The Ancients: The Forest

Reslyn sat with her legs crossed, trying to find the pool of light with her mind. She had glimpsed it before, unexpectedly, in meditations practice, but had never been able to reach a state of relaxation and clarity pure enough to get any real sense of what she had, in those few moments, felt a hint of. She sighed, fighting frustration and her restless mind. She was balanced on a log that was laid horizontal across the 10 ft. gap between the two banks of a river. The river itself ran fast and cold, buffeting her body and drying the sweat that sprang from her pores. It was a hot, humid day.

Reslyn looked upward toward the sky (excusing herself for this distraction because hadn’t her mother told her to watch the time for she wanted her home no later than mid-day so that she could take lunch over the other families?) and saw, through the filigree of branches and leaves, that the sun was making its way toward its apex slowly today- she had plenty of time.

She turned her head toward her left shoulder and, craning her neck upward, noted the clouds that were approaching, steadily and almost resignedly, the soaring and jagged peaks to the West. Though brilliantly white now, she knew that they would soon grow pregnant and grey, heavy and cumbersome with water. They would proceed orderly enough until the warm arm propelling them could no longer loft their weight and then they would drop away, snagged by the peaks that seized them, until the windward side of the range was overwhelmed with over-ripe clouds. Then they would shed their burden, dropping their dark weight onto the trees, lakes, rivers, and plantations of Praar. She returned to her meditations, trying not to acknowledge the disappointment that had arrived with the realization that she had hours left to spend in this fashion.

As she shifted her weight, she felt something small and hard hit her shoulder and glanced up. The trees above her were full of glanos, the large round seeds that fell to the ground in the hottest months of the summer, swollen and hard. She looked down at the river as it raced beyond her log and disappeared into a bend, around a copse of rimu trees, but the seed had been lost beneath the green froth instantly. This river, officially named the Praar, but known as the Graveda by her clan, was at its tamest as it passed through these lands, owing to the many tributaries that sapped its strength and fertilized the region. Even so, cold and swollen, made pregnant at its origin by both the sudden arrival of the spring rains and the runoff from the mountains above of melting snow and ice, the Graveda in the season of growth was a river to be feared. The Montero villages that had lived for centuries along its ancient banks had long ago adapted themselves to the river’s swelling rage and lost only a handful of people a year to its wrath.

Reslyn felt another impact on her shoulder, this one harder, and looked toward the sky again. A third glano hit her, on the head this time, and Reslyn felt her frustration at her meditations giving away to anger. Glanos were raining down on her at a constant rate now, a steady rate that nature could not possibly generate and Reslyn yelled up into the canopy.

“Arjun Miko! Stop that!”

Reslyn scrambled to her feet and scanned the branches high overhead. There weren’t many, for the trees on the river’s bank were mostly tall and straight; very few leaned over to join their brothers from the opposite bank.

“Hey Reslyn! I’ll stop when you can find me!”

Another glano struck Reslyn, on the arm this time, but her anger had lessened witht he realization that he was testing her.

She and Arjun shared most of their daily training classes and consistently beat the rest of their peers. With only each other as serious competition, the two had formed an unlikely and hesitant friendship, and they often incorporated the most recent lesson work into their play periods.

Reslyn rooted herself into the rough bark of the fallen tree and imagined drawing its strength up into her body, through to her shoulders, steadying herself. She leaned back slightly, felt the river’s wind slough against her slight frame, and gazed upward. The light from above was muted and grey, filtered through damp clouds. The sky, at its brightest point, was brushed steel, and only darkened further toward the west, where clouds were piling up on the windward side of the ridge.

Reslyn focused on the pattern that filled the sky overhead. She relaxed her eyes and felt them slide out of focus. Glanos were still hitting her, bouncing wildly off the plains and curves of her body like hail in a storm. She didn't feel them at all. She stayed that way -arms spread wide, face turned up towards the tree tops, eyes open and opaque- until she felt a shift inside her mind, a feeling of cogs falling into place and grabbing hold, moving forward, and pulling pieces into place.

She blinked and continued to gaze unfocused at both nothing and everything until one shadow, one bumpy shape, popped out and filled her vision, shocking in its incongruency. Though pattern vision was one of the first talents Reslyn had perfected, it still surprised her how glaring the anomaly became, once spotted. The outline of Arjun’s body, contrived and intrusive within the organic and curving patterns of the branches, stood out now in her vision and she wondered how she had not been able to see him before.

A glano splashed into the water to Reslyn’s right, and was followed quickly by another that cracked off of the log. Reslyn continued to look up into the trees and shifted her body to the right, moving along the log slowly as if she was trying to gain a better vantage point. She lifted her hand to her face and held it above her eyes, acting to shield them from the diffused light above. She heard the approach of the next glano and dropped suddenly into a crouch, grabbed one of the round, flat stones that she always carried in the pocket of her skirt, and hurled it up into the canopy, at the dark shape sitting among the leaves. She was rewarded immediately with a grunt of surprise.

“You could have pointed,” his voice drifted down.

“I could have done no such thing,” Reslyn retorted and walked along the log toward the right bank of the river, where Arjun was now deftly making his way down the trunk of a rimu. She watched his descent and saw that his hair, always worn tied back severely from his face and usually pulled into a tight not of intricately arranged braids, had fallen partway down and was now loose on the right side, giving him the appearance of a girl child.

He seemed to sense the cast of her eyes for, when he came to the next branch where he could rest his weight, he removed a hand from the trunk of the tree and rubbed vigorously at the right side of his head, brushing the hair there back and off of his face. As he turned his head back down toward the ground to negotiate his next move, Reslyn noticed the pinkening of his neck beneath the dark interwoven bands of his crest tattoo, took pity on him.

Unlike many of the other children who shared classes, training times, and play periods with Arjun and her, Reslyn took no pleasure in others’ discomfort. On the contrary, she felt pain, as if it were her own self who was enduring the careless jeering and ugly attention of the abusers.

“I’ve noticed your knot is loose. It is strange to see it so, but you must know that I will not mock you, Arjun.” She waited to see how he would react to her blunt acknowledgment of the awkward situation before them.

Men always wore their hair pulled back from the face and twisted ornately into braids and knots. It attributed to a man’s subtle power if his knots were thick and convoluted, shiny and black with a blue cast. It said even more about a man if his knots were thick yet fine, as well, convoluted yet simple, and shiny and black, yet muted by an arrangement governed by humility. Men’s knots were their pride and to see a man with his hair down, looking exactly as a girl would look- hair loose and floating freely- was to see him at his weakest and most vulnerable. Only mothers and wives were ever allowed the sight; mothers because they are the Keepers of the Knot and wives, only if they were sufficiently loved and obedient enough to earn the privilege. Reslyn herself knew that her mother and father shared the love of an un-knotted union, and she had secretly seen her father with his hair loose many times. But of course, Arjun would know none of that.

Arjun continued to look downward, avoiding her gaze, which came from the river to his right, so she continued. “I see that it is in the trunk knot and, if you don’t tell on me, I’ll fix it for you so that no one will know.”

The statement, called softly and in a muted voice, brought a mischievous smile to Arjun’s face and he raised his head slowly, shame forgotten in the face of this new knowledge. Reslyn smiled back at him, happy that her tactics had diffused the situation. Sure, he will never cease attempting to discover how I learned the sacred knots, but at least he has forgotten about his pain. Now that my secret is at his mercy, his pride is restored.

Arjun flitted down the lower branches of the tree and sprung to the ground, bounded off of the earth, and raced toward Reslyn. Deciding that the stump on the opposite river bank would seat them well, Reslyn turned as Arjun arrived breathless at her side, and walked across the log.

“The clouds are growing heavier,” she said loudly, turning slightly so that her words would carry to Arjun above the roar of the river beneath them. A pause told her that Arjun was inspecting the sky for himself.

“It is still too early in the day. It must hold off longer!”

Reslyn caught the edge of tension in his voice and wondered why he would be anxious. It was she who would be scolded terribly if she were to arrive home wet, dress dragging behind her and face veiled by the runoff of the scarlet ink her mother had applied to the crown of her head.

“An early rain won’t excuse us. The Elders will merely say that we should have arrived home early, anyway, in order to better prepare for the feast.”

They had reached the far side of the river now and could talk normally. Reslyn led the way to the stump from which her bridge had been felled and sat down. She gestured to the mossy ground at her feet and Arjun sat down, facing the river, back pressed against the smooth bark.

“Do I need to take down any more hair?” Arjun asked, impassively watching the river as it raced by.

“I must take down the damaged braids in order to fix them but no, you don’t need to take down all of your hair for this.”

Reslyn set to work, first finding the damaged string, then unknotting it, unbraiding it, restoring to it the escaped hair, rebraiding, and -finally- reknotting it. Her hands moved with calm assurance, pausing only briefly now and then when she had to search her memory for a particularly complicated section of the design. The fish-scale sheaths on her forearms glistened in the sun, reflected dancing bubbles of light onto Arjun’s hair as she worked.

Arjun cleared his throat. “How could you tell what knot I wore from so far away?”

Reslyn smiled to herself and watched the light sparkle across Arjun’s knots as her arms, instead of slowing, began to move more quickly. “The trunk knot is one of the simplest knots. It also seems to be your mother’s favorite and you wear it on nearly every festival day.”

Arjun made to turn his head, as if to look at her, and Reslyn held it still, gripping the braids in her hands firmly.

“So you guessed! You didn’t know it was a trunk.”

Reslyn heard mild resentment in his voice. “I bluffed. There’s nothing wrong with that.”

She completed a short but complicated series of twists, tucks, and knots and flicked him on the neck. “The rains are sure to come soon; we must go.”

She could see from his face when he stood and turned to walk back across the river that he was thinking hard. Asking her about her secret would be a delicate task and she knew that he must fear harming their friendship; he was sensitive and so naturally imagined everyone else to be as well. Reslyn considered speaking up, telling him willingly so that he could stop torturing himself but she knew that she wouldn’t. She found that you could know a person best by witnessing their solutions to challenging problems. She felt that she knew Arjun as well as she knew anyone, but she also sensed about people that there was always more to learn and so she let him continue his internal struggle as they followed the footpath away from the clearing on the river’s edge and toward the shade and density of the forest line ahead.

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Kasita, the village of river and rain, lush forest and rich soil, was a hidden place. Its bounty was concealed far away from the paths that constituted the main travel routes along the foothills of the (Mountain Range) and located as it was, a great distance away from the well-known passes, there existed almost no chance for it to be accidentally discovered. The village was rich and its people were blessed and every day dawned with new reasons to plan festivities and to honor the spirits.

As Reslyn and Arjun walked out of the leaf-fringed shade and into the cleared brightness of the village outskirts, they were greeted by a boy and girl running toward them. The girl’s hair was bright and flaxen and floated around her head as she ran in weightless curls. Her eyes were sparkling and blue, her skin light and luminescent. If she was day, then the boy beside her was night, for his eyes and hair were dark and his skin had a richly tan tint to it, as though he were of the sand people about which the children had heard tales.

The two of them slowed to a quick walk and greeted Reslyn and Arjun; two pairs of hands pressed forward, palms out, fingers pointed toward the ground. Reslyn and Arjun returned the greeting and pressed their palms against the others’, fingers pointed up toward the sky. The couples grasped each others' wrists and then released, formally stepping away from each other.

“Reslyn, your mother sent us to warn you of the rain,” Rideti said, apologetically, for it was plain to all of them that anyone with eyes could tell that the rain was soon to arrive.