The Totem-Maker (part one hundred thirty-two)

The Totem-Maker

Chapter Twelve

A Land So Perilous

(part one hundred thirty-two)

Sickness seemed, in light of so much downing of wine and rich food, an untroubling thing, an inconvenience that must pass. The jewelers worked with the weight of the village’s expectations, all their people’s receipt of scorn and abuse by the great houses of the city…

At the hands of these masters, all to be redeemed.

Each, secretive, kept cloistered in the workshop, eating less and less for the pains in their stomachs, yet Allel, Takel’kale, and Mafi found their separate reasons to dismiss the malaise, to count themselves better this day than the day before.

Takel’kale worked feverishly (Bani’s term, and I cannot say if his humor was dark), to embed her art into ring and bracelet metals, which must be purchased from the city guilds, for the Kale Kale were allowed no forges. She woke on her mat, ten days from first touching the stones, in a terrible itch and sweat, and when she went to the roof of the house below, she saw her pots of herbs green in the rain, and saw the veins of her hands and arms spidering, broken under the skin, the skin blotched with purple.

Her painful scratching, while through pain she could not stop herself, had opened these injuries; they wept and bled. She scratched on, and when the raw wounds flowed, fell to her side. Under her ribcage, the ache was intense. Rain fell, cooling her.

Alas, rain enough fell to show Takel’kale her own face, in the mirror of a puddle.

The sickness touched all who had been near the stones, all who had borne them in baskets, all who had bent their faces close to admire what had seemed only loveliness. The three artisans, their servants and their apprentices, were dead. Others died, though in some the sickness prolonged itself, and the attack of it was not apparent on the flesh.

Rathinihama, who had reached a hand to caress the crystals, saw that hand, then the arm, wither. As the limb blackened, already he felt the agonies of the bowels; he did not have the surgeon brought to axe his arm and cauterize it with the iron, knowing he would die from pain alone, and be fated no more mercifully than the man they had called halfwit.

His wish at the last, perverse to his attendants, was to have the adornments meant for the Emperor, things of a beauty surpassing all joy and pleasure, carried to his bedside on a low table. They pulsed there in the rays of sun, with a promise of evil…which the eyes of the Kale Kale could now recognize.

The attendants, for piety, had dared it, masking themselves and gloving their hands. They, like Bani’s father, fell ill, but recovered within the month. Rathinihama was wrapped in fleeces, and sunk in Lotoq’s lake, as were Takel’kale, Allel, and Mafi. All the dead, eighteen of them, were made to vanish.

Bani’s father, and the men of the mission, met with the elder’s successor, Zetihama.

“Ilota, Falzi, what do the people say?”

136

Lore and Lessons

The Totem-Maker (part one hundred thirty-three)

(2018, Stephanie Foster)