The Fifth Sacred Thing (15 page)

“Man, I don’t ever want to move again. I’ll stay here.”

About a mile upstream, Bird found an old apple orchard. The trees were overgrown and unpruned, the ground covered with fallen apples that smelled of sweetness and decay. The air tasted of fermentation; he could get drunk on it. Light filtered through the trees; the air was hazy with dust and bees hummed as they gathered around the fallen fruit. He sensed magic in the place. Someone had done rituals here, made offerings to the spirits, he was sure of it. For the first time in as long as he could remember, he felt safe.

He sat down with his back against a gnarled old tree. Suddenly tears were welling up and spilling from his eyes. He hadn’t been able to cry before. The demands of survival had been too pressing. Now he looked down at his hands and wept for the suppleness that was gone and the years he’d lost and for the sheer raw ugliness that had been imposed on the beauty of the world. He cried for his lost voice that hadn’t sung a song or laughed at a joke in a decade, and he cried because he could hardly believe they had really escaped and he was headed home at last.

Hunger and exhaustion had emptied him. The humming of bees was loud in his ears, taking him somewhere, as if he had stumbled into the sacred orchard of the Shining Isles where the living and the dead walk together.

Then the gates of the worlds opened, and the dead came walking, Cleis and Zorah and Tom, not as in a vision but with the sound of leaves crackling under their feet and a scent in the air that was blossom and sage and rot all at once. They came toward him, his beloved dead, arms outstretched and eyes shining, and behind them walked Rio, Maya’s partner, almost but not quite his own grandfather, who had been alive when Bird left home. Bird reached for them, opening his mouth and taking in breath to speak, to ask them what had happened and why they had abandoned him. But they were gone. Above his head circled three black cormorants and one old crow.

He looked down. At his feet were four black feathers. He looked up at the brow of the hill and saw a small herd of deer watching him with tender animal eyes. Their leader was a stag with full antlers raised high and proud, and the sun dropped behind him into the west, a flaming ball between his horns.

With his left hand, Bird made the sign of the God who gives himself away, the prey who yields to the hunter so the people may live. The stag dipped his head. A sense of strength and compassion flooded through Bird, and under it all was something else, a quiet sense of expectation.

Then a crow called, and the herd wheeled and turned and bounded off into the brush.

Bird gathered apples, eating one himself, slowly. He found a tree of ripe walnuts, stripped off his shirt, and improvised a carrying bag. And there were plenty of live oaks, heavy with brown, slender acorns. Soaking in the stream overnight would take away some of their bitterness. It was a bad time of year
for water, but a good time for foraging. Berries were ripe, and there were seeds of sage and fennel they could collect. When he returned to the others, he came laden with fruit.

Littlejohn was kneeling beside Hijohn, letting him drink from his cupped hands. The sky glowed indigo, and a bright pink cloud scudded overhead. The scene reminded Bird, for a moment, of one of the holy pictures the Sisters kept in their living room back home. The peace of the orchard remained with him; everything seemed beatified. He set down his shirt.

“I found food,” he said. “Let’s eat.”

“Food!” Littlejohn whistled. “Man, you really are some kind of Witch.”

They crunched apples and broke the nuts open between stones. The apples weren’t quite as ripe as they could be, and some of the berries were sour, but to Bird they had a sweetness that was almost a pain, the sweetness of real earth and sun and wind. It had been so long since he’d eaten anything at all, and longer still since he’d tasted food that wasn’t prepared as an aspect of punishment.

After the first rush of hunger was satisfied, they settled in to crack walnuts between stones and pick out the delicate meats. Bird looked thoughtfully at Hijohn. The man could use a night of rest, he decided. He’d never completely recovered from the beatings he’d received, and now his mouth was set in lines of pain. While he didn’t complain, it was obvious that any movement hurt him. For that matter, Bird could use some rest himself. He closed his eyes for a moment, asking the still, deep place inside him for guidance.

“I think we’re safe here tonight,” he said. “I say we don’t try to push on. What do you think?”

Hijohn laughed. “If you expect me to say we should move, forget it. I’m not sure I could if I wanted to.”

“Let me rest just a bit, and I’ll work on you,” Bird said. “What do you think, Littlejohn?”

“Push on to where?”

“I’m sorry,” Bird said. “I guess I just instinctively headed toward home. We should have discussed it.”

“And where is your home?” Hijohn asked.

“In the north. San Francisco. And don’t, for Goddess’s sake, tell me to call it Saint Francis or Frankie’s Place or any of that shit. Although some of us have taken to calling it
Hierba Buena
, since the Uprising.”

Hijohn looked at him thoughtfully. “And just what kind of place is that?”

“It’s a city,” Bird said. “And the land around it, the watershed. All the way up to the High Sierras in the east. And north up the coast. It’s beautiful there. Redwood country.”

“I’ve heard about redwoods,” Hijohn said. “What are they like?”

“They’re like … guardians. When you’re around them you feel protected. Watched over. They collect fog in their branches, way above your head. People say the spirits of your beloved dead hang out there.”

He felt good, remembering the redwoods of Mount Tamalpais, the damp earth smell when you were down in a grove of them, the soft, rough, ridged bark, and the bay laurel trees raising graceful limbs in between and wafting their pungent perfume around you. A tune he had forgotten came back to him, and he sang it for them.

“That’s the redwood song,” he said. “It kind of sounds like they are.”

The music sang itself inside his head, and his hands ached for an instrument to chase it with. They ached of old wounds, too, and he felt a sudden stab of loss, looking down at them. But the music is still inside me, he told himself. I will find it again, somehow. I’ll have to.

The sun was gone and the indigo air began to take on the chill tang of night. Bird considered building a fire. They had no matches, but he could always make a fire drill. It was a pain in the ass, but he knew he could do it. He’d done it often enough as a kid, the year they’d studied fire. That was the way Johanna ran the schools; she believed children should be taught about things from beginning to end. So they learned to make fire from sticks, and how to put out fires, and then studied all the chemistry and physics involved as they built steam engines and solar panels and tracked the course of the sun. He supposed it was a good way to learn; certainly they had never been bored, and he was always coming across bits of useful knowledge. Thanks, Johanna, Bird said silently. I wish you were still alive for me to say that to. But she had died, the same year his mother died, in the same epidemic. What would you advise me now about fire?

“Don’t tempt your luck.”

Maybe the voice was Johanna’s ghost, maybe just his own sense of caution, but he had to agree that a fire seemed unwise. He felt safe where they were—but not that safe.

“It’s getting cold,” Littlejohn said.

“Let’s get close together, under this bank,” Bird said. “We’ll keep each other warm.”

They huddled together, letting the rise in ground behind them break the force of the wind. But the earth under them was damp, and Littlejohn shivered.

“Don’t think about the cold,” Hijohn said. “There’s nothing we can do about it. Think about something else. Tell us more about your home, Charlie. Who owns the water?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean the water. Like, to drink and grow your food. Who owns it?”

“Nobody owns it. You can’t own water where I come from.”

“Somebody’s got to own it,” Littlejohn said. “Somebody always does.”

“We believe there are Four Sacred Things that can’t be owned,” Bird said. “Water is one of them. The others are earth and air and fire. They can’t be owned because they belong to everybody. Because everybody’s life depends on them.”

“But that would make them the best kind of thing to own,” Littlejohn said. “Because if your life depends on it, you’ve got to have it. You’ll pay any price for it. You’ll steal or lie or kill to get it.”

“That’s why we don’t let anybody own them,” Bird said.

“So if nobody owns the water, who decides who gets it and who doesn’t?” Hijohn asked.

“Everyone decides together. Four times a year, each household sends a representative to the Neighborhood Councils to discuss water issues. Water Council coordinates distribution and arranges for the work that’s needed to maintain the system. Each house has its own cistern that fills with the winter rains. But that doesn’t give us enough for the whole summer. We draw from the streams and reservoirs and bring down water from the Sierras.”

“What if you don’t agree?”

“We keep talking about it until we do agree. It works out.”

“What if it doesn’t?”

“It always does. It has to, because we know what the alternative is.”

“What?”

“The Stewards, or something like them.”

In the silence, they could hear the call of the night birds. The sun was gone but the wind had dropped.

“Well, where we come from, you pay,” Hijohn said. “The Stewards control the water supplies; that’s how they took control of the government in ’28. The Millennialists backed them with funds and religious prophecies, and in return they put into law most everything the Millennialists believe. You’ve got to work for the Stewards and obey the Millennialist Purities, or you can’t even buy water and you lose your right to eat.”

Bird sighed. “We studied the Millennialists in school. They were part of the history that led to our Uprising. Back in the twenties they had a lot of political clout. But it’s hard to imagine that people take them seriously. All that stuff about Jesus returning in 1999 and then repudiating the world because of sin.”

“He came and left,” Littlejohn said. “Leaving us to fight sin, which is most things worth doing.”

“And people really believe that?”

“Plenty do,” Hijohn said. “Or pretend to, now. They have to, if they want a job and a roof and a full belly every now and then. Or they join us up in the hills and fight.”

“It’s hard to imagine,” Bird said. “Even after where we’ve been.”

“It’s harder to imagine a city where nobody’s thirsty,” Hijohn said. “That’s what we’re fighting for, but it’s still hard to believe it might really be true.”

“Nobody’s thirsty in my city,” Bird said. “Nobody goes hungry. Nobody’s in prison.” Even to him, the words sounded unlikely, an article of faith more than a solid memory. “But we were hard hit by the epidemic. I don’t know what’s left, now. That’s why I’ve got to get back, to find out.”

“I don’t suppose you’d change your mind, come back south to the hills?” Hijohn asked. “We could sure use someone like you. I’d always heard stories about Witches from the north with supernatural powers. But now that I’ve met you, man, I believe them.”

Bird laughed. “My powers aren’t supernatural. In fact, as powers go, they’re fairly mediocre.”

“Then I’m not sure I want to meet the ones you’d consider well endowed.”

“Tell me about the hills. Who do you mean when you say ‘we’?”

“Come and see for yourself. We’re fighting for what you’ve got. Fighting the Stewards and the Millennialists. It’s not so easy down here.”

“It wasn’t so easy up there. People died. But we did it. We got free.”

“For a while,” Hijohn said.

“For a while,” Bird agreed. “We know they could come back any time, and I don’t know what we’d do if they came.”

“What we do,” Hijohn said. “Fight. Go thirsty. Die. Maybe win a few small battles, once in a while. But if we had someone like you, to teach us what you know—”

“I haven’t seen my home in ten years, man. I don’t know who’s alive anymore or who’s dead. Probably all my folks think I’m dead.”

“So they’re done mourning for you, years ago,” Hijohn said. “Why reopen old wounds? Come south, just for a while.”

“I’ll think about it,” Bird said, to quiet him. “But there’s something else I want to know.”

“What?”

“Why are you both named John?”

“It’s a tradition,” Hijohn said. “When you go to the hills, you leave your name behind. You become anonymous: John Doe. And it’s to do honor to John the Conqueror, the spirit who came over from Africa with the slaves, who brings hope to the hopeless. Because, to be honest, we don’t have too much hope of winning. But we’re fighting anyway.”

Bird heard what he didn’t say: We are desperate. He felt Hijohn’s will like a physical pull. The man’s eyes were on him; even in the dark Bird could feel their glow. But he had to go home. He had to find out if he still had a home.

Hijohn was silent. Bird could smell the sage wind off the land rise and blow out to sea.