The Totem-Maker (part one hundred four)

The Totem-Maker

Chapter Ten

Crafter Becomes Maker

(part one hundred four)

But I spoke to invite.

We of the coastal lands were a type, the northerners a different type. The traders, from what I’d seen of them, a third type. Noakale had not the face of the lands beyond the Citadel; she had not quite my own face, but we were alike in coloring.

“Yes, I confess to taking pleasure in the sight of you. I confess too, for you won’t discount me, that I was happy in Monsecchers. More than at home.”

She was in sighing mood, weary from these preparations. And the greater to come, when her husband and his army marched, and she must choose.

“Do you go, then? Do you join the battle? Is that a habit of the northern wives? As I’ve seen Darsale and her costumes, which to my eyes…”

“Are you chattering at me? Hush! A woman of my tribe makes her home where she finds it. My husband and his host are only a small thrust…or, to make a picture, let me say better. A drip of water below the roof tiles. The roof looks sound, but after many storms it will fall.”

“I foresee it, the Citadel will be conquered. But those many storms will cost you all your lifetime and more…”

Darsale, on a chair held aloft by servants, called to Noakale—

From the hilltop, not ordering herself carried lower.

“I’ll go up to her.” The containment in Noakale’s voice told all the story.

The Kale Kale had built Toboro on the strength of their fine craftworkings: of potters, stonemasons, jewelers, weavers. They lived beside the sea; they traded by the sea, but did not much sail or fish.

The fire-mountain left them untroubled, and its bowl was a lapping turquoise lake.

Lotoq (I allowed the naming of him, as Noakale’s ancestor did not) had been quiet those hundreds of years. He had not yet been summoned by his chosen people to rise and rain wrath on the impious…

I might be biased in supposing so. Lotoq was quiet, but the malenchantment that invaded Toboro came from his dominion.

As of Monsecchers today (I pray it be; so it was, when these thoughts were in my mind) the landscape was formed of ridges and terraces. The high places and the fertile were commanded by villas, the low and hardscrabble by the shanties of the poor. Human figures like ants in file climbed and descended daylong, and the ridges served with their winding, trampled paths, for the stacking of one structure on another’s roof. A jump from the path found a perch, very narrow, below the beams of an upper shanty; the roof of a lower made a sleeping place in the night air.

Ladders were laid, becoming the by-streets of the shantytown.

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Crafter Becomes Maker

The Totem-Maker (part one hundred five)

(2018, Stephanie Foster)