Shadowbridge (11 page)

Leodora closed her eyes and bowed her head in thanks. Then she reached out and placed her hand on Kusahema’s protruding belly. “Will it be today, do you think?”

“Only the ocean can know,” came the ritual reply. Both the touch and the interchange were considered propitious. They grinned at each other, but then Kusahema’s smile faltered and she took her basket and moved on.

As recently as two years ago they had been close friends, sometimes swimming together. But as Kusahema became nubile, her family had forced her to withdraw her affection and cease meeting her friend.

Only Tastion remained close now. And that, as she had suspected for some time, was due to motives of a different sort; and even he was betrothed, soon to be married. He still told her that he would run away with her, a plan they’d hatched when they were seven, but she knew it for an empty promise.

Soon her only connection to the village would be the shadowplays that she and Soter performed for them, and which by their very nature connected her with the spans—even though most of the tales they performed for Tenikemac were its own myths and legends.

She stood alone and watched Tastion and his father, the two of them looking like two versions of the same man. They unfurled their net and moved into the water. They even moved the same way. Tastion of course pretended not to see her, which he must, just as she could not stare directly at him for any length of time. She pretended to watch the crowd farther up the beach, and so happened to be staring at Koombrun when he suddenly lurched away from the crowd and grabbed hold of one of the nets. He was trying to help, desperate to take part in the ritual, to accompany the other men. Before he’d taken two steps, he’d put his foot through the weave and tripped himself. He sprawled onto his back and turned to get up. By then his mother had come forward, and she slapped him with a series of blows that had him cowering, ducking, crawling across the sand, his foot still stuck in the net. One of the other fishermen, Lemros, came to his rescue. The crowd was laughing, but Lemros calmly unsnagged the poor brute then, wedging himself between Koombrun and his mother, helped him to his feet.

Koombrun was a year older than Tastion, which meant he should have been riding dragons long ago. He was large and strong enough, but mentally feeble. He had always been. Even as a child he hadn’t been able to keep up with Leodora and her playmates, and none of them had treated him very kindly, something she regretted as she watched his mother attacking him. His deficiency would have been no more than a tragic burden upon the family, except that his father had drowned three years earlier. In any other family the son would have stepped in to do the father’s work, but Koombrun couldn’t be allowed to fish. She often heard him in the audience during shadowplays, his nasal bleating laughter drowning out other voices. He laughed at the obvious jokes, and sometimes added his voice to everyone else’s, as if he thought it wise to pretend to understand. As if they would accept him if he did.

The village made sure that he and his mother were looked after, of course, but this came with a price for her—always to be humbled, humiliated, dependent upon others. No one else had come forward to marry her. No one would. No one wanted Koombrun in their family, and his mother would never have another child. So she punished him for all the things he couldn’t control or comprehend. For being different. Leodora sympathized with his plight. It wasn’t that much different from her own.

She stood on the beach and watched until Tastion was gone from sight. He would likely be out all day, for he and his father fished farther out than many of the others. Where they went and how they found their way back on the vast and featureless sea was a mystery to her, and even though Tastion had tried to explain it to her, she didn’t understand. All she knew for certain about fishing was that she was forbidden to do it.

 . . . . . 

Later that afternoon, after dressing in clothes uncontaminated by blood, she emerged from the boathouse to find Soter awaiting her outside.

He observed her sternly, his expression grave, although she couldn’t think of anything she had done to warrant it. Maybe, she thought, he was unhappy that he was sober. Then he turned sharply, commanding her: “Follow.”

She smiled to herself as she obeyed. The imperious stride was all too familiar. Today Soter was acting the sage, the teacher, the wise old man whose pupil was a source of constant disappointment. She knew his roles: They had little to do with her, everything to do with him.

Where most people she knew were recognizably constant, Soter comprised a collection of posturings, guises, a composite of masks, so many that she had no idea if any one of them had ever been the true Soter, or if there had never been anything but masks.

He marched her across the island to his hut. They passed Gousier’s asymmetrical house and outbuildings, where the smell of Dymphana’s white root pie filled the air. Where the path split, they went right, away from the cavern, away from the trail to Ningle.

Soter made a show of sidestepping a large tree root that snaked out of the ground in the middle of the path. His dodging it reminded her of the night he’d fallen over it: less than a year ago, after he’d performed for the villagers without her and gotten roaring drunk as well. She had heard him yelling and careering through the woods with the two undaya cases and stole out to see what he was doing. He had tripped across that root and crashed to the ground, the cases landing atop him. She arrived in time to see two village elders, fairly pickled themselves, drag him to his feet. He was weeping, blubbering incoherently, and not at the two men but as if he were alone. The villagers took him by the arms and carried him and the cases the rest of the way to his hut. His behavior was so peculiar that she had followed along behind them. As the elders returned, she had ducked into the shadows. Passing close by, one of them told the other, “He’s ashamed to be alive.”

She glanced now at the scaly back of his head and wondered if that was true. Why had he fallen to weeping that night? Ashamed to be found so drunk? But he was drunk so often. It wasn’t something she could ask him about.

His hut stood hidden among an overgrown mass of vines and weeds so thick that only the glinting hexagons of the windows hinted at its presence. The roof had been rethatched not so long ago, and thick new windows added, bought from a Ningle glazier; but an ancient smell of charred, smoked fish remained. Even the fermenting vats behind the hut couldn’t obliterate it entirely.

He’d set up the booth against the back wall. Because of the smallness of the hut, it was only half as deep as a real booth. There was no room for an accompanist.

Within the curtains, on top of the undaya cases, Soter had laid out six puppets for her. He pushed into the confines behind her, moving to the side to watch as she considered the figures. Leodora knew every story Soter knew. His tests now probed whether or not she could formulate what specific tale or tales he expected her to perform based solely on which figures he’d selected. He was adamant that she be able to carry every single story and all of its nuances in her head; that she be able to take any elements and weave a performance from them.

“There are only a handful of true stories,” he said so often that she could parrot his exact emphasis. “The rest are simply embellishments, or reconstructions. Variations, my girl. When you walk the spans you’ll hear a thousand versions of the same story. Some are dark, others light. Tales get rewritten to suit people and place. What’s beheld as divine wisdom on one span will be mythic farce on another, with nary a word dividing the two. All depends on what is believed. I’ve seen stories revised from top to bottom, too, after the gods have sent something down to a Dragon Bowl. That one about the girl made of wood who receives a magic visit from an Edgeworld god who sends her off to find a prince and her wedding—well, it was once someone much lower than a god who granted her wishes, some local spirit somewhere. After a while that local spirit wasn’t recollected anymore and got replaced. Stories, you see, are alive, or else not worth the telling.”

As to which tales might be originals, she didn’t know. Perhaps everything was embellishment. Was the simplest the more fundamental? Or just a true tale stripped of true meaning? In the end she had stopped fretting over it. It was no more important than knowing on which span the story had begun. She was expected to know every one of them, regardless of their origin.

She now considered the puppets Soter had laid out for her on the case: the orange figure that was sometimes a beggar but most often a thief, a pair of winged dragons, a maiden, an emperor, an assortment of tiny weapons, two guards, a young man, and an old man. Soter had fitted a straight wand in the old man’s hand. From that she knew he was a wizard. Last of all was the resplendent figure of the handsome suitor.

The key object was missing, however. He had withheld it on purpose to challenge her. She smiled to herself for having recognized this, too. “It’s the tale of the Druid’s Egg,” she announced authoritatively.

Soter rocked on his heels. “You are positive?”

“Yes,” she replied, concealing the doubt his question let in. “But you have the title element.” She boldly held out her hand.

Soter’s gaze fastened on hers. “How did you identify the tale if I have the key?”

“The thief figure is also the beggar figure, so his limbs are detachable. In the Druid’s Egg tale the thief isn’t swift enough to steal the egg without being bitten by one of the twin serpents who hold the egg aloft, and he loses an arm to its venom. The old man is the wizard with the magic wand. He transforms himself into the handsome suitor to capture the heart of the princess, who is the true love of the thief. She’s the reason he stole the egg in the first place—to have her for a wife. The wizard wants her because he wants to rule the kingdom. He wants power. The thief fears she won’t want him with one arm, and so—”

“Enough! Here!” He handed her the prop of the translucent golden egg. “Show. Don’t tell.” Then he collected the figures of the guards and the emperor.

“Wait! I need them. How can I tell it right?”

As if the question were superfluous, he answered, “Improvise.” He pushed apart the drapery and left the booth.

The lantern was already lighted. She had only to rotate it to cast its beam upon the taut white silk screen. Beneath the screen was a narrow shelf. A groove ran the length of it.

She brought the figure of the wizard to the screen. Normally the trappings of a set would have been hooked in place around the puppet. But Soter forced her to rely on storytelling alone to convey situations.

It was theater without a stage.

She picked up her story: “The wizard disguised himself as a physician, and gained admittance to the palace in that form, taking a small room that overlooked the city. There he performed his dark arts. He used his powers to discover every suitor the princess had, worthy or not. He saw the thief’s passion for her. That was why the wizard, in the guise of the good doctor, had sent him on the impossible quest for the Druid’s Egg—for with that prize and his knowledge of how to unlock it, the wizard would gain remarkable powers, and as a reward would give the girl to the thief, after first stealing her love for himself.

“Other, more suitable if simpleminded suitors, he plagued with easy magics so that they would never arrive in the city at all. Some lost their bearings and wandered into other spans. Some fell in love with barmaids, hags, or even their animals.”

By rotating the puppet’s arm she made the wizard’s shadow sweep the wand above his head. At the same time she spun the lantern, and its light flashed and flickered, white and red, as the different lenses splashed the silk.

“Now he was unopposed for her hand. There remained but a final act to secure her. He must hide his true unwholesome nature.”

She caught the lamp. It stopped with its red lens glowing upon the screen.

“With a blast of magic he transformed himself.”

She gave the lantern a gentle twist. The red light slowly slid to the right, replaced by darkness—the blank side of the lamp. Then the dark, too, was pushed aside by the light of the clear lens. But in the instant that darkness covered the screen, she deftly swapped the old wizard’s figure for the young suitor, carefully fiddling the rods to keep the suitor’s arms in the same position as the wizard’s.

“He became the handsomest man in the world.”

She heard Soter’s grunt of approval. It was her embellishment of the text to make him not merely handsome, but the handsomest.

“Transformed, he paused to consider himself in a mirror.” The suitor touched his face, ran his hands down his sides, then held them up to look at them. “He was pleased with his handiwork. His power remained undiminished. No one could refuse him!”

The next scene she could not fully perform without the puppets Soter had withheld.

“He went before the emperor as if just arrived from another span. He bowed with a deep respect that he felt not at all, and then asked to be considered as a son-in-law.”

The suitor knelt on one knee, bowed low, and finally lay prostrate, with his hands outstretched as if to plead with someone beyond the screen.

“His clever disguise protected him from an emperor who would have killed him for all the evil he had created in that kingdom and others.

“The emperor sent the new suitor to his daughter. She knew already that he was in the palace—word of him had reached her through her servants. Now, with her chaperone behind the nearest curtain, she met the suitor. His face did take her breath away. He was smooth in every nuance. Calculated in every implied invitation.”

The princess, dressed in a purple gown, extended a hand; he kissed her, bowing. His gestures were graceful, and each one ended with the slightest pull, drawing the girl slowly across the screen, nearer with each flourish until she almost touched him. Then he reached out behind her, and his hand wove magic knots in the air.

“Soon the princess was caught in his spell. With a flick of the wrist, he put the chaperone to sleep behind her drapery. Then he was alone with his prize.”