The Fifth Sacred Thing (12 page)

Madrone stood outside the Council Hall, looking west. From the high peaks, she could see the ocean shining silver, invitingly. For one long moment, she let herself feel the temptation to take the Council’s advice, to duck out of work, catch the gondola west, and spend the day walking beside the rushing and retreating waves, filling her pockets with shells and stones. It had been too long since she’d spent a day like that. Bird was still on her mind. He had loved the water. When he was fourteen he’d spent days and days windsurfing on the bay. She’d tried to keep up with him but kept wiping out on the board, inhaling salt water, and Johanna had yelled at her about pollution and cancer. Suddenly she had a strong sensation of Bird standing beside her, so physical she could almost have put her arm around his shoulder, let him lean on her. He seemed confused, in pain. It seemed to her that if she went to the beach, he would accompany her. They could walk beside each other, letting the waves wash their feet, and lie on the sand, holding each other. She could almost hold him now, reaching out to gather in this sense of contact, transform it into breathing physicality. The golden dome of the Council Hall gleamed behind her. Her arm moved through empty air.

4

I
t was strange, Bird thought, pushing his broom down the day’s blank corridor, how the power that flooded through him at night ebbed by day, leaving him hollow. His reawakened intuition screamed inside him, Get out! Get out! They had left Hijohn alone for the last two nights, but it was only a matter of time before they started in on him again. And Bird wasn’t sure how much longer he could maintain his façade of mindlessness. More and more of his memory returned each day, still patchy, like those early explorer’s maps with vast spaces left blank. But enough detail had returned that he knew who he was and where he had come from. What would the guards do if they recognized that he was conscious again?

No, the three of them had to escape, and he would have to figure out how. Littlejohn was too resigned, Hijohn too battered, enclosed behind a wall of chronic pain. While he managed to drag himself up each day for count, for work, afterward he collapsed into sleep. But Bird was a Witch, with a Witch’s will to apply to the matter. He was determined to save Hijohn; they had bonded so deeply, sharing pain, that abandoning him was unthinkable. And he was determined to save Littlejohn, for only by giving him the solidarity due a lover could Bird redeem their relationship for himself.

If they could escape, maybe they could reach the hills, where Hijohn came from. If they could escape, maybe he could somehow get back to the home that daily became more clear in his memory. His mind raced around like a fly at a windowpane. He had to get out, but he could not find a way.

“Use your magic,” he could hear his grandmother say. But he only seemed to be able to find his magic in the night, stewing in a cauldron of pain. By day his power seemed drained, the cord that connected him to the source severed. Maybe he’d been locked away from the earth and the free air too long. The elements seemed shadowy to him, something invented or remembered but not quite real, as his own home seemed at times to be a made-up fantasy, too good to be true. He stood all day, a Witch with a broom in his hand, but the bristles were made of orange plastic and he didn’t know how to fly.

“Does anyone ever get out of here?” he asked Littlejohn that night as they lay together.

Littlejohn shifted uneasily, rolling over to look at Bird with a slightly wary expression in his eyes. He’s afraid of me, Bird realized. As accustomed as our bodies are to each other, I’m a stranger to him, now that I can remember and plan.

“Some serve their sentences and get released,” Littlejohn said. “Some die. Some get taken for the work levees.”

“What are they? Tell me about them.”

“You don’t want that, believe me. You’re a hell of a lot safer here, even with Harris riding your ass. They’re all the jobs no free man wants to do—because they’re too dangerous. Mostly salvage, sometimes toxic cleanup. They keep you drugged all the time and guarded. Lots of accidents. Average survival time is about three months.”

“How do you get picked for them? Can you volunteer?”

“Don’t make me laugh. It’s like everything else around here—you don’t choose it; one day it just happens to you.”

“Maybe it could happen to us. There might be more of a chance of escape, anyway.”

“Don’t bet on it.”

He resorted at last to the simplest magic he could think of. He cast a spell. He lacked all materials but the most basic: a pubic hair of Littlejohn’s and one of his own, some of their mingled semen, and a hair from Hijohn’s head. He dipped the hairs in the sperm and rolled them into a ball, which he secreted under his left thumbnail. He hid the charm all through breakfast and waited until he was left alone to sweep the corridor.

Nobody noticed that his sweeping pattern took him in a clockwise circle, pausing at each of the four directions, not that he knew where they were in that featureless space but he made his best guess. He called in earth, air, fire, water, his allies and his helpers, not as he could remember calling, with power running through him like phosphorescent fire, but simply with words and a heartfelt sense of need.

He called the Mother, the first aspect of the Goddess every child knew, the Caring One, whose second name was abundance. The full moon was her breast; her milk poured out as light on the earth to bring life and fertility to every growing thing. He prayed to see her again, to feel that light on his face, to feel earth under his feet. He could hardly frame the prayer in words, beyond the very simplest.

“Please, help!
Santa Luna, Madre Tierra
, please, please, get me out of here!”

Then, as he swept, he built his magical image. He tried to send his mind diving for the causal plane, to pull the strings that wove the fabric of reality
and reshape it according to his will. But he couldn’t do it. All he could create was a simple visualization, pale and flat. He imagined himself with Hijohn and Littlejohn, outside on a hill, their feet standing on real earth, in their nostrils the pungent smell of coastal air, the smell of freedom. Holding the ball to his lips, he blew into it his images and his memories and all his passion and anguish. He bound the spell and opened the circle and, when he was called to sweep the guard station, dropped the ball inside the housing of their computer.

The whole thing felt like an exercise in futility; he couldn’t raise any power, he couldn’t let his mind loose in the other realms. Still, Maya used to tell them about the early days, when this kind of magic was about all they knew how to do, and sometimes it had worked. “Need generates its own power,” she used to say. Goddess knew, he had need enough.

Late that afternoon, he was sweeping near the guard station again. He could hear their conversation even though he kept his head down and couldn’t see who was speaking.

“What about that hillboy? Central wants a report.”

“The little demonfucker’s still up and walking.”

“What do you mean? I thought you were going to take care of that.”

“I did! I beat the Jesus out of him. Twice. But like I said, he’s still up and moving. I’m telling you, it’s Witchcraft.”

“So work him over again tonight!”

“Hell, no. What do you think I am, man, some kind of sadist? You think I beat people up for the pleasure of it?”

“Well, yeah, I kind of got that impression.”

“That’s work, man. Hazardous Duty, to be exact. And it’s supposed to get Hazardous Duty bonus pay.”

“So put in for it.”

“How many times can I put in for it on the same guy? They’re going to think we’re running some kind of a scam down here.”

“So put a goddamned bullet in his head.”

“Sure. You want to fill out the Use of Firearms report for me?”

“I don’t care how you do it, just get rid of him.”

“What I’d like to do is throw his ass and a couple of those other sinlickers out on a work levee. Get rid of them.”

“Fine. What if Central wants to see them?”

“In ten godforsaken years, they haven’t wanted to see the idiot. They just throw these guys down here and forget about them. And we clean up their crap.”

“Look, I don’t give a shit what you do, as long as I don’t have to answer for it. If you can fix it, you can do it.”

“Fair enough.”

Two days later, Bird was standing in line for count when a new guard came in, carrying a computerized list on a clipboard. He read out a string of numbers. Bird recognized his own and Littlejohn’s. Hijohn also stirred and looked up.

“Report for transport,” the guard said. “Collect your things.”

They were strip-searched, their legs shackled so they could walk only in an awkward shuffle, their hands cuffed behind their backs. One by one, they were loaded onto a bus that wheezed and labored along with its archaic internal combustion engine. The windows were blocked with metal screening. They couldn’t see outside, couldn’t even tell if it were day or night. They rode for a long time, long enough for Bird to need to piss, for that need to grow into stabbing pain and then subside into numbness. He tried to sleep, to conserve his strength, and succeeded in dozing a bit.

Finally the bus stopped. A guard barked orders, and they filed off.

It was dawn. The horizon glowed orange and the sky lightened, as he blinked his eyes in the unaccustomed space. They stood on a patch of dusty ground outside a low, shabby building of corrugated metal, waiting while various guards did their own rituals with paper and signatures. Bird sniffed the air, all his senses suddenly so alive he ached all over, like the aching of salivary glands tasting food after long hunger. Behind the building stretched the rolling coastal hills, covered with the dry gold grasses of late summer. Whatever might happen next, he would have had this moment to stand once again on the living earth, to feel her like a vibrating body under his feet, to breathe air and feel a wind on his face that had blown free and unobstructed over the Pacific, to smell the compounded incense of leaves, dust, and ocean salt, the tang of bay laurel and sage, to see living things in their soft colors, blue and green, and umber earth below. He wanted to cry but he didn’t dare. Instead, he took a deep breath, drinking in the life that flooded back into his body. And in a moment, just a moment more, the sun would rise.

Then the door opened, and they were marched into another gray locked room.

“Everyone line up for count!” The guard’s voice thundered through the barracks and rang against the metal walls. Wearily, Bird dragged himself up and prodded Hijohn, who lay in the bunk next to him. Above his head, in the upper bunk, he could hear Littlejohn stirring. They’d been fed some lumpy porridge and left to rest for about an hour after their exhausting journey. Bird moved slowly. His body felt heavy, clumsy, his mind dull. The blocked-off window on the end wall admitted only a thin crack of light.

The barracks held about forty men. As they stood at the ends of their bunks, the guards counted and then counted again.

“Hold out your right hand,” a guard ordered when the count was done. Bird obeyed, wishing his extended hand gripped a weapon, a laser rifle to blast through these metal walls. But his fingers were empty. Around his wrist, the guards fitted a thin metal bracelet that locked tightly.