The Totem-Maker (part seventy-two)

The Totem-Maker

Chapter Eight

Use for Use

(part seventy-two)

After the chores of the fire, we spitted meat, dividing one hare. I offered him my new-picked greens, my seeds and my honey. I boiled water to steep the fat and bones. This broth was not wholly excellent, but much improved by the trader’s salt-stone. He placed another with a tap on the table, making me understand it was mine.

Salt had been got from the sea at Monsecchers. Salt for meat, salt for greens, salt to savor honey…

I blessed the salt.

The trader’s gear was folded in a cloth, four triangles opened to a larger square, four again. Inside were pouches of wool and leather, and garments rolled to protect bottles and knives, and jeweled things he gave me glimpses of. Having turned the cloth to its last unfolding, he created his bed, his fur hat tucked for a pillow. It seemed the time for sleep. But he had only meant to tell me this, with his show of lying down. He rose, took some of my skins and helped me arrange my own bed. Then he bent to dust ashes from the hearthstone and began to draw a picture.

A wall sketched, and a road. The road arcing down from a fortress. Mountains growing before it. The sketch vanished under his hand, and the road returned, the peaks at far left. It crossed its span and came to a house.

My house…he pointed to it in such a way. He smoothed the dust again, and drew his road onwards. He drew a city. His story told of his living, the path he followed, the places he visited. He lifted a finger, found coins in one of his pouches, palmed the dust and drew the house again. He laid a coin at its doorstone. But inviting me, seeming to say take it, he shook his head, and snatched the coin back.

Playful, perhaps. He unrolled a tapestried coat, laid for me a pair of short boots. A moment more, and using the coin, the house, the boots, he woke sense. Rather than my toll, I would have warm feet, a thing I needed. Very badly did I need these boots, but I did not feel the tolls to be a payment I earned. Aeixiea’s coins were not mine. The tolls were not mine.

But the trader placed another salt-stone beside the boots. He unpouched balls of yarn, and two carved sticks. He would teach me this art, he conveyed, and I would buy its implements.

In our waiting days, as clearly as our created language allowed, I told him how I’d fallen and might have died. He found this comic. It had needed my acting the scene, to have him see it. Yet as the winds howled me deaf, as I tried to follow the voice of my thoughts, I came to feel I had fooled fear with this game, away…

I woke, shared a breakfast, and the trader gave me news of a mightier rock fall, drawing for me the face of a broken mountain, gouged like a hunk of bread torn with fingers.

At the end of his stay I’d bought more of him, I don’t know how.

76

Use for Use

The Totem-Maker (part seventy-three)

(2018, Stephanie Foster)