Shadowbridge

by Gregory Frost

  The boy dozed fitfully that night, exhausted by constant fear but on guard against a concerted assault. Some hours before dawn, the woman woke him and led him out of the house. She gave him a crust to gnaw on while they traveled, and a small pack that he was to carry. They went up and down ladders, across makeshift bridges until they reached a ledge carved out of the bridge support itself. They moved by feel alone then, because no light reached the cavernous recesses just below the surface of the span. They walked carefully along the ledge. The trapped air hung thick as tepid gruel, and it stank of humans and oily fish and offal. The ledge led them out into the air. One moment all was blackness and the next a sky shot with stars stretched above them. The boy stared up in awe at the sight and nearly stepped off the ledge into the air. Only the woman’s grip saved him. She muttered a curse and yanked on his arm to get his attention.

  A flight of perilously narrow steps led up to the surface of the span. He remembered the steps. His mother had led him up them every morning and down them every evening. Seeing them, remembering her, he tried to look back again at the sea where she’d slid under the surface, but he couldn’t glimpse that spot from here and the woman was hauling him up. They emerged into an alley and from there onto one of the broader cobbled streets.

  He’d never seen this world after dusk. He stared at everything, glimpsing towers and minarets like shapes cut out of the night. People strolled about, not as many as during the day, but they all seemed to be disguised behind masks and capes, feathers and jewels, and someone brandishing a torch or a lantern led their way. From the street Mother Kestrel turned into another alley. The boy heard voices echo in it, whispers that seemed nearby but came from empty corners. The alley snaked around as if going somewhere but in the end dumped them back at the edge of the span again. Along the horizon, a thread of reddish glow hinted at the approach of dawn.

  Across the road there was a break in the railing as there’d been where they emerged, but this time there were no steps down. Instead a skinny curving walkway projected from the edge of the span out into the void—a beam above the ocean. The woman dragged him out along it indifferently. Over the side he could see all the way to the ocean. It was a long, long way down. Waves shimmered upon the black surface, but not a sound could he hear.

  Halfway out, a low wall curved up along one side of the beam, while on the other side, only pieces of the wall remained here and there like rotted teeth, having collapsed sometime in the past. People huddled against the bits of wall, one or two with their knees drawn up, another with his legs stretched in defiance across the width of the walk. The boy could see him watching, eyes shining in the pits of his sockets, as they climbed over his barrier and continued to the end of the beam.

  A concave bowl hung off the end. The crumbling wall gave way to a ring of bollards supporting a circular railing. Perhaps twenty people could have sat around the ring at the top of the bowl, but only four were in the bowl at the moment.

  The woman chose a spot for the boy and told him to sit. He was still watching the man they’d had to step over, paying her no mind. She had to push on his shoulders to make him sit. When finally he realized what she wanted, he complied at once. She took the pack from him, opened it, and drew out a length of chain. This she threaded between two bollards and back in around one of them, drawing it tight, and then securing it with a lock. The loose section of it ended in a cuff. The woman fitted this about the boy’s ankle and snapped it shut. He looked in puzzlement at his foot, then at her.

  “There’s a good lad,” she told him. “You’ve got length enough to move about some, to relieve yourself off the edge as needs be. I’ll come back with food for you but you’re going to have to make do otherwise. You have to wait and hope and curry the gods’ favor. They appear here sometimes,” she said, “come to those who wait, who show their true and good hearts. If the gods favor you, then we will be blessed, you and me. You’ll have something no one else has. Don’t know what it will be, but we’ll hope it makes us rich. You hope for that. Think on that. All the time you’re here. You want the gods to understand what you need if you’re to have it.”

  When she walked away he tried to crawl after her out of the bowl, until the chain snapped tight and he fell on his chin. He made a whining sound, but the woman didn’t hear. She had gone, back along the beam, back into the alleys, and back into her underworld. What she didn’t tell him was that he was the fourth child she’d chained to the dragon beam, that the first two had died—one of starvation, the other by foul play when no one was about—and the third had been set free to disappear, but probably to no good fortune. What she didn’t tell him was that everything she believed about the dragon beam, and the gods, and how they chose to appear, was based on gossip and invention and steeped in envy.

  . . . . .

  The Dragon Bowl became his existence. He didn’t starve, because the woman had learned from experience, and returned every couple of days with food for him—not a lot of food but enough to keep him alive. At first no one spoke to him or even acknowledged that he was there. The man who’d watched him being chained up came onto the bowl and sat close by, but pretended not to notice him, and then began to whisper imprecations. Even the feeble-minded boy understood that the man was whispering to imaginary beings, asking questions and hearing silent answers to which he responded. He babbled loudly until others ventured into the bowl. When they did, the madman curled up and clutched his belongings, wrapped in a shred of cloth, to his chest, and eyed them accusingly.

  People came and went throughout the day. There were young lovers who came for the novelty of it, and described for each other what they would wish for if the gods were to appear. Often this was wealth, but as often it was to be happily in love with their partner forever. There were those who showed themselves to be terrified at the prospect of stepping onto the rim of the bowl, despite the number of people already waiting in it. The boy watched them all.

  The first night the madman edged over to him and said, “I know you’re stealing my luck. I know you are. You can’t have it, you hear me? If you try and take it, I’ll throw you over, right into the ocean.” He grabbed the chain and yanked at it, but he couldn’t unwrap it from the bollard any more than the boy could. After a while he seemed to forget what he was doing; he took his bundle and moved back onto the dragon beam. “My luck,” he repeated, but no longer to the boy.

  Three days later when the sun came up he was gone, and only the bundle remained to mark his place. The boy managed to reach it and drag it into the bowl before anyone else saw it lying there. Inside the cloth lay a broken phial containing nothing, a wooden button, some black polished stones and white polished shells, a heel of bread that had gone green with mold long ago, and fragments of a parchment that had been written upon, but torn into strips. The meaningless contents of the bundle filled him with despair, and he savagely fought with the chain and the shackle until he’d rubbed his ankle raw and bleeding. Another man came along the beam, saw the scattered items at the top of the bowl, and scooped them up. He picked at each in turn, disappointed with each find, and finally tossed the whole thing off the side of the beam. “Worthless,” he proclaimed.

  The boy gestured at the chain attached to him, begging the man to set him free. “You want me to set you free?” the man responded incredulously. “Free?” He began swatting at the boy, slapping and beating him, and all the while saying calmly, “It is your duty to wait on this spot for the gods to honor you. Your duty!” He made one final, ineffectual kick at the boy before moving across the bowl and squatting on the far side, where he searched the sky as if for a sign, a reward. Nothing happened, and he finally gave up looking and hunkered down and fell asleep.

  From the beating the boy learned one important thing—to be invisible. He remained a huddling shape, his head down, reflecting his defeat in life, expressing that he would take any gift the gods condescended to give him.

  The woman came the next day and fed him. She noted the state of
his ankle and slapped him on the head, one more bruise to teach him nothing. He was by then too exhausted to fight back or protect himself, though he would have rejoiced if the cruel man across the Dragon Bowl had jumped up and killed her. Instead the man snorted as if concurring that the boy was getting his just deserts.

  Thus went his days. He sat unprotected in all weather, crouching to hide from the sun, lying flat in the curve of the bowl when the rains came and washed the dirt off all of them into the center of the bowl, where it drained back into the ocean. The floor of the bowl was tiled but he couldn’t understand what the tiles represented, if they represented anything at all, so many of them were missing.

  One day a woman stabbed a man to death at the end of the beam and then leapt over the railing to her own death. The man, who had tried to assault her, died hung across the railing, watching his blood trickle into the sea. The next morning he’d been pushed off, too.

  The boy didn’t have any idea how long he remained chained up. His leg festered and healed. The rain seemed to cleanse the wound, but rotted his clothes until they were tatters.

  True to her word, the woman continued to bring him food. She seemed surprised by his tenacity. Every time she came now, she said, “I bet this is the last time I see you.” But he was always there the next time, emaciated and exhausted.

  The food she brought seemed of a better quality then, as if she were so awed by his continuance that she was rewarding him. She touched him each time before she left, gently, almost tenderly. He couldn’t understand the look in her eyes.

  One afternoon someone jumped off the beam. The boy leaned over the wall to watch the body drop to the ocean. He had only seen the movement of the jumper peripherally; he didn’t even know if it was a man, a woman, or a child. He might have jumped then, too, if it would have finished him quick; but he knew he would only have ended up dying slowly upside down, hung from the railing by the chain. It would also have called attention to him, and whoever hauled him back up would surely have beaten him again, or worse.

  When the visitation finally came, he was asleep.

  It was so silent and swift that he didn’t even stir. In his dream the world flashed white, scalding his eyelids. Something thin and tall spoke to him in a reedy voice, words that were not human language yet which he understood after a fashion, the syllables weaving through his brain, knitting together things that had never been united before, bits of thought that had never found a way to coalesce, words like a glue to bond the strips of parchment in the madman’s bundle.

  He awoke to someone babbling nearby. The light of dawn gilded the Dragon Bowl through the spaces between the bollards. It lit the face of the man babbling beside him. He remembered the man from the day before, remembered that he’d been surly and greasy. Now the man stared with wide eyes, and his hair had gone white as clouds and sprayed out from his head.

  The bowl itself had been transformed. The missing tiles had all been replaced, creating a colorful mosaic. On it lay a host of small objects, all clear like glass but flexible—containers and lids scattered about. The people who’d been sleeping on or near the beam scrambled out onto the bowl and began grabbing up the objects. Lids seemed to be the wrong size for containers, and the people combed through the scatter in a frenzy, tossing one and then another lid aside, shoving one another to get at the next, fighting over a complete container whenever a lid fit. The sealed containers seemed to have an effect on whoever held them, for anyone who made a lid pop into place immediately began to wail—more as if they’d lost something than in joy at completion of a task. Some struck those nearest them with the completed containers, while others collapsed and clutched them to their bosoms, rocking back and forth while weeping as if they held a dead child in their arms.

  More people traveled along the beam every moment, pouring out, filling the bowl. Citizens of the span had seen the visitation—that was what the boy heard them calling it—and all wanted to share in whatever bounty the gods had left. Word of the event spread quickly, even to the underspan. Within the hour the boy’s keeper had pushed her way along the beam to find him. She demanded that he give her whatever the gods had bestowed upon him. He drew a container from behind his back and handed it to her. He’d found a lid to match it and handed that to her as well. He waited breathlessly to see if she would fit the lid into place. Instead she stared with swelling anger at the two pieces. “This? This is what I’ve fed you for all these months? The time I’ve invested in you, and you give me a container for fish scraps?” She backhanded him as if he had lied to her. “I thought—” She paused, shook her head, and sighed. “I let myself believe in you, in this, how stupid am I? You are useless to me.” As she said it, she bent down and snatched another of the small containers that had been overlooked, hiding it in her blouse. “Useless,” she repeated, and then, as if she’d forgotten about him, she walked around the bowl and back along the beam. Only then did he notice that the beam, like the tiles, had been repaired—that an intact low wall now ran along both sides of the narrow walkway, as must have been the case when it first appeared. The woman stepped off the beam and was accosted immediately; from what he could see, she began bargaining with citizens too frightened to come out themselves and grab one of the odd containers.

  The boy didn’t understand any of it—not the woman, not the crazed people about him, not the excitement over an event that seemed to have produced nothing of value. What sort of gods played such tricks on people? They’d repaired the tiles and the beam—that seemed to be the major transformation, but of interest only to him.

  He sat against the rail and watched. He had nothing, said nothing, and no one paid him much mind. As people got something, they deserted the beam, but there were many who, now that a visitation had occurred, decided to sit and wait for another. It would all begin again. It must.

  Because of the “blessed” event, there would for a time be more people on the beam and in the hexagonal bowl on any given day, more abusers of children, more who resented his presence here, never mind that he was a prisoner and would gladly have left if they’d freed him. For a while everyone would anticipate the next visitation, until this one faded into memory and most of the cormorants drifted away, back to whatever routine had filled their days before.

  He rocked in place, furiously frustrated by the stupidity of people. After a while different ones came and took the madman with the white hair by the arms, stood him up, and walked him down the beam. One glanced his way, and the boy said, “Please, take me, too.” The two paused. They contemplated him as if considering whether he was worth the effort; but he didn’t notice them any longer because he realized that he had spoken. He had spoken and it had made sense. Thoughts inside his head were making sense. He was observing the world around him and it was making sense—or at least the nonsense of it all was suddenly comprehensible to him as nonsense. For the first time in his life, he recognized and understood the motives of others.

  The madman took notice of him and began to laugh. The two handlers dismissed the boy and hurried on with their charge.

  He was aware! He stared up at the sky, at clouds and birds and sun. Whatever the gods had done for everyone else, they had given him the gift of himself.

  He was still marveling at his transformation when the woman returned some hours later. She told him, “Well, I’ve found someone to take you off my hands, and that’s what I’m going to do.” She unlocked the chain from the bollards but not from his ankle. She let him get to his feet, but then pulled him along, and he had to hop to keep up.

  They arrived back on the span. He wanted to run off, he wanted to shout at her for how she had treated him, but he did neither. He pretended to be the idiot she saw. His skinny legs trembled from disuse. It had been so long since he had walked anywhere beyond the length of the chain, and he was starved. He intended to bide his time, to see what she had in mind. While he now had the gift of thought, he still didn’t know much about the world or how it worked.

  Sh
e led him through twisting alleys and small rough streets, avoiding the main thoroughfares, where his situation might have proved inconvenient for her, and finally came to the very end of the span. The great wall of the tower rose up before them; but instead of taking him into the tower and off the span, she turned and walked down the narrowest of lanes with the tower wall on the left and the fronts of houses on the right, so close that he could have climbed in their windows even on the chain. The lane was a cul-de-sac, but near the end of it a dark doorway had been carved out of the tower wall.

  The woman banged on the door, and it opened almost immediately. A slender but round-faced man with darting eyes stood there, dressed in an embroidered robe that was belted slackly at his waist, revealing a hairy abdomen above loose trousers. He beamed at the woman. She handed him the chain. He looked the boy up and down. “He ain’t much,” he said. “Looks like a skellington, he does.”

  “I told you, Bogrevil, he’s been living on the bowl, waiting for the gods.”

  “I heared they come last night. They talk to you, boy?”

  The boy kept his mouth closed and acted as if the question had been directed at Mother Kestrel.

  “He’s mute?” Bogrevil asked.

  “Yes, as I told you, he’s an idiot,” she replied testily. “You don’t want him, that’s fine, I’ll be on my way.” She reached for the chain, but Bogrevil drew it out of her reach, which tugged the boy inside the doorway.

  Bogrevil said, “If he’s been visited by the gods, then I get whatever he’s got. You don’t.”

  The woman looked at the boy, but he stared dumbly at the ground as if unaware of his circumstances. She snorted with laughter. “Oh, I’ll agree to that. He’s got anything from here on, it’s yours to keep, including vermin.”