The Totem-Maker (part eighty-three)

The Totem-Maker

Chapter Nine

The Recalcitrant One

(part eighty-three)

Draw up your fellows, I said to it. That much you can do.

Mornings I went to that spot in my garden, as every sunrise brought change. I left my doorstone still braiding my hair, and was blundered against by Moth.

“What!”

Nothing. He vanished into the barn, keeping a holy silence, frightened at the emergence of two new Seeds. I crossed and bent to snag mine (for I’d chosen), tucking it in a pouch at my belt.

Moth I heard rustling in the straw, watching what I would do, and so I spoke aloud: “You have ambitions, I suppose. You count yourself stronger than your lessers, for you caused them to obey you. On the Peddler’s last day, I asked you to wake the faces, and you woke…I will say you were able to wake…one. I wait to see if it is the sleepers who rule you. And what may happen if I throw you in the fire, now you have your eyes? I will try in a moment, or if you counsel me to choose that misshapen fellow with the mild face, him I will trial.”

The power is yours. But ask for nothing you will not yourself endure.

Feeling a strange temptation to anger, I bowed instead.

“No, no cruelties. Here is a path that forks, where the way must answer, do I resist you or do I resist myself? Fire may be your joy, Recalcitrant One, for all I have the power to know—but to me it is the vilest impulse. And so I will not. I will bring these others to lie on my table, and I will ask you to wake them.”

Spring becoming summer, I bought from the caravans with an eye to the future. A great luxury for me, to have possessions for the enjoyment of them; as well, the notion I might put a thing by, shelved in its new-made state, as a gift to myself. As a comfort…as a payment for my labors.

This was fair, and enough.

I began to wonder how far Cuerpha could carry me if I followed the traders, rode under their protection as stragglers did. My work contented me…what more would I ask, but time? And time, Great Ami himself cannot alter. With a chest of gold and no law but my own, I might go anyplace, be what I liked—if jewels, silks, meats and wines, were my liking.

I could not return to Monsecchers, and be other than a thief and failure, an annoyance to the House of Decima. To turn up at all…but, to turn up in the semblance of a citizen, requiring courtesies…

In Monsecchers, my story was finished. It had bled itself into the River of Tales, had by now magnified or vilified me; all, if we are remembered, that we can hope for.

But was there duty in that? A role to play, fair or not: Fortuneteller, Keeper, Totem-Maker…

The houses of the gods hold wonders beyond our minds to know, and so we cannot ask. Wisdom lay couched where only the plod of my pony’s hooves and isolation (yes, from Moth’s wanting his next instruction) would allow me to converse with it.

87

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The Totem-Maker (part eighty-four)

(2018, Stephanie Foster)