The Fifth Sacred Thing (2 page)

We’ve become such artists of unwaste we can almost compensate for the damage. Almost. If we don’t think about the bodies mummifying in mass graves over the East Bay hills. If we ignore the Stewards’ armies that may be gathering, for all we know, just over the border.

Well, we made our choice. She started uphill again. We chose food over weapons, and so here we sit, lovely but as unarmed as the Venus de Milo.

As she neared the crest, the path wound across the west side of the hill. In the distance, she could see Twin Peaks, poking above a patch of fog like two brown breasts sticking out of a milk bath. They reminded her of Johanna.

“You hear that, Johanna? Twin Peaks remind me of your breasts.”

Johanna, dead, did not answer, but thinking of her breasts made Maya think again of Johanna’s granddaughter. Madrone works too hard, Maya thought. All the healers do. But since Sandy’s death, she’s hardly stopped. She’ll be sick herself if she doesn’t get more rest. I wish she’d taken the day off, like she said she would, but then something always comes up.… Goddess, I hope we’re not in for another epidemic! Please, Mama, you wouldn’t do that to us again? We’re on your team, remember? We’re the good guys.

Where was Madrone?

“Get some fluid in her!” Madrone called. “Aviva, check her dilation. Holy Mother, she’s burning up! I swear the ice pack is smoking! We’ve got to bring this fever down.”

“She’s only about three centimeters,” Aviva said. Above her white mask, her brown eyes looked worried. Her usual cloud of dark hair was tightly confined under a cap. Madrone had left her own face free. She believed a woman in labor needed to see a human face, and she had other ways to protect herself.

“Shit! How are we going to get this baby out of her?”

“C section?” Aviva suggested.

Madrone shook her head. “She’ll die.” She had one hand on the woman’s throat, reading her rapid pulse, the other on her temple, feeding her
ch’i
, vital energy.

“She’s dying anyway,” Aviva said, reading the monitor. “Her blood pressure’s sky high. None of the drugs have touched it.”

“We can’t lose her,” Madrone said. “She’s my neighbor, and she’s Rosa’s mother. I refuse to believe we’re going to lose her. I won’t lose her.” I lost Sandy to this disease, she was thinking; that’s enough. It should be enough.

“I wouldn’t make statements like that on the Day of the Reaper,” Aviva said.

Lou arrived at a dead run, pushing an IV cart. His narrow, delicate fingers expertly found a vein and inserted the drip line.

“Lou, work on her pressure point for dilation. I’m going to feed her
ch’i.”

“Be careful,” Lou said. His own mask concealed most of his face, but his black gull-wing eyes were grim.

Madrone nodded, as she took a deep breath and repeated her own secret rhyme that took her quickly into trance. Her body was like a tree with a hollow trunk; her roots could reach down to the great stores of
ch’i
in the molten mantle of the earth and bring it up. Energy pulsed through her, moving from her hands into the woman’s body, feeding her, keeping her alive. For how long? As long as I can sustain it, Madrone thought, and that could be an almost infinite time if I were rested, if I could keep myself out of its way and be nothing but a hollow tube, a wire, a vehicle. What I was born to be.

Two sparks of light flickered, mother and baby, struggling to hold on in a burning, smoldering, dark place. Madrone changed the earth fire to cool water, letting it pour through her, always reaching deeper, reaching for more. She was so deep now that the voices around her were dim murmurs, calling out their litanies of alarms and demands. Down and down. But it was like pouring water down an open drain. Nothing held.

One of the lights was wriggling out of her grasp, escaping her. She struggled to hold it, but she was starting to feel herself tire.

“She’s hyperventilating!”

“Pulse weak.”

Madrone made a last desperate effort, drawing on her own vital energy, hurling it at the light. But the light dimmed and dissolved into the dark.

“She’s gone,” Lou said softly.

“Take the baby,” Madrone said. How far along was Consuelo? Thirty-five, thirty-six weeks? The baby would be small but viable, if they just hurried before the placenta crashed. Why weren’t they moving, doing something?

Then she realized that no sound had come out of her mouth. She was pouring all her power into the child, and she had no energy left to speak. Still, she tried again.

“Take the baby.”

“Madrone’s saying something,” Aviva said.

“What? What is it?” Lou asked. “You okay?”

“Take the baby,” she said again, this time audibly.

Lou gave her a sharp glance and nodded.

Now she was fighting to hold on, not just to the life of the child but to her own life.
Diosa
, she had gone too far down, she was too tired for this, too weak. But the child lived, she knew that, and if she could just hang on …

Suddenly she felt a warm hand on the nape of her neck.
Ch’i
flooded through her. It was Aviva, backing her up, feeding her as she fed the child as Lou lifted it through its dead mother’s opened womb. The baby flailed weak limbs and let out a weak cry as he suctioned its lungs.

“It’s a girl,” Aviva said.

“Give her to me,” Madrone said, taking her hands from the dead woman’s temples and pulling open her own shirt. Lou cut the umbilical cord and handed her the baby. Madrone clasped the wet and bloody child to her chest, nestling her between her breasts, continuing to pump
ch’i
through her hands. The tiny body was hot, feverish. She grabbed a cube of ice from the pan and rubbed its small back, making trails through the blood. It needed coolness and warmth at the same time, and comfort, and milk.
Diosa
, it needed so much!

“Are you okay?” Lou asked.

Madrone nodded, although she felt sick and weak herself. “No, stay,” she said to Aviva, who had started to withdraw her hands. “I’m not
that
okay.”

“The baby?” Lou asked.

“She’s breathing on her own,” Madrone said. “She’s small and early, but she may be all right. Don’t take her yet, let me work on her some more. In a moment you can check her and weigh her.”

“Take a deep breath,” Aviva said.

Madrone inhaled slowly, willing her body to relax. But her mind would not comply. “Who has milk? Who could we get to nurse this kid?”

“It’d be safer to get volunteers to pump some milk. We don’t know how contagious this thing is,” Lou said.

“There is that,” Madrone said wearily. “It’s too bad. Nursing would help her.”

“You really think she’ll live?” Aviva asked.

“I don’t know. We don’t know enough about this fever yet.”

“I bet my neighbor would take her,” Aviva said. “She just lost a baby and her breasts are still dripping. And I’d notice if she started showing signs of fever.”

“That’d be good,” Lou said. “That’s a good idea.”

“Wait,” Madrone said, as Lou started to close Consuelo’s eyes. She took one last look at the dead woman’s face. “I’m sorry, Consuelo.
Lo siento. Lo siento mucho.”

“I’ll get Sister Marie for the rites,” Lou said.

Aviva shook her head. “She already gave the Last Blessing, when the labor started. Just in case.”

“May the air carry your spirit gently,” Madrone whispered to the corpse. “May the fire release your soul. May the water wash you clean of pain and suffering and sorrow. May the earth receive you. May the wheel turn again and bring you to rebirth.”

“Blessed be,” Aviva murmured.

Lou raised the sheet and covered Consuelo’s head.

“Let me take the baby now,” Aviva said. “Madrone, you are wiped out.”

Madrone considered for a moment. The child was still hot, but not burning. Her life force seemed fairly strong and stable, while Madrone’s felt drained. She handed the baby to Aviva, who withdrew her hands from Madrone’s neck to take the infant and cuddle her close. Unsupported, Madrone felt the full wash of her own exhaustion. There was a chair in the corner of the small bare room, and she just stumbled over to it before her legs gave way.

“You look terrible, Madrone,” Lou said.

She nodded in acknowledgment. “I went a little too far.”

“You take chances you shouldn’t take.” Lou’s eyes narrowed to dark slivers. “I’ve told you this before.”

Sandy’s eyes had been shaped like that, but they had laughed and teased and seduced her into stroking his black silk hair and rooting for his lips with hers. No more.

Madrone closed her eyes. “You can’t be my daddy, Lou. You’re younger than me.”

“You need a daddy.”

“I never had one. I wouldn’t know what to do with one.”

“You were hatched?”

“He died fighting to free Guadalupe, where I was born. Or so my mama said. I think she lied. I believe I was a Virgin Birth.”

“Hail Mary,” Aviva said from the sink, where she was washing the baby.

“More like the great Goddess incarnate,” Madrone corrected her. “Self-fertilizing, self-creating. That was my mother.” And immortal. She should have been immortal. Not so quick to disappear and die and leave me. But enough of that. She looked up at Aviva. “Or do you think I’m Jesus, with a sex change?”

“Jesus was crucified,” Lou reminded her. “If you don’t do an aura repair, you’ll be sick enough to wish it had happened to you.”

Madrone looked up at him through her lashes. “Be an angel, Lou. Do it for me?”

“I shouldn’t, you know. It only encourages you to excess.”

“I didn’t want to lose Consuelo,” Madrone said, turning away from the white shape on the bed. Her eyes were heavy with tears she felt too tired to shed. Aviva was weighing the baby and testing its reflexes. “She was a friend. Her family lived down the walkway from mine. I grew up babysitting for her daughter. And now what’s Rosa going to do? Her dad died six months ago.”

“Close your eyes,” Lou said. Madrone sank back in the chair, listening to Aviva croon to the child, and let him repair the breaks in the protective
ch’i
field that surrounded her. She could feel his hands moving around her head; she sighed when he dug strong fingers into the knots in her back.

“She’s a cute baby,” Aviva said. “I hope she lives.”

“I’m going to have to tell Rosa,” Madrone said. If she kept her eyes shut
long enough, maybe when she opened them everything would be different. They’d be back in the Good Reality, as Maya liked to say, in
El Mundo Bueno
where none of this had happened.

“Let somebody else tell her,” Aviva suggested.

“I can’t do that. I’m her friend.” She sighed. Really, she could almost drift into sleep for a moment, while Lou kneaded the tension from her neck. Drift back into her dream of last night, or was it yesterday morning? She couldn’t remember when she had last slept, she only remembered dreaming of Bird, and the dream left a sweet taste in her mouth. They were back in the mountains, in their watershed year, the year they gave to the forests, when they were both sixteen. They’d worked so hard, clearing firebreaks and planting new species of drought-resistant spruce and fir. But they were young, and their sweat seemed only an invitation to taste all the body’s salt streams.

Funny, she still hadn’t dreamed of Sandy, although he’d been dead for a month. But Bird had come several times in the last few days. Maybe Maya was right; she said he was still alive somewhere. But nobody had seen him for almost ten years, since the big epidemic when he went off with Cleis and Zorah and Tom and disappeared deep in the Stewards’ territory.

Most likely Bird was dead. Like the other men in my life, Madrone thought: my mythical father, Sandy, Rio. And a goodly number of the women.

Stop it! she told herself firmly. Stop wallowing in self-pity. She sighed again and then let out a squawk as Lou hit a sensitive point. “Ow! What are you doing to me?”

“That hurt?” Lou asked.

“Go easy, would you? I didn’t ask to be tortured!”

“That’s a point connected with the immune system. It needs strengthening.”

“Is that any reason to torment the poor thing? You should call that point Lou’s Revenge.” His finger remained, strong and adamant, and in spite of her complaints Madrone felt some energy returning.

“All right, Madrone, answer this question correctly, and I’ll let up. What are you going to do next?”

“Since I’ve failed to heal the sick, maybe I should learn to raise the dead. Ow! You’re really hurting me! I’m not kidding!”

“What are you going to do next?”

“Rest! Sleep! I swear it! Ah, that’s nice.” She sighed as his fingers let up and he began massaging her shoulders. “Just as soon as I tell Rosa.”

“What about the ceremony?” Aviva asked. “Aren’t you representing the Healers’ Council?”

“Oh, Goddess, I forgot all about it. What time is it?”

“About one o’clock in the afternoon on the first of August or, if you prefer, Third Foggy Moon,” Lou said. “The Day of the Reaper. The day you
are supposed to represent us, your guildmates, in the great and glorious celebrations of the twentieth anniversary of the Uprising. If you get a move on, you still have time to make it up the hill. I don’t know if that’s good news or bad.”