The Fifth Sacred Thing (87 page)

M
adrone was squeezed into a corner in the back of the basement that served as Council Hall. The carved wooden salmon mask of the Speaker for the west periodically grazed the top of her head, and she hoped the Speaker would not be moved to nod vigorously at some particularly persuasive speech. The room smelled of sweat and sage. Isis and Sara crouched intertwined beside her.

“How long do we keep on with this strategy?” Cress from Water Council was saying. “We’re losing people every day; the crop situation is critical. When do we admit that we need some stronger action?”

“We keep on until the limitations of force become apparent to them,” Lily said.

“They aren’t apparent to me!” someone called from across the room, and several people laughed.

“Process!” reminded Joseph, who was facilitating.

“Force always thinks itself indomitable,” Lily went on. “But in fact it is a very precarious sort of power, because to expend force requires the use of resources, energy, human lives. Force is extremely expensive to use.”

“I don’t know, Lily,” said an older man. “With all due respect, it’s also extremely costly to resist.”

“Force works ninety percent through intimidation,” Lily countered. “We obey not because of what they actually have done to us but because we fear what they will do and can do. But no system of domination can survive if it is actually required to use force every time it wants to be obeyed. If we refuse to obey, if we do no portion of their work for them, they must fall.”

“But can we really do that, Lily?” Lou said. “Even Bird could only resist up to a point, and now he’s working for them.”

“He told them about the cisterns,” said the yellow-haired woman sitting next to Cress. “They’ve been breaking up cisterns for the last three days, and five people have died so far trying to block them.”

“They discovered the cisterns themselves, the day they searched the Chen
place!” Walker jumped to his feet. “You can’t blame everything that goes wrong on Bird!”

“Well, he hasn’t been around the Plaza since they started in on the cisterns,” Cress said. “Don’t you think that means something?”

“What? What’s it supposed to mean?” Walker countered.

“Bird is not the issue here,” Lily insisted. “Why are we obsessed with Bird? Hero or traitor, he’s only one person.”

“He’s a bellwether,” Lou said, his low voice calm and contained. “Bearing in mind that I basically agree with your position, Lily, we still can’t ignore Bird. He’s a living example of what happens when force meets resistance, a microcosm of the struggle we’re all facing. So we needed him to be a hero. Maybe that was naive, unrealistic. Unfair, even. But it’s true. His betrayal has disheartened us. I know damn well he’s braver and tougher than I am. If he can’t resist them, how can I? How can we?”

“Don’t call it betrayal!” Nita protested.

“That’s what everybody
is
calling it,” Cress said.

“Then everybody is a fool,” Lily said.

“Stick to the process, please!” Joseph cried. “Okay, Lou, your turn.”

“Maybe we’re fools, Lily,” Lou said, “but that’s what we have to work with, a population of fools and ordinary folks of limited reserves, not a city of saints. There’s a limit to how much we can stand, and that limit is almost reached. So it’s touch and go who is going to break first. And it may be us.”

“What do you suggest?” Lily asked wearily.

“We need to escalate somehow. People need some way to express their rage. Not violence, just anger.”

There was silence in the room. Isis nudged Madrone. “Am I allowed to speak here?”

Madrone nodded. “Just raise your hand. And pause occasionally so the Signer can follow you.”

Joseph acknowledged Isis, and she stood.

“You people have a beautiful city here. I have walked all over it, looking for the poor sections, looking for the places where the houses are rotten and the gardens are dry, and at last I believe what Madrone here’s been telling me all along, that you have built a place where everybody has enough. This is different, this is not what we’re used to where I come from, and it’s not what the soldiers are used to either. Doesn’t surprise me that they’re starting to desert. Because most of them are just poor sticks that get picked up off the street, get to choose between the army and jail. They’re not your problem.

“Your problem is the Elite Corps, the ones that are born and bred and raised for the army, that don’t know anything else. They’re going to be the last to turn, if you can turn them at all. And if you can’t turn them, you may have
to kill them. I know that’s not your way, but it’s got to be faced. And they’re not easy to kill.”

“Do you have any ideas about how to reach them?” Sachiko asked.

“All I can say is this: they stick by their units. That’s who they’re loyal to, that’s who they believe in. So if you can turn one of them from any unit, there’s a good chance the others will follow. But getting that one—I don’t know how to tell you to do that. Maybe work on the one you’ve got, the one that shot all those people. Maybe you can change him.”

“Maybe pigs can fly,” Cress called out. There was a ripple of laughter before the Speaker for the Voices motioned for silence.

“Friend Coyote has a message for us.” The Speaker bent close to the muzzle of the Coyote mask in the south. “Coyote says, ‘Remember your forgotten powers. Hold to the trickster, not the warrior. Do not despair.’ ”

“We won’t answer this question tonight,” Joseph said. “We’ve got to end now if we don’t want the evening patrols to catch us on our way home. We will debate this again tomorrow night. Go safely.
Que les vaya bien.”

Lily approached Madrone as the meeting broke up.

“Come home with me,” she said. “I have healing work for you.”

Madrone let out a long breath. “Lily, I haven’t seen you in seven or eight months, I come back out of hell itself, and you can’t even say hi before you put me to work?”

Lily’s brows arched high. “What do you mean, I haven’t seen you? I’ve
dreamed
you a dozen times.” Then she pushed her hair back from her forehead, a gesture of weariness. “Forgive me, child. I’m becoming obsessed. But you’re right, I should have greeted you. I greet you now. Welcome back.”

She took hold of Madrone’s shoulders and kissed her.

“And now I have work for you.”

“Lily, Sam has a houseful of work for me. Is this really vital?”

“This is the most important work you can do.”

“And how the hell do I heal this?” Madrone asked. They stood in the living room of the small flat where Lily had moved for the duration of the crisis. In one corner of the room Ohnine squatted, his head in his hands. His eyes, when he looked up, were vacant. Quietly, Lily drew Madrone out of the room and sat her down at a table in the tiny kitchen.

But Madrone stood up and paced the small room as she talked. She could not sit still. “Show me a virus, a nice wound, a broken leg, a kid stuck in the womb—but how the hell do I heal the mind of a man who shot down a whole family in cold blood?”

“He
did
stop.”

“Sure, I give him credit for that. A five-year-old was too much for him. An eight-year old, he could waste, but—”

“Is there truly no part of you that can understand?”

“No.”

“Absolutely no?”

“Lily, you are asking me to heal my mother’s murderer.”

“What do you mean?”

“My mother was murdered by a death squad in Guadalupe. By men just like him. I was there. I remember it now.”

“Then you have a link with him.”

“I have no link with him! I’m not a candidate for sainthood; I’m not fixated on forgiveness. I’m not even a mind-healer. Why don’t you find one of them—there must be some of them left in this city—and let me go back to my germs and broken bones?”

“The mind-healers have failed with him. You are our last hope. You’ve been in that world he comes out of.”

“That’s why I tell you it’s hopeless. I know these guys. They’re not like us, Lily. They’re lacking something. It’s a different breed of human being, and I mean that literally.”

“Is it? Are you telling me that you could not kill?”

Madrone sat down in the chair opposite Lily’s, tipping it back so it leaned against the wall. “I don’t know. I had opportunities, down south, to kill. I couldn’t do it then. Except once. I had to hurt somebody to save Katy. I didn’t kill him, but it was just luck. At the moment I didn’t care. But that’s different from what he did, Lily!”

“Is it? Was he, too, not acting out of what his life and training had taught him to believe and defend? Imagine the inner wrenching it must have taken for him to stop, to let all of that collapse when he found himself violating something that ran deeper, some instinct perhaps he never knew he had. Can’t you find some compassion for him in your heart?”

“Maybe one drop.”

Lily smiled. The strain eased from her face; it returned to its habitual calm mask, which Madrone suddenly found irritating. “We will have victory only if we are stronger healers than they are warriors.”

“But nobody can heal somebody else. You know that, Lily. We heal ourselves or not at all.”

“Nevertheless you do work as a healer. You shift energies. You change the climate to one in which healing can occur.”

“But I can’t change his past or his history. You’re not talking about healing, you’re talking about making him someone other than he is.”

“Who says you cannot heal the past? Time is only a construct. Everything that ever was exists now.”

“I don’t like to think that. I like to think that some things are over and done with, for good.”

“But how can they be? The slave trade and the slaughter of the tribes of this land and the burning of the Witches live on in you, and somewhere in me lives a child starving in the potato famine and a young girl from China kept in a cage off Stockton Street and sold to passersby. All that is part of who we are in this moment.”

“Then nothing really gets any better!” Madrone protested.

“On the contrary. If you can heal something in this moment now, you in some measure heal all the pain that ever was.”

“That’s too big for me, Lily.”

“Try it this way. If you can somehow heal yourself, you help to redeem your ancestors. Who were, of course, also the torturers, the murderers, the rapists. We are none of us completely pure. If you can heal this young man, if in this present moment your compassion can create for him a new channel for his mind and heart and self, then you do in some sense heal his history.”

“Lily, I caught two of the Johnson kids when they were born. How can I heal their murderer?”

“Try.”

Madrone squatted beside the figure huddled in the corner. I don’t know what to do here, she thought. I’m not a mind-healer, I don’t even want to begin to probe his
ch’i
or taste his energy. All I can do is sit, ground, breathe, maybe.

She shifted her body to sit cross-legged and took some deep breaths. Compassion. Goddess, if you were trying to evolve creatures of compassion, you should have stuck with dogs. Dogs are better, kinder, sometimes vicious but never methodically cruel.