The Fifth Sacred Thing (34 page)

Madrone was riding on a wave of undulating space, carrying her down and down. Then she was at the crossroads, the still point where all possibilities extended out like the spines of a sea urchin, herself in the hollow center. One road glowed like a path lined with
luminarias
at Yule. As she looked down that road she saw herself, walking south. It was a dry road; her mouth ached for water, and she couldn’t see the end of it, except that it seemed to lead on into her shapeless fears.

She shook her head, trying to make the road fade, hoping some other path would open up. But it remained: shining, implacable.

“I don’t want it,” Madrone protested, but without heart. She knew in the end she would not refuse. “Why me?”

In the road was a snake, iridescent, pearly skinned, who fixed her with an eye in which light played among subtle colors.

“Because of your gifts,” the snake said and rustled off, leaving her sitting on the Island of the Dead.

Sandy came to her. He held out his hands. They were rough, with the dirt of the garden still in their pores. She remembered how he used to wash at the end of the day, and duck his head under the faucet to splash water on his face, and the tuneless songs he would hum. They had been the ordinary background noise of her life. She hadn’t realized then how the sounds contained the essence of her love for him.

“We all come here, eventually,” Sandy said. “But don’t rush it, Madrone. You just have to bear the time of being alive. Enjoy it, even. I want you to enjoy it.”

“I do,” Madrone said. “I will.”

“It’s a hard road, the road to the Southlands. You can survive it, but not if you take it because you’re trying to die. Your death won’t change anything. Your life might.”

“I don’t want to die,” she said. “I only wanted to stay in the cold place because the light was so beautiful there. But no more. I don’t want that anymore.”

“Bird has grounded you.”

“That sounds funny.”

“I’m glad for you. I bless you,” Sandy said. “I’m only just the slightest hair jealous.”

“Sandy, I’m scared shitless. I don’t want to go to the Southlands. I’m a healer, not a hera.”

“If it’s really your road, if you are really meant to take it, you’ll find the courage.”

“Where?” Madrone asked.

He bent over her, draping her with his waterfall of black hair, and kissed her. Then he was gone.

When they opened the circle, they shared pomegranates from the Delta.

“What did you see?” Maya asked them.

“I saw myself going to the South,” Madrone said. “I don’t want to go. I’m afraid. But that was my vision.”

Bird took her hand and gripped it tightly. They sat silently together, staring into the heart of a candle flame in the dark.

12

T
he Healers’ Council met in a small conference room at the hospital. The walls were decorated with colorful murals, herbs grew in pots under the window, but the room still looked like what it was, a square box, product of the sterile architecture of the past century. Madrone sighed and helped herself to a muffin from the plate on the low table in the center of the room. Bird had been speaking, telling the story of his journeys in the Southlands. Sam and the others had quizzed him thoroughly on everything he knew about the epidemics and their origins, which wasn’t much. Today’s meeting was unusually crowded, fifteen or twenty people crammed onto couches or sprawled on the floor. Now they were all silent, considering.

“The Web asked for a healer,” Bird said. “They need help. The Stewards control the antidotes and the boosters, and without them people die.”

“I wish I could get a look at one of their boosters in my lab,” said a slim woman wearing a dragon-embossed robe of a style popular on the north side of the city.

“We all wish that,” Sam said. “The question is, is it worth risking somebody’s life to go down there and try to bring some back?”

“They need a healer,” Bird said again. “I’m willing to go, but I’m not one.”

Sam looked at him, frowned, and turned away in silent dismissal. Fuck you, Bird wanted to say. I’m no cripple. I can do whatever I need to do. But he held his tongue.

“Do we owe them anything?” Lou asked.

“I do,” Bird said firmly.

“I think we do,” Sam said slowly. “First, out of simple humanity. And strategically, there’s no better deterrent to foreign wars than rebellion at home. If the Stewards are tied up fighting in the Southlands, that might keep them from invading us, or lessen their forces if they do come.”

“But who could we send?” Aviva asked.

“Someone who could work with the supplies and the resources the hill people have,” Sam said.

“Which are?” Lou asked.

“Pretty much nothing, as far as I could tell,” Bird said reluctantly. “They don’t need a doctor so much as a miracle worker, a shaman who can cure with her or his hands alone.”

Nobody looked at Madrone. They all stared down at the rug or picked apart the remains of their muffins.

“I don’t want to go,” Madrone said. “I’m not crazy. I want to stay here, where I’m useful and needed.”

“You have every right to that choice,” Sam said.

“But I will go,” she went on, “if you all think I should. I’m willing to go. It comes into my visions and my dreams at night. Maybe I’m meant to go.”

“No!” Lourdes and Aviva exclaimed together. Sam turned to look at her, the lines in his face deepening.

“It seems a waste,” he said.

“Are you well enough?” Lou asked.

“Not today,” Madrone admitted. “But in another couple of weeks—before Yule, anyway. Honestly, Lou, I’m not overestimating my strength. I could come back to work now. But for hiking down the coast and facing what comes after, I’d need a bit of time to get in shape and prepare.”

Sam turned to the woman in the dragon robe. “Do you have anyone on the north side who might be willing to go?”

She shook her head. “We have many specialists, and our research on
ch’i
mapping is very advanced. But we must have equipment to heal; herbs and pharmaceuticals and facilities to sterilize our acupuncture needles. True psychic healers are scarce, and of those on our team, three are in their sixties and one is blind. I can’t see any of them making that journey.”

“Same on the west side,” a man said.

“I don’t like this,” Sam said.

“I don’t like it either,” Madrone said. “But even less do I like the thought of weathering more and more epidemics until we’re so weak the Stewardship troops can just march in and pick us off. If there’s a chance of preventing that, it seems worth taking.”

“I especially don’t like you going alone,” Sam went on. “Maybe Defense has someone they could send with you.”

“I’ll go with her,” Bird said. “I know the way.”

Sam expelled a long breath through his teeth. “Bird, I’ve already told you this once. You’ve sustained severe damage. Much of it is correctable, with some surgery and a lot of physical therapy, if you start on it soon. If you don’t, if you continue to stress the tendons and ligaments, you’re going to get worse. There is no question of your going back to the Southlands at this time.”

Bird’s mouth was set in a grim line, but he didn’t answer. Madrone spoke up quickly.

“I might only go as far as the Monsters, down by Slotown. That should be relatively safe. I can help them out, train some of their people, and maybe they can get me some samples of the boosters. With luck, I’ll be back in a month or two.”

“Goddess go with you,” Aviva murmured.

“I don’t like it,” Sam repeated.

“What does it mean to become a Dreamer?” Madrone asked. She was sitting with Lily at the little table in the clearing outside the house of the Nine. They were drinking some strange astringent tea out of a round black pot. The tea left her tongue feeling stripped and dry, but the colors of the day seemed brighter, more clear.

“There is the world of physical form,” Lily said. “What we know and can touch. And there are the realms of the
ch’i
world, realms of energies and spirits that infuse and underlie the physical. The division between the worlds is never absolute. Always there is bleed-through. So a Dreamer stands on the boundary. Did you know the German word for Witch,
Hexe
, comes from
haggibutzu
, she who sits on the hedge?”

“Actually I did know that,” Madrone said. “I read it in one of Maya’s books.” She drummed her fingers restlessly on the table edge. Maybe Lily could not tell her what she needed to know. Will I live or die?

“In an ordinary dream, the spirit world speaks to us. But a Dreamer can speak back, can make shapes and patterns in that world that later take form in this.”

“So is that what my dreams are doing? Is that what I did when I was so sick?”

“There are many different ways to
dream
. Some do it at night, with their eyes closed, some open-eyed in the light of day. Some, like Maya, tell stories that become the dreams of many.”

“I have two sets of dreams,” Madrone said. “Often I still dream that I am seeing patients and healing people. I wake up tired, from those. But I have other dreams, now, dreams of a dry landscape, and clouds of dust, and thirst, terrible thirst. In those dreams I am always trying to find water, or to bring water to someone. And then I wake.”

Lily examined her tea, favoring Madrone with only the briefest of glances.

“The journey to the South is not an easy one. But you have come to the point where you need to gather power, and that is never easy. So this is your challenge—to bring healing to the sick, to bring water to the dry lands.”

“Is it? Lily, I don’t know what to do. I want to go and I’m afraid to go. I’m afraid to be hurt like Bird’s been hurt. And I’m afraid of other things—things I can’t name or see clearly. Can learning to be a Dreamer help me overcome those fears?”

Lily rose. “Come, child. I cannot answer those questions for you. I can only give you a few tools to work with.”

Madrone followed her through the doorway of the round house and down a spiral staircase that seemed to lead straight underground. The air was cool and dark. After a while Lily led her through a low archway into a vaulted hall, lined with doors on either side. She opened one and Madrone followed her into a round dark room. A candle cast a warm glow over the whitewashed walls. Underfoot was soft carpeting.

“Lie down,” Lily said. Madrone obeyed, letting her body sink into the rug, closing her eyes.

“Now,” Lily said, “here is the breathing pattern for lucid
dreaming
.” She led Madrone through a series of meditations, monitoring her breath, moving her hands through Madrone’s aura, weaving new patterns with the energy. Madrone was asleep but not asleep, flying. I am free now, she thought, I can go anywhere, anywhere I want. I want to go home, a child’s voice within her cried. She was rushing on the wind, south, always south, far past the dry Southlands of California, over the deserts and high plateaus of Mexico, south toward the tiny country of Guadalupe, sandwiched between Nicaragua and El Salvador, where a small whitewashed house stood beside a dusty road, its door ripped from its hinges—

“No!” Madrone sat bolt upright, sweating and shouting. Lily looked at her in alarm.