Lawrence Schoen: Barsk: The Elephants' Graveyard

“What matters is you’re here, where you all intended to be. Let what happened at the camp go. None of that matters.”

“I think we’ll hold on to one piece of it,” said Tarva, his trunk entwined with Abso’s, who nodded in response.

“Thank you, Jorl. I’d compose a poem in your honor, but I’ve left that life behind.”

“What happens next?” asked Jorl.

Almost as one, the two hundred sixteen summoned Fant looked at him with surprise.

“How can you not know?” said Rüsul. “It’s part of the dream.”

Jorl shrugged. “I never had the dream. I … found this place by other means. Beyond bringing you here, I haven’t a clue.”

“You oaf,” said Kembü, though not unkindly. “We walk up the beach and into the trees.”

“That’s all?”

Phas nodded. Others were already moving toward the trees. “You’re a good historian, Jorl, but this isn’t something for you to record or witness. You can’t go with us.”

“I understand.”

She turned away and took Rüsul’s hand in hers. “Walk with me?” The carver nodded, glancing once over his shoulder at Jorl, and then together they joined the rest of the Fant walking up the beach and into the trees.” As they reached the limits of the landscape he’d crafted, he released the constructs of each of the Dying, laying them to rest at last.

Jorl let his awareness return to the real world where Pizlo still played at the ocean’s edge. He glanced up the beach to the tree line where in the other world the Fant had vanished. A trick of the light or perhaps his own wishful imagination made him think he saw movement there, several Fant watching him from the shadowy safety of the trees. He knew better.

“Ready to go home, Pizlo?”

JORLhad come back to Keslo four days earlier. That same afternoon he’d returned the borrowed boat, sent payment to Suliv’s shop for the goods Pizlo had acquired, and sent the boy off to let his mother know he was fine and his hands would heal. Only then did he return to his simple apartment where he carefully locked the doors and shuttered the windows against the outside world. He turned away callers and ignored requests from concerned friends and siblings. Instead, he hung in his study’s work hammock and brooded.

Now and then he moved about the house to satisfy the intake and output needs of his body, but he always returned to his study. He neither read nor wrote, and the idea of doing any sort of Speaking lay further from his mind than the outermost colonies.

On the morning of his fifth day back, he noticed a crumpled scrap of brown paper on the floor. He stared at it, knowing he was not so far gone that he could have failed to mark its appearance earlier; the paper had not been there all along. He checked his doors, both the main entrance and the seldom used back door that led down to a community compost bin. Both remained locked from the inside.

Returning to his study he discovered one of the windows’ shutters had been dislodged and lay open a crack. Nodding to himself he at last examined the brown page. The paper had once wrapped a parcel of some sort before being repurposed. It was quite worn, variously stained, and had been folded so often it appeared fractured and had become as supple as cloth. As he scanned the tight circles of the glyphs Jorl recognized Pizlo’s style. He found himself smiling, and in that simple act returned to himself from wherever he had been for the past days. The paper was an invitation.

The pleasure of your company is requested next year, on the seventeenth day of the season of dark, at the westernmost edge of the island of Phran, just before dawn, when Wella will appear to share his wisdom.

P.S. Bring lunch for us both.

Shrugging off his melancholy, Jorl opened the windows of his study. He seated himself in his hammock again, but this time went to work. By late afternoon he had completed an overdue monograph. He sealed it in a large envelope and set it on the edge of his desk to remind him to drop it off the next morning. Then he pinned Pizlo’s invitation on the wall over his desk, and headed out the door toward Tolta’s home.

As he walked through the dusk of the Civilized Wood, Jorl spun himself through the rituals of a summoning. He didn’t need to do so, but the familiarity set him at ease. He’d never tried to Speak while walking before, but the trick lay well within the range of his talents now, just as it was simplicity itself to hold the nefshons of his conversant in his mind, all but fully formed, like a word waiting to be spoken.

Jorl let himself into the house and paused in the greeting room. It was one thing to presume to step over the threshold without an invitation, and quite another to breach the inner house unannounced.

“Tolta? Are you at home?” He already knew the answer. An alluring aroma came from the kitchen where someone had prepared a fragrant vegetable stew and set it aside to cool. The sound of running water and the clunk of a pot suggested the post-cooking cleaning had begun. He called her name again. The sound of water stopped, an instant later Tolta bolted into the room.

Jorl froze. Looking at her, he realized that she would surely have been among those who had come to his home in the days since his return and been turned away with silence. And he knew he must have hurt her.

“Oh, Jorl, Pizlo told me—”

“Tolta, I’m so sorry. I’ve not been myself these last few days. I’m … I’m sorry.”

She rushed across the room and hugged him tighter than he’d ever been hugged. “Don’t you try leaving again. You’ve no cause for it. You belong here, among the friends who love you.”

She embraced him for a long while, but then, too, he had to admit that he held onto her as well. He’d seen so much, and been altered by it, but that contact assured him he would be all right. When she stepped back, he held onto her hands and gazed deeply into her eyes. He saw the same face, the same Tolta, that he had seen when he stood Second at her and Arlo’s wedding. Nothing important had changed.

“I’ve brought you a gift,” he whispered. “I hope you like it.”

Jorl closed his eyes. He concentrated on the nefshons he’d already gathered and set to one side of his awareness, and then began anew with a second summoning. When he opened his eyes again it was to a mindscape of the same room in the house, and with barely a blink of effort he pulled enough of Tolta’s nefshons together to create a construct of her there.

From her perspective, nothing would have changed. She stood in front of Jorl in the real world greeting room of her home, and her awareness occupied an identical place that existed only in his mind.

He shifted his focus for an instant, pulled the other construct into existence in another corner of his mind, little more than an empty plane of light. Arlo took shape and stood before him there.

“I didn’t think I’d see you again. What happened—”

“This is the last time I’ll call you, my friend. Everything worked out, but I thought you needed some closure. A chance to say a proper goodbye.”

He gave a final push, and Arlo’s construct slipped from one venue to the other, materializing in the illusion of Tolta’s home in the very spot where he had been standing, his own construct fading away as his friend appeared. He heard Tolta gasp as she held her husband’s hands again.

“Hello, Tol,” Arlo breathed, “I love you, you know.”

As the living Tolta construct threw herself around the Arlo summoning in an embrace that was long overdue, Jorl discretely closed off his awareness of the created space. He slipped into the kitchen and helped himself to a bowl of stew and a wooden spoon. A moment later, he was crossing through the greeting room again on his way out the front door. He paused for just a moment to see the smile and tears on Tolta’s face, and went outside into the night.