Commitment Hour

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').

But those things are all Male History: public events, with public reactions recorded and private consequences ignored. The facts of Male History are only important if you want to know the exact number of people the Patriarch killed in his efforts to gain power and keep it.

Numbers like that must have been of great interest to the Patriarch himself. He was that kind of man.

'Sounds like you detest him,' Rashid observed.

'That's what it sounds like,' I agreed.