The Fifth Sacred Thing (5 page)

A deep hush fell over the crowd. Maya went on.

“This moon brings a time of hope and danger: fire season. We watch the dry hills anxiously, knowing that the rains are weeks or months away. Those of us who are old have seen fire destroy our drought-baked cities and smoke eclipse the sun. We’ve seen rich croplands shrivel into glass-hard deserts, and the earth itself collapse on its emptied water table. We have seen diseases claim our children and our lovers and our neighbors. We know it can happen again.

“We hope for a harvest, we pray for rain, but nothing is certain. We say that the harvest will only be abundant if the crops are shared, that the rains will not come unless water is conserved and shared and respected. We believe we can continue to live and thrive only if we care for one another. This is the age of the Reaper, when we inherit five thousand years of postponed results, the fruits of our callousness toward the earth and toward other human beings. But at last we have come to understand that we are part of the earth, part of the air, the fire, and the water, as we are part of one another.”

She paused for a moment. Her voice dropped, becoming lighter, almost conversational.

“We have had two blessed decades to remake our corner of the world, to live by what we believe. Today is the twentieth anniversary of the Uprising. I’ve been asked to tell you the story of
Las Cuatro Viejas
, the Four Old Women who sparked the rebellion in ’28 when the Stewards canceled the elections and declared martial law.

“On Shotwell Street, down below the slopes of this hill, which in that time was called Bernal Heights, lived a woman, Maria Elena Gomez Garcia, whose grandmother grew fruit trees in the back yard from peach pits and avocado pits, and she saved her tomato seeds. While the Stewards’ troops were massing down on the peninsula, commandeering all stockpiles of food, and the rest of us were debating what to do and trying to work up courage to do it, Maria gathered together with her neighbors, Alice Black, Lily Fong, and Greta Jeanne Margolis, four old women with nothing to lose. On the morning of the first of August, they marched out in the dawn with pickaxes over their shoulders, straight out into the middle of Army Street, and all the traffic stopped, such cars as a few people could still afford to drive.

“Some of them were honking their horns, some were shouting threats, but when Maria raised the pickax above her head, there came a silence like a great, shared, indrawn breath. Then she let it fall, with a thud that shuddered through the street, and the four old women began to dig.

“They tore up the pavement, blow by blow, and filled the holes with compost from a sack Greta carried, and planted them with seeds. By then a crowd had gathered, the word was carried through the streets, and we rushed from our houses to join them, bringing tools or only our bare hands, eager to build something new. And many of us were crying, with joy or with fear, tears streaming enough to water the seeds.

“But Alice raised her hand, and she called out in a loud voice. ‘Don’t you cry,’ she told us. This is not a time to cry. This is a time to rejoice and praise the earth, because today we have planted our freedom!’

“Then we joined them, tearing up the streets as the cars backed away from us, piling up barricades on the freeways, smashing the doors of the locked warehouses. And those who supported the Stewards fled south with all the goods they could steal. And we who remained planted seeds, and we guarded the sources of our water in the valleys and the mountains, and the Stewards withdrew to starve us out.

“We were hungry, so very hungry, for a long time while we waited for the seeds to grow, and prayed for rain, and danced for rain. It was a long dry season. But we had pledged to feed one another’s children first, with what food we had, and to share what we had. And so the food we shared became sacred to us, and the water and the air and the earth became sacred.

“When something is sacred, it can’t be bought or sold. It is beyond price, and nothing that might harm it is worth doing. What is sacred becomes the measure by which everything is judged. And this is our measure, and our vow to the life-renewing rain: we will not be wasters but healers.

“Remember this story. Remember that one act can change the world. When you turn the moist earth over, and return your wastes to the cycles of decay, and place the seed in the furrow, remember that you are planting your freedom with your own hands. May we never hunger.
¡Que nunca tengamos hambre!”

“May we never thirst!
¡Que nunca tengamos sed!
” the united voices of the listeners chorused.

“One act, and about a thousand hours of meetings,” Sam whispered.

“Cynic,” Madrone said. “Don’t you know a good story when you hear one?”

“It’s a great story. It’s just that it bears so little resemblance to the actual history I remember.”

“Quiet. It’s my turn now.”

Madrone and several others, representatives of various guilds and councils
and work groups, stepped forward into the center of the circle. The same solemn child held the Talking Stick for each of them.

“We have come here to give an accounting of ourselves, calling on the Four Sacred Things to witness what we have made of this city in twenty years,” said Salal from the Central Council. “This is how we have kept our pledges. This is what we have harvested.”

As the stick passed around the circle, each person spoke, in turn, from the Gardeners’ Guild, and the Water Council, and the Healers, and the Teachers, and all the interlocking circles that provided for the needs of the City.

“No one in this city goes hungry.”

“No one lacks shelter.”

“No child lacks a home.”

When the stick came to Madrone, she hesitated for a long moment. “There is sickness here,” she said finally, “but no one lacks care.”

The stick moved on.

“See, the fruit hangs heavy on the bough, ready to feed the stranger.”

“We have guarded our waters well, our cisterns will not run dry, no one thirsts, and our streams run clear.”

“All the gifts of the earth are shared,” they said in unison.

“May we never hunger!” the people responded.
“¡Que nunca tengamos hambre! ¡Que nunca tengamos sed!”

The drums beat a hypnotic, insistent rhythm. The music rose and the drums pounded, and suddenly everyone was dancing, in the central space, up in the ringed tiers that climbed the hill, on the ridges. The sky gleamed indigo with streaks of pink and gold in the west, and against its glowing light loomed giant figures,
La Segadora
herself, fifteen feet high, with serpent head and serpent skirt and a basket strapped to her back in which she carried a machete. And Lugh, the gleaming paint of his solar disc set on fire by the dying rays of the sun, and others: ancestors, spirits, visions. Maya knew, looking up, that they were only cloth or paper, but in the twilight they came alive. The musicians were playing one of Bird’s tunes, and Maya was suddenly shot through with pain like a ringing bell, the pain of missing him. The people sang:

The chant rose to a roar, subsided to a single harmonic tone, and ended abruptly, as if sung by a single voice. Everyone touched the earth. Silence swelled to consume all the echoes and the overtones.

“May we never hunger!” the people cried again.

Offerings of fruit and grain and cooked foods were piled in the central
circle. A young child was blessing the food and drink, while others thanked the ancestors and spirits and the Four Sacred Things to end the formal part of the ritual. But the feasting would go on for a long time.

“Are you staying?” Sam asked Madrone, coming over to them. “I can walk Maya home.” In his voice was a hopeful note.

Maya could feel the spark stretching like a thread between her and Sam. He was hoping for something, an invitation, a sign from her. She could feel his loneliness as she could feel her own. It was too much. She was too old, too tired, to take on the burden of it.

“I’ve got to get some sleep,” Madrone said. “I was up all night.”

“Good night, Sam,” Maya said firmly, taking Madrone’s arm. “It was good seeing you.
Que nunca tengas
and all that.”

“Kay noonka,” Sam said. “Get some rest, Madrone.”

In the dark, spirits fluttered like memories, like birds. Fog lay on the city like the silver fingers of a gloved hand, as the moon lit their way down the hill.

2

W
hen Bird awoke there was a boy in bed with him. They cuddled together with the ease of long-time lovers. Bird’s knees curved into the back of the boy’s knees, his arms were clasped across the boy’s smooth chest, and his cock nestled limp and damp between the boy’s buttocks. Tom? he thought sleepily. Sandino? He had been dreaming about Madrone, and for one moment he curled deeper into the sweetness of the dream. Her eyes met his. She forgave. What? He couldn’t quite remember, and in trying to track the memory he came up from sleep to an awareness of the stink of piss and metal.

He opened his eyes to find his lips pressed against the nape of a neck he did not recognize. The room was dark but slowly it began to lighten, as if somewhere an unseen sun were rising. He heard a creak above him; he was in a metal bunk with somebody asleep on the tier above. A plastic mattress bulged down against metal springs. Now he could see tier upon tier of bunks. It was a big room, big enough to hold maybe sixty bunks, with metal tables down the center. The light came from a grid of bars that blocked the window.

He didn’t know where he was or how he’d gotten there.

The boy stirred in his arms. “Charlie,” he murmured. “You awake?”

“Charlie?”

“Your name is Charlie.” The boy’s voice was patient, as if he’d explained this many times before.

“Uh … I don’t think so.”

“Don’t worry about it. You just don’t remember.”

He was pretty sure his name wasn’t Charlie, but for a long moment he couldn’t remember what it was and that scared him. Then it came back to him: Bird. It sounded right, it fit him, but he didn’t say it out loud because he had been raised to know that names had power.

“Who are you?” he asked the boy.

“I’m Littlejohn. I’m your girl.”

He was sure the boy wasn’t a girl because he could feel his cock when he ran his hand down the smooth body, and the cock was beginning to stiffen, as
was his own, as if his body remembered something his mind did not. He felt sick, confused.

“It’s okay,” Littlejohn said. “You don’t remember so good. The bigsticks did something to your mind. But it’s cool.”

“I don’t remember anything.”

“I know. Don’t worry about it. Fuck me.”

“I don’t know you.”

The boy smiled. “Charlie, you been fuckin’ me every day for the last year. You just don’t remember.”

“For a year? What year is this?”

“The Forty-eighth Year of the New Millennium.”

“Fortieth?”

“No, Forty
-eighth.”

“That’s ten years from now!”

“No, Charlie, that
is
now.”

“That can’t be true.”

“Want me to flip on the vidnews and prove it to you? All I need’s a screen.”

“I’ve lost ten years?”

“Why not? If you can lose one, why not two? Two, why not five? Five, why not ten? Believe me, one thing we got plenty of around here is time. You could lose twenty and barely notice them.”

“Shit.”

“Fuck shit,” Littlejohn said. “Or better yet, let’s just fuck.”

But Bird had rolled over on his back. He felt a sense of vertigo, as if everything around him were spinning and tumbling.

“Where are we?”

“Terminal Island. Angel City, heart of the Southlands. They call this the Pit.”

Bird had one moment of sheer panic again. He had been fucking a stranger, a boy who could have anything in the way of disease, even the old immune disorders or the archaic blood cancers. He
felt
his body and the boy’s; they seemed clean. And going into his body seemed to ground him a bit; the dizziness subsided, and a few memories swam into focus.

“I remember a prison doctor coming at me with a needle,” he said.

“You remember that? Hey, you never remembered nothing like that before.” The boy rolled over to look at him. Littlejohn had close-cropped straight brown hair, a dark face with delicately molded bones, and bright blue eyes. The effect was startling. “Maybe your mind can come back.”

“Don’t I remember anything?”

“You remember for about five minutes. Then I have to tell you all over again: who you are, who I am.”

The vertigo was back, and the sick feeling in the pit of his stomach. What if it all went away again in five minutes? What if he had lost his mind and could never find it again?

“That must be hard for you,” Bird said.

“I don’t mind. There’s worse things. Anyway, you always remember how to fuck. Sometimes when you fuck me once you forget that you already done it and you do it again. And you always remember how to fight. Around here that’s about all you really need to know.”

“How did you get here?”