Commitment Hour

by James Alan Gardner

  And speaking of the Patriarch’s Law, I was supposed to be on vigil.

  Yikes again.

  I had to restrain myself from leaping out of the bed. How soon was sunrise? Could I get back to the marsh in time?

  With agonizing caution, I pulled away from Cappie’s sleeping body, holding my breath so I wouldn’t smell the cowbarn sweat and sex that oozed off her skin. She was naked, of course, no longer wearing her father’s clothes; plain old Cappie now, except for the short-chopped hair. In the darkness, that haircut made her look disturbing—I didn’t like seeing her scalp so easily, or the raw shape of her skull. It was like one of those terror tales the old men told around the campfire: the hero embraces a beautiful woman and when he pulls away, finds that she’s turned into a worm-eaten corpse.

  No. That wasn’t fair. Cappie may have looked scrawny and underdeveloped as she lay uncovered in the darkness, but she was no horrible monster. She was just…ordinary.

  Didn’t my female half realize that?

  My life had progressed beyond this unsophisticated girl in my bed. I was famous the whole length of the peninsula. Admired by far more interesting women.

  I couldn’t let myself get trapped by mediocrity when I was just coming into my own. This was no time to make senseless commitments.

  I managed to find my clothes—scattered over the floor and furniture, but thank heaven the cabin was small—and I took everything outside so there was less chance of waking Cappie while I dressed. No one saw me. Only one of the nearby cabins was occupied, and that belonged to Chum and Thorn: a pair of nineteen-year-olds who lived together like crashing thunderheads. One second they’d be screeching over who should empty the chamberpot, and the next they’d be passionately a’moan with rough lovemaking that smacked against their cabin walls and knocked out chips of mortar. Since tomorrow would be their last sex switch before permanent Commitment, I was sure they had battered themselves into raw-chapped stupor hours ago. They would never open their eyes long enough to notice me on my own porch, pulling on my pants and hurrying off into the darkness.

  Hurrying off, then hurrying back again. A gentleman doesn’t abandon a woman in the middle of the night, without at least leaving a note. Just inside the door, Cappie and I kept a white pine board and a stick of charcoal for leaving each other messages. Holding the charcoal with a feather touch to avoid making noise, I wrote gone BACK TO VIGIL…then added, LOVE, FULLIN.

  Anything else would have been rude.

  The black sky was just beginning to lighten over Mother Lake as I reached the trail to the marsh. Dawn was still a good hour away. I slowed down and tried to force myself to relax, to keep an eye out for snapping turtles, but I didn’t have the concentration. My mind kept going back to Cappie.

  What had I done?

  What had I promised?

  What would she think when she found me gone?

  This mess was my sister self’s fault. If she hadn’t showed up, I could have fobbed Cappie off forever. Evaded conversation. Avoided promises.

  A gentleman doesn’t break his promises—a smart gentleman doesn’t make any.

  Now what was I going to do?

  I didn’t want to hurt her; that would just cause trouble. Cappie wouldn’t hesitate to make an embarrassing scene in public, even on Commitment Day. My only choice was to play along with what my female self had tied me to, at least until we reached Birds Home. Then…well, if Cappie was going to Commit male, I could go male too, making a relationship impossible.

  Or maybe I could Commit Neut, get myself banished, and escape everything.

  Not funny, Fullin.

  My violin was safe where I left it, inside the log near the duck flats. I took it out of the case, tuned up, and played…not exercises or any specific song, just playing, soft or loud, sweet or savage, whatever came from second to second. It helped. Music doesn’t solve problems, any more than daylight eliminates stars; but while the sun shines the stars are invisible, and while the music sang from my bow, Cappie, Steck, Female-Me, and everyone else who choked up my life vanished into the breakers of sound.

  In the sky, stars began to fade. Light seeped up from the eastern horizon, pasty-faced and watery as predawn usually is. (Zephram once observed to me, “Master Day is not a morning person.”) In the wan yellow light, flies began to buzz and frogs to chug, while loons still called night songs to each other and fish splashed the surface of open water, on the grab for fluff and insects.

  Buzz, chug, hoo-ee-oo, splash.

  Buzz, chug, hoo-ee-oo, splash.

  In time, I eased the violin off my shoulder and let the marsh sing without me. Or at least make noise. I couldn’t tell if the sound was wholesomely relaxing…or getting on my nerves.

  After minutes of sitting, my stomach rolled with a puma-like growl. I put my instrument back in its case, then pulled out the bread and cheese I had taken from Zephram’s. As I worried the rock-old cheddar with my teeth, I considered what to do next. Officially, my vigil would end as soon as the sun cleared the horizon…not that I could see the horizon with bulrushes all around me, but if I climbed the dead tree near the duck flats, I’d have a clear view all the way to Mother Lake. I still might not see the sun directly, but I’d easily catch its glare spooning the water to sparkles.

  When I reached the flats, they were still jumbled with footprints from Steck’s boots, plus the occasional smudge of moccasins from Cappie and me. No sign of ducks. I crossed to the dead tree and tried to waggle it, just to check how securely it was set into the wet ground. As far as I could tell it was rooted like stone, though it had stood bare and sapless since I came to practice violin as a child. Back then, I could only reach the lowest branch if I stood on tiptoe and jumped; now, I scrambled up easily, as high as I wanted to go. That was just high enough to see Mother Lake—you can’t trust old bleached wood to hold your weight, even when the tree feels solid. I intended to peek for the sun, then get down again before the branches snapped beneath me.

  That was before I saw Hakoore coming in a canoe.

  Cypress Creek runs down the very center of the marsh, a meander of clear water among the cattails. If you start at Mother Lake, you can boat up the creek as far as Stickleback Falls, and even then it’s an easy portage to Camron Lake and points south. The duck flats don’t touch the creek itself, but when the water is high enough you can paddle to the flats if you know the right route through the reedy mat of marsh…at least I assume that’s true, because the canoe was doing precisely that.

  Hakoore wasn’t paddling. He sat stiffly in the front while his granddaughter Dorr stroked in the stern. Dorr was twenty-five years old and tyrannized by the old man. I found her intermittently attractive, or at least pretty-ish, but she had no idea how to put herself together for good effect. On hot days, you might see her wearing a sweater; on cold, she might wander barefoot around the town common, hair tumbled shapelessly around her face. If Dorr had been a violinist, she’d be the sort who played with the energy of a devil, but never bothered to tune up first…and would always be slashing her way through a scherzo when the audience wanted a ballad.

  Dorr wasn’t a musician, though—she made quilts and dyed blankets that were eagerly sought by well-to-do buyers down-peninsula. Her designs were striking: sad-eyed trees with blood dribbling down their bark; catfish leaping into bonfires; horses with human faces crushed under stone-weight thunderclouds. I often said to myself that Dorr desperately needed a man…but until Hakoore was gone she was chained to the old despot, like a heifer marked with her owner’s brand.

  By the time I caught sight of the canoe, Dorr had already spotted me in the tree. Our eyes met. Her face was expressionless and her mouth stayed closed—she wouldn’t tell Hakoore I was there. (The more he treated her like a dumb animal, the more she behaved that way…at least when he was around.) I had hopes of scurrying back to the ground without being seen, but Hakoore must have possessed enough dregs of eyesight to notice me backlit against the brightening sky.

  �
�Who’s in that tree?” he hissed.

  Dorr didn’t answer his question. I forced myself to call down, “Me. Fullin.”

  “What are you doing?”

  “Checking whether it’s dawn yet.”

  “Is it?”

  “Yes.” Truth was, I couldn’t make out any sunlight shining on Mother Lake, but I decided to feather the issue. If the sun hadn’t risen, I was breaking vigil again by communicating with people; therefore, the sun had risen.

  “Come down,” said Hakoore. “It’s time we talked.”

  I didn’t like the sound of that—Hakoore’s talks could shrivel a man’s testicles at fifty paces. On the other hand, I had no choice. Moving slowly, trying to look the soul of cautious prudence when I was actually just delaying the confrontation, I descended from one branch to the next until my feet touched solid mud. By that time, Dorr had run the nose of the canoe onto the flats and helped her grandfather get out.

  “So, boy,” Hakoore said, hobbling toward me, “up a tree, were you? To see if it was dawn.”

  “Yes.”

  “Woman!” he snapped at Dorr. “Go do something productive. Don’t you use these plants for dyes? Pick some. Don’t hurry back.”

  Dorr said nothing. She brushed noiselessly through the nearest stand of rushes and disappeared. Hakoore peered whitely after her for a time, then turned back to me. “I climbed a tree on my vigil too…to see if it was dawn.”

  Some men would say that with a companionable smile of nostalgia. Hakoore didn’t, but his hissing voice did seem less venomous than usual. That worried me—the old snake was setting me up for something.

  After a moment he said, “Take me to the boat.” He held out his bony hand, and reluctantly I let him take my arm, the way he always walked with Dorr. I couldn’t remember him touching me before—he preferred to commandeer the help of important people like the mayor, or ignorable ones like Dorr. Then again, we were in the middle of a marsh. If he needed help walking, he didn’t have a lot of choices.

  His grip on my arm was tight and he leaned hard against me…not that he weighed enough to be a burden. Hakoore might be close to the same age as my foster father, but he looked several decades older: shriveled, gaunt and hunched. He had an old man’s smell to him, a mix of ancient sweat and urine, rising from his clothes like a sad memory. As we walked toward the canoe, I could hear him clack his molars together every few steps, as if he were still chewing the ghost of some long-ago breakfast.

  “So,” he said as we walked, “your Cappie intends to be priestess.”

  “Not my Cappie,” I answered quickly. “I don’t control her.”

  “True.” Hakoore nudged me knowingly with his elbow. “Cappie is just a girl you live with, right, boy? She’s the only female your age, so it’s natural you two would…be boy and girl together. But beyond that?” He made a rasping sound in his throat. “I don’t suppose you have feelings for her.”

  The old snake said “feelings” with so much intensity, I clenched my jaw. Did he want me to agree with him, that she was just some meaningless convenience? Even if I’d outgrown Cappie, a gentleman doesn’t talk about a lady as if she’s something he wants to scrape off his moccasin. I couldn’t tell Hakoore Cappie meant nothing to me, whether or not it was true. But the Patriarch’s Man was waiting for me to speak—to deny her, to say something disloyal.

  “There’s feelings and there’s feelings,” I answered carefully. “Depends what feelings you mean.”

  Hakoore actually smiled—as much as a frown-lined face like his could ever support an amiable expression. He reached out with his free hand and patted my wrist almost fondly.

  “You’re a weasel, aren’t you, boy?”

  His thumb suddenly dug into my flesh, gouging the soft web between my thumb and index finger. There’s a nerve there that hurts when it gets squeezed. Hakoore knew all about that nerve.

  “You’re a weasel, aren’t you?” he said again.

  “What do you mean by—”

  The old man squeezed and the pain was enough to clot my voice silent. “I mean,” Hakoore said, “that you’d kill your own mother under the right circumstances.” He released the pressure and gave a fierce grin. His teeth were yellow and jagged. “You’re a weasel, and one way or another, you see the rest of the world as your meat.”

  I didn’t answer. He was wrong, but it seemed politic to hold my tongue.

  Hakoore studied me for a moment with his milky eyes, then gave a soft snort of amusement. “Look in the boat, boy.”

  We had reached the edge of the flats where the canoe’s nose was pulled up onto the mud. Snug in the middle of the boat, tucked safely under the central thwart, lay the battered false-gold box containing the Patriarch’s Hand.

  What now? I thought. Did the old snake want me to take another oath?

  Hakoore released his grip on my arm. “Get it,” he said, pushing me toward the canoe. “Take it out.”

  Mistrustfully, I reached down and wrapped my fingers around the brass handle on the nearest end of the box. One pull told me the container was heavier than I expected; it took several good heaves for me to drag it out from under the thwart and lift it into the air.

  “Wait,” Hakoore said. He leaned into the boat and pulled out a blanket that lay under the front seat—probably one of Dorr’s own creations, but the blanket was too dirty for me to be certain. I noticed Hakoore didn’t wobble as he bent over; our Patriarch’s Man was only infirm when it suited his purpose. With a few dusty shakes, he opened up the blanket and let it settle onto the mud. “Set the box on that,” he told me. “Be careful.”

  I gave him an aggrieved look. Did he think I intended to take risks with the cove’s greatest treasure? But I held my tongue. Squatting, I laid the heavy chest on the blanket. “There,” I said. “Now what is this—”

  “Quiet!” he interrupted. “You’re going to learn something.” He lowered himself to his knees with the slow inevitability of an old dog taking its place by the fire. For a moment he just knelt there, stroking the tarnished gold surface with his fingers. Then he lifted the lid and exposed the mummified hand to the brightening light of dawn. It seemed smaller than it had looked last night, the skin rough and puckered. “Do you know what that is?” Hakoore asked.

  “The Patriarch’s Hand,” I answered, wondering if this was a trick question.

  “And I suppose you think it was cut off the Patriarch himself.”

  “It wasn’t?”

  He gave me the sort of look he’d been giving to lunkhead boys for forty years. “Who’d have the nerve to cut off the Patriarch’s hand? I wouldn’t. Even after he’d died, no one in the cove would dare.”

  “I always assumed the Patriarch left instructions for his successor to—”

  Hakoore waved me to silence. “Why would a man want to be mutilated after death? Even the Patriarch wasn’t that crazy.”

  I gaped at him. No one ever called the Patriarch crazy…except for all the women in the village, and they didn’t count.

  “The hand belonged to the Patriarch,” Hakoore told me, “but it wasn’t cut off his own wrist. It was just his property.”

  The old snake spoke dismissively as if the truth was self-evident; but all my life, I’d been told the hand was an actual piece of the Patriarch. When people swore oaths on it—when it was used at baby blessings and funerals—the Elders always spoke of it as the Patriarch’s own flesh. If it was just one of the Patriarch’s possessions…if he had hacked it off some criminal…or a heretic…or a Neut…

  Hakoore actually chuckled at the expression on my face—his version of a chuckle at any rate, a toneless hisk-hisk sound. “Touch the hand, boy,” he said. “I’ll show you something interesting.”

  Reluctantly I placed my right fingertips on the hand’s papery skin. Hakoore reached down too, pressing hard against a small protrusion on the box’s metal side. The spot he touched looked like nothing more than a slight dent. I had no idea what he might be up to…until I heard the box gi
ve a soft click.

  With a shudder, the hand squirmed under my fingers. Before I could flinch back, the hand had locked onto mine with an arm wrestler’s grip.

  I jumped back, shaking my hand frantically the way you do to shake off a speck of burning debris spat up by a campfire. The hand came with me, right out of its box, and clung like hot tar as I hopped around the flats trying to dislodge it.

  “Hah, boy,” Hakoore laughed, “if you could see the expression on your face!” Hisk-hisk: the sound of his laugh. Hisk-hisk. “If all those pretty girls who swoon at your fiddle-playing could see what a duck turd you look like now…” He stopped, still laughing, hisk-hisk-hisk. The sound put my teeth on edge, like a blacksmith filing iron.

  “What’s going on?” I demanded. “Is this some kind of magic?”

  “Magic!” The word was a sudden angry bark. “What kind of superstitious fool are you, boy? The hand and the box are just machines, special machines. You think a real hand could last over a century without rotting to dust? Use your sense! And don’t ask me to explain how it works: I don’t know. But it’s not sorcery or deviltry, just wires and things.”

  I couldn’t imagine how wires and things could make a hand that moved as fast as a striking rattlesnake. Still, the mayor had an OldTech clock where a goldfinch came out and chirped every hour; if our ancestors could make mechanical birds, a mechanical hand wasn’t out of the question.

  “Well, you certainly gave me a start,” I told Hakoore, “and I’m glad you had a good laugh. Now can you make the hand let go? It’s holding a little tight.”

  “You think that’s tight?” Hakoore’s milky eyes glittered in the light of the dawning sun. “It can squeeze much harder. It can squeeze like iron tongs.”

  “I’m sure,” I agreed. “But you’ve had your joke and I’m suitably impressed. Maybe it’s time we both went home for breakfast.”