The Fifth Sacred Thing (42 page)

But the rains were not expected for the next half year.

“It’s not so bad,” Rocky told her. “This time of year, you can always hike up to the waterfall.”

As dusk fell, Littlejohn lit a small fire in the ring of stones and cooked up a broth of stewed acorns. They sat together in a circle, after the sick were fed. Madrone felt her body crying out for something to drink. Baptist handed out cups, and Madrone restrained herself from snatching one from his slow hands. As Rocky poured water, Madrone stared at the clear stream, wondering how she could bear the dryness of her tongue for even another minute.

When all the cups were filled, they lifted them high.

“Drink deep on our day of victory,” they said in unison, and sat, gazing at the water for a moment. Madrone had been raised to treat water as sacred, but she sensed in that circle a reverence greater than she had ever imagined, a reverence she was rapidly coming to share. She swirled the water gently in her cup. She had never really appreciated the stuff before, how crystalline and transparent it was, how eager to take the form of its container, how it shaped and molded everything it touched. These hills, this flat bed of land, the course of the stream, the physical properties of the trunks of trees, the rounded shape of the stone in her pocket, her own body’s form and the texture of her skin—everything on earth was some revelation of water. Blessed water.

Carefully, she took a small sip on her tongue, as she had seen Hijohn do.
Oh, this wasn’t a drink, it was a sacrament. Every gland in her body seemed to leap for joy; her heart was racing. Let it sit for a moment, feel the coolness, swirl it in your mouth to wet every cranny, then let it sit again, until it takes on the temperature of blood. She could flick her tongue and set up miniature currents and waves; in her mouth was an ocean, a whitewater river like the wild streams of the high mountains she and Bird had rafted together. Finally, finally, when she could hold out no longer, she swallowed, dividing that small pool into five or six or ten sections, taking just a little each time to let the dry throat bathe again and again in that blessed sensation of wetness. And then she began all over again.

When the cup was empty, she could have drunk another five. But nobody asked for more. They served her a bowl full of a food that was strange to her: a nut-flour paste mixed with honey. She would have preferred an honest plate of rice and beans, but she ate thankfully and, when her bowl was empty, could have eaten twice as much again. But nobody asked for or offered seconds.

When dinner was over, they sat around the fire, talking as it burned to embers and died to ash. Baptist and Rocky were shelling acorns and grinding them between flat stones, their hands working automatically. Madrone offered to help, but Rocky told her to wait and learn during daylight. Hijohn sat propped up against a boulder, wrapped in his blanket.

“This may sound like a stupid question,” Madrone said, “but what do you do up here? I mean, what’s the purpose of these camps?”

“Different purposes,” Hijohn said. He spoke slowly, wearily, but his face had good color. “First, we’re a refuge for the ones who just can’t take it anymore down below. We give them somewhere to go, mostly west and north of here, where we have larger camps above the beach. Maybe you’ll get up to them one of these days. There’s more women there, and kids even, and more water. But the camps down here, close to the city, they’re for raids. We let the Stewards know that everything ain’t under control. Maybe we blow up a water line one place or cut their communication lines somewhere else. John Brown, that the bees are tending, he got shot bustin’ people out of the pens. Sometimes we raid a food distribution depot, give the stuff away. Steal from the rich, give to the poor, you know.”

“And are you having much success?” Madrone asked. She was trying to keep her voice neutral, but some of her doubts leaked into it.

“Maybe this doesn’t look like much to you, but it’s growing all the time. We’re like fleas on the back of the beast, you know. Or like bees. One sting won’t do you much harm—but enough of them all together can kill you.”

Madrone stared into the firepit, where the last embers were turning from glowing red to gray.

“What do you really want from me?” she asked.

“Three things. It’s true, we need a healer. As you can see. I would probably
be dead today myself if not for you, and I’m thankful. But more than that, the people here, we got to learn our own powers. We can’t depend on Witches from the North, we’ve got to have magic of our own. We got some, you’ve seen the bees. But we need more.” Hijohn’s voice sounded weak to her, and she wondered if, as a healer, she was remiss in not insisting he go back to sleep. But he continued.

“And there’s a third thing. The Web is strong, but it’s also divided. We got the camps up here in the hills, but we got houses in the city too. Lots of groups, different groups, and they don’t all know each other or trust each other. They don’t have a sense of being one thing all together.”

“And you think maybe I can provide that?”

“Maybe. You can provide a focus, maybe, that can bring some of them together. That’s why I’m hoping, after you’ve been up here in the hills for a bit and helped us out, that we can send you down to the city.”

The idea made Madrone shudder secretly, but she said simply, “I’m here to help. I’ll go wherever I can be useful.”

“I hate the city, myself,” Hijohn said. “Up here, whatever else is happening, you got earth under your feet, and trees, and air you can actually breathe. Down there, it’s nothing but poison. There’s grown men down there that have never seen a tree. But some like it.”

“What’s your city like?” Rocky asked a little shyly.

“We have lots of trees,” Madrone said. “Trees everywhere, and gardens. Fruit trees and walnut trees and avocados, wherever there’s a sheltered spot. We grow a lot of our own food, right in the city. And there’s water everywhere—not that we have a lot of it, but we conserve it carefully, in cisterns and graywater tanks so we can reuse it, and in the irrigation channels. But as much as possible we let it flow freely, in open streams that crisscross the pathways, so you can always hear it and smell it and sit beside it, watching it play with the light.”

“And people don’t steal it?” Baptist asked.

“Nobody owns it, so nobody can steal it. And everybody has as much as they need, because we all take care of it together.”

“But the poor people, what do they do?”

“There are no poor people. In our city, nobody is thirsty. Nobody goes hungry.”

She knew she was telling the truth, and yet her words began to sound unlikely, a fantasy tale of some mythical place she had invented herself, a dream too good to be true.

“Keep telling us that,” Hijohn said abruptly. “People won’t believe you, but that won’t matter. It don’t even matter if it’s true or not. Just keep telling us it is.”

“It is true,” Madrone said. “It could be like that here. We know a lot
about reclaiming dry lands. Rivers could run through the valleys, like they did a long time ago. People could have enough to eat and drink.”

“Just let it be possible,” Hijohn said. “True is great, but possible is enough.”

“A lot of things are possible,” Rocky said, and Madrone agreed. One of the names of the Goddess was All Possibility, and Madrone wished, for one moment, for a more comforting deity, one who would at least claim that only the good possibilities would come to pass.

“All means all,” she heard a voice in her mind whisper. “I proliferate, I don’t discriminate. But you have the knife. I spin a billion billion threads, now, cut some and weave with the rest.”

“I’m a healer, not a weaver,” Madrone answered back.

“Same difference.”

15

I
t had been too long since Maya had walked out in the City. The hills were still green from the winter rains, the trees growing bushy with the new leaves of spring. The slanting rays of the late-afternoon sun lit leaves and flowers with an inner glow. Rose moon, she liked to call it, when everything was budding, burgeoning, bursting forth with color and scent and the promise of fruit. She felt giddy, attractive—not young, exactly, merely immortal.

She walked slowly, supported by Bird on her left and Holybear on her right. Not bad for an old lady, to be flanked by two such handsome men, she thought. Although Bird still worried her. Sam claimed the operation was a success; the casts had been off for several weeks now and Bird had quickly weaned himself off crutches. He walked with more ease and she seldom saw the pain lines crease his face. But she didn’t trust him. If her weight became a burden, he would never let her know.

Bird caught Maya’s anxious glances and smiled at her. “I’m fine,
abuelita
,” he said. “You can quit worrying about me.”

“I’ll never quit worrying about you. Especially not on a night when we venture forth to reconnect with our Jewish roots. Worry is an integral part of our heritage, you know.”

“Then worry about fending off Sam’s attentions,” Bird said.

They were invited to celebrate the first night of Passover at Levanah House, a Jewish collective out in the fog belt where Madrone’s friend Aviva lived. Sam would be there too; he had especially requested Maya’s company. She wasn’t sure how she felt about him. Over the last few weeks he had been a frequent visitor at Black Dragon House. Ostensibly, he was checking on Bird’s progress, but he spent much of his time sipping herb tea in the kitchen with Maya.

“What if I don’t want to?”

“Then worry about fending off Rio’s ghost. And Johanna’s too, for that matter.”

“We were always very advanced about such things.”

Bird smiled, hoping she wouldn’t notice that his smile had a forced quality.
Yes, he was better, but he still felt like a clumsy approximation of himself, not quite able to walk, or work, or play his music, never able to silence his own worries about what was to come.

The weather is all wrong, he thought. Instead of this ridiculous sunshine, we should have storm clouds, gray skies, gloom. Madrone had been gone for months, with no word but the occasional dreams Lily reported. Defense had sent other scouts south. They brought back word of armies gathering, massing, moving slowly up the old freeways, repairing them as they came.

And yet the rosebushes were still heavy with buds and the city was busy with its usual spring planting and mending and cleaning. That morning he had gone to the central market. Farmers were in from the Delta with bushels of rice and black beans and soybeans, the last winter broccoli and artichokes, the first ripe strawberries. He had maneuvered carefully through the crowds to buy dried apples and raisins and bags of walnuts to make the
charoset
, the ritual food that would be their contribution to tonight’s meal.

It was a good year, Bird reflected, as he browsed the stalls rich with surpluses. Sam had been encouraging him to walk, but only in the last few days had he felt strong enough to venture very far. He was profoundly relieved to see something besides the familiar walls of the rooms at Black Dragon House.

He hadn’t realized what a toll enforced immobility would take on him. Not the pain, but the nightmares, in which he woke again and again, alone in the dark, abandoned by the living and the dead. He hadn’t wanted to speak of it to the others, but they had sensed something, and after the first few nights Holybear moved a pad into his room and slept at the foot of his bed.

“You don’t have to do that,” Bird said.

“Maybe I want to,” Holybear said, removing the blue silk robe he wore over green silk pajamas and hanging it neatly on the back of the door.

“You want to get woken up five times a night by my stupid dreams?”

“Yeah.” Holybear settled down on the mat, folding his hands behind his head. “When your dreams wake you up, I want to be there. In case you need anything. And so you know you’re not alone.”

The nights passed somewhat better after that, and when Bird’s body had healed enough so that a chance touch no longer jarred and pained him, Holybear moved into his bed. His even breath kept the nightmares at bay.

But Bird was still disturbed by this morning’s encounter in the market. He had walked out of his way to avoid the area where musical instruments were sold. But as he’d turned to skirt the covered section where crafts and hitech products were peddled, he’d heard his name and someone had grabbed him suddenly in a hug so vigorous it nearly upset his precarious balance. He’d wobbled dangerously until hands steadied him from behind.

The small dynamic woman who had grabbed him pulled back with a grin.
Her dark eyes were wet crescents under a sheet of black hair that she shook back from her face. “I heard that you’d risen up from the dead, like—who was that dude?”

“Lazarus,” said a deep voice behind him. Its owner moved around into his sight. “Good to see you again, man.
¿Cómo estás?”

“Sachiko, Walker—good to see you too.”

“How come you don’t come around the Guild,
hombre
? We could use you.”

Bird jerked his chin down toward his hand. “I’m not exactly playing much music these days,” he said.