The Fifth Sacred Thing (41 page)

He led them on through a barrier of brush, behind another outcropping of rock. There, on a flat stretch of ground where the valley floor widened, about twenty people lay sprawled under the trees. In the center, a ring of stones surrounded cold ashes. Two figures moved among the bodies, and they stepped forward to greet the new arrivals.

“It’s the healer,” Begood announced.

A man with a wild gray beard and staring blue eyes introduced himself as
Baptist. The second figure was slight and thin, almost genderless in a ragged pair of jeans and a gray length of cotton wrapped round her head and upper body. Her name, she said, was Arachne, but people called her Rocky.

“Drink deep,” everyone said, but nobody offered any water, and Madrone still felt hesitant to ask, even though her throat was raw and burning. She felt almost obscenely wet, as if every cell in her body was comparatively bloated. These people seemed to be covered with a fine layer of dust. Their skin had a leathery look to it, like the leaves of the live oak or the feather-dry foliage of white sage.

She chewed her dry tongue and swallowed, which made her thirst seem worse. Looking around, Madrone felt dismayed. Was this the Web, the heart of the resistance, this collection of gasping bodies and old rags? Was this what she had come to serve?

“Have you had much experience with flu?” Rocky asked.

Madrone simply nodded.

“Would you come look at Hijohn? He’s dying.”

Rocky drew her over to one of the prone bodies. He was naked under the grimy blanket that Madrone drew back. A smell assaulted her, of old shit and dried urine and sweat. Rocky, kneeling beside her, looked up, a faintly defensive note in her voice.

“We try to keep them clean,” she said. “But there isn’t enough water to wash them very often.”

“That’s okay.” The man was emaciated, unconscious; his wizened head on his skinny body reminded her of a dried apple on a stick. Hijohn. Was this Bird’s friend? When she felt down the energy lines of the body, she could read traces of old breaks and healed fractures, a history of pain. For a moment, she thought she could almost hear a long sustained note, sung in Bird’s voice. She went deeper, feeling for the cause of his labored breath and weak pulse. Exhaustion. Fever and malnutrition. And, underneath, a virus she recognized as one of the simple ones that in the well-nourished produce a three-day illness, hardly worse than a bad cold.

“Is he in withdrawal from the boosters?” she asked.

Rocky shook her head no. “He was never on them.”

Madrone felt a slight sense of relief, then a deepening of fear as she began to understand the implications. For she could heal, but if what they really needed was food, and rest, and water …?

An old joke raced through her mind, something about instant water … just add water. She put it aside and began breathing and focusing to draw her spirit helpers, laying her hands on Hijohn. After a moment she stood up, went over to the streambed, and searched until she found a smooth, round stone. She held it to each of the four directions in turn, gathering energy. Then,
returning to Hijohn, she passed it over his body, drawing out the sickness and shaking it off onto the ground.

“His fever’s gone down,” Rocky said, touching his forehead.

Madrone nodded. “He’ll be okay. Can we give him some water?”

Rocky nodded and returned with a small cup. “Hijohn,” she said, “can you sit up?”

The man groaned and opened his eyes. Rocky supported his head while Madrone held the cup to his lips. She noticed how carefully he drank, first taking a small sip and holding it on his tongue for a long moment, then rolling it in his mouth, and then, after another long moment, swallowing. He repeated the process again. Three of his swallows drained the cup.

“Can he have more?” Madrone asked. “By rights, he should drink and drink to flush his system.”

Rocky looked alarmed. “I’ll bring him another cup,” she said. “But it’s been a bad year for water.”

“We just brought ten gallons up with us.”

“Yeah, but those are for the cisterns. For summer, when even the wells run dry.”

“At least one more cup,” Madrone said. She worked on him again with the stone, trying to use energy for the cleansing that should have come from water, trying to still the clamoring panic in her body, which had begun to whisper insidiously, “If this is all
he
gets, how much will
you
get?”

I can survive, she told herself. If they can survive, surely I can survive. But suddenly she was filled with the image of the stream that ran outside Black Dragon House. She could smell the moist earth of the gardens it fed, she could hear its musical voice and feel the slippery coolness on her fingers. What am I doing here? she asked, and then thrust the thought aside. For certainly there was no lack of work here for her.

She worked on other men with fever and flu. As she looked around the clearing, she realized that she and Rocky were the only women.

“Aren’t there any other women here?” she asked.

“There are some. You’ll meet them, when it’s time,” Rocky said. Madrone sensed something concealed in her voice, but she couldn’t read the emotion behind it.

“Are there any more to look at?” she asked, when she had finished tending all the men.

Rocky hesitated. “There’s one. But he’s being cared for—differently.”

“I’d like to see him.”

Rocky looked at Baptist, who was walking toward them with an armful of firewood. A conversation took place between them in a few gestures, the raising of an eyebrow, the slight shrug of a shoulder. It made Madrone homesick.
There was nobody here she could talk to like that, with the change of the set of her head on her shoulders or the soft escape of breath from her lips.

“This way,” Rocky said. She led Madrone farther down the path, away from camp, to an isolated patch of shade under a sycamore. She pointed down, and Madrone looked at a piece of ground that seemed alive. As they drew closer and she made out the figure that lay there, she drew in a breath in shock. It was a human figure, entirely covered with swarming bees. They were crawling and moving over every inch of the body’s surface, setting up a loud and angry hum, forming in a small cloud of arrivals and departures. She couldn’t tell if the figure was female or male, awake or unconscious, whole or half devoured. She felt sick. It was like an image out of an old horror video brought to life.

She moved to go to the aid of the figure on the ground, but Rocky grabbed her arm and held her back. “No,” she said, “he’s fine. They’re helping him. But he’s enchanted. Don’t touch him or you’ll make the little sisters angry.”

Madrone stopped. Ground, she told herself. Listen. When she listened, she heard the hum of bees, businesslike, purposeful. When she
felt
for the man on the ground, she felt rest after weariness, healing after wounding. There was no horror there and no fear. Only in her own mind.

“I don’t understand,” Madrone said.

“The little sisters are our friends. They’re how we live up here. They feed us, and they tend the wounded.”

Honey was antiseptic, Madrone knew that. There were worse things to put on wounds. And if they smeared wounds with honey, bees would come. But something deeper was happening here.

“Can I go closer?”

Rocky shook her head. “It’s not safe, because the sisters don’t know you yet. But soon the Melissa will come to give him water. Then, maybe.”

They squatted down to wait. The hot sun beat on the back of Madrone’s neck. She could smell the blooming wild lilac; its scent made the air sweet and she could almost feed on it. It could almost ease her thirst.

It was not long before they saw something appear from behind the trees, a woman wearing a cloud of bees like a cloak. Their buzzing was a sustained hum, like a chant. The air seemed to vibrate in harmony, and Madrone felt it move through her body like a sudden rush of intoxication. She smelled something on the wind, like the distilled essence of wild blossoms: honey. The woman seemed to be wearing no other covering but the bees; they crawled over her body like a second skin.

“The Melissa,” Rocky whispered.

The Melissa’s eyes, the only part of her not cloaked by the bodies of
insects, gleamed darkly. A single bee broke loose from the mass and flew toward them, circling them a number of times as if sniffing them out.

“Hold still,” Rocky warned.

Madrone grounded herself. She had always liked bees, had even worked the hives herself from time to time, and she tried to beam toward this emissary her admiration and good intentions. The bee flew back to the swarm, disappearing among the others. After a moment, a hole seemed to open in the cloud, to reveal the woman’s face. She smiled.

“Drink deep,” she said. “You are the healer from the North.”

Madrone nodded. “Never thirst,” she said in English, since Spanish seemed to produce such shock and alarm.

The Melissa gestured toward the wounded man, inviting Madrone to come closer. “Don’t fear the sisters,” she said. “With me, you are safe.”

Together they knelt beside the body on the ground. Madrone at first had difficulty seeing an aura around him. The energies and colors were obscured by the flying bees. As she watched for another moment, she realized that the bees were not separate from the man. They had become his aura, his vitality, and their movements were shifting and sustaining his energy field much as she would have used her hands and her own spirit power to strengthen his link to life. As she watched more closely, she saw that the movements of the insects corresponded precisely to the treelike pattern of a healthy energy flow. The inner layer, of those who actually crawled on his skin, was like the etheric body, the most dense layer of the energy field. The others, swarming about a foot away, moved in a circular route from his feet up the center line of his body, branching out along his arms and continuing up over his head, to fan out and touch the ground before returning.

When she looked closer, she could see his wounds. They looked like laser burns, and she winced in sympathy. There were raw patches over his face and down his left side, and his left arm had apparently suffered a long gash. But that was closed, the edges of the wound bound together with a brown, sticky substance in weblike lines. All the wounded places were covered with honey, and the torn flesh looked clean, pink, and healthy. She could sense no signs of infection.

“Propylis,” the Melissa said, pointing at the binding on his arm. “And in here.” She indicated the water jug she carried, which she held to the man’s lips, giving him a few careful drops. “Taste?”

Madrone nodded and opened her own mouth to receive a drop of something wet and sweet and strong. It lay on her tongue, burning like fire but tasting like all the compacted fertilizing power of the spring blossoms. For one moment, before it dissolved, she was no longer hungry or thirsty.

“That’s wonderful,” Madrone said.

“It is our way of healing. We don’t have much, here in the hills, but we have learned to use what we have.”

“I would like to learn your way of healing,” Madrone said. “It’s very strange and wonderful. And maybe I can teach you ours.”

“Maybe,” said the Melissa. “The sisters work with us to heal wounds, but we who are bonded to them cannot come near the sick. They have a horror of illness. In the hive, they kill the sick bees. The wounded, too—but over the years we have been able to teach them to work with us on injuries, as long as they don’t get infected. It was difficult to train them. We have had to enter into the hive mind and become part of it. But it has also become part of us. I don’t know if we can learn your magic. And if you learn ours—well, once you come into the hive, maybe you won’t want to leave. It’s very sweet.”

Madrone spent the rest of the afternoon rechecking her patients in the grove and scouting the hillside and streambed for herbs. She was allotted a small amount of water for her patients, but fuel was in short supply. They lit fires only at night, Littlejohn said, so she couldn’t brew medicinal teas. She found a few water jugs of clear glass and filled them with bruised leaves and blossoms for sun tea. She would have liked to bathe her patients, but that was out of the question. The bees cleaned wounds; as for the rest, when the rains came, everyone would wash.