The Totem-Maker (part six)

The Totem-Maker

Chapter Two

Jealousy

(part six)

My predictions earned me status in the Decima household. As a prodigy; or if not that, a jester. Divorced now from any shadow of belief, I shaded my words, colored each hope with wider and happier prospects. I shared quarters with others, but was called for alone.

Lady Pytta, as a young wife, had the duty of visiting the high houses. She enjoyed her peers: she pleaded my help with the matriarchs.

“The Treiva are easy, they,” she told me what I knew, “are mine. I can put them last, but I won’t. I need strength! And the Decima are easy, because none live here, none but Mother Nyma and Cime. But Runah Vei, do you think? The Vei are almost relatives, Caleyna…did you meet her? My father’s wife? She and I are such good friends, but…” A whisper. “She has a secret. We can’t be conspicuous, we have to tiptoe around a certain party… Oh! You’re making me die, Little Creature, because I’m going to tell you everything in a minute, and I must not. Cime would say, a slave! Pytta!”

(And did she hold to protocol? Not at all. I had her stepmother’s secret and many others.)

I was a novelty for Pytta to collect in her train; given the hood of a priest for a lark.

Other servants would be sent away, and dark lamps lit, incense burnt. They insisted on me the importance of preparing behind a screen, of declaring myself ready. I was flattered to be listened to, flattered to have silence fall at the sound of my voice. I was played with—kindly I do think—asked to choose, as the women could not among themselves, whose fortune would be read first. The game lasted the spring and summer, and was in all only camaraderie, sport.

I had been isolated in childhood; I had not known what rivalry was.

Autumn would come in one cycle of the moon, and at last Cime claimed me.

“This is no trouble to you, to ride a pony?”

“I can, with two hands. If I am to mark my tablet…”

“Patience!” He shook a sack of beads or marbles. “Yours. Take it.”

My pony was named for his brown coat, Cuerpha. The sun sat low, burning red, and so I wrapped a cloth around my head and neck, fixed this with a cap.

“Wait, I like that!” Cime sent his groom to Pytta for a scarf and cap of his own. “I ought to look like something…unexpected, citified. Priestly, even. When I say to the farmers, ‘on my authority’… What do you think, Mumas? The headgear carries a certain baffling weight?”

Mumas, his deputy, demurred with a smile.

We mounted, and Cime said: “Now, in the planting season…”

He was speaking to me, because he had raised his voice. And because his deputy, riding at his side, gave a hunch of the shoulders that suggested an inward laugh.

7

Jealousy

The Totem-Maker (part seven)

(2018, Stephanie Foster)