The Fifth Sacred Thing (28 page)

Madrone’s crying had given way to quiet misery. She lay still, her face buried in the earth. Then she felt a hand on her shoulder.

“It’s me,” Nita said.
“¿Qué pasó?”

Madrone took her hand and pressed it against her cheek. It felt cool, soft, comforting.

“Nada,”
she said.

“Bullshit.” Nita slid her arm around Madrone’s shoulders. She recognized Sandy’s shirt and touched it softly. “I miss him too,” she said. “It hurts. It hurts a lot.”

They sat together for a while, not needing to talk. The sun had left the garden, and Madrone shivered suddenly.

“Well,” she said, “I’ve been a real bitch to Bird.”

“I don’t doubt it.”

“I just needed somebody to hold me and tell me I’m really wonderful.”

“You’re wonderful,” Nita said, squeezing her tighter and kissing the tear that dripped down her cheek.

“So instead I picked a fight.”

“You do tend to do that, you know.”

“Why couldn’t he see what I needed? Isn’t he supposed to be as psychic as the rest of us?”

“Since when have psychic abilities ever been the least help in anyone’s love life?”

“You would have known. Sandy would have.” She began to cry again.

Nita rocked her and kissed her again, on the forehead. “Ah, but Sandy and I had years to get used to you.”

“I’m tired of loving people who die.”

Madrone shivered again and Nita hugged her. They kissed, long and lingering.

“I’m glad you’re back,” Madrone said.

“Me too.”

Clustered around the old round table, they passed bowls of salad and steamed squash and rice. The room was once again filled with light and noise and voices. Madrone had made peace with Bird before they ate, intercepting him as he carried a stack of plates to set the table.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “You couldn’t know that plant was where I scattered his ashes.”

“Oh.” He set down the plates and turned to her. “You could have told me.”

“I know.” She put her arms around him and they hugged. “I was an asshole. I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay. I’m sorry too. I could have seen that you were just missing him.”

“I was just hurting,” Madrone said. “And it always makes me mean. I don’t really want you to be Sandy.”

“That’s a good thing.”

“But I want to know you. You’ve shut me out, Bird.”

He stiffened, then let out a long breath. “All right. That’s true.”

“So?”

“So I’ll try.”

They spent dinner talking over the latest gossip and catching up on news, carefully avoiding the serious questions that hovered like latent images just below the surface. When the meal was done and the kitchen cleaned up, they settled back into the chairs and couches that filled the other half of the big common room. Sage brewed tea from fresh herbs from the garden. Maya moved to her chair under the lamp and picked up the afghan she was knitting. Her eyes were no longer good enough for embroidery, but she could still observe every nuance of each interaction in the room.

Bird and Madrone sat close together, settled on the couch in the bay window. Madrone couldn’t seem to keep her hand from traveling over to touch Bird, to rest on his thigh or stroke the hairs on his arm. Her fingers reassured her that he was still there, still alive.

He welcomed her touch because it seemed to sink through the veil that kept settling over him, separating him from the scene as if it were happening to someone else, as if he were still trapped in his own prison of what was unsaid. Why was it so hard to talk? He had come back to warn them, here in the North. Yet now that he was home he felt reluctant to speak, as if by naming the danger he would cause it to manifest.

“So tell us about it,” Holybear said to Bird.
“¿Qué pasó?”

Bird was drinking out of one of the delicate Chinese teacups, and he turned it around, feeling the fragility of the porcelain between his thick, clumsy fingers. How easily it could be broken, crushed. He was balanced precariously between two worlds, like alternate realities, positive and negative space, trying hard to keep them apart, because if they came together, one would be destroyed.

“What’s worrying you?” Manzanita asked.

Finally he spoke. “War.”

There was a stillness in the room, like the glassy surface of a lake before someone plunges in.

“We are at war,” Madrone said at last. “We have been at war for a long time. Maybe our whole lives.”

Bird looked at her sharply. Her face was expressionless, but somewhere under its surface he sensed movement, like a boiling under the earth’s crust. If she let that out, he thought, she would be awesome, but then of course she did, every day, in her healing. No wonder offerings still cluttered the front steps.

“What do you mean?” he asked.

“I mean that every day since
Las Cuatro Viejas
took their picks to the streets, we’ve been living in a state of siege. We’re not free. We’re not even safe. In the last ten years, we have lost a third of the city. One out of three. We’re just fighting diseases instead of guns.”

“Is that what you think about the epidemics?” Holybear said. “That they’re some kind of biological warfare?”

“That seems to be the growing consensus on the Healers’ Council. Also, Defense thinks so. But it’s beyond even that.”

“What do you mean?” Sage asked.

“I mean that’s where the battle is coming down right now—around survival. Basic biological survival. And we’re losing. I’m telling you, this last one scared me. Things aren’t right. They seem all right on the surface, but they aren’t right.”

“No, they aren’t,” Manzanita said. “We went up the Delta and over to the North Bay, did some sampling. It’s not good. And there was another mass of sea lion deaths up past Mendocino. I’m scared to eat fish anymore.”

“But this has been happening for fifty years or more,” Maya said.

“And what if it’s reaching the critical point?” Madrone said. “When did they ban chlorofluorocarbons? Back in the mid-nineties? How many more years before we can hope to restore the ozone?”

“Twenty, maybe thirty,” Holybear said.

“And who knows how much of the forests are left, or what the Stewardships are dumping into the sea?”

“When I was young,” Maya said, “each spring brought back songbirds that nested in the rain forests of the Amazon.”

“You should have made videos,” Nita said.

Holybear turned to Bird. “But what you’re talking about is something else, right? Something undeniably warlike—guns and bombs and soldiers?”

“I came back up the coast,” Bird said. “The whole valley, down past the ruins of Slotown, is one big militarized zone. Troops everywhere. They’re being trained to march on the North. On us.”

“How do you know that?” Holybear asked.

“I met some deserters, back in the hills. With the Monsters.”

“Monsters?”

“That’s what they call themselves. They helped us.”

“Who’s us?” Nita asked.

“Me and my—friend. It’s a long story.”

“We’ve got all night,” Maya said.

“You won’t like it.”

“Nobody’s forcing you to tell it,” she said. “If you want to keep it bottled up and stay shielded, shut down, and miserable, like you’ve been the last two weeks, you’ve got a right to do that. Just don’t expect us not to notice.”

“And comment on it,” Holybear added.

“And bitch about it,” Sage said.

Bird almost started to smile, but his mouth fell back into its set line. “I don’t know why this is so hard for me to talk about. I haven’t wanted to shut people out. I guess I’ve gotten used to keeping secrets.”

“Keep all the secrets you want,” Maya said.

“As long as you don’t mind her divining what they are,” Sage said.

“You mean you don’t know it all already?” Bird said. “I’m disappointed in you.”

“I don’t know everything. I write stories, but that doesn’t make me the Omniscient Narrator of life.”

“What happened?” Sage asked softly.

He told them, beginning with the dreams that had led him and the others down to the Southlands.

“It started with Cleis, really, or with my infatuation with her. I was obsessed—even though I knew I was hurting you.” He turned to Madrone and pressed her hand. “Even though I knew she really wanted Zorah more than me, and Zorah wanted Tom—so naturally we all four started to sleep together. And we kept on having the same dreams—all of them about the South. It was the height of the big epidemic, everyone was dying all around us, and we weren’t the only ones that had the idea that it might be a good time for a scouting trip. You know their nuclear capacity had always given Defense
Council nightmares. If the Stewards were as weak as we were, maybe we could do something about it. And we did, although this part is where the details start to get a bit fuzzy in my mind.”

He described the attack on the nuclear reactor, as clearly as he could remember. The others interrupted often with questions, so it took a long time to tell.

Madrone cradled his hands between her hands, as if she could heal them, make them new. His face was turned away from hers, but when he described the deaths of Cleis and Zorah and Tom, he looked up and met her eyes, letting a barrier between them drop.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

He shrugged, reluctant to go on, to take himself back into the pain and share it here. For a moment, the others, with their straight limbs and strong bodies, seemed like plants grown under glass, sheltered. For just a moment, he hated their unbroken hands.

“Well,” he said finally in a flat voice, looking down at the rug, “a lot of the next part I don’t remember too clearly. Pain, but I survived that. They worked me over pretty good, a couple of times. Asked a lot of questions, about magic. How did we get into the plant? Was I a Witch? Where from? I got scared that I wouldn’t be able to hold out much longer, especially if they used drugs. So I did something. I kind of … rolled my mind up into a ball and hid it away.”

“How’d you do that?” Nita asked.

“I don’t know, exactly. The next thing I knew, ten years had gone by. I don’t remember any of it.”

Well, that was out now, Maya thought, as they sat in silence, and maybe that was the worst of it.

“That must have been hard,” Holybear said.

“It’s just … gone,” Bird said. “Sometimes a piece will come back, a scene or a phrase or a feeling in my body, but disconnected. Out of context. It makes me kind of crazy to think about it. I don’t know where I was or what I did.”

“Then what happened?” Nita asked.

“I woke up. It was like—like going to sleep at night and waking up the next day and finding out it was ten years later. Only it was night when I woke up, and I was in bed with this kid and it seemed like we’d been lovers for a long time, but I couldn’t remember who he was, and I wasn’t too sure who I was either. I was locked up in this horrible place, and I thought I was going to be trapped there for the rest of my life. That was pretty bad.”

“You have a gift for understatement,” Sage said.

“It was worse, in a way, than being beat up, because it just seemed so normal, like it could go on forever. Like it
had
gone on forever. There didn’t
seem to be any reason why it should change. And—it was strange. When I first woke up, I did a healing.” He told them about Hijohn. “But after that, I couldn’t seem to get hold of any power. Couldn’t trance much, couldn’t
shift
anything. I finally did a real simple spell. Actually, I didn’t think it would work, but I guess it did.”

He described the escape and the journey north, the meeting with the Monsters, the troops he had seen massing in Slo Valley, what the deserters had told him about the diseases.

“So they are weapons,” Madrone said. “I thought so, but I still find it hard to believe.”

“Some of them are, at least,” Bird said.

“And they have antidotes?” Sage asked.

“Antidotes for some things, and general immunoboosters,” Bird said. “You get them if you’re in the army, or if you’re in good with the Millennialists. Otherwise, you take your chances. A lot of people die. That’s why they need a healer.”

“What they need is mass rebellion,” Holybear said.

“They’re working on it,” Bird said. “In the meantime, staying alive is a pretty big challenge.”

“Healers’ Council will want to hear this,” Madrone said. “Will you come talk to us?”

Bird nodded.

“I want to hear the rest of your story,” Maya said. “How’d you get back here from—where’d you say? Slotown? Is that what they’re calling San Luis Obispo these days?”

“Right, like Los Angeles,” Bird gave the word its Spanish pronunciation, “turned into Angel City.” He told them the rest of it, then, about the long hike back up the coast. What he didn’t say was how hard that walk had been, how his body had screamed its protest at every step, how very close he had come to lying down and giving up. But they could hear what he edited out echoing in the pauses and hesitations between his words. Madrone worked pain from the knots in his fingers. She knew.

“And?” Maya said when he finished.

“And what?”

“And whatever it is that’s still sticking in the back of your throat.”