The Fifth Sacred Thing (35 page)

“What’s wrong?”

Madrone shivered. “Lily, I don’t think I can do this.”

“Where did you go?”

“I started to go home, the home I was born in, down in Guadalupe, the home where my mother died. I don’t want to see that, Lily. Is that what I have to do, to be a Dreamer?”

“What you have to do first is learn control,” Lily said in a calm voice. “Although it’s true that a strong Dreamer must not fear to face anything the mind can hold.”

“But I do fear. I can’t help it.”

“Where there’s fear, there is power,” Lily said.

“I’m not sure I want power,” Madrone said. “Sometimes it seems like I already have too much. It weighs me down.”

“But what you want is not the issue here. Power has chosen you to be its instrument. Would you refuse it? Refuse your own vision?”

Madrone fought for a moment to slow her own breathing. Her heartbeat steadied.

“You know the answer to that,” she said. “All right. Better put me down into trance so I can try again, now, before I lose my nerve.”

Madrone prepared to go. She sorted through Black Dragon’s sixty-year accumulation of camping gear, picking out what she might need and assembling her pack. She harvested the herb gardens, replenished medicines, and made herself a compact kit to take away. She distilled a six-month supply of violet-leaf tincture for Sister Marie’s cancer. Almost daily she went to the island in the lake to meet with Lily and practice her
dreaming
. She went with Maya to Council to sit beside Bird as he told the city what he had seen in the Southlands and alerted them to the possibility of war. In the ensuing debate, she kept silent about her plan to go south. Lily had advised her not to broadcast her intentions.

Every day, Madrone took long walks to strengthen herself. She studied old maps until she nearly had them memorized. But each attempt she made to go over routes and plans with Bird ended in a fight.

Bird was a haunted man. He was haunted by the anticipated silence of the house without Madrone’s presence, and by visions of things happening to her so horrible he could not allow them to reach more than the edges of his mind. As a result, he went around staring into corners, fearing what waited to pounce from the periphery of his vision.

He knew that he had to go with her. Over and over again she told him no, but she found no one else to take his place. The Council could not spare a second healer. Sage and Nita and Holybear were engaged in work vital to Toxics that could not be abandoned, and there was nobody else she knew and trusted well enough to take into mortal danger. So Bird continued in his stubborn determination to accompany her himself.

The alternative was unbearable: far easier to bear the physical pain of the journey than the fear and helplessness of staying behind. He practiced by ignoring the considerable pain he was in continuously, as overstressed muscles and ligaments rebelled and went into spasm. He never complained, and he tried hard to hide it, especially from himself. Nevertheless, every time he pulled himself upstairs or clumped downstairs, the very air ached. He insisted on digging in the garden and turning the compost pile even though Holybear yelled at him for half an hour afterward, warning that he was going to do himself serious injury. He went out of his way to bring Maya things she’d left upstairs or downstairs, until she became terrified of ever putting anything down for fear of forgetting it and causing him another trip.

Madrone finally lost patience with him. They were all in the common room after dinner and she was going over an old geological survey map of Big Sur, asking him if he knew which trails were still good and where they had disappeared.

“Don’t worry about it,” he said. “I’ll show you when we get there.”

“Bird,” she said tensely, “I don’t know how to say this to you, because I’ve said it fifty times already and you haven’t seemed to understand, so let me say it again in words of one syllable: You are not going. You no go.
No vas a ir
. You stay here.
Aquí
. Home.
¿Comprendes?”

“You don’t have to be insulting, Madrone. It’s my decision, and I’ve made it. I’m going. I have to go.”

“Hey, you’re not alone here,” Holybear said.

“That’s right,” Sage agreed. “This is something that affects all of us. It’s not a decision you get to make on your own.”

“I’ve made it,” Bird said.

“I block that decision,” Madrone said.

“You can’t block me from doing something I need to do.”

“I can block me from having anything to do with it. Bird, what is the matter with you? Are you out of your mind? Haven’t you noticed that you can barely make it down to the garden, let alone hike back down the coast range? It’s not that I don’t want you to come.
Diosa
, I’d give anything to have you along on this, if I thought you could do it. But you can’t.”

“I
did
it. How the fuck do you think I got back here? Don’t tell me I can’t do it, because I did do it—and I feel a hell of a lot stronger now than I did then.”

“You don’t look stronger,” Nita said.

“I am stronger. Every day. You don’t know what my body feels like to me.”

“We know,” all four of them said at once.

“Bird, we are Witches. We know things. It’s our business, you know that. You can’t hide pain around here, any more than you could hide a decomposing rat from the dogs. We smell it,” Holybear said.

“Pain doesn’t bother me.”

The silence that followed this statement seemed to crackle with the comments everybody held back. Madrone walked out of the room.

“Well, it doesn’t,” Bird said.

The silence only deepened. Maya focused carefully on her knitting. Bird looked around for someone to give him reassurance, but they all had their eyes turned down and inward. The atmosphere was heavy; they all sensed that someone was about to get hurt. Madrone came back in, carrying her pack. Her cheeks were flushed and her lips were set.

“Okay,” she said. “You win. You can come. You can do anything. Mind over matter. I give up. Just one thing, though. I’d like you to show me how you’re going to carry your pack.”

She held it out toward Bird, with the straps and frame facing him. He looked at her and saw her eyes, hard as little black stones. Then he looked at the rest of them. But they held nothing out to him.

“Sure,” he said, shrugging his shoulders. Then he slipped his arms into the straps of the pack. Madrone let it go, and as the weight fell on him, his face turned ashy gray. He cinched the waist belt. Beads of sweat stood out on his forehead.

“It’ll be all right in a minute,” he said, and shifted his weight as if he were trying to walk. Then his leg crumpled under him and he collapsed on the floor with a soft, strangled cry.

Instantly they were all around him, pulling the pack off and holding and stroking him and each other.

“Are you hurt?” Sage asked.

Bird was biting back tears. Maya wondered why he couldn’t just let go and cry. Who taught him to be stoic? she asked, but no one answered. You, Rio? His father? Not me. Not Brigid.

“You bastards,” he said. Madrone ran her hands over his hip, Sage rubbed his shoulders, Nita ran for an ice pack, and Holybear put his arms around Bird.

“Just cry,” he said. “Cry it out. You’ll feel better.”

“I don’t want to cry it out. I don’t want you to comfort me. I just want not to be broken anymore.”

He did cry then. They were all crying, Maya in her corner and the others in their circle. “You’re healers, damn it—heal me! Give me my body back. Give me my hands!”

But all they could give him was the touch of their hands, their bodies. It wasn’t enough, but it was something. Quietly Maya got up and left the room.

Maya lay on her bed, her arms outstretched, holding her breath. “Come and get me, death,” she whispered. “I want to go now.”

“Fold your wings, you old bat,” Johanna said, looking down on her with her own arms crossed over her chest. “Who do you think you are, Jesus Christ?”

“I was on a talk show with him once,” Maya said. “Remember? Back in 1999. He said he’d returned for the New Millennium, but he was disgusted with the world. So he went away again. Tell me, you should know now. Was he the real Jesus?”

“I’m not here to debate theology with you. Sit up, girl. You’re not dead yet.”

“I want to be. I can’t bear to stick around and watch the sufferings of the young.”

“Why not? Are they more fragile than we were? Hell no, these kids are tougher than those biscuits you used to make, the ones we called bullets. Anyway, this is no time to turn wimpy on me. You’re still needed.”

“I’m going on strike. Besides, I can’t
do
anything! What can I do for Madrone, except worry? What can I do for Bird?”

“Leave him his own pain. Don’t try to bear it for him. Come on, Maya, sit up and let me put my arms around you.”

Maya sat up. Her arms caressed her own shoulders as she rocked, cradled in the arms of the dead.

“We had our challenges and our suffering,” Johanna said. “Leave the young their turn.”

“But their turn is so much harder than ours was! It is, Johanna, don’t pretend it’s not! And that’s not right. That’s not what we worked for!”

“What we worked for was to give them a turn at all. Given the way things were going when we were young, we should claim it as a victory that they’re alive and still have a world to suffer in.”

Bird sat in the garden. The moon had caressed his sore back, but it was dipping down below the neighbor’s roofline, and the air was chilly. Still he couldn’t bring himself to move, to get up and go in and face Madrone again, with her camping gear spread out all over her room and a look of determined kindness in her eyes.

The cold creeping along his shoulder blades felt almost like a hand. If he closed his eyes, he saw Rio’s face, his hair and beard blue-white in the starlight.

“I’m disappointed in you,” Rio said. “I thought you had more guts.”

“Lay off me, will you?” Bird said. “Or try another tactic. That one won’t fly. Believe me, Rio, nobody in the world can accuse me of not having guts. I have nothing more to prove on that score.”

“It’s not your machismo I’m talking about, it’s another kind of courage. And I’m not criticizing. Who am I to judge you? I just wish you had the courage to let yourself really feel your wounds.”

“I am doing that right now. Right now! I’m just sitting here feeling how my leg hurts and my back hurts and my fingers are stiff and heavy and nothing works right, okay? I can’t go south with Madrone, I know that now; I can’t play my music; I’m altogether fucked up and fairly useless, and I admit it to you.”

“But those aren’t the wounds I’m talking about,” Rio said. “Listen, Bird. There’s something that happens to you when you’ve been through things that other people haven’t. When you’ve encountered possibilities of ugliness that they don’t know about. We both know this, you and I. How it feels like you have to hold the pain for them, to contain it somehow and keep from spilling it out.”

“That’s why there’s so much I can’t talk about,” Bird said.

Rio shook his head. “It doesn’t work that way, Bird. It just eats away at you from the inside. It’s hurting you.”