The Fifth Sacred Thing (94 page)

“Are you okay?” Bird had to shout to be heard. She nodded. He fumbled with the ropes that held her, but the knots were so tight he wondered how he would ever get her loose. Suddenly he felt someone tugging at his leg, reaching up from the side of the platform to place a pocketknife in his hand. He opened the blade and cut the cords that bound Maya to the pole.

Released, she slumped forward but he caught her and eased her down.

“Give her here,” a voice called from below. He handed her down to the strong pair of arms that reached up for her. Isis picked Maya up, slung her over her shoulder, and ran. Amidst the bullets and the streaks of laser fire, he half jumped, half fell, off the platform to the ground. Familiar arms enfolded him; he remembered them from somewhere as he recognized the body that pressed close to his. He blinked his eyes to clear his vision and saw Madrone.

“You’re alive!” he said.

“So are you!” For one long moment they clung together, while fire engulfed the platform and the crowd fled. Wrapped in her arms, he felt whole again, redeemed, forgiven. Holding his miraculously still-living body, she was finally home.

He pulled back, although he still held tight to her hands.

“Rosa,” he said.

“Are you okay? Can you walk?”

“Rosa, now, while the power is here.”

She nodded, and they made their way through the thinning crowd, calling out to people as they ran.

“The prisoners! We’ve got to free the prisoners!”

The crowd surged behind them, as they ran out the north side of the Plaza, down the street that faced the Old Library. Their following grew as they continued down the block, rising like a tide that broke on the glass doors of the old Federal building, where five armed soldiers stood guard.

“Who goes first?” Madrone asked, looking warily at the soldiers.

“The dead,” Bird said, and sang again. Gray wraiths swirled up from the crowd and bore down on the waiting soldiers. Madrone closed her eyes, sent out a call. Within moments, they were surrounded by a cloud of bees, humming and buzzing and making forays at the soldiers, flying into their eyes. The soldiers dropped their guns and fled.

They found Rosa locked in a room in the basement. Her eyes were closed, her head thrown back at an odd angle, and for one terrible moment Madrone was sure she was dead.

Another one, Madrone thought. Mama, I have tried so hard to stop all this, and failed and failed.

Bird went to her and picked her up in his arms. Her skin was cold but she stirred, as he touched her, and flinched.

“She’s alive,” he whispered. “Thank the Goddess.”

She opened her eyes, and looked up at him, and then shrank away.

“It’s okay,
querida
. I’m okay now,” he murmured. He didn’t want to think about how she had last seen him and what she might be remembering. “You’re safe now. Look, Madrone is here.”

“Madrone?”

Bird transferred Rosa into Madrone’s arms. She held the girl tight, crooning to her, stroking her tangled hair. “It’s okay, baby. It’s going to be all right.
Diosa
, I am so very glad to find you alive.”

Bird sank back against the gray stucco wall. His energy was leaking away, tears streamed down his face, the ghosts were leaving him now. It was dark here and his eyes were at ease, his whole body felt oddly comfortable, like an animal returned to a familiar cage. In a moment he was going to be sick on the floor.

“Let’s get out of here,” he said.

They carried Rosa up into the open air and sat next to her, keeping vigil on the steps. The crowd had moved off, they were marching to the hospital, someone said, and the soldiers were battling one another. River had led a squadron to take the armory. Many were fleeing back down the highway to the South or turning over their guns and asking for asylum. The Plaza and the surrounding streets were littered with the dead. Groups of volunteers were
searching the building, battering down doors to free the prisoners they found within.

The steps were cold and cement and solid under Bird. The sun was warm, and Madrone’s hand that clung to his was warm too. Rosa nestled into Madrone’s shoulder, unable to speak. People passed them by, waving banners and singing songs of victory.

“I guess we’re winning,” Madrone said. “I can hardly believe it. We should feel happy.”

“In a moment I will,” Bird said. “It’s got to run a long way to catch up with me.”

Inside he felt cold as the vacuum of space. The light hurt his eyes so badly. He wanted to hold Madrone, but he couldn’t even turn to her.

“I was giving her piano lessons,” Bird said. “Do you remember, Rosa? Maybe now you’ll learn to play that Mozart piece.”

Then he was crying and Madrone slipped an arm around his shoulders.

“You’ll heal,” she said. “You’ll both heal. We all will.”

He looked up at her, wiping his eyes on the back of his sleeve. “I’ll probably have to go live with the Wild Boar People. Does the whole city think I’m a traitor?”

“After today, they’ll think you’re a hero.”

“No. I don’t want to be a hero.”

“What do you want to be,
querido
? This is victory; you can be anything you want.”

“A piano teacher,” he said, and laughed. Suddenly happiness hit him. He was alive, and Rosa had survived, and Madrone too, and before them a boy hoisted a banner on the flagpole, the double spiral in the quartered circle on a rainbow ground. “Even if I’m a very bad one.”

Madrone laughed. Rosa looked up and smiled.

“How am I going to get you two home?” Madrone asked. “Goddess knows if there’s any transport going. I don’t think I can carry Rosa so far, and Bird, you look like hell.”

“I’ve been there.”

“But we’re out, now, aren’t we?” Rosa said.

“Yes,” Madrone said. “Out of hell, and free, and safe as anybody can be in this world. That’s real. We’ve made it back into
El Mundo Bueno.”

“Hold me, and I’ll try to remember that,” Bird said.

She wrapped her arms around him, hugging Rosa between them. He was warm and alive, as was she, against all odds, and they had come back to each other from terrible places. Pain and joy wrapped around them. Bird’s eyes still hurt, but when he closed them suddenly his ears were filled with music. In time, he knew, he would sing it and struggle to play it and write it down. Well or badly, it didn’t matter, only that he sang what was in him. Songs for the
living, songs for the dead. He began to hum. Madrone felt the music through his skin, humming like the bees, ringing like the voice for which she too was an instrument. A victory song. Today, she remembered suddenly, was the first of August, or Third Foggy Moon, the Day of the Reaper, the twenty-first anniversary of the Uprising. Soon they could climb the hill, make the offerings, say to the Reaper, “See, Goddess, this is what we have made of our city. This is how we have preserved it, defended it, saved our own lives.” The streams would soon flow again. And this winter, the rains would come.

37

T
hey lit bonfires on the tops of all the hills in the city. All night, drummers pounded out rhythms and people cried and danced. The army was gone. Some had fled down the old highway, others had died in the crossfire of mutinies, many had simply laid down their guns and asked to be taken in. The streets were thronged with people, the streams flowed again, and lights moved on the bay as boats sailed home.

The General lay in a hospital room, and Maya sat beside him, still dressed in white. She had been fed some clear broth and a piece of toast; she felt more alive now, almost substantial, even though Sam had yelled at her and told her to stay home. But she was not tired, only a little light-headed from her long fast. When they heard that Alexander had been found wounded in the Central Plaza, a laser burn piercing his chest and lung, she had known she had to come and see him for herself.

“So you’re dying and I’m not,” Maya said to him. The General’s eyes were closed; he did not respond. “How ironic. You get shot by your own men and I get carried off by a gorgeous Amazon pirate. Not bad for a woman of my mature years.”

The General moaned.

“You’re in pain. Maybe you should have let Madrone work on you. She pulls off miracles, from time to time.”

They had offered him healing, but when Madrone came, her hands extended toward him, he shook his head and whispered with labored breath, “No Witchcraft!”

“I’m offering you some healing,” Madrone had said. “Pure and simple, no ideology attached.” But he shook his head again, and she shrugged her shoulders and left, not reluctantly. For she was tired too. She’d managed to find a wagon to take Bird and Rosa home, but that was hours and hours ago, and since then she hadn’t sat down or stopped to eat a meal. There were so many wounded to tend, and too many dead. And this was the man responsible, the man who’d tortured Bird and Rosa and murdered Marie and so many more.

But I would have healed him nevertheless, or tried, she thought, and so there is a loss here, loss of the possibility of some opening. Maybe I’ve had it backward all along. I thought healing was pouring energy out, but it’s not. It’s opening, refining each receptor to any possibility of hope and comfort and change, taking in and taking in until you overflow. She felt rich, even in her exhaustion. She would go home now to Bird, who had stripped off his uniform and bathed and put on his own clothes, and they would touch, his touch would sing to her, and she in her own way would sing to him.

“I don’t mind dying,” the General whispered, his voice so low that Maya had to lean close to his mouth to hear. “Better than living in defeat.”

“That happy philosophy, throughout history, has killed more men than gonorrhea,” Maya said. “Still, I have to admire your consistency, if not your ideals. In spite of all the suffering you’ve caused, I would ease your pain if I could.”

The General groaned. He was silent for a long time. Maya sat and waited. She didn’t mind waiting with the nearly dead, she was that way herself. Why am I here? she asked herself. Is this an act of compassion, or do I just need to see with my own eyes that the man is really dead?

“You made your own defeat,” Maya went on, speaking as much to herself as to the limp form on the bed. “With your own fear, and with the hatred you yourselves have sown. So that even though you seemed so much more powerful than us, you could not win in the end. Although I have to admit there were more than a few moments when I doubted that.”

The General gasped and strained and finally managed to spit out a few words. “Others will replace me.”

“Maybe. Maybe not. Perhaps you have taught us the lessons we need to know to resist those others too.”

A bright bubble of blood burst between the General’s lips. “War never ends,” he gasped, in a voice so low she had to lean down to hear it.

She took his hand, cold even as she lifted it. “There was a place for you at our table, General, if only you could have believed us.” He closed his eyes and died.