Commitment Hour (11 page)

I rolled my eyes. “How awful!”

Hakoore sighed. “I know they aren’t bad in themselves, Fullin, but they’re distractions. Tobers are starting to think prosperity is their due. That’ll kill this town, it really will. Money is only smart about making more money; it’s sheep-stupid about everything else. The cove is already sunk so deeply in materialism—”

“Come on,” I interrupted, “why is it greedy to want your kids to have a doctor when they grow up?”

“Materialism isn’t the same as greed,” Hakoore snapped. “Materialism is reducing everything to an equation of tangible profit and loss. It’s saying that a family of outsiders will cost this much for housing and this much for schooling and this much for ongoing annoyance factor, so if we get twice that many crowns back in payment, we should take the deal. Materialism is an uncomprehending blindness to anything that isn’t right in front of your nose—believing that material effects are the only things that exist, and there’s nothing else you’d ever think to put on the scales. Hell, boy, materialism is the belief in scales at all: nothing is absolutely right or absolutely wrong, but just something to be weighed against everything else.”

“Okay, right,” I told him, trying to calm his tirade, “I’ll be sure not to let myself fall into materialistic…yoww!”

The Patriarch’s hand had tightened again. When I looked down, my fingers had turned birch-white.

“Pity about your hand,” Hakoore said without sympathy. “Still it was nice you tried to humor me. Respect for your elders and all that.”

My voice came out in a strained whisper. “Can we skip the sermons from here on out? Please—just ask your questions and I’ll answer them.”

“That’s what I like to see,” Hakoore smiled. “Abject submission. And as for questions…if you had been Patriarch’s Man, would you have said no to that rich merchant?”
 

“I don’t know,” I whispered.
 

“Do you need more information?” Hakoore asked helpfully. “Do you want to know exactly how much money he offered us?”
 

“That doesn’t matter.”

The old snake nodded. “At least you understand that much. So why can’t you make a decision?”

“Because…because…” I closed my eyes and tried to find the most sincere, honest part of my heart. It wasn’t all that difficult once I started searching. “Because,” I said, opening my eyes, “because I have a son. Of course, I don’t want Southerners barging in here, but I want Waggett to have a good doctor too. If it ever came to the point where we had to take Southern money or else our children got sick…”

Hakoore’s expression wilted. “That’s just it, isn’t it, boy? That’s where the knife cuts.” His milky eyes stared at me for a moment, then turned away.

“A hundred and fifty years ago,” he said, “the Patriarch rode on the backs of our people with spurs of iron. When babies grew famished, he blamed outsiders…Neuts…scientists. And he started a reign of terror that kept Southerners scared for a whole century after he died. But the fear seeped away eventually. In my lifetime, I’ve seen the Southerners start to get interested in us again. More tourists…more traders…more of their godless materialism rubbing off on us. Still, if I tried to choke the town the way the Patriarch did—if I said no trading with the South or I’d pronounce the Great Curse—who could I blame when children grew sick with starvation? People think I’m harsh, but I’m not the unbending man our Patriarch was. Once upon a time, I was a mother, just like you, boy. I nursed my little girl…”

He closed his eyes and lifted his hands as if holding an infant to his chest. I looked away. I don’t know if I was embarrassed or just giving him his privacy.

After a while, he whispered, “Enough.” He reached into the hand’s tarnished metal box and pressed at another dent. Click. The grip around my knuckles suddenly went limp; the Patriarch’s Hand slumped as lifeless as an ugly glove.

I’d have let it fall onto the mud, but I couldn’t get my fingers to uncurl.

“Put the hand back in the box,” Hakoore said quietly.

“You’ve run out of questions?”

“I was going to ask you everything my predecessor asked me,” he replied, “but you’d just say you didn’t know the answers and I’d say I couldn’t blame you. Put the hand back where it belongs.”

Carefully, I lowered my arm toward the box. Because my fingers had no feeling left in them, I had to use my other hand to pry my grip open. The mechanical hand-thing fell off me into the box and rocked a bit before lying still: flat on its back, fingers in the air…like a dead fly, legs up on your windowsill.

“So I suppose I failed your test,” I said as I straightened up.

“Idiot boy,” Hakoore rasped. “It wasn’t a test you could fail. I told you, I don’t care about your opinions. I’ve chosen you as my disciple, and that’s that.”

I massaged my fingers to try to get them working again. “Then why hurt me if you never cared about my answers?”

He gave me a look. “Had to get your attention, didn’t I? Had to start you thinking. Had to let you know that a Patriarch’s Man must be ready to be a ruthless bastard for the good of the cove.”

“I knew that already,” I growled.

He smiled…then suddenly slapped me flat across the face. It wasn’t hard and it wasn’t fast, but it stung like fire. “You haven’t seen anything yet,” he hissed. “After you’ve Committed, you and I will get together with the Patriarch’s Hand day after day after day. I’ll get the warriors to hold you down if need be; Bonnakkut would like that. My own master had to hold me down a few times before I accepted my fate. You’ll accept your fate too. Patriarch’s Man.”

“I’ll Commit female,” I snapped. “You can’t make me Patriarch’s Man if I’m a woman.”

“If you do that, boy, I’ll make your life hell. You know I can.”

“You can’t. The most sacred tenet of Tober law is that we can each choose male or female, and
no one
can punish us for the choice.”

“Just wait and see,” Hakoore snarled. “When I say you’re going to be my disciple, boy, it’s not a request. It’s a calling from the Patriarch himself. A vocation. A
command.
Whatever you may have wanted to do with your life doesn’t interest me. You are what the Patriarch says you are.”

With a last ferocious glare at me, he raised two fingers to his lips and blew a piercing whistle. “Dorr! We’re leaving.”

His granddaughter slid through the rushes immediately. In one hand she held a clump of bedraggled greenery; in the other was a knife nearly as long as Steck’s machete. I suspect she had simply cut off the first bunch of reeds she’d seen, then hidden in the bulrushes to eavesdrop. She must have heard everything, Hakoore’s sermon and his threats…but her face was devoid of expression. Without looking in my direction, Dorr gave Hakoore her arm and helped him clamber into the canoe.

“Your vigil is over,” the old man snapped as he settled in the prow. “Go home. And even if the gods didn’t send you a duck, you know what sex they want you to Commit.”

Dorr lowered her eyes. She must have felt ashamed for her grandfather, trying to influence my free Commitment choice. With a stab of her paddle, she pushed the canoe off the mud and stroked quickly out of sight.

NINE

A Hush for Mistress Snow

So first I swore loud enough to panic every frog, duck and muskrat in the marsh. The curses were uncreatively repetitive, but heartfelt.

Then I massaged my fingers for several minutes until they could move again. They made soft cracking sounds when I flexed them, and I couldn’t close them all the way to a fist, but it didn’t feel like there was permanent damage.

I checked that I could still hold the violin bow. I could.

I checked that I could still hold a ferocious grudge against Hakoore. I was on top of that too.

Then I started the walk back home.

“Should I Commit male or female?” I shouted at a red-winged blackbird. It flew off without answering. Sometimes the gods visit Earth in the form of birds, but this one just seemed to be a dumb animal.

“Male or female?” I called to a gaiter snake trying to hide from me in long grass. The snake didn’t budge a scale.

“Male or female?” I asked a squirrel on an upper branch of an elm. At least the squirrel made eye contact with me. I took this as an encouraging sign. “You see, it’s Commitment Day morning,” I explained, “and I should have made up my mind by now.”

The squirrel decided my problems were too big for its brain…not surprising since a squirrel’s brain is about the size of a ladybug. With a sudden leap, the squirrel scrabbled up the elm tree and out of sight.

“Thanks a lot!” I called after it. “Consider yourself a fur scarf if I ever catch you!”

The squirrel didn’t seem impressed. A fine Patriarch’s Man I’d make if I couldn’t even intimidate a tree-rat.

Not that I wanted to be Patriarch’s Man.

Although it might be amusing to get Bonnakkut alone with the mechanical hand for five minutes. Find out if his talk about Cappie was all hot air.

No. Not the Patriarch’s Man. Not the old snake’s
disciple.

And if I Committed female, Hakoore couldn’t claim me. His threat to make my life hell if I became a woman gave me chills, but at least I wouldn’t have to spend more sessions with him and the hand. Unfortunately, Committing female meant facing all the promises my sister self made to Cappie…including that promise to become the next Mocking Priestess.

Male or female: Patriarch’s Man or Mocking Priestess.

The gods were conspiring to give me a future in theology.

When I reached town the streets lay empty, though the sun hung well above the horizon. What other evidence could you want that Commitment Day was a holiday? Cows needed milking and chickens clucked for feed, but other chores would wait till tomorrow. The perch boats wouldn’t go out. The blacksmith’s forge would stay cold. Water ran down the races at our sawmill and grist mill, but the wheels were locked, frozen for the day.

Even the women, cooking late into the night for the afternoon’s feast, would take it easy for an hour now; their preparations were mostly over, and their men were home to watch the children. Fathers were eager to tend the children on Commitment Day—one last lump-in-the-throat chance to see the boys and girls before they became girls and boys.

Thinking about that made me walk faster toward Zephram’s house. Waggett would take his first trip to Birds Home today. When he came back—when
she
came back—how long would it take her to notice how things had changed in her diapers? Over the years, I’d laughed at parents lurking near their children so they’d be present for the moment of discovery…but I fully intended to do the same with Waggett, to catch that look of surprise and curiosity on her face when she saw she’d been transformed.

Outsiders sometimes worried children would be traumatized by the change: former boys wailing that they’d lost something, former girls shocked by the sudden dangly addition. Not so. The reaction was always fascination and delight…or rather, fascination followed by delight as inquisitive fingers discovered interesting sensations when the new architecture was poked and prodded.

Outsiders worried about that too: parents smiling fondly as they watched their children play with themselves. Frankly, outsiders worried too much.

I could smell bacon frying even before I opened Zephram’s kitchen door. I could hear it too: not a hot sizzle, but the soft whish of summer rain falling through birch trees. Zephram stood at the stove making dramatic gestures with his spatula, all to impress Waggett who sat giggling at the table. The boy’s expression didn’t change when he saw me—no cry of “Da-da!” even though he’d spent the night without me. Oh, well. I’d left after Waggett was asleep, and had changed him during the night, so he probably didn’t realize I’d been gone.

That’s what I told myself anyway.

“So the great vigil’s over,” Zephram croaked cheerfully. He always croaked these days until he had his first cup of dandelion tea. It was his only sign of age—over sixty and he still had all his hair, with no gray to mar the curly dark brown. Perhaps he’d grown a little rounder, perhaps he walked a little slower…but to me, that wasn’t aging, that was just becoming even more Zephram-like than he’d been before.

“How did it go in the marsh?” he asked.

“More interesting than I expected.” I laid my violin on the sideboard and gave my knuckles a discreet rub. “How were things with you two?”

“Waggett went the whole night without changing,” Zephram answered proudly. “The boy has a bladder of steel.”

I ruffled Waggett’s hair affectionately. Finally, he deigned to smile at me and try to grab my hands. “Bahkah!” he said…which may have been his version of
bladder, daddy,
or
bacon.
For that matter, it may have been his version of
Let’s play a violin duet
—Waggett invented his own words and the onus was on grownups to figure them out. I picked him up, kissed him on the forehead…then remembered that the last time I’d played with my son, Female-Me had sidled in to take over my body. Women love playing with babies, and who can blame them? But I didn’t want to do anything that might encourage her to come back. My sister self had caused enough trouble already.

Reluctantly I eased Waggett back into his chair. To turn my thoughts a different direction, I asked Zephram, “You ever know someone in the cove named Steck?”

His back was to me. I saw it go rigid.

“Steck?” he croaked. “Where’d you hear that name?” He didn’t turn around…as if the bacon would take advantage of his inattention and jump out of the pan.

“Leeta,” I replied, picking the first person who came into my head. Given my oath, I couldn’t tell Zephram the truth. “Leeta roped me in for a solstice ceremony last night. She mentioned that she once had an apprentice named Steck.”

“I thought you weren’t supposed to talk to anyone on vigil.”

“The Mocking Priestess stands outside the rules.”

“How do I get her job?” He poked the bacon sharply with his spatula.

“So you
did
know a Steck?”

He sighed…the way people sigh when they’re trying to decide whether to admit to something they’d rather keep hidden. “Yes,” he finally said, “I knew Steck.”

“Steck who Committed as Neut?” I asked.

“Leeta
was
chatty, wasn’t she?”

I waited.

“Steck was here the first year I was,” Zephram said at last. “Fall, winter, and spring.”

“And that summer, Steck went Neut.”

“She did.”

“So Steck was a girl that last year?”

“I wouldn’t use the world ‘girl,’ ” he replied distantly. “I know the cove considers you a boy or girl until you Commit permanently. But Steck was twenty; to me, she was a woman.”

“Oh.” By which I meant
Uh-oh.

That was all either of us said for a while. The bacon continued to hiss like summer rain.

“I blame myself,” Zephram said.

Breakfast was on the table now, the slabs of bacon beautifully browned. My foster father never burned food, no matter how much weighed on his mind.

“What do you blame yourself for?” I asked.

“Steck turning…” He stopped, as if he couldn’t say the word. Suddenly, he blurted, “You call them Neuts, but they aren’t neuter. Neuter means sexless, and they’re perfectly hermaphroditic. They can even have children: father them or mother them, both ways work.”

“How do you know about Neuts?”

“Steck wasn’t the first of her kind—you know that. I met another down in Feliss City, almost forty years ago. A manwoman named Qwan. Qwan missed Tober Cove a little, but still thought getting exiled was the best thing that ever happened to her. Or him.”

“It,”
I said pointedly.

“Qwan wasn’t an It. Qwan was a contented father of three, and just as good a mother. And don’t make faces like you’re going to be sick,” Zephram snapped. “Half the people in this village have been both mothers and fathers.”

“Not at the same time.”

“Neither was Qwan: married to a woman for ten years, widowed, then married to a man. Both marriages were happy, believe me.”

“And you told that to Steck?”

Zephram sighed. “Yes. I told that to Steck.”

“You
are
to blame.”

“So I said.” He poked at his bacon with a fork…probably just to shift his attention to something that wasn’t accusing him. “I told Steck about the bad parts too. Qwan had two happy marriages, but she sometimes ran into trouble walking down the street. Boys shouted insults…mothers pulled their children out of the way…there were a few close calls with drunks…I told Steck about those things too, but she must have thought it would be different for her. And Steck could never resist a melodramatic gesture. She was the sort of person who had crazy impulses, thought about them a long time, then surrendered to them anyway.”

Zephram’s tone of voice suggested he wasn’t just thinking of Steck’s decision to Commit Neut. “What kind of impulses?” I asked.

“Well…me.” He kept his eyes on the bacon. “She was a stunning twenty-year-old beauty, while I was a middle-aged outsider, half-dead with grief. What could she possibly see in such a shattered wreck of a man? Most folks in the cove thought it was my money. I thought so too for a while—it was a motive I could understand. Then I wondered if she just wanted to shock people…or if she looked on me as a charity case, with herself as Sister of Pity, bringing me back to life with fleshly mercy. But I’ve had twenty years to think about Steck, and I’ve rejected all the easy answers. She met a withdrawn, far-from-enticing stranger and the idea just popped into her mind: ‘Wouldn’t he be unlikely!’ I imagine she wrestled with the notion for weeks. In time, she succumbed to the idea…and I succumbed to her.”

I could barely hold my stomach down. My foster father and a Neut? But of course, Steck hadn’t been Neut back then: just a normal girl, a good-looking one if Zephram could be believed. Then again, by the time you’re sixty, every woman you’ve slept with must turn beautiful in memory. Beautiful, or else hideous; when you’re sixty, why waste your memories on anyone in between?

“So you and Steck were…” I let my voice trail off rather than say a word that would make me cringe.

“Lovers?” Zephram finished for me. “Depends on your definition. I was a needer rather than a lover. I needed someone in the nights, and I needed someone in the days too. Steck saved me from smothering under grief. As for what was in it for her—I don’t know if she loved me or needed me, but some impulse made her
claim
me.” He suddenly picked up his knife and briskly chopped his bacon into pieces. “Let me tell you about meeting Steck,” he said.

And he did.

The Silence of Mistress Snow settles over the village with the first snowfall every winter. By tradition, no one speaks a word from the first sight or touch of a snowflake until dawn the next day. This isn’t the Patriarch’s Law—Leeta thinks it goes way back to monkey times, when the coming of snow stopped our ancestors jabbering in the trees and reduced them to watching the world coat up with white. There’s something about the quiet of snow, especially when it comes after sunset and descends like a million ghosts slipping from the skirts of Mistress Night: you
have
to hold your breath. You stand silent in the open doorway, with no thought of how hard winter will be, no worry whether you’ve put up enough preserves or stored enough hay for the cattle. What’s done is done; you’re ready or you’re not, and either way, the snow is too beautiful to care.

So Tober Cove falls silent when the snow arrives, as mute as an initiate in prayer. Even the children understand. Parents hug them to show it’s all right, but keep a finger to their lips until they get the idea. Chores get set aside to let the hush settle in deeper; many people sit on their front steps or in their windows, with no lamps cheapening the blackness.

Then, around midnight, the Council Hall bell rings once: the Cold Chime, rung by Mistress Snow herself. Sure, it might be the mayor who pulls the bell-rope, but it’s Mistress Snow who carries the sound through the village, her fingers so fuzzed with frost that they muffle the tone. The chime signals people in town to make their Visits…Visits which are promises, sealed by Mistress Snow, that you’ll help another household through the winter.

A Visit is simple. You get a small piece of burnable wood and carry it to someone else’s home. Every front door is open, if only by a crack. You walk in without a word, add your stick to the fire, then go, closing the door tight behind you. The closed door shows that this house has been placed under your protection—others who might come by should Visit elsewhere, looking for a door that’s still open to the wind. One by one, the doors are closed; and so the people of Tober Cove silently promise that no one will face the winter alone.

You don’t break promises made to Mistress Snow.

Zephram had lived in our town almost a month by the time snow came. He couldn’t say why he hadn’t left while there was still time before winter. “I’m bad with explanations,” he told me. “Now and then I believe I understand why things happen…but then I always think better of it.”

People had seen the snow coming long before it arrived: a bundle of bleak clouds advancing across Mother Lake from the northwest. The clouds had the feathery gray look of mourning doves, and they closed off the afternoon as they drew in. Every perch boat came back to harbor early. Down at the Elemarchy School, the teacher let her children out at two o’clock so they could scurry home to help with last-minute chores.