“A joke,” he said, still smiling. “You think the Patriarch’s hand is a joke?”
“No, no,” I corrected myself quickly, “the hand isn’t a joke, it’s a sacred artifact, but…”
I gasped. The hand had suddenly tightened its grip, wringing me hard around the knuckles—the way Bonnakkut had sometimes grabbed my hand and mashed my fingers together, back when he bullied me in the schoolyard.
“You don’t believe it’s a sacred artifact,” Hakoore hissed softly. “Now that you know it’s mechanical, you think it’s just another piece of OldTech garbage.”
“It’s sacred, it’s special, I believe that!”
The hand squeezed again. I felt one of my knuckles give under the pressure with an audible click. It wasn’t broken—not yet. Just slipped slightly out of alignment.
“Stop doing that!” I shouted at the old snake.
“I’m not doing anything,” he replied, all innocence. “The hand has a mind of its own. My old master explained it this way: when people lie, they sweat. Not normal summer sweat, but damp-palm-nervous liar’s sweat. And the Patriarch’s hand can taste that sweat in your palm, boy. It doesn’t like the taste. Lies turn its stomach.”
It’s a hand! I wanted to say. It doesn’t have a stomach. But I kept myself under control and told him, “I don’t believe the OldTechs could make something like this. In all the OldTech books I’ve read, there’s no mention of anything close.”
Hakoore gave me a coy look. “Maybe not. Maybe the hand is older than the Patriarch, dating back to the founding of the cove.” He grinned at me with those jagged yellow teeth. “The founders of Tober Cove were something special, boy—far beyond the OldTechs. There are secrets I could tell you, passed down from one Patriarch’s Man to the next; but I can’t share those secrets with you until…”
He let the last word hang pointedly in the air. I didn’t want to give him the satisfaction of asking what he meant, but the hand was still pulping my knuckles. Even worse, there might be other hidden buttons Hakoore could press in the box, buttons that would make the hand clinch up on me even if I wasn’t lying.
“Until what?” I asked through gritted teeth.
“Until you agree to be my disciple and become the next Patriarch’s Man.”
“Me?” My voice was almost a squeak—I blame that on the pain in my half-crashed hand. “Your disciple? Who says I want to be your disciple?”
“Who says I care what you want?” Hakoore rasped back, mimicking my tone. “I’m not choosing you for your opinions, boy.”
“But why choose me at all?”
“Since Leeta told me she was making Cappie her apprentice, I’ve been thinking about a successor too. It appeals to me, easing back the same time Leeta does. Especially after seeing Cappie last night, trying to play priestess while dressed like a man. The girl’s got fire; she’ll hit the cove like a lightning strike. And she’s smart—when women have problems, Cappie will solve them. Won’t be long before men turn to her too…not for everything, but for important things. Show me the man who wouldn’t rather talk to Cappie than to me. Present company excluded, of course.”
He actually gave me a grin.
“So it got me wondering,” he went on, “what man in the cove can handle Cappie and come out on top?” He poked a bony finger into my chest. “Guess whose name came to mind.”
“But I don’t want to be anyone’s disciple…”
“Shut up!” he snapped, jabbing his finger into the pain-hub of nerves at my sternum. “I don’t care about a weaselly boy’s personal preferences. All I care is whether you’re suitable for the job.”
“I’m not. The only thing I’m fit for is playing violin…”
“You won’t be fit for that if you don’t shut up! The hand won’t let go till I want it to; you understand that, boy? And how are you going to play violin with crushed fingers?”
I choked back the retort that came close to spilling out of my mouth: It’s holding my right hand, you old fool; I play violin with my left. But giving that away might be a tactical error. Besides, how could I hold the bow if my right hand got ground to powder? How could I pluck pizzicato? Without two good hands, I’d be just some kid who’d once had delusions of grandeur—condemned to work the farms or perch boats for the rest of my life, as if I’d never dreamed of more.
“All right,” I muttered. “What do you want?”
“To ask some questions. To see whether you appreciate the cove’s need for a Patriarch’s Man.”
“And if I lie, the hand will hurt me.”
Hakoore nodded. “The Patriarch found it useful for getting at the truth.”
“I’ll bet.”
“Don’t go insolent on me, boy! I can always order the hand to grab a different part of your anatomy. Something you really don’t want mangled.”
I glared at him for a moment, then gave a defiant flick of my head. “Ask your questions,” I told him. “See for yourself that I’m wrong for the position.”
The Patriarch’s Man just smiled, an ancient yellow smile.
“First question,” Hakoore said. “Do you believe in the gods?”
“Yes.”
“All the gods? Even Mistress Want and Master Disease?”
“Yes.” After last night, I wondered if I believed in Master Disease too much, but I didn’t say so aloud.
“Do you pray to the gods?”
“Sometimes.”
He gave me a withering look. I expected him to ask how often was sometimes, but he must have presumed the worst. Instead he asked, “Is the cove important to you, boy?”
“Absolutely.”
“And how far would you go in order to keep the cove safe?”
I hesitated. “That’s hard to say,” I finally answered. “It depends on the circumstances.”
“Of course, it depends on the circumstances, you idiot!” Hakoore roared. “Everything depends on the circumstances.” He gave me a steely glare. “Stop being such a weasel.”
Easy for you, I thought. You aren’t the one whose fingers get mulched if you answer wrong. Out loud, I told him, “Describe some threat to the cove and I’ll tell you what I’d do.”
“Don’t give me orders, boy!” He closed his eyes for a moment, then opened them again. “Last year,” Hakoore said, “a Feliss merchant came here, supposedly to see the leaves, but what he really wanted was to buy his way into the village. He had a lot of money, a pregnant wife…and when the baby came, he wanted it brought up like a Tober, alternating sexes. Thought that would be healthy for the child.”
“He was right,” I answered.
“Of course he was,” Hakoore agreed. “And he was willing to pay for it—donations to the Council of Elders, to the school, to me, to Leeta—not bribes, he insisted, but gifts to help the people.”
“I hope the Elders spat in his face.”
“You don’t know the Elders,” Hakoore answered. “They have a long list of projects they’d love to start if only they had the money…and some of the projects are even sensible. Like paying to train a replacement for Doctor Gorallin; she’s going to retire in ten or fifteen years, and it’ll take that long to put one of our own through medical school. It’ll take a lot of gold too. If the council took the merchant’s money, they could guarantee the cove would have competent doctoring for the next forty years. That’s a hard thing to turn down.”
“I didn’t think of that,” I admitted. “But the council still must have said no in the end. We didn’t have an outsider family move in.”
“The council didn’t reject the merchant,” Hakoore told me. “I did. Started shouting threats and scared the nipples off every man there.” He allowed himself the ghost of a smile. “One of the fun parts of my job.”
“You think it’s fun to make it harder for Tober Cove to afford a doctor?”
“No,” he sighed. “That’s one of the ugly parts of my job.”
“So why did you do it?”
“Because if one merchant buy
s his way in, another will try too. Only the next one will just want a summer home— come up for solstice, let Master Crow and Mistress Gull process the kids, then go back to Feliss. A lot of Tobers would be outraged at such a proposal, but others would just say, ‘Get a good price.’ That way we could buy more books for the school…or maybe some muskets for the Warriors Society so they can match the firepower of any gun-toting criminals who come up-peninsula.”
“One gun is too many,” I muttered.
“And one merchant is too many too,” Hakoore replied. “Not that I have anything against merchants in themselves…”
“No,” I said, “you’ve always been so welcoming to my father.”
The old snake glared at me. “You think I was hard on Zephram? There are times I still think I should have booted him out. With the money he’s brought here, the cove has expanded its perch fleet, bought more cattle, improved the sawmill…”
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. S
he 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.
Commitment Hour Page 11
