She fussed for a while trying to get the claws sitting straight. I held my breath, uncomfortable that she was so close but treating me like a sewing dummy. I didn’t like women concentrating so intently on my clothes—it was as if the clothes were real and I wasn’t. To pull her attention back to me, I said, “If you had to choose a successor, why did you wait so long?”
She looked up with those watery green eyes. I couldn’t read her expression. “I chose a successor once before,” she said. “It didn’t work out.”
“Why not?”
“She wanted to use the position as a weapon, to pressure for change. I tried to convince her that being priestess was a spiritual office, not a political one; but Steck wouldn’t listen.”
Steck? Uh-oh.
“The office could be political in the right hands,” a voice said behind my back. “You’re too afraid of rocking the boat, Leeta.”
The voice was neither male nor female. I cringed as I turned around.
“Thanks for taking care of my instrument,” the Neut said, holding up the violin I’d left back in the bush.
The knight was there too, both of them standing behind the spruce tree where I’d hidden earlier. “ ‘Once more well met at Cypress,’ ” the knight said. “
Othello
, Act Two, Scene One. That’s a
bon mot
actually, because Shakespeare meant Cyprus the island, as opposed to Cypress, the swamp. You see? It’s a pun. Clever, if I say so myself.”
We stared at him. Blankly. For a painfully long silence.
“Oh sure,” he finally muttered. “You’re just jealous you didn’t think of it first.”
FOUR
A Dance for Mistress Night
Leeta said, “You shouldn’t be here, Steck.”
The Neut, Steck, shrugged. “I’m here anyway.”
“You shouldn’t be.” Leeta took a few shuffling steps forward, the milkweed pods on her belt clacking against each other. I looked away, embarrassed. A dress decorated with weeds was all very well when Leeta and I were alone in the forest; as soon as outsiders arrived, she looked pathetically shabby. It didn’t matter that the outsiders were a Neut and Master Disease. Visitors like that must have seen city women dressed in finery, with their hair just so, and their bodies tall and elegant. Now to have these outsiders see me in the company of dumpy little Leeta, all milkweed and daisies hanging haphazardly around her ears…I was mortified.
Leeta showed none of the shame I felt. She pointed a pudgy finger at the Neut and said, “Don’t you remember what I taught you, Steck? I taught you to ask questions, I know I did.
What good will this do?
That’s the first question, that’s always the first question. And
What harm will it do?
That’s the second. Did you ask those questions, Steck? You didn’t, I know you didn’t. Because if you asked those questions, you’d see why you should have stayed away.”
“Steck is here as my assistant,” the knight said, stepping more clearly into the light of the campfire. With a flick of his hand, he twisted off his helmet and shook out his hair—thick coal-black hair, as long as a woman’s. He had a droopy pencil mustache and heavy-lidded eyes: a foreign face but human, not crawling with maggots and sores like Master Disease’s should be. Maybe, just maybe, this
wasn’t
Master Disease after all; but a scientist was almost as bad, and he’d admitted to that.
For a moment, the knight waited in the firelight, as if he thought we might recognize him now that the helmet was off. Then he shrugged and spoke again. “My name is Rashid and Steck is my
Bozzle.
Do you know that word?”
“Of course,” I answered. Even children knew a “Bozzle” was the aide of someone important: a mayor or a noble, maybe even a Grandee like a Governor or a Spark Lord. Did Rashid think we were bumpkins, not to know such a thing? Or maybe he was hinting he was special enough to rate a Bozzle; I guessed he might be an Earl or a Duke from Feliss Province. He should have known that didn’t matter up here—Tober Cove held a charter of independence from the Sparks themselves, and within our boundaries, even a day-old Tober baby was worth more than a thousand Dukes.
“We all know what a Bozzle is,” Leeta replied. “Do you think that makes a difference?” She didn’t spare a glance in Rashid’s direction; she kept her gaze glued on the Neut, not in a stern way, but soft and pleading. “Coming here will just stir up trouble, Steck…you know that. What good can you do after all these years? Leave before it’s too late.”
The Neut stared back, saying nothing. It was one of those moments when you know unspoken undercurrents are flowing all around and you don’t understand a turd of what’s really going on. You want to shout, “I deserve an explanation!” But sometimes, when you see faces like Leeta begging and Steck gazing back as dark as lake water at midnight…sometimes you decide you don’t care about their stupid problems anyway.
Rashid, however, wasn’t the kind who stayed out of other people’s staring matches. “Look,” he butted in, “there’s no reason for Steck to leave, because
nothing is going to happen.
I’m a scientist and I’ve come to observe your Commitment Day ceremonies. That’s all. Nothing sinister, nothing intrusive—I just want to watch. Steck is here, first as my Bozzle, and second because she can help explain your customs.”
“Don’t call a Neut ‘she,’ ” I muttered. “A Neut is an ‘It.’ And if Steck is supposed to explain Tober customs, why not start with our custom of killing Neuts on sight?”
“ ‘A custom more honor’d in the breach than the observance,’ ” Rashid replied. He looked around at us expectantly, then exploded, “Oh come on, that was from
Hamlet!
Everyone knows
Hamlet!
”
“What I know,” I said, “is that every man in the cove will try to kill your Neut if It comes to our village. A few women may try too,” I added, thinking of Cappie.
“Barbaric,” he muttered. “Just because someone is different—”
“Neuts
choose
to be different,” I interrupted. “They know Tober law, but they Commit as Neut anyway. The Patriarch said that choosing Neut is no different than choosing to be a thief or a killer. But Neuts get off easy compared to other criminals. No whippings, no chains, no execution…they just get sent away and told not to come back.”
“How generous!” Steck hissed. “Driven down-peninsula to cities we don’t understand, where we’re despised as freaks. Shunned by friends, separated from my lover and
child—”
“Steck, shush!” I’d never heard Leeta raise her voice so sharply. Mostly I thought of our priestess as a mumbly, self-effacing woman; but now she rounded on Rashid and poked a finger into his green plastic chest-plate. “You say you don’t want to interfere, Mister Rashid, Lord Rashid, whoever you are…but you’re interfering right now. At this very moment, I’m supposed to be dancing a dance for the solstice. I’m supposed to be doing some good for the world instead of wasting time with outsiders who are only going to upset everybody!”
“A solstice dance!” Rashid said, wrapping his gauntleted hands eagerly around hers. “Wonderful! Steck, step back, give them room. Yes, I should have noticed—the milkweed, the daisies, whatever that young man has in his hair…very nice, very
vegetal.
A ‘romping through the groves’ motif. Neo-paganism can be so charming, don’t you think, Steck? Such a homespun,
agrarian
feel to it. I assume this dance celebrates your instinctual attunement to the ebb and flow of the seasons? Or is there some other purpose?”
I said, “No,” at the same time Leeta and Steck said, “Yes.”
“Really,” I insisted, “we shouldn’t talk about this, should we, Leeta? The women’s religion must have some prohibition against sharing secrets with outsiders.”
“No,” Leeta replied. “Secret handshakes only appeal to men.”
And she proceeded to tell Rashid the complete story of Mistress Night and Master Day, and how Earth would burn up if she didn’t dance to shift the balance from light back to dark. Rashid produced a notebook from a compartment on the belt of his armor and scribbled excitedly; now and then he would murmur “Charming!” or “Delightful!” in a voice that was far too amused. Steck just made it worse by offering background commentary, speaking with condescension about Master Wind’s dalliance with each year’s Mistress Leaf, or Mistress Night’s continuing misadventures that always begin with someone saying, “If you want that pretty stone, you’ll have to do me a favor…”
I wanted to crawl into the campfire and burn to ash. It’s bad enough to hear your priestess claim she’s personally responsible for the solstice. Then to have a mealy-mouthed Neut give such sneering versions of the good old stories…
Listen: everyone knows it’s not hard to make the gods sound ridiculous. It just takes sarcasm, exaggeration, and a determination to be vulgar. Instead of saying, ‘Mistress Leaf donned her brightest finery in a vain attempt to rekindle Master Wind’s passion,” you say, “Mistress Leaf tarted herself up like a red-powdered whore and still Master Wind stayed as limp as lettuce.”
But that’s kid’s stuff. You do it as a thirteen-year-old girl, when you want to show the boys how daring you can be. After a while, as with most things at thirteen, the memory of how you behaved makes you squirm; even if you know that seasons come from a tilting planet whirling around the sun, the old stories still
mean
something to you. Why not confide in Mistress Night when you can’t understand why love gets so screwed up? She’s not wise, but she never breaks secrets. And when you’re out on the perch boats, how can you
not
talk to Master Wind a dozen times a day…respectfully, of course, because he has a temper, but if you ask nicely, he might give more breeze, or less, or another half an hour before he lets the storm break open.
The gods aren’t jokes; they’re people you walk around with every day. Insulting them is like insulting family.
“Don’t let me delay you any longer,” Rashid said at last. “Cany on with your dance.”
By that time, I was sitting with my back to the three of them, trying to pretend I couldn’t hear their conversation. Why was I still there when I should have been running to tell the cove about this Neut? If anyone asked, I’d say I didn’t want to leave Leeta alone with the outsiders…that I intended to watch and listen until I learned what they were up to. But the truth was that Cappie had stolen my chance to do anything spontaneous and noble; now I was floundering, lamely hoping another opportunity might arise. So I frittered away the minutes by poking the fire with a stick. I’d watch the stick burn, then I’d snuff it out in the dirt, then set it on fire again. As a pastime, it didn’t have much to recommend itself, but I kept doing it anyway.
A hand settled lightly on my shoulder—Leeta. “We have to do this now. Please?”
Rashid waited for my answer, his pen poised over his notebook. Half of me wanted to stomp off into the forest while telling them all to go to hell; the other half said I would damned well do what Leeta asked, just to show these outsiders that Tober people stuck together. “Sure,” I told her. “What do I have to do?”
“Dance. Really, that’s all.”
She held out her hand to help me up. I took it, but stood up on my own—she was such a little woman, I would have pulled her over if I let her take my weight. 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.