Commitment Hour lop-2

by James Alan Gardner

  Leeta smiled weakly at the Elders around her, curtsied to the Spark Lord, and hurried off behind Cappie. I guessed Cappie was due for some tutoring on the niceties of being our cove's priestess.

  The crowd on the steps dispersed. Elders slumped toward their homes; Hakoore shuffled off, trying to look fierce while clinging to Vaygon's elbow. Mayor Teggeree wrapped an arm around Lord Rashid and propelled him toward Mayoralty House, with Steck trotting behind. Bonnakkut and the other Warriors went off in the other direction, arguing whether Kaeomi, Stallor and Mintz would get a chance to fire the Beretta.

  I stood on the steps, watching them go. Then, with a deep sigh, I started back to the marsh to continue vigil. Cappie might defy the Patriarch's traditions, but I was above cow-headed contrariness. Besides, my violin was still stashed inside that hollow log. I wouldn't relax till I knew it was safe.

  Just one problem: now that I wasn't tied up in thoughts of Cappie and the Neut, I couldn't help taking a deeper sniff of the woodsmoke in the air. Was it my imagination, or could I smell baking bread too? Roast pork. Raspberry mash. All the things women would spend the night cooking in preparation for tomorrow.

  My stomach wasn't growling, but it would start any second. If I went straight to the marsh without getting food first, how could I possibly concentrate on fostering a spirit of proper sanctity?

  I couldn't go to my own home — Cappie was there, and probably Leeta too. They might spend the whole night talking priestess talk: Leeta with her milkweed pods, and Cappie in her man's shirt, perhaps with the top few buttons undone because the night was hot and because with Leeta she didn't have to worry about exposing the occasional flash of bare breasts if she leaned over…

  Food. I needed food.

  So I headed to my foster father's house.

  In OldTech times, the house must have been amazing: two stories tall plus basement, with enough space to squeeze half the population of our village inside. It had been rebuilt many times over the last four hundred years, losing much of its upper floor, having walls reinforced or reassembled, getting its living room replaced with a woodshed. A lot of the original construction materials were still at the back of the property, where they'd been dragged after they were pulled off the house. Dirt had accumulated over the mound of junk, but you could still see the occasional roof shingle or metal eaves trough sticking out. I'd dug up plenty myself, no matter how much my foster father had shouted, "Leave those dirty things alone!"

  Unlike the other houses in town, this one showed no lamplight in the kitchen. No one was cooking for tomorrow's feast; no one was embroidering the final stitches on Blessing outfits for children. My foster father, Zephram O'Ron, left that to other people… partly because he wasn't native to the cove, and partly because he could afford to pay others to do whatever had to be done.

  Those two facts went hand-in-hand to tell everything about Zephram's life in our town: he was an outsider, but he was rich. He'd made his money as a merchant in Feliss, selling everything from soap to cinnamon. Sometimes he claimed to be one of the wealthiest men in the province; then he'd turn coy and dismiss himself as "middle of the pack." No one in Tober Cove knew enough about the Southlands to tell one way or the other. All they could say for sure was that he had barrels more gold than anyone local.

  Not that he lorded it over people. A lot of Zephram's success in business came from his ability to be likable. He charmed folks without being charming — you know what I mean. Zephram didn't ooze or enthuse; when he talked, there wasn't a flea's whisker of putting on an act. I'd often watched him striking deals with people in town, to buy fish or to hire someone to help with repairs on the house. He had the friendly reasonable air of someone who'd never take advantage of you: the other person always walked away with a smile. I'd tried to imitate him many times, especially when working to make Cappie see things my way… but I guess Cappie was more pig-blind and willful than the people Zephram dealt with, because I could never dent her stubbornness when she got into one of her states.

  Zephram came to the cove almost twenty years ago, not long after his wife Anne died in the South. "She got sick," was all he would say; and no one ever found out more. Whatever the circumstances of Anne's death, Zephram turned half corpse himself. He sold his business, left Feliss City, and wandered in mumbles until he ended up in Tober Cove. "Come to see the leaves," he muttered… and it's true, our region is famous for its autumn colors, enough to draw a dozen sightseeing boats up the coast each fall. Zephram stayed late, maybe because the falling leaves suited his mood or maybe because he didn't have the energy to think of somewhere else to go. Then winter broke with a surprise blizzard, he got snowed in, and by the time spring budded back, he was alive enough again to invent excuses why he didn't want to leave.

  I was his best excuse. He adopted me in the middle of that summer, and then he couldn't leave. I figured he might have known my mother and felt he owed her something. Then again, maybe taking on a toddler was his way to make a new connection with life; maybe he wanted to stay in Tober Cove and used the adoption to cement himself into the community. I didn't know why Zephram wanted me… and the thought of asking made me balk, because I couldn't imagine any answer it wouldn't embarrass me to hear.

  The kitchen door was unlocked. I counted myself lucky; even after all these years, Zephram sometimes reverted to city ways and turned the key before going to bed. He claimed it was just old habit, but I knew there was more to it. When I was young, I'd tell him, "This is Tober Cove. You don't have to worry about burglars." Many nights, he locked the door anyway.

  At age fifteen, it occurred to me maybe his wife hadn't really died of sickness. Down south, rich men are targets.

  I walked into the larder, found bread and cheese, and cut off hunks of each. Now that I'd moved out, Zephram stocked the sharpest, oldest cheese he could find — he loved giving his teeth a workout, chewing up cheddar that was halfway to becoming landscape. The bread was hard too, with handfuls of cracked barley heaped into the normal flour. I swallowed enough to take the edge off my hunger, then tucked the rest into my pocket until my jaw regained its strength.

  Feeling better, I was heading for the door when my ears caught a gurgly sound from the next room. It made me smile. On tiptoe, I walked through the dark kitchen into the side parlor, its air filled with the leather-dust smell of books. The room also had a creeping aroma of something less dignified and more dear: my son Waggett, one and a half years old, with a habit of making that chucklelike gurgle as he loosed himself into his diaper.

  Waggett's crib stood close to the far doorway, where Zephram slept in the bedroom beyond. That made me smile too. Since Cappie and I were required to spend the night in the marsh, Zephram had volunteered to babysit his "grandson"… and even though my foster father adopted me when I was younger than Waggett, Zephram behaved as if he'd never had charge of an infant before. Where to put the crib? If it went right in the bedroom, maybe Zephram's snoring would keep the poor lamb awake; but if the crib sat too far away, maybe Waggett would cry and cry without his grandfather hearing. I could imagine Zephram moving the crib a hair, running into the bedroom to see how sound carried, then hurrying back to move the crib a freckle in the other direction. He fussed over things like that.

  When I'd left Zephram, I wondered if he'd sleep at all during the night. His worry and exhaustion must have worn him out, because I could now hear him snoring peaceably in the next room. There was no point in disturbing him. Since I happened to be here, I'd deal with my son on my own.

  Carefully, I lifted Waggett, picked a clean diaper from the stack beside the crib, and moved quietly to the kitchen. After so many months of baby-tending, I didn't need a lamp to work; the movements came automatically as I laid my son on the kitchen table and changed him in the dark. All the while I whispered soft, "Shh, shhs," and, "Be quiet for Mummy." It was only when I hugged him to my chest afterward that I realized I didn't have breasts… that like Cappie, I was now a woman dressed up in a man's clothes.
/>   Physically, I was still male: the same body I'd been wearing since the previous summer. But internally… my male soul was gone, and my female one was snugly in control.

  If you're not a Tober, it's complicated to understand.

  The Patriarch taught that all souls have a gender: males have male souls and females female. The exception is a newborn child, possessed of two souls: baby girl and baby boy in one body, often swapping dominance back and forth every few minutes… not that it makes much difference at that age.

  The first time a child travels to Birds Home, Master Crow and Mistress Gull gently remove one of the child's souls, leaving only the male soul in a boy's body or the female soul in a girl's body. From that time forward, the gods take one soul out and put the other one in, each summer when they change the body's sex. Boy bodies get boy souls; girl's bodies get girl souls. This is how the gods ensure that mortals think and act according to the ordained inclinations of their gender…

  …or so the Patriarch preached in his fatuously uninformed way a hundred and fifty years ago. Since then, a series of Patriarch's Men had quietly admitted it wasn't as simple as that.

  In times of great need (so the current wisdom went), the gods might permit your opposite-sex soul to fly from Birds Home to take temporary possession of your body. I've already described how this happened when that woman knifed me: my male soul arrived to help my female soul win the fight. A pity my male soul then stuck around and got in a tizzy about my harmless tumble-fumble with the doctor woman: it was no big deal, certainly not the "perversion" he was forever moaning about. But then, whenever I became a woman, I always felt mystified by the things my brother self thought were important.

  Don't get me wrong — it wasn't common for my female soul to take over my male body, or vice versa. This was only the third cross-gender twist in my life. And everyone agreed these flip-overs never happened after Commitment… only to younger people who hadn't yet chosen a permanent sex. Still, almost every Tober had experienced a gender swap at least once, no matter what the Patriarch said; and now that I was my woman self, I had no trouble accepting that once again, the Patriarch hadn't had a clue what he was talking about.

  (Men and women tend to disagree whether the Patriarch was a sacred prophet ordained by the gods, or a vicious old windbag who should have died from the clap.)

  Hakoore had lectured us that temporary gender flips sent by the gods shouldn't be confused with possession by devils. Devils could make a woman think she was a man (and occasionally vice versa); but there was a crucial difference between opening up to your own brother or sister self, versus the troublemaking invasion of a fiend. Our Patriarch's Man summed up the situation this way: the gods are quiet, devils are noisy. If someone acts like the wrong sex to the point of disturbing other people, you know hell must be involved.

  Like Cappie dressing up as a man. That was deeply disturbing — I could remember being deeply disturbed.

  And yet, as I cuddled my son in the darkness of Zephram's house, I couldn't understand why Cappie's clothes had affected me at all. They were only clothes… and it was only Cappie, my oldest and dearest friend, who hadn't been possessed at all — just helping Leeta with the solstice dance.

  Generous, dependable Cappie.

  I smiled fondly. As a woman, I still loved Cappie — no resentment of her neediness, no suffocation if she wanted to talk about Us. In fact, words like "neediness" and "suffocation" felt alien in my mind: cast-off sentiments left behind by someone else. The gritty tension that had grown between Cappie and my male half, the silences, the avoidance, the evasions and lies… I could still remember all that, but the memories were like stories I'd heard secondhand, or thoughts I'd read in an OldTech book.

  The past year had left its mark on my brain, but not my soul. As a woman, I wasn't mad at Cappie, or afraid of a future together. I loved him.

  Her.

  No, him. I loved him. In a way, I barely knew her.

  That's the odd thing about having two souls. It's fuzzier than being two separate people, with no sharp division between boy and girl. My consciousness was one long, uninterrupted line: I was always me, Fullin, a continuous thread stretching back to my earliest days. It was just that some parts of the thread were dyed red, and others dyed blue.

  When I was Female-Me, I felt differently; I thought differently; I seldom felt the emotional impact of events that had happened to Male-Me… his obsession with snapping turtles, for example. When I was boy of six, I had been dangling my feet off the docks with several other children, when the girl beside me got bitten by a snapper. The turtle took off two of her toes, and the girl screamed, and the blood spilled…

  Both Male-Me and Female-Me remembered that moment. But when I was male, the memory crackled with immediacy, very vivid, very real. Now that I was female, the memory was like something I'd seen in a dream — still meaningful enough for me to be wary of turtles, but not the overwhelming concern my brother self felt.

  I had said all this a year before, to my pretty carpenter Yoskar… who wanted to be sure that whatever he was doing, he was doing it with a woman. The best way I found to explain it was this. Suppose twin children are born, a boy and a girl; and suppose that every day, one twin goes out into the world while the other stays home in bed. The first day the girl goes out, the second day the boy goes, and so on, back and forth. At the end of each day, the twin who's been outside tells the twin in bed everything that happened — every new thing learned, every emotion felt, every daydream that happened to sift down under the afternoon sun. In this way, the twins know the same things and have the same experiences to remember… but the experiences have different weight. Half your life is real, and half just comes from stories at the end of the day.

  Is it any wonder the two children grow up with different outlooks? And of course, there are other differences. In time, the girl will take a shine to boys, just as the boy puffs himself in front of girls. (At least, that's how it works with most girls and boys.) And your boy self has only heard about the principles of hem-stitching while your girl hands have actually done it… just as your girl self observes spear practice, but your boy self is the one who wakes with tired muscles.

  A single line of memories, but two different experiences.

  So, when one of my souls took over from the other, the world quietly shifted. Different things became important. Different things caught my eye. Different interpretations occurred to me for the same set of facts.

  Even though I happened to be in my male body — even though I could feel a penis pushing against my pants, still wet from Cypress Creek — I knew with unquestioning acceptance that I was a woman.

  I could feel my absent breasts like weightless phantoms.

  I could squeeze crotch muscles this body didn't possess.

  I even had a sense of humor. Male-Me didn't possess one of those, either.

  And it all felt completely natural… just as it must have felt natural for Cappie to dress like a man in the swamp, and fight like one too. Now that I was a woman, the Patriarch's words about separate male and female souls struck me as the kind of dogmatic oversimplification you always expect from men.

  The priestess had explained it better, in one of those "girls only" sessions that Male-Me never made an effort to remember. "Yes," Leeta had said, "you have two souls, male and female. And they've gone through different upbringings, haven't they? You girls live fully in your female years, but experience your male years at arm's length. Of course your two halves will see things differently — you've had different lives. But what the Patriarch lied about is that a female soul can be anything, just as a male soul can. It's not like only one half is capable of cooking, and the other can shoot a bow. You girls can be whole universes, just as your brother selves can be whole universes. You can't help but be different people… but you can both be whole. You know you can."

  "You're going to be whole, Waggett," I whispered to my son. "If Daddy Fullin says the Patriarch will only let you be half a
person, you tell him Mommy says that's a load of horse-flop."

  My boy didn't answer — if he wasn't completely asleep, he'd drifted three-quarters of the way. Carefully, I carried him back to the crib and tucked him in. As his little fists relaxed open, I kissed him lightly on the cheek, then silently left the house.

  The night was quiet as I walked through the hundred paces of forest that separated Zephram's house from the rest of the village. Twice, I caught myself staring at my feet because they weren't the proper distance away. My male body was three fingers shorter than my female, and it took some getting used to.

  Still, it was a minor adjustment compared to some of the changes I'd gone through. On Commitment Day when I was thirteen, I went from a prepubescent boy to a fully-blossomed girl, almost a head taller, rounded above and below, and just starting my first period. I stared at more than my feet, let me tell you… at least when I wasn't tripping over doorsteps, bumping into furniture, and wondering what the hell the gods had been thinking when they invented menstruation.

  The one saving grace was Cappie, who'd gone through his first period a few months before. He sat me down so earnestly and tried to explain… but he'd gone all male and shy and mortified, with a stricken expression that made me laugh myself wet and forget about my cramps….

  Never mind. You had to be there. And you had to be thirteen.

  When I reached the village square, I paused for a moment. Turning right would take me to the path leading into Cypress Marsh… and I could remember how Male-Me thought it crucial to resume our vigil for the rest of the night. He'd always had inexplicable priorities. Surely it was more important to patch things up with Cappie, to make sure he — no, she — wasn't ratcheting herself into a resentment that would poison our Commitment and the rest of our lives. Cappie had a tendency to brood if you didn't chivvy him out of it fast. The last thing we needed was either of us fuming and sullen when we finally reached Commitment Hour.