The Totem-Maker (part fifty-six)

The Totem-Maker

Chapter Six

A First Road

(part fifty-six)

Happy-enough hours I had spent wading the ashy stream, searching for this soft, translucent stone. I was shown how to use a flint to etch spiral lines, deeper ones where I wanted my stone to break. Next I carved a bowl of pumice. My eye was good, and my totems, turned and turned, finished in sand, became round as the moon.

“A gift like this,” I told them. “But mine grants me only hints. The grandmother of Escmar was a Seeress of the ancients, and knew spells to say over hers. The girl was kept in the forest alone, but heedless of any hardship, for she need only wish on her totem any thing she wanted.”

Egdoah, the murmur of Jute’s voice following mine, sat absorbed. One of the soldiers met Egdoah’s eye…his face saying, yes, I know that.

Later, wait and see. Even Jute, her smile arch, allowed Escmar a generous suspension of scorn.

A prince, I told them, a Hezhnian it might have been, set off to hunt on the Island of Birds, but his ship was blown to Escmar’s. Her song drew him to her palace, and she was not afraid. How could she be? She had known only her grandmother, and to her eyes the stranger appeared as a forest creature. “But I did not wish for it,” she puzzled. “If I could understand this…this One’s talk.”

At once, she understood the prince’s speech and more, that he was a man, a being like and unlike herself; that marriages were, between lovers. “The wind was of the gods above,” the prince said. “For I sailed in search of glorious feathers, to weave into a bonnet for my bride to be, and here I have found my truer bride!”

Certainly a tale comes shorter with speeches, than with each passage picked out in narrative…

Jute, however, acted my lines in a way to make them silly.

Perhaps sillier. I sighed for my audience and drew smiles. Escmar, I said, grew angered at length. She had pledged herself, and for her prince’s admiration had wished a bounty of game teem her forest, and every day he hunted, and put the marriage off, and would not carry her home on his boat, to meet his father the King. She wished herself into a bird, feathered in surpassing glory. Then in the wanton manner of the ancients, she led her love a chase to a great waterfall—where leaping to net her, he plunged to his death.

She wished herself a woman again, and said over her totem, “Now restore him.”

“Ha,” said Jute. “And he lay dead.”

“Not,” Egdoah said, with a worried face.

I hoped I had not erred, trodden on a word forbidden. I recalled I had no reason to tell this story, only to explain why a moon-shaped implement was named for a bird. “No, friend, there is redemption.”

The soldier said, “The princess ran mad over all the world. She flew into the face of the sun, and the plumes of her tail caught fire. She was blinded by the smoke, and she crashed into the face of the moon.”

60

A First Road

The Totem-Maker (part fifty-seven)

(2018, Stephanie Foster)