Shadowbridge

by Gregory Frost

  “You won’t have to,” he said. “You don’t have to pretend to be Jax anymore—or, rather, Jax becomes a woman. We’ll sail to a span where they won’t mind. Colemaigne. We’ll go to Colemaigne.” It had been the span of choice anyway. “It’s one of the oldest spans, and they have no restrictions about—”

  “About women?” She might have been crying but her voice remained all threat.

  “About much of anything. They’re the epitome of the debauched.”

  “Like Vijnagar.”

  “Oh, my dear, Vijnagar is positively puritanical. It hides its predilections beneath its surface.” He gestured at Diverus as living proof of what he said. “In Colemaigne there’s no hypocrisy of that sort. And they’ll welcome you. Perform a Meersh story for them first thing. They always loved him. Positively their favorite. I’ll be surprised if they haven’t erected a statue to him by now.”

  “I don’t have to pretend?” She was wounded, but the anger had drained from her voice.

  “No,” he assured her. “No pretending. And we’ll work our way around, you see, while the story of you spreads from two sources instead of one. By the time we play half a dozen spans on that spiral, the tales of you will have closed up, they’ll meet with us in the middle. Then we’ll have a circuit to travel. Maybe we’ll even sail to a third one before then and spread your reputation farther. Why, by the time we return to Ningle, we’ll be riding in on the shoulders of crowds, too esteemed for your uncle even to—”

  “Ningle?” she said warily. “We’re going back there?”

  “Not soon, but, you know, it was part of the circuit in Bardsham’s day, and there are many good venues on that spiral, but above and below it. We’re just broadening our compass, is all, as well as our repertoire. You wanted to see the world and collect its stories, didn’t you tell me that?” He waited for her reply, hanging everything on that reminder—the argument fabricated even as he was saying it.

  She sniffled and made a weak smile. “All right. That is—” She turned about. “—Diverus?”

  “Yes?” He seemed surprised that anyone cared to ask his opinion.

  “Would you want to go? To sail to another span?” Behind her, Soter observed him coldly with a look that might have implied a threat.

  He replied, “I’ve nothing to compare it to. I’ve never been on a boat.” Then as an afterthought he added, “But if it takes me farther from Vijnagar, that’s probably good, isn’t it?”

  “Well, there you are,” Soter said.

  She nodded. “All right, Soter. It’s settled.” He smiled but she didn’t meet his gaze, wouldn’t look at him as she parted the fabric and stepped out of the booth. He tried to listen to her retreat, but she tread silently like a cat.

  Then it was just the two of them, with Diverus looking puzzled and uncertain. “You care about her,” Soter said. “Well, so do I. I’m protecting her, though she’s unaware of it.”

  “Protecting her from what?” asked Diverus.

  For an instant he contemplated confiding, but as quickly rejected the idea as insane. “From everything,” he replied. He stared at the open case and shivered. The Coral Man lay hidden in the bottom compartment. When that figure had invaded Leodora’s dreams, he’d dismissed it, or at least pretended to. Now he appreciated what it meant to have something without a mouth, without a face really, speaking to you.

  He’d have liked to open the case, haul out the boxed puppets, and confront the figure. In his mind’s theater he carried the Coral Man to the edge of the span and tossed it into the ocean where it sank without a trace, for someone else to find. What he said was, “Be sure you secure that case well and then grab yourself some sleep, boy. We’ll be up early tomorrow for us. Or, rather, today.” Then he, like Leodora, stepped out of the booth and left Diverus alone to secure the lid and blow out the lantern.

  . . . . .

  From the stern of the ship, she watched Hyakiyako shrink slowly, steadily, rounding upon the horizon until the whole length of it and of the span north of it—which they would not know hereafter—lay upon the sea like the body of a great dark snake, with the towers that divided the two spans projecting like horns, but even this image dwindled and soon only the tops of the towers remained, illusively rising and falling, buoyed upon the choppy sea until, finally, they vanished and with them the sense of the continuity of her life. Disconnected, she could not mask the pit of terror this opened in her, that everything had now been abandoned and she was lost in a way she’d never been, even when turned from Bouyan and the haven of home.

  When finally she pushed away from the lost view, the tillerman, seated beside her with one arm up and pressed to the rudder bar, looked her up and down as if not sure what he made of her.

  She walked unsteadily toward the ship’s prow—for all that she’d ridden a sea dragon and lived upon an island that fished for its livelihood, she had never set foot in a boat before, and this one seemed determined to throw her to her knees. It was a shallow-bottomed craft and felt much too small and flimsy to undertake journeys across vast stretches of open water—especially with no one but the tillerman seeming to pay the slightest attention to how it sailed.

  In the middle of the deck and butted up to the mainmast stood the only shelter the boat afforded, a small shack—at least, that was her opinion of it. The crew called it a “house.” Soter had ducked into its dark recesses before they’d even left the span, along with the remaining three crewmen, and he hadn’t come out since. He’d been unusually reticent this morning, mostly nodding or shaking his head in response to questions, and more than once as they’d waited to cast off she had caught his gaze at the other boats moored along the two quays that projected from the side of the span, as though he expected something to come from them. When she looked, the boats were empty. No one was paying them any mind at all.

  Like Soter, Diverus sat in the shadows of the shack. He had his arms wrapped about his knees and was trying very hard not to be ill. She would have liked to have confided in him, asked him what he thought of Soter’s behavior, but clearly he was in no condition to discuss anything at the moment.

  The two undaya cases were secured to the side of the little shack, surrounded by more crates and baskets of amphorae packed in straw. She steadied herself against them as the ship abruptly lurched. Then she took hold of one of the sail-control lines and swooped beneath the woven main sail and toward the second mast. A control line ran from that smaller sail to the side of the boat, and she caught it and swung beneath it with her feet up and was a child again for a moment, free and untethered. She let go and landed beside the mast, almost kicking what she took to be an enormous yellow cable, as big around as her waist, that encircled the base of the mast. The cable flinched, and Leodora caught herself against the mast, leaning forward precariously over the cable. In the middle of it an eye opened and a thin reed of a tongue flicked into the air. The cable’s color changed then, yellow becoming brown, darkening to viridian. It was not hemp rope at all, but an enormous snake. She backed away from it, then scurried to the prow of the boat, and once there glanced over her shoulder. The snake hadn’t moved. Its color was blending with the deck again, until she was looking once more at a coil of rope that had no apparent eyes or tongue. The snake had gone back to sleep. It didn’t care about her.

  In the vee of the prow, ahead of the lugsail, a small step boosted her high enough that, gripping the side tightly, she could lean over the stem head of the boat to look down into the water as it parted beneath her. She saw a fragmented reflection in the ripple, a face split into shadowed halves topped by a burnished cowl of hair that flared with the late-afternoon light. The water was a deep blue, almost violet. She felt that if she’d leaned down far enough to dip her hand in, it would have come out dyed.

  Ahead lay only more ocean, and no hint of any other spiral. Gulls wheeled around them, probably hoping for some food, and that suggested to her that nothing else lay anywhere near, for surely gulls would find better feeding off
a span or even an isle than from a single small boat where no one was eating.

  If the world was infinite as Soter claimed, then how far might Colemaigne be? The way he’d described the world when she was small, she’d imagined that one span led to the next, and wherever you were you could look out over the rail and see the nearest spiral just across the way. That was certainly not the truth, however. The world might contain infinite spirals, but they could also be infinitely separated. And so, no longer able to assume that what she assumed was true, she wondered about the truth of Colemaigne. It was a much-celebrated place, the subject of endless fables and tales and, most likely, lies. A locus for hedonistic delights, they said, where wine flowed from a huge central fountain and through a thousand capillaries, so that no matter where you were, you had only to dip your cup to sample it. Streets were paved with a crust of hard rock candy, and glazed pastry shell houses leaned over them. No one ever went hungry and every pleasure was indulged—no worries, no desires left unfulfilled. She might have been amazed by such tales once, but now—and especially after rescuing Diverus from the paidika—she understood that for one person’s pleasure to be indulged, another must submit to indulging it. Pleasure had its price, even when paid by another.

  In any case the stories were ancient, as old as those of the storyfish and Meersh, according to Soter. What Colemaigne might have been in its past said nothing of what it was now. Look at Ningle, a decrepit, crumbling span that had once been new and glorious and blessed by Edgeworld, and which was surely much younger than their proposed destination.

  Colemaigne by implication had to be on an ancient spiral. How else could a span so old exist? Every span linked to it must likewise be old, mustn’t it? Or did bridge spans spring up suddenly after long intervals, the way that spans had appeared night upon night in Chilingana’s story? Another span, called Valdemir in one of the Meersh tales, had fallen into the sea because it was so old. Would another span have replaced it, then or later, or was there a permanent gap where it had been? She hadn’t seen enough of the world to surmise much less know the answers to such questions. Besides, every span on every spiral had its creation story; many were alike, but just as many contradicted the rest. While Chilingana’s was nearly universal—at least it seemed to be so far—it didn’t account at all for the unseen gods of Edgeworld, for Dragon Bowls or the myriad creatures and cultures she knew existed. How could one fisherman have dreamed it all? Finally she doubted she knew anything about the truth of the origins of Shadowbridge and suspected nobody else did, either. It didn’t bear contemplating. She was part of this world. The truth of its creation and its being, whatever that was, wouldn’t make her less or more so. Nevertheless, she wondered if she could ever unravel the mystery. Maybe, someday, if she ever found the mythical Library and it contained all the works it was supposed to—maybe then she would discover the truth; but not here, not in the company of a drunken old liar and a boy her age whose memory barely stretched back beyond a few subterranean months. So she focused her thoughts on their destination and let herself be excited by the notion of setting foot on one of the most ancient spans no matter what shape it was in now, for such a span must know the oldest stories, the earliest versions of all the tales she already knew. With luck Soter would let them stay awhile on each of these spans, giving her time to soak up everything while Jax’s reputation spread.

  She stood at the prow until sea spray showered her, then jumped back, but too late, already drenched. The lugsail slapped against the back of her head.

  “The price of curiosity,” hissed a low voice.

  She crouched and looked beneath the sail. Nobody else stood on the deck; but the snake, against the mast, had raised his head. Although his body was yellow, the head had darkened again to green.

  She pushed her dripping hair out of her face and walked halfway to the second mast. “And what’s your price?” she asked, just to be certain who was speaking to her.

  The snake’s head rolled from side to side. He said, “That would depend upon what you’re purchasing.”

  “What sort of snake are you, then?”

  “Do you mean, am I the sort who would sup on you?”

  “It would be useful to know.”

  “Your drenching hasn’t done a thing to curb your curiosity, has it?” He sounded amused.

  She walked closer. Her bare feet left wet prints across the deck. “I’d rather know than not know, if that’s what you mean.”

  His head bobbed back and forth as if he was weighing her answer, then suddenly he stretched toward her. She leaned back but otherwise didn’t move. She’d judged that he would have to unwind one coil to reach her; but close, she could see the remarkable blue and yellow facets of his eyes. He opened his mouth wide in a yawn. There were no fangs.

  “If you must know, I’m an Ondiont.”

  “Ondionts are water snakes.”

  “So you know something then, after all. Yes, we are water serpents, my people.”

  “Then what are you doing on a boat?”

  “Being lazy. Actually, I’m supposed to be a sentry to protect the cargo these creatures shuttle back and forth from one span to another. I’ve been sentry now for months, and so far I haven’t had to do more than stick out my tongue to send off the occasional scavenger. Eventually, I’ve been assured, they will ferry me home.”

  “Do Ondionts have a span of their own?”

  He snorted. “A span? What would we do with a span? How would we get up the stairs from the sea?”

  “I’ve no idea.”

  “Nor does anyone else. No, we have an isle, mostly rock, full of caverns—very nice, cool caverns out of the sun to sleep in.”

  “So, what do you eat?”

  “Everything. Same as you.” He rubbed the side of his head against the mast, his eyes closing ecstatically. “We squeeze it to death first. If necessary.” His narrow pupils settled on her again. “Now, what is it you’re buying, storyteller?”

  “How do you—?”

  “I listened to all you were saying to one another when you boarded. People will tell you everything if they don’t realize you’re listening. Stillness is a great skill. I’m sure you know this. I’m sure there are moments when you hold your puppets absolutely rigid to draw in your audience, and then strike.” She thought if he’d had teeth he would have been grinning at her.

  “If you know what I am, then you must know what I’m seeking.”

  “You would like a tale of the Ondionts, as different from your own people as I am from you.” When she nodded, he said, “My price for this is that you must sit beside me.”

  “So that you can squeeze me to death before you eat me?”

  His tongue flicked in irritation. “So that you and I have a pact of trust. You must trust that I won’t crush you.”

  She rubbed the bottom of one foot against the other ankle. “That would seem to put all the trust on my side of the bargain. What are you trusting me to do?”

  “I am trusting you to honor the story every time you tell it on the spans of men and other creatures, by telling it true. Mine is the greater trust, because if you break it, there’s nothing I can do about it.”

  “There’s nothing I can do about it, either, should you choose to crush me.”

  “That’s quite probably true. But you might attract the sailors and your comrades, who are inside, and they could certainly kill me before I could finish my meal. And anyway, they would see. It’s not as if you would be easy to hide once I did eat you.”

  They faced each other in silence then, and if the snake was thinking anything at all, she couldn’t tell. Yet she sensed that, like the kitsune who’d led the procession of monsters, the snake meant her no harm.

  She walked boldly up beside him and sat down cross-legged on the deck. “What story then pays for my trust?”

  The snake opened his mouth wide and hissed. She tensed to flee until she realized that he was laughing. “You’ve steel in you, storyteller.”

 
“Maybe not as much as you imagine.”

  “Oh, the contrary. I’m a judge of such things. But now to your reward. Here is a story you do not know.” He lowered his head and, very delicately, laid it upon her lap. His crystalline eyes swiveled to look up at her as he spoke. “There was once a serpent woman who collected souls.”

  THE STORY OF MISSANSHA

  Her name was Missansha, which means “the lonely one” in the Ondiont speech. She was born blind, and this is very rare among my people. Perhaps because of this, she schooled her other senses. We have a strong sense of smell, but hers was superior. She could flick her tongue and tell you what lay beyond the horizon, picking up its scent long before anyone else could.

  However, as she came of age, she developed one particular talent that no other of us has—she could sip life itself. When she came near anyone else, she drank from them. She surely didn’t know this was unusual. It was how she was. Nor could she control it, any more than the living can control the urge to breathe. Inadvertently, like a basilisk, she drained the life from two playmates.

  We have elders among us in whom we place our governance, and she was taken before them for this crime; but even as she was escorted into the room, she was draining those guards who accompanied her. One collapsed at her side; the other slithered away for his life. No one, nor especially her family, could come near her. The more she cared, the more absolutely she absorbed.

  Now, we do not slay our own, least of all for things they cannot control, and Missansha bore no responsibility for this. She wept for those she destroyed. We could not harm her for it.

  The elders chose the only solution they could imagine. They would commission a tower for her, high enough that she would never again come near them. As you can imagine, for snakes such an undertaking was near impossible, and so we sent out messengers to the bridges, to ships, to other islands, asking for assistance. There were few who accepted our very generous offer to come and erect our tower. Serpents have an unsavory reputation among other species, most of which we’ve done nothing to earn. We’re simply distrusted for our appearance and stories concocted about us, our decency dismissed. But I digress.