The Totem-Maker (part one hundred three)

The Totem-Maker

Chapter Ten

Crafter Becomes Maker

(part one hundred three)

I was little consulted as to the ordering of my own affairs, but proofs of my mission finding itself peopled and supplied appeared daily at the margins of my attention. I lay on my stomach in the garden, solving Noakale’s puzzles. She and the women would seat themselves nearby, and when she had finished her dispatches…

(How, I wondered, was Lord Ei ever to return his servants to their old management? He ought to marry his cook. I did not suggest it, but shared the thought with Tnoch, a glint of the eye and nod of the head between us…)

I went to my patroness and knelt, to ask my three or four questions.

“Enough!” Noakale tapped me with her fan. “You must not make such sport.”

When her women had gone their ways, I said, “I show you respect for their sakes. Most certainly I will play this game wherever I go.”

She laughed then until her eyes wanted dabbing. “Well, you are a courtier, less a diplomat! But to your credit, you don’t believe yourself.”

“And so your people, the Kale Kale, are descendants of those at the Citadel. Tell me this word…tell it in my language and in yours.”

The word was conflagration. Anfer, ashfal.

In the beginning, the tribe of Kale Kale had commanded a plain above black sand, whose bay lay pinched between the finger and thumb of a giant, Hoto the Defeated, whose fall had heaved mountains above his corpse. Toboro they had called their city under shadow of a fire-mountain. Noakale’s people, too, recorded that life had begun among the clouds, calamitous warfare bringing the descent of a diminished remnant…

But to ourselves, these gods were great ancestors of magic and power, whose gifts (for still they warred with one another), were by the anger of Ami denied them.

The Kale Kale called their Ami Euka.

But he was the same, and the great city might have been Monsecchers.

“We are all cousins,” I said to Noakale. It was the morning of the wedding, when I was reciting to her as much of the history as I’d translated. My people would then scratch our words into tablets and press them onto clean linen. We used a panel of gold to read our linens, turning the reversed print right.

It was a priestly act, done in temples.

I had thought of the written word so, cloaked in a hush of sanctity and the light of candles. For candlelight and the reflection of gold were the media of prophecy, the illumination of sudden passages in our fortunes. This, in Monsecchers, we had known to be the will of Lotoq, such as he ordained his priests deliver to the Lords and Judges of Delia, Decima, Vei, Treiva…

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Crafter Becomes Maker

The Totem-Maker (part one hundred four)

(2018, Stephanie Foster)