not? Why not fly, when it was so easy, and her wings were pulling her into the air, pulling her apart the more she tried to hold on. But if she just let go they would lift her. She could let them lift her away from all the horrors locked in her own human memory, and dissolve, transform, take wing.

  Madrone was lying in the cave, with no awareness of how she’d gotten there. It was warm and felt safe, like a womb, like a hive. She was covered in honey and there were bees with her constantly, a blanket of them, feeding from her body. The tickling of their thread feet, the almost imperceptible rasp of their tongues brought every nerve alive in her body. Then something stung her in the center of her forehead. It pulsed and throbbed, she couldn’t even call it pain; in this state the word had no meaning.

  She was moving in the dark safe hive, where body brushed against scented body, learning from movement and smell what the hive knew, the paths through the air to the nectar flow, the health of the brood, the golden warmth of the sun. And under it all, the queen’s smell, something that crept into her and soothed her with a deep sense of rightness, the way the milky smell of the breast soothes a baby. I remember this, she would have cried out if she had had words; oh, Mama, I have missed you so—but before she could sink into the brood smell, her bee body swelled and elongated. She was the queen, nurtured on royal jelly, emerging with strong wings out of the womb-dark hive to soar for the first and only time up into the light, up and up, her strong wings beating the sweet air, chased by a cloud of drones. Only the strongest could catch her, could plunge himself into her in one ecstatic midair moment and fill her with the brood to come. She longed for that moment; she ached for it, but before it came she shifted again.

  Now she was not the queen, but the drone, spiraling higher and higher in the air, quickened to life for the one mad moment of flight that was life’s purpose, wings whipping the air in pursuit of the golden flying body that was the aim of all desire. Drone entered queen, shaft buried itself in bee flesh, and she was both at once, singing in union, letting go and spilling all and receiving all. Until the moment ended. The drone pulled away, ripping out his own guts, relinquishing his honey drop of the hive’s life so that life itself might pass from drone to queen to egg. She felt a tearing in her belly; something gave way. The hive was a vessel, sweetness pouring itself through form, in and out, so that queen and drone and worker were only flashing, sparkling, momentary configurations of the morphic kaleidoscope, each individual an impermanent convergence of golden liquid and lacy wing, dissolving and forming, dying and being born.