The Totem-Maker (part eighty-one)

The Totem-Maker

Chapter Nine

The Recalcitrant One

(part eighty-one)

On my mountain, I exercised my mind discerning the morning gossip of birds I knew, then of birds I had given new names to. For Moth was not in that way educated; as to how Alëenon sages ranked fowl in their compendia, he could say nothing.

I threw out seed. I would not have lured any bird to my bow, but I wanted them close for study.

“We call that the redbreast. And that is the yellow-throat,” my servant told me.

“And these small ones?”

“Are brownets.”

“But, do you know, in my country we also have such birds. Ours are marked differently, their breasts are striped.”

Moth gazed across, patient to know my point, which I had made.

“There are many things,” I said, saying an old thing, “under the sun.”

“Yes, Keeper.”

“I am going to leave you with your reward, though you don’t like receiving it.”

These words were the peddler’s. “Put out your hand.”

I did, in a leave-taking way, hoping for it.

“No.” He turned his own palm up…and so I followed suit. “When I visit next, you may like to buy something of me that catches your eye. Something more than a sack of meal and a skein of wool.”

Coins, eight of them, he meted to me.

Gold was exchanged in the coastal towns, where ships put in, and where such tokens were of great use, I knew. Money seemed to me a dubious magic. Another to give a valued thing, a loaf of bread, a cooking pot, and I to give a disk of gold, as I might a marker in a game…

At length to gain these markers back, and by this means enrich myself and the merchants alike. But the peddler rummaged in his basket, laughing. He frustrated me; he was pleased to do it. “Moth! Guard the Tollhouse. The Keeper and I will walk a ways.”

We walked to the meadow, to the sight of the god-mountains with their heads to the sky as daggers at the throat. He lifted his staff to show me with a gesture veins of white running in the shape of a tree through one scoured cliff.

“Perhaps it is in your fate to breach the Citadel. The zhatabe is said to own a great library, scrolls decorated by inspired sons and daughters of those godlings first cast down, when the dark of night had been dispelled by the fires of divine warfare sheeting across the skies, until the second darkness. If any mystery is not concealed there, it shall never be revealed. The people of Taqtan have a legend. You have heard the story of the first tree, whose limbs upheld the heavens. All creatures of earth lived among them, until for that battle of the gods she toppled, thus the waters of earth were born of the firmament fallen, and the land was filled with creeping things of every kind, and only the birds, sheltered in those limbs still high as a mountain, were given the gift of flight.”

I was of no mind to speak, worried that the peddler, with his sometime majesty, his frequent disdain, was a Princely retainer of power…my Prince, or this zhatabe, king of the Citadel people.

85

Use for Use

The Totem-Maker (part eighty-two)

(2018, Stephanie Foster)