Knot my problem
A short tangle from Waist Not, Want Knot
Knot My Problem
Micos worked through the message a third time, but still things didn’t add up. It seemed like the accounting must be off by a factor of ten. There wasn’t a shred of possibility that Capac had traded quinoa for more than eight hundred guinea pigs. No way. When had Capac’s clan ever raised that much grain, let alone enough surplus to trade? And who on earth would have had that many spare cuys?
Micos prided himself as an expert regarding cuy husbandry, yet he’d never come close to tending a herd so large. Simply feeding that many hungry mouths would require six or eight times his crop of children to grow and gather barley and to sweep up the cuy shit. And think of having that many creatures under foot!
Like all of the families in his village, and as chief it was his village, Micos kept a couple dozen in his home, and, being the rich Inca on the block, a few dozen more in an attached coop. As he pondered the account he’d been given he watched the house-bound critters scurrying back and forth from the kitchen to the vestibule, chirping as they ran. The restraining curb at the base of the doorway continued across the room, keeping the smelly things out of his office space.
Micos shook his head. The stench of hundreds would be unbearable! Sure, guinea pigs are tasty, but that kind of stink would put you off your feed bag for sure.
He looked at the record again. Capac had always proved to be reliable. An ally. As trusted as the rising sun. Eight hundred? It simply didn’t make sense.
Or had he allowed himself to be misled? Was Capac actually that wealthy? And if he was, then who had he been trading with? Another rich man. Had to be. Going further, if there were two men, both many times more flush with barley and cuys than Micos, were they a threat? Were they even now conspiring to raid and rob and run off with the women1 in his village?
The rich, Micos knew, are different.
Stepping outside he hailed the courier who was relaxing in the shade, recovering from his long run. “Urco! A question!”
The runner spat the coca leaves he’d been chewing and strode to Micos’ side. “Yes?”
“This message, you brought it straight to me from Capac?”
“You betcha2 Boss.”
“Non-stop?”
“A half hour at my home. For a light snack3.”
“Was the message ever out of your possession?”
“I left the quipu4 on our kitchen table when I went out to relieve myself. Not long.”
“Was there anyone else in the kitchen?”
“Only our seven year old … oh,”
“Oh, what?”
“He was holding it when I returned … and,”
“And what?”
“Lately he’s been learning his knots5.”
*****
Note: Substack starts footnote numbers anew each time I paste in a story. But footnotes are wildly important and sometimes refer back to previous matters, so I’ve thoughtfully put the correct numbers in brackets, like so [#].
1 [30] Micos had, of course, obtained wives in similar fashion. As a general rule suspicion of wrongdoing is usually rooted in personal guilt. Viz: spousal or business partners’ accusations of cheating.
2 [31] Or its equivalent in Quechua (known as Runasimi to its speakers).
3 [32] Ditto. Probably a cold, leftover leg of cuy.
4 [33] A quipu usually consisted of cotton or camelid fiber strings. The Inca people used them for collecting data and keeping records, monitoring tax obligations, properly collecting census records, calendrical information, and for military organization.The cords stored numeric and other values encoded as knots, often in a base ten positional system. A quipu could have only a few or thousands of cords.The configuration of the quipus has been “compared to string mops.”Archaeological evidence has also shown the use of finely carved wood as a supplemental, and perhaps more sturdy, base to which the color-coded cords would be attached.A relatively small number have survived.—Wikipedia
5 [34] Required of a Cub Scout® or “Runasimi Boy,” in the Peruvian Highlands in the early 400s.
*****
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