The Totem-Maker (part sixty-nine)

The Totem-Maker

Chapter Seven

Winter Alone

(part sixty-nine)

I slept a first night with them in my house…slept to excess, the honey drink to blame. Sorry for my hurting arm, I had swallowed three more draughts. I woke not having dreamed or thought it, but with the certainty a crafted thing of my own must be puny in magic to the bhekale’s, my orb’s company an insult. I put it away.

Bhekale, I said to them, still naming them beings of evil, I need my axe, which one of you has broken. I went astray yesterday, in giving you my attention, and never brought in firewood, a thing I also need.

The air was cold; and Cuerpha restless, stamping for a jaunt along the road. The birds were silent. Yes, I know the signs, I told them. A storm is coming, and I am very hungry. My wrist is weak, and that makes a hardship…

Just here, amidst this grumble, came a picture of me toting a sledge, I the beast of burden, the sledge laden with sticks and logs. That was the answer I’d failed to conceive…for having eight days posed the question. I knew a sledge was in the stable, fastened already with a rope.

Stacked with baskets and cloths, so that I hadn’t named it to myself. I had let the old Tollkeeper’s sledge become disguised to me.

Take the lesson.

Denial floated in my head unspoken. Then I said to the bhekale, “I don’t need you. I am not here to serve you.”

I sighed over my breakfast of honey and seeds, and went to saddle Cuerpha. But I turned him into the yard. The bhekale were right. Reason concedes a wrong. What the Prince had exiled me to learn would not make me of use to him, if I was another Mumas, proud and stubborn.

I tied the rope around my waist… My young pony had never been hitched to a vehicle. I remembered that needles could be steeped, that the old woman had known of this as medicine. At Lotoq’s foot no pines were seen, nor no patient wanting to ease the pain of childbirth, and I had never tasted or prepared the brew.

But any medicine must feel healing when one’s diet had been so dull for so long.

I found snow under the pines. My foot broke the crust, and I discovered this crystalline stuff shrank top and bottom, that small green sprouts sheltered beneath—that the winter world was far from dormant. I had been stupid, I supposed, and if I’d known the mountain country, would have had forage.

If, my complaining heart said in turn, I had been instructed at all.

I crouched and picked promising leaflets to chew, daring this without much fear. I cut needled branches and tossed them onto my sledge. I made my way closer to the overhang, drawn by fields I could see so far below, by what at the very edge of distance might be the sea.

73

Winter Alone

The Totem-Maker (part seventy)

(2018, Stephanie Foster)