The Totem-Maker (part sixty-one)

The Totem-Maker

Chapter Six

A First Road

(part sixty-one)

My friend the Hezhnian sailor returned. He bent for my basket.

I waved a hand and pinched its edge, wanting not to be served any longer. Our tussle ended at once, for he was polite. But keeping hold, he explained, making single-handed gestures, I and you…

His rapid words, a few that rang familiar, told me we would sail further up the coast. Yes, to my bitter disappointment, I was not to set foot in the city of Hezhnia. I was to drop down a knotted rope to a rowing boat. This vessel was like the greeting party’s, having a house at the front, oars below, and behind a fence of net my pony, forgotten by me. Cuerpha tossed his mane, saying any bit of fruit, or even bread, and I forgive. Two horses were tied with him, pack animals of my escort.

Our way north, through winds and currents and tiny outposts with stores under care of lonely guardsmen, has no lesson in it, and I will not linger here. We beached at a rocky place, tented round by a small camp. Their fire burned in a covered pit, to have heat with smoke sent crawling the ground…the practice of borderlands.

I was not credited with knowing how to disembark, but was carried ashore on a sailor’s back. (I did not know how to disembark.)

I was given a knife to carry, told that each of us must protect our own mount, our own food, drink, pelts and blankets, treasures. My pony was laded with more sacks and baskets, and I rode in a company of six through twenty-one sunrises.

Four of the riders were traders, not Alëenon, but of the race of the Citadel.

I found I was supplied a groom, called Moth. Moth said little…as he should. But I had no feel for commanding attitudes. I did understand how lost I was about to become. I tried, “Tell me your thoughts as they occur to you.”

As I could not guess what a Hezhnian knew that I did not…

I saw him flinch as though my powers caught his thoughts slipping past unspoken. He tried to convey the fear of the tollhouse his people had, the unwelcome awe with which they prepared to regard me.

“The keeper is always alone.”

It is only the Prince who chooses me, not the gods, I said in return.

I was hurt to have been dispatched so, though common sense warned, the Prince is not your ally. And if he had stopped my leaving, finished the advice Jute interrupted, prayed his well-wishes for me reach the gods…

(Which they might, winging from a higher station than my own.)

I would, in my way, have liked him less.

As our road climbed, snow began to blow. Time was short for deciding this enchanting. The flakes had great beauty; the whiteness under their fall made a god’s palace of the surrounding world. They soon blotted the horizon—all but the crushing peaks that loomed dark grey. Certainly these were angry gods, worthy of each other, dimly eyeing the specks that mounted their flanks.

And then I was shown the house of logs and stone. And then my baggage was thrown on its floor—and wasting none of the day, my escort fled.

65

A First Road

The Totem-Maker (part sixty-two)

(2018, Stephanie Foster)