The Fifth Sacred Thing (3 page)

“Oh, it’s good,” Madrone said. “Since the Council for its own unfathomable reasons has chosen me as its representative instead of Doctor Sam, I better get my ass up there.”

“Sam suggested it,” Lou said. “He meant it as a tribute to Sandy.”

“Lou, if you get that knot out of my neck I’ll … what’ll I do for you? I’ll bear you a child. I’ll cook you a dinner. I’ll nominate you for the next public honor.”

“Those aren’t promises,” Lou said, kneading her shoulders expertly, “those are threats.”

I look like the death hag herself, Madrone thought as she stared into the scrub-room mirror. Wisps of her curly black hair had escaped from their thick braid; there were blue circles under her eyes and a grayish tinge to her bronze skin. Streaks of blood covered her cheeks and chest. She stripped off all her clothing and threw it into the solar disinfector, loosed her hair, and stepped into the shower. The hot water felt good on her skin, restored her sense of being back in a body. She scrubbed thoroughly, down to the roots of her hair. She could protect herself from the fever, but until they knew how it was transmitted, she wouldn’t risk passing it on.

Clean, her wet hair clinging to her back, she changed back into her street clothes and went to look for Rosa. The girl was waiting in the corridor with Marie, another neighbor, one of the Sisters of Our Blessed Lady of the Waters who had a community house on Madrone’s block. Rosa was nestled, half asleep, in Marie’s arms, and Madrone squatted down to take her hand and wake her gently.

Rosa opened her eyes, large and dark in her thin face. Her hair hung in two long braids, a little frizzy and disheveled after the sleepless night, and Madrone remembered Consuelo’s hands moving deftly in her daughter’s hair, weaving the black, shiny strands. Never again.

“I’m sorry, Rosa,” Madrone said simply. “I’m very very sorry.
Tu mamá ha muerto
. Your mother is dead.”

Marie’s arms tightened around the child, and her blue eyes narrowed with concern. She too had been a patient of Madrone’s; she too was someone Madrone had not been able to cure and would lose. The milk-white skin of Marie’s Irish ancestors wasn’t made to withstand the ultraviolet that poured through the earth’s weakened ozone shield. Madrone noticed a new growth next to the older woman’s nose. Her skin was papery, transparent, the look of cancer.

“I’m sorry,” Madrone said again. “We did everything we could. We just don’t understand this fever yet.”

Now Rosa seemed to comprehend what Madrone was saying. Her eyes filled with tears. She buried her face in Marie’s shoulder and began to sob.

“Pobrecita,”
Marie soothed her. “I’m so sorry.” She looked questioningly at Madrone. “The baby?”

“She’s alive. For now. I don’t honestly know how it will turn out. We found a nurse for her. I wish I could be more optimistic.”

Marie nodded. Madrone rested a hand on Rosa’s back. She would have liked to curl up and cry herself. I hate this, she thought. I really hate this.

“You look exhausted,” Marie said. “I’ll take care of Rosa. You go and get some rest.”

Nodding, Madrone stood up. If she hurried, she would have just enough time to run home, change into her festival clothes, and meet Maya before the ritual started.

At the crest of the hill, people were descending from the bucket-shaped gondolas. Their thick cables spanned the city like a metallic spiderweb. They reminded Maya of Rio, how he had grumbled when they were first proposed after the Uprising.

“It’s beyond our resources!” he had objected. “We’ve still got people we can’t feed; how can we afford to turn the City into an eco-Disneyland?”

“I like them,” Maya said. “They’ll be fun. They’ll cheer people up.”

“Circuses! It’d be cheaper to feed a few Millennialists to the zoo lions. That’d cheer
me
up!”

“Don’t be an old crock,” she’d said to him, but then she noticed that tears were gathering in his eyes. The cataracts gave them a milky blue look that reminded her of an infant’s glazed stare. He was still a handsome man then, in his early eighties, just a few years older than she was. His blond hair had turned silky white and made a bushy frame for the roughly sculpted planes of his face. They could still end an argument by making love, burying in each other’s flesh their sorrow at all that had been done too little, too late.

Maybe he was right, Maya thought. We were carried away by our own optimism, in the first flush of victory, still thinking in the old ways, in terms of massive projects and heroic efforts: the sea dikes, the gondolas. Yet in the end the gondolas were quite practical, given the impenetrable maze that the Uprising had made of the city. And beautiful, embellished over the last two decades with bright colors and sacred designs: spirals, interlocking triangles, moons, stars, animals, and birds.

“Hi, Maya.
¡Que nunca tengas hambre!
May you never hunger!” Passersby greeted her, smiling, with the ritual blessing, and to each she replied politely, “May you never thirst!
¡Que nunca tengas sed!”
Some of them she
knew by name, others knew her by sight or through the books she had written. A few looked inclined to stop and chat, but she nodded at them and turned away. Too much admiration became wearying at her age.

The terminus was a tall sculptural tower forged out of the metal scavenged from the old microwave tower that had once crowned the hill. It shimmered with soft metallic hues, raising extended arms in welcome, the great windspinner on its top tracing moving mandalas with its blades as it generated power.

A figure emerged from the tower’s entrance and waved at Maya. At last, Madrone. The way she moved, her gait as she walked briskly over to where Maya waited, brought Johanna vividly alive again for a moment. Johanna had also liked flowing pantaloons and elaborately draped blouses and overtunics, in those same colors, maroons and purples and deep blues. There wasn’t a lot else of Johanna visible in Madrone, just that hint of Africa in the exuberance of her hair and a touch of chocolate under the bronze of her skin. And when Madrone turned, to regard Maya with one eyebrow raised and her lips pursed, shifting her basket of offerings from her right hip to her left, she was Johanna incarnate, and maybe more than that. Maya could, in fact, remember that expression on Johanna’s mother’s face, who had gotten it from some great-grandmother of her own, and so on back to the beginning of time, that first ancestress whose mitochondria swam in the cells of us all.

“Are you all right, Maya?” Madrone asked. “Did you walk up that hill?”

“I still have the use of my legs.”

“And you still don’t have any sense. You know I would never have let you try that alone.”

“Let me? What makes you think you could stop me?” Maya said.

“Well, for one thing, I outweigh you.”

“That doesn’t count for much. I’m old but tough.”

“Hmph. An old nut is the hardest to crack.”

“What are you implying?”

“Nada, madrina
. Not a thing.”

Madrone appraised Maya with a healer’s eye. The old woman could have passed for the Crone, the Reaper, herself: her skin, pale as cake flour, protected from the sun by a broad straw hat, her hair a wispy silver corona around the spiderweb wrinkles of her face. Her lips were a thin line, firm and determined, her jaw somewhat square, her brown eyes still clear and luminous. She wore a long black dress and leaned heavily on her silver-handled stick. She did, however, look tough, Madrone admitted, or, more accurately, vital. Amazing, really, that she had survived to such an age, through such times, her wits still sharp as cheddar.

“What are you looking at?” Maya asked.

“You,
abuelita
. You lookin’ good.”

“Now don’t you
‘ita’
me. I’m not little, and I’m not your grandmother.”

“It’s a term of affection, not size. As you well know. And as for exactly what we are to each other, I don’t know of a word that covers the case.”

“You don’t know a word that means ‘the daughter of the child one of my lovers had by my other lover when my back was turned’?” Maya asked innocently. “There isn’t something in Spanish for that?”

“Better settle for
madrina
. It covers a multitude of sins. Are you really okay?”

“Better than you. How much sleep did you get, anyway?”

“Don’t ask.”

Maya’s voice softened. “How did it go?”

“We lost Consuelo.”

“No.”

“I can’t talk about it now, I’ll start to cry.”

Maya placed a hand on Madrone’s shoulder. She pressed it against her cheek, taking comfort. A single blast of a conch rang out, wavering on the air.

“Half an hour warning,” Maya said. “Where do you want to go?”

The upper slopes of the hill were dotted with shrines to Goddesses and Gods, ancestors and spirits. Some were elaborately sculpted and painted, some as simple as an offering basket under a tree. They encompassed an eclectic mixture of traditions. A cairn of memorial stones crowned a green mound dedicated to the Earth Goddess, who could be called Gaia, or Tonantzin, or simply
Madre Tierra
, Mother Earth. Kuan Yin had a shrine and so did Kali and Buddha and many bodhisattvas, along with devis and devas, African orishas, and Celtic Goddesses and Gods. Some formed natural clusters: The Yoruba Oshun, Love Goddess, Goddess of the River, stood near Aphrodite and Inanna/Ishtar/Astarte, in front of a small circle of cleared ground where, at the moment, a woman danced barefoot and bare-bellied. Farther down the hill, the Virgin of Guadalupe overlooked the Stations of the Cross. Up here, the sun was welcomed at dawn on the Winter Solstice, the shofar was blown to announce the Jewish New Year, gospel music was sung on Easter morning, the call to prayer was chanted five times a day, and at almost any time of day or night someone sat in silent meditation, counting breaths.

“To the cairn,” Madrone said. “I brought a stone for Sandy.” Nestled under the vegetables and herbs in her basket was a rock, carved with Sandy’s name and the dates of his birth and death. Sandino Shen Lotus Black Dragon, born September 15, 2019. Died on the twenty-third day of Fog-Rolls-In Moon, Year 20 (June 23, 2048). She would add it to the memorial cairn at the top of the hill, a pile growing at an alarming rate. And that would be all that
was left of him, her friend, lover, companion,
compañero:
a rock in a pile, some ashes buried in the garden, memories. There were some griefs no ritual could heal.

Maya touched her arm, lightly, like the brush of a tentative wing. “Shall we place it together?” she asked, “Or would you rather do that alone?”

“Come with me.”

Maya reached for her hand. “Come on.”

Around the mound, clusters of people were leaving their own stones, or placing fruit or flowers for their dead, or simply standing, weeping, holding each other for comfort.

Madrone took the stone from her basket and held it for a moment. She was trying to think about Sandy, but instead she was thinking about Bird. He was born on the Day of the Reaper; they should have been celebrating his birthday today. A Leo, but he’d had five planets in her sun sign, Scorpio. Sex and death. How old would he have been? She was twenty-eight, and he would be turning twenty-nine. Goddess, they’d been so young ten years ago! She could see his face on the night he went away, his dark skin so smooth and unmarked, his beard still a novelty.

They were going off with a raiding party, he and Cleis and Zorah and Tom. Would she say goodbye to Maya for him?

“You’re going to get yourselves killed,” she’d said to him.

He met her eyes, steadily.
“Claro.”
At the look on her face, he softened it a bit. “Well, probably.”

She’d wanted to scream at him for being a fool, for abandoning her. But his eyes had frightened her. She had seen him look like that on the night of the Uprising, as he stood over his father’s bleeding body, with everybody around them screaming and the cops trying to club them down. They were only children then, but the look was old, too old.

Her own eyes were suddenly wet with tears. I’m disloyal to Sandy, she thought, I’m not focusing on him, I’m escaping from fresh pain by probing old wounds. Easier to mourn Bird, after all these years, than to face Sandy’s loss. Or Consuelo’s. Or the others that would come.