The Fifth Sacred Thing (8 page)

A fist slammed into his jaw.

“Speak English, slime. None of that Devil’s tongue around here. What’s your name?”

“Uh … Charlie. Charlie Parker.”

“Charlie, we’d like to know how you got into that power plant. Who let you in?”

He was silent. Who could he still betray? Who was alive? Who was dead? Spirit wings fanned the room. No, he wouldn’t tell them anything.
Claro
. And there would be more pain, and then an end.

“Boy, you cooperate with us, we’ll cooperate with you. You can make it easy on yourself. You want to stonewall, that’s all right. We can deal with that too.”

He stood, silent.

“Give me your hand, boy.” One of the cops took his left hand, held it almost tenderly in his own. His face was round, and he had a gray stubble over his cheeks. His eyes were bright blue, and he smiled a lot. The good cop, Bird thought. There’s always a friendly one.

“That’s a nice hand,” the cop said. “Delicate. Refined.” He touched the calluses still there, though soft now, on the tips of Bird’s fingers. The touch made his skin feel slimy, polluted. “Almost a girl’s hand. Musician? Play guitar?”

Control. Bird willed himself not to respond, not through a breath or an eye blink or a gesture. He knew how the game was played. If they could read a “yes” from him on what they knew was true, they could read his “yes” or “no” to anything they asked, whether he answered or not.

“You a Witch, boy?” asked the second cop, who had black hair and wore mirrored sunglasses that concealed his eyes. “Answer me!” he barked.

Bird was silent. He was seeing Madrone’s face, asleep on her pillow, and the needlepoint over her bed that Johanna had done long ago.
Who sees all beings in their own self, and their own self in all beings, loses all fear
.

In his own self, he saw the executioner. He remembered a gun in his own hand, a face coming toward him, snarling, raging, then falling, blood spewing from the nostrils. Like his father’s face, dying by some other hand. Death moved on, and hands like these, like his, passed it along.

The men Bird faced were not alien to him, and so ultimately they could not defeat him. All they could do was kill him, and he wondered why they didn’t get on with it.

The first cop held Bird’s hand down on the table in a steely grip. The second cop pulled out his long nightstick, observed it almost philosophically, then suddenly smashed it down on Bird’s outstretched hand.

He could feel the knuckles crunch and the bones break. Pain was like a chord, or grating dissonances. He could let it be sound, and not feel it, and stay where the fear couldn’t get at him. As long as he stayed sheltered from the fear, nothing could get at him. Or so he told himself. In some other life, he would cry for his lost guitar and the lost possibilities of music.

They broke both his hands and then sent him back to his private underworld.

Maybe this was their modern version of the old test for Witches, the one where they threw you in the water. If you sank and died, you were innocent. If you floated, you were guilty and they burned you.

If he survived this, he had to be a Witch, he thought, as he went into the starsong for healing. He couldn’t make the bones go back quite right, but he could knit them together and put the pain into an arrow and shoot it off to disintegrate somewhere else.

They would come for him again, he knew that. He didn’t want to let the fear in because he sensed, now, that it was big enough to eat him alive. But he knew he couldn’t block it out indefinitely. He needed a plan. He wanted to be able to walk through walls, to pass invisible through the corridors and out into the night air. He wanted to go home.

Well, he could walk. He had learned that much. Not easily or long or well, but part of that was lack of practice. The muscles had atrophied. But he would work on them, and he would make himself walk around this cell, three paces one way, three paces back, until he had the use of his legs again.

It was his mind that was the problem. Sooner or later they’d break him and pick it. They’d find the pain he couldn’t resist or they’d get tired of cruder methods and drug him. Did it really matter, he wondered, what he told them? They asked him questions about magic. What could they do if they knew how much or how little he had? And they asked him about the North, how the city was governed and defended. Were they planning a war? If he told them the truth, that the North had not armed itself or prepared for war, would they invade?

He paced, and he worried. The fear crept in, chink by chink. He thought maybe he was going to lose his mind.

Or maybe that was the answer.

When they came for him again, he was ready. A good thing, too, he thought, when they laid him down on a hospital cot and came toward him with a syringe. He remembered a story about the stone they called the desert rose, pink, with ridged and striated surfaces. Maya had told him some people called it Witches’ Brains. The legend was the old Witches had locked their secrets inside it when they were taken to be tortured, to keep them safe from the Witch burners until the Remembering time would come again. Inside his mind was a stone like an egg. He took a deep breath, let it out, and imagined that his mind and his memories were inside the rock. He set a ward, the tiniest speck of mindstuff, to watch and wait and bring him out again when it was safe or necessary. Then the fear got him, for one stark moment of absolute terror. They found his vein; the syringe emptied the drug into his arm, and he
took the crystal egg of his mind and his memories, of what was in him that he believed made him, and fled. The more they came after him with drugs and questions, the farther away he hid. And the stone was buried deep, deep, underground. Where his mind had been was something opaque and resilient that memory bounced away from.

Littlejohn was in bed beside him, rubbing against him. Bird came alert instantly, the fear still clinging to him. Where was he? In the barracks. Who was he? Bird. How long had he been here?

Ten years? Ten years.

And the pain he was awash in was Hijohn’s pain. Not his own.

Clarity. Boundaries. He remembered the lessons of his childhood. Always draw the magic circle before you step between the worlds. Don’t get lost.

“I once was lost, but now I’m found.” His father had liked to sing that old hymn.

“Fuck me,” Littlejohn whispered.

“No, wait. I can’t now.” He could still hear Hijohn moaning, and he could still feel the power flooding through him. Funny, he had never been a healer, or much wanted to be. But his hands, broken, had found unsuspected powers. He imagined reaching out with them to Hijohn, imagined lifting him with his hands, as if he could lift the man up out of his broken body. They stood together somewhere on the slopes of a mountain. He smelled sage.

“Do you want to live or die?” Bird asked.

“I want to die. But I’ve got to live, if I can.”

Bird’s own body was an instrument of the great music; it could sing through him and charm Hijohn’s life back into his broken bones, smooth his torn flesh. And then Littlejohn was doing something to Bird’s body: he could dimly feel his cock rising with a hot stab of need. Cautiously, Bird lowered a barrier in his mind and
felt
for the younger man, to draw him into the link. Littlejohn drew away, with an electric shock of panic.

“Don’t Witch me,” he said. “Let’s just fuck.”

Bird felt shock ring through the harmony, like a door slamming in the middle of a symphony. He was almost thrown out of contact, but he reached for Hijohn and held on. Ground, he said to himself, letting the power run back to earth. Let the earth hold it, Maya used to say. She won’t lose it for you, and you’ll always know where to find her.

Ground.

“Come on,” Littlejohn urged.

“That is how Witches fuck,” Bird breathed in his ear. “I can’t do it any other way.”

“Sure you can, like you used to. Please, let’s just do it like we always used to.”

The boy feared him, Bird sensed. He feared Bird would reach into his mind, grab something there he didn’t want to face, take it, and then hate him and discard him. Maybe he preferred Bird mindless, a force like raging nature he could submit to but that wasn’t capable of controlling him. Maybe forms of control were all he’d ever known.

Bird started to draw back. He could still feel Hijohn, a spirit trapped in a shell of pain, just on the edge of bearable, now. He wanted to stay with him, not to be distracted. But then Littlejohn’s mouth was on his cock and the need in him was raging and building. The boy’s fingers drummed on his chest, and Bird could hear him make soft little sounds of imprecation and submission. He had never before, in his memory, used a body without opening to the mind, and the thought repelled him but something in it also excited him, seemed to fit the kind of cold comfort he needed in this place, as if the very bars around him could become erotic dreams. Hijohn moaned somewhere, and Littlejohn moaned in his ear, and then the sex and the healing and the power and the pain were all mixed up together, all building and vibrating in strange dissonances that finally peaked. He came, and then he owed it to the boy to make him come too.

In the stillness, he felt a silence where Hijohn was. Was he dead? Then the door opened and the guards dropped Hijohn’s body back into the corner bunk. When they were gone, Bird slid out of bed and placed his hand lightly on the man’s chest. No, sleeping. Healing. Imperfectly; all Bird had really been able to do was feed him the energy necessary for survival. He was damaged and in pain, but alive. Thank the Goddess.

Bird returned to his bunk. And then he lay awake, remembering, for a long, long time while Littlejohn curled up and slept. He was remembering tall, silent Tom, how making love to him was like falling into a mirror, as mind opened to mind and they could feel each other’s pleasure and rise with each other’s heat. He was remembering Sandy, the sensitive one, who could suck his sadness away from him, and he was remembering Cleis and Zorah and Madrone.

He had never imagined that sex could make him feel ashamed.

What would they do in the morning, when Hijohn still lived? Would they beat him up again the next night? How many times could Bird bring him back from the dead before they caught on? Before he wore himself out?

He had to get them out of there.

But he didn’t see any way out.

3

M
aya awoke most mornings surprised to find herself still alive when so many she loved were dead. Often they visited her in the early morning, as the sun’s rays filtered through the upper bay window where her bed nestled. She had always loved being awakened by the sun. Many years ago she made herself curtains, beautiful curtains, balloon shades of raw silk dyed turquoise and trimmed with French lace. They disintegrated and she never replaced them. She no longer feared exposure.

From her bed, Maya could look through the south-facing bay of her window when the trees were bare and see the green winter slopes of Ritual Hill. If her door were open, she could look down the long hallway, through the glass door of the kitchen, and out the back window to the rising curve of Twin Peaks.
Los Pechos
, the young ones called them, the Breasts: Breasts of the Virgin, Breasts of the Goddess, depending on your persuasion. It didn’t matter to her. The Goddess always was a virgin, complete in herself, untamed, unmated. She had been a virgin herself once, but then she met Rio.