The Fifth Sacred Thing (93 page)

I have been burned before, Maya’s eyes seemed to say, it is not new to me, this death. What are you afraid of?

Not death,
abuelita
, not for me. Death is an act of grace, he tried to tell her. If only I could administer it to myself, I would. But I don’t dare, not with these guns behind me, ready to turn and fire on people who don’t want to die yet.

But death is a gift I can offer you. I can release you. I can restore your lost loves. I can make you safe.

Think, Bird. He heard Rio’s voice. Think it out carefully. But he couldn’t think. His head was too heavy; he could hardly hold it up. His eyes refused to see clearly.

Maya stood looking calmly at her own death in Bird’s face. She was afraid, not for her own life, which she had held on to far too long, but for him, for what this act would do to him. He would never be free of it. There was nothing she could do to help him. She couldn’t even speak. What would she say? Bird, your failing is that you are simply mortal, susceptible to pressure and fear and capable of making great mistakes. I have failed you, Bird. Good feminist that I was, I always said yes, men should feel, should cry, should not be afraid to show their vulnerability. But in my secret heart, what I really wanted from you was the impermeable courage of the warrior. I wanted you to be invincible, larger than life. I did not raise you to accept less of yourself.

Madrone stood still, hardly breathing. If she could meet Bird’s eyes or touch him or speak with him, even flash him a sign—but he was shut off, his eyes focused only on Maya, who one way or another was now going to die. She wanted to scream, to throw her own body between them, to beg him not to do this. Because if you do, Bird, you will destroy us all. We will never again be able to believe in our power to resist.

Across the Plaza, she caught a glimpse of Cress, who was standing surrounded by a knot of his supporters.
Diosa
, what were they going to do? If Bird shoots, he’ll confirm their worst accusations. They’ll break our unity, shatter the Council, and run’ riot, sniping at soldiers from rooftops, ambushing troops on the street. And the soldiers won’t come to us, the ones who might have wanted to sit at our table. They’ll shoot back, and we will lose.

But if he refused? Was she about to see him die now, right in front of her, without ever having a chance to greet him one more time? Oh, Bird, Bird, I love you and I can’t help you, I don’t even know what to hope for. All she could do was reach for him, reach and reach with her uncaught love.

Bird felt a breath of wind caressing his cheek like the touch of a hand, like a spirit, like the memory of rain. He sensed a presence, not a voice, not a ghost, just a sense of someone standing there with him.

Whoever you are, go away, he whispered. No one can stand with me here. I have walked here on my own two feet. I won’t find any way back. They are too strong for us, and I can’t think anymore. My brain hurts, and my ears are ringing.

Madrone waited. Bird didn’t see her, he wouldn’t turn to look at her, and maybe that was just as well, yet she couldn’t help but believe that if he would look at her, she could save him. Maybe that was an illusion, like so many others. With all her power and all her skills, she could only watch, and not shield herself from the pain, as she no longer hid from her own memories. Watching, she took a long, deep breath and began to open.

Layer by layer, peeling away everything she had ever constructed to tell her who she was and separate what was not, she opened. She felt she was holding Maya’s hand, not an old hand but a smooth-skinned hand with bitten nails seventeen years old, and in her other hand, Johanna’s fingers pressed her, and touched through her, and then it all came crowding in, pain and hate and ugliness and emptiness and fear, she swallowed it all until her own belly ached, and she moaned, and swelled, and cried with rage, but it came on, on and on, moving through the spirits in the crowd. It was all here, thousands of years of the lash and the stake and the bomb. Could she take that into herself to heal it as she had taken other sorts of disease? Could she heal not just the pain of the wound but the pleasure in hurting and the worse and deeper pain behind that?

The ghosts of the dead were swarming, hovering over this square like bees, hordes of them, millions of them, legions of victims, legions of victimizers. She was stretched like a live wire between two ghost hands, light and dark, and she could not bear any more, could not heal this with either her love or her rage, could not transform the magnitude of this history. They would be lost, lost forever, she and Bird and all of them. She stared at him; he was so far away and so closed to her, he who had had the power to make her happy just with a touch, a meeting of eyes. Yet that was not in him but in her own openness, in their opening together. How were we made that we could do this for each other and to each other, so much beauty, so much pain? There was always a choice, to hurt or to heal, but she no longer knew what healing was, or what it meant to be whole if wholeness included all of this. She felt rain beating on her face, and wind on her naked flesh, and she heard a song that
was carried not so much to her ears but directly through her skin, like a current. As if she had, indeed, become an instrument in some larger hand, a spoon to stir the cauldron, a knife to cut through the fabric of this world and reveal world after world of possibilities and forms. She closed her eyes and began to sweat honey.

Bird felt a stirring around him. Dimly he heard the voice of the General, yelling an order. “You’ve got ten seconds, boy. Ten …”

He couldn’t think, and anyway his body seemed to have a will of its own. His arms responded to commands; his slow brain had lost its influence.

“Nine …”

He lifted the rifle. It was heavy in his arms, heavy as a sleeping child. He looked down the sights.

“Eight …”

Everything swam and rocked. He felt seasick.

“Seven …”

Steady. Hold the rifle steady. Maya’s face was outlined in a circle, marked by the cross hairs, the cross in the circle, the mandala, the four sacred directions, the Four Sacred Things.

“Six …”

Air, I cannot breathe, I am falling past the limits of what I can resist.

“Five …”

Fire, this burns;
abuela
, my soul has been burned away, forgive me, forgive me.

“Four …”

Water, the rains will never come again.

“Three …”

Earth, this is hard, hard as rock, hard as banging out broken chords for Madrone so she would have a song to take with her when she went. I am tumbling and tumbling and there is no earth under me.

“Two …”

He began to hear that song in his mind; it filled him with a sense of her presence, and the memory of loving her, a memory that hurt terribly because he was no longer who he had been, and even she could not heal him of this.

“One …”

Abuelita
, this is a gift I give you. Isn’t it? If only my head would clear.

“Ready!”

But he was not ready, would never be ready.

“Aim …”

My aim is to save you suffering what I have suffered.

“Fire!”

A bee circled, landed on his forehead, and stung him between the eyes.

Bird let out a small cry. A golden pain, a good pain, shot through him like
a shaft of sunlight breaking through the fog. A myriad of Mayas swam and danced before his eyes, but each one was clear and perfect. Bees walked his murderous wrists with thread feet, and he wanted to caress them. They had reached for him; they had not abandoned him. Not because he deserved compassion, but because by their very nature they were emissaries of a power that was always and everywhere offering itself, asking nothing in return, a force that set the bees in motion and colored the blossoms and made them sweet. That was the real gift, the true grace: not death, but love, the fifth sacred thing.

“Fire!” the General repeated, louder.

Bee venom trickled through his veins, dissolving the drugs, dissolving the haze of pain. Suddenly everything became very clear. Each separate face in the crowd seemed to have a firm outline drawn around it. Maya’s eyes glowed, big as moons. He would not put out their light. No, what happened to Maya, to Rosa, was not under his control, never had been. He could not save them. He could not redeem the choices he had made before, he could not guarantee that he’d have the strength to resist again. But none of that mattered. What mattered was only to gather the courage for this one moment, to step off the road.

Slowly, as if he were laying a child down to sleep, Bird lowered the rifle and placed it on the platform.

“I won’t kill for you,” he said to the General.

“Then you’ll die.”

“It’s a better choice,” Bird said. “There’s more hope in it.” He raised his hands above his head and waited for the noise and the blast of pain. But he wasn’t afraid. He could feel the ground under him again.

The song he had made for Madrone echoed in his ears. He’d thought he’d lost the music that was in him, but now it worked his lips and pried his mouth open and forced its way out of him in croaks and gasps. He tried to sing for the people as he had sung for the bees, hoarsely at first, but gradually his voice strengthened, and the sound rose and swelled above the crowd. His upraised arms became a gesture not of surrender but invoking, for he had never loved his life more than at this moment, loved his own breath and the movement of blood in his veins and the touch of air on his skin and his own voice reverberating.

That was all he had to do, to sing—to his grandmother and his lover and his enemies and his executioners. He had found his ground to stand on, and, yes, there was a bottom place, a place where who he was and what he could not do was stronger than fear and stronger even than hope. He understood now that he could never lose the music. It grew in him as the silence grew around him. They had broken his hands, but they had not broken his voice, they had broken his will but they had not broken his ears, and if they took his
ears they could never take the inner ear, the inner voice. And even when his voice was silenced, some voice would still continue to sing. For he realized now that he was wrong in thinking the music was in him.

He was in the music, and it would always find an instrument.

“Unit Five, fire!” the General ordered. “Kill him.”

Ghosts wheeled and circled like gulls.

Now, Bird thought. Now I will die and join you.

He looked out at the men who had their guns trained on him. It was his own unit, and that seemed comforting, somehow, to die at the hands of friends, not strangers. For they were his friends. He had grown into them, become one of them, as they now shared some part of him. He smiled and sang louder.

But he did not die. One by one, the soldiers lowered their guns.

“Fire!” the General ordered again. They remained standing, silent, impassive, disobedient.

Go ahead, Bird almost wanted to shout at them. Get it over with, do it, I cannot maintain this tension any longer.

He stopped singing. Complete and utter silence gripped the square. He could hear only ghost wings in the air and a drumbeat, like a heart, pulsing.

“He’s in our unit, man,” Threetwo said. “We don’t kill our own.”

“Fire!” the General roared a third time. “Fire, you slimecrawlers, or I’ll have every soulless one of you taken out and shot!”

River sprang up onto the platform. “Unit Five,” he cried out, and everyone in the Plaza could hear him. “We in the wrong army! Follow me, and fight for ourselves! The Witches, they can fix us so we don’t need the boosters. They our true people. Stand with them—we got nothing to fear. Come on!”

“Shoot to kill!” the General ordered his Private Guard.

River knocked Bird down and grabbed his discarded rifle as gunfire rang out. The soldiers of Unit Five returned fire, leaping off the platform and into the panicked crowd. Lasers flared, shots rang out, and people began screaming and desperately trying to push through the press of bodies. The squadron around Maya melted away to join the scattered soldiers of River’s unit.

“Get down!” Madrone screamed, pushing Nita to the ground, for they were caught between Unit Five and the General’s Guards. Shots were flying around her. Up on the platform, Maya was still tied to the pole, exposed, lasers streaking by her calm eyes.

“Madrina
,” Madrone screamed, but her words were lost in the chaos. A wild laser struck something electrical under the platform, and black smoke began to rise.

“Come on,” Isis called to her, and began crawling toward the west side of the platform. Madrone followed, wriggling on her belly through the chaos of shots and smoke and stampeding feet. Nita was lost behind them.

Bird lay on the platform in shock, trying to decide if he were alive or dead. War had erupted around him. The General’s army was fighting itself. He knew he should move, but his body wouldn’t seem to obey his mind. Clouds of smoke billowed around him, full of ghosts. Cleis and Zorah and Tom passed by; his brother Marley played a drumbeat that brought clouds gathering and drops of rain down from the sky; Rio stood over him; there were warriors and ancestors and flocks of extinct birds. Every battered child, every bruised slave, every starved peasant, every woman raped and murdered, every soldier who’d died for somebody else’s ends, legions and legions of the dead came marching, howling, screaming, whipping cold wind fingers across the nape of his neck, ruffling his hair so it stood on end. He opened his mouth and tried to sing to them, but the acrid smoke choked him. Still he thought the dead took up the chorus, whining and whistling and shrieking until he had to move, crawling down the length of the platform while the spot he’d been lying on burst into flame.

Air. He could breathe again. The wind whipped the smoke aside and he caught a glimpse of Maya, still tied to the pole. He had to reach her. Bent over, crouching, he ran.

Isis and Madrone reached the edge of the platform near Maya just in time to see Bird dive at her feet as a sheet of laser fire went streaking above his head. Maya’s dress was singed, but she looked unharmed.