The Totem-Maker (part one hundred twenty-one)

The Totem-Maker

Chapter Eleven

Lore and Lessons

(part one hundred twenty-one)

Through all prompt and balking, rage and fear, longing and reluctance, the Prince had seen clearly one thing to do. He put himself right with the god he had paid few respects to.

“There,” Liben’s wife said. “Now perhaps Liben, for the sum he is willing to lend, would prefer some assurance. Life, for fighting men, has its perils. Your brother has no house of his own, and the house a son builds ought to stand against the father’s. As to do justice.”

She lifted her shoulders, apologized if she spoke badly in this difficult language, but surely Samatho saw her meaning. She offered him tea, and he gulped it down this time, rather than dare think.

The house a son builds ought to stand against the father’s.

“But he may become husband to the daughter of King Tubalt, and die that very day.” She drew a roll of bark, tossed it in the flames. “God send the young man health and joy.”

When Samatho returned to his father, he reported Hach’kale Liben so impressed that Dars Gesvar should honor his house with such unlooked for, most humbling, patronage, as to insist on a greater sum than asked. Samatho, with the care of all his heart, unpacked the clay tablet he could not read, nor any of his father’s household.

“Father, Liben would marry me to his daughter. Her name is Karabitha…”

“No.”

“Father.”

A faint smile had for a moment encouraged Samatho. The King might jest. He had never been seen to do so, but the jar sparkling its gold coins, the second jar, and the third, laid at the King’s feet by a ceremonious train of servants, had put a flush in his cheeks. Tubalt, there for the concluding of the bargain, and Samatho’s brother Dobran, leant to bask in the heft and music of wealth.

Tubalt nodded to Samatho, a frozen figure on knees, proffered hands clutching the tablet; this, and its bearer, unaccepted. “A contract, Dars! A contract, set down in terms. What does it say, boy?”

“I don’t know.”

“Have you married the girl already? What have you bound your father to?”

Dars, hard-handed and vain, woke to suspicion. “Contract? In Kale hen scratchings on mud! What do you mean, Tubalt, bound? He has not my authority to make agreements. Never with the Kale Kale! Begone, you will not marry this girl! I will make a marriage for you.”

Samatho was dispatched to a different exile, made lieutenant to one of his father’s captains, to our own Emperor subjugated…as mercenary, for a first campaign of ten years. The wife the king had chosen was sent to him.

“She dwells today in the Emperor’s household. She pleases him.”

I did not ask the Prince if he doubted the parentage of the boy and girl. Noakale stood, decisive, and her husband went to her side.

“That, my Princess, is not all the story.”

“No,” she said to me. “But enough. And what you cannot divine, I will tell. Tubalt, having gained a son-in-law and a fortune in gold, rid himself of the son-in-law, and kept the gold.”

125

Lore and Lessons

The Totem-Maker (part one)

(2018, Stephanie Foster)