The Fifth Sacred Thing Read online

  PRAISE FOR STARHAWK’S THE FIFTH SACRED THING

  “This is wisdom wrapped in drama.”

  —Tom Hayden, California state senator

  “Starhawk makes the jump to fiction quite smoothly with this memorable first novel.”

  —Locus

  “Totally captivating … a vision of the paradigm shift that is essential for our very survival as a species on this planet.”

  —Elinor Gadon, author of

  The Once and Future Goddess

  “This strong debut fits well among feminist futuristic, utopic, and dystopic works by the likes of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Ursula LeGuin, and Margaret Atwood.”

  —Library Journal

  “A compelling and ingenious tale of two competing potential futures.”

  —Ernest Callenbach, author of

  Ecotopia and Ecotopia Emerging

  “Equal parts urgent testament and fervently hopeful vision … A valuable contribution to ecotopian literature.”

  —San Francisco Chronicle

  “An anthem of hope. Generations to come will bless the name of Starhawk.”

  —Daniel Quinn, Turner Tomorrow Award-winning

  author of Ishmael

  “A book which wants to change the world … Starhawk has vividly portrayed her vision of a better future.”

  —The Denver Post

  This edition contains the complete text

  of the original hardcover edition.

  NOT ONE WORD HAS BEEN OMITTED.

  THE FIFTH SACRED THING

  A Bantam Book

  PUBLISHING HISTORY

  Bantam hardcover edition published June 1993

  Bantam trade paperback edition / July 1994

  All rights reserved.

  Copyright © 1993 by Miriam Simos

  ORNAMENTATION BY SIGNET M DESIGN, INC.

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 92-14431

  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  For information address: Bantam Books.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-47765-1

  Bantam Books are published by Bantam Books, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc. Its trademark, consisting of the words “Bantam Books” and the portrayal of a rooster, is Registered in U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and in other countries. Marca Registrada. Bantam Books, 1540 Broadway, New York, New York 10036.

  v3.1

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  DECLARATION OF THE FOUR SACRED THINGS

  The earth is a living, conscious being. In company with cultures of many different times and places, we name these things as sacred: air, fire, water, and earth.

  Whether we see them as the breath, energy, blood, and body of the Mother, or as the blessed gifts of a Creator, or as symbols of the interconnected systems that sustain life, we know that nothing can live without them.

  To call these things sacred is to say that they have a value beyond their usefulness for human ends, that they themselves become the standards by which our acts, our economics, our laws, and our purposes must be judged. No one has the right to appropriate them or profit from them at the expense of others. Any government that fails to protect them forfeits its legitimacy.

  All people, all living things, are part of the earth life, and so are sacred. No one of us stands higher or lower than any other. Only justice can assure balance: only ecological balance can sustain freedom. Only in freedom can that fifth sacred thing we call spirit flourish in its full diversity.

  To honor the sacred is to create conditions in which nourishment, sustenance, habitat, knowledge, freedom, and beauty can thrive. To honor the sacred is to make love possible.

  To this we dedicate our curiosity, our will, our courage, our silences, and our voices. To this we dedicate our lives.

  1

  In the dry time of year, the dangerous time, the risk time, an old woman climbed a hill. Like most people in the southern part of the city, she called the season El Tiempo de la Segadora, the Time of the Reaper. The hills were dry, the gardens dependent on the dwindling waters of cisterns, the rains still weeks away. A time of ripening, but not yet of harvesting, when nothing was certain.

  She climbed the hill as she had once climbed mountains, one step at a time, planting her stick firmly in front of her and letting it bear her weight as she hoisted herself up. She was ninety-eight years old, born at the midpoint of the twentieth century. Two more years, and she would see the midpoint of the twenty-first. In her day she had climbed many things: Sierran peaks, pyramids, chain-link fences, the way back from despair to hope. And this hill, looming up above the southern corner of the city, rising like a pregnant belly above the green patchwork of houses and gardens and paths and the blue waters of San Francisco Bay. By Goddess, she could still make it up this hill!

  Maya stopped to catch her breath. Around her was a moving throng of people, dressed in the greens and golds of the season, gossiping happily or chanting solemnly according to temperament. They carried baskets of offerings: bread and fruit and cheese, fresh vegetables from the gardens.

  Below stretched a panorama of sculpted hills crowned by toy houses, cradling the aging skyscrapers that rose from the low ground beside the bay. The city was a mosaic of jewel-like colors set in green, veined by streams and dotted with gleaming ponds and pools. Seen from above, blocks of old row houses defined streets that no longer existed. Instead, bicycles and electric carts and the occasional horse moved through a labyrinth of narrow walkways that snaked and twined through the green. Above the rooftops, gondolas like gaily painted buckets swung from cables, skimming from hilltop to hilltop, moving between high towers where windspinners turned. To the northeast, Maya could see a long train moving across the lower deck of the Bay Bridge, bringing early grain to the central market. Beyond, the blades of the wind generators atop the Golden Gate Bridge seemed suspended in midair, their supports invisible under a gray shroud of fog.

  Beautiful, Maya thought. She had adored the city ever since her first glimpse of it in the Summer of Love, more than eighty years before. She had been seventeen then, enchanted by the fog concealing and revealing mysteries like the veils of an exotic dancer, delighted by the crowded streets where people seemed to be perpetually in costume: gypsies, pirates, Indians, sorceresses skipping down the sidewalks to the strains of the Beatles singing “Love, Love, Love.”

  You have been my most constant love, she told the city silently. Not monogamous but never unfaithf
ul, sometimes a bit tawdry but never boring. And you haven’t gone and died on me yet, like the others.

  “Love is all you need.” The song played in her mind. But the Beatles misled us, she said to the air, thick with the ghosts of her own dead lovers. It wasn’t all we needed. We wanted to love, freely and without barriers. We had to remake the world in order to do it.

  Sighing, she continued up the steep incline. The truth is, she admitted, this is a hell of a climb for an old hag like me. I could have spared my strength, let Madrone visit the shrines.

  The shrines to the Four Sacred Things encircled the base of the hill at the cardinal directions. Maya had made a laborious circuit. She left seeds of rare herbs at the earth shrine, feathers of seabirds and roosters at the air shrine. At the fire shrine, she gave white sage and black sage and cedar, and at the water shrine, she’d left a jar of rainwater saved from the first storms of the previous autumn.

  But Madrone probably wouldn’t have time. I know how it goes, Maya grumbled. She’s probably up to her elbows in blood and vernix, lucky if she can dash up the hill at the last minute. I’m fussy in my old age. An Orthodox Pagan, I like these rituals done right: a leisurely visit to each shrine, a walk up the processional way, time to meditate, contemplate, trance out a bit.…

  The path wound its way above the small reservoir dug into the side of the hill. Now she could hear the little stream that tumbled down a sculpted watercourse to feed the gardens along her own street. There were so many more gardens, these days. By necessity, now that the Central Valley farmlands were baked to rock by the heat and the fires.

  Look at it! Maya paused again, breathing heavily. The city was a place of riotous flowers and clambering vines and trees, whose boughs were heavy with ripening fruit.

  It looks so lush. She took a long, deep breath, then another. You’d think we had plenty of everything, plenty of land, plenty of water. Whereas we’ve simply learned how not to waste, how to use and reuse every drop, how to feed chickens on weeds and ducks on snails and let worms eat the garbage.

  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.