The Totem-Maker (part four)

The Totem-Maker

The Little I Can Tell

(part four)

But there were bad seasons, blights in the crops, dearths in the harvest, for which I was held wanting. There were myriad quibbles with Elberin, when I had only his tasks for time spent, and no garden to tend.

I was as tall, at length, as the elders. By now our town had doubled in size; it had doubled again and again. And from that prince who hadn’t deigned to shelter refugees, came a snaking throng, seen all along the road into the distance, towards haze and his border.

A mammoth beast of work led them, its shod hooves clapping the pavement laid by the old race of Lotoq’s plain, a long-maned beast of such girth that one must be harnessed before another. They drew their burden in train, catching all eyes. Iron bells tolled from the collars circling their necks.

The wagon bore a statue. The second wagon its massive plinth.

Two days’ labor with trunks of trees, and wheels and ropes, and the prince’s slaves had raised this monument. That we would know our land was claimed, and know our prince by his visage. The face was done in gilt; the robes enameled in brilliant blue, a hue stronger than the sky, but as I’d seen at the heart of a flower.

By this time I believed I also would be a priest. I had copied out all the scrolls, and so my histories, my genealogies and my miracles, were well-established in memory. Any Father or Mother I met would speak a name to me, and I recite the lineage. I knew the size of spring leaves, what their veins boded, when mortifying sacrifice was needed, as envious gods demand. I knew the meaning of a grasshopper, of a double-yolked egg, a blood-red moon. The types and colors of clouds.

I clipped the wings of a moth, drew the divining circle in ash, and read the pattern that in dying it scattered there.

I had been set to work particularly on signs, for the elders hoped…they had invested pride in this hope, and held to it…that here my gift would show itself. And so the prince’s seizure of our city, and the fertile fields outlying, proved a portent indeed—for me. The puniness of my oracular talents was bared.

A host of strangely dressed men, testified to by sentries of the night, had swarmed like insects through the thin trees of Lotoq’s flanks—by moonlight seen; by morning gone. It was the culminating sign.

“Elberin’s.” [I was called this way, as his possession.] “What do you say?”

I answered her, the priest Burda: “That our borders are crossed, that ones foreign to us have passed in the dark hours, that their business is not to stay.”

She smiled, and looked at Elberin. I knew I’d said nothing, really. Nor had I foreseen the next day’s news, or I might have invented a wild prediction, unable to be tested or shown false.

But you will note that to preserve my place meant caring for my place. I had not come, then, to care for anything so worldly.

4

The Little I Can Tell

The Totem-Maker (part five)

(2018, Stephanie Foster)