Shadowbridge

by Gregory Frost

  Leodora turned and started after them. When Diverus didn’t tag along she turned back to him. “I have to see this,” she told him. “I don’t know why, but I have to.”

  The street ran directly to one of the canted uprights supporting the swooping beam overhead. The street widened to circle the upright, and the procession flowed around it like water around a stalk of bamboo. On the far side the split road opened even wider, into a crescent at the span’s edge. The funeral group spread out to fill the crescent. Leodora and Diverus remained on its fringe, slightly separate from the others so as not to intrude. They didn’t know how they might be regarded.

  The woman with the red scarf began a recitation: “There are two hundred levels to the universe. The higher we ascend, the hotter it becomes. The realm of the spirits would scorch us, and even they cannot reach the level of the fire and water gods, but are connected to it only by rays, as the sun connects to us.”

  A woman standing beside her and clutching the hands of two children began to wail. The children took their cues from her and added their voices to the anguish.

  Diverus moved off from the clustered group, to the rail at the edge of the span. Leodora trailed after him, curious about his response. She could still hear the priestess’s recitation, but the talk of levels made little sense to her. Through thin mist the other wing of the span was visible, separate but close enough that Leodora could make out the shapes of people in the nearest lane. As she approached the rail, she could see below them the darkness of the land that sloped out from under the surface of the span. A hillside. She leaned over and peered down into a deep valley that ran between the avenues. Houses on stilts dotted the lower slopes, and the ones at the very bottom stood in water, in a narrow stream that snaked through it. The course of the stream led back to a waterfall in the gray distance. On each side of the stream, the land had been flooded—a system of small gates and channels allowed water to be diverted from the stream, enough to cover the valley floor. Some sort of crop grew in the spread of water, and people worked there with hoes and other implements, with baskets slung over their shoulders, standing ankle-deep.

  The funeral recitation had ended, and the body—still on its plank but now fastened to ropes—began a steady descent over the edge. She had to lean out over the rail to see where it was going.

  The hillside below was cracked open, and inside the opening, directly beneath the descending body, lay a grotto. The sides of it were jagged; down in its depths lights flickered, like candles sparkling off faceted gems, revealing more white-robed figures. They stood awaiting the body, reaching up eagerly while it descended toward the open mouth of the hill.

  Diverus said suddenly, “My mother died and they dropped her down into the sea.” She glanced sidelong at him. He seemed calm, almost entranced. “There was no land under Vijnagar. Just water. They wrapped her up like that and then they sent her under the water.”

  “Diverus—”

  “I came to believe she’d become a mermaid and lives now in a city at the bottom of the sea.”

  She found she could watch the descent of the body by watching his eyes. He tracked it until it was taken by the figures in the hole.

  “It’s the same, though, isn’t it?” he said.

  The priestess recited: “After the Storm of Raruro, comes a reuniting, and all spirits join. Shukkon and fukkon will join. Until that day he must remain separated from us—that is the order of things.”

  Diverus pushed away from the ceremony and through the many figures in white. Leodora followed after him. He didn’t go far but sat down against a wall where a cart had been standing earlier—a few cast-off vegetables lay scattered there. He rested his face on his fists. As she came up to him, Leodora thought he looked like a little boy. She knelt, and then sat beside him.

  “It’s strange,” he said immediately. “I can remember it all, but in the way you remember the stories you tell, the way I remember the story that fox told us yesterday. It never happened to me, but I can recall that emperor and his fox-wife now—as if I was there.”

  She said nothing, but considered that awhile. Idly she picked up a long-necked gourd and a taro potato and began toying with them, dancing them about. There seemed to be no answer, really. Diverus had been present, and yet from what she gathered, the Diverus seated beside her hadn’t existed then. He was a creation of the gods. A Dragon Bowl had made him.

  Meanwhile the funeral procession was returning from the burial. The wails of the two children at the rear of the group reached them well before the children passed by.

  Without looking at him, Leodora said, “It isn’t as if you could have saved her, Diverus. Any more than I could have saved my parents. They both died before I could talk.” She met his angry eyes and held his gaze. “You think she died on your account.”

  His eyes widened with surprise and betrayal, and she knew that she’d guessed right. She spun the gourd around, then waltzed it to the potato. “There isn’t a day when I don’t miss my aunt Dymphana. I can’t see her again, maybe ever.” Her throat tightened and her face flushed. She’d thought she was saying this for him, not to express her own pain. She wanted to stop but had to go on. He had to understand. She willed herself not to cry. “It’s not my fault I can’t see her. I didn’t make it this way, my uncle did. He made the rules, and what I’ve done…is because of that.”

  People were walking past now. She lowered her head, unable to look at him or anyone else, knowing that she might burst into tears if she did—and how stupid and pointless that would be—but she couldn’t help it. She focused on the vegetables, on making them waltz about and pirouette upon the stones.

  The crying children came abreast of her but she didn’t look up, even when their noise was right on top of her. And then suddenly the crying stopped.

  At that she raised her head slowly. The children stood directly before her. They were watching her hands in fascination. They might have been twins, both with black hair and almond eyes. Above, holding their hands, their mother, the widow, met her gaze and made a pitiful attempt at a smile, ruined by grief. Her tears had etched trails in the thick powdery makeup on her cheeks. The thought came to Leodora: All of us are here on account of death.

  The rest of the funeral party moved on, but the mother couldn’t work up the energy to order her children away, and so she stood there as if expecting Leodora to read her a future.

  Quietly, Diverus suggested, “Tell them a story.”

  She glanced over at him. He seemed to have forgotten his despair. His eyes shifted from her to the children and back again.

  She spoke what she’d been thinking. “We’re all here on account of death,” she said, and she spun the long-necked gourd about, as if it were turning to face the children. “Death is everywhere, but do you know that once upon a time Death didn’t exist? No? Let me tell you, then, how Death came into our world.” She raised her eyes to the widow. “I think you should sit down to hear this. It’s not a long story, but it isn’t short, either.”

  The mother knelt, and her children sat beside her.

  “Now, does anyone here know who Chilingana is?” asked Leodora.

  One of the twins said, “He dreamed Shadowbridge.”

  “That’s right. He was the original dreamer.” She walked the taro potato forward and hid the gourd from sight, then leaned over and picked up a small cluster of enoki and set it aside. She said, “One day a different dream came to him.”

  HOW DEATH CAME TO SHADOWBRIDGE

  In those times the sun was called Lord Akema. He was a warrior god, terrible to behold, who would blind all those foolish enough to seek for his features. That’s why there existed the second—the false mask of Akema—Nocnal, upon which everyone might safely gaze, and which they could petition when they wanted a favor from the war god. Behind the mask of Nocnal, the warrior would listen and sometimes answer.

  It was under Nocnal’s aegis that the fisherman Chilingana dreamed the bridges of Shadowbridge into place.
Each night more bridges appeared—covered in structures, in houses and towers, in parks and alleys, but all of them were empty, lifeless, and still. Soon his dream stretched far across the world, and Nocnal observed it all as it unfolded.

  By day, beneath the burning face of Akema, Chilingana’s life persisted as flat as bread. He fished, he ate, and he dwelled with his wife, Lupeka, in his stilt house. Although he could have stepped across the gap onto the first bridge he’d dreamed, he didn’t. He talked about going, almost every day, but each time he came to the edge of his own small world he hesitated, peered down the empty way until his eyes ached, and then gave up. He could not go traveling out upon these spans. To do so would have invited the unknown, and Chilingana, for whom everything had ever been the same, feared the unknown. He didn’t understand that the unknown needed no invitation.

  One night while he lay upon his seaweed mat, a chill wind called loneliness came floating down the empty spans of the bridges he had dreamed. It swirled about his house. It slipped into the sleeves of his clothing and fluttered the cloth against him. His mouth filled with it and he rose and went out and stared off into the distance, across the near-black sea. He looked for what he knew not.

  Chilingana thought his wife was asleep inside, but she lay awake. The wind had filled his house, and she had breathed it in as well as he.

  She was aware of him outside, yet did not call him. No distance had ever existed between the woman and the man before he dreamed the bridges. They stretched into infinity like the lives of Chilingana and Lupeka. This new distance touched her with longing. She wondered: When had she come to be, and who had built her house? She assumed Chilingana had done it, but he never said. She had never before thought to ask. The two of them wanted for nothing: All the food of the world swam through the ocean beneath their house. Why, then, create such things as bridges? What purpose could they serve?

  Fear gnawed at her then, that her husband wished to travel away from her into an unknown so vast that he might never return. The distance opened like a pit beneath her, and her breath caught in her throat.

  The wind of loneliness heard her and was surfeited.

  She arose and crept out the back of the house onto the balcony that surrounded it on all sides. She gazed out across the sea away from her husband. Her eyes followed Nocnal’s bright stripe upon the swirls and waves until she made out, just above the horizon, the black edge of a bridge’s line, and in the middle of it the black spire of a tower, and her fear frothed and foamed. She knew in wordless fashion that these spans connected to some other place, although she knew no other.

  Her fearful musings disturbed Lord Akema’s rest, prodding the face of Nocnal to call down, “What troubles you, lady?”

  “Well,” she answered, and then fell silent before the immensity of what she wanted to say. What was still emerging inside her soul had no words. She’d never known anything but herself; how could she express something so much larger? She kept silent. If Nocnal had to ask, then he didn’t understand.

  Yet he continued asking her till finally she retreated inside where the walls were near, the territory small and safe. When her husband came in later and lay down beside her, she rolled over to clasp him and he held her tight. “I know,” he said.

  “What?”

  “Something is coming.”

  The certainty in his words terrified her more than her own inexpressible unease. “What is? What’s coming? Tell me.”

  “When it arrives, I’ll know it.” He couldn’t tell her more, and they lay like that, tightly bound in unshared fear, too conflicted even to remember shared desire.

  Chilingana tried to forget what he’d told Lupeka. He continued fishing as he had always done, but with uneasy glances over his shoulder, down the length of the adjoining spans, across the ocean to where they vanished over the horizon.

  One afternoon the face of Lord Akema was particularly fierce. Chilingana lay on the shadowed side of his house as people still do to escape the god’s fury, and he happened to glance up to find a stranger walking up the next span.

  The fisherman who had created the world leapt to his feet. Other than his wife, this was the first person he had ever seen. Whatever he’d dreaded for so long, this had to be it.

  The stranger was tall and gaunt. He wore robes that we would say belonged to a mystic. They were deep red and glittered with powerful designs woven with silver thread, thick as fishbones. The hood of his robe kept the stranger’s features in shadow. All Chilingana could determine was that this traveler was very dark indeed.

  The stranger came to the place where the dreamed bridge ended and stepped across the gap onto the balcony encircling the stilt house. The stilts groaned beneath him as if he weighed as much as the world. He walked right up to Chilingana, who huddled shivering in the shadows. It took all the fisherman’s reserves not to cry out and flee inside. He stared into a face of sharp cheekbones and high polished brows, looked into bottomless eyes. “Who are you?” he asked.

  The traveler replied, “I am Death.”

  “What sort of name is that?”

  Death laughed. “One new to you even though you’re the Dreamer. Your bridges have grown to encompass the world, reaching even as far as the land of the dead, which is a barren and uninhabited place I was happy to leave. Your creation invited me to walk the world, and I set out directly to find you.”

  The fisherman raised his shoulders. “You aren’t making sense.”

  “I think you’ll see that I am, once you’ve come inside me.” Death opened wide his robes, and Chilingana saw a place so cool and inviting that the harsh rays of Lord Akema couldn’t find him there. He must have fallen into those robes, for he had no memory of walking. Once he was inside the cool place his mind tumbled with memories. The robes that had been held open closed, and at the core of the darkness within them lay a red glow of life out of which came discordant noises he’d never known—crackling energies and devices that rang and then spoke, the barking of dogs, the canister rumble of machines as they rolled along an empty boulevard, the clicking of a metal thing that unfurled strips of paper covered in indecipherable symbols, and the voices of people—more people than he could hold in his mind—all speaking at once and shouting through objects in the sky that were nothing like Akema, lifeless creations, but spraying chatter out and down like rain in a million different tongues drowning him under their flow. He saw impossible blue-glass buildings across which clouds slid like oil, and lighted things that were not fish but traveled far beneath his perfect sea, and he knew that all of these things, however they were new to him, were also ancient, long gone, dredged up out of a collective silt of memory, from some other time and place before he and his wife had arrived. And he knew torment, for in all his new recollections, his birth was nowhere to be found.

  He sank to the stones before the traveler. His head hung, too heavy for his neck to lift. Death spoke. “Now you know mortality. Now you’ll live and age and cling to what memories you have, because you will always be falling away from them.”

  Then Death left the fisherman there and entered his house. Chilingana tried to crawl after him, to shield his wife from this terrible conjurer. Why should she have to know these things? She hadn’t done this—she hadn’t made the bridges. But she couldn’t be spared, else gaze down upon a mortal man whom she no longer would recognize as her husband.

  Death did not leave, but when the fisherman dragged himself feebly inside, the traveler had gone, and his wife lay upon the bed, naked and open to him. She had been made fertile, able to bear children. Thus did Death plan to people his realm.

  Nearing her, Chilingana recovered his strength, and they folded together and slept, safe so long as they touched.

  In the morning, when he awoke, he was alone and certain that he had dreamed the traveler. He stretched, to find that his body ached unfamiliarly.

  As he stood, he kicked something from the mat. It clattered across the floor. It was a silver object, small enough to lie in th
e palm of his hand.

  Grooves threaded the length of it; at the top was a large single slot. He had brought it back from the realm within Death’s cloak.

  When he stooped and lifted the thing, Chilingana dropped to his knees with his fist closed, and began to weep because now he could remember his entire life and he recognized that each day would hereafter be different from the last, and farther away than the land of Death itself.

  Time upon Shadowbridge had begun. Life had arrived, carried by Death.

  Leodora laid down the taro and the enoki. The gourd she’d already hidden in one sleeve, and she let it roll slowly out. It came to rest sitting up, its “head” canted as if toward the children. For them it had become the figure of Death; and for their mother, as well. She smiled at the storyteller, and now that smile was proof against grief. Her tears had dried and those of her children. “Thank you,” she said.

  Some members of the funeral procession had stopped when they found the widow missing, and had wandered back. They’d clustered close enough to hear the story, and complimented Leodora by dipping their heads in an informal bow. The widow turned to her people and then folded the children back in among them, but the two kept glancing over their shoulders at Leodora and the gourds as they were drawn away, and then lost from sight.

  She got up, weary, her legs stiff from all the walking followed by sitting awkwardly while she performed the tale. She saw the expression on Diverus’s face. “What is it?” she asked.

  “I—I’ve no words. I stand amazed.”

  Blushing, she lowered her eyes. “You’ve no call to be. You have a far more remarkable talent than mine.”

  “No,” he said. “Mine was a gift from the gods.”

  “How do you know mine isn’t?”