The Fifth Sacred Thing by Starhawk Page A

a foot or two—and his left leg felt heavy, encased in something that weighed him down. His whole body hurt more than he could believe. He wished for Madrone, wished she were there bending over him, her face grave but confident, her healing hands pouring warmth on his wounds. But she was far away, and he was alone. He had never felt so alone.
    He had to piss, and he groped with his free hand in hopes of finding a bedpan, but there was nothing. If he got the bed wet, that would only make him colder. With a great deal of effort and some pain, he finally managed to shift his position to roll on his side and pee over the edge of the bed. Relieved, he began to feel thirsty and hollow inside. He couldn’t remember eating or drinking or much of anything for a good long while, but he must be healing because his mind felt clear enough for him to begin to worry. What the fuck was going to happen to him now?
    After a long, long time, a door opened. He smelled soup. “Stinking slime,” a voice said, but hands placed a tray down near his free hand, and he heard a metallic sound, like something being dragged to the side of the bed. “Use the goddamn bucket,” the voice said, and then the door slammed shut.
    If he ate, he was going to have to shit someday, but he would worry about that later. There was some sort of thin soup, and bread, and a hot, bitter liquid to drink, and the fact that it seemed as good as it did told him how hungry he was. Then he slept.
    In memory, he spent a long time in that cage. Alone in the dark, he’d begun to fly. He had always been good at spirit travel; now he had infinite time to explore and few outside distractions. He went to his power place in the mountains; it was winter there, and in his astral body the crystalline structure of the snow became a labyrinth of rainbow chambers where he could wander for hours or days. Every crystal was a world. He could move through them, into dark spaces that were also, somehow, the great reaches of emptiness between the stars.
    His captors had made time into an instrument of punishment, but he wasfree of it on the star roads and they couldn’t touch him. He was in the underworld, like a seed, gestating in the dark. The scraps of old myths he half remembered became actual places, where he dropped with Inanna down into the realm of the Queen of the Dead. The past was a place, too, where he rode with warriors of Queen Nzinga to defend their walled town, where he attacked cities and burned children in their houses, where he lay in a dungeon like this one and was dragged out to burn, where he stood behind an Inquisitor’s mask and asked the question and ordered the torment, where if he lay in his hole long enough he could experience every single thing that had ever happened to a human being.
    And there were beautiful places, orchards of fruit trees that shone with their own light, misty islands where he followed the tantalizing back of a woman who was always just beyond his reach. He moved in realms of color so pure that even sunlight could only diminish them; he heard music, chords so perfectly tuned he could dissolve in their perfection and lose all fear. If he could only hold the melody to himself and remember, he knew it would knit his bones. And when he was far enough gone, so that even the edge of his mind disappeared, she came: the Crone, the Reaper, the one whose breath you feel in your hair when the gate slides shut and there’s no going back anymore, the terrible beauty, the hag who holds out withered arms and demands your embrace. In the fairy tales it was always the older brothers who rejected her. But he was the younger brother, the one who laid out his cloak for her and lay down with her to let her take him into herself, and take her in. And so he came to know in his body the power of the Reaper and the song of the stars.
    Enough, Bird thought, struggling to shake free of his memories, to open his eyes. He didn’t want to relive any more. But the images