The Heartwood Crown

by Matt Mikalatos

  The multiple unresolved plotlines of the Tales of Meselia impacted its popularity, but while it is not remembered as fondly as other children’s fantasy series, it still has a small but devoted fan base.

  LEXICON OF ALUVOREAN WORDS

  * * *

  ALAM: flower

  ALLAE: the river of life; a waterfall; clear, running water

  ANNAGINI VASAGI: the Queen’s Tree; literally “the queen who brings life”

  ANNAGINUK: queen

  ANUKOP: a pond; also the name of the lake around Inyulap Anyar

  ARAKAM: dragon of the underworld

  AYARA: heartwood; heart; the center of a matter; “life’s blood”

  AYARA ARDHA: the Heartwood Throne, or the fruit of its tree

  AYARA IKANNUTO: the Heartwood Crown

  EMES ESUTOL: seed of hope

  ENALANOK: hero

  INYULAP ANYAR: the Queen’s Island

  ISAP: moss

  KASKA SHRAM: the carnivorous forest

  LIN: long grass that is good for weaving; productive

  RASKAN: firethorns

  UDUHUM KOB: literally “thirsty water”; the Ginian Sea

  URUDAP: an Aluvorean beast of burden

  VANA: a good and pleasant place

  JELDA’S REVENGE

  A Scim Legend

  * * *

  A great while ago, when evil wandered the land without opposition, a righteous woman named Jelda also wandered. She had a home once, but it had been burned to the ground, her husband murdered, her children slain. She wandered like a deer, her path repeating over the days, her feet making tracks through the woods.

  So it was one day that she came across an Elenil man who had fallen into the river and become ensnared in the roots of a prison tree. In her youth, Jelda would have dived in to save him without a thought, but age and experience had given her wisdom.

  The Elenil heard her move among the bushes on the far side of the river, and he called out, “Help me, dear friend, for I am trapped among the roots of this prison tree, and when the water rises, I will surely drown.”

  “How do I know you are a friend?” Jelda shouted. “This is a harsh world. If released, you may slay me or cause me harm.”

  Then the Elenil promised on his name that no harm would come to her, and Jelda trembled, for it was a name she knew well: it was this man who had murdered her husband and ordered his soldiers to set fire to her home, her two children still inside.

  She stepped into the sunlight so he could see her clearly.

  The Elenil’s hands clutched the roots of his prison. “Fair lady,” he said, “I see that life has used you ill, for you are more forest spirit than woman. Your hair is struck through with moss, your hands the color of dirt, your clothing in tatters. Still, set me free and ask what you will of me, and whatever service it may be, I will perform it. Bid me go to the roots of the world and bring back pure magic, or follow the humans to their other earth and bring back the cold, dead clay of that land, and I will do it.”

  Then it was that Jelda knew the Elenil did not remember her. She stood at the water’s edge and said to him, “Elenil, if I free you, promise on your name that whatever three commands I give, you will follow.”

  He swore it on his name.

  Jelda dove into the river and swam deep until she found the key knot for the prison tree. She turned it thrice, and the roots released the Elenil. Jelda grasped his shirt and pulled him to the bank and sat beside him on the emerald grass as he gasped and dried in the sun.

  When the Elenil had regained his strength, he sat up and said, “Now, fair lady, what three commands have you for your servant? For you have saved me, and I must do as I have promised.”

  Now, in those days, a promise made on one’s name was a promise bound with magic, and anything Jelda asked, the Elenil would have obeyed. Had she asked for great wealth, or to change shapes, or to be archon, he would have done those things for her, even if it had taken his whole life to do so.

  But Jelda intended to get revenge on this Elenil, not to enrich herself, not to gain more magic, not to gain more authority in the world. Her first command, then, was simple. To the Elenil she said, “Know who I am.”

  In one moment, all his memories came rushing in. He remembered the Scim woman from the windswept plain, and how she had begged him over the corpse of her husband to spare her children. He could see in his mind her story, how she had fallen in love with a Scim man, and how they had lived happily together in their meager home, and the joy that had come with their children. He saw the sort of woman she must be to overcome her sorrow and still live, although she wandered the forest like an animal. He saw, too, that a woman such as this must have a bold plan of revenge against someone like himself.

  With deep foreboding he said to her, “Jelda, I remember you well. The magic of the Elenil has given me a deep knowledge of who you are. Now speak! Tell me the second command I must obey.”

  The words leapt to Jelda’s mouth, and she said, “Know what you have done.”

  In one instant, the Elenil knew all that he had done in those few moments on the windswept plain. Not only the death of this farmer and his children, but the consequences of it. The unworked soil, the food that was not produced and not sold to other families, the network of pain and longing that flowed to every person, every creature, every soul touched by the loss, the destruction of two young lives who might have brought greater joy to the world, cut off, destroyed, in a moment of power-drunk madness.

  The Elenil could not bear the pain. He wept and cried out, tearing up the grass, tearing at his hair. The enormity of what he had done closed in upon him, as if the entire sky were a weight pressing upon his shoulders. He could not hide from it, could not pretend it did not exist, could not forget what he had done. He grasped Jelda’s legs and begged for her forgiveness. He screamed to be set free, to be released from this pain. He snatched a dagger from his belt and prepared to slay himself, for he could no longer bear the full knowledge of his actions.

  “Was I not promised three commands?” Jelda said, and the Elenil paused, the dagger in his hand.

  Terrified and trembling, the Elenil dropped the dagger. “What is your third command, O Jelda? Command me any task, be it possible or no, and I will perform it. For my trespasses against you and against your family have been many.”

  Jelda did not acknowledge his speech but said only, “Live a long life.”

  Then, her revenge served, she left the Elenil upon the riverbank, weeping and cursing himself, and Jelda returned to civilization and did not think of him again in all her days.

  Thus was her revenge complete.

  Jelda was given three commands and used them wisely. So, too, this story shares three commands: one for the storyteller, one for the hearer, and one for the heart which understands.

  HUMOR IN THE SOUTHERN COURT

  From the book The Sunlit Lands and Their People,

  found in King Ian’s library

  * * *

  The people of the Southern Court are shape-shifters. There is some debate among sociologists as to whether they have a “default” shape, because they are highly secretive about their marriage, birth, and death rituals. In fact, for many years, some sociologists did not recognize humor in the Southern Court for what it was.

  Humor in the Southern Court is generally recognized as funny because it is one of three things: 1) truth; 2) what is known as “truth in conflict”; or 3) so obviously false as to point toward the underlying assumption of what is true. I will share here an example of each form of humor.

  One, truth. There is a famous story of a well-beloved comedian who arrived at a Southern Court marriage ceremony wearing the shape of one of the most hated enemies of the Court, Garnesh the Slayer. He arrived and immediately announced, “I will kill everyone at this wedding!” The comedian was met with riotous laughter because this was undoubtedly true (if someone had been so foolish as to invite Garnesh to the wedding). In some versions of the tale, h
e goes on to murder several members of the wedding party, with the guests and attendants laughing harder and harder as he slaughters the happy gathering.

  Two, “truth in conflict.” The idea here is that the comedian must juxtapose two ideas that are both true but appear to be in conflict with one another. In Southern Court humor, this is often accomplished by putting one’s words and one’s physical form in conflict with one another. The most famous example is, no doubt, the comedian known as Lenia. She was well regarded as one of the most gifted shape-shifters of her generation, able to take on the shape of another person with such precision that a family member might choose her rather than their loved one if they stood side by side. She did this, she claimed, by not only taking on the physical attributes of her target shape but by actually emphasizing certain parts . . . making herself “more like them than they were themselves.” A well-regarded act of Lenia’s began with her taking the shape of a different Sunlit Lands race—for instance, an Elenil—and then standing in front of the audience and saying, “I am not an Elenil.” The truth is that Lenia was not an Elenil, and yet all evidence of one’s senses would say the opposite. This juxtaposition of a true statement while wearing what was, to all appearances, an Elenil body, is said to have created a wave of mirth that caused many in the audience to doubt she could top her opening sentence. Her second sentence is lost to history because of the crescendo of laughter. Her third sentence, however, was “This is not the Sunlit Lands”—a statement that was so boldly true and untrue that some in the audience that day do not remember the act continuing from that point forward. The truth here (the Sunlit Lands are much larger than just the Southern Court) and the competing truth (even a local territory like the Southern Court is, in some way, “the Sunlit Lands”), created a near riot of hilarity.

  The third Southern Court principle of humor is to say something that is self-evidently untrue, with the express purpose of revealing the underlying truth. This is most often done through exaggeration to a ridiculous degree. For instance, the common human saying “I’m starving” when one is hungry is considered hysterically funny. Clearly the speaker is not suffering from starvation, but their statement points to the underlying truth that the speaker is hungry. Citizens of the Southern Court often break into uncontrollable laughter when speaking with humans.

  The most famous teacher of Southern Court humor has a maxim that he says is the core of all Court humor (you will see it is partly based on the comedy routines of Lenia herself), and all of his students begin their course of study by memorizing these simple sentences:

  This is not Aluvorea.

  This is not the Sunlit Lands.

  This is not the Southern Court.

  The first sentence shows the value of truth as humor—the Southern Court is not Aluvorea. The second sentence is both true and untrue, as discussed earlier. The third sentence is a complicated exaggeration. The people of the “Southern Court” have their own name they use to refer to their territory. The term Southern is one the Elenil use, as the Court is to the south of Far Seeing. They are not, in fact, a “court” at all, since their government has no royalty as such, no sovereign, and in fact does not even have a judiciary. They employ a form of government very difficult to explain in a few sentences—it’s a shifting form of representational democracy in which the person who makes a final decision rests on a complicated calculus of morphology, generation, gender, season, and chromatic awareness. Their “king” is a figurehead whose role is connecting to other political entities in the Sunlit Lands and, in fact, is not one person. Depending on the event, a different person will take the shape of the monarch and “play” the king. There was, in fact, considerable distress among the people of the Southern Court when deciding whether to use gendered language like king when the monarch might be, at any given moment, a female. So the term Southern Court is a political fiction embraced by the people for pragmatic reasons. There are undertones to the statement “This is not the Southern Court” that the Elenil (at least those who understand it) find troubling: it could also be a cry for complete disassociation from Elenil society. The Elenil concerns on this topic are, as you might imagine, hysterically funny to the people of the Southern Court.

  For those outside Southern Court society, by far the most distressing outworking of not understanding Court humor is when they attempt to make jokes at public events. The people of the Southern Court love weddings, celebrations, and festivals of all kinds. It is common for a member of the Southern Court to arrive in the shape of, for instance, the mother of the bride, and to loudly declare, “I will break the legs of any who disturb this wedding!” While hilarious in a Southern Court context, this is considered uncouth by the other cultures of the Sunlit Lands.

  THE GOOD GARDENER

  An Aluvorean Story

  * * *

  It happened when the trees were still young—not saplings but not full growth, either. That was when the boy ran from the Sunlit Lands, for his family had been murdered. The boy was too young to know that the forest held no safety for him, and so he crashed through the trees and forded the river and found himself alone on an island.

  Here he lived on berries and drank the fresh water of the stream. His bed was a carpet of moss, and at night he covered himself with a blanket of leaves. No one from his village came to find him, for in those days the forest still housed creatures that struck fear in the hearts of the villagers, for no hero had been found to empty the woods of monsters.

  But the creatures did not harm the boy, perhaps because they saw in his heart a sort of kin, for what he had seen happen to his parents had sent his mind to different places than those walked by the people of the Sunlit Lands. So it was that the boy would hunt fish near the waterfall with Arakam, the dragon. Or climb the tallest trees and sit upon the edge of Fantol’s dark nest. Even, it is said, he would swim down the river and join Malgwin and her dark brood in the Sea Beneath, though he returned home shivering and stiff from the cold. And most days he would walk through the forest with the man.

  The man did not have any name that the boy knew, nor did the boy think to ask him for one. He was the man, and the boy was the boy. What else was there to know? He did not need to call for him, because the man came every day. He did not need to speak his name for attention, for who else would the boy be speaking to? When they were together, it was only the two of them.

  The boy did not know, but it was the man who told Arakam and Fantol and, yes, even Malgwin that they were not to harm the boy. All the creatures of the wood knew to leave the boy in peace, for he had suffered enough already, and the man had not created the Sunlit Lands as a place of war and suffering but as a respite from them. True, the creatures of those woods had come to think of the boy as a peer and, it might be said, had even come to love him. But it was the man who had told them they must give the boy his freedom, and without the man the boy would have surely died in the woods.

  One day as they walked through the trees, the man asked the boy a strange question. “Would you like there to be more people in the woods?”

  “What do you mean?” the boy asked, his heart pounding in his chest. He could scarcely remember his own parents or the other people of his village. His life had been all wildflowers and berries and the creatures of the wood.

  “The Sunlit Lands are not as they should be. The people fight and argue. They have ceased to be the people of the Sunlit Lands and have made for themselves other names: the Scim, the Elenil, the Southern Court, the Zhanin, and so on. They have forgotten that they are one people. There is anger. There is murder. There is even war.”

  The boy did not know this word, so he asked the man about it. “What is war?”

  “War is when two groups of people kill each other until one group says ‘enough.’ Then that group—the one who says ‘enough’—they are said to have lost the war.”

  The boy threw a stick into the woods. “But are they not the wise ones? Is not even one person killed enough? It is the smartest, then,
who lose the war? The wisest?”

  “A war does not end with only one death, though sometimes one death could start one.”

  The boy was amazed. “How many must die before a war is ended?”

  The man looked sad and put his arm around the boy’s shoulder. “How many do you think?”

  The boy thought hard on this question. “Three?” he said, and when the man shook his head he said, “Five? Seven?”

  “More,” said the man. “Sometimes many more.”

  “Why would you bring such people here, then?”

  “Not to wage war but to escape it.”

  “Because if they come here they will not be killed.”

  “Yes.”

  The boy did not have to think long on this. “Then they should come. I will teach them about the fruits that are good to eat, and I will show them where the wild berries grow. I will show them the cool places to lie on hot days, and the shady spots in the river that are best for catching fish.”

  “And you will not let them wage war?”

  The boy was shocked. “No! Never.”

  “Good,” said the man. “Then I will let the people come into the forest, and perhaps these woods will become what the Sunlit Lands were meant to be: a refuge for those who have been harmed by the injustices of the world.”

  The boy was troubled. “But if these people come, what will I call them?”

  “They will each have a name,” the man said gently. “Have no fear about that.”

  “Then what shall I call you? For now there are only we two in the forest, but in that day there will be many people, and I will need a name to call you by.”

  The man smiled. “I am called different things by different people,” he said. “The people who call themselves the Elenil call me ‘the Majestic One.’”