Shadowbridge

by Gregory Frost

  “The next thing she knew there were hands on her body, and she was being dragged through the water. She said she thought that the gods of the ocean had finally got her for all the times she’d taunted them. She tried to fight, but she had no energy left and fainted dead away. Then she was being pushed up into the air and onto something hard.

  “Some young fool—and a brave one, I expect, to chance rescuing a merwoman—saw her floating there and pulled her into his boat. He was from Omelune. He had no idea what had happened; he just saw this naked girl in the water and dove in after her. When he found out who she was, he paddled her back home. By the time he’d got her back to our beach, your mother had decided he was the one for her.”

  “And that’s the man who called me a witch?” guessed Leodora.

  “Hush, now. You want this story, don’t try and race around it.

  “Afterward, the two of them met in secret. Even in Fishkill Cavern if your uncle can be believed—which he can’t. He thinks the worst of them both, of course, even though he doesn’t know anything at all. She didn’t tell him half what she told me. She was in love. She wasn’t going to tell her brother about that, was she?

  “Now, the village of Omelune must have had some inkling what was going on, but maybe they didn’t know just where he was going. Surely they couldn’t have guessed that the red-haired creature they’d fended off was the same one he was visiting regularly.

  “Then one night he and Leandra arranged to meet on that ridge of rocks that makes your lagoon. He was such a fool for her that he decided to swim from Omelune to the lagoon just to match her feat. To prove to her or to himself that he was worthy. He didn’t tell a soul, just set off.

  “Leandra, she waited and waited and he didn’t come and his boat never appeared. She could have got into Gousier’s esquif, but not her. She had to swim off to look for him. I think she was still planning to tease him: She would creep up on his boat just to scare him. That was her intention.

  “In the morning we couldn’t find her anywhere. The family looked all over. It hadn’t been so long since we’d thought her drowned, so we weren’t quite given over to panic this time. She wasn’t in the cavern. She wasn’t at Tenikemac. We had no idea where she’d got to, so it was late in the day before your grandfather thought to go looking for her in the direction of Omelune. He found her on the beach. Somewhere between here and there, not all that far from home. She was sitting, just sitting, cold and wet and rocking back and forth, with that poor dead boy’s head cradled in her lap. He’d drowned trying to match her. You see what happened—her willfulness undid her in the end.”

  “He died?” Leodora couldn’t understand this turn of events. She had already jumped to the end of the tale, where her mother ran away with the boy from Omelune, and this development ruined that story.

  “He died, yes, and afterward nothing was good for your mother on the island. Omelune blamed her for his death. When they saw her, when they realized who she was, the women accused her of being a water witch, a lorelei. A love-struck girl wasn’t enough for them. She tried to drown herself, tried to swim to the ends of the ocean and let the gods take her soul; but your grandfather had some sense of this. He was watching her close now, and he went after her, brought her back, locked her in the boathouse with only her grief for a companion, and wouldn’t let her out until he was satisfied she’d got the idea of drowning herself out of her head. Even I couldn’t see her or talk to her that whole time. He let nobody near her. And then, while she was locked up, a terrible storm struck the island. Nets and boats were tossed around and torn apart. Your uncle’s esquif was smashed up on some rocks, and that’s the hole what’s still in its side. Weejar and Tenikemac both suffered, but not like Omelune. That poor cursed village was stamped flat, and so many people died that you couldn’t have made a village out of what was left. The survivors blamed your mother for it all. They knew already she was some sort of ocean spirit. Now she was worse: Leandra the Red-Haired Witch, the Soul-Drinker. Either they couldn’t see her misery or they didn’t believe it. Weejar took in some of the survivors—of course, Tenikemac so typically refused to be a haven for those who’d sold fish on Ningle. The Omelune opinion of your mother, though, spread everywhere. Weejar traded with Tenikemac the same as now. Pretty soon your mother had nowhere to go at all. The whole island had set itself against her.”

  “Why didn’t Grandfather…do something?”

  “What could he do? We were already viewed as no better than a necessary evil by Tenikemac. It’s a role we’ve long accepted, because we make a good living by filling that niche. The taint of the spans was bad enough, and her jeopardizing their men worse, but now we harbored something cursed.

  “When Leandra insisted on accompanying your grandfather and Gousier onto Ningle, the two of them agreed it was a very good idea. She was seventeen. She was a beauty. She ought to have been married. And it was clear that she could never find a suitable husband here. I think they hoped she would catch someone’s eye up there.

  “A few times she went up, and I’m sure she must have been learning all she could of the place. Laying her plans. She said nothing to me or anyone. One morning she went up with the men and never came down again. Vanished right out from under their noses. That was the last time anyone in the family ever laid eyes on her.”

  “She ran away.”

  “That she did, and alone, too. No one thought she could get far, but they had always underestimated her distance. Gousier went looking for her up and down the span and found nothing, not a trace. She’d taken a full purse from the family coffers—we had as much then as now. No one begrudged her that; she would have been given more as a dowry had things gone right. The money meant she could buy herself into the shadows, though. Buy passage to some other great long stretch of spans, leaving no trail to follow, no way to guess which way she’d gone.

  “The day Soter came down those steps, carrying you as proof of his tale of her, of her death, was the first we’d heard of her in years.

  “Your uncle cried like a baby himself. I know that’s hard for you to imagine, but it’s true. So long as he had no idea of his sister’s fate, he could make up whatever he liked, and even if it was awful and cruel and defamed her with every word, it was comforting somehow. Like he kept her alive by inventing a world of failures for her. The truth wiped it all away. It broke him. It went much worse on him than on either of your grandparents. They’d come to accept her choice. Gousier took to drink. What he made in the stall of a day he spent in the pursuit of his own undoing. Trying to erase her, hiding from her. I couldn’t talk to him, almost like he couldn’t see me. One time he fell partway down the steps from Ningle, he was so drunk. For a while he wasn’t allowed to go up. Soter and I filled in as much as we could. Of course then Gousier accused Soter of trying to usurp his position—Soter, who wanted nothing at all to do with fish, but felt he owed your grandfather something for letting him stay. Gousier was crazy awhile, and nothing he said during that time is worth recalling. When it went on past all reason, your grandfather locked himself and Gousier in his workshop for the better part of a whole day. Neither one of them ever told what went on in there, but when they came out your uncle was bruised, bloody, and sober. And quiet. Whatever his opinions were, he said no more about her. Never mentioned his sister afterward, as if he’d never had one. He went back to work and after a time, he eased up. He was good for a bit—you might even remember from when you was little. Then, when your grandfolk died, it all came out again, everything he’d bottled up, and he cursed her for their deaths, too, blamed her all over again, but this time it was different. He bellowed at her as if she were hiding in the woods and could hear everything he said. He told her she’d killed them by breaking their hearts as surely as if she’d murdered them by her own hand.”

  The idea terrified her. “Is that true? Did she?”

  Dymphana leaned forward and took her hand. “Now, you think on it. Years had passed between her going and theirs. She was
n’t no more responsible than you was. They were old people. Whichever of them went first, the other was going to follow. Them Kuseks up on Ningle had more to do with your grandfather’s going than your mother and you. No, Leodora, your uncle’s like the Omelunes—he needs there to be someone responsible for all the bad things. Someone he can point at. I think he was in love with your mother a little bit, and I think part of it’s envy. I think there’s a part of Gousier that’d like to roam the spans, but the dutiful part tells him he has to stay here and maintain the tradition that his father maintained. An’ if he has to, then so does everyone else.”

  Leodora stared, dumbfounded. Her aunt’s story revealed a depth of comprehension and thought that she’d never suspected. How could Dymphana think and see and know so much, and keep it all to herself? Why didn’t she feel as Leodora did the need to express her feelings—to fight the restrictions that were placed on her?

  Then Leodora’s face clouded with another puzzle. “If the boy from Omelune is dead, then who is the man who thought I was my mother?”

  “I expect he’s one of the other villagers, someone who didn’t leave there with the rest. There was a handful, tried to rebuild. I daresay he won’t come our way again, not now he believes the witch is still with us.”

  “But how can he have been there for so many years and not come here before?”

  Dymphana shrugged. “Life’s full of mysteries. Not all of ’em have answers, Leodora. Why did a storm destroy Omelune when it did? And why not Tenikemac?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Well, and you won’t, neither. The world has its mysteries. The gods have designs into which we and the world are woven.”

  “But—” She stopped herself. “But how can anybody know if the things they’re doing are part of that plan or not?”

  Dymphana smiled. “And aren’t you the deep thinker?” She tousled Leodora’s hair. “Better be careful asking that sort of question aloud, or the archivists of the Library will hear and come take you away to teach them.” She laughed at the look of bemused terror on Leodora’s face. “Oh, it’s just a myth, dear heart. The Library’s just a story.”

  “It is?”

  “Of course.”

  In that case, she wondered, why hadn’t Soter taught it to her?

  . . . . .

  Two years later she did know the story of the Library of Shadowbridge, and far more than that.

  By the time she turned fifteen, Soter had given up all his stories, and there were mermen and archivists of the Library in among the tales, along with Meersh, and two brothers who coveted each other’s gifts, and brides who drowned their husbands and husbands who beheaded their wives—of course Bardsham could have spun even more stories, but Soter had attended so many performances that he remembered a great many of them.

  Now, instead of teaching her stories, he taught her how to take the elements and mix them together to make new ones. “Not until you can improvise from all you know will you become a true shadowmaster,” he told her. “That’s where your father truly excelled.” The way he said it suggested that he didn’t anticipate her excelling there ever. Yet she was devoted to the craft. She had every intention of succeeding. The world of the spans was going to be her oyster. She had decided. But while she laid her plans and dreamed of far-spun fame, other forces were conspiring to demolish every dream and keep her a prisoner there forever.

  FIVE

  Even before she opened her eyes that morning, she heard the strange murmurous call. It woke her nearly every morning now, no louder—if such could be said of something silent—than when she’d first heard it as her grandfather held her at the railing of the span, ten years before; since she had moved into the boathouse it had become more insistent, urgent, although the urgency gave her no guidance, no advice, no real idea of what to do in response. She climbed from her bed and crossed the narrow garret to stand in the window, to stare across the water as if this morning she might spy the source. It—whatever it was—might suddenly top the horizon to reveal its shape, and in appearing explain why it called to her and no one else. What did it want of her? It wasn’t calling her to come to it, but by the same token it was not going to let her forget its existence.

  The curtains flapped in the breeze. The light coming off the ocean was gray and vaporous. It smelled of rain, though there was nothing of rain in the sky.

  Melancholy joined her then, a late-awaking twin. Leodora leaned out the window like a figurehead on the prow of a ship, and stared along the shore to the north, out across the point and past, where the call was strongest, like a smell on the breeze or a gull’s cry wrapped in the wind; loud in its silence, bright in its subtlety, overwhelming in its absence—the source of her soul’s unease. One day it would surely appear and she would have her answers. She had learned to accept the frustration of not knowing when. The call remained, but she let it recede into the sizzle of the surf, and withdrew from the window.

  It took her a few minutes to dress in her ragged and stained clothes for Fishkill Cavern. She climbed down the steps into the boathouse, where her uncle’s small esquif lay on supports, the hole in its side aimed at her like an empty socket. He was never going to repair it—she understood that now. It was linked to her mother and now to her, because she lived here.

  She walked barefoot across the planks and picked up a wicker basket as she pushed open the wide double doors. She jumped down the stone launching ramp then padded across the beach toward the water. Streamers of seaweed were scattered all along the shore, and she collected each one, shaking out the sand and debris and little perturbed creatures before placing it in the basket.

  The sand was soft and sodden between her toes. She jumped when an irate sandcrab nipped her foot before digging in deeper. Most of the little crabs scattered and scuttled and burrowed before she reached them. Later, when the tide had withdrawn, the shore would teem with gulls, squawking and fighting over the same scurrying snacks. Yet there would be new ones tomorrow, just one more of life’s mysteries.

  After walking awhile, she climbed to the top of the ridge and surveyed the village, concentrating on the figures there, forcing the ocean’s call out of her head.

  Moving her way were the usual group of women collecting seaweed. She spotted Kusahema and headed down the slope to their beach. Kusahema was married now, and pregnant.

  When they were face-to-face, Kusahema smiled and held out her basket, and Leodora took all the strands of seaweed she’d collected and gave them to her.

  “I liked your shadows the other night,” said Kusahema. “They were very funny.”

  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. Sh
e 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.