The Fifth Sacred Thing (79 page)

But that didn’t mean you had to leave it halfway across the city, Madrone addressed the absent Sara. She hoped to Goddess nothing had happened to her.

Angela’s crying was really going to drive her crazy. What was wrong with the child?

“Is she sick again?” Madrone asked. Mary Ellen nodded.

There was no end to it. Her strength was barely enough to hold out for Katy’s and her own survival; there was the fever to deal with and whatever unknown disease it represented, and the birth itself didn’t promise to be an easy one, after the trauma and horror of the past few days. But yes, Angela’s cries were those of a child in pain. Did she have enough strength to spare to ease her?

She felt a sudden urge to throw the screaming girl over the side. A splash, and then blessed silence. Too bad, but she was just too loud.

I’m losing my compassion, she thought, and wished suddenly and sharply for Lou and Aviva and Sam and, yes, Sandy, who would have commiserated and said cynical things and then laughed.
Diosa
, she missed them, missed
compañeros
she could count on, who could speak with a wink of the eye and the slight inclination of a head. No one here really understood her, except maybe Katy, who lay there sweating and grunting and possibly going to die.

What am I going to do? I need somebody to heal me.

Angela was squalling louder and louder. All right, Madrone thought, at least I can shut her up. She laid her hands on the girl’s head and went into that stillness of thought where her hands grew warm and seemed to cloud over and dissolve into the child’s body. Goddess, she was tired. She couldn’t think of anything to visualize, couldn’t imagine moving any power through her stone-heavy hands. But her hands knew what to do, just resting on the child’s head and heart, quieting her. The pain was mostly panic, Madrone decided.

“Sleep,” she murmured to the girl. That was what she herself most needed and was unlikely to get. The child’s breathing became deep and slow and even.

Madrone scrubbed her hands in the galley sink and then examined Katy. She was only a few centimeters dilated, not even a finger’s width.

“Hang in there,” Madrone murmured. “We’ve both got a long night ahead.”

She heard voices overhead and the creaking of ropes. Sara must be back, thank the Goddess. Sails flapped, the rudder thumped into its seat. The boat listed to one side, and she felt them glide out of the mooring and get under way.

“You look spent,” Mary Ellen said. “Let me do something for you.”

“I need about six months of rest,” Madrone said.

“Why don’t you go lie down? I’ve seen babies born; I can sit with Katy for a while. Nothing be happening for a long time yet anyway.”

“It’s not just that. Katy’s very sick, maybe dying. What she has is similar to something I have healed before, but I nearly died doing it, when I was stronger and a lot more rested than I am now. I’m afraid, Mary Ellen. How can I sit back and watch her die? But what if I don’t have the strength to heal her?”

Mary Ellen sat down and put her arms around Madrone, who nestled into the woman’s warm, lush body and began to cry. She felt like a child again, cuddled up to Johanna. Oh, if she could be held and rocked and nursed for a week!

“You’re exhausted. You get some rest, and you may see an answer you don’t see now.”

“I wish I could believe there was one.”

“You don’t know.”

Obediently, Madrone crawled into the forward bunk, in the triangular prow of the ship. I’ll just rest for a few moments, she told herself. Body, let one hour of sleep serve for ten. But sleep seemed far away.

She lay watching her breath, trying to practice the relaxation techniques she had taught others so often. Muscle by muscle, limb by limb: tense and relax. Breathe deep. But instead of sleeping she was drifting, back onto a familiar road, the road outside their house in Guadalupe. Beside the door bloomed a bush with bright red flowers,
maravillosa
they used to call it, the marvelous flower. Madrone did not want to enter, but she did not resist. I know what is here now; there is nothing more to fear. But the room smelled sweet as she entered, fragrant with the incense her mother, Rachel, used to burn. As her eyes grew accustomed to the dim light, Madrone saw somebody in the old rocker that used to stand in the corner of the room. The chair moved back and forth, its runners making a rhythmic sound like a heartbeat.

Madrone moved closer. Her mother rose from the chair and held out her hands.

Madrone took a step back. For a moment, she wanted to run, afraid that if
she touched those hands they would be cold corpse hands, afraid that if she looked into that face she would still see the wounds of death.

Her mother waited. Madrone took a deep breath and stood her ground.

“You cannot bring me back, you know,” her mother said. “To heal is good. To rescue Katy was good too. But no matter how many lives you save or lose, mine is gone. You cannot bring me back.”

Tears filled Madrone’s eyes. “I know that. I’m not a baby, or a child, Mama. I only wanted your memory back, unstained.”

Her mother reached out her hands. “You have that now.”

Madrone reached for her. Her mother’s hands were warm as she placed her own hands in them, healer’s hands in healer’s hands. Power flowed between them, fire and water and the sweet smell of honey from marvelous flowers.

“What do you want for yourself?” her mother asked.

“Nothing, Mama. Not for myself.”

“Then you cannot heal. A healer must have a powerful desire for life and all that goes with it. Only then can you stand safely at the gates of death.”

Suddenly Madrone was alone, back on another road, the ice road, where she had lingered so long in the
ch’i
worlds healing the virus; and, yes, the knife of
La Serpiente
was in her hand, and she was stirring again the patterns of fate like lines of a silver web. But something had changed, as if she were now in a different dimension from those energies, and her knife slid through them without disturbing them. She was too solid; they were like ghosts, insubstantial. She couldn’t break loose from her body; bone and blood held her in a living web.

She did want to live. That was the difference; that was how she had changed. In these last months she had fought too hard for life. Never again would she rush open-armed into the embrace of death. She remembered the strength of her grip on the life preserver Isis had thrown her. From now on everything she did would proceed from that grip, whether she succeeded or failed. Someday she would die, but death would have to pry each separate finger loose. She might lose Katy or save her, but she could no longer use her own life as a bargaining chip.

So now what do I do? How do I heal? Must I let Katy die? Madrone wasn’t sure whom she was asking, but suddenly her mother’s face appeared to her inner sight. Or maybe it wasn’t Rachel, maybe it was
La Serpiente, La Vieja
, the Old One, using Rachel’s face as a mask, speaking in her familiar voice.

“In this situation, it’s not enough to be a healer. You need to be a Witch.”

Rachel was speaking in Spanish, and the word she used was
bruja
, sorceress.

“What do you mean?”

“You cannot cure this disease. So shift the reality the disease exists in.”

“Just how do I do that?
Dígame, por favor.”

“You’ve already begun. Attach your will to your own existence. Then you begin to gather your true power.”

“Please, Mama, no philosophy; just tell me what to do.”

“Create the Good Reality in your mind, clasp it with the same tenacity with which you hold to life, and leap into it.”

“Oh, sure, that’s perfectly clear.”

But Rachel was gone and Madrone was wide awake suddenly, listening to the scraping of the anchor chain over the bow. They must be taking shelter for the night in one of Isis’s secret coves. Madrone hoped they would be safely hidden.

She considered her mother’s words. In
El Mundo Bueno
, what Katy had was not the old bad virus that had nearly killed Madrone herself, but—what? Some new experimental strain, not yet perfected. Still vulnerable, brittle, Madrone thought. Of course they would infect Katy with something new, not one they’d used already. Why hadn’t she seen that? And yet in her mind she was still partly in the ice-crystal world of trance, and she was floating in cold, cold water, losing heat, losing life rapidly—no, she wouldn’t accept this. The Good Reality was like the ice crust somewhere above her head, and she reached up with her knife, midwife’s knife that cuts the cord, pierced a hole through the crystalline surface and hoisted herself up. Oh, Mama, let me now be in
El Mundo Bueno
. Let me be where Katy and I both can live, where what she has is curable. And as she shook her head and forced her body to sit straight up, she began to believe herself. How did she know what was causing Katy’s fever? She’d let her own fear and despair trap her in an assumption she had never tested. Why, she hadn’t even
looked
for this one yet. Why shouldn’t it prove to be more susceptible than the last epidemic? And hadn’t she gathered power in all these months? She had her bee mind to work with and something more. Her mother was right. From her own fierce hold on life came a solid strength she could draw on.

She rolled over and felt something sharp protrude into her hip. Reaching down into her pocket, she pulled out the handful of data slugs she had stolen from the lab. She had forgotten them, not that she could do anything with them here. At home maybe the tecchies could figure out how to read them. But the printouts? She had tossed the clipboard into the car, but had she remembered, in her exhaustion, to bring it on board the ship?

Laboriously she raised herself up and crawled out of the bunk. The rest had done her good but she was still tired. Her head felt heavy and her lungs still hurt.

“What you want?” Mary Ellen asked. She was seated on the edge of
Katy’s bunk, holding her hand. “This child ain’t coming for hours yet. I thought you were going to get some sleep.”

“There was a clipboard with some papers on it. Did I bring it from the car?”

“Miss Sara found it when she left the car. It’s over there on that shelf.”

Madrone grabbed it and settled on the side bunk, next to the sleeping Angela, to look at it. But the long strings of numbers and figures were incomprehensible. They might be genetic records. These letters might represent strings of amino acids, and if she had days or weeks to devote to cryptography, and if she could remember those long-ago courses in genetic mapping, never a favorite subject … Better leave this for somebody else, if they ever made it back home.

Katy moaned. Mary Ellen was bathing her face and arms with a cool cloth, but she sighed.

“She’s feverish. And it’s rising.”

“I’ll look at her,” Madrone said. She moved over to sit hunched at Katy’s side, facing Mary Ellen. What reality am I holding to? she wondered, and for a moment felt a cold stone of fear in the bottom of her gut.

Mama, I doubt your premise. If will can make the world as we want it to be, why is the world as it is?

“Will can’t always change the world,” Rachel whispered in her mind, “but it can sure as hell try. Remember the strength of your grip on life.”

Isis and Sara came down into the cabin. They were wind-blown, spray-drenched. Isis’ muscles danced under her skin. The galley was a stage for her deft, sure, catlike movements. Sara’s face glowed with spots of red, two warm suns in a pearly misted sky. Her corn-silk hair lay in ragged strands over her shoulders. She had lost her polish and sheen but not her beauty; it was just a little rougher, raw silk.

“Okay, Mama, I won’t complain,” Madrone whispered back to the voice in her mind. “Maybe we’re skating on the edge of
El Mundo Malo
, maybe I’m exhausted, Katy nearly dying, Angela squalling, six of us jammed in this tiny space, days of undigested trauma behind me, but at least two of us are among the most ornamental women I’ve ever seen.”

“Use them,” Rachel told her.

“What do you mean?”

“Think about it.”

But she had already thought about it; at least she had thought about how to back up her own flagging energies.

“Mary Ellen, you stay with Angie. Isis, Sara, I need your help.”

“What do you want us to do?” Sara asked.

“Just stand and touch me—that’s good, your hands on my back,” Madrone
said. “Yes, like that, behind my heart. Now breathe deeply together and imagine a flow, of water, maybe, or fire, or light, whatever image you like. A flow coming up from the earth and through your bodies and into me. Try to keep the picture in your minds—probably you’ll lose your concentration from time to time, but that’s okay, just pick it up again and keep breathing deep. All I need from you is raw energy.”

They were locked together in silence, the three of them. Madrone’s hands hovered over Katy’s belly as she tried to fill herself with the energy of the other two. A wavering force filled her, not the steady flame of focused concentration she could have drawn on from Sandy or Aviva or Lou, but a flicker like a candle flame in a gusty wind. They weren’t concentrating; they didn’t know how. Madrone sighed. Okay, she would do the best she could.

Then suddenly the energy shifted. Between Isis and Sara, the air became viscous; subliminal thunder rumbled. Madrone could feel the tension shift to attraction. Slowly their hands migrated across her back until their fingers touched; an electric current poured through her.

“Use them,” Rachel whispered again.

Madrone’s tongue flicked on Katy’s forehead, tasted her sweat. Her hands searched, they felt out the core of
wrongness
in Katy, pulled it forth for her inner eyes to see. Yes, there was something she recognized, a cousin of the earlier plague. The pulsing power behind her was like the swell of the ocean. She could ride on it—out, to rip loose connections, dissolve a link here, a protein there—and then in, to create something new, another bonding, so that the thing changed form and shape and function, melted and re-formed, until it became a harmless chunk of protein, just formed enough to mate with its own kind, transforming and undoing them. It was done.