Commitment Hour

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.

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 un-helmeted 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 wearily 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