The Totem-Maker (part fifty-eight)

The Totem-Maker

Chapter Six

A First Road

(part fifty-eight)

As always, if Jute were unforthcoming, I gave her naivety. “Wolgan… But you speak as though this were a quality, not a name. Or a clan? Do the Wolgan have godly powers? Are they descendants of some deity?”

“Yes.”

Obscure. But I knew something of the northerners’ legends…

They were not pretty, as my little fable of Escmar, and their gods did not forgive. Errant lovers were cast into cold prisons, to grope in blindness, to know themselves failed, however courageous, however children of misfortune. Our realm of the dead was only a shadowed land of mists, from which souls who pleased the dark god Tophe might win escape.

“Are you Wolgan?”

“No.”

A lie, I thought. She had been Wolgan, born Wolgan, but her slavery disgraced her. She counted herself banished.

Pride, pride, you are a foolish people, I wanted to say. Still it was of use to know family lines meant so much to them. They could deny themselves help and young men die for it…

It was not a woman leading them they feared; it was a vulgar one, low-born.

Night on the open sea was alight in strange ways. The stars gleamed, clustered thick as diamonds in a basilisk’s egg. I felt my eyes could drink this light and shine it before me…but magic cannot be performed by wish.

Other lights, green and dancing, played across the waves. Egdoah said, “Do not look. They will spirit you to the city below.”

I smiled. “Your sea devils.”

“I change my mind. You may look…it is for them to fear.”

His superstition allowed not much of banter. I saw him try to hide the sign by which the northerners warded demons, four fingers out and the thumb touching the palm.

I slept, as it seemed our rendezvous must take some hours.

And when the sky lightened, I woke from a dream of talking, talking all around me. I woke reminded I had never, after all, cast the Prince’s fortune. I had never tried again to learn my own. What was I, if I were born to the House of the Dead, but lived? A totem of protection to my charges, bearing the sum of the thousand thousand spirits Tophe could not examine one by one…to learn if they had died in innocence, or with great works undone?

Tophe alone speaks of himself, no other god, not they, will raise his name. I have heard it said always, that to turn a curse you must look into the reflection of a still pool—if you dare invoke him. I thought the god of the dead had spoken to me in this dream. The voices, though, were from an Alëenon ship.

When I stood and peered from under my roof of skins, I saw it had been lashed to ours, and the Prince had boarded.

62

A First Road

The Totem-Maker (part fifty-nine)

(2018, Stephanie Foster)