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

The Totem-Maker

Chapter Twelve

A Land So Perilous

(part one hundred twenty-five)

“He will hold off attacking, do you think? For the time a reasoning man would allow we might yet send word?”

“A reasoning man! When I see him, I will tell him you said that.”

“Noakale is all his reason. Doesn’t he say so himself? Now, answer.”

“He will hold off attacking for a season. By summer’s end… But far sooner, if his men begin to squabble and steal, will he curse you and send his army to the Citadel’s gate.”

“Madness. The Emperor may dispatch the whips from coast to coast and never raise such a force, as to throw life after life into the flames. Any foothold gained would be self-imprisonment.”

“But you would counter the Emperor’s plan with no plan at all.”

“Because! Who controls the Citadel controls all trade and lands beyond, but why does the fact of power justify its seizing?”

Castor left me, laughing, for this.

By day, with snowfields on mountain flanks glaring for me a fine reading light, I sat Cuerpha and studied Noakale’s gift. When my head wanted a rest, I exchanged her book for needles and yarn, and knit myself new entries for my dictionary. The tales, I recounted in camp to my companions, so to fix them well in memory.

We slept in twos and threes, and we did not tether our animals. Too often in the dark (though I suspect it was the loneliness and quiet we feared…by day we could see, and our guides sang sweet ballads to chase away the gods’ anger), terrible splinterings would wake us and we would roll tight against the rockfaces where many before had left signs of their sheltering.

We walked our mounts, took the wheels from our wagons and carried them as the traders did, down and up a passage where the road had gone, and no help for it. The mountain in her rage had half-leveled herself here, a great tonnage of boulders, spiked with trunks of trees. A few trees lived.

But Castor pointed to me, just as I’d started a remark on that worthy quality of resilience, that this fall of rock was haunted. A landmark for wayfarers, a warning.

Quite several of a travelling company could be discerned…their bones. Portions of flesh, where flesh sits thin, had mummified, threads of cloth fluttered next to a desiccated arm, an open cavity between ribs.

The dead had been food for scavengers, but their faces—for they had them, the shape and suggestion of faces, so human after all—were pitiable, not frightening.

“You see, had they been wise, they would not have kept company this way. They were caught, all, none free to free his friends. A long death. We do not hope for that!”

That beauty so rich, air so cleansing, sounds so echoing of all time, as though each eagle’s cry froze a fresh note upon the last, should lie in a land so perilous! When we reached a cavern we gathered at last, to rest our animals, fill our waterskins, send out foraging parties. I had even less chance to feel at peace, to listen and see with all senses undisturbed.

“Yes, we fill the skins,” Castor told me. He enjoyed introducing new worries. “In some places, there is no snow. Water flows here underground, if it flows at all.”

129

Lore and Lessons

The Totem-Maker (part one)

(2018, Stephanie Foster)