The Fifth Sacred Thing (29 page)

Bird swallowed. Yes, she was right, it was sitting there, the thing he was reluctant to admit, even to himself.

“Well, it’s this,” he said finally. “What I told you is what I remember. But how do I know for sure that it’s really what happened? Maybe it wasn’t
me
that did something to my mind; maybe they did. Maybe I really broke and told them everything.”

“No one would blame you,” Maya said.

“I know,” Bird said. “I wouldn’t even blame myself. But I feel responsible. Did I let them know that the city has nothing they would call defenses? Is that why they’re invading now?”

“But whatever you might have told them,” Holybear said, “you would have told them ten years ago. They would have invaded then, not now.”

“I guess you’re right. I keep getting time mixed up in my mind. It all seems compressed and scrambled.”

“You did good, Bird,” Sage said. “As good as you could. As good as anyone could.”

“It’s just not knowing. Not trusting my own memory.”

Oddly, once it was out he felt relieved. The others regarded him steadily. What had he feared? Their judgment, their condemnation? But that made no sense. Madrone pressed his hand. No one spoke, because there was nothing to say, and yet slowly Bird felt comforted.

“So what are you going to do?” Manzanita asked at last.

“Go back. I said I would.”

“How?” Sage asked.

“The way I came, I guess. Walk.”

They were silent again. He looked out at five pairs of eyes that stripped away his outer coverings and saw the energy lines in his body. Pain stood out on him like a tracery of red veins.

“I can walk,” Bird said. His voice sounded defensive. “I walked here, didn’t I?”

Maya looked intently at her embroidery. Madrone closed her eyes. On the inside of her lids, she saw herself walking in the canyons of the coastal hills, alone. From her belt hung a sheathed knife. She blinked to make the vision go away.

“They want a healer,” she said. “You’re not a healer.”

“I’ll do in a pinch.”

“Somebody should go. Sam’s already making noises to that effect, in the Healers’ Council. But not you, Bird. You’ve been through enough.”

“Who can say what’s enough? Who can say what it’s going to take to survive, if they really bring war here?”

“Let the Healers’ Council decide who goes,” Madrone said.

“Why should I? You yourself just said I’m not a healer.”

“She’s right, Bird,” Holybear said. “You’re back home now, where we do things collectively, remember? This isn’t your battle alone.”

His words echoed Sam’s. Madrone shifted her weight and looked up to find Nita staring at her.

“Don’t you get funny ideas, either,” Nita said. “You don’t look fit enough to fry rice, let alone invade the Southlands. What the hell happened to you, girl?”

“You work too hard, epidemic or no epidemic,” Sage said.

Maya snorted. “She did more than that. Go ahead, tell them.”

“Explain, please,” Holybear said.

“All right.” Madrone withdrew her hand from Bird’s and faced the others. I have nothing to be ashamed of, she told herself. “We weren’t having any luck getting at the virus, either with magic or with lab work. So I went after the
aumakua.”

“The what?” Bird asked.

“The oversoul, or the morphogenetic field, if you want to get technical. You studied morphic field theory, didn’t you?”

“Mostly as it relates to music,” Bird said.

“In the
ch’i
worlds, something like a virus is a collective entity. What we
see
of it is a symbolic representation of actual form-generating forces,” Holybear explained. “So what happens to its
ch’i
image reverberates in the physical world.”

“And?” Sage asked Madrone.

“I absorbed it,” Madrone admitted.

“Are you kidding?” Holybear looked at her, shocked. “Madrone, are you sane? Don’t you realize how dangerous that is?
Diosa
, if that’s true I’m surprised the Healers’ Council left you running loose.”

“I knew it was dangerous,” Madrone said. “But it felt right. And it worked.”

“You nearly died,” Maya said. “You’re still not well.”

“But I don’t understand,” Nita said. “Who was in your circle? Wasn’t your backup strong enough?”

“I didn’t call a circle together,” Madrone admitted. “I just … it just came to me to do it, one morning—there was a possibility I could grasp if I acted that moment. So I did.”

“That goes beyond stupid,” Sage said. “That’s suicidal.”

“It worked,” Madrone repeated.

“Luck doesn’t justify recklessness,” Holybear said.

“You understand, don’t you?” Madrone turned to Bird. “It was like a
geis
. It was laid on me.”

“I understand,
cariño
, what it is to do what you have to do and wonder afterward if you were brave or dumb.” He slid his arm around her shoulder. “And to pay for it. And frankly, to me it seems you’ve paid a pretty heavy price. You need a good long rest.”

“Healers’ Council agrees. They wouldn’t let me start back to work yet.”

“I’m glad
they
have some sense, at least,” Maya said.

“I have sense. I’m sure a nice long rest would be good for me, in some other world. But we live in this one, and who among us gets what’s good for us? Did Sandy? Did you? And will any of us, if what Bird says is true?”

In the quiet, Maya’s knitting needles clicked together in a rhythm like a slow drumroll.

“So what do we do here, when the troops come marching up the highway?” Holybear broke the silence.

“I don’t know,” Bird said.

“We’ve never known,” Maya said. She stabbed at the yarn with her needle. “We’ve been afraid of an invasion ever since Lily and Alice had their great moment of drama with the pickaxes and the pavement, but we’ve never known what to do if it happened.”

“We’ll fight it,” Bird said. “Like we did before.” He slid his arm around Madrone’s shoulder and held her close.

“Of course we’ll fight it,” Holybear said. “I’d just feel a whole hell of a lot better if I thought we could win it.”

“We were damn lucky before,” Maya said. “We can’t count on the same constellation of circumstances again. We could just as easily all have ended up dead.”

“We were still right to resist,” Bird said. “Smartly or stupidly or even suicidally. Believe me, I’ve seen it down there. Even if we’d all died, it would have been a thousand thousand times better.”

“We did okay,” Nita said. “I have faith that we’ll do okay again.”

“But I’m not looking forward to it,” Sage said. “I’m afraid.”

Maya was suddenly very, very tired. “We have to think about this,” she said. “We have to take it to the full Council. We won’t figure it out tonight.”

“Have you taken it to Defense Council?” Nita asked Bird.

“Not yet.”

“Maybe it should go directly to the City Council,” Sage suggested.

Nita considered for a moment. “No. If he does that, Defense will get their backs up. Go to them first, and then go talk to Cress on the Water Council, just sort of off the record. Call him
hermano
, buddy up to him, and get him behind you.
Then go
to City Council, preferably on a day when Sal’s facilitating.”

“Listen to Nita,” Holybear said. “She’s Toxics’ prime strategist.”

Maya stood up. She wanted to be alone with her fears and her memories and her own rage. “I’m an old lady. I’m going to bed. You’re all very brave and I can’t say I’m not proud of you, even if I’d like to fold you up safe and keep you in my dresser drawers. It’s Rio coming out in you, Madrone. You can’t help it. And you, Bird. I should never, never, never have let your grandfather knock me up just because I thought he was the bravest man I’d ever met. I knew at the time I’d regret it, and I do. I do.” She was standing there, crying down onto her knitting, and Bird stood up and hugged her.

“Don’t lie,
abuelita
,” he said, kissing the top of her head. “You know you don’t mean a word of that.”

“I do,” Maya said.

“Well, you’re doomed to pay for your sins, then, I guess,” Bird said. “Because here we are, the curse of your old age.”

“¡Que suerte!”
Sage murmured. The word meant luck tinged with fate, and Maya didn’t argue.

When Maya was gone, they sat in silence for a moment, Bird with his head sunk down on his chest and his eyes closed, as if he had not yet fully emerged from his story. Nita yawned.

“It’s time for bed,” Sage said.

“The operative question here,” Holybear said, “is, who’s going to bed with whom?”

The question brought Bird out of his reverie. He looked up, slowly. There was a speculative light in Holybear’s eyes, but Bird wasn’t sure of his meaning. The others had all been lovers for a long time, but he hadn’t been part of their circle. He had been lovers with Sandy and with Madrone, but separately, and he had never tasted the others, or the whole they made together. Maybe they preferred to keep it that way.

“Don’t worry about me,” Bird said.

“Asshole,” Madrone whispered softly.

“Actually, he meant that as an invitation,” Sage said.

Bird looked from her to Holybear and around the room. What he saw sent a faint smile to his face. “Is there consensus on that?”

“I’m greedy. I want us all,” Nita said.

“We need to be together,” Sage said, and Madrone nodded her agreement.

They unrolled the soft rug in the ritual room and lit candles in the four directions. In three breaths, they grounded and quickly cast a circle.

“Madrone first,” Nita said.

She slid off her clothes and stood in the center of the circle. The others surrounded her and began to chant her name softly. She closed her eyes and let herself be stroked, by the sound of their voices, by the soft touch of their hands, until her skin became electric, charged with fire. She opened to them, feeling them catch and hold the pain that seemed to her bottomless: the sorrow that rose up because Sandy, who should have been there, was missing from the circle; the sorrow and the rage that went deeper, into the very core where her power to heal arose. Their hands seemed to move through her body, deep into her, down to that core, as they teased and roused her, sliding lightly over the nipples of her breasts, brushing gently the tips of her pubic hair. Lips lightly touched her breasts.

“Thou art Goddess,” they chorused softly.

Madrone opened her eyes and stepped out into the circle, as Manzanita entered to have the Goddess stroked into her. Then it was Sage’s turn, and then, one by one, they called the God into the men, with delicate touches that left them rampant. They all stood for a moment in a circular embrace. Madrone and Sage were next to each other, their breasts touching. Bird had one arm around Nita’s shoulders, clasping Madrone’s hand behind Nita’s back. His other arm circled Holybear’s waist and brushed Sage’s hip. They were linked, each in contact with the rest, and as they matched their breathing, they began to sink into the deeper link, into the point where each was part of the whole that was them all, until the energy opened, each of them a velvet petal unfolding from a bud with a common heart, and they began to move together, in a dance of hands, lips, breasts, cocks, vulvas, an interweaving of energies that sounded high notes and deep notes and syncopated rhythms of pleasure.

The circle knew her, Madrone realized. There was a mouth on each of her breasts and they sucked to the surface her unspilled tears like milk. Tears were streaming down her cheeks and Nita was holding her head, crooning to her until beneath the flood she could feel the solid ground of the body, each cell gripping life in its fist, squeezing and caressing and exulting in life. There was a mouth on her vulva and a tongue that played against her like a dare, until her tears turned to laughter and awe at the body’s capacity for pleasure. Pleasure shook her until she could no longer contain it; she began to arch her back and shake, and as the pulse inside her began to beat the mouth changed to a warm thrust that carried pleasure deep inside her and sustained it while she fell. The core of pleasure shone like an apple, like a place she could glimpse between the pulses of orgasm, and Sandy was there somehow, not lost to her but smiling, juice dripping from his mouth.