The Fifth Sacred Thing

by Starhawk

  “Then you will do our enemies’ work for them,” Lily said.

  “Process!” Joseph said again. But the process had broken down.

  In the dark, Bird felt a flicker of motion. By reflex, he opened his eyes. He thought he was awake now and had been asleep before, but he didn’t know for sure. It didn’t matter. Bad dreams haunted his sleeping, ghosts plagued his waking.

  The darkness around him was vibrating and humming, alive with a sound that was strange and yet not strange. He had heard it before; it reminded him of something: sunlight, and flowers, which he had forgotten existed. Then he recognized the sound as the buzzing of a bee.

  “What?” Bird said, and jumped at the sound of his own voice. Had he spoken aloud, for the first time in how long? “What?” he said again, just to test if he really existed, if his lips made sounds that his ears could hear. He wasn’t sure, but he thought they did.

  It was too dark for even his long-accustomed eyes to see much, but in his mind’s eye he pictured a honeybee, furred and golden. Something landed on his forehead; he closed his eyes as it walked delicately over his face. Its touch was so soft, so gentle, like the feather touch of a lover’s hand, like Madrone’s fingers tracing his cheekbones and eyelids, like forgiveness. He almost cried—it was so long since he had been touched that way, and it seemed miraculous, the Goddess herself reaching out to him to remind him of life. The dark unfolded and blossomed, a black rose, a night lily. He felt warm, as if someone were holding his hands.

  The bee stayed with him, and when it left another came. He still had no sense of time but he began to trust the bees, that their comings and goings measured intervals. They seemed to take shifts, perhaps no one of them could stand the stench and the darkness very long, but they never left him alone again. He was grateful. Their buzzing chased the ghosts out of his head; their feet on his skin reminded him that the body could feel not only pain but pleasure. He had nothing to offer them in return; the thin and slimy soup that appeared periodically was not something that would nourish them. But he spoke to them and praised them and sang them little songs, which they seemed to like, although how he knew that he couldn’t say. Most likely he was just out of his mind, talking to insects, but he no longer cared. His voice croaked at first, but as he used it the tones improved. He sang them all the songs he knew, and when he was done he made up new ones, songs that fit the hell worlds, songs of the unquiet dead, their losses, their betrayals, their defeats. The bees didn’t care. Listen, spirits, I am singing for you, like you wanted. Are you happy now? No one will ever hear these songs, but I’m singing.

  The guards came for him without warning. The opening of the door, the sound of their heavy boots, and their hands grabbing him and jerking him up to his feet sent such a rush of physical terror through Bird’s body that he almost vomited. The bees deserted him, and he felt jealous. He wanted to fly away too. His hands were cuffed behind his back, and he was marched on unsteady legs down a long corridor toward a new ordeal. You little winged fuckers, he thought. I was past fear, and then you made me come alive again, and where are you now?

  In the room they brought him to, Rosa waited, tied and shivering.

  “We’re giving you a choice tonight,” the guard said. “We can work on her while you watch, or let her watch while we work on you. Who will it be, you or her?”

  He had just barely enough will left to open his lips and force out one word: “Me.”

  He promised himself he wouldn’t scream in front of her, but he screamed and groveled and shit in his pants. They were going to work on him until he begged them to work on her instead. How long would that take? And would it matter anyway? If he held out this time, would he give way the next? Already he was beginning to hate her, to hate her screaming that hurt his ears, to want her silent, dead, ended, to want to see her suffer as he was suffering.

  Then the General himself came in.

  “Is he ready?”

  “Not quite, sir. He’s holding out longer than we expected.”

  “We’re out of time. Give him a shot—not too much. I don’t want him to appear drugged. Then clean him up. I’ve got a use for him.”

  All day long, people had been converging in the Central Plaza. Some had gathered early in the morning; others arrived in contingents that formed spontaneously in the outlying neighborhoods and made their way chanting and singing through the streets, picking up others along the way. Now it seemed that the whole of the city had grouped together in this one spot. The crowd kept shifting, weaving and circling, restless as a brew coming to boil.

  The sound system installed after the Uprising still worked perfectly, fueled by the solar cells high in the tops of trees. When a speaker stood on the raised platform in the center of the square, her or his voice was carried easily to the outer boundaries, clear and audible. Now it was the soldiers who took advantage of it, massing on the platform in the center, warning the people to disperse and go home. The crowd responded with chants and pounding drums and howls like ghost cries on the wind.

  A phalanx of soldiers approached from the street in front of the old library, clubbing and beating a path through the crowds. There was a moment of confusion when they reached the platform, then they cleared a space.

  Madrone looked up. Isis and Nita were on either side of her, and River stood at her back. He was still healthy, and the three days they had promised Sam to wait had passed. He had insisted on coming with them to the Plaza. “Maybe be a chance to talk to the army,” he’d said, and Madrone had nodded and accepted his reasoning. If they could gain the central platform, he could speak to the whole crowd at once.

  From where they stood, they could see the General, surrounded by the white faces of his Private Guard. He stood on the east side of the platform. A squadron of copper-brown soldiers carrying a white bundle climbed the steps and stood on the west side. They set their burden down by the flagpole where the starred cross of the Southlands flapped above their heads.

  “What are they doing?” Nita asked. Shorter than Madrone, she could see little but the backs of the people in front of her.

  “They tying something to the flagpole. Or somebody,” River told her.

  The soldiers moved back, revealing Maya, pale and frail in her tattered white dress, bound to the pole, a gag stretched across her mouth.

  “Oh, Goddess,” Nita murmured. Madrone gripped her hand.

  Isis nudged them. “Let’s get up there, closer to her. Maybe we can do something.”

  They began worming their way through the crowd but stopped as a new group of soldiers pushed their way through the massed people and mounted the platform in the center. They were molasses dark, with coiled African hair, like River.

  “Do they color-coordinate all the squadrons?” Nita asked.

  “Keeps the races from mixing,” Isis said. “Also, it looks good on parade.”

  “That’s my unit,” River said. “I got to talk to them.” He plunged into the crowd in the wake of the soldiers. Madrone moved to follow him but Isis held her back.

  “Let him go. He can take care of himself.”

  River’s unit arranged themselves in two lines on the north and south sides of the platform. One lone figure was left standing in the center. It was Bird. Madrone recognized him, even though in his uniform he appeared as one more dark, anonymous soldier. He gave off a red glow of pain, surrounded by a dull gauzy film that seemed to wrap him up in a separate bubble of air. Still, he seemed to be standing and walking.

  General Alexander stepped forward. His voice was boomed out over the crowd.

  “I didn’t call you here,” he said. “Nevertheless, it is opportune that you have come. The Fourth Expeditionary Force of the Stewardship has claimed this land in the name of the Four Purities. We are charged with the cleansing of this land from all forms of Witchcraft and demon worship. Before you stands the chief Witch and demoness. You have come to witness her execution.” He motioned to the west, where Maya stood bound.

  I should
be afraid, Maya thought. I should feel something. But nothing seemed quite real to her. She was already halfway gone, why bother to hurry the inevitable?

  Girlfriend, I always knew you would come to a bad end, but shot in the public square? Really!

  Shut up, Johanna, or do something.

  What is there to do? This has gone beyond your doing or mine. All we can do is wait.

  Bird stood in the center of the square, not sure how he’d gotten there, not clear what was happening around him. Everything looked fuzzy, his eyes wouldn’t focus, and the back of his throat was dry and hurting. It was like a hangover, a pain hangover, but there was something that kept him from quite feeling it, from quite being able to focus his eyes.

  One of the General’s Private Guard approached him. A white face loomed up before his face, spoke. “One wrong move from you, slimecrawler, and we’ll fire into the crowd.”

  He felt something cold in his hands. They seemed very far away, like somebody else’s hands. He looked down. The soldiers had handed him a laser rifle.

  “One of your number has abandoned the ways of evil and joined us to receive the blessings of Our Lord,” the General went on. “Cadet Fivefour Threethreefour, once known as Bird, we honor you today by choosing you as the executioner.”

  It took him a long time before he understood. There, across the way, stood Maya. She faced him, her old eyes steady. She had shrunk and aged in these weeks, she had lost that timeless quality and now simply looked old, frail, ready to die.

  They wanted him to kill her.

  Here it was, then, the end of the road. He had been led along it step by step, and now here was the unthinkable thing they wanted from him. If he refused, what would they do? Kill her themselves, slowly, with torture, while he watched? Or work on him until he broke again, and pleaded with them to allow him to kill her? Oh, Goddess, he had done this to her, he had told them about her, told them her name. His own weakness had already murdered her.

  If he could only make contact, make her understand and forgive. He stared through the empty air between them. Maya seemed calm but he was sweating, his breath coming in stifled gasps. If he closed his eyes, he was still falling, weightless, unable to strike ground. His hands shook. But he was the one with the gun. He could, if he chose, turn and train it on the General, but before he could pivot and shoot other guns would fire. How many of the crowd would they kill in retaliation? And if they killed him, who would stand between Rosa and Maya and their fate?

  I have been burned before, Maya’s eyes seemed to say, it is not new to me, this death. What are you afraid of?

  Not death, abuelita, not for me. Death is an act of grace, he tried to tell her. If only I could administer it to myself, I would. But I don’t dare, not with these guns behind me, ready to turn and fire on people who don’t want to die yet.

  But death is a gift I can offer you. I can release you. I can restore your lost loves. I can make you safe.

  Think, Bird. He heard Rio’s voice. Think it out carefully. But he couldn’t think. His head was too heavy; he could hardly hold it up. His eyes refused to see clearly.

  Maya stood looking calmly at her own death in Bird’s face. She was afraid, not for her own life, which she had held on to far too long, but for him, for what this act would do to him. He would never be free of it. There was nothing she could do to help him. She couldn’t even speak. What would she say? Bird, your failing is that you are simply mortal, susceptible to pressure and fear and capable of making great mistakes. I have failed you, Bird. Good feminist that I was, I always said yes, men should feel, should cry, should not be afraid to show their vulnerability. But in my secret heart, what I really wanted from you was the impermeable courage of the warrior. I wanted you to be invincible, larger than life. I did not raise you to accept less of yourself.

  Madrone stood still, hardly breathing. If she could meet Bird’s eyes or touch him or speak with him, even flash him a sign—but he was shut off, his eyes focused only on Maya, who one way or another was now going to die. She wanted to scream, to throw her own body between them, to beg him not to do this. Because if you do, Bird, you will destroy us all. We will never again be able to believe in our power to resist.

  Across the Plaza, she caught a glimpse of Cress, who was standing surrounded by a knot of his supporters. Diosa, what were they going to do? If Bird shoots, he’ll confirm their worst accusations. They’ll break our unity, shatter the Council, and run’ riot, sniping at soldiers from rooftops, ambushing troops on the street. And the soldiers won’t come to us, the ones who might have wanted to sit at our table. They’ll shoot back, and we will lose.

  But if he refused? Was she about to see him die now, right in front of her, without ever having a chance to greet him one more time? Oh, Bird, Bird, I love you and I can’t help you, I don’t even know what to hope for. All she could do was reach for him, reach and reach with her uncaught love.

  Bird felt a breath of wind caressing his cheek like the touch of a hand, like a spirit, like the memory of rain. He sensed a presence, not a voice, not a ghost, just a sense of someone standing there with him.

  Whoever you are, go away, he whispered. No one can stand with me here. I have walked here on my own two feet. I won’t find any way back. They are too strong for us, and I can’t think anymore. My brain hurts, and my ears are ringing.

  Madrone waited. Bird didn’t see her, he wouldn’t turn to look at her, and maybe that was just as well, yet she couldn’t help but believe that if he would look at her, she could save him. Maybe that was an illusion, like so many others. With all her power and all her skills, she could only watch, and not shield herself from the pain, as she no longer hid from her own memories. Watching, she took a long, deep breath and began to open.

  Layer by layer, peeling away everything she had ever constructed to tell her who she was and separate what was not, she opened. She felt she was holding Maya’s hand, not an old hand but a smooth-skinned hand with bitten nails seventeen years old, and in her other hand, Johanna’s fingers pressed her, and touched through her, and then it all came crowding in, pain and hate and ugliness and emptiness and fear, she swallowed it all until her own belly ached, and she moaned, and swelled, and cried with rage, but it came on, on and on, moving through the spirits in the crowd. It was all here, thousands of years of the lash and the stake and the bomb. Could she take that into herself to heal it as she had taken other sorts of disease? Could she heal not just the pain of the wound but the pleasure in hurting and the worse and deeper pain behind that?

  The ghosts of the dead were swarming, hovering over this square like bees, hordes of them, millions of them, legions of victims, legions of victimizers. She was stretched like a live wire between two ghost hands, light and dark, and she could not bear any more, could not heal this with either her love or her rage, could not transform the magnitude of this history. They would be lost, lost forever, she and Bird and all of them. She stared at him; he was so far away and so closed to her, he who had had the power to make her happy just with a touch, a meeting of eyes. Yet that was not in him but in her own openness, in their opening together. How were we made that we could do this for each other and to each other, so much beauty, so much pain? There was always a choice, to hurt or to heal, but she no longer knew what healing was, or what it meant to be whole if wholeness included all of this. She felt rain beating on her face, and wind on her naked flesh, and she heard a song that was carried not so much to her ears but directly through her skin, like a current. As if she had, indeed, become an instrument in some larger hand, a spoon to stir the cauldron, a knife to cut through the fabric of this world and reveal world after world of possibilities and forms. She closed her eyes and began to sweat honey.

  Bird felt a stirring around him. Dimly he heard the voice of the General, yelling an order. “You’ve got ten seconds, boy. Ten …”

  He couldn’t think, and anyway his body seemed to have a will of its own. His arms responded to commands; his slow brain had los
t its influence.

  “Nine …”

  He lifted the rifle. It was heavy in his arms, heavy as a sleeping child. He looked down the sights.

  “Eight …”

  Everything swam and rocked. He felt seasick.

  “Seven …”

  Steady. Hold the rifle steady. Maya’s face was outlined in a circle, marked by the cross hairs, the cross in the circle, the mandala, the four sacred directions, the Four Sacred Things.

  “Six …”

  Air, I cannot breathe, I am falling past the limits of what I can resist.

  “Five …”

  Fire, this burns; abuela, my soul has been burned away, forgive me, forgive me.

  “Four …”

  Water, the rains will never come again.

  “Three …”

  Earth, this is hard, hard as rock, hard as banging out broken chords for Madrone so she would have a song to take with her when she went. I am tumbling and tumbling and there is no earth under me.

  “Two …”

  He began to hear that song in his mind; it filled him with a sense of her presence, and the memory of loving her, a memory that hurt terribly because he was no longer who he had been, and even she could not heal him of this.

  “One …”

  Abuelita, this is a gift I give you. Isn’t it? If only my head would clear.

  “Ready!”

  But he was not ready, would never be ready.

  “Aim …”

  My aim is to save you suffering what I have suffered.

  “Fire!”

  A bee circled, landed on his forehead, and stung him between the eyes.

  Bird let out a small cry. A golden pain, a good pain, shot through him like a shaft of sunlight breaking through the fog. A myriad of Mayas swam and danced before his eyes, but each one was clear and perfect. Bees walked his murderous wrists with thread feet, and he wanted to caress them. They had reached for him; they had not abandoned him. Not because he deserved compassion, but because by their very nature they were emissaries of a power that was always and everywhere offering itself, asking nothing in return, a force that set the bees in motion and colored the blossoms and made them sweet. That was the real gift, the true grace: not death, but love, the fifth sacred thing.