Elemenchya - Book One

S'bowynn meandered back to the city center, standing amongst the crowd as she considered the story she had just heard. Like a bolt of lightning in her mind, the memory of the flower-haired woman reminded S’bowynn of the deal she had made the day before. With the news she had collected about the caravan bundled with the story she had heard from Sira, S’bowynn hoped for a rich trade with the stranger. Before she could the forum however, a familiar voice called out from the crowd.

“S’bowynn!”

She turned and found her mother, Nista, hustling in her direction, carrying familiar clipboards in her arms that S’bowynn recognized from when she was a child and her mother worked organizing and planning through the Communication Building, before she left to help Drana with the hat shop. The urgency upon her mother’s face was clear and S’bowynn knew there was no escape. “You’re back to helping out Janoiah planning?”

“Some old coworkers stopped by the hat shop last night and asked if I would be willing to lend a hand with refugee care organization,” she huffed out, trying to catch her breath. “S’bowynn, its so much worse than we thought.”

“What do you mean?”

“Come with me, please. I need your help,” Nistra turned and started walking through the crowd. S’bowynn rolled her eyes but said nothing and followed after her mother. “I was told last night that it was a caravan of refugees from Bouarj. Displaced by some scuffle and they just needed a little help. I swear, S’yby,” her mother paused and faced her for a moment. “It has to be the entire town.”

A woman in a yellow robe walked up purposefully to Nistra and waited to be acknowledged. Once she had, the robed woman handed another clip board to Nistra before disappearing into the chaos. She closed her eyes for a moment before shaking her head back and forth in short jittery movements. She opened her eyes and looked at her daughter with a pleading look.

“What,” S’bowynn asked, attempting to keep her disappointment out of her tone and failing.

“All the taverns and inns are full. A group had started a list of volunteers to take additions into their homes, but the guard have started erecting tents outside the stone wall.” Nistra let her words hang in the air, thick with expectation, without bringing herself to ask for help.

“You want me to go help.” S’bowynn said with a tone that hovered between a statement and a question. The pleading look in her mother’s eyes affirmed what she was asking of her daughter. “I can go help,” she resigned.

“Thank you, thank you!” Nistra hooked S’bowynn’s arm in her own and hustled both of them toward the front gate.

The environment that S’bowynn found outside the gate was entirely alien from the compact setup of nomadic carts and stalls in a chromatic display of fabrics and ribbons that usually made up the Bazaar. Instead, she found herself among a sea of flowing, single tone canvas held up by thin poles and attached to the ground in a web of anchored twine.

As they rushed past tents with half open doors of rolled canvas, S’bowynn heard her mother command while she guided her through the maze, “Don’t look.” Of course, upon hearing the command, S’bowynn immediately looked through door into a tent to find what her mother had cautioned her not to look for. Inside the tent were makeshift cots, crammed as closely as the tent could afford while still allowing a medic to attend one side. The cots were filled with blanketed shapes of vimova, hidden under bandages and thin cloth sheets where the only color amongst the white fabric were splotches of red, yellow, and greyish green. S’bowynn passed the tent before the shapes and colors could become real vimova but she couldn’t stop her imagination from trying to fill the gaps. Soon the larger tents gave way to smaller tents and lean-to’s where soot-covered vimova huddled together like statues with their faces cast toward the ground.

Amongst the sea of small tents, one stood above the others. There, Nistra and S’bowynn were enlisted to set up another tall tent where the Elemenchya pullulates were starting a large cooking fire. Yellow banners were hung off the corners marking the tent as a distribution center for the refugees. As soon as a table was erected, it was filled with the remaining blankets and fruit bowls as well as towers of small bowls the city purchased from a local vendor. The bowls were later handed out freely, filled with a soup of donated vegetables from local farmers. The line of soot-covered faces that passed before S’bowynn as she filled the bowls filtered through the tent until early in the evening.

Once she was relieved of her station in the food line S’bowynn walked listlessly through the new tent city outside her home. She passively searched for her mother, who had been requested hours before and disappeared to attend some other task. It was only in the stillness and the heavy quiet that S’bowynn felt the sharp pierce of remembrance she had felt earlier in the forum. She had forgotten all about her agreement and the flower haired woman. She hurried her steps back toward the entrance to the city before a boisterous laugh echoed into the night, drawing her attention to a circle of wagons, illuminated in the advancing darkness by a private fire amongst the canvas maze.

From inside the wagon circle, a group of vimova were sharing stories, food and drink, and creating quite the jubilee amongst themselves. S’bowynn spotted the muscular woman she had met yesterday. Brista was reclining on a bench, folded out from the side of a small canvas covered cart. In the firelight it was easy to see all the vimova gathered were free of soot and a brightness reflected in their attentive eyes. Sitting beside Brista was a tall, wiry man smiling with the same intensity as the beaming woman who was regaling the audience that gathered near the cart.

“… turned around to see he wasn’t following me anymore. I turned and searched, and his ass was scrambling up a tree!” she wrapped her arm around the man sitting next to her. He looked down in shy embarrassment, but his smile betrayed him, allowing a quiet laugh to escape. “I yelled, “No! Don’t go up the tree! Vadhar can climb!””

“I didn’t even think about it. I grew up in the woods. Of course, I knew that. So silly,” he added while laughing. He hung his head in a mocked shame, shaking his soft, blonde curls to fall onto his brow and cast light shadows over his bright blue eyes.

“So, then this guy,” she paused and leaned forward, “jumps.” The crowd erupted into laughter. Brista raised her hand high in the air and brought it down against her other hand resting atop her knee to create a theatrical slap. “Just like that! Face down. Scrambled up.” Her sentences clawed their way out between her laughing and labored breathing. “We had no clue his collar bone was broken until we got back to town. He spent the rest of winter in bed, under a blanket with his books. Not that he cared, but I couldn’t go back out without him. He’s slower than me!” Again, the whole group laughed and raised their glasses to cheer the storyteller and in condolences to the man the story was about. Before she realized it, S’bowynn had made her way into the group and become entrapped by the vivacity.

When the intruder had been noticed, Brista grabbed a cup that had been waiting next to her hip on the bench and held it out, offering it to S’bowynn. She accepted the cup and instinctually sniffed its contents. The alcohol burned as it filled her nose with its sweet scent. S’bowynn took a small, cautious sip and found the liquid delicious and warm. A small smile spread over her face. “Oi! She likes it,” declared Brista.

“S’bowynn,” she introduced with a small, general wave at the group.

Brista pointed to herself with splayed fingers aimed at her chest. “Brista,” she said. She pressed her hands together and closed her fingers before pointing her flattened hands at the man sitting next to her. “Artim.” The man gave a gentle nod of his head before Brista continued, “Bit late, aren’t ya?”

“I got wrapped up in volunteer work and we never specified a time,” S’bowynn countered.

“Late for what?” Artim asked coolly.

“Well, she was going to give me information about the caravan as I was forcefully asked to not attend the festivities and I was going to tell her stories of far off lands to fill her imagination so she can trudge through her repetitive life by living vicariously through vimova who travel,” she responded with a neutrality that S’bowynn couldn’t tell was meant to be cruel or ambivalent, but its accuracy felt like a punch to her throat. A defensive anger rose in her chest before she remembered the story Sira told her. Before she could respond, Brista continued. “As you can see, the caravan was just a bunch of refugees from a town, probably burned to the ground as a dispute over territory, but if you want to stick around, I got more stories and you’re welcome to soak em up.”

“The locals from Bouarj seem to think its retribution carried out by a Voidtouched for disrupting the cycles,” S’bowynn recited from her memory.

All the smiles illuminated in the firelight vanished. S’bowynn looked around nervously. Brista set her mug down between her feet, focusing intensely on S’bowynn. “What did you hear?” Brista asked severely.

“What is that? What does it mean?” the nervousness evident in S’bowynn’s voice.

Brista’s gaze scrutinized details up and down over S’bowynn before her face relaxed and she reclaimed her mug from between her feet. It was Artim’s turn to set his mug between his feet and meet S’bowynn’s eyes. “Let’s start small. What do you know about Elemenchya?” His smooth voice eased over her nervousness.