The Totem-Maker (part seventy-four)

The Totem-Maker

Chapter Eight

Use for Use

(part seventy-four)

I’d taken these stories for truth. We were not like the northern people. In their songs, throughout all memory told, they had lived in one place. They found us unbeautiful, or colored in ways that marked us for subservience. Yet we were greater in wisdom, greater in our music and our arts. So great as to have crafted what they could not, our stone sentinels, towering with flame behind their eyes, guiding ships to the walls of our port cities; walls that defied the sea and made safe harbor where nature made none. Our skills with the flow of water, our fountains and our pools, were ours alone.

All this had forged a pride I’d shared. I, from an unknown parentage, not honored with a name. I had believed in the mightiness of our gods.

I had not seen the boundaries of a god fade, a new god rise, a new prophet my equal…almost, Salo-Ami, Aeantahah, spare me vanity. A border-god, who guards a patch of earth. To give way, a hundred leagues hence, to some other. Some lesser god to be appeased with lesser sacrifice. The gods of these mountains had favored me greatly in sparing my life, sending to me the hare and the hawk. In Balbaec, though, could one defy them altogether? I calculated that all the rock a mountain held could not bury such a plain. It would roll and cease, and the place it ceased was the limit to which the anger of these gods mattered.

My cautious piety…I wondered. Could I take more on myself, choose more boldly?

At odd moments, passing in from the yard, I had been trying rocks on the Iron Seeds. If I struck them as they lay on the table, not a jot of them altered. If I placed one on the floor, stood on the table and dropped the rock, it was the rock that split.

(My guest the trader had repaired my axe…but never again did I think of using it on a Seed.)

I had put one in the fire. Its purple deepened. I held it with the tongs, turned it in the light, saw the hues of a rainbow. I put its fellows in the fire and left them baking in hot embers overnight. They too grew more beautiful.

The caravan that approached this day showed me a society among the traders. I saw yellow wagons, then green, precede red. I saw a roof of copper, windows paned in thin horn. One tallish house had a porch…a woman lay there among pillows, at her ease. Under were openwork panels, every flowered join of them painted white, red-centered, the wood waxed to a gloss, exotic birds caged behind. Feathered in armor of shining green metal, so they looked to me, working their peevish bills at confinement, shrieking now and then like demons.

I wanted one. For no reason but the pleasure of a tame, fabulous monster in my possession. I began to see myself in this light, a shrine-keeper for Balbaecan peoples to climb to, famous for my curiosities and fortunes.

I was not pleased.

78

Use for Use

The Totem-Maker (part seventy-five)

(2018, Stephanie Foster)