The Totem-Maker (part one hundred five)

The Totem-Maker

Chapter Ten

Crafter Becomes Maker

(part one hundred five)

A scene for you, if I conjure well, of a jumble of dwellings, balanced at hazard. Yet brave, in the weavings of cloths used to cover drafts, the glaze of mosaic for beauty alone, cemented with that strong clay dug from the bottoms of ravines.

Under the weak light of many a candle, the poor earned their bread, taking the needle and chisel and brush into their teeming rooms, and on their backs bearing bundles to the lower town, the Old Town, as I have described it to you, in speaking of Vlanna Madla’s workshops and the house of Mumas.

They walked with their bundles, and odd, fearful things began to hound them. A woman would lay down the weight to fetch a drink, and a deadly serpent slither out. A man would feel a sudden sharp pain, and find his cloths afire. The children who trailed their parents would shriek at masklike faces darting behind trees, bone white, with rolling yellow eyes, and mouths in the shape of a turtle’s shell.

The people did not live insensible to their vulnerability; they feared and were cautious of fire, deadly beasts, demons and plagues above all. For it is one of the tiles, the turtle, which foretells thus: whatever tile is turned after, that fate will be yours and your beloved’s, twinned but opposite. One a windfall, the other a bankruptcy. One recovered from illness, the other stricken. But when a child is to be born, the turtle takes this shape—

Of ending the line, no child ever born to that house again.

Turtles are never touched or troubled among our people. Nor, I must suppose, among these older brothers and sisters, the Kale Kale.

The laborers of the shantytown went uncomforted. Their priests were the city priests; the people knew that in the temples they were not wanted. Worshippers with shod feet and coins to offer commanded these, and when the poor peered in, they were swept by the acolytes to the yard below the temple window, where they might hear the priests but ask them nothing.

One priest, however, a blind man who had taken upon himself a sequestered life, as the unsighted often do, was said to pray day and night for the succor of these least. A’an, he is recorded, which meant father; he was so addressed by pilgrims seeking his intervention with Euka, or with lesser deities. He was not thought to love children, but a child was lowered to him in his seacliff cave, to whisper the horror of the masked spirits.

“They are not spirits.”

This was abrupt; the child dared, “They are evil men?”

“Oh, indeed.”

“Why do they invoke the turtle?”

“For, child, that there are other lands than ours. Places of unbelievers, infidels. You must tell your father…your father has given you this task?”

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Crafter Becomes Maker

The Totem-Maker (part one hundred six)

(2018, Stephanie Foster)