Commitment Hour

with Steck. Teggeree was saying, 'If you really want to keep your identity secret, Lord Rashid, we'd better…'

The mayor's voice died away as he saw Cappie and me sitting on the steps.

'We can keep secrets,' Cappie said coldly.

'Good,' Rashid smiled. 'The council and I have come to an agreement, and it would be better for all concerned—'

'Better for the prosperity of the cove,' Teggeree put in smugly.

'Yes,' Rashid continued, 'better for everyone if we don't spread rumors about Neuts and other complicated issues.'

'Then why not leave, and take Steck with you?' Cappie asked.

'I'll leave tomorrow, after I see Master Crow and Mistress Gull,' Rashid replied. 'In the meantime, we can disguise Steck — conceal the nature of her gender, at any rate — so we won't upset the rest of the village. I want you to swear you won't tell what's happened here tonight, till after I'm gone.'

'You have to swear on the Patriarch's Hand,' Teggeree added.

Cappie rose to her feet. 'Why should I?'

'Cappie!' That was me, shocked. People didn't talk like that to our mayor.

But Cappie gave me a dark look and turned back to glare at Rashid and Teggeree. 'I'm only a foolish woman,' she said in precise tones, 'but perhaps you might humor me.'

The mayor's jaw dropped open. He stared at her, then let go of Rashid and craned his neck toward the open hall door, where Leeta stood amidst the Elders. Leeta took a shy step forward, lowered her eyes, and mumbled toward the ground, 'I've invited Cappie to become the next Mocking Priestess.'

'It seems to me,' Cappie said loudly, 'that if the council has good reason to permit strangers to observe Commitment Day — the most central event in our lives and the thing that makes us unique from everyone else on Earth — it seems to me if the council has good reason for this decision, there's no need to keep it secret from other Tobers. If it's the right thing to do, everyone will agree when you explain. They'll say, 'Yes, it's a good thing you're allowing a Neut to mingle with our children. It's a good thing you've welcomed a scientist.' '

'Rashid is more than a scientist,' Leeta sighed. 'He's the scientist. King of all other scientists on Earth. He's the Knowledge-Lord of Spark.'

SEVEN An Oath for the Patriarch's Man

Leeta's news set me back a pace. As far as I knew, we'd never had a Spark Lord within a hundred klicks of Tober Cove. Spark law only allows fourteen Lords at most, and an average generation has just five or six — way too few to visit every little village on Earth. On top of that, the Lords are too busy to worry about peaceful places like our cove, because they spend their lives stopping wars and fighting demons in more complicated parts of the planet. Between battles, they have their hands full with other important work, making medicines, organizing food shipments in time of famine, and leaning on provincial Governors who get too uppity for the good of their people.

Tober Cove had never had the sort of trouble that warrants a Spark Lord's attention. It made me wonder what kind of mess we were in, to get the Knowledge- Lord now. But at least I knew why the Elders had welcomed Rashid with open arms. All the stories about the Sparks drive one message home: they get their way in the end, so you might as well give in right off.

I wasn't the only one unsettled by a Spark in our midst. Cappie's stern expression wilted and she whipped away to face out into the dark. Anyone would feel crestfallen to deliver her first homily as Mocking Priestess, then have it swept aside by the intervention of a Lord; still, I fussed that Cappie had just put me into that toss-up situation all men hate. Was I supposed to go over and say comforting there-there's? Or should I leave her alone till she'd recovered from the disappointment?

Leaving her alone finally won out. If I tried to comfort her and she pushed me away, I'd be embarrassed in front of important people.

'All right,' I said, pretending to ignore Cappie's sulk, 'we'll swear not to tell anybody about tonight… at least till Lord Rashid leaves the cove.'

'Then let's finish this,' yawned one of the Elders — Vaygon the Seedster. 'We're losing sleep here.'

People chuckled. Vaygon had a reputation for sleeping twenty-two hours a day. Any time you ventured into the seed storehouse, you'd find him sprawled across burlap bags of wheat and corn, snoring as loud as a sow. Someone (maybe his wife Veen) had spread the rumor it was good luck to have Vaygon sleep on your seed. People would bring all kinds of unlikely things for him to use as pillows — sacks of potatoes, vines of hops, even bundles of cuttings from apple trees — all in the hope that a night under Vaygon's head would make the plants flourish. A normal man might find it a challenge to sleep on apple branches, but Vaygon was a master at his trade. If we didn't let him get back to bed, some poor farmer's strawberry crop might come up sour next year.

Elders at the back of the crowd murmured, then parted to let someone shuffle through: old Hakoore, the Patriarch's Man. He was three-quarters blind and sickly with arthritis, but still a rattlesnake, spitting venom at the slightest deviation from the Patriarch's Law. I wondered what Hakoore thought about giving permission for a Neut to return to the cove… but the Patriarch's authority had come straight from the High Lord of Spark, so the Patriarch's successors could hardly oppose Spark now.

Hakoore had his arms wrapped around a golden box the size of a newborn baby: a tawdry sort of box, scratched and tarnished and dented. Even in its prime, the box couldn't have been much to look at. Its surface was only imitation gold, maybe imitation brass, and the four sides were embossed with indistinct reliefs of stiff men and women in pleated robes. Down-peninsula, I'd seen better looking window planters; but the box still held the greatest treasure in all Tober Cove. As Hakoore opened the lid, even Rashid leaned over to get a better look of what lay inside.

The box held a human hand — said to be the Patriarch's hand, doused with salt and herbs to keep it from crumbling to dust a hundred and fifty years after its owner's death. As children, Cappie and I made up stories about the hand: that it crawled out of its box at night and strangled you if you said bad things about the Patriarch; or that the original hand had rotted years ago, and a succession of Patriarch's Men kept replacing it with hands chopped off thieves or Neuts. I could list a dozen such tales… but you know the stories children whisper to each other on blustery afternoons when there's thunder in the distance.

The hand was a central part of Tober life. Couples getting married had to kiss it to seal their vows; newborn babies got it laid across their chests as a blessing, and it was laid there again at their funerals. The hand would even play a sideways role in the Commitment festivities; when Mistress Gull came to take Cappie and me away to Birds Home, we each had to carry a chicken foot, symbolizing the hand, symbolizing the Patriarch.

Hakoore thrust the box toward me. I reached inside to touch the hand with my fingertips; the skin felt like paper. My foster father always said he cringed to see Tobers touch 'that dirty old thing.' He worried about us contracting an illness… although I doubted anyone could get sick from contact with the Patriarch, the pure antithesis of Master Disease.

'Swear,' Hakoore hissed. Hakoore always hissed, and seldom more than a few words at a time. Some folks claimed he had a festering growth in his throat; others said he just spoke that way to make your skin crawl.

I shrugged to show I wasn't intimidated, then said, 'I swear I'll conceal the true identities of Lord Rashid and Steck until they've left the cove. Okay?'

'Fine by me,' Rashid answered.

'The girl must swear too.' Hakoore got a lot of hissing into that sentence — even the words without S's.

'Do you really want a Mocking Priestess to touch your precious relic?' Cappie asked. 'Aren't you afraid I might contaminate the hand… say, with common sense?'

'Oh, boy,' I muttered under my breath. A few Elders groaned stronger oaths; some glared at me, as if I were responsible for what she said. I tried to look innocent, the picture of a reasonable man, and said, 'Cappie, aren't you taking this priestess thing too far?'

Okay — I should have known Cappie wasn't prepared to listen to reason. In fact, she suddenly looked prepared to claw my eyes out; and she might have done so, if Steck of all people hadn't stepped protectively in front of me. I wanted to tell the Neut I could look after myself… but I decided to save that for a less public moment.

Leeta hurried into the middle of everything, dithering vaguely to Hakoore, the mayor and Cappie. 'Now, now,' she said. 'Now, now. It's true a priestess doesn't swear on the hand. If necessary, she swears on a stone or a tree, you know, something real. Which is not to say the hand isn't real. Anyway, it's not an illusion. But the point is, Cappie, you aren't priestess yet, are you? To be priestess, you have to be a woman, and you aren't fully a woman until you've Committed. People change their minds at the last moment, you know they do. They promise they'll Commit as a woman, and then at the last moment…' Leeta cast a glance at Steck. 'At the last moment, they get other ideas,' she finished. 'So I'm not rejecting you, Cappie, I still want you to be my successor, but claiming the rights of office tonight… that's premature, don't you think?'

Whenever Leeta went into her wooly-headed old woman act, it became impossible to stay angry. Annoyed, yes — especially if you had pressing business. But even Cappie in full temper couldn't blaze hot enough to burn through Leeta's dampening babble. Cappie sputtered and guttered and shrank down to sullen coals of resentment. Lowering her eyes, she mumbled, 'All right. Let's get this over with.'

'Swear!' Hakoore hissed, and thrust the mummified hand toward her.

Cappie reached out to touch it; but as she did, Steck bent, picked up a small stone, and dropped it into her other hand. 'Nothing says you can't hold a stone the same time you touch the hand,' Steck told her. 'Who knows which you're really swearing by?'

Hakoore's face twisted with hatred. Rashid, however, clapped Steck on the back. 'Excellent compromise!' Cappie smiled a fierce smile. Touching both stone and hand, she quickly recited the same oath I had.

'That's fine,' Mayor Teggeree said, taking a step back from the furious Hakoore. 'Now, shall we wend our separate ways to bed? We don't want to fall asleep in the middle of tomorrow's feast.' He favored us with a mayoral chuckle.

'Do Fullin and I have to go back to the marsh?' Cappie asked. I was glad she'd spoken up; otherwise I'd be obliged to, and I didn't want to draw Hakoore's wrath.

Hakoore didn't answer immediately. When his rage really caught fire, he didn't snap; he took his time, thought things over, then attacked you in cold blood. 'So,' he hissed at Cappie, 'you think you're exempt from vigil? That it's beneath you?'

'I think it's pointless,' she replied, with no apparent fear. 'We aren't going to catch any ducks — Steck sabotaged our nets. And I'm sure you don't want us to set