The Totem-Maker (part ninety-nine)

The Totem-Maker

Chapter Ten

Crafter Becomes Maker

(part ninety-nine)

“What are we to talk about, Wosogo? I have been totting up my needs, but you arrive too soon. Taken out of order, then… The Prince will vouch for the Emperor’s authority? Has the Peddler been found? I have this notion, Wosogo, that to translate my speech to the Zhatabe, his to me, weakens our parley just there. On that point of trust, how helpful it would be…”

I was putting the old man off his guard, and he had gone so far as scooting round to watch our faces. Wosogo apologized for slowness, murmured, “How helpful though”; laid his bread aside to draw beads, undid a knot, moved one, another. He tied these captive and raised his face to mine.

“Mero,” I said to the old man. “Partake!”

In the Balbaecan language, he said that he was servant to the two of us, guests of the house, and needed nothing. He came to kneel at our table, to pour fresh cups of wine.

“That interests me,” I said. I stood and walked.

Below, a terrace was spanned by this garden, from where the house could not be seen. The fortress wall, topped with pines, appeared natural to the eye. Boulders concealed places of defense; at fearsome labor they must have been dragged to where they sat, now grown so mossy, small trees placed to root in their crevices.

The terrain fell to a grassland, cut by three streams, ringed in hills that steepened to distant mountains.

Wosogo came to my side

“The Zhatabe,” I said, “would pour his army through those passes yonder. They would make their camp on the widest swath between these waterways. Some, sent to forage for food, must climb to this fruitful spot, and…might it be so? Lord Ei would not wish them struck down with arrows, though he could command it done. He would not have his enemies know he had not fled before their numbers, but held his forces within his stronghold. He would take these foragers prisoner. Now the dilemma! How to question them? How useful it would be, to dress spies in the prisoners’ garb and have them slip into the camp by night…”

Wosogo, I would have said on, I know so little of military matters.

Wosogo, given new thoughts to remember, was at his beads again. The old man had come to hear these things, and my role needed no further acting. I met his eye, and he met mine.

“Who is the Totem-Maker?” I asked him.

“Do I understand you?” Lord Ei answered. “I have commanded these watches many and many a year. But we are all children, and you… You have some magic, spat at your feet by Mother Earth, the Mother of Ami, in the form of totem-stones. You instruct me that I am blind.”

103

The Recalcitrant One

The Totem-Maker (part one hundred)

(2018, Stephanie Foster)