The Totem-Maker (part one hundred eighteen)

The Totem-Maker

Chapter Eleven

Lore and Lessons

(part one hundred eighteen)

At once, he felt he had erred. Dogs must fend for themselves, choose their homes…so it has been always, and so he ought to have turned on his heel. He did now, consoling himself as very slowly he climbed, and still his feet slipped, and still he heard the laughter of girls, that he would never see them again. He would not make this mistake twice.

But a sense of eyes on his back made him turn. A tall girl, an older girl, stood beside the tribal chief, and Samatho disliked what her smile promised.

The sickly boy was dead. He had died before that day, but Dars had closed his fortress in mourning, and sent no message. Mourning he did not feel. Now the bride could offer him nothing, he had ordered her poisoned.

Yet King Dars knew himself in peril with the gods. He scorned Samatho for an heir; this son was not obedient…

“He said that I was not obedient. I was not reverent to him. The Darsdena count the death of an eldest, death of the house. For, true, my people henceforth will bear my own name.”

“Only…you have no son or daughter?”

“I have both.” The Prince laughed—that I had thought so.

“Noakale is your favorite wife,” I guessed. “But, children of her tribe do not…?”

“No, we have none, the two of us. In that you are not mistaken. But no, her children could not, had they been born, be called Darsdena.”

“But at this telling, your elder brother survived.”

“Perhaps you anticipate how it was his marriage brought me back to the Kale Kale.”

Invited to, I could. “Your father was spendthrift, had drained his treasury, and sought to restore it. Drained, spent…both those things, perhaps? Finished, for wives whose families would accept an old man. And the fortune he coveted for his son needed wooing by fortune.”

“You have the right of it. When he borrowed of the Kale chieftain, he would not speak for himself, lower himself. By means of gossip he had gained…you will not be astonished…a picture of far more than had occurred. You have befriended them, he said to me. Hach’kale Liben you have spoken to, he will recall you. My father put four coins in my hand. I assumed this man he named was that elder I had been insulted by.”

“Insulted by,” Noakale said.

Her husband reached for her hand, kept it in his, but did not banter.

“Each coin represented a sum requested. And that was how the bidding of your father was conveyed.”

“Yes. By custom.”

“My Lord Prince, I am not prompting you to finish quickly. I surmise, because this is the custom everywhere.”

“Totem-Maker…”

He left off, leaving me to surmise further that I’d gleaned too much of his contempt for his father, expressed this observation too openly; that I would tuck another lesson away, as to caution and familiarity.

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Lore and Lessons

The Totem-Maker (part one)

(2018, Stephanie Foster)