The Fifth Sacred Thing (81 page)

M
aya’s head ached. The meeting room was a dark basement garage, with people crowded and crammed into the space. It stank of sweat and fear, overlaid with a tinge of sage. The Voices in their masks were jammed together with everybody else. The discussion was heated, with nasty undertones, and in Maya’s opinion had already gone on far too long.

“Bird has gone over to the enemy.”

Cress from the Water Council addressed the room. His eyes were red and there was a three-day growth of beard over his narrow chin. He looks stretched too tight, Maya thought, like all of us. Still, I cannot help but dislike him.

“Don’t say that!” protested Sachiko from the Musicians’ Guild. “We don’t know what they did to him.”

“As far as that goes, we don’t know that they did anything to him at all,” Cress said. “No, don’t shout me down! I have a right to raise this question. He disappears into the South for almost ten years, comes back a few months before the invading armies, just in time to talk us out of building any weapons or planning armed resistance. Now he’s handing out their water ration cards. It’s suspicious, that’s all I’m saying.”

Maya half rose to speak, but Sam laid a restraining arm on her. “You can’t defend him,” he whispered. “You’re his grandmother.”

For a moment Maya thought nobody else would speak. Then the big man sitting beside Sachiko rose. Maya recognized one of Bird’s old friends, another guitarist. What was his name? Walker?

“I’ve known Bird many years,” Walker said. “I can believe he might give way under torture. Any of us might. But I’ll never believe he’s a traitor. Even if he were, nobody should be tried in absentia by rumors and innuendo. Suspicions like yours, Cress, do more harm than ten collaborators. Especially if they keep us from supporting one of our own, who’s been through Goddess only knows what.”

“I’m not condemning him,” Cress said. “Personally, I’m willing to believe he just overestimated his capacity to resist. But don’t you all see, that proves
my point. He’s an example that when it comes down to the ultimate test, we can’t withstand their force.”

“Maybe he’s still resisting, in his own way,” Walker suggested.

“How? Running their rationing program?”

“Nobody’s taken any of their cards yet,” Walker said. “Why? Because almost every house in this city has a cistern, which is still pretty full from the winter rains. If Bird’s a traitor, why hasn’t he told them about the cisterns? Why haven’t they done anything about them?”

An older woman wearing the handspun garments of the Silk Guild rose. “My daughter was captured by the soldiers. She is still too shocked and hurt to tell her story here in public, but I will tell it for her. They were going to rape her, a whole gang of them. She fought them but they tied her down to the bed. Then Bird came in.” She paused. In the hush, Maya squeezed Sam’s hand so hard that his fingers turned from red to white. “Somehow he talked them out of it,” the woman went on. “He made them let her go. He is no traitor.”

Maya let out a long sigh, and Sam patted her hand as she released his.

“That’s not the question at hand here,” Cress objected. “It’s not Bird who’s on trial, it’s our whole strategy. We’ve been too naïve. What is it going to take to make us admit that noncooperation isn’t working?”

“We expected casualties,” Lily said. She was dressed in a simple gray shift, and she too looked tired and drawn. “We knew there would be suffering.”

“Maybe it’s time we inflicted some,” Cress said.

In the silence that followed, Maya could feel the tensions in the room polarize. Yes, there were many who agreed with Cress, and there would be many more as the days wore on.

“Defense does not agree,” Lily said.

“That goes without saying, but what do you suggest? We can’t just go on lying down and eating their laser burns. We can’t let them turn us all into Birds, one by one.”

“I’m not proposing that we do.” Lily’s voice was calm. How does she do it? Maya thought. Does she practice in the mirror, or does it come from so many years of sitting meditation?

“Then propose something else,” Cress challenged her. “The Forest people have held the railway right-of-way. The South Bay groups have blown the tracks and cut their supply lines.”

“Is that true?” Salal, who was Crow of the meeting for the day, broke in. “Can anyone verify that piece of news?”

“It’s true,” said Lily. “Defense scouts brought us back the message two days ago.”

“What have we done?” Cress continued on. “Besides serve as their victims?”

“Some of us, acting without consensus, have blown their dams.” Lou from the Healers’ Council stood and faced Cress. “Without that, perhaps there might not have been so many casualties.”

“Without that,” Cress countered, “we might already have used up the reserves in our cisterns.”

“We’re getting away from process,” Salal said. She too looked weary and seemed to lack her usual sharp grasp on the meeting. Even her red hair had faded to a dull brown, its roots grown out. “If you want me to facilitate, you’ve got to wait and let me call on you. Does anybody have a proposal?”

“Defense does,” Lily said.

“What is it?”

“Marie, before she died, told the army that there was a power in this city they would never be able to conquer. Apparently to them that meant we have some sort of secret weapon. So they tortured Bird until he told them what it was.”

Maya grimaced. How can she say that so casually, so matter-of-factly? If it were
her
grandson …

“What did he tell them?” Salal asked.

“Why doesn’t he tell
us
what it is?” someone muttered at the back of the room.

“Process, please!” Salal said sharply.

Lily went on. “He told them our weapon was the dead. That if they killed any one of us, they would be haunted. Our proposal is that we make his words come true.”

“What do you mean?”

In the pause before Lily spoke, Maya thought she heard the beat of a drum.

“Defense proposes that we haunt the killers.”

“Has Defense been recruiting among the dead?” Cress asked. “Are you suggesting we hold séances?”

Several people around the room snickered. Lily continued, unperturbed. “I’m not proposing that we raise the dead. I’m suggesting that we try to face the killers with the consequences of their actions, make their victims real to them. That we follow them, tell them stories about the ones they have shot down, never leaving them alone but continuing to offer them a place at our table.”

“You’re insane,” Cress said.

“Won’t more people get killed?” Sachiko asked.

“Yes,” Lily said. “More people will die, in any case. But Cress is right about one thing—it is time now for us to become more active, more confrontational.”

“It might play on their fears,” Salal said thoughtfully. “If they believe what Bird told them, it might unnerve them enough to destroy their morale.”

“That may happen,” Lily conceded, “but it is not our primary objective. We must continue to reach for their humanity, to believe that within the worst of the murderers lies some spark of the fifth sacred thing. If we can reach that, we will find victory even in death.”

“You’re completely insane,” Cress said again. But after lengthy discussion, the Council adopted Lily’s proposal. Cress and his faction stood aside.

The woman dressed in white approached the soldier stationed in the Central Plaza. Yes, he was the one. She would never forget him, the cold look on his face as his hand raised the gun to her brother’s head. She approached him and looked him in the eye.

“My brother Jorge, that you killed yesterday, was a woodworker,” the woman said. “When I was little he made me the most beautiful toys.”

“Get out of my airspace,” the soldier said.

“He made me a toy dog that rolled on wheels; you could pull it with a string, and her head bobbed up and down. He got in trouble, though, because when
Tía
Anna asked him, ‘What are you making?’ he looked her right in the eye and said, ‘This is a bitch on wheels.’ ”

The woman’s eyes held tears, and the soldier shuffled his feet uncomfortably. “I said get away from me!”

“Jorge could never resist a joke. I feel so sad that I will never hear his laugh again.”

The soldier glanced behind him. “Look, lady, I didn’t want to kill your brother, okay? Sorry I had to do it. Didn’t have no choice about it.”

“But you did choose; it was your hand on the gun. You ended his life without ever knowing him or seeing his smile.”

“Him or me, lady. I don’t shoot, next stick down the line shoot me.”

“How do you know that? Is not that man, too, making his own choice? Maybe he too will choose to lay down his gun.”

“He won’t.”

“We can never escape from choice. Every act we take or don’t take. Every time we open our mouths or close our eyes.”

“Fuck you! Get the Jesus away from me! I never had no choice, okay? Never had no brothers or no sisters! Nobody made no toys for me. I was bred for the army; I do what the army tell me.”

“That is a terrible thing to do to a child. You have suffered. You are suffering now, in a new way. Because now you do have a choice to make. And I can see in your eyes that you understand this. It is the terrible gift you have come here to receive, and you will never be free of it again.”

The soldier patrolling the dam was a dark khaki-colored spot surrounded by moving figures in white. At first he pushed ruthlessly through the crowd, swinging his bayonet, but they followed him across the plaza.

“My son was a gardener,” Mrs. Hernandez said, holding out a basket of ripe tomatoes. “Take, eat the fruit of the man you killed.”

“Out of my way, lady.” He shoved her aside and turned, to encounter a small girl.

“My
abuelo
told good stories,” she said. “This is the story he told me about the woman in the mountain.…”

He turned abruptly away from her, only to encounter a tall man, who smiled and said, “My cousin liked baseball. Do you play sports? No one could touch him when it came to bat, even as old as he was—”

“I said get the fuck away from me!”

“Do you know how I felt, to see my son shot down, that bullet enter his head, that dear face I had washed so many times and watched as it grew and changed—”

“Shut up, lady!”

“Taste, taste these fruits so you will know what you destroyed!”

“Look, I was ordered to do it.”

“Choice is always possible. You chose to obey. And now we are here to teach you the meaning of your choice.”

“Clear the way!”

“Even now, there is choice. There is still a place set for you at our table, if you will join us.”

“I said clear the fucking way!” He swung his rifle butt wildly, and it smashed the child in the head. She began to cry, and someone picked her up and soothed her, while a woman stepped forward.

“My daughter, who you have just injured, is six years old. She likes to sing. From the time she was an infant, she moved to music. From the time she could stand, she tried to dance.”

“I’m warning you, get out of here or I’ll kill a few more of you.”

“Then others will come in our place, to show you the consequences of that choice. But still, let me tell you more about my brother—”

He turned and fled.