Lawrence Schoen: Barsk: The Elephants' Graveyard

“Tell her I’m sorry, will you?”

“She knows. We all do. I have to go now, Pizlo is demanding a story.” As he began the mental exercises to disperse his friend’s nefshons, Jorl nodded his farewell.

“Tell him the one about Pholo. He always loved hearing about—”

With a shiver and a shake of the head, Arlo was gone. Reality returned to only a single frame of existence, a single alcove in Tolta’s home. Jorl stood, stretching his arms and legs and trunk like a man rising up from a deep nap in the first afternoon of wind.

A pale blur of child-sized Fant pushed past Tolta and threw itself upon Jorl, attempting to climb him like a tree branch. With one arm and his trunk Jorl swung Pizlo up to his shoulder and followed Tolta out of the alcove and down a hall to the room set aside for the boy’s use when he chose or could be persuaded to sleep under a roof. As Pizlo’s trunk circled tightly around his left ear for the ride, Jorl began his tale of a legend of Barsk. He knew the story would end with the hero’s enlightenment and the boy’s slumber.

“Whilom, Pizlo, and oh so very long ago, there lived a young man named Pholo. But this was no ordinary Fant.”

“No?” That one syllable was all breathless anticipation and no part question.

“No, because Pholo possessed the gift of flight! While all others walked or ran, skipped or jogged, Pholo soared through the passways of the Civilized Wood like a purposeful leaf on the edge of a storm…”

THROUGHOUTthe tree cities of Barsk’s archipelagos, Fant went about their daily affairs. Occasional travelers worked their way through the maze of massive roots and boles, mud and gloom and deceptively deep pools that defined the Shadow Dwell, before stumbling without warning onto open beach and welcome rain. Families of mothers and aunts, sisters and girl cousins and children of both sexes, worked and studied, laughed and dreamed in homes, offices, and workshops carved and grown from the trees that defined the Civilized Wood. Adult males established smaller bachelor homes or circulated through the assortment of lodges and fraternal apartments that changed residents almost as frequently as their occupants changed clothes. Fant lounged and strolled along platforms and balconies, cooked meals, made music, enjoyed their lives. Children played on public balconies, studied in gymnasiums, slept in warm beds in homes populated with adults who loved them as the promise of their own posterity.

None of that applied to Pizlo’s life.

He hung in open air, ruminating, suspended upside down in a well-tended shaft walled on all sides with living green. Seven such chimneys existed on the island of Keslo; every island on Barsk boasted at least one. Fant society created the insubstantial monuments as part memorial and part warning. Few reached all the way to the uppermost limits of the forest, or ran all the way down to its roots. This one, Suth’s Shaft, was one of only three that Pizlo knew did both. It curved and meandered, bulged and narrowed, a metaphor for the twists and turns of Suth’s life some two hundred fifty years in the past.

Maintaining the memorials required countless hours of effort. The shafts provided conduits for seedlings, pollens, and molds to float from one height to another, eager to root and grow. Everyone took turns to keep them clear, from roving teams of elderly bachelors to field trips of school children. They’d snip and clip, groom, and sculpt, preserving the negative space, until lunchtime bade them pack their tools and leave the living task for the next day’s team.

This day, Pizlo had arrived early enough to have the space to himself. The walls of Suth’s had called to him, promising an adventure. A collection of hastily knotted vines had proved sufficient to his need and allowed him to dangle in the middle of the Shaft, far from the safety of any side or railing. His feet wriggled above him and his head grew dizzier by the moment.

But the chimney wasn’t his destination, merely the staging area. Eyes tightly closed, he listened to the forest as it revealed the path for him to take. When he had it clear in his mind, he squirmed free of the vines and dropped like a stone.

Like Arlo had dropped.

Unlike him, Pizlo bounced on curves, snagged branches, passed turns, and briefly clutched bits of vine to gain spin. The effort transformed his fall into a controlled plunge that ended in a deep pool many levels down in the Shadow Dwell.

Since coming to Barsk and adopting an arboreal lifestyle, few Fant learned to swim. As with so much else, Pizlo was an exception. He let the water absorb his momentum, diving down to the pool’s murky bottom before executing a perfect flip, his legs scissoring to propel him upward. He surfaced and swam to the water’s edge. Mud-covered stone surrounded a pool scarcely wider than the boy’s height. He hauled himself up onto a stone and lay back under the fronds of a butterleaf plant, panting and complimenting himself on the speed of his descent, a personal best for reaching the Shadow Dwell.

He used his trunk to snatch up several mouthfuls of dusty, golden leaves, grimacing at their bitter aftertaste. He squinted, as much with concentration as to focus his weak eyesight, and exhaled pollen rings through his trunk. In the circular glyphs of Barsk he spelled the consonants of his friend’s name in the humid air. J … R … L …

Jorl had been Arlo’s friend and somehow that friendship had transferred to him, doubling the number of people in his world after Arlo’s death left him only Tolta. He liked that, much as he liked the irony that all the thousands of Fant, the Lox and Eleph that shared this island with him while denying his existence because of his differences, were themselves denied by millions and millions of other people on more worlds than he could imagine. And none of the Fant who pretended he didn’t exist had ever been to any of those other places or met any of those other people (who wouldn’t have wanted to meet them anyway). Except for Jorl. He had done both, been there and met them and come home to be his friend.

Maybe that was why Jorl kept showing up in his conversations with the world. It didn’t matter that only two other Fant acknowledged his existence; the rest of the planet conversed with him on a regular basis. Not words so much, because only people had language. Even though he was only six, Pizlo knew the difference between real and pretend. The trees of the Civilized Wood had brought him here today, and many times in the past rocks and streams in the Shadow Dwell had shared secrets with him. On two occasions, the entire island of Keslo had alerted him to time and place so that he could position himself just so, sprawled out on one of its thin strips of beach or secreted upon an observation platform poised above the canopy. On both junctures he had occupied just the right spot when the ubiquitous clouds had parted to reveal one of Barsk’s moons. He’d looked up at them and felt them gazing back down in turn. The moons were the wisest things he’d ever met. Their light shone onto his face and passed knowledge to him, ideas and thoughts and stories, of what had been and what was yet to come. Pizlo smiled as he remembered the experience; Jorl would have called those conversations visions.

Conversing with the world was yet another way he differed from other Fant. They had gray skin, his was colorless white. They winced and pouted when they stepped on a sharp stone or cut themselves on a broken branch, but no injury, large or small, bothered Pizlo. Tolta had tried and tried to get him to wear long-sleeved shirts and thick pants, but he preferred less encumbrance, and since he couldn’t feel the hurt of the innumerable cuts and scratches covering him from ear to toe he ran wild, wearing nothing more than a pair of shorts and a daypouch on a strap around his chest.