The Fifth Sacred Thing (16 page)

Littlejohn yawned. “I’m wiped out. You two must be really beat.”

“Yeah, let’s sleep now,” Bird said. “In the morning, we can decide where to go.”

When the sun rose, the night chill had seeped into every muscle and bone in Bird’s body. He was one solid ache, and he was sure Hijohn felt worse. But the cool wind that blew in over the water tasted of unfettered tides. Bird offered up gratitude to the spirits, for the moist fog on his face, for the absence of walls between him and the elements. They ate apples and the last of the berries.

“You still determined to go north?” Hijohn asked.

“Yeah,” Bird said. “And you? Still heading south?”

“Yeah.”

“How are you going to get around the camp if you head back where we just came from?”

“Look.” Hijohn bent down and scratched a rough map into the dirt with a stick. “I can guess roughly where we are. Here’s the work camp, down in that flat area, and here’s these hills to the north of it. But all of it’s on this kind of bulge that juts out from the coast. I’m going to head east until I pick up the South Coastal Hills—the Motherrocks, we call them. They run all the way back down to Angel City.”

“Can you make it that far? Alone?”

“I won’t have to. I know where to find friends in these mountains. But north of here there isn’t much. You’ll run into the dunes, where there isn’t too much cover, and then hills again. Farther up, when you get close to Slotown, there’s one stretch where the old Coast Road runs right up next to the beach. The army still uses the road, and you can’t bypass it to the east; they’ve got the area mined. If you get through, into the Irish Hills west of Slotown, you’ll meet up with friends of ours who can help you.”

“Thanks,” Bird said. “What about you, Littlejohn?”

He shrugged. “There’s nobody waiting for me down south. I guess I’ll stick with you for a while.”

“Well, then, this is goodbye,” Hijohn said. “It doesn’t seem enough somehow, just to say thanks, but there it is.”

“De nada,”
Bird said. He put his hands on Hijohn’s shoulders, sending him one last flood of energy that eased his own muscles as he drew it up from the earth.
“Que te vaya bien, que vayas con Diosa. Que nunca tengas hambre. Que nunca tengas sed.”

“What does that mean?” Littlejohn asked.

“May it go well for you, may you go with the Goddess. May you never hunger. May you never thirst.”

“Never thirst,” Hijohn said, as if he was considering the idea.

“Merry meet, and merry part,” Bird said. “That’s what Witches say.”

“I remember my folks saying that,” Littlejohn said. “And merry meet again.”

“Take care,” Hijohn said.

Bird filled Hijohn’s pockets with apples and acorns. They watched as Hijohn made his slow and careful way up the streambed. He rounded a curve, and vanished.

“Vamonos,”
Bird said. “Let’s get going.”

5

A
bove the sink in the small scrub room next to the epidemic ward someone had posted a sign:
WEAR YOUR MASKS; PREVENT THE SPREAD OF DISEASES
. Underneath, in handwriting she recognized as Sam’s, was a penciled note:
This means you, Madrone!
Madrone felt a strong temptation to scrawl something nasty back, but she restrained herself. No matter how many times she explained, he couldn’t seem to understand that she had other ways of protecting herself. And if they failed, gauze was useless.

She placed her hands on the sink and drew in a long breath, renewing her grounding, her connection with the earth. Silently, she checked her own aura and renewed her wards, the guardians she had created for herself in the
ch’i
worlds. She pictured them buzzing around her like a swarm of spirit bees. Then she waited, watching the mirror until broken patterns of light came together as an image, a reflection from some other realm. After a moment, she saw a face take form: female, old. The lines that crisscrossed the face became a net of light, like a spiderweb glinting under the moon above a dark pool. Madrone felt hands behind her hands, power she could lean on. She turned and entered the ward.

The big room was crowded with beds. Most of them were filled with children, who were especially vulnerable to the disease. Down the hall were wards for older people and pregnant women; she would visit them later. She stood for a moment, breathing in the air that carried the sweetish odor of death. Above it floated the pungent odor of moxa, the herb Lou was burning at the side of a young boy who lay still, his back full of acupuncture needles. She watched as Lou removed the needles, patting the boy on the shoulder and covering him with the blanket.

She couldn’t look at Lou without thinking of Sandy. They had the same black silk hair, although Lou cropped his short and Sandy had let his grow down nearly to his waist. Usually he had worn it neatly wrapped and tucked at the nape of his neck, but when they were making love he would let it down to drape her like a tent. She had lain many times with her head nestled close to
his, letting her fingers play with that hair, each separate shaft so thick and straight and spaced far from the others, a forest she could wander in.

Lou’s eyes observed her quizzically over the white mask that concealed the rest of his face.

“You missed the meeting, love,” he said. “Sam promised that if he caught you or anyone else without a mask, he’d give us all a demonstration of in vivo dissection.”

“In other words, he’ll skin you alive,” Aviva said, coming up behind her. “He’s serious, Madrone. This time he’s really on a rampage.” Her own bushy curls were covered with a cap, and her white gown was spotless.

Madrone shook her head. “He knows that’s not how I work. Since when does he make the rules for us?”

“We all agreed to this one,” Lou said.

“When? I never did.”

“If you miss the meetings, you miss the decisions,” Lou said.

“It was my day at Council. I can’t be in two places at once.”

“No?” Lou raised his eyebrows. “What kind of Witch are you?”

“The Wicked Witch of the West,” Madrone said, but she went and got a mask from the scrub room and put it on. With it covering her mouth, she felt removed, isolated. “I hate this.”

“So who likes it?” Aviva asked.

“You look tired,” Lou said. “Had any sleep?”

“Have you?”

“You’re working too hard,” Aviva said.

“And you aren’t? You’re just lounging around here, the two of you, from six in the morning until midnight?”

“Languishing on our bloated healers’ stipends,” Lou said. “How was Council?”

“People are starting to get scared,” Madrone told them, filling them in on the decisions that had been made.

“We’re all scared,” Aviva said. “What do you think about the disease? Do you think it’s a weapon?”

“I for one don’t care,” Lou said. “I don’t care if it’s a Stewardship plot, a judgment by a vengeful God, or a misguided attempt at communication from space aliens. I just want to get rid of it. And I don’t want to discuss it.”

“What do you need from me here?” Madrone asked.

“A miracle cure,” Lou replied.

“And while I’m working on it?”

They conferred for a few moments about the progress of their cases. Then Lou and Aviva moved on, while Madrone stood still for a moment and scanned the room, letting herself sink one level down into trance, so that the
bodies disappeared into an interplay of lights. She was looking for an opening, someone or something that would call to her. There’s got to be some way to
find
this thing, she thought. Goddess, show it to me and I will go wherever it leads, give whatever it takes.

Bright lights and dim lights, lines and shadows pulled and danced. At last she picked out the form of a young girl, lying on a bed in the corner. She went over, picked the child up, and sat down, propping her back against the wall. The child was semiconscious, and Madrone could smell the sweetness of decay on her breath. She let her own breath take her down, down. Down to where sounds and smells disappeared, down to the level where everything was energy,
ch’i
, and, below that, through the place where fear and pain and the light of spirits moving across the veil gave way to something even deeper. The level of
cause
.

Automatically Madrone’s hands soothed the child, moved energy to reduce her fever. But behind Madrone’s hands were other hands; behind her face hid the face of the Crone, the Old One,
La Vieja
, whose other name was the Reaper. Where Madrone was now, the upper world seemed dim. She was in the belly of Spider Woman, where the lines of probability were spun out into webs and nets. She could see them, some glowing and shining, some dim and broken, some filled with a sweet fragrance like fresh herbs, and some smelling of the sweet ketone stink of death.

In this place, patterns of probability were laid out like shifts in a landscape, hills and hollowed valleys and curving roads. But she had been here before, time after time, gone down road after shining road, hunting, finding neither cause nor cure for the fever. There had to be another way.

There was another way to heal, a dangerous way, a way everyone who had trained her had warned her against. Healers had died, trying it. But she was going to have to do something. She couldn’t bear to go through ’38 again. The city couldn’t outlast another mass epidemic. Even now, their survival was precarious; there was too much work to be done and not enough hands to do it. But more—there were limits to how much people could stand to lose.

Am I strong enough? she wondered.

Silence reverberated through all the levels of possibility. No one would answer her. Goddesses and Gods, ancestors and orishas walked these roads, but none would appear and guide her through this choice. It was hers alone, her
geis
, maybe. In her mind she used the old Celtic word for the dare you have to take, the task you cannot refuse, the taboo that is doomed to be broken.

The child moaned in her lap. She was about six years old, her long brown braids tied with blue ribbons. Someone loved this child, carefully braided her hair, took pleasure in her prettiness.

Deliberately, Madrone dropped her protection, envisioning an opening in her own aura, dismissing her wards, taking off her mask. She bent her head down over the child’s midriff to suck the disease from her solar plexus, feeling at the same time the ancient mouth of the Reaper draw the elusive
thing
she sought out of the child’s body into hers. The girl’s aura flared bright.

It was one of the oldest forms of healing known, and the most risky. Absorb the disease; then cure it inside yourself.

Almost instantly, Madrone began to fear she had made a mistake. The sickness moved so quickly. She could feel her ears ring and a feverish flush rise on her skin. She couldn’t see but she sensed something racing inside her, racing toward her brain. If it got there before she did … but already she wasn’t making sense. She felt dizzy and slumped back against the wall as sweat broke out on her forehead. She tried to call in power. Where was
La Vieja
, the Old One? Now Madrone herself felt old age creeping as an ache through her bones. Her blood was on fire, burning her youth away.

Diosa
, this thing moved fast! Why couldn’t she remember any Goddesses, any names of power? Or how to use her power? Things she’d known since she was a child. She wished she was a child; she wanted her mama, but Mama Rachel had died long ago in faraway Guadalupe. And Rio had come for her and brought her back to California to be safe, but now he was dead, and Johanna was dead, and only she was left with Maya: Yemaya, that was a name of power, that was the ocean, that was the true mother who could save her or drown her.

I’m drowning, Mama. Help me, send me something, someone to help me.

There was a sound in her ears like the roaring of the tide, and a light in her eyes like a moon over water, an old moon, Crone moon, crescent scythe of the Reaper. The tide surged at her feet; it was dark, alive, and as it receded it left behind a form that glided and spiraled and reared up with two heads—red-mouthed, gaping, fanged serpent’s heads—that turned to stare at her with their narrow eyes.