The Totem-Maker (part one hundred sixteen)

The Totem-Maker

Chapter Eleven

Lore and Lessons

(part one hundred sixteen)

I had once mentioned how use darkened and scored them, how I could guess a tile’s portent without turning it. The tenth hour was the pearl.

But pearl is a symbol we use because we do not use the turtle.

I kept my eyes soberly from a glance at Noakale, who did not love the games as Pytta had. When I turned and named this tile, she might think only of rarity…of softness, of the ocean itself.

I said to the Prince, “This night’s fortunes will end in dreams and the promise of day. The tenth hour is the pearl. We see much of water in these omens, yet water within a pot will not overflow.”

“Unless the fire burns too hot.”

“Let us turn the eleventh hour. This is the serpent’s eye. The serpent’s eye tells,” I told the Prince, “of unseen watchers. A warning to be alert.”

Except for Moth, who did not ride at daybreak, none of us were nervous, none to sleep poorly. The songs among the soldiers had died.

“Do the gods truly move those hands of yours? You oppose me. If you mock me, can I know? Your reading of the game is what you say it is.”

“Vlan. The gods do as they will.” I made the sign, only because he had startled me to confess such a fear. He made the sign himself, clumsy at it. I had never seen him pious.

Noakale said: “We sit at the seventh hour and are blessed by the owl. Tell on, my husband, how it was you took a daughter of the Kale Kale for your wife.”

He did not count himself a man contented in his nature. The land his father permitted his tending was sparse of fertile shallows where crops thrive. Samatho—the Prince named himself for the first time in our acquaintance—liked well enough to see things grow. His sparrow mind could bear wandering under cool pines, his gaze flitting to the clouds that augured rain or sun, down again to duff and straw, to spy strange jeweled domes and velvet pennants…

It was forbidden to trap young things in spring, and so he idled and knelt, and studied what he knew were dwellings of the woodspirits, shimmered visible in the witching times of greening and browning, winter’s and summer’s ends; while in the spirit world, these brief purples and reds, these mushrooms and blooms that unfold and rot, have passed an age.

He could not be made a farmer, but a good dinner on the table pleased him. (Though writing so, I feel I must say that this is something of our own expression, my people’s, our tables carried to our couches, our use of knives and cups, our hands cleaned between courses. The northerners take meals around their fires, women and men seated alike on skins, their attendants on gathered leaves. They rise with their flints and drinking vessels, they sport dangerously over the spitted meat, they sup from the skulls of animals sacred to this clan or that, and our southern ways have no civilizing virtue, for returning to their homes the northerners forget their sojourn among us.)

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Lore and Lessons

The Totem-Maker (part one)

(2018, Stephanie Foster)