The Fifth Sacred Thing (90 page)

“It’s suicide! Sheer bloody stupid suicide!” Sam began to cry. Madrone held him and soothed him, but she was crying herself. “I loved her, Madrone. I really loved her!”

“I know. I know, Sam.”

“And if they find out Bird’s her grandson—”

“Don’t think about it, Sam. There’s no point in torturing yourself. She’s gone, now, and we’re just going to have to let her go. Or follow her with magic, not with worries.” Oh, she could sound so wise and cool. “Lie down a bit, Sam. Rest until supper. I’ll do some magic for her.”

“Will you?”

“I will, right now. You rest.”

Madrone went out into the back garden of Black Dragon House. Unlike the front gardens, the back was still mostly green, although weeds choked the vegetable beds. Honeybees buzzed around the blue stars of prickly borage. Only the lawn was dead, and she lay down on the brown dry grass and closed her eyes.

Concentrating on her breath, she slipped back into her bee mind. She saw, not the world of visual form as she knew it, but a multifaceted prism of light and shade intertwined with streaks of color. Traces of scent bombarded her, the heady clarity of borage, the perfume of the rose, the pungent pineapple sage. She could get lost in the twining, trailing scents, drifting in for miles—how tempting to pick one and follow it, track a particular sweetness to its source, return to the hive to dance directions.

Nothing happened in words or even pictures, exactly, but more as an overlay of images and smells and movements and feelings, like the body sense of magnetic north, feelings of rightness or wrongness. And yes, as she approached the hive, disturbance. A buzz of fear and alarm; this was nothing they had ever known. Madrone exuded a calming smell, not the queen smell, which might trigger competition with their own queen, but something just enough akin to it that the bees relaxed. She was not a threat.

Under their immediate distress was a deeper sense of alarm. Things were not right. Gardens they counted on were dying. So many of the flowers were gone, withered up early, dried on the vine. Everywhere they smelled fear and pain.

Madrone let the honey of her body well up into the bee spot and began to speak to them, a speech of projected visions and pheromones, molecular scents on the air. Slowly they gathered, touching, tasting, until her body was covered with crawling bees. Help us, she said, and we will grow the green well-watered gardens again, let the borage run rampant, dance for you in summertime. You are part of our powers, our forgotten powers. Help us, please, sisters, help.

Bird had been alone in the dark with the dead for so long that he was no longer sure he was alive. They had taken him back to this dark bare room, where time no longer passed but left him marooned in a vacuum, without gravity. Occasionally his body intruded itself with its pain, its hungers, its need to relieve itself. At intervals the door was opened, something resembling food was pushed in, the bucket of his wastes was replaced. Once in a while, he tried to remember his muscles, to keep them functioning and exercised, but he was too weak to sustain activity for long. Mostly he drifted, conversing with ghosts until the slender cord of vital energy that held him to his body stretched thin and fragile and frayed.

He was lost not only in his own pain but the shadowy pain of multitudes
of others, awash in guilt and fear and despair that he could no longer separate. Ghosts spoke to him, telling tales of their suffering. “You conjured us up,” they seemed to say. “Now listen, listen. This is how it was, when the slavers came to my village, when the Nazis broke down the door and took us off to the camps, when the whites broke our temples and sent us to the mines, when everything we knew and cared about was destroyed. Listen to us, feed us, carry our pain.”

No, I have nothing to feed you, I can’t carry my own pain, let alone the weight of all of yours.
Diosa
, I have too many ancestors, one history of oppression would be enough to inherit. Leave me alone!

“Then listen, listen to us, we are your ancestors too. I sold my daughter to the slavers, I loaded the cattle cars, I smashed the temples of the heathens, I applied the lash, I raped. We are your ancestors, we are the unquiet dead. Feed us, heal us, listen to our stories. Or we will feed on you.”

Go ahead. Eat me, kill me, let me have some peace.

Maybe he was already dead, caught in the hell the Millennialists warned of. Familiar, it was so familiar, this place, as if he had already spent years and years here, eternity. Often he couldn’t clearly remember who he was and what he had done to merit this punishment. He had been weak, he had betrayed something, he thought, but he was not clear what or how or why or if he could have resisted or whose nightmare he was trapped in. And there were hell worlds after hell worlds to be lost in, too many of them, the underside of the last five thousand years of history, and he could find no way out because he had given in and accepted the power of the killers.

“No, we want you to sing for us, speak for us, redeem our lives,” the ghosts clamored, victims and victimizers, their voices intertwined.

But I can’t even redeem my own. I have no voice left, and I am going to die defeated.

“Then we have no hope.”

No hope, no hope, buzzed around his brain like a tuneless song. Having no hope, he felt no fear, and that was a small relief. Even when he thought of Rosa, what did it matter, ultimately, what happened to her? She would be just one more victim among legions of the dead.

I tried, I wasn’t strong enough. You see, Maya, it’s not the Good Reality or the Bad Reality, it’s
El Mundo de la Fuerza
, the reality of brute force, that is stronger than all our magic. Oh, Lily, it was a noble attempt. Fight on the landscape of consciousness, you said, but the body is too damn vulnerable, and we cannot win. We cannot win.

36

“Y
ou got to eat, ma’am,” the soldier said, distressed, picking up the platter of bread Maya had left untouched.

“No, young man, there you’re wrong,” Maya replied. “I’m ninety-nine years old. I don’t got to do nothing. Anything.”

“For real?” he breathed. He looked very young to Maya; perhaps they drafted them at fifteen or sixteen in the South. His eyes were wide and round in his copper face. “You really ninety-nine years old?”

“Just had my birthday, back in June. Fog-Rolls-In Moon, we call it. Not that we were much in the mood to celebrate.”

“Maybe you like some soup? Bring you some,” he offered.

“I am a wild bird. I do not eat in captivity.”

“You don’t eat, you die, ma’am.”

“Call me Maya. It’s my name. What’s your name?”

“Don’t got one. They took it when they took me for the army.”

“Ridiculous. Nobody can take your name. You still remember it, don’t you?”

He glanced quickly around the dark room, as if worried that someone might overhear them, and then nodded.

“What is it?”

“Tom,” he whispered. He looked around again. “
Tomás
, my mother used to say.”

“Tomás, that’s a fine name.
Mucho gusto
, Tomás. Pleased to meet you. There, that was your name, and now you have it back. So you have a mother? You weren’t bred for the army?”

He shook his head no. “Our unit, we come off the streets. Soup, ma’am? What you say?”

“Why are you so worried about me?”

“You die, you haunt me.”

“I’d consider it. Intermittently, at least. Why does that bother you?”

He shuddered. “Come out to the guardroom, ma’am. I need to clean this place.”

“You’ll have to carry me.”

“You hurt?”

“No, I’m refusing to cooperate. It’s a time-honored political tactic.”

“Okay, I carry you”—he hesitated, and then said her name—“Maya.” He set down the bread, slid his hands under her body, and lifted her, holding her out from his body as if afraid to allow too much contact. He carried her into the hallway, where a number of soldiers were stationed. They were all bronze-skinned, with dark straight hair; they all reminded her of Carlos, who had seduced her long ago and gotten her pregnant with Brigid, Bird’s mother. Three of them were playing cards at a desk they’d set up facing a bank of elevators. Tomás set her down on an empty chair beside the desk.

“Watch her,” he said to the card players. “I got to clean her cell.”

“Tie her,” suggested the soldier closest to Tomás, a big man with forearms so muscular they bulged out of his sleeves.

“I ain’t gonna tie her. She’s ninety-nine years old.”

“No shit?” The soldier turned and looked at Maya.

“On my honor, as a Witch and a former Girl Scout.”

The soldiers shifted their chairs away from her. Tomás took a bucket of cleaning materials out of a closet and disappeared into the room where Maya had been held.

“You gonna put a spell on us?” asked another of the men. He had lost several of his front teeth, and his gums were nearly black.

“I don’t need to,” Maya said. “You are already under a spell, a spell I’d like to free you from.”

“Who got us under a spell?” asked the man Maya thought of as Muscles.

“The General, of course. He’s got you under a spell of obedience. Otherwise, why are you here? You don’t want to be here, do you? When you could sit with us at our table, at the place we have ready for you?”

“What you people mean by that?” asked the third soldier, whom Maya nicknamed Tiny to herself. “You mean we should come on over to your side, win the war for you? Then what? We die from no boosters?”

“No fucking boosters half the time anyway, man, long as they keep losing trains,” Teeth said.

“We’re on the edge of a solution to the booster problem,” Maya said, wondering if that were really true. “We’ve almost got it licked.”

“Say you do,” Muscles said. “Say we come over, say we even win. Then what? What you do with us? How you feed an army?”

“We don’t want an army,” Maya said. “We can’t feed an army. But we can offer you ways to feed yourselves. Land, if you want to farm. Work here in the City, if you prefer. A house to live in—a big one if you share it, a small place or an apartment if you want to live on your own.”

“What kind of work?” Teeth asked suspiciously.

“What kind of work would you like to do? We can train you for anything you like or apprentice you to one of the work groups. You could build transport towers, or help maintain the water systems, or raise silkworms. Some of you might even want to study at the university. We’re short-handed here in the North; we’ve got more that needs doing than people to do it. So we all work hard, I won’t lie to you. You’d have to work hard too. But you’d never lack for food or water.”

“Why should we believe you?” Tiny asked. “What’s the catch?”

“You’ve seen our city,” Maya said. “Have you found any slums? Any ghettos? You’ve seen who our leaders were, before you murdered most of them. You’ve seen that they come from all races, that no one group rules us. It’s true there are some things we won’t tolerate here. Rape, for one. Violence. But we’re offering you a chance at freedom. Isn’t that worth taking a gamble on?”

They were silent. Behind the masks of their faces, thoughts were churning, even if Maya couldn’t read what they were. You see, Johanna? Rio, do you understand, now? This is what I was sent to do.