The Death Feast: A Name to Conjure With Chapters 17-18
Book: A Name to Conjure With by Donald Aamodt (1989)
One Day Out
Three nights of hard travel. Everyone’s short-tempered. Nobody talks except to argue. Sandy passes the time composing bawdy limericks for Glupp. The grundzar beams at every one, probably because he doesn’t understand any of them. Sandy calls him a bootlicker. Glupp literally licks his boot.
Sandy’s sixth sense has been stronger since the stone beast encounter. He wakes with a “vaguely pleasant anticipation.” Something is shifting inside him.
They’re less than a day from Tham Og Zalkri. Uskban says they wait. Zalkring stragglers will be streaming toward the mountain all day. If even one spots them, they’re dead. They’ll move the next night under a new moon.
But first, Uskban insists on a death feast.
Zhadnoboth panics. “Death! Who said anything about death?”
Uskban explains with unusual patience. When the Kri Shandri go knowingly into danger, they hold a death feast. It puts the soul right with this world and the next. He extends the invitation formally. You can’t refuse without mortal insult. Zhadnoboth gulps and accepts.
The Ritual
Small fire. Uskban in the north, place of honor. Three black leather bottles with brass rivets. Pognak holds a brass tray of unleavened bread. Zhadnoboth and Sandy sit west and east.
Sandy thinks about his family’s Christmas dinners. Turkey, mashed potatoes, pecan pie, hot mulled cider. His mother’s cooking. He wonders if he’ll ever see any of it again.
Uskban chants a simple prayer to the Goddess. Then they drink.
The bragberry brandy starts mellow. Then it becomes a pool of glowing lava in the belly. Rivers of liquid fire race through the veins. For one moment, Sandy’s flesh seems like pure flame. Then it fades, leaving a deep lingering glow.
They eat unleavened bread. It’s salty hardtack that gets stuck in the throat. More brandy flows. The mood shifts from somber to half-rowdy, half-serious.
Pognak the Bard
Pognak pulls out a stringed instrument. Forty strings, lemon-colored wood inlaid with jet and ivory. He slips on picks and begins to play.
The music hits deep. Sandy hears it in his bones. It speaks of fierce sorrow with “an eerie beauty that made the soul soar and weep at the same time.”
When Pognak stops, Sandy sees him differently. His thick fingers have magic. His face is softer when he plays. The hard lines of hate smooth out. For the first time, Sandy sees him as more than a bully.
Uskban tells the story. Pognak was once a bard to the Kri Shandri clans. Men said he’d be remembered with the legends. Some sang sweeter, others with greater skill, but none with his force and feeling. Then the Zalkrings took him. They cut out his tongue. A singer was slain. His fingers still work, but there’s no voice to harmonize with.
“Only reborn in death will he sing once more.”
The Zalkrings didn’t just take Pognak’s tongue and family. They took his art. What’s left is a man who can only express himself through violence.
Speaking from the Heart
At a death feast, everyone speaks truth. No judgment.
Zhadnoboth, thoroughly drunk, tells about his wife. He met her at Madame Tilza’s, a house of ill repute. Tried to sneak out without paying. She chased him barefoot down the street. They got arrested. A judge forced them to marry. She stuck with him for twenty-five years.
Tears streaming, he pours brandy on the ground. “Here’s to that damned bitch. As hard-assed a rig as I’ve ever known and ten times more the lady than most who boast of their fancy breeding.”
His daughter married rich and became more virtuous than her in-laws. She calls his money tainted. But she still slips him gold when he visits.
Uskban had a woman too. Wild love in both directions. He might have married her “if fate had been kinder.” She has a son now. “No doubt he’d be a pride to his father.” The implication hangs there. Nobody touches it.
Sandy admits he’s afraid to give his heart. “People are cold to me” because of it. An honest moment from a guy who usually hides behind sarcasm.
They spend the last hour finishing the brandy and arguing about love and philosophy, mostly talking past each other. The feast ends in a blur. Pognak dances drunkenly around the fire carrying the unconscious sorcerer.
The Goddess at Dawn
Chapter 18 is just two pages. They hit hard.
Dawn. The Goddess walks through morning dew to Glupp. She touches his brow and he dreams of meadows. She looks at her four drunken companions and smiles. “A fiercely possessive and strangely doting smile.”
These are her bravos. Rough, rowdy, disreputable. Each one flawed. But each “somehow greater because of his flaws.” They have the stuff that moves mountains.
She lays a healing hand on each forehead. Until she reaches Sandy. She pauses. Stares with deep fathomless eyes. Then she kneels and kisses his forehead with her shadowy lips. Looks bemused. Walks off into other places.
That kiss carries weight. She’s marking Sandy as something beyond the others. Not just her brave. Her weapon.
These chapters are the emotional center of the book. Four broken, mismatched people sit around a fire, get destroyed on brandy, and tell each other the truths they’ve been carrying. For one night, they’re not enemies forced together. They’re companions.
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