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

The Totem-Maker

Chapter Twelve

A Land So Perilous

(part one hundred thirty-five)

“They do not.” Bani’s father was heavyhearted with misgiving, but his misgivings were not the fancies of a boy. “Those demons were no other than the strangers at the lake. They had decorated their faces. What did the hermit tell you? You must always remember what you know, for soon I can tell you nothing.”

Bani’s father and the villagers he trusted made tracks into the forest for days, carrying food and skins, and other things by which a new village might rise—rolled mats to wall thin shelters, basins for catching rainwater, stores of goods that might be sold, if the exiles found a home over the mountains, and returned to lead away their brothers and sisters.

In Noakale’s book (I may say so today, though it took me many years to fully translate), Bani does not recount the fate of the second tribe. Yet I was not wrong to feel my kinship to Noakale in the blood. I knew it, and she knew it. From the soil where the people of Monsecchers farmed, at times would rise a visage of marble, demonic enough…the fleshy paint of its face scored, the nose off. Or, causing less terror, the capital of a pillar. At times the stone-diggers would unearth a painted scene.

Further, our legends told of a city that had spanned all the plain between Monsecchers and the villages surrounding the mountain. All cities of antiquity were of a glory untellable, but as legend, of gold in rivers poured over every roof, of gardens that sank through grottos and rose in the terraces of a temple, each terrace dedicated to a god, each god of higher importance than the last, each array of flora and art surpassing.

But from that city, once Toboro, my mother had fled, and Lom’s grandmother had been sold. The disaster on the day of my birth would have been a second winnowing, of a people born into slavery. For certainly the Emperor’s soldiers had scoured the forest, but would not have slaughtered those they could enslave.

I will not, for Bani does not, expand on all the Kale Kale did in preparation. Takel’kale, Allel, and Mafi, had been crafters from their blood and being, of dek Zebhe. The golden coffer, dressed in garnet stones, which encased the lead coffer, that held death, was delivered.

And was taken up.

That is all Bani says of it.

 (And because I am old, and a lover of language, I will mention that here I had learned our word, my people’s, bhekale, which I had thought meant evil ones, meant more an exciter of dark passions…one quite capable of working iniquities; and when given the dek prefix, a blood obligation, a tribe’s inherited vengeance. Thus we see the echoes of the Kale Kale’s chosen name, and the Ze…to swear, to avow, of Zetihama.)

My friends, I feel that Curiosity, which we take lightly, is our true besetting sin, and a grave one. The men of the council had postulated this chain of events, this dramatic break, this flight. They could not return their minds to a long patience, leave their mission for the generations to come. They wanted the knowledge, now, of what would happen. Whether they ought to have drowned the crystals and suborned themselves to tyranny, I count a false conundrum.

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Lore and Lessons

The Totem-Maker (part one)

(2018, Stephanie Foster)