I didn’t answer. He was wrong, but it seemed politic to hold my tongue.
Hakoore studied me for a moment with his milky eyes, then gave a soft snort of amusement. “Look in the boat, boy.”
We had reached the edge of the flats where the canoe’s nose was pulled up onto the mud. Snug in the middle of the boat, tucked safely under the central thwart, lay the battered false-gold box containing the Patriarch’s Hand.
What now?
I thought. Did the old snake want me to take another oath?
Hakoore released his grip on my arm. “Get it,” he said, pushing me toward the canoe. “Take it out.”
Mistrustfully, I reached down and wrapped my fingers around the brass handle on the nearest end of the box. One pull told me the container was heavier than I expected; it took several good heaves for me to drag it out from under the thwart and lift it into the air.
“Wait,” Hakoore said. He leaned into the boat and pulled out a blanket that lay under the front seat—probably one of Dorr’s own creations, but the blanket was too dirty for me to be certain. I noticed Hakoore didn’t wobble as he bent over; our Patriarch’s Man was only infirm when it suited his purpose. With a few dusty shakes, he opened up the blanket and let it settle onto the mud. “Set the box on that,” he told me. “Be careful.”
I gave him an aggrieved look. Did he think I intended to take risks with the cove’s greatest treasure? But I held my tongue. Squatting, I laid the heavy chest on the blanket. “There,” I said. “Now what is this—”
“Quiet!” he interrupted. “You’re going to learn something.” He lowered himself to his knees with the slow inevitability of an old dog taking its place by the fire. For a moment he just knelt there, stroking the tarnished gold surface with his fingers. Then he lifted the lid and exposed the mummified hand to the brightening light of dawn. It seemed smaller than it had looked last night, the skin rough and puckered. “Do you know what that is?” Hakoore asked.
“The Patriarch’s Hand,” I answered, wondering if this was a trick question.
“And I suppose you think it was cut off the Patriarch himself.”
“It wasn’t?”
He gave me the sort of look he’d been giving to lunkhead boys for forty years. “Who’d have the nerve to cut off the Patriarch’s hand? I wouldn’t. Even after he’d died, no one in the cove would dare.”
“I always assumed the Patriarch left instructions for his successor to—”
Hakoore waved me to silence. “Why would a man want to be mutilated after death? Even the Patriarch wasn’t that crazy.”
I gaped at him. No one ever called the Patriarch crazy…except for all the women in the village, and they didn’t count.
“The hand belonged to the Patriarch,” Hakoore told me, “but it wasn’t cut off his own wrist. It was just his property.”
The old snake spoke dismissively as if the truth was self-evident; but all my life, I’d been told the hand was an actual piece of the Patriarch. When people swore oaths on it—when it was used at baby blessings and funerals—the Elders always spoke of it as the Patriarch’s own flesh. If it was just one of the Patriarch’s
possessions
…if he had hacked it off some criminal…or a heretic…or a Neut…
Hakoore actually chuckled at the expression on my face—his version of a chuckle at any rate, a toneless
hisk-hisk
sound. “Touch the hand, boy,” he said. “I’ll show you something interesting.”
Reluctantly I placed my right fingertips on the hand’s papery skin. Hakoore reached down too, pressing hard against a small protrusion on the box’s metal side. The spot he touched looked like nothing more than a slight dent. I had no idea what he might be up to…until I heard the box give a soft click.
With a shudder, the hand squirmed under my fingers. Before I could flinch back, the hand had locked onto mine with an arm wrestler’s grip.
I jumped back, shaking my hand frantically the way you do to shake off a speck of burning debris spat up by a campfire. The hand came with me, right out of its box, and clung like hot tar as I hopped around the flats trying to dislodge it.
“Hah, boy,” Hakoore laughed, “if you could see the expression on your face!”
Hisk-hisk:
the sound of his laugh.
Hisk-hisk.
“If all those pretty girls who swoon at your fiddle-playing could see what a duck turd you look like now…” He stopped, still laughing,
hisk-hisk-hisk.
The sound put my teeth on edge, like a blacksmith filing iron.
“What’s going on?” I demanded. “Is this some kind of magic?”
“Magic!” The word was a sudden angry bark. “What kind of superstitious fool are you, boy? The hand and the box are just machines, special machines. You think a real hand could last over a century without rotting to dust? Use your sense! And don’t ask me to explain how it works: I don’t know. But it’s not sorcery or deviltry, just wires and things.”
I couldn’t imagine how wires and things could make a hand that moved as fast as a striking rattlesnake. Still, the mayor had an OldTech clock where a goldfinch came out and chirped every hour; if our ancestors could make mechanical birds, a mechanical hand wasn’t out of the question.
“Well, you certainly gave me a start,” I told Hakoore, “and I’m glad you had a good laugh. Now can you make the hand let go? It’s holding a little tight.”
“You think that’s tight?” Hakoore’s milky eyes glittered in the light of the dawning sun. “It can squeeze much harder. It can squeeze like iron tongs.”
“I’m sure,” I agreed. “But you’ve had your joke and I’m suitably impressed. Maybe it’s time we both went home for breakfast.”
“A joke,” he said, still smiling. “You think the Patriarch’s hand is a joke?”
“No, no,” I corrected myself quickly, “the hand isn’t a joke, it’s a sacred artifact, but…”
I gasped. The hand had suddenly tightened its grip, wringing me hard around the knuckles—the way Bonnakkut had sometimes grabbed my hand and mashed my fingers together, back when he bullied me in the schoolyard.
“You don’t believe it’s a sacred artifact,” Hakoore hissed softly. “Now that you know it’s mechanical, you think it’s just another piece of OldTech garbage.”
“It’s sacred, it’s special, I believe that!”
The hand squeezed again. I felt one of my knuckles give under the pressure with an audible click. It wasn’t broken—not yet. Just slipped slightly out of alignment.
“Stop doing that!” I shouted at the old snake.
“I’m not doing anything,” he replied, all innocence. “The hand has a mind of its own. My old master explained it this way: when people lie, they sweat. Not normal summer sweat, but damp-palm-nervous
liar’s
sweat. And the Patriarch’s hand can taste that sweat in your palm, boy. It doesn’t like the taste. Lies turn its stomach.”
It’s a hand!
I wanted to say.
It doesn’t have a stomach.
But I kept myself under control and told him, “I don’t believe the OldTechs could make something like this. In all the OldTech books I’ve read, there’s no mention of anything close.”
Hakoore gave me a coy look. “Maybe not. Maybe the hand is older than the Patriarch, dating back to the founding of the cove.” He grinned at me with those jagged yellow teeth. “The founders of Tober Cove were something special, boy—far beyond the OldTechs. There are secrets I could tell you, passed down from one Patriarch’s Man to the next; but I can’t share those secrets with you until…”
He let the last word hang pointedly in the air. I didn’t want to give him the satisfaction of asking what he meant, but the hand was still pulping my knuckles. Even worse, there might be other hidden buttons Hakoore could press in the box, buttons that would make the hand clinch up on me even if I wasn’t lying.
“Until what?” I asked through gritted teeth.
“Until you agree to be my disciple and become the next Patriarch’s Man.”
“Me?” My voice was almost a squeak—I blame that on the pain in my half-crashed hand. “Your
disciple?
Who says I want to be your disciple?”
“Who says I care what you want?” Hakoore rasped back, mimicking my tone. “I’m not choosing you for your opinions, boy.”
“But why choose me at all?”
“Since Leeta told me she was making Cappie her apprentice, I’ve been thinking about a successor too. It appeals to me, easing back the same time Leeta does. Especially after seeing Cappie last night, trying to play priestess while dressed like a man. The girl’s got fire; she’ll hit the cove like a lightning strike. And she’s smart—when women have problems, Cappie will solve them. Won’t be long before men turn to her too…not for everything, but for important things. Show me the man who wouldn’t rather talk to Cappie than to me. Present company excluded, of course.”
He actually gave me a grin.
“So it got me wondering,” he went on, “what man in the cove can handle Cappie and come out on top?” He poked a bony finger into my chest. “Guess whose name came to mind.”
“But I don’t want to be
anyone’s
disciple…”
“Shut up!” he snapped, jabbing his finger into the pain-hub of nerves at my sternum. “I don’t care about a weaselly boy’s personal preferences. All I care is whether you’re suitable for the job.”
“I’m not. The only thing I’m fit for is playing violin…”
“You won’t be fit for that if you don’t shut up! The hand won’t let go till I want it to; you understand that, boy? And how are you going to play violin with crushed fingers?”
I choked back the retort that came close to spilling out of my mouth:
It’s holding my right hand, you old fool; I play violin with my left.
But giving that away might be a tactical error. Besides, how could I hold the bow if my right hand got ground to powder? How could I pluck pizzicato? Without two good hands, I’d be just some kid who’d once had delusions of grandeur—condemned to work the farms or perch boats for the rest of my life, as if I’d never dreamed of more.
“All right,” I muttered. “What do you want?”
“To ask some questions. To see whether you appreciate the cove’s need for a Patriarch’s Man.”
“And if I lie, the hand will hurt me.”
Hakoore nodded. “The Patriarch found it useful for getting at the truth.”
“I’ll bet.”
“Don’t go insolent on me, boy! I can always order the hand to grab a different part of your anatomy. Something you
really
don’t want mangled.”
I glared at him for a moment, then gave a defiant flick of my head. “Ask your questions,” I told him. “See for yourself that I’m wrong for the position.”
The Patriarch’s Man just smiled, an ancient yellow smile.
“First question,” Hakoore said. “Do you believe in the gods?”
“Yes.”
“All the gods? Even Mistress Want and Master Disease?”
“Yes.” After last night, I wondered if I believed in Master Disease too much, but I didn’t say so aloud.
“Do you pray to the gods?”
“Sometimes.”
He gave me a withering look. I expected him to ask how often was sometimes, but he must have presumed the worst. Instead he asked, “Is the cove important to you, boy?”
“Absolutely.”
“And how far would you go in order to keep the cove safe?”
I hesitated. “That’s hard to say,” I finally answered. “It depends on the circumstances.”
“Of
course
, it depends on the circumstances, you idiot!” Hakoore roared. “
Everything
depends on the circumstances.” He gave me a steely glare. “Stop being such a weasel.”
Easy for you,
I thought.
You aren’t the one whose fingers get mulched if you answer wrong.
Out loud, I told him, “Describe some threat to the cove and I’ll tell you what I’d do.”
“Don’t give me orders, boy!” He closed his eyes for a moment, then opened them again. “Last year,” Hakoore said, “a Feliss merchant came here, supposedly to see the leaves, but what he really wanted was to buy his way into the village. He had a lot of money, a pregnant wife…and when the baby came, he wanted it brought up like a Tober, alternating sexes. Thought that would be healthy for the child.”
“He was right,” I answered.
“Of course he was,” Hakoore agreed. “And he was willing to pay for it—donations to the Council of Elders, to the school, to me, to Leeta—not bribes, he insisted, but gifts to help the people.”
“I hope the Elders spat in his face.”
“You don’t know the Elders,” Hakoore answered. “They have a long list of projects they’d love to start if only they had the money…and some of the projects are even sensible. Like paying to train a replacement for Doctor Gorallin; she’s going to retire in ten or fifteen years, and it’ll take that long to put one of our own through medical school. It’ll take a lot of gold too. If the council took the merchant’s money, they could guarantee the cove would have competent doctoring for the next forty years. That’s a hard thing to turn down.”
“I didn’t think of that,” I admitted. “But the council still must have said no in the end. We didn’t have an outsider family move in.”
“The council didn’t reject the merchant,” Hakoore told me. “I did. Started shouting threats and scared the nipples off every man there.” He allowed himself the ghost of a smile. “One of the fun parts of my job.”
“You think it’s fun to make it harder for Tober Cove to afford a doctor?”
“No,” he sighed. “
That’s
one of the ugly parts of my job.”
“So why did you do it?”
“Because if one merchant buys his way in, another will try too. Only the next one will just want a summer home— come up for solstice, let Master Crow and Mistress Gull
process
the kids, then go back to Feliss. A lot of Tobers would be outraged at such a proposal, but others would just say, ‘Get a good price.’ That way we could buy more books for the school…or maybe some muskets for the Warriors Society so they can match the firepower of any gun-toting criminals who come up-peninsula.”
“One gun is too many,” I muttered.
“And one merchant is too many too,” Hakoore replied. “Not that I have anything against merchants in themselves…”
“No,” I said, “you’ve always been so welcoming to my father.”
The old snake glared at me. “You think I was hard on Zephram? There are times I still think I should have booted him out. With the money he’s brought here, the cove has expanded its perch fleet, bought more cattle, improved the sawmill…”