Shadowbridge

by Gregory Frost

  “Well, Uncle,” she said without humor, “you finally plugged her leak.” She had to lean against a post while sparks spun away in the darkness. Tastion touched her shoulder. “No,” she said, “I’m all right. Soter’s waiting, I can rest afterward.”

  . . . . .

  As they came through his door, Soter started to bellow at Tastion until he moved aside and Soter saw Leodora. He stared accusingly at Tastion, who shook his head and mouthed, Gousier.

  Soter nodded. “In that case it’s good you’re here, boy.”

  And so, despite her protests, the two men carried the cases and Leodora followed stiffly with only her small bundle of belongings. When they reached the steps, Tastion never hesitated, but climbed straight up. She called his name tenderly, knowing that he must be petrified, but he was deaf to argument. On the landing at the top, he placed the puppet case on the wall that edged the span. He gazed out over the island. Leodora came up beside him. She looked where he looked—at the lights of Tenikemac and the beautiful ocean beyond.

  “You shouldn’t be here,” she told him.

  He turned his head, surveyed the crumbling stone building on the other side of the wall. “So this is Ningle. Doesn’t look monstrous, does it? Just kind of seedy and run-down, and it smells like something rotten. I think it could use some mortar at the very least, don’t you ag—”

  She touched his shoulder and he stopped talking. He faced her.

  “I love you, Lea,” he said. “Everything I said before was because I couldn’t stand letting you go. You’ve always been here. There was never a time when you weren’t here with me.” He grimaced. “I wish I could take it all back. I wish you hadn’t heard any of it.”

  She slid her arms around his waist and drew him against her.

  When Soter finally reached the landing, they were still embracing. “Would have been damned nice if someone had come back down and helped me with my burden once he’d flown up the steps.” He dropped the case dramatically, but they still didn’t move. He wheezed at them, refusing to grant them any solace, and glowered as they kissed.

  Then Tastion pushed himself back from Leodora. “It’s time you found…time you went.” His voice broke, and he lurched around Soter and hurried down the steps. Tears trailed silently down Leodora’s cheeks.

  Gently, Soter patted her hair. He inadvertently touched the cut in her scalp, and she flinched. He withdrew his hand. “Your uncle?”

  Snuffling, she wiped at her nose and replied, “I don’t know. He might be dead.”

  “I wouldn’t grieve. I won’t so much as pour a drop of libation in his memory ever.” He picked up his case. “You’re following in your father’s footsteps in almost every detail. You do see that, don’t you? We’ll have to find a new name for you…on the next spiral. Come on now, grab your burden and bring it along. I know you’ll hurt all over come morning, but one thing’s certain: If he is still breathing, he’ll come looking. We need to be tucked away before the sun’s up.” He went through the gate.

  Leodora remained standing there until Tastion had vanished into the darkness of the trees. “Reneleka, take care of Dymphana,” she said softly. She picked up the case and followed. Her final view was of the whole dark half of Bouyan, her home.

  She was never to see it again.

  II

  DIVERUS

  This is the way, when someone asked, that Leodora told his tale:

  . . . . .

  There was once a silent boy who lived beneath the bridge. He lived neither on an island nor on land, nor even upon the water, but within the frame of a span itself. Chiseled supports and struts formed the foundation of the span, beams and cross-ties created an intricate latticework of layers between them, and upon these platforms were laid surfaces on which huts and fortifications were erected, all at different heights and lengths because no one who built there required the permission of anyone else, and few there were who sought others’ opinions. Mad geometries were the result.

  As a baby the boy had sat outside his tiny hovel and looked without understanding upon the random sections of this sub-rosa city. From his platform a ladder ran to the next, which was suspended at a slightly higher level and broad enough that three dwellings had been erected across it. Another ladder, of rope, declined to a level below theirs on the opposite side.

  Few houses beneath the bridge had roofs because there were no elements to protect anyone from—save the prying eyes of those situated above. The thick stalactitic surface of the span provided all necessary protection, and just acquiring the materials to erect walls was hard enough. In most cases divers, who lived on the lower levels, brought up the stone from the sea bottom, especially from around the piers, where the rocky ocean floor had been crushed and heaped as far down as anyone could see. It cost money to pay the divers, and more to have the stones hauled up on ropes and pulleys from layer to layer through the underspan hierarchy. Everyone knew that a stone was going to disappear here and another there as the pile of rock ascended, and if you were lucky and the pullers not too greedy, perhaps half of the original pile made the journey. It was the way of the underspan and no use railing at its unfairness; it had been thus for centuries and would be thus for centuries more. What it meant, however, was that walls were not built very high, but more like boundary markers than sides of a house. Most were not even as tall as the inhabitants themselves. There would be one entrance, and only the one great room. Privacy was at best an untested notion. There was always someone on a level above yours. You learned quickly which corners of your home offered sanctuary or at least deep shadows, and you conducted your intimacy there.

  The boy often spent his time looking down at other people, whose behavior was as alien to him as the life of insects. Like insects, they seemed to live in patterns. The patterns he could make out, though not their meaning.

  All of this may seem uncommon and strange, but on almost every span of Shadowbridge we know, substructural societies flourish below the main boulevards. Many forms of life thrive in caverns, and more in shadows, in the dark. Some of them can’t stand the light at all.

  . . . . .

  By the time he turned fourteen, the boy had no family.

  His mother died of a wasting disease, and her body was ejected into the sea with little ceremony; his father, a man of scant talent and less ambition, had only remained with her because she managed to bring in money by begging upon the surface of the span. She used the boy for this. Even as a baby he was clearly, visibly deficient. The impoverished mother clutching her damaged child while reaching one claw of a hand toward passersby tugged at all but the hardest hearts, and she did very well for herself, for her husband. When she died the father unraveled. He knew he couldn’t care for a child, never mind one who was practically an idiot. He was the sort of man who preferred to be blown from place to place by the winds of fortune. Wherever he went he’d always found someone to take care of him, exactly as the boy’s mother had done. He had pretended to go off in search of work every morning, and she must have known he wasn’t really doing anything more than finding someplace to drink up her coin, but she never said anything to him, because he was handsome and solicitous, always showing her kindness, always promising to do better the next time, although he never did. He was handsome enough still to think he could find such a situation again, provided he didn’t bring any baggage along. He was looking over the wall of his house at his son as he thought this.

  The silent boy sat near the edge of the platform with his feet dangling as he stared across the underside of the bridge, down and down to the water. He focused upon the spot where his mother’s body had vanished. He could remember every detail of how her form, wrapped in a sheet, had been carried three platforms away, where the inhabitant had assembled a chute for the disposal of the deceased; how his father had paid the inhabitant a few coins and then carried her to the edge of the chute and callously slid her off.

  In his interior world the boy imagined that she had turned into a merwoman
or a siren, or even a fish. He assumed that this was the natural order of things and that one day the same would happen to him, although he didn’t like the idea of becoming a fish and being caught and eaten by someone living up here, which is what happened to fish every day—he might even be caught and brought up to be eaten by himself. After all, who could say with certainty that the flow of time didn’t allow such things to happen? Who could be certain time didn’t fold over upon itself or weave back and forth like an Ondiont snake on the surface of the ocean? Certainly not he with his swirled thoughts. He didn’t want to eat his mother, and so he made up his mind that she was not a fish but a sea creature, definitely a merwoman living now in a city on the bottom of the ocean. It was a city that looked like the one where his mother had taken him to beg, up above. It had towers and spires of stone and glazed tile, bright pennants and lamps, and happy people—of course, they would all have fish bodies.

  Time passed, and he lay down under the weight of this dream and dozed.

  All the while he dreamed of his mother’s transformed life, his father was busy gathering up a few belongings from the house. He paused to watch the boy sleeping, curled up at the edge of the platform. If he felt anything at all for his child, perhaps he felt it then; but it wasn’t strong enough to move him to action—at least not to action in the boy’s favor.

  The poles of a ladder clacked against the side of the platform from a level below, directing the father’s attentions toward the group who appeared one after the other at the top—a father and mother and two daughters. They were better dressed than he, in clothes that might have been castoffs from the richer people on the surface. They approached him, and he welcomed them, let them inspect the house, turn over the pallets, stir the ashes in the tiny hearth. There were pots, a skillet. He was leaving all that behind. Close up, the family stank the way fish did after floating for a few days. If they noticed the sleeping boy out at the far edge of the platform they said nothing, and finally they gave the father his money, enough to keep him lubricated until he’d left this span far behind. He clasped hands with the father, then threw his pack over his shoulder and climbed up the ladder to the next level, and on from there, until the gloom of the place swallowed him up as if he’d never been.

  The new family spent the day carrying belongings up from the water’s edge where they’d been living, and where everything smelled like brine and rot. They carried the smell with them but it would go away, now they had moved up to better accommodations. Here they would have to live with nothing worse than cooking smells. Much higher and the air would have been smoky all the time. This was better, they thought—a perfect balance between the green swirling ocean and the dark heights beneath the span.

  A black bird swooped in through the tangle of habitations and landed beside the boy. It tilted its head one way and then the other, and finally hopped over and cawed at him. He woke to shining beady eyes just inches from his own. The bird plucked at his hand as if he had food hidden there. The boy sat up, and the bird squawked and flew off. He rubbed his eyes and looked around. The sun was sinking. The whole underside of the span burned orange in the light, and each spar and beam threw off stretching shadows cut out of the air. Down below, fishing boats had tied up around the piers. His eyes moved to the one important spot in the ocean again, but there was nothing to see. He stood and shuffled back home.

  If anything seemed peculiar about his home, he didn’t notice it until he had entered the doorway. A little girl stepped out and barred his way. She wasn’t any older than he, but she rose up as if inflating, and ordered him to get out. He couldn’t understand what she was doing in his house. Because he’d been asleep, he experienced the odd sensation that he’d dreamed his whole life before now, and it had evaporated forever the moment he awoke. His father was nowhere in the house, and all the scattered clothing and belongings lying about were things he’d never seen before.

  Seized by terror, all he could do was wave his arms and wail wordlessly. The two adults rushed from their fire.

  They didn’t know what to make of him any more than their daughter had, but they were not heartless, and it was clear he thought he lived here. The man who’d bought the platform from the boy’s father had indeed noticed him sleeping at the far edge, but because the boy had gone unmentioned, not even looked at, he’d assumed him to be a passing vagrant and nothing to do with the house; now he suspected that the boy had lived here and the man who’d sold them this place had known it. But it was too late to do anything about that—he knew that man would be long gone. The couple communicated to him that he could stay the night; in the morning they would solve his problem. He sat by the door, ragged and sullen. Two small girls now occupied the space that had been his. The one who had confronted him remained awake after her sister and made faces at him. He might have run off that night, and the man and wife would not have minded if they’d awakened in the morning and found him gone, but he lacked the sensibility to forge such a plan, much less set out on his own. He stayed.

  In the morning the man took him to a different platform, well across the width of the underspan from his own. A woman lived there with a house full of children. The man and this woman bargained and bickered about him as if he weren’t standing beside them. She said, “Look, I’ve got a full house now, more than I can feed, and half of them can’t steal for spit despite my best efforts to teach ’em. The rest are all what keeps us above the tide. What you want me to do with another, then? What’s he got for me?” She knelt and looked him in the eye. Her breath was foul, her teeth brown and rotten. She clutched his wrists tightly. “What talent do you have, boy?” Her tone implied nothing friendly.

  The boy could not think of any talent, and the woman frightened him. He looked away from her.

  “Dumb, is it? He can’t even talk? What good is he to me?” She let go his arms and straightened up. “I can’t use him.”

  The man said, “What happened to the girl you put out on the beam?”

  “How you know about her? Wasn’t one of your girls, anyhow, so you’ve no business asking.”

  “She bring anything back for you?”

  “Nah. Ran off, she did. Someone cut her loose, took her away. Probably felt sorry for her. Took her off my hands, anyway, and that’s good enough. Could have had her for supper for all I care. Nothing would have come of it anyway, that old beam hain’t lit in years of waiting.”

  The man looked down at him. “Still,” he said, “it’s a position that needs filling.”

  “Fine, then you take him up there and you look after him while he waits.”

  “I can’t go up there anymore. You know that. If they saw me…”

  “Yeah, I know all about that, now, don’t I? You got two daughters and a wife now what don’t know nothin’ about your life before. If she knew, would she let you near them girls anymore?” She smirked at his discomfort. “You’re gonna tell me you’ve changed, hain’t you? Well, don’t bother. Matters nothing to me whether you have or not.” She glanced down at the boy, and her fingers curled like vines around his chin. “Your troubles don’t make a case for this sad bit of drool.”

  The man stood awhile in silence, whether in contemplation or anger, the boy couldn’t have told; but finally he reached over and drew her hand away from the boy. She hadn’t expected his touch and jumped at the contact. The man held her hand from underneath, her fingers still curled as if cupping the boy’s chin. He placed his free hand on top of it. The boy saw something shiny slip from the man’s fingers into hers; then he let go with both, but her hand remained there, hovering just in front of the boy’s eyes. She uncurled her fist and contemplated its fresh contents. “All right, then,” she said, and glanced his way askance. “I’ll take him to fill a vacancy. But if he’s rewarded, his gift is mine. I don’t share.”

  “A fair enough bargain,” the man agreed. He didn’t expect the mindless boy to do anything other than starve out on that beam, as countless others had done before him and would do agai
n; but the important thing was, it would not be his problem. He would never have to see it happen, which meant that so far as he was concerned, it never did. A million cruelties occurred each day, but out of sight and out of mind.

  He knelt and told the boy, “Now, you stay here with Mother Kestrel and she’ll provide for you. Whatever she says, you do it for her, just like she’s your own mother. Do that and everything will work out for you.”

  The boy stared back at him the way a fish might have, and the man doubted that anything he said had penetrated. In fact, the boy was visiting his mother again, under the sea. He had always obeyed her, and still she had left him.

  The man roughed the boy’s hair as he stood again. He gave the woman one more look that might have been a warning or resignation. Then he walked away, climbed down the ladder, and was gone.

  “Well, come in, then,” said the woman, and she grabbed him by the hair and dragged him beside her.

  . . . . .

  The woman did feed him that day. More than a dozen children were crammed into her dwelling. They approached him, sniffing around him, trying to figure out what he might be, and whether or not his presence meant trouble for them. He’d never been near so many other children before and shied away from them, behavior that only got him into trouble, as it made him an easy target for the bullies in the group. He had no defenses. Soon enough most of the others had allied against him behind the bullies and teased him, plucked at his ragged clothes, called him names, told him he smelled awful, laughed at him. They might as well have taunted a toadstool. He cowered against the wall until the woman came and drove off the attackers. She kept him away from them the rest of the day, even feeding him separately. He got a larger portion than the others and they resented him for that, too, even though their own tyranny was the cause. They swore among themselves that the next day he would be made to pay.