The Totem-Maker (part seventy-six)

The Totem-Maker

Chapter Eight

Use for Use

(part seventy-six)

I could hardly play at something devil-may-care, as though I chose to live here, on a road so lonely the law I enforced bore weight only with the honest. I might have looked sadly wasted at the end of this hungry winter. I fumbled with the latch in nerves and eagerness, promising with too much chatter that I did have one or two stones of value, even if he had brought only those plaits of dried, spiced meat the traders chewed.

He glanced at the Seeds, worked over by that variety of tortures I have described. “They are taking on the proper colors. One or two look nearly done.”

This, I had no use for, allowing myself to understand what I was not to be told. “You would like to buy them, all three?”

“No. Do they begin to have their faces?”

We looked at each other. I said, “You are my guest? Or do you live in your wagon?”

Why, or how, should they have faces! I hissed through my teeth, as I went to stir the fire…to turn my back on him.

“If the weather is fine, yes. Tonight I’ll never trouble you. But we will take our supper together.”

“Of course.”

He laughed. He had been laughing the while, by the tone of his speech. Oh, I disliked him. I was tired of him.

“And what sort of fowl do you hunt in the treetops?”

So artless, this question. But my lost arrows…after a moment I understood. “What sort of food can I buy from you that you would prefer to eat?”

His society was for nine days the thorn in my side.

Under his eye that first night I put away the coins, shaking them into a chest. Their embossments and metals were not the same; reason suggested different values. Over my shoulder I gave him a daring look.

He smiled, not as the wolf to the lamb.

“And here,” I said, noisy in setting the jug before his plate. “Have the most of it, if you like.”

And here, he sighed. “How am I to think of that? Do you wish it, or will you be angry if I do? Totem-Maker, I can well tolerate leaving you alone.”

I had become as bad a host as Jute had been a servant. Pride, pride…I chided myself this time.

In the morning, when without invitation he was there to see me wake, he had covered my table with articles. A cheese, eggs, meals of grasses and nuts, pots of crystalized syrup, aromatic cuts of the traders’ venison. Fleeces, dyestuffs, large and small spindles. Three knives meant for weapons, the blades prettily traced, the hilts jeweled. Jewels as well for my arms and ears, if I liked them. Jeweled slippers, and a jeweled girdle. Cloths of silk, carried to us westwards only by the traders’ road.

80

Use for Use

The Totem-Maker (part seventy-seven)

(2018, Stephanie Foster)