The Totem-Maker (part one hundred forty-seven)

The Totem-Maker

Chapter Thirteen

The Citadel

(part one hundred forty-seven)

And what was the Citadel, when finally I saw it?

Not for the first time. When speaking to Wosogo long ago, I had seen that configuration, that plain at the foot of vast stoneworks, that green valley safe on the other side, those tents of merchants from every land.

But these could not be called works. They were native pillars, of three angled sides jutting, fissured at intervals. We know by edifices we have built, that the stone is mortised, hoisted by winch, by oxen team, and fitted to its tenon. The Citadel’s pillars rose to form a fat cone, truncated at its top, and must in time beyond reckoning have been capped, by the handiwork of the gods.

They rose by a measurement easy to guess. Trees grew from any crevice where an acorn might root, and so the Citadel’s mount vaulted six great oaks’ height, from earth to sky.

At the foot of all this was a barricade of boulders. The highest apartments of the zhatabe began between the mountain-face and its anthill of tunnels. Our view was a god’s, for from a gallery at heaven’s height we looked down on the conflicts of men.

The Prince had not waited for my mission. The people of the Citadel for some time had known it. Noakale had failed to persuade him, and my own persuasions had come unfixed.

His cavalry and chariots lay camped, his war engines arrayed, on high ground; and I dared think it was he that had marred the land, ordering fresh scars among the grasses. The poor young men were left below, where the earth had an odd pimpling…

I intuited the cause, and said to Castor: “They have waterworks underground, these clever Citadelians. They can dissolve the soil to mud when they like. That mire is what the Prince means to drive his battle through. The fallen will become the road his charioteers grind over.”

“It may not go as badly as that. I thought you came armed with cleverness of your own, which you will use to knit these adversaries.”

“As a blanket, or a neck-scarf?”

“How can I know? All proceeds from your own plan.”

“No,” I said, aware of interested ears surrounding me. “As, first, I have no plan. I command none of these events. As second, if he thinks to threaten the zhatabe… Why!” I mastered some anger. “Even if he could conceive, gazing upwards at this magnificence the gods approve to the zhatabe and the people of the Citadel, or they would cast them down, that a weak position looks strong in the light of mere defiance…”

“You disappoint me. Please don’t, or what have I left to believe in?”

“Oh? I disappoint you? How then can I serve you, Pravor Castor?”

Not crestfallen, he said: “By hearing what I have said to you more than once. Do your affections, where you bestow them, cloud your sight in every case? Samatho acts by all he deems may please the Emperor, and do himself honor. He told you he will die on this field. His eyes may never see the slaughter he has wrought.”

151

The Citadel

The Totem-Maker (part one)

(2018, Stephanie Foster)