The Totem-Maker (part seventy-three)

The Totem-Maker

Chapter Eight

Use for Use

(part seventy-three)

For a song he gave me a sewing kit, yarn, salt, herbs. Boots, and a following of him to the sheep’s cave, where he showed me how I would get wool—a comb to draw the hair from the skin, a sharp-edged flint to sever it.

The Tollkeeper’s stable had had these implements all along. The trader sold me also a bow and some arrows. I offered him one of the Seeds, wanting rid of it.

Wanting to know what occurred when a Seed went into the world.

But the trader made a sign; not ours, to ward evil, but easy to read. That I’d found them, that the new Keeper was toying with them, news he would carry into the world…

That was most of my payment.

When the warm winds returned, I knew them better. Twice more before the spring, they thawed my garden. They had a name, these amiable winds, but my guest had not made me know it. The sound of his word conjured nothing memorable in my own tongue.

I’d searched all corners of the house, crawled the loft—found hoarded there, again, basins, bowls, and baskets, empty. As though some harvest had been carried from the field, and this was the old Keeper’s business. Any sign he tallied his coins, I sought for, any formula used to portion his share from that owed the Emperor…

If I might assume a share.

Or, I was to earn a living of my own.

But I  confess it, I began stealing the money. I needed to use money to learn its value. I was half decided on a journey to the city below, to buy a few things with the coins I acquired more and more of—and that, to my bemusement, no one would take from me.

I noted how stitches made wedge-shapes, like characters of writing. I tried the experiment of knitting figures in rows, to serve for my record-keeping. Evenings, I made squares, growing to a cloak, then to a blanket, each square a day of my life.

When for twenty in a row (and I could say this with certainty, having memorialized it) the air was warm, and it had not rained, a large caravan passed the tollhouse. White flowers now spilled my meadow’s edges like seafoam, and islands of orange, eddies of blue.

I hoped this spell was the goddess’s will, that the dry weather was not drought.

This goddess, in Monsecchers, was Trifesse, born of morning mist, whose dewy tread blessed fields into bloom. I wondered, thinking of her, can there be but one grandsire, Ami? One mighty son, Lotoq; one great mother, Ami’s wife, who lives far, far, in a frozen land? Its snows lie flat as the desert, blackened by the ashes of her fires. We call the mother of our race Aza. Legend has it our faithless ancestors were driven by the wrath of Aza to a terrible wandering. We arrived from the east, to the seabound lands of Ami; Ami’s sea where the sun is drowned at night.

77

Use for Use

The Totem-Maker (part seventy-four)

(2018, Stephanie Foster)