Shadowbridge

by Gregory Frost

  Before she even saw the gray hut through the wall of brambles, she smelled his cooking brew. The furious tang of fermentation clogged the air.

  She crept around the brambles, listening for any sound of him. He was often irritable when sober, and had chased her away more than once when she’d interrupted him doing seemingly nothing. At first she thought to hide behind his hut, only to find that the accumulated sediment from one of the vats had been dumped out where she would have secreted herself, creating a noisome bog. Beneath the tiny rear window of the hut stood a line of small kegs he called barriks—half a dozen hogsheads of his wine. It was the first time she’d seen them all lined up—one entire vat’s worth. The window was unshuttered.

  She climbed up on two of the barriks and poked her head in the window. The interior was dim and smoky. Maybe Soter was gone. She backed out and looked around.

  The woods were empty of people. Overhead, leaves sizzled in a breeze. She heard no other sounds.

  She put one leg in through the window, then had to double nearly all the way, head to knees, to ease herself over the sill. She felt with her toe for the floor, stretching so much that she slid off-balance. Almost immediately her foot touched the floor, which left her balanced on one foot with the other leg out the window and raised halfway to her ear. She couldn’t get her other foot inside until she had placed her hands on the floor as if about to perform a handstand. Then she folded her leg in through the window, crouched down noiselessly, and looked about.

  She was inside Soter’s makeshift pantry. She had never seen inside the pantry before: It was larger than its narrow doorway implied. To her left hung a heavy tarp, which hinted at even more space. She stepped into the doorway, parted the curtain, and stuck her head into the main room. Almost at once she drew back.

  Soter was there. His silhouette perched on a low stool, knees up high, his arms splayed, like some spider creature. He was muttering softly as if to a companion—whispery words that she was unable to catch. She didn’t see anyone else. He was not looking in her direction, so she stuck her head farther out. He gave a loud, abrupt curse, and she thought he must have seen her. She stepped back behind the curtain and glanced at the tiny window, certain that she would never get through it fast enough. She scrambled instead behind the tarp and, turning to pull it tight, backed into two black cases. As she stumbled, she twisted about and caught herself on the top case, but her weight made it slide. Something from a shelf farther back fell with an alarming crash.

  Soter yelled, “Damn you louse-ridden rodents! How did you get in this time?” He marched into the pantry and flung back the tarp. He had a cleaver in one hand, poised to cut her in half.

  She screeched and slid as far back on the cases as she could go. Half a dozen more items bounced and rolled and crashed onto the floor.

  Soter closed his eyes and clutched his ears, nearly burying the cleaver in his own head in the process. “Oh, don’t squeal, Lea! Don’t shift about!” he hissed. He groaned and backed away, dropping the tarp. “Oh, I’ve got a Glauber’s head this morning,” she heard him say.

  A minute later he returned without the cleaver. “What are you doing in there, anyway? Out, come out here now.” He gestured her from the room with one hand and pinched his temples with the other.

  She told him about her fight with her uncle over the amount of fish she had cut up, valiantly trying not to cry while she did, and he nodded with care, rubbing his eyes, pulling at his nose. He offered her some biscuits.

  “I’m surprised,” he said, “that he hasn’t come bellowing down upon me like the wind, hammering at my door. Then I might find a place for that cleaver. He doesn’t know you’re here, does he? Doesn’t know, doesn’t care. Just chased you off and gathered up his fish and went off to sell them to people who wouldn’t have anything to do with him otherwise on behalf of some other people who wouldn’t have anything to do with him otherwise.” He patted her head and told her, quietly, that she could stay as long as she liked, provided she made no more noise. He retreated to the outer room. She followed, and found him pouring a cup of his latest brew. After a few sips, he sighed. “Rejuvenation.”

  Leodora nibbled at her biscuit awhile. Then she asked him about the long cases behind the tarp.

  “The undaya cases, ah-ha, yes,” he answered, very conspiratorially. “Those are a secret kept from your uncle. He doesn’t know I have them, or he’d probably want to burn them, and me along with them.”

  “Why?”

  “Because,” he replied, and she thought that was all he would tell her. Then he added, “They belonged to your father.”

  It was a revelation that tore the breath out of her. She set down her biscuit. She had always known that she’d had a mother, but no one, not even her aunt, had ever mentioned her father.

  Soter, wincing against his headache, shifted his gaze, as if wondering whether he’d revealed too much.

  “But you said—” she began, much more loudly than he would have liked.

  Hissing violently, he raised a hand as if to ward her off. “I know what I said,” he whispered. “I know.” His gaze held her steady. “I promised your uncle, you see. He can be very insistent when he threatens. Which you know better than I. He did not want you growing up with a lot of dreams and ideas in your head about your father. Did not…want you to know.

  “I gave in because I wanted to stay here, too, where your grandfather had permitted me. Gousier does have the power to remove me. He could banish me from this island if he didn’t find it more satisfying to be able to tell me that he can do it. All of this is his property, this dung heap amid the thorns, and so long as I keep to his path I get to remain.” He grinned unevenly, which made him press his palm to the side of his head and close that eye. “I seem to have stepped off today. Wonder how we should handle this? Discretion will be key, I think. No reason he has to know anything about anything—which anyway I’ve maintained for years.”

  “But what’s in the cases?” she demanded.

  “Oh, well, lend me a hand with them and we shall find out together, hmm?” He held up the curtain to let her enter the pantry again.

  The two cases were as long as Soter was tall, and brown with dust, spattered darkly where wine or something else had slopped over them. The nub of the leather was worn off in places, too. One case was decidedly heavier than the other. Kneeling, one eye still squeezed shut, Soter fumbled at the hasp on the smaller one. He slipped the pin free, then pushed and prodded the top up. He didn’t remove the lid, but peered secretively underneath.

  Then suddenly as if he wanted to drive her back, he shoved a clicking, clattering thing at her. She leaned away but refused to be startled. She stared at what he was holding.

  It was a shadow puppet, the first she’d ever seen. The body was articulated: the wrists, elbows, shoulders, and knees all revolved on pins, and each segment was fitted with a hinged rod. She pinched one of the loose ones and the puppet’s jaws opened in a great leer. She pushed on another, and from behind his legs his penis emerged. It was almost as big as his thigh, and the tip was cut with small swirls that made it seem to have a face of its own. Despite the monstrousness of his anatomy, Leodora had to bite her lip to keep from laughing.

  “His name is Meersh,” said Soter.

  “Meersh,” she repeated. She moved his arms and legs, flexed his wrists, marveled at the green tissue-thin skin stretched over his form. She held him up admiringly, and with an ease that surprised her circled the rods so that the puppet appeared to give a gesture of welcome to Soter. Something stirred within her. She forgot her uncle, the cavern, the hatefulness of the rest of her life. Some shape that had possessed no shape until that moment collected and formed deep inside her, and drew its first breath. She leaned around the lid to look into the case. There in three compartments lay stacks of puppets as deep as her arm, and each unique. She looked up past Meersh to Soter; tears were already forming in her eyes.

  Soter gaped in awe or terror at her fingers twirli
ng the rods of the puppet, as if staggered by what he saw. She wanted to speak but only a croak emerged, and she sobbed. Soter looked her in the face and recoiled. He dropped the tarp, escaping the sobs, escaping her, escaping the future that in his drunken cleverness he had just cast. He did not in that moment understand that what he had pried open was her life.

  Her life incarnate: the puppets of Bardsham.

  THREE

  It may have been ridiculous ever to have believed that she had no father, but it seemed reasonable at the time. Gousier and the villagers called her mother a witch, and Leodora had simply concluded that the witch had conjured her into being. If nothing else the explanation allowed her to be magical, and she liked being magical.

  Suddenly she had not only a father, but a father of legendary stature. Even in Tenikemac, isolated from the tumultuous life of the bridges, she’d heard his name—the name of the greatest shadow puppeteer who had ever traveled the myriad spans of Shadowbridge: Bardsham. And there before her, in the care of a grizzled old drunk, lay the puppets Bardsham had used. As it had been with her mother, her father was a revelation.

  . . . . .

  Soter soon had all the compartments and both cases open. He judiciously selected more puppets and spread them around him. They belonged to a dozen different stories, but he assembled them to tell his own. Then he asked her for Meersh. The grotesque Meersh was going to represent her father. For her mother he picked a sinuous figure he called Orinda.

  He began the performance, sometimes looking at her, sometimes squinting as though pained at having to squeeze his memory through the cracks in his hangover.

  “Your father,” he began, “came from a span far to the south of here, and at least three spirals away. You do know about the spirals, don’t you?”

  “They’re other bridges,” she answered uncertainly.

  “Other great long, unimaginable arms of bridges, yes, child. And each one, sooner or later, curls up like a nautilus shell, or so it’s said, because you can walk a thousand different spans, a thousand different great, wide communities filled with all sorts of people and creatures, and not ever reach that curled-up point where the bridge started or maybe ends. Who knows which. But your father, he came out of one of those places, one of those spiral ends. Or so he said…”

  BARDSHAM’S TALE

  His parents had their own troupe of traveling players, the Mangonel Circus. That was his real name, too. They played in public for money. They juggled and danced on cords strung high above the streets. They performed a skillful whip act with your grandmother holding up things like flowers or torches that your grandfather snipped the heads from or extinguished with a snap of his whip, until finally she held a jeweled ring lightly between two fingers and he snatched it without her fingers even moving—snatched it and with the same movement sent it into the audience, where a fight inevitably broke out over its ownership. It was a cheap ring, but a dazzling trick. The way your father told it, no one had ever seen such skill before Mangonel. There was quite a bit of sleight of hand in among the crowd, too, which had to be done most carefully if they wanted to avoid any trouble. The boy—that is, Bardsham, your father—he had a natural dexterity. Right from the time he could walk, he could steal coins from between your fingers and you wouldn’t feel so much as a breeze—just like his father did with that whip. Plus, he was so sly that anyone would have sworn he’d been across the avenue the whole time. He was a child, none too large, and who noticed him down around their hips when people were doing handsprings on a rope way up there?

  The family did not overlook his talent. They trained him and trained him until he had the most skillful fingers in the world. His only limit then was how much he could make off with before the weight of his boodle pulled the pants off him.

  One night another member of the troupe, a fellow called Peeds, took sick an hour before the performance. Peeds was the Mangonel shadow puppeteer and a great favorite of the boy’s as well as of the audience’s. Bardsham had heard Peeds’s stories hundreds of times, and was always transported by them. He sat through every rehearsal, absorbing all the details like any small child. Like you. When he wasn’t outside fleecing the audience, he even sat in the dark booth with Peeds. Mind you, he wasn’t supposed to be in the booth at all. His father had a temper to make your uncle look positively unassertive. But the boy took risks. And he and Peeds were friends.

  So, Peeds took sick and there was nobody could do his part. Your grandmother sometimes narrated a tale for him, but she knew nothing of the puppetry itself. Nobody else had paid any attention to his old stories—they had their own acts to develop and refine. The family needed an act to link the other acts together—that’s what Peeds did with his stories, his puppets. He moved things along from the jugglers to the knife throwers, weaving the distance between the two with some tale that touched both. The boy decided to risk punishment. He confessed to his parents that he’d been studying secretly with Peeds and could do the act. He swore he knew it by heart. They didn’t have time to argue or fight or punish him—not right then. So they capitulated. That was when Bardsham the Great was born.

  He’d followed how Peeds used colors to change mood, how he spun the lantern, the different ways he moved figures off the screen. For the rest—what he didn’t know—he had the instinct to invent.

  His mother came up with the name. She told him, long after, that she had walked out to the end of the dragon beam sticking off the side of span where they were performing—every span has a dragon beam, Lea, not just Ningle. She stepped into the tiled Dragon Bowl at the end of that beam and asked the gods for the name, and it had come to her right then and there. That’s what she told him anyway. During his performance she stood outside the booth, telling the stories where they needed narrating, doing the introductions.

  The thing about puppeteers is they’re invisible. Never seen. All you see is the handiwork, the skill. So any story she fabricated about Bardsham, it was the real story. Who he was, where he’d come from. Anything she felt like adding. If the story changed from night to night or span to span—as it did—that only added to the mystery of him.

  It all began as a single provisional performance, but poor Peeds never recovered. He got sicker and thinner, till he’d grown as thin as a puppet skin himself. On his deathbed he bequeathed young Bardsham all of his puppets, his tools, his stage. His stories.

  From then on the boy spent less time thieving from the audiences and more listening to them tell the stories of their spans, their people, their families. He did something no one else had ever thought of—he started collecting the heritage of Shadowbridge. Diverse elements he folded all together, making something that had never been before. It became a great giant of a story, a spiral of a tale, just like Shadowbridge itself, all linked and spun together into something bigger than any of us can see. Except for Bardsham. And such vision, you know, it makes you a little bit mad.

  His father was none too happy about losing his talented little thief permanently. But he was no fool, either. The Shadowplays of Bardsham were soon bringing in the largest crowds. Nevertheless, pigheaded creature he was, he insisted that while the other acts went on, the boy must mingle with the crowd. After all, they didn’t know who he was. He was a stranger, and still small. And still a skilled pickpocket. But it was a risky and foolish proposition. Anyone could see that sooner or later the child would be caught. What pickpocket hasn’t been? And there were spans where the authorities cut off fingers if not a whole hand by way of punishment. The circus would lose far more than their little thief if that happened.

  Finally it was his mother who confronted the old man to keep the son out of thieving. His hands were pure gold, she said. If he was caught thieving, the troupe would be ruined. Picking pockets brought in so little. Puppets brought in crowds. She was right, but her husband did not like being shown that he was wrong; as with many a man, it only made him insist on being wrong. He refused to listen to her. They argued. He threatened to stop the shadowpl
ays, instead, which would have been sheer folly. He didn’t care. He wanted the boy to obey him.

  The time came for them to perform their show, with the two of them still arguing and as far apart as could be. They went out with that disagreement hanging unfinished between them.

  That night at the end of the whip act, Mangonel missed the ring his wife held up. It had never happened before. The whip snapped against her face instead. He swore it had been an accident, but I don’t think even he believed it. After that she had a scar across one cheek. Her husband couldn’t look at her without feeling the twist of guilt in his own breast. The only way he could expiate his crime was to capitulate on Bardsham. He released the boy from the duties of thieving.

  Now on every span they came to, the boy disappeared. Wherever they went, he sought out the elders almost immediately, returning only when it was time for his performance. He asked them questions, sometimes describing versions of the stories he knew, and listened to the oldest tales they knew, hearing endless variations on the ones he told. He brought back no money now when he mingled with the crowds, but his act became more and more refined, precise, taut. He was the lure for the Mangonel Circus. Placards portrayed him as a faceless figure in a swirling purple cape. They announced his imminent arrival before the circus had even set foot upon a span. Audiences whispered his name. He was the mystery puppeteer of a million tales. Bardsham had traveled the whole world. Bardsham had been a librarian in the mythical Great Library. He was an Edgeworld god, because he knew every story on every span and only pretended at mortality—an ingenious argument given substance when an old man in one crowd claimed to have seen Bardsham’s performances when just a child. He was a shill for the circus, of course, but the story spread. People watched the troupe arrive, counted their numbers, but failed to find this mystical genius. And that, too, fueled stories of him. By whatever magic, Bardsham could look inside the audience and read the stories in their hearts. Bardsham.