The League of Peoples

by James Alan Gardner

  Gorallin looked at the rest of us and rolled her eyes. Cappie, Dorr and I all nodded. Outsiders were inherently crazy: unbalanced at best, and often insane. If spilling a few drops of Pona’s blood saved her from that blinkered confusion, the price was worth it.

  Cappie helped Gorallin swab blood off Pona’s body. It mopped up easily; in less than a minute, the baby’s skin was back to its clean soft pink, and the black-stitched incision just an inoffensive line no longer than my fingernail. As Cappie slipped Pona into a new diaper and her summer smock, the doctor ran through a set of instructions that she must have given dozens of times over the years: how to care for the cut as it healed, how to check for signs of infection. Cappie nodded carefully as Gorallin spoke…and I noticed that Dorr, standing silently in the corner, nodded too.

  I wondered how Dorr felt: to be childless in a village where almost everyone else had borne a life. Suddenly, I felt guilty for thinking she might have guzzled some herbal concoction to abort her baby. Suppose Dorr’s miscarriage had been perfectly natural; suppose it was the pain of that loss which unhinged her enough to Commit Neut.

  Quietly, I left Cappie listening to the doctor and went to Dorr. “Are you okay?” I asked softly. “How’s your wrist?”

  “It hurts.” Her glittering eyes turned toward me. “You know Bonnakkut wouldn’t have taken me as his death-wife.”

  “Dorr…”

  “I know you know. You had to be able to feel what I have…and I just lay there. Because my wrist hurt and because I suddenly found myself tired and angry about hiding. Do you know what I did while I was lying there?”

  “No.”

  “I touched him,” she whispered. “Bonnakkut You weren’t covering his whole body. I reached under you and laid my hand on Bonnakkut’s bare arm…and nothing happened. Even a dead man doesn’t want me.”

  “Hakoore had started the last rites—”

  “Don’t be stupid,” she interrupted. “I carry the stretcher whenever my grandfather attends to a corpse. I know how the rites go; I know when the body is and isn’t safe. But it seems I don’t have to worry.”

  Hesitantly I suggested, “Maybe with the corpse of a woman…”

  Dorr gave me an exasperated look. “It’s not that I want to marry a corpse, Fullin. Do you think I’m just looking for a boyfriend? I’ve got—”

  She stopped. Cappie and Gorallin were looking at us.

  “My wrist hurts,” Dorr said; and like a stone sinking in muddy water, the emotion vanished from her face. She must have had years of practice making her feelings go away.

  “All right,” Gorallin said, “let’s have a look.” She glanced at Cappie and me. “In private.”

  Cappie picked up the still-sleeping Pona and I opened the door for her. With a glance back at Dorr, I wondered why she’d confided in me. Merely because I knew her secret? Because she’d once had a crush on me? Because she recognized me as a woman who would sympathize with…

  Recognized me as a woman?

  Oh. It seemed I’d become female again.

  Rashid and Steck fell silent as Cappie and I entered the waiting room. For the first time it struck me how handsome Rashid actually was. His long black hair made him look dashing, even rakish, but his eyes had a poetic sensitivity to them, like a man who has always been too intelligent to feel at home among the people he meets. I could understand how he’d fallen for Steck—both of them fish out of water, a Spark and a Neut, distanced from the common crowd.

  “So the operation’s over?” Rashid asked Cappie. He was trying to sound casual, as if he and Steck hadn’t been fighting. “How’s the little girl?”

  “She’ll be fine.” Cappie turned to me. “I’d better take her back to my mother now. Do you know where you’re going to be?”

  “I promised ‘Maria’ I’d stay with her until the gods come at noon.”

  “Why don’t you and Steck walk me around town?” Rashid suggested. “We’ll talk to people. Investigate Bonnakkut’s death.” He sighed, as if the murder had been committed purely to spoil his day. “We can always hope a witness saw someone sneaking behind Bonnakkut with a knife.” The Spark Lord turned to Cappie. “If Tobers noticed something suspicious like that, whom would they tell?”

  “The neighbors,” she answered drily. “But eventually they’d go to the mayor.”

  “Then we’ll go to the mayor ourselves,” Rashid said. “Ask if he’s heard anything.”

  Cappie nodded, then leaned in and gave me a quick kiss on the corner of my mouth. “After I drop off Pona,” she murmured, “I’ll meet you at Mayoralty House. We’ll find a place to talk.”

  Then she was gone.

  Dorr told us not to wait—Gorallin agreed that the wrist was broken, and now had to go through the chore of mixing plaster to make a cast. Rashid was keen to get moving and Steck wisely didn’t try to cross him. I didn’t understand why Rashid was annoyed at her for not telling him about the Gift, but he clearly thought she should have mentioned it to him earlier. Steck had forced herself to couch down into meek acquiescence with Rashid’s mood…although as we walked to the door together, she did stop to look at me.

  “You’re sure you don’t want the doctor to examine you?”

  “I’m fine,” I told her.

  “You’re walking oddly.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with me.”

  “Oh.” She stopped for a moment and gave me an appraising look. Suddenly, a smile seeped across her face. “What sex are you, Fullin?”

  The question caught me off guard. I answered, “Male, of course,” but I knew I didn’t sound convincing. Even Rashid could tell something was amiss.

  “Male, of course?” he asked.

  “Of course.” I still didn’t sound convincing.

  Steck patted me on the cheek, her face preening with an “I’ve got you” smile. “Don’t lie to your mother,” she said.

  “So you think he’s female?” Rashid asked. “What’s going on?”

  “Are we going to the mayor’s or not?” I snapped. Without waiting for an answer, I headed out the door and down the doctor’s front steps. Rashid followed quickly, still looking back and forth from Steck to me for an explanation.

  “It’s something no one talks about,” Steck said, tracking along on my heels, “although as far as I can tell, it happens to everybody. I certainly switched several times on my Commitment Day. Leeta once told me she’d had plenty of women confide that it happened to them too. But most people do their best to keep it a secret. Why, Fullin? Do you think it’s indecent? Or just too private to bring out into the open?”

  “Too tricky,” I replied. It surprised me that I spoke the words out loud; but then, I had been thrown off balance by what Steck said. This happened to everybody?

  “What’s going on?” Rashid demanded.

  “In the day leading up to Commitment,” Steck told him, “Tobers go through short bouts when they feel as if they’re the other sex. Their other sexual selves. Right now, I have the feeling Fullin’s male body is occupied by the personality that usually takes charge in his female years. Isn’t that right, Fullin? Isn’t that why you’re watching your feet a little too much while you’re walking?”

  That was precisely what was going on…but I immediately lifted my eyes from my feet and focused them straight ahead. I didn’t fool anyone—I could feel myself blushing, which surely showed on my face. “Can we change the subject?” I mumbled.

  “No,” Rashid answered, and turned back to Steck. “You say this happens to every Tober?”

  “That’s my guess.”

  “In the day leading up to Commitment?”

  “It would make sense,” Steck said.

  “How so?” Rashid asked.

  “As a reminder!” I suddenly blurted out.

  Steck and Rashid looked at me.

  “You’re right, it does make sense!” I said, thinking it through for myself. “It’s been a year since I was female…distant enough to forget what it’s like. The diffe
rent priorities I have. The different weight of memories. So the gods are giving me a chance to recall who I was. Who I am. To make sure I have a clear idea of both my male and female selves before I choose between them.”

  “Good thinking by the gods,” Rashid agreed. “You don’t usually expect that much foresight from a deity.”

  “So there’s nothing to be ashamed of, is there?” Steck said to me. “It’s ridiculous how Tobers all think they’re abnormal and bottle it up.”

  I didn’t answer; I was too busy thinking about Cappie. She must have been switching back and forth between male and female too. Was that why she had worn male clothes this morning, even though they were no longer needed for the solstice dance? Which soul was she wearing when she sang to me in the marsh? During the fight with Steck…when she punched me and stole my spear…as we made love…

  Who the hell had I been with when?

  “What surprises me,” Rashid said, “is that Tobers don’t discuss this openly. If it happens to everybody, why treat it as a shameful secret?”

  I thought of Tobers back through the years, most of them living in relationships by the time they reached Commitment Day, and most of them intimidated by the permanent repercussions of the choice they were about to make. They had enough complications already without having to confess they were occasionally not who they appeared to be.

  “It might not be shameful,” I said, “but it is secret. That’s not such a bad thing; that’s not such a bad thing at all.”

  The path from the doctor’s office to Mayoralty House led around the mill pond, where a single mallard floated peacefully in the center of the water. The bird was lucky; our miller, Palph, was a good archer, and any other day, a duck on the pond had a good chance of becoming Palph’s dinner. No Tober, however, would dare kill a bird on the morning of Commitment Day—that was an insult to Master Crow and Mistress Gull.

  I said as much to Rashid. He nodded, but didn’t answer; his mind was obviously elsewhere. After a moment, he spoke without looking at me. “What’s going to happen today at Birds Home?”

  “Rashid,” Steck began, “I’ve told you everything…”

  “You didn’t tell me the doctor took tissue samples,” he interrupted. “So I’d like to hear what Fullin has to say.”

  I looked back and forth between the two of them. Of course, Rashid would have quizzed Steck long before coming to the cove—about our way of life, how switching sexes affected us, what the gods did in Birds Home. And because he was infatuated with her, he had believed what he heard: he thought he knew everything she did. Now, however, something had stirred a freckle of doubt; now, he wanted to check her version of the facts.

  Steck’s face flushed with emotion. Anger? Hurt? I couldn’t tell—it disappeared in an instant, replaced by a hard-edged stoniness, as if she didn’t care whether he believed her or not. “Go ahead,” she said grimly to me. “Tell him whatever he wants to know.”

  “There’s not much to tell,” I mumbled, embarrassed for her. Embarrassed for my mother. “At noon, Master Crow and Mistress Gull arrive from Birds Home and land on the lake. The children go with Master Crow; the people ready for Commitment go with Mistress Gull.”

  “Go with,” Rashid repeated. “That means you get inside.”

  “Yes, we boat out and get inside Mistress Gull and Master Crow,” I said, wondering why he had decided to be obtuse. “There are chairs inside. We sit in the chairs and the gods fly us north to Birds Home.”

  “What happens there?”

  “The children are taken into Master Crow’s nest. They climb out of Master Crow and wait in a special area until they are touched by the gods. Then everyone falls asleep.”

  “Gas,” Steck murmured. “Knock-out gas.”

  I shrugged, not wanting to argue about how the gods did what they did. It felt awkward, being questioned by Rashid to see if my mother had lied to him; I just wanted to get it over with. “After a while, the children wake up and find they’re the opposite sex. They get back inside Master Crow and fly home.”

  “That’s the children,” Rashid said. “What about the candidates for Commitment? You and Cappie.”

  “Mistress Gull takes us into a different nest, her own. I don’t know what happens there because it’s a holy secret—no one who’s gone through it is ever supposed to reveal the details. But the gods will come to us in the Commitment Hour and ask, ‘Male, female, or both?’ We tell them our choice, and that’s our Commitment.” I looked at him sharply. “Good enough?”

  Rashid hesitated, as if considering whether to grill me further: to keep pushing to see if my story matched whatever my mother had told him. He glanced at Steck, but she wasn’t looking at either of us. She had picked up a stone and was staring at the duck in the mill pond. Her fingers rolled the stone back and forth across her palm.

  “All right then,” Rashid muttered. “I was just checking. It’s always possible that something changed in the twenty years since you Committed, Steck.”

  She made a scoffing sound, but her face lost some of its grimness. When she threw her stone, she aimed well clear of the duck. The rock landed in the water with a light plop, scarcely rippling the pond at all.

  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 fart
her 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!”