Chapter 26: Goblin, Town, Home, World, Sprite, Ossuary

Reads: 113

“Are you still angry?” Sabill asks.

“Yes,” I say.

I’m resting my meal, back to the stone cottage of an overseer. As carters, they feed us well. It’s not some generosity of Lianth, Jimbe tells me. Carters get more than double rations. And the bread isn’t the peasant bread that overseers are generous with, but a sweet bread, with fruit juices baked in and sometimes dried fruit mixed in.

She sits with me. I notice the curve of her face and her ready smile and I don’t want to be loud or mean around her. I’m not quite old enough to understand those grownup things, just that I like her.

“You don’t sound angry,” she says.

“I’m not angry at you,” I clarify. “Or your father. I will do my best for him.”

A beggar approaches us, bowing. I give him the heel of my bread.

I’ve seen beggars on the Path of the World before. I saw two begging together right after the peddler’s cruel lesson in putting on the hood. In general, I don’t remember them or talk about them.

But this one is a warning to me. Running off from a bone mark isn’t automatic poverty. You can still become a sailor or do some carting, when no other would.

Or join the Legions.

I’m more determined, now, to see my bone mark through and return home.

I say something like this to Sabill.

“Father was a bone carver,” I add. “Mother can get me apprenticed to one of the others or one in another town.”

“I hope so, Bessil, but that costs a fee.”

“It costs a fee,” I say. Left unsaid - the peddler paid for my carrying his wares. Unless he took a real shine to me, there was no chance he would have apprenticed me. “How long will your father be gone?” I ask.

“Maybe the sky knows,” she says. “Jimbe’s saved up to lay with a peasant. Are you going to do that?”

“I have no money, no trade. Besides, isn’t it wrong? Outside marriage?” I clarify.

“Not with a peasant,” she says. “Or maybe it is. Father wants me to show these to you.”

She hands me the box and gestures for me to open it. I’m tired from eating and drinking and dearly want to sleep, but I don’t dare speak up in case she takes offense and won’t talk to me in the future.

“It’s bones,” I say. “What are the symbols?”

“That’s what you’re to learn,” she says.

These are the bone symbols. Each ulna has carved one symbol and a little scene to represent the word there. As I rotate each bone, in the dashes and slashes of the common tongue is an explanation of how the symbol may be used.

There are only thirty-six and they do not represent all the things on all the worlds, but only the needful things.

Four of them frighten me, but even those that don’t frighten shine with power.

Here is the symbol for skerry, the giant rock floating through the sky. Everything I’ve ever known, every person I’ve ever met (save sailors) is on this one world and all that is meant by that is in this one symbol.

On a bone in my hand.

Sabill starts showing me the meaning of the common tongue inscriptions. These are the common words that make up the bulk of reading.

I quickly learn “inscribed”.

“World inscribed -” Sabill points to each symbol. “Inscribed only means carved on human bone. There’s a different symbol for scratching words any other place.” I watch her lips as she explains. “The world inscribed is a limit for those barred from the sky. Learn ‘sky’,” she says, catching my eye for a moment. “It is an important word.” She licks her lips and continues. “The world is a circle to walk and return home. The world is the people who live on the skerry and must keep its laws.”

We look at six symbols, my eyes darting back and forth between her lips and the marks on the bones. I remember them: Goblin, Town, Home (one of the frightening ones), World, Sprite, Ossuary. I remember better Sabill’s closeness to me, both of us sitting against the wall of the cottage, smelling her sweat from walking and dancing along the path.

“This one is sprite,” she says. “Can you read the symbols? What does it say?” She guides my eye with her finger.

“Sprite inscribed memorializes -” this word had been used before and Sabill only had to prompt me a little - “madness of a one taken by the sprites. Let the symbol be written on the raver’s head until death, then inscribed on skull in the ossuary.”

I remember, now, that ossuary is another of the first symbols she taught me, and easy to remember, for it looks like a box.

We look up as the overseer approaches.

“There’s a dark coming on, miss,” he says. “Best to get some sleep anyway. Carter, there’s a bunk by the fire. Miss, there’s a couch in the parlor. The other carter can bunk with me.”

“Thank you, sir,” I say, handing the word back to Sabill, who returns it to the box, carefully wrapped.

“Father says you can learn as much as you want, on rest. I’ll teach you, but you must cart true for father.”

“Eh,” says the overseer. “Once you do learn to read and do your numbers, it’s all about counting and tracking boring stuff. How much hay, how much grain, how many babes.” He shakes his head. “But best you know.” He turns to walk away, but calls back, “And use the privy before you come in. Could be a long dark.”

Submitted: July 23, 2023

Fantasy sprite goblins bones