The League of Peoples

by James Alan Gardner

  “I’ll get Leeta,” Cappie said. She gave Steck a little smile, but the Neut only responded with a nod. I realized it was hard for Steck, turning down a chance to do priestess work after so many years.

  My mother is sad, I thought; my mother is a sad woman. I couldn’t help remembering how Zephram had visited her during the Silence of Mistress Snow. Out of all the doors in the village, Steck’s was the last one for someone to enter.

  Cappie went to pick up Leeta. Together they would break the news to Bonnakkut’s mother, Kenna.

  As for me, I got conscripted to escort Rashid to Hakoore’s, while Steck stayed with the body. I expected Steck to protest, but she didn’t. She seemed subdued, possibly thinking how she had lost the chance to become comforter to the women of our village…possibly thinking something completely different. I couldn’t read my mother’s mind.

  It was only a minute later, as I was leading Rashid up the trail, that it occurred to me Steck might be happy for a chance alone with the body…if she’d had anything to do with the murder. She could check to make sure she hadn’t left behind any clues.

  “You know she’s my mother,” I said to Rashid.

  “Who?”

  “Steck. Maria. Whatever you want to call her. She’s my mother.”

  “You’re joking.”

  “She’s from Tober Cove. She has to be someone’s mother.”

  Rashid stopped walking. “I never thought of that. You all have children, don’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “No exceptions?”

  “Some girls turn out to have medical problems. But Steck wasn’t one of them.”

  “And you’re her…” He didn’t say the word. “Is that why she wanted to kill you last night?”

  “It was why she went to the marsh to find me—she knew it was my year to be there. The knife fight was just an impromptu thing.”

  “Because you tried to kill her first.”

  I shrugged. “Cappie overreacted.”

  “For a quiet little village,” Rashid said, “Tober Cove has a wicked taste for blood.”

  “We’re fine when Steck’s not around.”

  “Don’t speak ill of your mother.” He paused. “She’s really your mother?”

  “Steck didn’t tell you?”

  He didn’t answer. He didn’t have to.

  I’d never met anyone as important as Rashid, but I’d heard plenty of stories: official ones taught in school, as well as campfire talk at sunset. Bozzles weren’t supposed to keep secrets from their masters. There should be a lake full of trust between Bozzle and master, with no one quietly peeing when the water’s over your waist. Too much of that starts killing the fish.

  Cappie once told me I should stay away from metaphors.

  “I just wanted you to know,” I told Rashid, “Steck had an ulterior motive getting you to come here.”

  “To watch her child Commit,” Rashid answered after a pause. “That’s no crime, Fullin. It’s an important day in your life, isn’t it?”

  “The most important.”

  “What kind of mother would she be if she didn’t want to see you? Perfectly understandable…perfectly natural.” His voice was getting stronger, more definite. “This shows quite a positive side to Steck’s character.”

  “You’re making excuses for her,” I said. “Is she your lover?”

  Rashid coughed. “Where I come from, boys don’t ask that about their mothers.”

  “Where I come from, they do. Do you love her?”

  “You tell me,” he answered. “How do you feel about her? One minute you’re screaming, ‘Kill the Neut,’ and the next I can see you thinking she’s not so bad.”

  “One minute she acts hateful, and the next she lets on she might be a human being.”

  “That’s Steck,” Rashid admitted. He started walking again, the plastic soles of his boots clicking when they touched any pimples of limestone poking up through the soil.

  I fell in behind him. “My father still loves her,” I said. “At least I think he does. Or maybe it just pains him she’s lonely.”

  Rashid murmured, “Sometimes that kind of pain passes for love.”

  I couldn’t argue with him. My mother seemed to have the same effect on a lot of people.

  The village streets had come alive with children and parents. Breakfast was finished, and everyone wanted to squeeze in some playtime before the gods arrived at noon. The most popular game had to be Catch: Catch with bright rubber balls bought down-peninsula, or floppy homemade pouches stuffed with dried corn kernels. Mothers threw easy lobs straight to their children’s hands, while fathers made the kids run, work for their successes. But all the parents were watching with keen bright eyes—trying to memorize how their boys and girls used their bodies, because it was all about to change.

  I’ve already mentioned how my female half felt awkward in my male body the night before. The same thing happened every year at the solstice switchover…except that it was more confusing when you were only five or six. Your hands were bigger or smaller, your eyes weren’t the same height above the ground, and it always looked like your feet weren’t the right distance away. It was worse come puberty: the presence or absence of breasts, the difference in how your weight sat around your hips, and of course, the variations in sheer muscular strength and stamina—not that your male half always had the physical advantage. Female-Me went into a growth spurt at thirteen, and Male-Me didn’t catch up until sixteen. My two halves had a full head difference during those years, and that meant embarrassing clumsiness for weeks after each transition. Parents found that kind of awkwardness amusing and endearing…which is why they made a point of testing their kids’ coordination just before changeover and would repeat the same games when the children came home again.

  The kids checked themselves out just as thoroughly after each change. You just couldn’t help staring at yourself. A whole year had passed since you had occupied your other self, and even if the body had just been sleeping in Birds Home, it had still been growing—changing—while your eyes and brain had been living elsewhere.

  You heard a different voice echoing in your head.

  So you marveled at your arms: they had hair or they didn’t, and all the moles and freckles you’d been used to were now replaced by a different set, ones you vaguely remembered from a year ago but which seemed darker or bigger…more noticeable anyway, and you thought all the other kids would gawk at these strange marks on your skin.

  And my oh my, your skin…especially once you hit puberty. You couldn’t help touching your skin. It was skin exactly like the skin you lusted after just days before. I don’t know why my skin had such an effect on me. Of course, there were also the overtly sexual body parts, and yes, a lot of teenagers (including yours truly) held solitary Orgasm Derbies every day for a week after each gender swap; but for me, having different skin was always the most arousing change. Male in a male body, I might find myself remembering how my female half had longed to stroke a boy’s chest or thighs, to feel muscles close beneath the skin, the hard warmth…and female in a female body, I still recalled the pure lust that boiled in my brother self at the sight of a mere bare shoulder…

  You felt sexy. That’s the simple truth. You looked at your skin, your legs, your body, and you knew you were sexy. You knew how the opposite sex burned in your presence. And for a few weeks, until you got caught up in your own new burning, you knew you were wonderfully, powerfully desirable.

  In those few weeks, lovemaking was always lazily relaxed—enthusiastic to be sure, because you’d slept for a year and were juiced up now with the urge to take your newly regained equipment for a ride. But for a while, you never asked, “Does he like me? Does she want me?” You possessed a comfortable confidence, knowing you had what your bedpartner craved.

  Doubt only surfaced later: when the sweat-sheen dried and the whispers in the dark strayed into topics beyond, “Isn’t this great!” When you had to deal with each other as people instead
of bodies. When, “Of course he wants me!” gained the tag, “But does he want me the right way?” When your sweetheart wanted to set a definite time to get together and you preferred to play it by ear.

  When being who you were stopped being a delicious novelty, and settled back into a snarled tangle of normal humanity.

  Suddenly, the realization struck me: after today, I’d never experience that golden self-wonder again. I’d be myself, day after day, locked into a single identity till I died.

  Feeling that, I knew the real reason why parents came out into the streets to play Catch with their children: to remember when they thought they’d never stop being new.

  Hakoore and Dorr lived in a house of gray flagstone, meticulously preserved since OldTech times. No doubt it had taken a few tumbles in the four hundred years since OldTech civilization committed suicide…but when a flagstone wall collapses, you can just stack the stones again, using fresh mortar and timber framing. Wood houses rot, and bricks erode one pock at a time; Master Stone, however, gives his children a chilly permanence, so they can last to see the Great Arrival at the culmination of all things.

  Dorr came out even before we had set foot on the porch. I don’t know what she had been trying to do with her hair—mere minutes ago in front of the Council Hall, it had been combed to ignorable anonymity. Now one side was clumped like a haymow, while the other was frazzled to the consistency of a bird’s nest that’s been gale-whacked out of its tree. It was the kind of mess a seven-year-old girl makes when she discovers the principle of “teasing,” then loses her patience halfway through. Surely Dorr was past that stage…although now that I considered it, I couldn’t remember her ever coifing herself beyond the minimal limits of neatness. Most of the time she let her hair go about its independent business, as if she were loath to burden it with her own expectations; I wondered what had sparked this sudden change.

  Did she want to impress Lord Rashid? But here she was now, meeting him nose-to-nose on the porch steps of her house without a flicker of emotion crossing her face.

  She said nothing, waiting for Rashid to speak first. Rumor whispered that Hakoore once told her she had an ugly voice, and she’d used it sparingly ever since; but sometimes I wondered if Dorr had started the rumor herself so people would hate her father. Whatever the cause for her silence, I’d seldom heard her talk over the past years…even during that odd period when Dorr just happened to be lingering outside our house every time I headed to the marsh for violin practice.

  Rashid eventually realized Dorr would not bubble out effusive welcomes, so he accepted the conversational duties himself. “Hello. We’re looking for the Patriarch’s Man.” He spoke slower and enunciated more clearly than usual. Perhaps he thought Dorr was wrong in the head…not an unnatural conclusion for anyone looking at her semi-threshed hair.

  “We have to see Hakoore,” I told her. “You could say it’s official.”

  Dorr raised an eyebrow.

  “Nothing to do with his visiting me in the marsh,” I said hastily. “Something else that’s come up.”

  She shrugged and held out her hand. To me. The gesture was surprising enough that I put my hand in hers without thinking. She closed her fingers carefully, as if worried about causing me pain—evidence that she must know what Hakoore did to me in the marsh—but after a moment, she gripped me warmly and pulled me forward up the stairs.

  This was strange behavior, even for Dorr. Yes, she’d had that crush-smush on me when I was fourteen, but that had vanished as uneventfully as it first arose. These days when I played violin for weddings and such, I still noticed her watching me with glittering intensity…but Dorr was glittering and intense about everything she did.

  Besides, I was used to people ogling me as I performed. The price of talent.

  Had Dorr been oiling a torch for me all this time? Maybe letting it flare brighter, now that Cappie and I weren’t cooing with domestic bliss? Had she made an effort to gussy up her hair to catch my eye—one last kick at the can on the day I would choose a sex for the rest of my life?

  And had she thought of this on her own, or had Hakoore put her up to it?

  Oooo. Ugh.

  I could just imagine the old snake whipping into his daughter, hissing about her duty to the Patriarch. “Granddaughter, go influence that young weasel.” Dorr would diligently set about prettifying her hair, and just as diligently sabotage the whole effort in submerged protest against Grandpa’s dictatorial ways. It had nothing to do with me—she might still find me attractive, even as she beat her hair with a whisk to scare me off. Somewhere in the quirks of her mind (maybe the same place where her unsettling quilt designs got hatched), she might even be drawn by the idea of submitting herself to her granddad’s disciple, the same way she submitted to Hakoore himself.

  The Patriarch’s Man was forbidden to marry, but he was definitely allowed to dally. Way back when, the Patriarch had supposedly sampled all the women in the village—with their flattered permission, of course. Hakoore was now too old for fleshly urges—at least I hoped he was, because the idea of him tangling sheets with a woman made my stomach churn gravel—but in his day (I had it on good authority), he besported himself in accordance with the Patriarch’s outreach-to-the-masses example.

  Would that be my life if I became Hakoore’s disciple? And was Dorr now holding my hand because the idea baited some hook in her mind? Maybe Hakoore didn’t need to pressure her more than a nudge…not if she’d been waiting all her life for an excuse to approach me.

  Or maybe I was reading too much into simple hand-holding. This might just have been her unschooled attempt at being a good hostess…or perhaps sympathy for how her grandfather had bruised my knuckles at dawn.

  Sometimes I wish the gods had given us the ability to read each other’s minds. Alternating genitalia each year is nice, but there are questions it doesn’t begin to answer.

  The interior of Hakoore’s house smelled of Dorr’s dyes: dampish plants from onions to bloodwort, some fresh, some crinkling their way into the late stages of decomposition. I knew she kept her mixings in the basement—during my female years, I sometimes bought dyes here rather than make my own—but the odors barged their way out of the cellar with the determination of a drunkard, settling thickly into the cloth oversheets that covered all the furniture.

  Those oversheets were densely embroidered: a few with Dorr’s work (slanted horses stretched like taffy, winged spirits burying their faces in leaves), but mostly with the work of her mother. Dorr’s mother had been a meticulous needleworker; or more accurately, an obsessed one. From dawn to dusk, she filled her days with French knots, lazy daisies, and countless cross-stitches…literally filled the day, with no time spent on cooking, cleaning, or even getting dressed.

  No one ever told me what caused the mother’s compulsion—whether a friend had betrayed her, a lover died, or the gods spoke to her in voices that drowned out the rest of the world. Perhaps Hakoore had traumatized her with the Patriarch’s Hand, crushing her under its grip whenever she misbehaved. Whatever the reason, Dorr’s mother simply stitched with all her strength until the day Dorr turned twelve; then the mother went to the basement, drank a jugful of her most poisonous dyes, and choked her life away with smeary rainbow vomit. (“She must have dreamed of that death for years,” Zephram told me. “She must have dragged it along like a weight tied to her ankle, until it started dragging her.”)

  All of this may explain why Dorr seldom spoke, why she made the quilts she did, and why she passively submitted to her grandfather’s will…but I’m suspicious of glib hindsight analysis. It was too easy to say Dorr had slipped helplessly into her mad mother’s shoes. Dorr was not buffeted by irresistible winds in her mind; she just liked the role of someone shadowed by insanity. It shielded her. It excused her from small talk, and from her Great-Aunt Veen dropping hints that she wasn’t getting any younger. When Dorr’s baby by Master Crow died in a four-month miscarriage, Tober Cove accepted the death as the sort of bad luck
that happened to Dorr.

  (Cappie actually slapped me when I whispered Dorr might have tried a sip of the plant dyes too. Tobers aren’t supposed to know there are vegetable extracts which can spill a fetus out of the womb before its time.)

  With all these thoughts running through my head, I found myself staring at Dorr more intently than I intended…and suddenly she turned, meeting my gaze with hers. She studied me for a moment, as if debating whether to break her silence and ask that most female of questions, “What are you thinking?” I saw no madness under that mad hair—simply a woman of deep and silent privacy, in the world, but not of it. Her lips parted and she took a breath to speak; but at that moment, a cough sounded across the room and Hakoore shuffled in through the doorway.

  “What now?” he snapped.

  I had broken eye contact with Dorr the moment I heard Hakoore coming, but I still felt as if I’d been caught in some guilty act. “Bonnakkut’s dead,” I blurted. “Murdered.”

  The fingers of Dorr’s free hand brushed lightly across my wrist. It seemed more like a caress than a gesture of shock at the news. “Will you take possession of the body?” I asked Hakoore.

  “Bonnakkut?” the old man said, with a tone so sharp he obviously thought I was lying. “Bonnakkut’s been murdered?”

  “I’m afraid so,” Rashid answered. “On a trail through the woods out…” He waved his hand in the direction of Zephram’s house.

  “Who murdered him?” Hakoore asked.

  “We don’t know,” Rashid said.

  Hakoore looked at him with narrowed eyes. “Where was that Bozzle of yours?”

  “With my father,” I said immediately. I don’t know if I was defending Steck because she was my mother or because I was her son.

  “With your father,” Hakoore repeated. “With her old…” He hissed in disgust. “Are there any devils left in hell, or have they all come to Tober Cove today?

  Rashid looked to me as if he expected an explanation of what the old snake meant. I ignored him. “You should take possession of the body now,” I told Hakoore. “It’s already attracting insects.”