Mayoralty House lay at the base of Patriarch Hill, in the shadow of the OldTech radio antenna that speared into the sky on the heights. Zephram claimed the big ramble-faced building must have been a hotel back in OldTech times. It had more than two dozen rooms, all the same…or at least they had been the same before years of rain, snow and termites took their toll.
By the time the Patriarch came to power a hundred and fifty years ago, much of the old hotel had collapsed. He ordered it rebuilt to his own specifications, calling it the Patriarchal Palace. After his death, there had been a fierce political struggle between the mayor and Patriarch’s Man of that day, fighting over which would get the house. Somehow, the mayor had won—possibly by making generous financial concessions to the Patriarch’s Man—and the old hotel had been residence for every mayor since.
To the mayors, it must have been a mixed blessing. A house that size needed constant expensive upkeep. Even worse, the summers boiled insufferably hot in that area, thanks to a huge expanse of OldTech asphalt that bordered the building on front and sides. (“The hotel parking lot,” my father said.) Four hundred post-Tech winters had churned that aging pavement like taffy, but fractured and crumbling, there was still enough old blacktop left to drink up every drop of sun and fill the air with the fierce smell of baked tar.
On the front edge of the asphalt, an OldTech horseless cart had been crisping its way to rust for four centuries. The exterior body was completely gone, shredded partly by weather and partly by Tober children prying off souvenirs to stash in dresser drawers and other hidey-holes. Earlier generations must have had it easy; by the time I came along, the only parts left were solid and heavy, almost impossible to break off. Cappie had won himself a quick close-lipped kiss for chiseling off a piece of the underframe and giving it to me on my ninth birthday.
As soon as the cart came into sight Rashid made a beeline for it, his plastic boots making sticky sounds as he crossed the sun-soft blacktop. Leaning over the remains of the engine, he tried to wiggle various components. I could have told him he was wasting his time—anything with a hint of wiggle had been worried off by children long ago.
Steck nudged me and murmured, “All his life he’s been looking for a car that’s still in running order. We’ve found plenty that look good on the outside—preserved by eccentric collectors, that sort of thing—but the engines are always seized up. Even with a heap like this, Rashid has this insatiable optimism that he might find good spare parts.”
“This one doesn’t have any parts,” I said. “It’s rusted into a solid whole.”
“I know that,” Steck replied. “You think I didn’t try to pull pieces off that pile of junk when I was—”
She stopped. Rashid had just reached down into the motor, a look of triumph on his face. He bent over farther and farther, straining to get at something until his feet were almost off the ground.
“What is it?” Steck called.
Rashid’s voice echoed from the cart’s metal belly: “Something I’ve never seen in all my years looking under the hood.”
Steck gave me a “let’s humor him” look and we both moved forward. Rashid pulled his head out of the machine long enough to take a short metal cylinder from a pouch on his thigh; when he twisted one end of the cylinder, the other end suddenly shone with light like a lantern. He turned the yellow beam toward the engine and aimed it down into the rusted guts. “See that?” he asked.
Steck and I looked. The beam of Rashid’s lamp was centered on a palm-sized box of black metal, attached to a hunk of rust-slathered steel. Of course I’d noticed the black box before, back when I was young enough to care about getting a piece of the cart. I’d hammered the box with a rock, poked it with knives stolen from our kitchen, even held a candle under it to see what happened. “It doesn’t come off,” I told Rashid. “It’s just a black lump.”
“A black lump that shouldn’t be there,” he replied. “Ask Steck how many engines I’ve examined since we’ve been together.”
“And the engines have all had their idiosyncrasies,” Steck told him. “I admit I haven’t studied cars like you have, but you’ve taught me yourself there were hundreds of different types. Dozens of companies manufacturing dozens of models each, and every year they made changes and improvements…not to mention that individuals sometimes whipped up customizations of their own. Why is it surprising there are engine thingummies you haven’t seen yet?”
“Because I’m the Knowledge-Lord.” He leaned into the cart again, trying to give the black box a jiggle.
“It doesn’t move,” I told him. There was no shade here on the asphalt, and the sun pressed down hard. The last thing I wanted was to stand around baking while a Spark Lord picked away at something that died four hundred years ago.
“Aha!” Rashid said, his voice muffled. “An antenna!”
“What?” Without thinking, I glanced up to the antenna on Patriarch Hill. This cart had nothing remotely like that. I supposed there might be different types of antennas, but our schoolteacher had never mentioned the possibility. She had been hard-pressed to tell us much about radio at all: she called it a baffling OldTech technique for sending sounds from one place to another. Almost every town on the peninsula had at least one antenna, usually rusted and toppled by wind; but all such antennas were long and thin and exposed, not hidden in the motor of a cart. “What are you talking about?” I asked Rashid.
“This box has a wire antenna running tight against the engine block. Camouflaged to match the metal. And there’s another wire running to…I’ll bet those are photoelectric cells. Solar collectors. This thing may still have juice.” Rashid lifted his head and grinned at Steck. “Still think it’s just a normal engine thingummy?”
Steck put a hand to her mouth and faked a yawn. “The OldTechs had a saying,” she told me. “Something about boys and their toys.”
I nodded, amused that Steck had decided to play the age-old part of the long-suffering woman when she was half man herself. Then again, how could I talk? Male outside, female inside…and sweat-drippingly bored with black boxes. “How much longer?” I asked Rashid.
He grinned impishly at me. Men get a kick out of being an aggravation to women; my brother self delighted in teasing anything female, especially by exaggerating the most juvenile tendencies of being male. A long time ago, some bastard invented the phrase “boyish charm,” and since then the whole gender has believed the way to a woman’s heart is behaving like an eight-year-old.
Then again, we women still believed the way to a man’s heart was playing hard to get. Why did the gods have to make both sexes so calculatingly stupid?
“Just one more thing to check,” Rashid said. He pushed his shine-light cylinder back into its pouch and drew out a hand-sized plastic box. “Radio receiver,” he said. With his thumb he rolled a dial on the box; the little machine began to make a raspy noise, like waves washing up on a gravel beach.
“Nothing but static,” Steck said.
“You think it’s just static?” Rashid asked. Slowly he moved the radio receiver toward the black box on the engine…and the volume of the sound increased, as if the waves on the beach were churning up, peaking, getting blown into whitecaps.
“See?” Rashid told us, patting the black box fondly. “This little baby is transmitting something. Using the whole car as an antenna.”
“Why would the OldTechs do that?” I asked.
“They didn’t,” Rashid answered. “If I didn’t know better,” he looked at me, “I’d say someone from a long way away has been planting bugs in Tober Cove.”
His eyes turned thoughtfully toward the sky.
FIFTEEN
A Predictable History for the Patriarch
Mayor Teggeree had heard nothing about the murder—no one had even told him Bonnakkut was dead. That didn’t surprise me; the news was still in the bubbling gossip stage, and people wanted to share it with others quickly. Mayoralty House just wasn’t close enough to the rest of town for people to
pop in on a moment’s notice. Under normal circumstances, it would be the First Warrior who hurried across the hot pavement to pass word to Teggeree. As it was, we were the ones who got to see the mayor’s jaw drop when we reported the bad tidings.
For one second Teggeree was caught by shock. Then he opened his mouth and said, “How tragic.” A mayor’s phrase: the position was talking, not the man. In a way, I admired Teggeree for that. “How tragic,” he repeated. “But at least we’re fortunate in having a Knowledge-Lord to seek out the truth. That is, if it’s not an imposition on Your Lordship’s time…”
“No, no,” Rashid answered, “I’ve already started investigating. That’s why I came here—I’m told that anyone with relevant evidence will report it to you.”
“Just so,” Teggeree nodded. “Let me ask my family if anyone has come by already.” He turned to me. “Fullin, perhaps you’d show Lord Rashid to the Patriarch’s Hall where he can wait in comfort?”
“Sure.” I had to smile; every child in the cove was marched through the Patriarch’s Hall at least once a year, and I had never imagined it could be described as comfortable. Our mayor simply wanted to impress the visiting dignitary. Don’t ask me why Teggeree hadn’t dragged Rashid into the hall as soon as the Knowledge-Lord arrived last night—Rashid must have dodged the mayor’s clutches somehow. A temporary reprieve only, I thought. You’re stuck with the full tour now.
Then again, the Patriarch’s Hall was dusty, self-important and largely irrelevant. It might be exactly Rashid’s cup of tea.
“This old place!” Steck said with disgust. But her gaze traveled sharp-eyed around the room, as if reminding herself of all the things she had missed the chance to despise during her banishment.
The hall was the Patriarch’s memorial, and crammed with keepsakes from his era: some mounted in formal displays, others just stacked where there was available space on shelves or the floor. This was my first visit here since I’d graduated school at fourteen, and the room seemed to have shrunk in the intervening years…not to mention the air growing more stifled and close, as dust accumulated on the so-called “treasures.” It occurred to me that mayors might regard this place more as a junk heap than a shrine—somewhere to stash things they couldn’t throw out but didn’t want cluttering up the rest of the house.
Take, for example, the collection of glass jars filling up three long shelves—the same sort of jars all Tobers used for fruit preserves, but this batch contained ashes from the execution pit on Beacon Point. They had no labels: no way to tell whether a given jar contained the incinerated remnants of a scientist, a Southern trader, or a Neut Knowing the Patriarch, some of the jars might just hold clinkers pulled out of his bake stove—the old tyrant had no qualms about inflating his reputation with a few false urns. Then again, if the Patriarch thought his shelves looked too empty, he might simply accuse another Tober of uttering heretical thoughts; preferably someone well off, whose goods could be confiscated for the public coffers.
The public coffers administered by the Patriarch, of course.
Looking around the room, I was struck by how he had spent that money on personal indulgences. Paintings of himself. Fine clothes and trinkets brought from the South. Still-corked wine bottles that probably contained nothing but vinegar.
Supposedly, my violin dated back to those times. Leeta claimed the old tyrant had paid a master violinist to come up-peninsula and settle in the cove, so that the “palace” would always have music. Such an extravagance was typical of the Patriarch—killing innocent Southern peddlers to “cleanse” the cove, then immediately importing a Southerner of his own because it suited his pleasure.
Still, I shouldn’t complain: I was descended from that hired Southern musician…as was Steck.
Neither she nor I spent much time looking at individual items in the hall; it was more a matter of absorbing the whole ambience, letting our attention wander from the Patriarch’s tooled leather saddle to his “coat of many colors” constructed by the Hearth and Home Guild at his dictatorial command. I blanched at a tapestry showing a couple making their marriage vows on the Patriarch’s Hand—unbidden, my mind conjured up the image of that hand suddenly coming to life and grabbing the woman by the throat as the Patriarch hissed, “Do you love him? Do you?”
But I put that out of my mind; I had promised Cappie to Commit female and become priestess. To hell with the Patriarch and all his successors.
Spinning away from the sight of the tapestry, I nearly bumped into Rashid. He had planted himself in front of a wall-sized painting of the Patriarch during the Harsh Purification: a fierce white-haired man with a blazing torch in his hand. The artist, no doubt working under the Patriarch’s eye, had painted the ghost of a halo around the old tyrant’s head. The painter had also placed three blackened figures in the background, burning their last in a well-fueled pyre.
After a long moment contemplating the scene, Rashid turned to me. “What do you think of that, Fullin? About the burnings and the Patriarch and all? Just doing what the gods demanded?”
I hesitated. “You remember I’m female at the moment?”
“What does that have to do with it?” Rashid asked.
Steck snorted. “What do you expect? Men and women have completely different opinions about the old bastard.”
“How can that be?” Rashid said. “When Fullin changes from man to woman, how can his opinions suddenly change? Are Tobers all multiple personality cases, or do they just—”
“My opinion on the Patriarch,” I interrupted, “is that he should have died when he was a baby…like everyone thought he would.”
Rashid frowned. “He was an unhealthy baby?”
“Too sick to give the Gift of Blood,” I replied, “so he was Locked male all his life. Everything else follows from that.”
“Tell me,” Rashid said.
Steck and I met each other’s gaze. Perhaps my mother and I didn’t have much in common, but I could see that for the moment we were thinking like two women.
And women who spend time thinking all have the same opinion of the Patriarch.
May he rot forever in the death-grip of Mistress Want.
The Patriarch (who erased all record of his real name) was born two hundred years ago—a child of Master Crow and always prick-proud how his parentage made him one half divine. Leeta told all the girls in Hearth and Home that the Patriarch despised people fathered by normal men: whenever he needed to make an example of someone, he chose someone of “thin human blood” to be whipped.
But that was after he came to power. The Patriarch’s story started only a few months after he was born: a baby boy who got sick just before summer solstice. High fever, vomiting, convulsions…when Hakoore preached his annual sermon on the Patriarch’s life, he took morbid delight in hissing out the list of symptoms. Hakoore loved to label the illness as the work of devils who wanted to kill our Redeemer before he could save the world; but when I told this story to Rashid, I steered away from mentioning devils.
I’d come to feel sheepish on the devil issue.
Anyway, there was no question the infant Patriarch suffered extreme sickness, whatever the cause—the doctor of that day believed the baby wasn’t strong enough to give the Gift. Yes, the child would be Locked male all his life…but, “Male is better than dead,” as the doctor told the Patriarch’s mother.
(“I’d have to agree,” Rashid said.
Steck and I exchanged “isn’t that just so typical” looks.)
So the Gift was never taken. In time the baby recovered (“…through sheer force of will!” Hakoore preached). The infant even traveled to Birds Home the following summer with all the other children. That was common practice—whether or not the boy had given the Gift, the gods might decide to switch his sex anyway. They were gods; they could break their own rules.
But they didn’t. (They never did.) The Patriarch went out a boy and came back the same way. At that age, he didn’t understand why it broke his mother’s heart.
He must have found out soon enough. I didn’t grow up with any Locked kids, but I can imagine how Tober children would have treated someone who was so creepily handicapped—with an inconsistent mix of cruelty, pity and indifference, changing from hour to hour depending on the whim of the schoolyard mob. When a boy receives that kind of treatment, the outcome is determined by how he reacts: if he makes himself likable, the other children soon forget he’s different; if he tries to make himself likable but isn’t, he becomes the school goat or perhaps class clown; and if he fights back verbally or physically, he becomes hated, taunted, and shunned…in other words, a pariah.
Guess which option the Patriarch took.
A big-muscled pariah turns himself into a bully; a small one becomes the brat who steals and tells lies to get everybody else in trouble. The Patriarch tried the bully route for a while, picking on kids weaker than himself, but in Tober Cove, little kids often have big brothers (or big sisters with all the instincts of big brothers). The young Patriarch soon realized he couldn’t make a success of bullyhood, at least until he became a teenager and could match big brothers in size. Therefore he went the other direction—becoming a weasel, as Hakoore might put it, although the Patriarch’s Man never used that term when speaking of our Revered Redeemer. (“The other children spurned him because they were shamed by his inner radiance.”)
Time passed. The boy grew crafty. He learned to ingratiate himself to adults, who were (then as now) easier to manipulate than children. Leeta liked to tell us he had a knack for wheedling perks and privileges out of grownup women—he always had a ready tale of woe, how he felt deprived by never knowing the joys of femininity. It may seem naive that they believed him…certainly in light of how he treated women later on. But you have to understand that no one was used to a child like this. No one back then had ever dealt with a boy who never became a girl.
Commitment Hour Page 21
