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

The Totem-Maker

Chapter Thirteen

The Citadel

(part one hundred thirty-eight)

When the roadway had broadened further, and on both sides stone blocks supported bright-painted wooden houses, I craned my neck to see spires or domes, or any grandeur that might amount to a palace.

I asked a child’s question: “Are we there?”

“We are at the traders’ town. You see the signs for rooms and stabling.”

I had and hadn’t seen, not knowing what the little flags communicated.

“It is permitted to name this town Aran,” Ba’ahn told me, smirking somewhat.

“It has a name you like better, but won’t tell?”

“Not I,” he said.

Think of that, I said to myself. The zhatabe will catch you in the same way, if you leave room for two answers. Tents came into view, at the bottom of the slope; guards stood where wings of cloth were drawn and corded, and others…officials certainly…walked the queues of waiting travelers. Who had something to declare, I surmised.

“Will we pass?” I asked, my face turned to Diira.

“How can I say? Where is your friend? He has disappeared.”

Castor, I counted a doubtful friend, and (to my annoyance) he had disappeared. He had taken my mission under his own command, I could well believe, and appointed himself spokesman. Ahead two roads diverged each into three, six starring outwards across a plain. Grain waved in plots, separated by pathways, bordered by low stone barriers.

From this busy place of hostelries and declarations, the plain was blocked by a circle of high carved pillars, lintels perched on every two.

“A temple?”

“No… Not as you mean. True, each city has a god, and each god has an altar, where the road begins. For blessing, if you travel these ways, you will leave your offering.”

She paused, and so I said…I, the mischievous one this time…

“But I have no coins. I have given them all to the zhatabe.”

“Why should the gods be pleased with a coin?”

“Or why anything? If, Diira, you really mean to raise the question. Why do the Divine expect our offerings? Don’t they pity us enough to leave us our puny wealth, when their own is boundless?”

“They do pity us. But they know what is nothing to them is too much to us. And your fortunes surely must be cursed, if you cannot pass their shrine without the wish to cheat.”

“Then why is a poor traveler demanded more of than a rich one? You, here in the City Without a Name, must have at least one such story, of highest sacrifice. In my first country, the story was…in fact…”

(I addressed myself when I said in fact, for I thought of the Kale Kale.)

142

Lore and Lessons

The Totem-Maker (part one)

(2018, Stephanie Foster)