The Fifth Sacred Thing (92 page)

Cress opened his mouth to speak, but a look from Joseph silenced him.

Sachiko stood up. “That’s wonderful, Madrone. So maybe more soldiers will defect now?”

“We hope so,” Madrone said.

“That’s speculation,” said the woman sitting beside Cress. “We don’t know for sure.”

“But can’t we give it a little time?” Madrone pleaded. “A week or two, at least, to see what happens, before we go splintering off into factions and breaking the Council? It would be a shame to start shooting at the soldiers just when they might be about to come over to our side.”

“If we’re going to mount an offensive, we have to do it while we still have some resources,” Cress said. Joseph glared at him.

“We will never have enough resources to defeat them with guns,” Lily countered quietly.

“I said I wanted to hear from those who have not spoken yet,” Joseph said.

Silence fell on the room. Sachiko looked at Joseph. “I did speak once, but I wasn’t really finished,” she said.

“Go ahead.”

“I think Madrone is right. We’ve got so much invested in this strategy, so many lives already lost. It only makes sense to give it a little more time to work, now that we have some real hope to offer the soldiers. I’d like to make
that a proposal. But, Cress, I do hear your concerns. We can’t hold people back forever from taking actions they want to take.”

“They’re not concerns,” Cress said. “They’re not threats. I’m simply going to state here, once and for all, what Water Council and our allies intend to do. Unless there’s some radical change in the situation in the next few days, we intend to take autonomous action. We won’t block your proposal, but we won’t bind ourselves to abide by it either.”

“Then you will do our enemies’ work for them,” Lily said.

“Process!” Joseph said again. But the process had broken down.

In the dark, Bird felt a flicker of motion. By reflex, he opened his eyes. He thought he was awake now and had been asleep before, but he didn’t know for sure. It didn’t matter. Bad dreams haunted his sleeping, ghosts plagued his waking.

The darkness around him was vibrating and humming, alive with a sound that was strange and yet not strange. He had heard it before; it reminded him of something: sunlight, and flowers, which he had forgotten existed. Then he recognized the sound as the buzzing of a bee.

“What?” Bird said, and jumped at the sound of his own voice. Had he spoken aloud, for the first time in how long? “What?” he said again, just to test if he really existed, if his lips made sounds that his ears could hear. He wasn’t sure, but he thought they did.

It was too dark for even his long-accustomed eyes to see much, but in his mind’s eye he pictured a honeybee, furred and golden. Something landed on his forehead; he closed his eyes as it walked delicately over his face. Its touch was so soft, so gentle, like the feather touch of a lover’s hand, like Madrone’s fingers tracing his cheekbones and eyelids, like forgiveness. He almost cried—it was so long since he had been touched that way, and it seemed miraculous, the Goddess herself reaching out to him to remind him of life. The dark unfolded and blossomed, a black rose, a night lily. He felt warm, as if someone were holding his hands.

The bee stayed with him, and when it left another came. He still had no sense of time but he began to trust the bees, that their comings and goings measured intervals. They seemed to take shifts, perhaps no one of them could stand the stench and the darkness very long, but they never left him alone again. He was grateful. Their buzzing chased the ghosts out of his head; their feet on his skin reminded him that the body could feel not only pain but pleasure. He had nothing to offer them in return; the thin and slimy soup that appeared periodically was not something that would nourish them. But he spoke to them and praised them and sang them little songs, which they seemed to like, although how he knew that he couldn’t say. Most likely he was just out of his mind, talking to insects, but he no longer cared. His voice
croaked at first, but as he used it the tones improved. He sang them all the songs he knew, and when he was done he made up new ones, songs that fit the hell worlds, songs of the unquiet dead, their losses, their betrayals, their defeats. The bees didn’t care. Listen, spirits, I am singing for you, like you wanted. Are you happy now? No one will ever hear these songs, but I’m singing.

The guards came for him without warning. The opening of the door, the sound of their heavy boots, and their hands grabbing him and jerking him up to his feet sent such a rush of physical terror through Bird’s body that he almost vomited. The bees deserted him, and he felt jealous. He wanted to fly away too. His hands were cuffed behind his back, and he was marched on unsteady legs down a long corridor toward a new ordeal. You little winged fuckers, he thought. I was past fear, and then you made me come alive again, and where are you now?

In the room they brought him to, Rosa waited, tied and shivering.

“We’re giving you a choice tonight,” the guard said. “We can work on her while you watch, or let her watch while we work on you. Who will it be, you or her?”

He had just barely enough will left to open his lips and force out one word: “Me.”

He promised himself he wouldn’t scream in front of her, but he screamed and groveled and shit in his pants. They were going to work on him until he begged them to work on her instead. How long would that take? And would it matter anyway? If he held out this time, would he give way the next? Already he was beginning to hate her, to hate her screaming that hurt his ears, to want her silent, dead, ended, to want to see her suffer as he was suffering.

Then the General himself came in.

“Is he ready?”

“Not quite, sir. He’s holding out longer than we expected.”

“We’re out of time. Give him a shot—not too much. I don’t want him to appear drugged. Then clean him up. I’ve got a use for him.”

All day long, people had been converging in the Central Plaza. Some had gathered early in the morning; others arrived in contingents that formed spontaneously in the outlying neighborhoods and made their way chanting and singing through the streets, picking up others along the way. Now it seemed that the whole of the city had grouped together in this one spot. The crowd kept shifting, weaving and circling, restless as a brew coming to boil.

The sound system installed after the Uprising still worked perfectly, fueled by the solar cells high in the tops of trees. When a speaker stood on the raised platform in the center of the square, her or his voice was carried easily to the outer boundaries, clear and audible. Now it was the soldiers who took
advantage of it, massing on the platform in the center, warning the people to disperse and go home. The crowd responded with chants and pounding drums and howls like ghost cries on the wind.

A phalanx of soldiers approached from the street in front of the old library, clubbing and beating a path through the crowds. There was a moment of confusion when they reached the platform, then they cleared a space.

Madrone looked up. Isis and Nita were on either side of her, and River stood at her back. He was still healthy, and the three days they had promised Sam to wait had passed. He had insisted on coming with them to the Plaza. “Maybe be a chance to talk to the army,” he’d said, and Madrone had nodded and accepted his reasoning. If they could gain the central platform, he could speak to the whole crowd at once.

From where they stood, they could see the General, surrounded by the white faces of his Private Guard. He stood on the east side of the platform. A squadron of copper-brown soldiers carrying a white bundle climbed the steps and stood on the west side. They set their burden down by the flagpole where the starred cross of the Southlands flapped above their heads.

“What are they doing?” Nita asked. Shorter than Madrone, she could see little but the backs of the people in front of her.

“They tying something to the flagpole. Or somebody,” River told her.

The soldiers moved back, revealing Maya, pale and frail in her tattered white dress, bound to the pole, a gag stretched across her mouth.

“Oh, Goddess,” Nita murmured. Madrone gripped her hand.

Isis nudged them. “Let’s get up there, closer to her. Maybe we can do something.”

They began worming their way through the crowd but stopped as a new group of soldiers pushed their way through the massed people and mounted the platform in the center. They were molasses dark, with coiled African hair, like River.

“Do they color-coordinate all the squadrons?” Nita asked.

“Keeps the races from mixing,” Isis said. “Also, it looks good on parade.”

“That’s my unit,” River said. “I got to talk to them.” He plunged into the crowd in the wake of the soldiers. Madrone moved to follow him but Isis held her back.

“Let him go. He can take care of himself.”

River’s unit arranged themselves in two lines on the north and south sides of the platform. One lone figure was left standing in the center. It was Bird. Madrone recognized him, even though in his uniform he appeared as one more dark, anonymous soldier. He gave off a red glow of pain, surrounded by a dull gauzy film that seemed to wrap him up in a separate bubble of air. Still, he seemed to be standing and walking.

General Alexander stepped forward. His voice was boomed out over the crowd.

“I didn’t call you here,” he said. “Nevertheless, it is opportune that you have come. The Fourth Expeditionary Force of the Stewardship has claimed this land in the name of the Four Purities. We are charged with the cleansing of this land from all forms of Witchcraft and demon worship. Before you stands the chief Witch and demoness. You have come to witness her execution.” He motioned to the west, where Maya stood bound.

I should be afraid, Maya thought. I should feel something. But nothing seemed quite real to her. She was already halfway gone, why bother to hurry the inevitable?

Girlfriend, I always knew you would come to a bad end, but shot in the public square? Really!

Shut up, Johanna, or do something.

What is there to do? This has gone beyond your doing or mine. All we can do is wait.

Bird stood in the center of the square, not sure how he’d gotten there, not clear what was happening around him. Everything looked fuzzy, his eyes wouldn’t focus, and the back of his throat was dry and hurting. It was like a hangover, a pain hangover, but there was something that kept him from quite feeling it, from quite being able to focus his eyes.

One of the General’s Private Guard approached him. A white face loomed up before his face, spoke. “One wrong move from you, slimecrawler, and we’ll fire into the crowd.”

He felt something cold in his hands. They seemed very far away, like somebody else’s hands. He looked down. The soldiers had handed him a laser rifle.

“One of your number has abandoned the ways of evil and joined us to receive the blessings of Our Lord,” the General went on. “Cadet Fivefour Threethreefour, once known as Bird, we honor you today by choosing you as the executioner.”

It took him a long time before he understood. There, across the way, stood Maya. She faced him, her old eyes steady. She had shrunk and aged in these weeks, she had lost that timeless quality and now simply looked old, frail, ready to die.

They wanted him to kill her.

Here it was, then, the end of the road. He had been led along it step by step, and now here was the unthinkable thing they wanted from him. If he refused, what would they do? Kill her themselves, slowly, with torture, while he watched? Or work on him until he broke again, and pleaded with them to allow him to kill her? Oh, Goddess, he had done this to her, he had told them
about her, told them her name. His own weakness had already murdered her.

If he could only make contact, make her understand and forgive. He stared through the empty air between them. Maya seemed calm but he was sweating, his breath coming in stifled gasps. If he closed his eyes, he was still falling, weightless, unable to strike ground. His hands shook. But he was the one with the gun. He could, if he chose, turn and train it on the General, but before he could pivot and shoot other guns would fire. How many of the crowd would they kill in retaliation? And if they killed him, who would stand between Rosa and Maya and their fate?