Shadowbridge

by Gregory Frost

  The island of Bouyan lay so far below her that wisps of cloud gauzed the treetops, and she could see clear across to a hint of their rooftops and even all the way to where a chimney of smoke signaled the location of the fishing village of Tenikemac, and farther still—to the sea itself, like a great sheet of glass upon which the whole world was set. She could see that the Adamantine Ocean stretched forever just like the stories said.

  That day, standing upon the rail, with her grandfather’s hands enclosing her waist, she heard the call for the first time. It was not a voice exactly, not words, not something anyone else could hear. It whispered her name, spoke to her in the silences, invited her to find it, join it, embrace it. All without words. She thought then it was the ocean calling her. There was nothing else to see.

  “Isn’t it fine?” her grandfather asked.

  She turned her head to look at him, and now she was afraid. The wordless, communicating voice was frightening, and she didn’t know whether her grandfather was referring to it or to the view. He saw her fear and took her off the rail, assuring her softly, “It’s all right, child, it’s all right. I wouldn’t let anything happen to you, you know.” She knew this to be true, but she wasn’t paying attention to him.

  The moment he’d touched her, the ocean call had ceased. She listened hard, but it didn’t reappear.

  She would not hear it again for years, but on that day—she was certain of this now—the caller had located her. It had sought her, knowing she was somewhere. Now it would be able to find her again.

  . . . . .

  Throughout the next year Leodora spent nearly every day on the span. It teemed and surged with life, with the noises of excitement, the smells of otherness, newness. Bright costumes and plumed caps dazzled her, and facial adornments from rapier-sharp beards to spiky stiffened eyebrows, beauty spots to shaved scalps drifted past to amaze her. One day she saw a man with wide and tightly waxed mustachios, the tips of which burned with blue fire that didn’t consume them. And on another evening a raggedy fellow walked the thoroughfare with a box dangling from a lanyard around his neck while he cranked handles on either side of it, which in turn caused two metal hooks facing each other through the top of the box to spark and burn and glow in the space where they didn’t quite touch. The ragged man looked lost as he went by, and she heard someone say, “From a Dragon Bowl, that. Ruined him.” But when she asked her grandfather about the man, he replied, “Nothing to do with us, Lea, so never you mind it.”

  Her grandfather did not always accompany them. As often he stayed below, on Bouyan, in his workshop, crafting or mending their furniture. Like her uncle Gousier, he was a big man, barrel-chested and powerful.

  The buildings on Ningle, all made of stone, were nothing like the structures she knew on the island. Her own house and those of the fishing village were mostly made of wood and woven thatch. Houses on Ningle were dark and roughly finished, and not quite true. Their angles, as her grandfather showed her, were all slightly off the square. He took her to one street not far from the market where the buildings were so crooked that she couldn’t understand how they didn’t fall over.

  The market comprised a stretch of mismatched awnings, boxes, carts, and poles. In comparison with many of the others nearby, their own stall was clean and orderly. On three sides of the center, whole fish and cleaned fillets lay in ceramic boxes, atop ice chipped from the depths of Fishkill Cavern. Deep blue awnings kept the stall in shadow and cool.

  Gousier usually had someone working for him, someone on Ningle who set up the stall before they arrived and took it down at night, as well as someone to help haul the fish and watch that the clientele didn’t steal. She could remember none of these men—for they were always men—during that year. None of them remained for long. The work was too hard. And—she would later learn—descending to the island for work was considered beneath the dignity of most of Ningle’s denizens; but there were much more reprehensible acts that were not.

  Her uncle seemed to enjoy her company. While they walked and climbed to market each morning, he taught her the names of the fish in his baskets and described how they were caught, what they could be used for. Once the stall was set up he put her right up front, and when someone came by and inquired about one of the fish, Leodora would proudly repeat what she knew about it. Most of the time after listening to her recitation, a customer would buy the fish, and Gousier would tell her, “Why, you’re a fishmonger, child. Look at what you sold.” He would give her a coin and let her buy something for herself. Eventually he let her parade up and down the boulevard, calling out the names of the fish they were selling, and this led more people to their stand. Her uncle and grandfather treated her like a princess out of a story—like the girl Reneleka who emerged from an oyster, coiled around a pearl, and who had created the sea dragons. It was a story they told in Tenikemac. She felt as if she, too, had been magically created.

  Then one afternoon when she was sitting to the side of the stand, a woman came over and spoke to her. It seemed the most natural of events, one more person asking her questions. The woman was fidgety and furtive, but Leodora didn’t appreciate the meaning of this. She had only known kindness.

  The woman invited her for a walk, with a promise of an undisclosed surprise at the end of it. Leodora would have told her grandfather, but he was with a customer on the other side of the stall. She might have told Gousier, but he was haggling with still another person over the price of a halibut. The current assistant had wandered off.

  She strolled along beside her new acquaintance for only a few moments before the woman took her hand and drew her suddenly into the nearest crooked little alley, with the promise, “Your treat’s up here.”

  It was the same alley her uncle had shown her, full of tilting buildings, and she marched along bravely into the not unfamiliar gloom. Then a man unfolded from the deeper shadows, and she stopped. Leodora remembered him—he had passed by their stall two or three times and then asked her about the cod, listened with a wolfish grin to what she told him, and thanked her for her recitation. He hadn’t bought anything. He grinned at her again now. He had very good teeth.

  The woman shoved ahead of her and said, “Give me my money.” But the man shook his head. “When I’ve made the delivery, when they’re happy with their new arrival.” Both of them glanced down at her, and that was the moment she knew something was wrong, but the woman still gripped her wrist. The two began to argue. Leodora pulled with ever-increasing urgency to get away. The woman was too busy squabbling to notice. Abruptly Leodora broke the hold, but it was so sudden and she’d pulled so hard that she spun against the wall. The man was on her before she could get up. “All right, darlin’,” he said. The stink of him smothered her. “You come along with me now to get your surprise. No more working in a fish stall for you, not a lovely girl like you. They’ll like you where we’re going. You’ll be the most popular girl they have.” Smiling though he was all the while, his sweet words were more ominous than anything she’d ever heard. She twisted, but his grip was much harder than the woman’s, and the wall was at her back, offering no way to put distance between them. She started to scream. The man clamped his hand around her face and hissed at her. He ordered the woman to do something to silence her, and they both closed in where there was hardly enough room for one of them alone, and the acrid sweaty stink poured over her like the stench from rotting meat. The woman crouched, cooing, trying to sound tender beneath her jagged, hungry sharpness. Leodora fought for breath beneath a mask of filthy fingers. She grew dizzy.

  The grip abruptly lifted from her face; the stench and the man swept away as if by magic. The woman bit back a shriek, grabbed Leodora again, and tugged her down the alley and back out onto the boulevard.

  A crowd was collecting. They blocked the woman’s retreat, so that she cried out, “Someone, someone stop him!” and then, almost as an afterthought, “My child, my baby!” She wrapped herself protectively around Leodora, and the crowd obligingly opene
d a space for the two of them. Even as they moved into it, the crowd moved with them, stepped back as if to accompany them; but they weren’t following the woman. They were fleeing something else. Leodora twisted her head around to see.

  Her grandfather.

  He caught the woman before she could get past the last of the people choking the boulevard. He tore Leodora from her grasp, then wedged himself in between them. Dreamily she looked back and saw her uncle in the alley. He was bent over and seemed to be gesturing fiercely. His fist raised high and held, hovered. It clutched a mallet. The hand and mallet were wet and dark. She had seen her grandfather holding a mallet that way as he drove pegs into holes he’d cut, but Gousier brought it down harder than Grandfather ever had.

  People began shouting “Kuseks!” and she looked up at their mouths, their fearful eyes. Then the woman toppled beside her, knocking someone aside, skidding on her face upon the paving stones. Their eyes locked, just for a moment, before the woman’s expression went slack and the eyes fluttered shut. The crowd turned, roaring, and split in two directions. The space filled almost instantly with a swarm of police—the Kuseks, so named for the striped sashes they wore. They grabbed her grandfather immediately. She saw him struck with a stick, and she screamed.

  Her uncle charged from the alley. Blood drenched his face and clothes. He bellowed at the Kuseks to release her grandfather. She watched it all as if from the rail of Ningle, as if it were all transpiring far below, far away from her—the mallet striking once, the police beating her uncle senseless, and beating him even after that. Her grandfather swaying on his knees, blood from his scalp covering his face like a membrane, as he tried in vain to stop them.

  Everyone was taken into custody, including the woman. She wasn’t dead after all. She portrayed herself as the victim, and the wounds to her face lent her credibility. She claimed the six-year-old girl was her daughter, and kept touching Leodora, running trembling fingers through her hair. Of course she was not Leodora’s mother, nor looked anything like her, but the bold assertion smothered her denial with the warped aroma of hope, a possibility that was impossible. It surely would have tripped up no one other than a girl who had no mother, generating an internal conflict that terrified and silenced her when she most needed to speak. Finally the authorities had to send for her auntie Dymphana, hauling her up from Bouyan to prove that this hadn’t been something else, a lovers’ quarrel, a domestic dispute. The moment she saw her aunt she began to wail and flung her arms about Dymphana’s waist, and then the Kuseks knew absolutely. They set her grandfather and Gousier free.

  The family were escorted back to the market to find their stall a shambles. The fish had been stolen; some of the ceramics were smashed. Apologies from the nearby vendors, who might have intervened but more likely had participated in the plunder, did nothing to mitigate the damage or curb Gousier’s anger. His ribs were broken, his face was bruised and swollen, and he’d lost a tooth. The police pointed out that he had been caught in the act of murder and should be thankful he was alive to complain.

  For weeks afterward he could hardly walk along beside the laborers he had to hire to cart the fish up the steps. The workers were hardly better than beggars, but no one else wanted the work. Once his bones had knit, he visited the Kuseks and paid them to see that the pathetic kidnapper was banished to a prison isle called Palipon. It was a bare chunk of rock so far out in the ocean that it could not be seen from any of the great spirals of bridges. No one sent to Palipon was ever heard from again. When he announced this over dinner, the whole family stopped moving as if upon a signal. They stared; they paled. Gousier retorted, “It’s where all her kind should go.” Then he lowered his head and ate as if no one else shared the table with him and his heart was as light as a cloud.

  Later, from her bed, she heard the family arguing. Gousier snarled, “Well, what sort of a woman would sell a child into perdition? Or maybe she’s an Edgeworld goddess, do you think? It was a better life she was going to give the girl, in a tiny cell, chained in filth to a bed frame, waiting for her next customer? Because that’s what was going to happen. These people are worse than anything you know, Dymphana, I don’t care if you grew up in the same house with them!” Her aunt said something too quiet for her to hear, but Gousier drowned out the last of it: “Then maybe you’d rather have stayed up there! Maybe the street has more to offer you!” After that it seemed no one spoke again until after she’d fallen asleep.

  Her grandfather, although he’d only been struck the once, seemed unable to recover. He suffered spasms, numbness, and headaches that rendered him helpless. A few months later he was dead. Her grandmother died of grief less than a month after that. Leodora was no less devastated than anyone by their combined loss. Her world was shrinking, closing in on her. She dreamed of the two of them with her in an alley where the buildings were sliding together to crush them, and both her grandparents were pushing her, trying to get her out before the walls met, but she could see the space narrowing ahead, and she knew she would never reach the avenue in time, never reach it at all, and then the walls did slam together behind her, so loud that it woke her up. The dream proved portentous.

  Gousier forbid her ever to set foot on Ningle again.

  Over time she would learn that he blamed her for everything that had happened that day, including the deaths of his parents, which became the foundation for unlimited blame thereafter. Gousier remained as bitter as patchroot wine. His retribution was bottomless.

  It was during one of his tirades that he inadvertently called her “Leandra.” He caught himself, but the realization of what he’d said only fueled his anger, as if she had cleverly diverted him. Provoked him. After that, almost her every error or act of defiance was equated with something Leandra had done, although he never spoke the name except in anger, because he refused to acknowledge that he had ever had a sister except when too angry to help himself.

  Leandra. Her mother.

  TWO

  A name was almost the only thing she knew of her mother—but the lacuna hadn’t been apparent before her kidnapper had tried to assume the role. And while that was impossible because Leandra was dead, the impersonation lifted the pall on her knowledge and she saw that nothing lay beneath it, nothing of her mother beyond that name, spoken only in anger.

  She was to learn nothing more of her parents until she ran away from home at the age of ten.

  Running away had become something of a routine by then. Initially it was herself she fled from—part of her believed her uncle’s accusations, believed that she had been responsible for her grandparents’ deaths, and she tried to escape her guilt to no avail. Dymphana was sensitive to her pain, however, and comforted her when Gousier wasn’t around, telling her, “You are not to blame for this misery, and you mustn’t think that you are. You’re a little girl. You had no experience with such people as tried to hurt you, and those who are older than you ought to have been looking out for you. They should have protected you. Your grandfather knew this, and I think it wore him down. He blamed himself. Your uncle…his way of adjusting is to cast the blame on everyone else. And you are everyone else this time. It is not your fault, child. It never was.” The more times she heard this, the more she accepted it. For a while this was enough to compel her not to hate him for the things he said. But her compliance seemed only to anger Gousier more. When another worker quit and he condemned her to the odious job of cleaning the day’s catch in Fishkill Cavern, she ran away from him. The problem was, there was no place for her to run to. She didn’t dare run to Ningle again, and she knew only a little of the island. She’d long ago been scared off exploring its mysteries, too, with ominous warnings about things that lurked in trees, in bushes, in the dark. Her knowledge of the world was so small as to be nonexistent, and Gousier had only to wait for her certain return in order to effect retribution for her misconduct.

  In the past when she’d run away, she had escaped to Tenikemac, where Gousier could always hunt her down. The vill
age in general considered her tainted, contaminated by her association with Ningle and with a family that did business there daily; but most of the villagers overlooked this censure, since most of them did business with Gousier, too. She was, after all, a mere child. They always gave her up when he came looking.

  She had two playmates in the village—a girl, Kusahema, and a boy named Tastion, neither of whom at that age would have understood the proscriptions against fraternizing with her. That would come later, or perhaps they were expected to discover it on their own. Within a few years Tastion would prove to be her only friend in that village.

  However, on that particular day, she broke the pattern and didn’t flee to the village. Instead she ran to Soter, never imagining that this one element of change would alter the rest of her life.

  . . . . .

  Soter had taken up residence in an old smokehouse back in the woods, where he lived in relative seclusion. The family—her grandparents—had offered it to him as a reward for having brought Leodora home to them, and thank the ocean they had been alive back then. Her uncle surely would not have let Soter remain on the island.

  Soter kept two vats brewing most of the time: His concoctions were always either cooking or fermenting. The main ingredients were fruits he picked himself. She knew that he sometimes went off by himself to the far side of Bouyan and returned days later, dragging bags of fruits behind him. Other items he purchased on Ningle. The product—those quantities he didn’t consume himself, for even then he was prone to imbibe—he sold to Tenikemac. Although they held him in no higher regard than her uncle, somehow Soter managed to be more tolerated. It may simply have been that he wasn’t related to the family—and that he was careful not to mention that what they were drinking included ingredients lugged down from the spans.