The Fifth Sacred Thing (13 page)

At the opposite end of the room, a tall man in a military uniform entered.

“Listen hard!” he said. “You have each been fitted with a PCD, a Prisoner Control Device. These devices let us monitor you at all times. We know where you are, we know what you’re doing, we know what you’re goddamned thinking. So don’t get any ideas or try anything, because if you do, this is what happens.”

He paused. Suddenly a searing pain flashed through Bird, beginning at his wrist and then extending through every cell of his body, ringing through him like a bell of agony. In an instant it was over, but he was left trembling.

“Try anything, and that will go on for a long, long time. Is that clear?”

“Yes, sir,” the men chorused, and then they were marched out to work.

The sunlight was warm and welcome on Bird’s skin, but he felt encased in some barrier that kept him from feeling or thinking. All he could focus on was his desire to avoid pain.

The guards led them down a dusty road that wound through the hills. Bird’s feet were unbound, but they dragged as if they were shackled, and his head rang. They rounded a bend, and suddenly in the distance he could see the ocean, luminous and calm in the morning light. For an instant, his mind cleared. I’ve been drugged, he thought, and then the fuzziness was back again.

On a flat shelf of land a hundred feet above the ocean, hordes of men were swarming around the ruins of giant machinery. A huge crane stood in the center, a black skeleton against the sky, and at its top, men were working with laser torches, taking it apart piece by piece. A few hundred feet away, another group of men were dismantling the once-sleek shell of what appeared to be a giant missile.

The prisoners’ job was to pick up the pieces of metal scrap dropped from above as the workers cut them loose. They sorted and loaded them onto the back of a flatbed truck. The metal was jagged and sharp, and Bird’s arms were scratched raw by the end of the day. He tried to look out for the flying metal chunks, tried to avoid cutting himself, but his mind kept drifting away and he didn’t care much. The sun was warm and he felt no pain.

Days passed, and he sank deeper into numbness, as did the others. There were no fights in the barracks, no more arguments, no card games with decks improvised from scraps, no moans of passion in the night. After they returned to the barracks, they ate, slept, and woke to work again, made docile at last.

Bird knew there was something he needed to remember, but it kept slipping away from him. Each time he first glimpsed the ocean as they
marched over the crest of the hill, something teased his mind. But he couldn’t focus long enough to track it.

Other memories came, evoked by the scent of the air, by a sound or a word, by random electrical patterns in his brain. He remembered coming down from the high place in the mountains where he had fasted for his vision quest, his hands on fire with melodies and rhythms that had snaked their way into his dreams. Madrone was naked beside a clear glacier-fed pool on a high meadow. He watched her slide under the blue waters and emerge, the wetness on her red-brown skin reflecting back the sky’s blue light so that she seemed to glow, blue and silver and golden in her own newfound power. They came together, power reaching out to power on the soft green grasses of the high country, where the wildflowers of spring bloomed in August. Then she was gone, and his hands hurt dully through a haze.

Something was important, but what? His brain was too foggy, he wanted to sleep, only someone was yelling behind him and he pitched the hunk of metal he was carrying onto the back of a truck. It landed with a clang; something in the sound reminded him of barred doors slamming home behind him, of finality.

Pain shot through him from his wrist, and he jerked awake.

“Get to work, slimecrawler,” shouted the guard behind him, and there was a new sheet of metal to grasp hold of and carry, cut from the side of some mammoth cylinder that might once have been a weapon, some guided missile of the old times that no one any longer knew how to guide. And who would guide him out of this place, guide him home if he could only remember how to get there? It smelled like the ocean, he sort of remembered that.

“Get hold of yourself, boy,” he said out loud. But his self kept sliding away, leaving at most a phrase he would repeat over and over, like an incantation.

“The ocean is the road home. The road home is the ocean. The ocean is the road home.…”

The rhythm of his chant merged with his feet, with the shouts and cries of the men, and soothed him. He was too tired to ask what his own words meant. He no longer believed in home.

By the second week on the work levee, Bird began to wonder if they would, indeed, survive. The question seemed distant, almost unimportant. He dragged his heavy body over the hill each day to work in a stupor of heat and exhaustion, dropping things, narrowly missing cutting himself half a dozen times. The others were no better. Hijohn had a new gash along his arm that wasn’t healing well, but somehow Bird couldn’t rouse any energy to heal it.
Littlejohn barely spoke. There was something Bird should do but he couldn’t think what. Maybe it didn’t matter anyway.

Bird was stooping to pick up a chunk of metal when suddenly he heard a keen, shuddering cry in the air above him. He looked up. A red-tailed hawk was circling, its wings still against the updraft that held it. As he watched, the hawk cried again. He wished he could circle with it, rising to see the hills and the valleys and the roads all spread out under him, flying free.

But what he saw was a hunk of metal flying toward him. His mind was still blank but somehow his body responded, leaping away. The metal crashed down just a few feet from where he stood; he could feel the whine in the air and the dust of its impact. Fear rushed through him, a flood that for a moment cleansed his blood of every other chemical.

I am alive, he thought. I almost died. I will die here if I don’t break out of this. He was drugged, he remembered that now, and he needed to refuse their food, if necessary, even their water, and get clear. If he could only keep on remembering. He made a chant and repeated it again and again. “No food, no water, no eating, no drinking; no food, no water, no drugs to keep from thinking.” It wasn’t a very good chant, but it would do.

He skipped supper, although he was hungry and the smells tantalized him. Nobody noticed: they were not strictly supervised in the barracks. He slept fitfully and woke with a headache in the morning, skipped breakfast, and went out to work with a throbbing pain behind his eyes that grew to nausea as the day wore on. He drank water only from the tanks at the site that the guards also used. His muscles ached and he wanted to vomit, but he forced himself not to.

That night he hardly slept, the pain in his muscles so bad that he bit his fist to keep from screaming. He tried to heal himself, but he couldn’t channel any power. He wished for Madrone or Maya, but he hadn’t seen them for so long he’d forgotten how to look for the road back to them.

Instead, he tried to distract himself by remembering stories. When he was a child his mother, Brigid, had put him to sleep with tales of shapeshifters and magicians. Now he recognized that she had been teaching him magic, telling him history in a form that kept him eager for more and more. “Once there were some children who could turn themselves into birds,” she would say. He tried to imagine her there beside him, soothing his pain with cool hands. She had died a long time ago, turned herself into a bird in the big epidemic, just before he went away. He sang himself an old folk song:

There was another line but he couldn’t remember it, so he sang what he knew of the verse over and over in his head, until it became a droning chant that finally calmed him into oblivion.

In the morning, he woke with his body still sore but his head clear. When he walked out on the earth he could feel her life humming beneath him and and could draw her strength into his body. He could pull down power from the golden sun and let it wash away the remnants of the drug in him. He was himself again, standing on the living earth under the unfettered sky, with the hills curving around him that were part of his own land. He was ready to make a plan. And he would have to act soon; he couldn’t go forever without eating.

His first problem was the others. When they returned that night to the barracks, he touched Littlejohn’s shoulder and took him aside.

“Don’t eat,” he said. “The food is drugged.”

“Yeah, sure,” Littlejohn said in a dull voice and then went blankly into the dinner line. Bird took the tray out of his hands, set it down on the communal table, and took him back to the corner by their bunks.

“Wha’ the fuck,” Littlejohn said.

“Shut up,” Bird said. “I’m telling you, don’t eat. We’re getting out of here.”

“Yeah, sure,” Littlejohn said, starting back toward the table where the other men were already devouring his dinner. “Hey, tha’s my food!”

“Shut up, man. I’m telling you, we’re not eating another thing, and we’re getting out.”

When he had Littlejohn settled on the bunk, Bird managed to intercept Hijohn, who was, as usual, shunted to the back of the dinner line while stronger men pushed ahead of him. Bird tapped him and pulled him aside.

“The food is drugged,” he said. “Don’t eat it. We’re getting out of here.”

It seemed as if his words had to penetrate a thick cloud of fog before they reached Hijohn’s center, but once they did a spark of comprehension lit up in his eyes. He returned to his bunk, lay down, and slept.

Bird held Littlejohn all through the night, while the younger man twitched and jerked in withdrawal. The barracks were still, and every sound Littlejohn made seemed to rattle the metal walls, but no one disturbed them. Bird drew on all the healing power he could remember or invent, and in the morning Littlejohn seemed more lucid and slightly more comfortable. At least Bird didn’t have to fight him to keep him from breakfast.

With Littlejohn demanding all his attention, he didn’t know how Hijohn got through the night. In the morning, Bird could see that the lines of pain had deepened in Hijohn’s wizened forehead, but his eyes were clearer, and he winked a greeting as they hung back from the breakfast line.

As they filed out to work, Bird observed the lay of the land. He felt sure that if they could just get into the hills, no one could catch them. There was
cover in the ravines and the stands of live oaks. Although it was the dry time of year, they would find water, and the land would feed them.

The problem was the bracelets, the PCDs. They were electronic, and that was hopeful. Electronics were more susceptible to magic than physical locks and bars. The brain emits an electrical field; back home, they had developed entire technologies based on that principle, like the intelligent crystals in their computers that were programmed purely by visualization. Tecchies would know what to do with the damn bracelets, but they trained for years and began with special talent. Bird himself had only the minor training given to every schoolchild, and he hadn’t practiced those skills for a long time.

Well, he could only try. Maya always said that magic was like riding a bicycle: once you learned how you could never forget. Nevertheless, Bird thought, when you were out of shape you were more prone to fall. He wished he could practice somehow, try making the lights flicker in the barracks, maybe, or mess with their computers. But he didn’t dare do anything that might arouse suspicion. So far, no one had noticed that he and the others were refusing food, and he wanted to keep it that way.

On the sixth day of his fast, he awoke with his hunger gone, feeling light, clarified, his intention pure as a beacon. Today, he said to himself, and he whispered it to Littlejohn and Hijohn, hope and fear racing each other through his veins. “Today.”

They walked the winding road to work with the same slow shuffle of the other prisoners. Bird was alert, on edge, fearful of some freak accident that could undercut their chances of escape. In the few days without drugs to take the edge off his pain, he had learned the limits of his injured body. His muscles were slack from years of disuse and now sore from unaccustomed labor. His leg had never healed correctly, and he walked with a limp that strained tendons and the muscles in his lower back. He wondered if he were going to be able to pull it off—both the magic and the running. Maybe he would fall behind, unable to sustain the pace. Maybe they were all going to die.

Time marched with its own drugged shuffle, dragging its feet interminably. But at last the sun began its slide down toward the horizon, and in the slanted light of early evening the prisoners were lined up to go back to the barracks.

Bird made sure that he and the two others positioned themselves toward the middle of the line. One guard was stationed in front, one in back. There were one or two places where the road curved and the head of the line would be out of sight of the tail, and the middle of the line out of sight of both. The guards depended mostly on the PCDs to keep prisoners in line; they wouldn’t be on the lookout for trouble.