Commitment Hour (2 page)

It was a mallard, its coloration male. Under its tail, however, was nothing but a mess of bloody guts dangling where a knife had cut off a chunk of flesh.

Coloration or not, the duck wasn’t male. Not anymore.

I grabbed the bird by its neck, swung it twice around my head, then threw it with all my strength. Its wings fell open limply as it traveled, and dragged against the air; it barely cleared the reeds before it splashed into open water. For a moment I stood there panting. Then I kicked at the cattails I’d thrown on the fire. They scattered in a flurry of sparks, some hissing as they hit water. Methodically I walked around the flats, stamping on burning cattail fluff and grinding it into the mud.

The stranger had castrated my duck. The duck sent to me by the gods. The duck telling me what sex the gods wanted me to choose.

The duck had been cut neuter. Made a Neut.

I’d seen a Neut once. It was my earliest memory: a pale face, fat and blubbery, close to mine; and hands lifting me up, heaving me off the ground. I screamed, terrified—I knew this monster wanted to kill me. Then I was torn away from the thing and there were other people there, throwing stones at the Neut, thrusting at It with the butts of their spears. The Neut howled as a sharp rock opened a cut across Its forehead. It looked back at me once, hungrily, then fled.

That was how we Tobers treated Neuts: immediate exile, and death if the monsters ever returned. Neuts were renegades, malcontents, heretics. Untold generations of our people had chosen a permanent sex in their Commitment Hour, accepting that they had to abandon either their male or female halves…but Neuts refused to let go of either side. Neuts claimed you didn’t have to reject half your life, that people could follow both male and female ways. So Tober Cove hated Neuts with the fierce burning hate you always aim at someone who says your pain is stupid and self-imposed.

To suggest that I should turn Neut—that the gods
wanted
me to turn Neut—the thought was poison. An evil so disgusting, my brain could hardly grasp it.

“Fullin?” It was Cappie calling, very close—on the other side of the bulrushes, not far from the place where I’d called to the stranger. Perhaps she’d seen the fire I’d made with the cattails. “What are you doing on the flats?” she asked, her voice whetted sharp with anger.

“There’s someone else nearby,” I said as quietly as I could. “Someone dangerous. Don’t make any noise.”

“How could there be anyone else here?” she asked, softer but not soft.

“I don’t know what’s going on; I just know there’s trouble, all right? Go someplace safe and stay there.”

“Don’t talk to me like that!”

“Cappie, please…”

But the rushes parted and she stepped out to join me. I sighed. So much for vigil.

Surprisingly, she wore pants, bleached cotton pants. Perhaps I shouldn’t have been taken aback—pants are more practical than skirts when spending the night in a mosquito-filled marsh—but I had never seen her in pants, not in the years she was female. She must have sneaked the clothes from her father’s closet: they were much too big for her slender frame. Held sloppily at waist level by suspenders and stuffed firmly into socks at her ankles, the pants billowed in the middle like the sail of a perch boat. Her shirt billowed too, a man’s shirt so large and loose there was only a hint of her compact breasts under the cloth. And her hair…no billowing there. Her long black beautiful hair was gone. Just a few hours earlier, it had draped fluidly over her bare shoulder as her daughter Pona sucked sloppily at supper. But now Cappie’s lovely thick hair was chopped off raggedly, as short as mine.

Cappie the woman was dressed and barbered as a man. I wondered if this could be some new ploy to arouse my interest. If so, it hadn’t worked; I found it unsettling and unnatural. Commitment Day tradition allowed candidates to wear whatever they liked, but the town would still be scandalized.

“What have you done to yourself?” I blurted.

“Think about it,” was her only answer. “What are you doing here?”

Under normal circumstances, I would have lied or brushed her off—it was a reflex I’d acquired over the preceding months. Since winter, I hadn’t had the stomach to share anything with her, certainly not events that confused or disturbed me. Now, however, she looked so unlike herself that the reflex didn’t spark. I told her everything, all the while glancing furtively at her hair, her clothes. She snorted in outraged disbelief when I swore there was a second violinist; but she had figured out the music came from the duck flats and she could see I didn’t have my instrument with me.

When I finished my story, she headed immediately for her own duck trap. The brisk way she stomped off intimidated me; I didn’t go after her. In a moment I heard her curse with a phrase no woman should ever use, and something heavy splashed into the water.

She walked back slowly. In the darkness I couldn’t identify the expression on her face.

“A duck for you too?” I asked.

“Part of one. Are you going to use that spear for anything?”

“If you think I should track down the stranger, you’re wrong,” I said. “I don’t want to break vigil any more than I have already.”

“Then give
me
the spear.” She held out her hand.

“Don’t be ridiculous. You’re a woman.”

“I’m better with a spear than you are.”

I had to laugh. In her male years, yes, Cappie was an absolute master with the spear, both in target throwing and hand-to-hand fighting. If she Committed as a man, she would surely be offered initiation into the Warriors Society. But this year she was a woman and unfit to wield a weapon. Her clothes must have gone to her head.

“Go hide someplace safe,” I told her. “Down by the dead tree where we once saw the owl, remember? I’ll stay close to that tree too; if the stranger comes back, you can call for help and I’ll be right there.”

She stepped in close to me, and I thought she was coming for a hug of reassurance. I started spreading my arms. Then her fist ploughed hard into my stomach and she kicked my feet out from under me. I crumpled to the ground and lay there dizzily, the smell of mud under my nostrils.

The spear was no longer in my hand. Somewhere far above me, Cappie said, “Go hide someplace safe.”

I lay on the flats several minutes, my head spinning. Eventually I managed to flop over on my back and stare up at the stars as they reeled like drunken fireflies. My stomach fluttered on the edge of vomiting, but I had no strength to fight it down. I simply waited to see what happened…and my stomach settled, the stars slowed to a stop, and the murkiness in my brain cleared.

Cappie had breast-fed Pona at supper. She had been a woman then; I saw all the evidence anyone could need. The mood during our own meal was strained, but we were used to that. Then we had gone our separate ways to prepare for the vigil, she to her parents and I to my foster father.

Sometime after we parted, she must have been possessed by a devil. Or a legion of devils. When devils possessed a woman, they often made her think she was a man. Hakoore, the Patriarch’s Man, claimed that Commitment Eve was too holy for devils to leave their burrows, but the Mocking Priestess said it was the devils’ favorite night of the year: the air was alive with power that they sucked up with toothless mouths in their skin.

For once, it looked like the Mocking Priestess was right.

I rose painfully to my feet and looked around. Cappie was gone, my spear was gone, and I was alone in the dark.

Toward the south, somewhere near the spot where Cypress Creek smoothed over Stickleback Falls, a violin began playing again: “Don’t Make Me Choose.” The stranger obviously wanted to catch our attention. I took a deep breath, then started toward the sound.

I knew the marsh trails well. I had walked them many times as a child, violin under my chin, pretending to be a wandering troubadour. These trails taught me the power of music—my playing scared utter hell out of wildlife. Many of the marsh landmarks I’d named in honor of animals I’d frightened there. A patch of stinging nettles I’d christened Turtle Terror; a stretch of puckered mud was Heron Horror; and an OldTech horseless cart half-swallowed in bog I called the Frenzy of Frogs.

The OldTech machine was now no more than a stepping-stone across sucking muck. Four hundred years earlier, before the collapse of OldTech culture, there must have been a road running through this marsh; but it was gone now, swallowed by mud and time, just as everything else of twentieth-century Earth had been swallowed. When I was young, I sometimes like to scare myself with the image of a skeletal driver trapped inside the swampbound cart, fingers clutched on the steering wheel, bony feet still pressing the pedals. More likely, he simply abandoned the vehicle—stepped out and called to the sky, “I want to leave!” Then he was carried off to the stars by the so-called League of Peoples, just like all the other traitors who turned their backs on Earth in the Great Desertion.

Good riddance.

As I clambered onto the cart’s grille, the music ahead of me stopped in mid-phrase. I paused and listened. Silence…then a shout followed by the splash of something hitting open water. I raced forward, swiping my way through
head-high reeds till I came to a clear area on the bank of Cypress Creek itself.

Cappie stood waist-deep in the water, her spear held over her head and ready to plunge downward, as if she were going to jab a fish. I couldn’t see what she was aiming for, just black water lapping around her. She waited, holding her breath, watching the stream in front of her.

On shore near my feet was a violin bow, and a few paces off, the violin itself, lying facedown in the mud. I hurried to pick it up. It looked like a fine instrument, lighter than mine, with the scroll more ornately carved. The strings weren’t gut, but metal wire. Wire strings must last a lot longer than the gut ones I made myself; I wondered where I could get a set.

As I wiped muck off the violin’s bridge, water surged loudly behind me. I turned in time to see a stranger erupt from the creek a stone’s throw away from Cappie.

The stranger was a Neut. No doubt of that. Its homespun shirt hung wetly over full breasts that sagged slightly with age; but Its face was thickly bearded and lean as a man’s. In Its hand It held a huge knife, a machete dripping water and glinting in the starlight.

“You’d better hope my violin isn’t damaged,” the Neut said to Cappie.

“It’s all right,” I called out.

Stupid. Neither of them had noticed me yet. Cappie half-turned at the sound of my voice, and in that moment, the Neut lunged. If that lunge hadn’t been slowed by the water…but it was, and Cappie dodged in time, knocking the Neut’s machete aside with the butt of her spear. She tried to follow through with a cross swing that brought the spear point around to attacking position, but she was off balance and slow. I shouted, “Quick!” but the Neut was gone, vanished beneath the water again. Cappie stabbed out once but hit nothing.

“Watch that It doesn’t grab you underwater!” I yelled.

“Shut up,” she yelled back. But she retreated toward the riverbank, all the while holding the spear ready to drive downward. When her thighs touched the bank behind her, she stopped and waited, in fishing position again.

I set the violin on a clean bed of reeds and approached Cappie, saying, “Get out and give me the spear.”

“No.”

“You can’t fight, you’re possessed. Women are very susceptible…”

The Neut geysered up a short distance to our right. Cappie turned to meet the attack, spear held high. The spear was within reach, perhaps my only chance to get it away from her. I seized it with both hands, just as she was stabbing out.

I think I saved her life. If she had followed through, she would have run straight into the blade that the Neut thrust at her, stomach height. But my hold on the spear brought her up short, twisting her body out of the path of the knife. She granted with pain, but it was only the pain of wrenched muscles, not metal piercing flesh.

There was no time to congratulate myself. Cappie’s weight and the force of her jab jerked me forward to the edge of the creek bank. My feet slid on mud like sleigh skids on snow; for a heartbeat I stayed up, dancing for balance, then I furrowed into the water with a deep plunging sound, directly into the gap between Cappie and the Neut.

Water stung in my nostrils as my head went under. A body bumped against me; I’d lost my grip on the spear, so I punched out blindly, hoping it wasn’t Cappie. My fist was slowed by water and connected without force, but it still spooked my opponent. The body surged away from me with noisy splashing.

Good—someone was afraid of me. If it was the Neut, I was pleased; but if it was Cappie, the Neut was still out there somewhere, ready to impale me on Its knife. Without coming up for air, I kicked out into the night-black water, just trying to put distance between me and the Neut’s blade. A few strokes, and my outstretched hand collided with the opposite bank of the creek. Cautiously, I lifted my head.

The Neut, Cappie and I stood dripping in a widely spaced triangle: me against one bank, Cappie against the other, the Neut in the middle, several paces downstream. Cappie no longer held the spear; I assumed she’d lost it when I fell into the creek.

Keeping Its eyes on both of us, the Neut asked, “Is either of you named Fullin?”

The question startled me. I said, “No,” immediately, the same reflex that automatically lied to Cappie whenever she asked what I truly thought.

Cappie said nothing.

“This makes things easier,” the Neut said with a dark smile. “Two against one isn’t so bad when I have the knife.”

The Neut waded down the center of the creek, until It stood on a direct line between Cappie and me. That particular stretch of the Cypress isn’t wide—from the middle it was only a few steps to either bank, where Cappie and I waited to see which of us the monster would attack. Behind my back, my hands scrabbled for any sort of weapon: a stone I could throw, a stick I could jab at the Neut’s eyes. I found nothing but a dirty piece of driftwood, shorter than my forearm and light as a bone with the marrow sucked out. It would break into tinder with the first strike of the Neut’s knife…but I swung it up smartly and hoped that in the dark, the Neut couldn’t see how flimsy my defense was.