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

The Totem-Maker

Chapter Twelve

A Land So Perilous

(part one hundred twenty-four)

I moved myself further and further from those who worked, and watched the Prince’s camp for an embassy, the party I thought surely would cross the meadow to say farewell, fortune attend you, return with good speed…

Noakale came out, her gaze fixed on me as she approached.

For the cold she was wrapped in skins, and wore a hat of shearling. She strode tall, refusing me by some means, with her hard steps and grave face.

I knelt.

“Do not,” she said.

“Princess, this totem I have made is yours. If the Prince requests one…”

“Why, what will he use it for?”

Small before her, I felt detected. “I would make one to counsel him…” My voice half-deserted me. “Against war.”

“And what do you call that quality, to oppose war? Can you make a totem of peace?”

“Of clemency. Of…reluctance. Of doubt?”

“Creature. Are you a Maker?”

“Today I am. Yes. But I falter because you know. I had been going to tempt you. Test you, perhaps.”

“I believe I have treated you well.”

I might have wept for the austerity of this. “But I have made a Totem of goodwill. You could not do harm with it. Wouldn’t you like…”

Suddenly she bent and hugged me, and I was forgiven.

“Give your gifts to the zhatabe. And as I’ve told you, be a scholar. Read my people’s history. Things of earth are wise, and we use them. Things of the gods…? No, not for the Kale Kale.”

Her husband held back; I hadn’t known it of the northerners, but Egdoah explained. He used a word, fhewen, and gestured with his fingers trotting like a horse. He turned his back to me, then grinned round.

Which gave me to understand that partings, figures receding to invisibility, awaked their terrors of the ghostly realm. They did not follow this with their eyes.

I ordered my mission as Cime’s teachings, as stories I’d known, instructed, and my intuition compelled. Before us in stages we sent our scouts. They returned, and reported the way clear, or needing the labor of clearing. Pravor Castor, far more travelled than I, told me we must ride, and our drivers guide the wagons, well-spaced through the mountains. Within shout of one another if bandits showed, but for the practicality otherwise of falling boulders killing only a few, and destroying only a part of our supplies.

On our third day, patient in outfacing his sly jokes, I got the forecast of a month’s ride, the gods giving kind weather. Else a winter in camp.

“Castor, the Prince will long since have counted our cause lost, in such case.”

“Totem-Maker, he has never counted our cause but lost.”

128

Lore and Lessons

The Totem-Maker (part one)

(2018, Stephanie Foster)