The Totem-Maker (part fifty-one)

The Totem-Maker

Chapter Six

A First Road

(part fifty-one)

One of the Prince’s captains came next morning, in company with my friend, the officer of the wagons. Jute stood tall, cupped her right wrist in her left hand, arm crooked upright below her neck. The sleeve of her tunic fell to the elbow.

The men looked wary.

“Jute, give me their names.”

Depwoto, she told me. Egdoah. Egdoah also to be my scribe. Surely not, I said. I stared at her forearm, which bore a sign troubling to her countrymen. A patch with none of the strange, pale hair, plucked clean of these, and inside a raised circle—as the northerners made from slivers of bone worked under the skin.

A family sign.

She held the arm stiff and let me read it, which I could not. “He wishes this himself. You have a champion. He will stay by your side, and you will teach him this language.”

Great disdain for it, our language. As well for Egdoah, whose championing I’d learned of with gratitude. Jute left my couch to sit on the steps with her back to us.

“Egdoah. What will you like to call me?” I pointed to him, and to myself. I watched him pass with Depwoto some questioning remark.

Jute said: “Nur-elom.”

“Nur-elom,” Egdoah repeated in innocence.

She meant insult, naming me the little scion of the slave Lom—scion only grammatically. I began to wonder, given such clues, if Jute were not…

“Jute, does the Prince call you cousin?”

Her eyes widened, a look of rage, panic-threaded; she glanced past the columns to the blue sky, and in this silence noise of the army camped everywhere filled the porch.

“Yes” I said. “Depwoto, Egdoah. I am Nur-elom.”

I patted the place next to me, and Depwoto sat, with a simplicity that made me think better of his kind. Whom had I met in this place unbeset by crippling haughtiness? Lom’s kind sister Dessa, the general’s adjutant, the northerners Depwoto and Egdoah.

I thought of a refinement to my art.

Each man would like something, some charm to finger and remind himself he was favored, that he brought no curse to the great undertaking…

And the answer, as the god had put Dessa in my mind, was the legacy. I bade Jute fetch it. “You know well what I mean. You will please make haste, come again to your duties at once.”

She had grown used to her privacy, I saw—to words inside herself being such the men surrounding her, ordering her, could not understand, doubly cached away. Here were two discovering news of her; who, meaning no harm, would tell it to their comrades. A curiosity, a phenomenon.

There were so many things you could not help.

55

A First Road

The Totem-Maker (part fifty-two)

(2018, Stephanie Foster)