Rüsul opened his eyes, blinking away tears. He moved his empty hands in the motions of carving, trying to center himself and halt or at least slow his rapid breathing. The stupid light of his box was just stupid light, and his hands knew his art well enough to do their work in dark and storm. He had no need to make the light mean anything more than a pesky circumstance, like a neighbor’s newborn testing out a healthy set of lungs while he tried to work. He shaped empty air with a nonexistent blade and calm settled upon him. His eyes closed of their own accord, his own lungs settled into a relaxed pace. The throbbing in his forehead continued even as the other complaints and outcries of his body began to fade into the background. It came into focus, not a headache at all, and not coming from his head but only resonating there in that space between his eyes and above the root of his trunk. It played in him like he was a living soundbox, a sensation both familiar and impossible to place.
With his eyes still closed, Rüsul rose on unsteady knees. He turned from the waist, rotating his chest and shoulders back and forth in as wide an arc as he could. He leaned back, keeping his jaw pressed down against his chest, and presented the broad surface of his face to the walls of the box his captors had put him in. There. It was coming from that direction. He pushed up, onto his feet, dragging them in tiny steps toward one wall, stopping when his forehead touched the plastic surface. He recoiled half a step, arms lax at his side, letting the fullness of the thrumming beat enter his head and travel through his body.
In that moment Rüsul forgot his own pains. He heard, he felt, a meaning in the faint but persistent pounding. It was a rhyme of changing pressure, a child’s game as universal as green leaves and falling rain. One would hide and the others would search and whosoever discovered the hidden child would in turn hide and the game continue, on and on. In the opening spaces of his skull, Rüsul felt the refrain he’d not made for almost ninety years, the faint pounding of infrasonic signals, where, oh where, play fair, be there, over and over again.
He opened his eyes. A slight turn of his head, to first one side and then the other, assured him he had targeted correctly. He leaned in, pressing his head against the wall, no longer caring about its alien plastic or the light or the closeness of his box. Somewhere beyond this wall, close enough to be felt, another Fant called out in the wordless way that children had used to tease their playmates, or when lost to cry out for their missing parents. Rüsul was not alone.
The decades of adult life dissolved in his mind. From dusty, untraveled corridors of memory he grasped after knowledge and skills untouched since childhood. The rules and rhythms of the games flittered on the edge of knowing, like a word dancing just out of reach on the tip of the tongue. After a few false starts, they came to him, each fragment trailing other memories and pieces until he had enough. His eyelids drifted down once more and with long forgotten ease he flexed and pulsed out the prescribed reply. Hiding … Abiding … Will you be confiding?
Over and over again he sent out the rhythms, more a well-learned pattern than actual words. He repeated it twelve times in all, as required by the game, lest he be forfeit. The idea struck him as so absurd he almost giggled and had to start again. Almost.
With his first pulse, the other Fant’s infrasound had stopped. As Rüsul completed his cycle he felt a probing, meaningless pulses pushed out by the other in a rush of echolocation. A flush of relief and comfort washed over him like he hadn’t felt since he’d wandered away from his mother as an infant and found her questing pulse before he had a chance to wallow in his own panic. And then, clearer, no doubt aimed directly at him as he had locked onto the position of the other Fant, as welcome and rare as sunshine upon his face, the classic reply:
Free … Free … Tree and me … Free …
Rüsul slipped to his knees in silence. The enormity and horror of his capture fell away. He thrummed back a reply of Free … even as he allowed the shock and fatigue to claim him. As he plunged into unconsciousness his face relaxed into a smile. He was not alone.
TEN. MOONLIGHT
LIKE some over-ripened piece of fruit dragging down the branch of its birth, Pizlo hung from the penultimate level of the forest canopy, dangling in the emptiness that was Arlo’s Chimney. Slimmer and straighter than any of Keslo’s other open air monuments, the shaft that bore Arlo’s name also commemorated the path he’d taken as he’d fallen from a tiny platform above the canopy. Wreathed in fire, his plunge had burned a passage all the way through the Civilized Wood and into the Shadow Dwell. The shape of that trajectory had been smoothed in the transformation to art. The width of the shaft now averaged twice the height of a Fant. The inner surface had been planed into six evenly sized walls that turned like a lazy hexagonal helix, completing ten rotations as it ran from top to bottom.
Pizlo had come not out of sentimentality, but rather at the beckoning of his personal oracle. The sense of it had begun days ago, a gentle urging of where and when that had grown in insistence even as he prepared himself. Night had fallen before his arrival, smothering the limited, diffused glow that reached the spot at the height of day. And despite the direct route of the shaft, he was too far up for any illumination spilling from homes in the Civilized Wood below. But darkness suited him. He knew his surroundings, every plant, every branch, every vine, with a surety that did not depend on traditional senses.
He had rigged a sling to hold himself precisely where he needed to be, equidistant from the six green walls, not quite supine, gazing up to the top of the shaft at an opening as black as everything else. Long before morning, Pizlo would be gone, leaving no indication that he’d ever been here.
He waited. Swayed. His trunk grasped a supporting vine of the sling and leveraged his angle a few degrees, easing an unfelt strain on his neck as he stared up into darkness. Rain had fallen down the shaft when he’d first arrived and set up, but it had since stopped as he knew it would.
A buzzing cloud of winged insects took advantage of the break in weather and rose from below, attacking a colony of flightless bugs that had emerged from a hollowed knot of a kalatma tree on one face of the shaft just above Pizlo’s height. The defenders beat back most of the invaders, shredding their wings with brutal swipes of barbed and edged forelimbs. Bodies hurtled downward as a warning against future attacks. But some few of the fliers, maybe one in twenty, profited from their comrades’ sacrifice and swept past the other bugs to bite into the tap of the kalatma. They drank deep of the sap. As their abdomens swelled with fluid, each began to give off a pinprick-sized vermillion glow, taunting the defenders who turned to repulse them too late. The bloated, surviving fliers pushed off, formed a small, glowing cloud, and began to drift back down the shaft. They paid no attention to the young Fant hanging in their midst.
Pizlo lurched in his sling. He thrust both arms into the cloud, hands curled into two cups that he brought together, capturing some of the insects. Squirming, he unstopped a gourd that hung from his waist, curling his trunk around the neck to hold it steady as he transferred most of his prize. His collection had twenty-seven varieties of insects that glowed under one or another circumstance. He’d study this latest addition after he crept into Tolta’s house for breakfast. He kept a few of the fliers, coaxing them into a single closed fist as he restoppered the gourd with the newly freed hand.