PodCastle

* Author : Kelsey Hutton
* Narrator : Samantha Loney
* Host : Matt Dovey
* Audio Producer : Eric Valdes
*
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Previously published by Beneath Ceaseless Skies


Content warning for racism and racial slurs


Rated PG-13
Your Great Mother Across the Salt Sea
by Kelsey Hutton
PART ONE
 
Kwayask nātohta. Listen carefully. There once was a woman who sewed clothes so powerful they made you become the person you needed to be. Children’s feet wrapped in her flower-beaded moccasins never stumbled. Otipēyimisowak orators, backs held straight by her finger-woven sashes, never lost a vote. Loved ones, buried in family robes storied with a thousand hand-dyed quills, were never forgotten.
This woman, called Miyohtwāw, used her gifts with bead and shell and calico and stroud to sew kin relationships together all across the Plains. Then, at the direction of the grandmothers, she was asked to do the same between the Otipēyimisowak and the distant Hauthasan kwīn.
Yes, she remembered their language from her time with the nuns. Yes, she could still count their coin and twist her hair up like a “lady,” though it was now touched with grey. A Hauthasan lord sailing home was even willing to present her in the Hauthasan court. This lord assured the Otipēyimisowak that his great woman leader across the salt sea was a compassionate and upright woman, who cared for the people of the lands she ruled from afar like a mother cared for her children. No matter how different they might be.
But Miyohtwāw was no ambassador. She always spoke through her clothing if she could. And yet, the Otipēyimisowak Nation badly needed to be heard — before the next great wave of land-hungry Hauthasan moved onto the Plains. The grandmothers heard out her own qualms but insisted nonetheless.
Over and over, for the two lonely moons it took to sail across the world, she reminded herself: others, at least, thought her gifts were enough.
They finally arrived at the cold Hauthasan palace — a monstrous block of white stone held tightly together by its harsh, straight lines. Inside, Miyohtwāw trailed the Hauthasan lord as he hurried them to the “audience room,” where they were to meet his leader, the kwīn. Every angle and awning was astonishingly cut, with an almost inhuman precision. Miyohtwāw couldn’t help but run her fingers over the gleaming metal banisters, the plush bench covers, even stopping mid-ascent to press her palm flat against the impossibly smooth marble stairs. This earned her a frustrated harrumph from the lord presenting her, just as the nuns once scolded her as a dawdling child. All it took was that one huff of scorn for Miyohtwāw to feel as stripped bare as she had felt decades ago, defenseless before the nuns. She quickly carried on.
Soon enough, the palace helpers stopped in front of a set of heavy oak doors. They threw them open and ushered her into a cavernous room that smelt sharply of boot polish. She barely knew where to look — at the great pillars, intricately carved and sparkling with gold? Or the ceiling, painted with hundreds of near-naked figures laying on clouds? The room itself was filled with hundreds of the queen’s kin, dressed in swelling skirts and brass-buckled coats. Furious whispers rose up like a deadly storm of mosquitoes — each word too quick for Miyohtwāw to catch but all together enough to strip a horse of its flesh.
She fought to catch her breath.