Commitment Hour (24 page)

After a while, Cappie said, “I’m going to Commit female, Fullin. My male half needs you too much.”

She opened her hand to let go of the Patriarch’s coat. The sleeve fell—limp cloth, worn and faded.

“Just so you know,” she added, “in case I end up as the next priestess . . . Leeta says there’s an unwritten law that the priestess and Patriarch’s Man must secretly get married. The Patriarch saw it as a sneaky way to ‘subjugate’ women under male command. That’s the Patriarch for you. But Hakoore and Leeta have been happy with each other over the years. I hope the next Patriarch’s Man, whoever he is, won’t be someone who makes me feel so cryingly lonesome.”

Without looking back Cappie strode away, disappearing out of the hall and out of Mayoralty House.

SIXTEEN

A Dish for the Traitors

I intended to wait five minutes—give Cappie plenty of time to leave, even if she ran into the mayor, or Rashid and Steck. But the atmosphere of the Patriarch’s Hall oppressed me: the cloying smell of dust, the pointless faded finery, the picture of the couple swearing their love on the Patriarch’s Hand. When I was young, this room seemed Ml of treasures; now I realized it was a place that adult Tobers sent their children but never went themselves. After only sixty seconds, I fairly ran away from the ominous mementos, as if ghosts were chasing me—down the corridor and out to the wide front steps where Rashid and Steck sat with Embrun in the sunshine.

Steck looked at me quizzically when I arrived, as if she could claim some right to ask what had happened between Cappie and me. She couldn’t; by my age, boys didn’t confide in their
real
mothers, let alone Neut strangers. If we had been alone, Steck might have pressed me…but Rashid was interrogating Embrun, and showed no sign of acknowledging my return, let alone allowing the conversation to be diverted to my personal life.

From the sound of it, Embrun’s information about Bonnakkut hadn’t taken much time to tell. Rashid’s questions had already shifted to his real interest, learning more about Birds Home and the Tober sex change process. For that, Embrun could actually be helpful—he had Committed the previous summer, so the memory was still fresh in his head.

“And it’s a disembodied voice?” Rashid was saying. “Asking, ‘Male, female, or both?’ ”

“Right you are, master,” Embrun replied. He had sprawled himself on the house’s cracked concrete steps in an effort to look casual, as if he talked to Spark Lords all the time. I noticed though that he seldom looked in Rashid’s direction. It wasn’t humility; he was just devoting his attention to Steck, ogling her in that deepcut neckline.

I could have punched him in the nose.

“So,” Rashid said, “if it’s not too personal, could you tell me why you chose male?”

Embrun glanced at me with the look of someone trying to decide if he can get away with lying. Finally he decided to tell the truth. “I didn’t have much choice, did I?” he answered. “My female half got kicked stupid. I couldn’t live like that.”

He proceeded to tell about the accident and its consequences, embellishing details here and there, because he seldom got a chance to share his story with newcomers. The way I originally heard it, Girl-Embrun had been teasing the horse when it kicked her—poking it with a stick. In the tale Embrun told Rashid, however, his female half’s motives were far more noble: trying to pull out a thorn that had speared the horse’s rump, making it bleed.

Off the top of my head, I couldn’t think of any local vegetation with thorns growing as high as a horse’s flank. In fact the stupid animal had nowhere to pick up a thorn at all, unless it decided to sit on the mayor’s rose bushes. Still, I couldn’t see the harm in letting Embrun glamorize himself, provided he didn’t go too far.

Besides, it was interesting to hear him describe what it was like to be…well, brain-damaged. Not that he could remember much from his female years: just moments of emotion, pain at touching a hot stove, or fear and confusion one time when she got lost in the woods. Mostly, those years had just disappeared from his memory, like muddy dreams that are gone when you wake.

As Embrun continued, Rashid took on the expression of a man mulling over a profound revelation. When it was over, he murmured, “You received the injury as a five-year-old girl. You switched to a boy at six and poof, you were fine—except that you couldn’t remember much of the past year. Then when you returned to being a girl at seven, you were…disadvantaged again?”

“That’s right, master,” Embrun nodded enthusiastically. “I’m not lying, am I, Fullin?”

“Not on that,” I agreed. “His girl half truly had her brains jarred loose by that kick. Her body kept growing after, but her mind stayed stuck where it was.”

“So your female body was damaged, but your male body wasn’t,” Rashid said. He turned to me. “Is it the same for everyone else in Tober Cove? I mean, injuries to your female body don’t affect your male, and vice versa?”

“Of course,” I said. Holding out my arm, I pointed to a pale pink scar just above my wrist. “That’s a gash I got as a kid, exploring a half-collapsed house on the other side of town—I didn’t see a nail sticking out of a board. My male body has the wound, but my female one doesn’t.”

“This is amazing!” Rashid said.

“Oh, that’s nothing, master,” Embrun told him. “What about Yailey the Hunter? She’s got my head-kick beat.”

“Who’s Yailey the Hunter?”

“Eight years ago now,” Embrun answered, “Yailey drowned. He was sixteen—out diving ropeless with a bunch of other boys off some rocks up the coast. Tried some fancy dive he’d read about in an OldTech book, and fucked the…I mean, he made an awful mistake. Hit his head on the way down. And the thing was, he’d gone off a ways from his friends so’s he could practice the dive without them laughing at him. By the time they came to check on him, Yailey was face down and floating.

“The other boys were in tears as they carried him into town,” Embrun went on. “I remember that much, even if it was one of my dull years. Scared me, all that wailing. Anyhow, the drowning happened in late spring. Then solstice came, the children headed off to Birds Home, and when we came back, guess who was tagging along with us? Girl Yailey.”

“You mean,” said Rashid, “her male body died, but a female version of her came back at solstice?”

“That’s what happened,” I assured him. “Yailey herself lit the funeral pyre for her male body. Hakoore delayed the cremation until he found out whether Yailey came back from Birds Home—apparently this has happened before.”

“Where is this Yailey?” Rashid asked, ablaze with enthusiasm. “I must talk to her.”

“Sorry, master,” Embrun said, “she’s hard to find. Dying like that upset her—not that she remembered it. Everything went black the moment she hit her head. But it still nettled under her skin.”

“And knowing Tober Cove,” Steck muttered, “people treated her like a monstrosity.”

“I don’t remember anyone ragging on her,” Embrun said—untruthfully, because he himself called her names in the schoolyard:
Hey, Corpse-girl! Mistress Want!
“But Yailey turned more and more edgy as time went on. Especially close to the next solstice.”

“Hakoore decided to get dogmatic,” I put in, “and declared she’d have to go to Birds Home when the time came.”

“It wasn’t just Hakoore,” said Embrun. “Yailey was only seventeen; she hadn’t even had her child by Master Crow. A lot of people thought she should go back to Birds Home and do everything right. But Yailey was afraid she’d get there and come back dead…or Neut or something else. On Commitment Eve, she ran off into the forest and she’s been out there since. That’s why they call her Yailey the Hunter. Now and then she sneaks back to her parents’ house to trade meat and furs for things she needs. Officially though, Hakoore has declared her unwelcome in town.”

Steck snorted. “Because she refused to follow his nasty little orders.”

Embrun looked surprised at Steck’s anger. “Hakoore just doesn’t want kids thinking they can avoid the proper switchover. Hell, there were sure times
I
didn’t want to go to Birds Home. When I was boy, thinking how the gods would make me back into a girl with my brain all clotted—some days, I felt like hiding so I’d miss the trip. And the year I knew I’d come back pregnant . . . that terrified me. Not for myself, you understand, but for the baby. My female half couldn’t be a proper mother, could she, master?”

I doubted that Embrun really worried about the baby more than himself, but he still had a point: switching sexes could be a scary thing. In the weeks before my pregnancy solstice, I considered haring off down-peninsula—becoming a traveling minstrel rather than a mother. The thought of my body harboring some alien little being, like a parasite inside me…and suffering all the pains of pregnancy, the dangers of labor…yes, I contemplated taking the easy way out. The idea must have crossed a lot of people’s minds.

Maybe Hakoore had a point when he took an inflexible stand against Yailey. The cove’s way of life depended on a tough Patriarch’s Man who ensured that teenagers didn’t dodge their commitments.

It made me wince. I was making excuses for Hakoore. I was arguing for the necessity of the Patriarch’s Man.

Who was secretly forced to marry the Mocking Priestess. To become
hers.

Why was everything so complicated all of a sudden?

Rashid declared he had run out of questions for Embrun. “Stay here,” he told Steck and me. “I’ll just walk our friend a little way back to town.”

He and Embrun started across the parking lot, Rashid’s boots making more sticky sounds on the hot pavement. As soon as they were out of earshot, I asked Steck, “What’s Rashid up to?”

“He plans to give Embrun some money,” Steck replied, “and he doesn’t want to do it where the mayor or I can see. He’s afraid we’ll think he’s a sucker for paying off such an obvious little worm…and he’s right.”

“So Embrun didn’t have any real evidence about Bonnakkut’s murder?”

Steck shook her head. “Just that his dog had some kind of barking fit about the time Bonnakkut was killed.”

“Embrun’s dog has barking fits five times a day,” I told her. “The poor animal liked female Embrun a lot more than the male version; it’s missed her dreadfully since Embrun Committed.”

“Speaking of Commitment,” Steck said, “how did it go with Cappie?”

I should have expected the question—Steck trying to play the attentive mother. “Cappie and I have our troubles,” I muttered.

“Would it help if you talked to Zephram?” Steck asked. “I know we agreed you’d stay with me, but if you wanted to talk to…your father…if you wanted to talk to him alone…”

“It wouldn’t help,” I said, mostly out of stubborn pride. “Thanks for the offer though.”

“If you need to talk to anyone…” Steck didn’t finish the sentence. “When you face Commitment Hour, it’s best not to have conflicts weighing on your mind.”

“Is that what happened to you?”

“I made a choice,” Steck said. “That’s all. A choice to be new.”

“What do you mean by that?”

She glanced at me but looked away again quickly. “Zephram said he told you how we got together: in the Silence of Mistress Snow. Did he tell you that no one else in town chose to visit me?”

I nodded.

Steck shrugged. “There were reasons for that—reasons I was living alone in my final year before Commitment. I hadn’t gone out of my way to make myself popular. Things were better when I was with Zephram, but I couldn’t imagine he’d stay with me long. I convinced myself his feelings were…oh, just his way of mourning, I guess. He was vulnerable because he missed his wife. Once he got past the worst of his grief, he wouldn’t need me anymore—that’s what I thought. That he’d wake one day and wonder why he was spending time with a girl who couldn’t give…”

Her voice trailed off.

“You couldn’t have been that bad,” I said. “Leeta wanted you as her apprentice.”

“Leeta only took me because I badgered her,” Steck replied. “I’d got the idea that if I became priestess I’d suddenly
mean
something. It’s hard to feel worthwhile when you’re a teenager with no friends…girl or boy, it made no difference. Leeta accepted me out of pity; or maybe she thought she could mold me into a real person somehow. Either way, she didn’t
like
me. I wasn’t likable, male or female. And on Commitment Day, I thought maybe if I picked the third option, things would be different.”

“You thought people would like you more as a Neut?” I asked. “Not in Tober Cove.”

“I thought maybe I’d like
myself
more. A new body, a new personality. Leaving behind all the stubborn habits that made me…difficult. I wanted things to change for me. Inside.”

“But you knew you’d be banished!”

“Did I care? What was so attractive about Tober Cove?”

“Me.”

She sighed. “I know, Fullin. But I thought I could take you with me. I’d leave Tober Cove with my baby…and Zephram would go with me, back to the South…where he told me Neuts and normal people could live as husband and wife…” She shook her head. “And I’d be a new person. I wouldn’t make the same mistakes. I’d stop being…oh, the kind of woman Zephram would hate as soon as he came to his senses.”

Women say such things for only one reason: to have a man tell them they’re mistaken.
No, no,
I was supposed to say,
Zephram loved you for yourself.
And I think he did; when he spoke to me at breakfast, his voice had been full of fondness, not “What was I thinking?” embarrassment. Still, it was hard for me to treat this Neut, my mother, as a normal woman who wanted reassurance. A wall of awkwardness loomed between us…and before I could speak, Rashid reappeared at the far end of the pavement.

As before, he stopped at the rusting OldTech cart. For a moment, he leaned into the engine again, presumably to look at the black radio box. Then he suddenly straightened up, and lifted his eyes to the hill behind Mayoralty House. His face broke into a jubilant smile.

“Damn,” Steck whispered.

“What?” I asked.

“He’s figured it out. He’s figured it all out”

She suddenly flinched, as if she hadn’t intended to speak those words aloud. Before I could ask what she meant Rashid started running toward us.

Rashid’s feet slapped the pavement like waves clapping against a boat’s hull. His smile gleamed with excitement. Long before he reached us, he called out, “On top of the hill…that antenna…”

“It’s an OldTech radio tower,” I told him.

“The hell it is,” he answered. “Have you had a good look at that dish assembly on top? The OldTechs never built anything close.” He stopped in front of me, panting lightly. “Quickly, O Native Guide—show us the fastest route up the hill.”

Steck put on an irritable expression as she got to her feet. “What’s this all about?” she asked.

“Radio relay,” Rashid panted, pointing back to the rusted cart. His finger swiveled around to point to the antenna on the hill. “Main receiving station. That’s got to be the answer.”