The Fifth Sacred Thing (68 page)

“Those hotheads on the Water Council,” Sam said. “I bet they’ve blown up the dam. I knew they’d be up to something.”

“What do you think will happen?” Maya whispered, her throat dry with fear for Bird.

The next morning, soldiers shot five people taken at random from the streets in the Central Plaza. The army rebuilt the dam and began work to enclose the other streams in the city. Two nights later, another explosion rocked the silence, and again the water flowed. That morning, ten people were shot.

“How long can this go on?” Maya asked.

“Till they give up, or we do,” Sam said.

“Water Council doesn’t have consensus from the full Council to keep blowing the dams.”

“No, but they won’t get much opposition, either.” “What about the dead?”

“The dead don’t have a voice on the Council.”

“That’s an oversight,” Maya said.

25

B
ird closed his eyes. Mostly he preferred to see what was coming at him, to preserve at least that much control. But he could not bear to look in the eyes of his torturers, to see on their faces that serious, intent, and probing look. It was too much like the look on a lover’s face or, he imagined, in his own eyes, making love to Madrone, when she gaped in ecstasy. Maybe we men need to do this, he thought, one way or another, in order to know we exist. We need to leave our mark on another body, to make it feel our power. He closed his eyes against the mingling of cruelty and sex he saw in the faces above him, so as not to be forever tainted. And yet he could feel himself being changed.

He had lost count of the days, of how many times they had gone to work on him, of how many hours he had suffered. Certainly weeks had passed since he was arrested—but how many? He had no idea. At first, he’d felt confident. I can get used to this, he thought, I can endure. The neural probes they used on him left no marks. They did no physical damage; they simply stimulated the pain neurons in the body directly. I could even come out of this with no more of me broken, maybe. A dangerous hope, a hope that could be used against him, and Bird tried to put it out of his mind. Hope would make him vulnerable, manipulable. Like fear. Better to resign himself to death.

But death was far away. That was the catch. As hours lengthened into what seemed like days or eternities, Bird began to understand. If they’d simply been beating him, he would have gone into shock by now, maybe bled to death from internal wounds, at least gone numb. Instead, his body seemed capable of perpetual fresh responses to pain, and he was awed at the intensity and variety of pain the body could produce. What they could do to a finger, or the sensitive skin inside his arm. An eyelid, a toe, a nipple, the ridge of skin that rimmed his cock. This is what being raped is like, he thought. He was exposed, violated, and he couldn’t seem to lift himself out of his body, to escape, even for a moment, from wide-open consciousness of the pain. When he began to weaken, from thirst and hunger, they jammed a tube down his throat and poured in gruel. When he threw it back up, trying but failing to
inhale the vomit and choke and die, they stuck a tube in his arm and fed him intravenously.

They are taking good care of me, he realized, and that thought made him afraid in a new way. Why? What do they want to use me for? He could feel himself approaching the limits of his ability to resist. He could hold out a long time, but even he could not hold out forever. Let me die, let me die, let me die, he prayed. They called the Reaper the Implacable One, but that was wrong. She was mercy, grace, the release that would not come to him. No, what was implacable was life, his life, that kept his lungs breathing and his heart pumping against his will. His body betrayed him, responding with such a full orchestra of agonies to what? To nothing, a beam of photons, the tickling of a laser a few atoms wide. He would never trust it again.

The moment came when he could not tolerate one more descent and emergence into the extremities of pain. Something shifted in him, some ground of himself that he thought was solid dissolved and melted away. I am going to break, he realized. Behind his closed eyes he saw a face, like an old woman with serpent skin.
La Serpiente, La Segadora
, the Reaper. Mama, this is as far as I can go. In one more breath, I will give way, and open my mouth, and be gone.

“Talk to us. Answer our questions.”

He couldn’t stand it. Whatever will of his own was left was contradicted by every impulse of his body. He was going to talk, to make some sound, say something, anything to stave off pain. And once he began, how would he be able to stop, to force his lips to say certain words, not others? He couldn’t seem to die, and even if he did they would only drag someone new into this dilemma. Anything he did to escape the pain would only visit it on someone else. No, they had to break somebody. Let it be him, he was already half ruined. Or was he just making excuses? Maya,
abuela
, Lily, Madrone, I’m sorry.

He talked. Once he began, he told them whatever they wanted to know. What was the point of suffering over one question or another, when he knew he would tell them all in the end? Only to buy a little more time—for what? For nothing. He told them that the real Defense Council was nine old women hidden somewhere. He did not know where, and all the pain they applied could not make him know, for which he was glad because if he had known he would surely have told them. He explained to them the city’s strategy of noncooperation. He told them how the city was organized, how work was divided and credits were assigned, how the power grids were operated, how fish were bred in the aquaculture tanks. Anything, everything. What he knew about healing. How the city had thrown off the last epidemic. Name names, he was told. He named Madrone—after all, she was gone and they would never find her.

The questions went on and on, and the exhaustion, after how long without sleeping? He no longer knew or cared. What mattered was pleasing them, getting them to believe him. Sometimes they did; sometimes, even when he told the truth, they did not.

“You have destroyed your data bases.”

“No, we haven’t done that.”

“You lie. Nothing will function for us. None of the hardware responds to our commands.”

“No, no, they won’t function under stress. They don’t work that way.”

“What do you mean?”

“Look, I’m not a tecchie, I can’t really explain this very well. Maybe if I had some water.…” Earlier, when he still had his soul, he had refused food and water, but now he begged like a child for it.

“Just answer the questions.”

“A little water …”

They placed a cup in his hand. He couldn’t see anything, or maybe his eyes were still closed, he wasn’t sure anymore, and the water tasted like blood. It was cool on his tongue and it bought a respite; maybe that was a bad idea because it gave him something they could take away, something more for him to fear.

“The data bases?”

“They’re all based on crystals,” he said, barely audibly, “and the crystals have a consciousness of their own. They cooperate with us, as long as they want to. We don’t command them.”

“You cooperate with rocks?”

“That’s how it works. The tecchies spend a long time in meditation before they try to work out a program. It’s tough, believe me. I had to do it in school.”

“You lie.”

“It’s the truth. I swear to you!”

He was beyond what he could endure, but he endured more, until they tired of the question.

“What is the secret weapon?”

“What weapon?”

“The secret weapon that gives you all such confidence.”

“We don’t have a secret weapon.”

“Don’t lie. We know you do. The old woman told us so herself.”

“What old woman?”

“Your cancerous friend who was arrested with you. There is a power here you will never defeat or understand,’ she said, on the first morning of the invasion. What is the power we do not understand?”

“That power is not a weapon. It’s a metaphor.”

“Liar. Armies are not defeated by metaphors.”

“I mean she didn’t mean that literally. She meant—spirit.”

“The power is a spirit?”

“Right, our spirit.”

“How do you harness and command this demonic spirit?”

His head hurt so badly he wished they would put a bullet into it.

“Not that kind of spirit. A feeling spirit.”

“Armies are not defeated by feelings. Tell us what the weapon is.”

“I can’t!”

“You will find that you can.”

“I mean I can’t because it isn’t what you think.”

A nice quick bullet that would stop everything, as his father had been stopped, as he himself had stopped a man once. But he had to think, to think what to say. It’s not the truth that matters, some exhausted part of his brain acknowledged. I can’t satisfy them with truth, I have to tell them what they expect to hear. What they’re capable of believing. There was something hopeful about that, but he couldn’t focus on it. He existed only to make sounds that would bring some short relief from pain.

“Perhaps he needs a reminder of what we can do to him if he continues in this stubbornness?”

It was almost funny, Bird thought, a hilarious comedy of miscommunication, but he was beyond laughing, and after a while he was crying and pleading and begging them to let him die.

But he didn’t die. They stopped, just before he lost consciousness.

“Tell us about the weapon.”

Dear Goddess,
Diosa mía
, Mama, Rio, somebody, anybody, I can’t stand this and there is no way even to break. I would tell them anything if I could only think of something to tell them. My tongue won’t work; I will never be whole again.

“We are losing patience. You will see that up until now we have been restrained.”

The voices that came to him were the voices of the dead. “You think you cannot bear this, but we have borne worse: the rack, the stake, the Middle Passage, the torture of children, the forced labor, stone upon stone, while the people died of disease. We have already borne every unbearable thing human beings can do to each other, and why should you escape, or expect the rescue that never came to us? Are you so much better than we?”

No, no, but help me, please, Goddess, please, please. He was no longer sure whom he was talking to, whether he was begging aloud or in his mind; the dead were thick and swirling in the room.

“What is the weapon?”

He screamed, or thought he screamed; he was no longer quite sure of
what was inside him and what was outside. Something hurt his ears and he thought it was his own voice. I don’t want to die of fear, he thought. I just want to die, to join the ghosts who are safe and winged and out of their pain.

“Again? Do you need more persuading?”

“The dead!” he cried out. “I swear on the Four Sacred Things, on the Goddess, ow—on Jesus, on anyone you want, name it and I’ll swear on it, our weapon is the dead.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“Ghosts, hauntings,” he said wildly, desperately, “poltergeists. Things moving through the air on their own. You don’t have to believe it—the Goddess does it. The power of Hecate is in us. Every one of us you kill becomes a ghost. We’ll haunt you. Kill a Witch, and you’ll never be free again.”

Even as he spoke his words grew dark wings. There was a cold wind in the chamber, and the dead swarmed through as if he had indeed opened a gate for them.

“You don’t see them yet,” Bird said, “but soon, soon. And you will never be free. Don’t you see? It’s a trap. The whole thing is a trap we set for you, to deliver you into the hands of the dead, who will take you to Hecate, the Reaper, the Goddess of Death.”

He could talk on and on to them, forever, as long as his words bought a moment free from the pain. This is what I have become, a traitor, a liar, living from moment to moment, breath to breath.

But they believed him.

“Tell us more.”

“Water—I need water.”

They gave him another drink. He savored it on his parched tongue; it was cool on his throat, almost like forgiveness. He drank slowly; while he drank nothing was real to him but the cup, and the water, and his own body swallowing.

“Enough. Tell us more, and you can have more to drink.”

He nodded dully. What more was there to tell? But he was not the grandson of the city’s foremost storyteller for nothing. Great Mother, Dark Mother, Mother of Rebirth, forgive me for what I am about to do. I have seen your face, and in your eyes I see reflected the limits of my strength. He took a deep breath and began to tell them what they wanted to hear.

“Every child in the city is dedicated to Hecate at birth. And what she offers us is this—anyone who hurts us, anyone who kills us, belongs to her. She will take your soul and ride it and drag it into hell for eternal torments that will make this stuff look like a birthday party. And the ghosts will haunt you. That’s why there’s no violence in this city—everybody knows better. The Goddess of Death keeps the peace for us.”