The Fifth Sacred Thing (65 page)

I don’t want to hear any more stories, Madrone thought. I don’t want to take on the burden of Mary’s ghost, like my mother’s ghost, like the spirits of how many women healers, burned Witches, priestesses defiled? Suddenly Madrone wanted desperately to get out of Beth’s house, out of the dark basement room that in her mind reeked of women’s blood and the faint sweet smell of tropical flowers.

They left two hours before dawn. The woman Madrone had healed, whose name she never learned, was resting quietly, her fever down, her pulse stronger.

“Just keep giving her that honey ’til it’s all gone. And after, just regular garlic honey. She’ll make it. I’ll be back, if I can, but that’s a big if.”

“Come back when you can,” Beth said. “If there’s ever help I can give you, I will.”

Already in May, night was the only sane time to travel in the sun-scorched hills. Their route lay across the freeway, and Hijohn hurried them along, making the most out of each dark minute until Madrone wanted to scream with weariness. He showed no sympathy for her.

“You been across that bridge. Want to try it in full daylight, get yourself shot?”

She couldn’t argue with his logic, even though she wondered to herself whether falling off the bridge from fatigue would be much better. But they
made it over. The narrow scaffolding had by now become so familiar it no longer scared her.

Hijohn led her down a side canyon and up again on the fire road to the crest of the hills, racing against the dawn. Just as the sun’s first searchlight rays reached over the hill’s rim, they slipped down a twisting, hidden trail that wound like a tunnel beneath overarching stands of dry brush. Madrone slid in the dust or scraped along on her bottom, but Hijohn moved surely, as if each foot had a separate contract with the earth to support his moving weight. Full light found them at the bottom of a canyon, concealed by trees from the houses that loomed above. The air was fragrant with sage, and the nearly dry streambed was occasionally puddled with mud. They rounded a bend where a stand of pale, mottled sycamores threw heavy branches up in an open-armed embrace of the sky.

Madrone stooped down to bury her hands in the cool mud. Where the water pooled, only an inch or so deep, a clump of giant cattails raised their proud stalks eight feet high. Their presence stunned her. What were they doing here, these giant plants of the wetlands, making do on so little, just memories and promises of water?

“Here,” Hijohn said, indicating with a toss of his head the dense shade under an arching live oak, whose blue-green leathery leaves concealed the green buds of acorns to come. She followed him under to nestle in a clear patch he made among the leaves.

“Hungry?” he asked.

“Always,” Madrone replied.

Hijohn smiled. “Try this.” He indicated a wild grass, running its feathery fronds between his finger and thumbnail to produce a light sprinkling of minute seeds. Madrone imitated him and found that they crunched under her teeth in a tantalizing way.

“Good?” he asked.

“It’s sort of like eating,” Madrone admitted. “A few hours of this and I might collect a mouthful.”

“You can get a lot of good protein this way,” Hijohn said. “And we’ve got all day.”

“Que nunca tengas hambre.”

“What does that mean?”

“ ‘May you never hunger.’ It’s what we say back home.”

“Nice,” Hijohn said. “It’s a nice sentiment. May it come true some day.”

“That’s a nice sentiment too.”

Madrone stretched out on the ground. It felt almost soft under her, embracing, welcoming. She could sleep now, and rest, and then, when she woke again, think about what she’d done and what it might mean.

“Madrone?”

“Yeah?”

“I’ve got to tell you something.”

“What? What is it?”

“News. Beth told me; she said it came on the vidnets while you were doing your healing.”

“Tell me, Hijohn.”

“The army in the North—they say they’ve entered your city, taken over. They’re declaring a great victory.”

No, Madrone thought. It isn’t true. It can’t be true. They had known all along the invasion must come, and yet she still could not wholly believe it. The City must still remain, green and watered, her refuge, her safe home.

“Do you trust the vidnet reports? Do you think it’s true?”

Hijohn shrugged. “Could be. Could be true, could be lies. But it’s likely to be true. I’m sorry.”

She buried her face in her arms for a moment. Her disbelief dissolved away, leaving her suddenly sick with worry. Maya, Lily, Bird—where are you? Why can’t I reach you? How do I go on, weak with fear for you? And for me? But the spirit world was silent.

“I’m afraid,” Madrone said softly, lifting her head. “I’m so afraid for them all. I want to go home.”

He reached over and placed his hand on hers. It was warm and woke forgotten hungers. She was aware of his battered, stubborn body, breathing and sweating so near to hers, walking proof of life’s implacable tenacity.

“You’re fighting for them here,” Hijohn said. “Helping us, working with us—it’s the best thing you could do for them.”

“But I can’t see them, touch them, know what’s happening to them. Oh, Goddess, what am I going to do?”

“There’s nothing much you can do, except what you’re doing already. So we’ll just keep on.”

“Aren’t you ever afraid?” she asked.

“Of course. Often. It’s normal to be scared. Nobody wants to die. I don’t even want to get beat up one more time, if I have a choice about it.”

“But you never act afraid. You never show it.”

“What good would it do to act afraid?” he asked. “It wouldn’t change anything.”

“I’d feel like I had company. I’m afraid all the time.”

“That’s because you’re smart. Nobody sane is brave.”

“You are.”

“No, I’m not. I just do things. Being afraid or not afraid—it’s not important. You just do things.”

What she wanted to do, suddenly, was to let her healer’s fingers trace his scars.
Diosa
, she thought, I need comfort. It’s been too long since I’ve been
touched and held and loved. I need somebody else’s arms around me to stop me picturing Bird’s face twisted in pain, Maya’s body lying broken on the pavement. Oh, stop, stop it! Better to think about Hijohn, alive beside her. Was his hand on hers just for comfort, or was he asking, promising more?

“How do you do things?” she asked. “How do you survive what they do to you? And then keep on living in this world?”

He turned and looked at her. His eyes were a dark brown, and as they met hers she felt a rush of excitement through her body, ringing down through all her hollow places like the sound of bronze bells.

“There’ve been times I’ve wanted to die,” he admitted. “From pain, or hopelessness, or fear. Fear of pain. But that passes. In the end, pain is not important. Living is.”

“Living in a world full of murderers and torturers?”

Hijohn shrugged. “They’re not so different from you and me. They just don’t have the same vision to hold on to. Without a vision, human beings are nasty creatures.”

He was not like Sandy or Bird or even Holybear, whose energies were always sparking and flying and playing around them in colors. His were contained, a cool frosted indigo like the clumps of tantalizing, inedible berries in the scrub. She couldn’t read him, couldn’t divine his intentions or desires.

He leaned over and brushed her lips with his. “That’s why you are so important to us,” he murmured. There was a suggestion of heat in the millimeter of air between their lips. What about Katy? Madrone wondered, imperceptibly pulling back from Hijohn. But how could she begrudge me this brief moment of comfort? Then they were pressed together, their bodies clinging, nursing, drinking each other as their lips fused. They broke apart to wriggle out of their clothes. Madrone slid her hands down his back, over his buttocks, over the traces of healed wounds and the hardened ridges of old scars, and then up to touch his small, proud cock. He moaned, as his fingers found the lips of her vulva, and then in one motion he guided himself into her. She was surprised, wet but not really ready yet, still expecting more touch, a longer ascension. But he was pumping furiously, and then moaning, and in a moment it was over. He groaned aloud, and she felt him gush and shrink.

Hijohn rolled off her and looked anxiously into her face.

“Okay for you?” he asked.

She lay on her back, stunned into silence. Didn’t he know? Couldn’t he feel? Was it possible to be both such a hero and so ignorant?

Evidently so. It was the gap again, the chasm that opened continuously before her feet each time she thought she was getting close to someone down here. Different worlds, different lives.

Who would have taught him how to please a woman, answered his questions, as Maya and Johanna and Rio had answered hers? When would he have
had the luxury of the forest year she’d shared with Bird and the others, the time to experiment and taste and play? And while they had learned young to open up, he had survived by closing down.

“Wasn’t too good for you, was it?” he asked.

She sighed. “Hijohn, there’s some things I need to teach you.”

“You like it better with women, maybe?”

“Not necessarily. It’s the person I care about, not the form of their genitals. But it helps to have a little bit of—well, technique.”

“Show me.”

She instructed him slowly, gently. They had all day, and a little water, and the lesson kept her mind from imagining horrors she was helpless to prevent, wounds she was too far away to heal. She showed him the secret pleasure points of her body, and how to build the intensity from light and delicate touch to wild animal release. He learned eagerly, if a bit awkwardly. Bird’s fingers had once had a musician’s assured touch, Sandy’s hands held the heat of a healer, Nita’s moved with the delicate grace of a scientist. Hijohn was merely direct but willing. Still, the day passed rapidly.

“Would Katy like this?” he asked, when they lay, satiated at last, stewing in their mingled sweat.

“Try it with her and see.”

“I don’t know. She’s bound to wonder why I’ve suddenly changed my style.”

“Tell her it’s my gift to her.”

He pulled away suddenly and looked down at her in alarm. “You don’t think I mean to tell her about this, do you?”

The gap was there again. Suddenly he was miles away, in some other world.

“You mean you wouldn’t tell her?” Madrone asked. “You’d keep it a secret?”

“Why would I tell her? It would only hurt her.”

“Would it really?”

“Sure it would.”

“But why?”

“What do you mean, why?”

“Why should it hurt her that we took pleasure together, here where there’s so much hardship and so little comfort to take?”

“It would, believe me.”

“Then why did you do it if you knew it would hurt her?”

“Won’t hurt her if she don’t know about it.”

“But how can you keep it from her? Won’t she know when she looks at you, or me, or sees how the energy has changed between us? Won’t she feel it?”

“We aren’t all Witches like you, sweet. She won’t know unless you tell her.”

“But how can I lie to her and be her friend? We talk about you—women do talk about these things, you know. How can you lie to her and be her lover?”

“You mean you don’t ever lie to your lovers?”

“What would be the point? They’d know I was lying.”

“You’d just go home from here and say, ‘Hey, Charlie, I got lonesome for you but I fucked Hijohn, and here’s a few tricks he taught me’?”

“Yes.”

“And he’d say, ‘Next time you see him, tell him thanks’?”

“Yes, more or less.”

“Now I know you’re lying. You must get jealous.”

“Of course we do. I’ve been jealous myself, like once when Bird was infatuated with this other woman and stopped paying attention to me. But it doesn’t hurt me to think of him taking pleasure with other people now, when I’m not even there. I assume he is. Unless he’s deathly ill, or locked up, or severely injured, I know he is.”

“Well, that’s the way I believe, myself. But Katy sees it differently. So you won’t tell her, will you? Promise?”

“Hijohn, I can’t promise that. I don’t know what I’ll do.”

“You’ve got to promise.”

“I’ve got to do what feels right to me at the time.”

“Shit.”

He turned away from her, staring up at the sky behind the cupped, prickly leaves.

“Then I’ll have to tell her,” he said. The energy between them was gone. They lay next to each other, but separated by a void as sullen as oak’s blue shade.

“That might be a good idea.”

“Oh, shit.”

“Are you mad?”

“I never get mad. It’s a waste of food.”

“I’m sorry if it makes trouble between you and Katy. I wouldn’t want to do that.”

He patted her hand absently, his face closed, his touch heavy as wet clay.

“Let’s get some sleep now, okay?” he said. “We’ve got a lot of ground to cover tonight.”

He rolled over, his back to her, and dozed, but Madrone lay awake a long time, watching the blistering sun move across a white, empty sky.

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