The League of Peoples

by James Alan Gardner

  “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.

  It’s hard for me to imagine what it’s like to have a single, unified soul. When you’re just one person, everything that happens in your life can only happen to you; it’s always immediate. With most of us…well, when I was a girl of five, I decided I didn’t like oatmeal. I don’t know why—kids sometimes get attacks of the Stubborns, and then it becomes a matter of honor: no oatmeal would ever pass my lips. I tried to tell Cappie that oatmeal was poison…some complicated tale about the Mishi pirates crossing wheat with poison ivy and getting oats. No doubt I drove poor Zephram to distraction; not to mention, it was all empty pigheadedness after the first few days, just an obstinate refusal to admit I was making a fuss over nothing.

  Then summer solstice came, I turned male, and my old pointless obstinacy seemed like someone else’s problem. I had different areas of stubbornness—that was when I began plink-plink-plinking at my mother’s violin—but fighting about oatmeal just wasn’t worth the headaches. Yes, I could remember that it was important to me only the day before; but I felt as if my sister self had told me it should be important, not that I really believed it myself.

  So I started to eat oatmeal. And by the time I turned female again, it was all a dead issue.

  You see how it works? When you’re two people, some of your extreme rough edges get rounded out. Hates, loves, frights…my male half’s fear of snapping turtles used to be much worse. He used to be paralyzed with terror at the thought of going down to the dock where he saw the girl get bitten. But the next year, I wasn’t so afraid—the fear wasn’t so immediate. I worked up the courage to go to the waterfront now and then; and by the time I turned male again, I could draw on my female experiences of sitting on the docks with nothing bad happening.

  Only one version of me had the truly intense fear. The other could cope…and the first one could learn from the coping.

  The Patriarch never experienced that restful kind of distancing. His fears always clutched him; his resentments stayed hot at the boil, like a kettle that never gets taken off the stove; his loves (if he had any) never got the chance to mellow and rearrange themselves.

  He was a violin that always played the same tune…and his only possible variation was to play louder and louder.

  The Patriarch’s mother made a token effort to expose him to women’s culture: sent him now and then to talk with the priestess, for example. It didn’t work. “He saw the falseness of women’s ways,” Hakoore preached…which probably meant that he felt out of place surrounded by girls and made a fierce nuisance of himself until the priestess told him to leave. He never learned womanly skills like cooking, sewing, and tending the sick: skills aimed at helping other people more than yourself.

  But the most crucial lack in the Patriarch’s life was that he never gave birth. He never felt a life emerge from him, never felt the needy sucking at his breast soften into contentment.

  Zephram tells me there are plenty of good fathers in the South: men who have
always been male, but still cherish and keep their children with loving devotion. I hope that’s true. Still, a voice in my mind whispers that Tobers are different. Every father in the village has also been a mother. Every father knows.

  You take bullies like the Warriors Society: even Mintz, the meanest of the bunch. In his last year as female, Mintz wasn’t a model mother, but he gave it a genuine effort. He nursed his son; he changed diapers; he sang self-conscious lullabies when the baby wouldn’t sleep, and screamed at the doctor, “Make him better!” when the boy picked up a case of the sniffles. Mintz Committed as male because he knew he wasn’t cut out for nurturing…but he still cared for his child in a haphazard way. A few times in the previous year, on my way to the marsh for violin practice, I’d met Mintz and his daughter out searching for medicinal herbs—she’d got the idea she wanted to take over as Healer when Gorallin retired. And Mintz, who wouldn’t know a medicinal herb if it cleared up his eczema, was out with his kid to make sure she didn’t drown in a sinkhole and to let her know, “Yes, I believe you’re smart enough to be a doctor.”

  No one, not even Hakoore, could imagine the Patriarch getting his shoes muddy for the sake of a child’s dream. So ask yourself what a man like that might do in a town where everyone else does have a fierce concern for children.

  There’s an old saying that children are “hostages to fate”: dependents who make any parent think twice about stepping out of line. And when the person who draws the line is an angry man who doesn’t give a damn what happens to kids…

  …you’ve got the secret of the Patriarch’s success.

  The rest of the Patriarch’s story you can fill in yourself. Or you could see it in the paintings on the walls of the Patriarch’s Hall. The Patriarch taking the oath of office as mayor (after a campaign of bribery and intimidation had eliminated other contenders). The Patriarch posing with his cadre of hand-chosen warriors (stupid teenaged boys who liked seeing fear in adult eyes). The Patriarch being blessed by Father Ash and Mother Dust (while somewhere not shown in the picture, warriors held the Father’s and Mother’s families in “protective custody”).