Bandele Three Hundred Forty Seven, Heat Moon

Two-Parthal

Lord Eagle, do not snatch my child

From my arms holding tight,

And carry him above the mountains

To see how far the world ends.

Lord Eagle, drop him back to me

Before he alights where,

sharp beaks and claws will rend the embraces

 of flesh and breath of his birthright.

-Unknown, from the Marsis

It was my twelfth summer and I had Beloved, my sister's youngest at all of three and a half years of age, on my shoulders as we leaned into a roughberry patch. I was trying to teach her how to pick the berries without crushing them and to not eat them before they made their way into the basket I was holding up to her.

 "Shall we save some for Mama to make a pie with?"

I was beseeching her, which only got me more giggling and a berry popped in my mouth as an answer. This rose to laughing with glee if her plump fingers occasionally added a silvery leaf to each bribe and I had to noisily spit them out. The only bounty we would be bringing home today was that which was staining my niece's smock. Knowing the exasperated look that would most certainly follow from her mother on our return, I decided to just blithely surrender to the streams of golden sun coming through the slim trees and the hum of placid bees and birdsong. I wasn’t tired of bearing her weight, more proud that I had grown strong enough to do so. However, the peace of that afternoon was soon pierced by the high voice of her older brother Oak calling to me as he ran to us.

 "Uncle, the bard is here, he's asking for you!" he huffed out, bent over, hands on his knees in front of me. I put Beloved down and let her brother fill his lungs and then started home with the two of them in hand. We went as fast as they would allow without falling and I ignored any complaints about the pace.

It was late in the season for Parthal to be gathering his usual audiences from a valley such as ours. Worried farmers preparing for the harvest weren't the most attentive to tales of our ancestor’s deeds or the lessons of the few Gods the Emperor listened to. There would be always be news from corners of the empire that they could barely imagine. I had been wondering if the bard’s great wagon with its treasures would come bumping up our road this year, with relief and regret taking their turn inside me. If he did not come, I would be free from trudging up the hillsides with food and cooking pots on my back as I did last Summer. I would also be freed from memorizing both laws and poems while sitting around a fire, Parthal’s crisp deep voice filling me up with worldliness. I would be asked to empty whatever part of it I could understand afterwards, back to him in my own thin words. 

When we arrived, Parthal was sitting in front of our door on our best chair from the hearth, my sister Primrose and her husband Fisher sitting on either side. Fisher’s Aunt Myrtle, widowed young and grown old while grieving, was filling their bowls with ale and offering up honey-dipped nuts and apricots. 

"Ah, my pupil and his attendants," Parthal smiled at us, obviously amused by Beloved's pink stained hands, face and clothes. Her mother, unamused, sucked in air through clenched teeth, betraying a different greeting. She leapt up and scooped her daughter into her arms and dropped her smock and all into the raised brick tub by the side of the house we kept filled throughout the warm days. 

"Oak! In!" Prim commanded and a naked little boy clambered up and in happily. His mother kicked a smoldering log from the outside cookfire into the opening underneath to warm the water which led to both children excitedly teasing her with cries of "Mama, don't cook us," and laughing wildly at their joke. My sister resisted for a heartbeat with the rest of us until we joined in the merriment and laughed along with the children. Oak, seizing the moment, started the rhyme we all knew from childhood, Beloved trying to join in but just collapsing into more laughter.

“Mud and crud, blot and spot, play in the dirt and hope the bath is hot!”

Aunt Myrtle sobered first and went to tend the splashing pair, stating to the air as she moved that "love and punishment live together”. She stopped Oak from continuing by dumping a bucket on his head, which he spluttered under with good cheer while the rest of us shouted our approval. Myrtle's stern mutterings rarely turning into an open hand on a young bottom  so Prim returned to her chair and allowed herself a bemused glance with Fisher.  I decided washing my face clean of Beloved's attempts at feeding me would also be wise.

The women of my sister's loom house were finishing the day's work and closing the shutters. All seven came over, by ones and twos, to greet Parthal and shyly ask how fared the Empire. They were hoping, or rather expecting, that this would prompt an expansive reflection that called for ale and treats, as had happened many times before. They would lay on their sides in the grass, listening and eating, both rapt and peaceful. Prim, as usual, relented with a look at Myrtle to fetch more for her workers and Myrtle shuffled into the house, followed by Grandmother Jenci. She was the oldest weaver here who had worked for my family since before my mother or father had been born. Pushed by habit or will, she would always go to Myrtle’s side to help in the kitchen. No one, especially her daughter and granddaughter who worked alongside her, rose to relieve her of her tray when she emerged. They knew they would only get pursed lips and a gnarled finger pushing them out of her stooped way. At least, after the bowls were filled, Jenci and Myrtle would sit side by side in two good chairs and look contentedly over their respective domains sprawled before them.

"The horse demons from beyond the Great Flats in the East are scratching at our doors again...they even raided over thirty miles deep into Karland! They probably wanted to show the younger ones how to murder good and peaceful citizens before one of their lords kills enough of their other lords to bring the thousands upon thousands of demons together to invade again under his bloody banner."

Parthal was, in his calm sternness, washing away some of the warm ale with icy water, his words in our tongue as clear as those in his native Imperial. The weaver who I knew as Lala had a son somewhere on that frontier; my sister would read his letters to her when the post rider brought them once or twice a year, and I saw her eyes grow fearful as the bard spoke. Her friend Morn, lying head-to-head with her, each raised on one elbow, knew to reach over with her free hand and cup Lala's face without anything being said. As the young prince of the loom house, I had seen this many times before, this invisible wisdom, these gestures between the women, with my sister being the first among them in this magic. As I scurried about, from the thread cabinets to the well to the lamp oil barrel as bidden, I only sometimes understood the familiar chatter and jests that were shouted above the clacking of the looms and the stuttering bobbins. Sometimes, as I leaned in to pick out the doff, they would stop talking altogether until I moved on. When I was younger, I would press Prim to explain what I had overheard as we sat at table in the evening. She would either smile and indulge me, frown and shush me or, with a face as unmoving as the statue of our family guardian on the hearth mantle, lie to me about the meaning. 

"We must, and we will, build more forts to hold fast our doors from this foul wind, remember this when the magistrate sends the tax collector on his rounds...soon.  Swords are forged from silver, not steel.” 

Whenever Parthal said something that reminded me that his wagon was pulled by the Emperor’s horses, that he entertained us with official purpose as well as his love of words and philosophies, I felt older, more aware of the simpler beliefs fading with my childhood. Tomorrow, he would unload his wagon to show and explain to the inevitable stream of visitors all his exhibits and wonders, but for now, his duty done, Parthal closed his eyes and started in on a short poem, of lovers lost to each other that was sure to allow safer tears and sighs.

“…Suns will rise and suns will set, but I will burn…”

“Boy, do you know why I will summon you year after year? What I saw at first?”

I shook my head, very much wanting the answer but suspecting it might not be a simple pat on my nine-year-old head.

“Do you remember that small goose with the foot that wasn’t right?” he asked, leaning forward to watch my face as I thought.

“Yes, I called it Keep Up, when it died I buried it under the big pines but didn’t tell anybody so they wouldn’t eat it.”

Parthal smiled at this, his eyes crinkling with the pleased surprise of a storyteller receiving an unexpected morsel to make the tale richer. I, in turn, was pleased and surprised that he would know such an important secret of mine.

 “I saw that when you fed the geese, they would, as birds are known to do, attack the misshapen one and drive it away from the food you scattered in their pen. Each time you would toss some grain in one corner to draw the flock there, and then run as fast as your little legs could to the other corner, where this Keep Up had learned to wait for the handful you held back just for him. People can sometimes behave thusly as those birds, tis a sorrow but tis true.”

We were setting out on his long table with his statues and sculptures of animals from lands so far away they might as well be fables, so strange looking were they. We herded those together at one end and arrayed on the other half the busts of subjects from the different strands of the Imperial rope, stronger woven together, as the Magistrate’s men always repeated when collecting for the Capital’s treasury. These benefits were not always clear to our small world of a hundred miles this way, another hundred that way. The plaster heads with their wigs and clothes were for looking; the carved stone beasts were for passing around between hands rough and dirty, large and small.  Later, Parthal would raise the wagon’s shutters to show the shelves of scrolls on every possible topic, written in an Imperial shorn of any ornament and suited for those of my people that had the ambition or necessity to learn it. Each scroll had a wooden disc attached with a title and description scratched into it and would be carefully lent out to any citizen, usually one in each family, who approached. Their return when Parthal came again, even if a year later, was expected and, to a one, received. Some were reserved for scribes who had earned their rings, which gave them license to copy and peddle as many as they could manage. Most of my writing teachers had been apprentice scribes, of diverse abilities and affections for word and child, who traveled from farm to farm or set up their desks at any village that could pay.

When all Parthal’s wonders were set down as he wanted, he looked the table over and then turned to me and put his hands on my shoulder. 

“You were kind, clever and stubborn, which is a good beginning, no?”

copyright 2025-Philip salkind

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