The Fifth Sacred Thing (40 page)

Breathing slowly, she let the sunlight playing on her face call her back.

“So that’s it,” Madrone said. She was sitting with Rhea and Isis on the porch of Rhea’s house, watching the waves lick the golden tail of the sunset. Littlejohn had wandered up to join them, and Isis had moved pointedly away from him. Madrone, embarrassed by her rudeness, gave him a warm smile. “I still don’t know exactly what the boosters are, but I can make an educated guess. I suspect they’re synthetic cytokines.”

“What?” Littlejohn asked.

“Cytokines are like hormones for the immune system. They stimulate white blood-cell production.”

“If you say so, baby,” Isis said. “What does that all mean to us?”

“It means you’re lucky if you’re off them, luckier still if you never were on them. I can’t believe it’s safe in the long run, to overstimulate the bone marrow like that. I would think you’d see a lot of leukemia after a few years.”

“I got off them a few years ago,” Isis said. “It was too much hassle, raiding for them and the steroids both. So I loaded up the boat with food and water, sailed off to a nice secluded cove I know”—she winked at Madrone—“and hung out for a month. Sure, I got sick, but I got over it. Since then, I’ve taken my chances.”

“That’s good to know,” Madrone said. “It shows that the system can restore its own functioning naturally. If you were alone on the boat, you were isolated from contact with the worst infections during your most vulnerable period.”

“So what do we do now?” Rhea asked.

“Continue doing what we’ve been doing. Unfortunately, I can’t just make
a metabolic adjustment for these men. Their bone marrow is like an overfarmed field; it needs building up. But herbs are very good for that, and I can teach you all the points on the body to stimulate. We don’t have acupuncture needles, but massage and pressure can do a lot.”

Isis slid close to her and murmured in her ear. “I got some points I’d like you to stimulate for me. How about tonight?”

Before Madrone could answer, Littlejohn spoke up.

“I got word from Hijohn today, from the camps above Angel City. Wants to know how soon you think you can head down that way. I volunteered to guide you when you go.”

“Not for a few weeks,” Madrone said quickly. “At least. I want to monitor these men, see if their white cells kick in.” And then I want to go home, she thought, but already she suspected that she wouldn’t. Her dreams were still full of dry, dusty roads and thirst.

Now there was nothing left of the sun but a pink glow in the sky and a few splashes of color playing on the dark troughs of the waves. I need to get this information back home, Madrone thought. But does it justify my returning? It’s still only a guess, at best, not so different from the speculations we kick around over muffins at morning meetings. I still haven’t learned what causes our epidemics or examined any of the antidotes. I still haven’t done much to help the Web divert significant numbers of soldiers from the invasion. Maybe I should go further into the South.

“I’ll send him that message. Can I tell him you’ll come in three, four weeks?”

“Let me sleep on it.”

Littlejohn left, and Rhea went into the house, leaving Madrone and Isis alone together.

“Come back with me to the boat tonight,” Isis said, sliding her hand around Madrone’s waist. “I’ll be good to you. You won’t be sorry.”

Madrone wriggled, to shift Isis’ hand away from her own breast. What’s wrong with me? she wondered. Is it just fatigue? But that’s never kept me from wanting sex before. Yet with Bird or Nita or Sandy, who understood her, lovemaking would have filled her empty places, replenished her like a drink of cool water after a long run. With Isis, sex was a physical performance, demanding endurance she didn’t have.

“I know you’re tired,” Isis said. “I won’t bother you if you don’t want. But I could feed you and rub your back, and you sleep so nice on the water.”

“Maybe tomorrow,” Madrone said. “I’ll come early. I should check you anyway to see how you’re adjusting without the steroids. They should be pretty much out of your system by now.”

“Come tonight.”

“I’ve got work to do.”

“What kind of work you got to do at night?”

“Dreaming.” As she said it, she realized it was true.

In her dream, she was swimming, not flying, but swimming through the air, which was viscous and thick. The air tugged at her like a riptide, pulling her south. Yes, that is how I feel, she thought: caught in a current too strong for me, taking me away. But I have to learn to resist; otherwise the tide will carry me south to thirst in the City of Angels. Maybe I will go there, but it must be my choice; I can’t just drift into it. Yet her real fear seemed to lie beyond the hill camps and the dry streets below. She was not afraid to join the fight in the South, only afraid to go closer once again to the empty place in her own memory.

Lily. I am dreaming to Lily, she told herself firmly. Lily, Lily, Lily: she said the name until a face appeared, eyes like two inverted smiles blinking at her in the night.

“Madrone. Are you all right?”

“I have some information for the Healers’ Council.”

“Give it to me.”

Madrone explained to her what she suspected about the boosters. Then she had to wait and explain it again, while Lily wrote down the terms she was unfamiliar with.

“And the invasion?” Lily asked.

“I don’t know. Rumor here is they’re gearing up for sometime in the spring.”

“And you, child? Are you well?”

“They want me to go further south, into Angel City itself. I’m afraid. But that doesn’t matter. I mean, it doesn’t seem a reason not to do it.”

“Where there’s fear, there is power.”

“You’ve said that to me before. Lily, how do I know this is real, that you’re actually hearing me, that Sam will really get this message? What if it’s all just in my mind?”

“I can’t prove it to you,” Lily said. “I can tell you that Maya is well, that Bird has had surgery and is mending nicely, that the rains have been good this winter. I can tell you to trust.”

“I don’t have much choice, do I?”

“And I give you one piece of advice. Train your replacements before you go. Don’t let these people get dependent on you. Ultimately that’s no healthier for them than depending on the boosters.”

“I’ve begun that, Lily. I’m going to train teams to work with herbs and pressure points and massage. I’ve given lectures on germ theory and
ch’i
and basic cleanliness.”

“And try to have a little fun.”

The image of Isis rose up in the dreamspace even though Madrone attempted to fix her concentration somewhere else and banish it. Lily’s thin eyebrows made two perfect arcs.

“Have a lot of fun,” she said. Then Madrone slipped out of the lucid place and into other dreams, where she and Isis lay next to each other, bronze against blue-black skin. But no one is steering the boat, Madrone wanted to cry. Isis placed a hand on Madrone’s lips, covered them with her own. She couldn’t speak, and then she no longer wanted to speak. The ocean rocked them gently as the boat drifted south.

14

A
dry wind blew down the canyon. Madrone and Littlejohn climbed a trail that wound up the flanks of the hills above the bed of a dry stream. Madrone shifted the load on her back. Besides her own pack, she had slung a five-gallon water container, filled from the solar still at the coast. She wasn’t too sure about the safety of sea water, but Littlejohn claimed the distillation process removed heavy metals and toxins. And anyway, his look had seemed to say, when you’ve been here a bit longer you won’t care.

She was in the South, at last. For almost three months, she’d stayed with the Monsters, healing and teaching and training. By the end of her second month, the survival rate among deserters was close to ninety percent. The work there would never be done, but it had passed the point of greatest urgency.

Isis had sailed them down the coast, insisting that Littlejohn sleep on the deck. She was full of dire warnings and gloomy forebodings.

“You watch your ass,” she said to Madrone. “Don’t do anything brave and stupid.”

“I’m not stupid, and I’m not very brave, so I should be okay.” In fact Madrone was still afraid, but nobody else knew that, unless her fear leaked through her dreams and alerted Bird, back home. At times she felt him close to her and heard his song playing in her mind.

The dry air sucked moisture from her cheeks and seared her lips. The straps of her heavy pack dug into her shoulders; she hooked her thumbs underneath to redistribute the weight. They climbed swiftly, hugging the cover of the feathery chamise and the broad-leafed toyon. Here and there the path ducked under the thin shade of a stand of live oaks, their curled, leathery leaves blue-green in the dusty air. Stands of sage anointed them with pungent odors as they brushed by. Overhead, a pair of vultures wheeled in slightly tipsy circles, waiting. She heard no sounds but their own muffled footsteps and the rattling wind.

After a couple of hours, the streambed branched. They walked on the
canyon floor, over the cracked mud of dry pools and the stones deposited by currents long ago.

“Is there ever water here?” Madrone asked.

“It flows for a few weeks, in the middle of winter. If the rains are good.”

The trees were taller, sycamores with their mottled bark and great valley oaks. They were shaded by the walls of the canyon itself, and Madrone blessed the cooler air, which eased, slightly, the painful dryness inside her nostrils. She wanted to stop and drink, but Littlejohn didn’t suggest it, and she felt sensitive about depleting their precious water supplies.

They were sheltered from view under the trees, and she could see Littlejohn relax, his walk becoming looser, more rhythmic. The canyon narrowed and the streambed wound on and on.

They rounded a curve at a narrow point, and suddenly Madrone found herself staring down into the barrel of an old rifle. Its bearer looked to be about fourteen years old, a slight brown boy with long greasy hair falling over his eyes. She was impressed. She hadn’t seen him or heard him move.

“Who is our mother?” the boy asked.

“The earth is our mother,” Littlejohn replied. “How ya doin’, Begood?”

“Oldjohn died last night,” the boy said. “We took his body up to the rock. Who’s that you got with you?”

“The healer.”

The nose of the rifle dropped abruptly. The boy’s eyes stared at Madrone with a mixture of awe and skepticism that made her uneasy.

“Drink deep on the day of victory,” he said.

Madrone was confused, but then she recognized that the phrase was a ritual greeting, like “May you never thirst.”

“Que nunca tengas hambre. Que nunca tengas sed,” she replied
.

Littlejohn blanched. Begood’s eyes darted quickly around as if searching for someone who might overhear them.

“That’s Spanish, isn’t it?” Littlejohn said. “I haven’t heard it since I was a kid, except from Bird when he’d get excited.”

“Watch out,” Begood warned. “Anyone in Angel City hears you talk like that, you be in the pens before you can turn around, with no more claim to a soul to call your own. They don’t hold with foreign devil tongues, the Stewards.”