The Fifth Sacred Thing (19 page)

The day passed and the sun passed, drawing a line of shadow in its wake. Bird felt the chill in his sleep, stirred, and opened his eyes. Littlejohn was still asleep. Bird wanted to get up but his muscles were so stiff that he found he could only roll over very slowly and push himself up with his arms into a kneeling position. As he raised his head, he found himself staring into the barrel of an ancient shotgun.

For one moment, everything he could see seemed sharply outlined in light. A leaf, a branch, a patch of ground were imprinted on his retinas, last images to take with him into the spirit world. He knew he couldn’t run; he must have pulled every muscle in his back and hips, and his neck was so sore he could only continue to raise his head very slowly. If he couldn’t run, he would have to die; it was as simple as that. He would never go back to imprisonment.

But as his eyes traveled up the gun barrel, he became aware that he was not facing a guard. The hands on the gun were brown, cracked and dirty, with broken nails, but undeniably female. The arms connected to a body that had breasts under a ragged cotton shift. And the face—but when he reached the face, he froze again. The face was like nothing he had ever seen before. At first it seemed to be one gaping hole; then he discerned a lower lip, capped by an
upper lip split in two around an open gash where a nose should have been. The face was framed in wild, uncombed dreadlocks. And the eyes …

But the eyes caught him. They were brown, wide-set under well-shaped brows, and as he looked at them he fell into their depths. He hadn’t looked into eyes like that for years, but now he could stare, lingeringly, at eyes that opened to him and entered into him, that read exactly what he was thinking and feeling, that remained steady under his first shock. He wondered what it was like to live behind that face with those knowing eyes. They would never misread revulsion or rejection. But what he felt, in their depths, was compassion.

“Who’s our mother?” a man’s voice said behind him.

He pushed himself up to his feet and turned. No one was there. Am I hearing things now? he wondered, but then he looked down at a pistol trained on him, held by a man who ended at the hips. He was muscularly built and handsome, with round blue eyes and a thick, curling black beard covering most of his oak-brown face, but where his legs should be, Bird saw nothing, as if his trunk had sprung up out of the ground.

“Who’s our mother?” the man said again.

Maybe this was an aftereffect of the drugs they’d been given. Littlejohn began to stir and Bird remembered, suddenly, his first meeting with Hijohn.

“The earth is our mother,” Bird said.

“We must take care of her,” came a voice from off to his left.

Littlejohn looked up. They were surrounded by a ring of armed figures, some with faces oddly distorted, others missing a hand or an arm or with some withered limb dangling. Bird counted seven of them.

“Who are you?” The first woman spoke. Her voice was thick and somewhat distorted, but it rang with a tone of confidence and authority. Bird turned to her again. He realized, looking again into those eyes, that he couldn’t lie to her. She was reading him as well as any Witch might.

“My name is Bird,” he said. “Bird Lavender Black Dragon.” His own name tasted sweet on his tongue, and unfamiliar. It had been so many years since he had spoken it aloud. He felt something from Littlejohn, a small spark of hurt, and he realized he had never told him his real name. There was no help for that now. “This is Littlejohn.”

“From?”

“We’ve escaped from the South, from a work crew. But I come from the North—from the City.”

There was an excited murmur around them.

The woman said something that Bird couldn’t quite understand. The legless man repeated it more clearly.

“You are Witches.”

“Right.”

“From the North?”

“He is,” Littlejohn said.

“Are you being tracked?”

“No,” Bird said.

“Hell,” Littlejohn added, “if we were being tracked, we wouldn’t be here; we’d be dead. Say, don’t you think you could put those guns down?”

“We’re fairly harmless, really,” Bird said.

The woman’s eyes held his, searching. She reminded him of Maya; he felt known to the core and, after a moment, accepted.

“Not harmless,” she said, “but I will trust you.”

Another murmur, and the guns were lowered. The woman stepped forward and held out her hands to Bird. He reached out, and she clasped his hands between hers warmly.

“Welcome,” she said, and pointed to her own breast. “I am Rhea.”

Bird felt her touch go through him like an electric shock. Suddenly he wanted to be taken into those arms, enfolded in that touch, to fall into the wells of those eyes. He felt the possibility in her of contact, and the need for it possessed him more strongly than hunger.

The man with no legs tucked the gun into his belt. He came forward, moving gracefully by balancing on his palms and swinging his torso between his arms.

“I’m Morton,” he said. “Welcome to the dancing ground of the Monsters.”

“Monsters?” Littlejohn asked.

Morton grinned. “That’s us. Fits, don’t you think?”

“They can’t possibly answer that and be both honest and polite,” a slender young woman said. Her long black hair was arranged in a mass of tiny braids that framed a catlike triangular face. Her left hand was shaped like a claw. “I’m Dana. Welcome.”

“But who are you?” Bird asked. “And what are you doing here?”

“We live here,” Rhea said.

“Isn’t the land poisoned?”

“Look us over closely,” Morton said. “We’re all natives of Slotown and the Irish Hills, all born back when the old reactor was still running, probably leaking like crazy but what the hell did they care? Of course, you don’t see the ones who died of cancer.”

“And you still live here?” Littlejohn asked.

“We got to live somewhere,” Dana said.

“It’s livable,” Morton said. “For us. Yeah, there’s probably still radiation. It doesn’t go away. But it’s better now than it was. Ten years ago, in the big
epidemic, the Witches from the North sent down a raiding party. Shut the thing down, smashed the controls. Died doing it too.”

“Goddess give them peace,” Dana murmured.

Above their heads, a crow called. A shell broke open somewhere in Bird’s spine, sending shivers of energy climbing to the top of his head. A jumble of images flashed through his mind: long white corridors, and a round pit of a room lined with dials and switches, and most of all a presence like a living thing with its own strange beauty: matter liberating itself into pure power. A presence that did not want to die.

But he had killed it.

“It’s been better since then,” Morton went on. “The Millennialists had purged so many tecchies that the Stewards didn’t have the know-how left to repair the reactor or start it up again. The land feels better now, and there’ve been some kids born that are okay. Not to us—but there’s some others in the town, deserters from the army.”

“We work to heal the land,” Rhea said. “On the moons and the festivals.”

Bird barely heard what she said. He remembered the cold feel of a gun in his hand, an old-fashioned revolver Tom had brought them from the Forest Communities. And if he followed the aim of the gun he saw a dough-white face slimed with fear and a pasty hand pulling switch after switch to move control rods in between fuel rods in patterned sequence, shutting the reactor down. It had taken a long, long time. They had spelled each other, he and Cleis and Zorah and Tom, holding the guns, forcing the man to do their will, standing guard.

“We like to maintain the idea that this place is too toxic to deal with,” Morton said. “Keeps away unwanted interference.”

“When necessary, we make enough of an appearance to keep the rumors current,” Dana said.

Someone had come at him, another man, freckled and sandy-haired and shouting something. Bird’s hand had jerked, and the bullet caught the man between the eyes, sending his spirit shrieking off in shock and outrage and his body crashing at Bird’s feet as the nuclear hum grew faint as a whining dog. Yes, he remembered feeling the man die, looking down at his face as he had looked down at his father’s face after the Uprising.

Maybe all the dead look the same.

“How long have you lived here?” Littlejohn was asking, glancing curiously at Bird’s remote eyes.

“Since the Hunger came,” Dana said. “Most of us were kids, then. We lived with our families in Slotown or at the state school. When food got short, they threw us out.”

When the last switch was pulled and the hum silenced, they’d emptied
their guns into the control panel. Which had left them unarmed and helpless when the door exploded and the guards came in firing. Zorah had screamed, Cleis moaned and fell as Tom cried out, and then they became the birds, soaring away on an updraft. Something had hit Bird in the thigh. He remembered falling, falling in a blaze of pain. And then nothing.

“You okay?” Littlejohn asked. Bird nodded and tried to focus on Morton, who was going on with his story.

“There was a woman, lived at Avila Beach. We call it Avalon Beach now,” Morton said. “She took us in. Taught us some things—about growing food, herbs. She had certain herbs she said would cure cancer, so she wasn’t afraid of the land. She was a good woman.”

“The Millennialists took her away in ’35,” Dana said.

“Goddess give her peace,” the others murmured around the circle. They came forward and introduced themselves: Gardner, a small dwarflike man; Anna, a woman with no left arm; and Holly and Heather, twin sisters with humped backs.

Bird’s head spun with names and memories. Ground, he told himself. Stay in the present. Now. A secret seed of pride stirred in his gut. These were his people, although they didn’t know it. He had given them their lives. He had committed one act that changed the world.

Are you here? he called silently to Cleis and Zorah and Tom. Do you know that your lives bought something after all? Why can’t I feel you? The air had grown cold as the sky darkened, and he shivered.

“This is our ritual circle,” Rhea said. “We were just about to set up for the Full Moon Ritual when we stumbled on you two. Will you join us? We don’t often get to celebrate with Witches from other places.”

“We’d be honored,” Bird said.

The Monsters began busily building a fire in the pit at the center of the clearing. Behind the trees, the sun was setting in a red glow. The air grew cool as the sky turned from blue to indigo. Someone threw a blanket over Bird’s shoulders, and he clutched it gratefully. Light winked behind the branches of the oaks in the east, and slowly a full moon rose to paint the dry grasses silver.

They crowded around the fire. Bird felt the warmth on his hands and drew it into his body. He hadn’t eaten in so long that he was almost beyond hunger, light-headed, beginning to lose sight of the forms of things and recognize only the energies. His leg ached. Yes, he’d been shot there and it had never healed right, and that was just one of the reasons he hurt. The fire felt good, but he wondered how long he could continue to stand erect.

The Monsters set up an altar on a flat rock in the north. Dana lit a candle in a glass jar, and the others brought out food from their baskets and placed it around the altar, setting out loaves of bread, slabs of cheese, bowls of apples and grapes, and steaming pots of stew.

Bird swallowed. His throat was dry, and now hunger stabbed at him. Littlejohn was staring at the food. Rhea came over and placed a hunk of bread in Bird’s hands.

“Eat,” she said. “You’re hungry.”

Bird didn’t deny it. His hands trembled as he tore off a small corner of bread and threw it into the fire as an offering. Reverently, he bit into the bread and began to chew. Saliva sprang painfully into his cheeks, and he forced himself to chew slowly, not to tear at the bread like a ravenous animal.

Littlejohn was sitting on the ground, making whimpering sounds as he gulped down his portion. When Rhea saw how hungry the two men were, she and Dana brought them bowls of stew and more bread and sweet apple juice to wash the food down.

Before long, Bird realized he needed to control himself or he would be sick. “Take it easy,” he said to Littlejohn. “If we eat too much now, we’ll regret it.”

“You can feast more later,” Rhea said. Bird found himself more and more able to understand her speech as his sense of contact deepened. “Now it’s time to begin the ritual.”

They stood in a circle around the fire. Morton turned to Littlejohn. “Will you ground us?” he asked.

Littlejohn looked alarmed. “I don’t know anything,” he said. “You ask him.” He jerked his head in Bird’s direction. “He’s a real Witch, from the North. And he’s got real powers.”

“We don’t have too much in the way of powers,” Morton said. “They killed our teacher when we were just getting started. But we’ve got books.”

“Will you ground us?” Rhea asked Bird.

“I don’t feel very grounded,” he said. “Someone else ground us, and I’ll—I’ll cast the circle.”

The small woman who lacked an arm stepped forward. Bird had forgotten her name. She picked up a book from behind the altar, opened it, and began reading.