Commitment Hour

by James Alan Gardner

  But that’s kid’s stuff. You do it as a thirteen-year-old girl, when you want to show the boys how daring you can be. After a while, as with most things at thirteen, the memory of how you behaved makes you squirm; even if you know that seasons come from a tilting planet whirling around the sun, the old stories still mean something to you. Why not confide in Mistress Night when you can’t understand why love gets so screwed up? She’s not wise, but she never breaks secrets. And when you’re out on the perch boats, how can you not talk to Master Wind a dozen times a day…respectfully, of course, because he has a temper, but if you ask nicely, he might give more breeze, or less, or another half an hour before he lets the storm break open.

  The gods aren’t jokes; they’re people you walk around with every day. Insulting them is like insulting family.

  “Don’t let me delay you any longer,” Rashid said at last. “Cany on with your dance.”

  By that time, I was sitting with my back to the three of them, trying to pretend I couldn’t hear their conversation. Why was I still there when I should have been running to tell the cove about this Neut? If anyone asked, I’d say I didn’t want to leave Leeta alone with the outsiders…that I intended to watch and listen until I learned what they were up to. But the truth was that Cappie had stolen my chance to do anything spontaneous and noble; now I was floundering, lamely hoping another opportunity might arise. So I frittered away the minutes by poking the fire with a stick. I’d watch the stick burn, then I’d snuff it out in the dirt, then set it on fire again. As a pastime, it didn’t have much to recommend itself, but I kept doing it anyway.

  A hand settled lightly on my shoulder—Leeta. “We have to do this now. Please?”

  Rashid waited for my answer, his pen poised over his notebook. Half of me wanted to stomp off into the forest while telling them all to go to hell; the other half said I would damned well do what Leeta asked, just to show these outsiders that Tober people stuck together. “Sure,” I told her. “What do I have to do?”

  “Dance. Really, that’s all.”

  She held out her hand to help me up. I took it, but stood up on my own—she was such a little woman, I would have pulled her over if I let her take my weight. When we were standing side by side, the top of her head scarcely came to my chin: a short, dingy-gray-haired woman, only a few years away from being a great-grandmother. But she kept hold of my hand and wrapped her other arm tight around my back, the way Cappie did at weekend dances when I set aside my fiddle and took to the floor with her. A moment later, Leeta rested her head against my chest.

  In recent months I’d managed to avoid dancing with Cappie; it felt uncomfortably odd to have Leeta settle next to me in such a warm-bodied way. Ceremonial dances were supposed to be different from weekend dances, weren’t they? Ceremonial dances were supposed to be…chaste. The way Leeta snuggled against me had a lot more of the sacred male/female duality than I’d expected.

  “Come on,” Leeta said, squeezing me tighter. “We have to dance.”

  I put my arms around her guardedly. With her elbow, she shoved my right forearm downward, so my hand was only a hair’s breadth from touching her rump.

  “Now I assume,” Rashid called to Leeta, “you represent Mistress Night and the boy represents Master Day?”

  “That’s right,” she called back over her shoulder. “Come on, dear,” she said to me, “you aren’t going to break me. We’re dancing here. You have to hold me like you mean it.”

  Reluctantly, I squeezed a little tighter. She leaned into me…the way a woman leans into a man when she doesn’t have patience for preliminaries.

  “And this dance,” Rashid called out again, “somehow transfers energy…cosmic force…some mystical something…from Master Day to Mistress Night, to redress the balance of light and dark?”

  “You’re talking like the Patriarch,” Leeta said. “This dance goes back to the saner days of Tober Cove, before the Patriarch came along. There’s no doubletalk; it just fixes things.”

  “How does it fix things?” Rashid asked.

  “Talking won’t help,” she said, annoyance creeping into her voice. “Keep still now. Words only get in the way.”

  Rashid shrugged and settled himself on the edge of a low limestone outcrop. Steck sat at Rashid’s feet and leaned against the knight’s armored legs—an intimate pose, probably intended to offend me. I ignored it; my attention was dominated by the jab of milkweed pods on Leeta’s belt, now crunched tight against my crotch.

  We began, slowly, to dance, holding each other like lovers. No music; no sound at all but the crackling of the campfire. For a while I kept my eyes open, staring at the dark trees beyond the firelight so I wouldn’t have to look at Rashid and Steck. But Leeta had her eyes closed, with the shadow of a smile on her wrinkled face…dreaming of other dances, I suppose, other men, or maybe other women from her long-ago male years.

  I tried to get dreamy myself: to think of past dances with Cappie and others, to think of anything besides the smell of wilted daisies curling up from Leeta’s hair and the prickle of animal claws digging into my chest.

  Slow rocking, shifting back and forth from one foot to the other…not really a dance at all, no steps, no explicit rhythm, just that slow movement. I wondered if I should lead: I was the man, I should lead. But when I tried directing our motion, toes got in the way of toes and Leeta’s hand clenched into a fist where it rested against my back.

  I gave up steering.

  Time passed. The fire faded to coals. Gradually, the claws on my sash, the milkweed pods, everything else prodding between our tightlocked bodies tweaked into more comfortable positions and drifted out of my consciousness. Leeta and I danced together in the quiet dark, alone among the trees. Distracting thoughts about Rashid, Steck and Cappie slipped away, as I stopped worrying about what I was supposed to do. I stopped thinking much at all—time blurred and thought blurred, but the dance went on.

  Two people in the sleeping forest.

  Back and forth in the quiet dark.

  At some point, we stopped. Neither of us made the decision; the dance was simply over, and we clung motionless to each other for a time that might have been seconds or minutes. Then we parted, blinking in slow surprise, like children awakened from sleep. I wondered if I should do something—maybe bow and say, “Thank you.” But a leaden awkwardness weighed me down so strongly I couldn’t speak. I turned away, looking off into the forest…away from Leeta, away from Rashid and Steck whose presence I had just remembered. Despite the warmth of high summer, I felt chilled and naked.

  Leeta poked the fire with a stick. Maybe she was stirring the coals; maybe she just felt as awkward as I did, and needed time to draw in on herself. After a moment, she muttered, “That’s it. It’s done.” She kept her head bent over the ashes.

  “That’s it?” Rashid asked. “That was the whole ceremony?”

  “That’s all it had to be,” Leeta replied. Her voice sounded choked; for some reason, I worried she was angry at me.

  “But nothing happened!” Rashid protested loudly.

  “Things happened,” Leeta answered, still not looking at anyone. “You can’t put two people together without things happening. Maybe folks on the outside can’t see the change, but it’s real. When you’re quiet and tired enough, you stop posing and you stop worrying. For a few seconds, you aren’t trying to be something other than what you are; for a few seconds, two people are real, and balanced. Me and the boy, Mistress Night and Master Day. Then, of course, we go back to posing again, because reality is terrifying; but we made the balance, and we made the difference.”

  At that moment, I admired her: her faith. She was clearly embarrassed to defend the ritual in front of Rashid—Leeta probably knew about rotations, revolutions and axial tilts too—yet she’d come out here to dance anyway, because that’s what a priestess did. The only magic in the entire universe might be inside her own head; but that could be enough.

  Maybe it had to be enough.

&nb
sp; Rashid opened his mouth to ask another question, to dissect the moment, to explore our quaintly absurd “superstitions”…but he was interrupted by an arrow speeding out of the darkness and an explosion of violet flame.

  FIVE

  A Bribe for Bonnakkut

  A second arrow followed on the nock of the first and this time I had a better glimpse of what happened. The arrow shot straight for Rashid’s unhelmeted skull; but before it penetrated his temple, the arrowhead struck an invisible barrier and vaporized in a crackling burst of violet light. That arrowhead was made of flint, flint which blazed like straw falling into a blacksmith’s forge…and the flame burned so hot, it incinerated the arrow’s shaft and fletching with the same gout of fire. The flash left an afterimage of purple streaked across my vision, but in the ensuing darkness, I could blearily see a violet outline surrounding Rashid from head to toe.

  The outline extended around Steck, still cuddled against Rashid’s knee.

  Another arrow brought another eye-watering explosion as the barb struck the violet fringe…and it occurred to me, Leeta and I should hightail it out of the target area before we regretted not having violet fringes of our own. I looked around for Leeta, intending to shield her with my body as we crawled away—it’s a man’s duty to safeguard the women of his village. Leeta, however, had already scurried into the darkness on her own initiative; so instead of making a strategic withdrawal as the heroic protector of a vulnerable woman, I scuttled into the bushes like a raccoon caught stealing garbage.

  I found a place to crouch behind a bigger-than-average birch and waited as a flurry of violet flashes speckled the blackness. How many archers were out there? Probably the whole Warriors Society. Cappie must have dragged them out of their beds when she got back to town, and they’d followed Steck’s heavy-booted tracks from the marsh to this clearing. The first few arrows were aimed at Rashid, so Cappie must have told the men about his stink-smoke weapon; now the shots split half and half between knight and Neut, trying to pierce the violet barrier that shielded the two.

  “Is this really necessary?” Rashid called over the crack and sizzle of arrows burning. “My force field was designed by some very smart beings in the League of Peoples. Unless you’re carrying laser rifles or gas bombs, you don’t have a chance of touching us.”

  As far as I could see, he was right: the barrage was a waste of arrows. Then again, men of the Warriors Society weren’t famous for developing new strategies. If something didn’t fall down when they hit it with a stick, they’d try again with a bigger stick. If they emptied their quivers on Rashid and Steck, the Warriors would probably whack away with spears, and swords, and that big steel ax our First Warrior Bonnakkut always bragged about.

  It put me in a quandary, that ax. Did I want to close my eyes when Bonnakkut swung it at Rashid, so I wouldn’t be dazzled when the ax exploded? Or did I want to watch, so I’d see the expression on Bonnakkut’s face when his precious baby turned to smoke in his hands?

  Tough choice. A flash that big might permanently blind me, but it could be worth it to see Bonnakkut reduced to steamy tears. Why did I hate him so much? Let’s just say Warrior Bonnakkut was not a music lover. He was five years older than me, and had always been jealous of the attention I got for being talented. Bonnakkut wasn’t talented; he was only big and strong and mean. Apparently that was enough to win his way to the top of the Warriors Society in record time.

  You had to worry about the safety of Tober Cove, if this ineffectual volley of arrows was typical of Bonnakkut’s “tactics.”

  Rashid did nothing despite the commotion. He continued to sit on the ledge where he’d watched the dance, one arm wrapped around the Neut’s shoulders. With his other hand, he shielded his eyes from the bursts of violet flame that flared a finger’s width away from his face. I had to admire his composure; if I were the target of so many archers I’d be flinching constantly, no matter how protected I was by diabolic fires.

  The arrows were still flying when Leeta stuck her head from behind a nearby tree and called, “I’m only a foolish woman, but perhaps you might humor me.” Those words always started a Mocking Priestess homily, and Tober custom dictated that people stop what they were doing to let her speak. I figured it was fifty-fifty whether Bonnakkut would let the other warriors quit shooting; but maybe he thought Leeta would suggest a more effective way of killing the outsiders, and he was ready to listen. The forest fell silent: no thrum of bows, no cracks of flame.

  Leeta cleared her throat. “I just wanted to say perhaps you should save your arrows for when they might be useful. It’s exciting to watch them go pop and make pretty lights…but suppose a wildcat or bear shows up in the pastures before Fletcher Wingham has a chance to make more ammunition. We’d lose sheep and cattle, wouldn’t we? People wouldn’t like that.”

  “They don’t like Neuts either,” a deep voice shouted back. Bonnakkut, of course.

  “That’s true,” Leeta agreed, “but your arrows aren’t solving the Neut problem, are they?”

  “There is no Neut problem,” Rashid said, rising to his feet. Steck stood quickly too, wrapping an arm around Rashid’s waist; I could just make out the violet glow surrounding both of them. “Steck and I won’t harm anything,” Rashid went on. “We just want to observe your ceremony tomorrow.”

  “You can’t,” Bonnakkut snapped. “Steck was banished twenty years ago, legal and proper. And Cappie said you claim to be a scientist. That’s against the law too.”

  “All these laws against being something,” Rashid grimaced. “Don’t you have any laws against doing things? Like trying to kill visitors who come in peace?”

  Steck said, “The Patriarch was not noted for his hospitality.”

  “I’m prepared to be lenient,” Bonnakkut said in an unlenient tone of voice. “If you leave immediately, we’ll let you go.”

  “Oh, very generous.” Rashid rolled his eyes.

  “Otherwise, we’ll kill you here and now.”

  If those words had been said by anyone but Bonnakkut, I might have held my tongue; but I’d hated him ever since he was a twelve-year-old girl who shoved my sheet music down an outhouse hole. I couldn’t pass up the chance to rub his nose in his inadequacies, even if it meant siding with outsiders. “Come on, Bonnakkut,” I shouted from the cover of the bushes, “you can’t make a dent in these two. Stop pretending to be effective and escort them back to the cove. Let the mayor and council sort out this mess.”

  Bushes rustled on the far side of the clearing and Bonnakkut stepped out. In the darkness, I could only make out his silhouette: massive shoulders, massive chest, massive ax held in one hand. “So,” he said, pointing the ax-head at me, “look who’s become a Neut lover. Why doesn’t that surprise me?”

  “It surprises me,” Steck said, craning Its Neut neck to peer at me. “Where’d you find this sudden streak of common sense?”

  “The solstice dance breeds common sense,” Leeta answered, saving me the trouble of an excuse. “The dance puts things in perspective.”

  “And while we’re brimming over with perspective,” Rashid said brightly, “shall we go to Tober Cove?”

  “Taking you to the cove would start a riot,” Bonnakkut replied, planting himself and his ax squarely in front of us all. “We don’t want riots.”

  “Neither do I,” Rashid assured him. “I’m one hundred percent in favor of tranquility. You’re some kind of local town guard?”

  “I’m Bonnakkut, First Warrior of the Tober Warriors Society. I protect the peace.”

  “Hence, the repetition of ‘warrior’ in your official title,” Rashid murmured. Then in a louder voice, he said, “I happen to be carrying an official peace offering for the leader of the local constabulary. This seems like an excellent time to pass it on.”

  Without waiting for a reply, Rashid reached into a pouch on his thigh and pulled out something I couldn’t see in the darkness. “This,” he told Bonnakkut, “is a classic Beretta Model 92F automatic. You know what
that is?”

  “A firearm,” Bonnakkut said. “A pistol. It shoots bullets.”

  “Indeed it does. It holds fifteen 9mm Parabellum cartridges, and Steck has another sixty rounds in her luggage. The powder and primer are guaranteed fresh. You could probably sell each bullet for twenty crowns on the black market in Feliss City. As for the gun itself…what would you say, Steck, five thousand crowns for a mint condition 92F?”

  “It depends whether buyers in Feliss know anything about guns,” Steck replied. “A lot of so-called collectors can’t tell the difference between a perfectly maintained pistol like this, and some rust-eaten thing that will blow off your hand when you try to fire it.”

  “You’re giving me the gun?” Bonnakkut asked, not quite tuned up to pitch with the conversation yet.

  “No, he’s not,” Leeta said fiercely. “The last thing Tober Cove needs is a new way to hurt people. Shame on you, Lord Rashid, for bringing it.”

  “A responsible man like the First Warrior will only use the gun for reasonable ends.” Rashid held out the weapon to Bonnakkut, butt first. “Here you go.”

  “Is this a bribe?” Bonnakkut asked.

  “Yes,” Leeta replied.

  “No,” said Rashid, “it’s a peace bond. To show I support the laws of Tober Cove and those who enforce them. Go ahead, take it.”

  “Don’t you dare,” Leeta ordered.

  But cautiously, Bonnakkut shuffled forward, holding his ax at the ready in case…well, I don’t know what he expected Rashid or Steck to do, but whatever it was, they didn’t do it. They stood placidly while Bonnakkut reached out, took the pistol, and hurried back away.