The Totem-Maker (part fifty-nine)

The Totem-Maker

Chapter Six

A First Road

(part fifty-nine)

I saw him with no head covering, hair in the wind. He seemed to me freed and unburdened. He had come to us knowing our language, and knew our hosts’, too. His speech with their envoy was confiding, and they laughed at a joke half-sad. The captain glanced across. When he saw me, my plaits hooded in fleece, he invited the Prince to see. And when they had seen together, they agreed on some act, a thing to be done at once.

So with no breakfast, I was pulled from my shelter onto this vessel of the Alëenon. Jute at the Prince’s command passed across my basket and the little shrine filled with coins.

“Am I to follow?” she asked.

“No. I am going to make a gift of you to my kinswoman. She is the wife of Sente Vei.”

He spoke not for Jute, but that Sente’s friend, I, would know the marriage was complete, no more of Sente’s gold to be cached in the House of Treiva.

“Lord Prince,” I said, “are you making a gift of me, as well?”

“No. I have an office for you in mind…though the Alëenon will get the use of your performing it. You see that this is a mountainous land.”

Mountainous and cold. But in the time I might have turned and questioned, the Prince was called away. The smaller boat had been roped aboard, propped on a wedge of planking. Ropes circled the hull, and I thought the sailors must launch it thus, slowly to unwind and right itself.

After a spell of our slow approach, I shivered, and a sailor brought me a different sort of skin—thick, long fur of a lovely animal I would rather have met living.

I touched my heart and bowed my head.

He laughed. “Atu. Nur-naache.”

And I laughed, for understanding these words. Here were cousins, small dark-eyed people like ourselves, whose language was almost ours. He had said our word atu, which is to greet another with a blessing. Nur, a small thing. And naache, where for us a favor, a boon, would be nake.

“What office will they have me fill, can you tell?”

“I have more.” After leaping down a ladder, he returned with a jar of wine and a bowl of bread.

“My gratitude,” I said. “Atu. But, what office?”

“Please cease to interrogate our friends.”

The Prince shooed away my helper. In his hands were dishes of his own. He sat, arranged these, patted the place next to him. “As I am here to be asked, why not ask me?”

“You are sailing with the Alëenon. When,” (because I had pushed myself into this corner), “I’d thought we had left you behind. What office?”

His eyes lit for me, in a way of sharing my mischief. I felt almost in love. For that is power to the powerless, friends.

63

A First Road

The Totem-Maker (part sixty)

(2018, Stephanie Foster)