Shadowbridge

by Gregory Frost

  And what was your father’s reward for all his work? To vanish.

  His father took all the bows, receiving the kudos while the boy stayed hidden in the dark, listening to audiences shout his name, but unable to reveal his identity.

  Mangonel may have given in to his wife’s demands, but he still had the means to keep the boy in his place. He got to acting as if he had performed the shadowplays, even hiding out during some performances to reinforce the impression.

  Meanwhile the gulf between him and the other two family members deepened. He took performance money and went out on his own after shows, sometimes not coming home until the next day. His wife knew what he was doing but said nothing about it. After he’d scarred her, she had nothing to do with him beyond rehearsals anyway.

  The world went on about its business. The Edgeworld gods blessed some spans, showering their Dragon Bowls with gifts, and completely ignored others. Women gave birth. Lovers quarreled and made up. Fish swam and ate smaller fish. The troupe traveled its circuit of spans and spirals. On each they might play four or five locales before sailing off to another arm of Shadowbridge, and sooner or later back again. It was a small circuit, hardly anything compared with all the possible spans, but enough to keep them moving all year round without returning to any particular span more than once every few years. Bardsham the child developed into Bardsham the young man. As he grew older, he also grew more frustrated. He choked at having to hide in the darkness of the booth while his father accepted his acclaim. He had great skill and he wanted to be recognized. The mysterious phantom Bardsham received letters and money from admirers, invitations to palaces, even proposals of marriage. His identity continued to attract speculation. He was a djinn kept in a bottle. No, he was horribly disfigured. He was deformed. That was why he hid his face.

  While not particularly handsome or tall, the real Bardsham was not unattractive, either. As he grew older, he became a more conspicuous member of the troupe. Mangonel required him to pretend to be an idiot lest someone suspect him of being Bardsham. Now when he was old enough to be accepted as the puppeteer, it had become imperative that the mystery be maintained. The mystery of Bardsham was what filled the benches. He helped set up the acts. He assembled and broke down the platforms. But he had to pretend to be less, always less, than what he was. He was finding other people more and more appealing. Women interested him particularly. After all, they wrote him invitations. But what chance did he have with anyone he took a fancy to when he had to play the gibbering fool? Inevitably some people taunted him as he set up. They even jeered, “Hoy, there’s Bardsham!” at him while they pointed and laughed. He was doing twice the work of everyone else in the troupe. He had to be seen working like a lackey and looking like a fool. Secretly, he had to practice, to perform. Even more secretly he had to find ways to gather information on stories without revealing his identity. He donned disguises or masks when he spoke to the elders on the spans. The whole process was exhausting him.

  The critical clash with his father was inevitable—a mere question of when the two tempers would flare in unison. His mother did her best to act as intermediary, but she must have known she couldn’t do it forever and dreaded the day when the two men would collide.

  That day came: Bardsham had shirked some onerous chore in order to lurk about the span and gather up new stories. Mangonel saw him returning and called him. The old man had his whip.

  He asked him something like “Where have you been and why haven’t you done what I told you to do?” You know the sound of it, your uncle brays the same way—when he tells you to do one thing and then damns you for not doing another. Mangonel knew perfectly well that his son had been out doing his job as Bardsham. But he hadn’t shoveled manure or swept off the stage, or cleaned some animal’s pen, which were his duties, too.

  Now, Bardsham wasn’t big, but he performed so much of the troupe’s donkeywork that he was much stronger than he looked. And right then he’d had enough of trying to placate, of appeasing when it was himself being mistreated and maligned. Instead of apologizing, he walked over and told the old man that he could hire someone else to do the grunt work from now on. Bardsham had more important things to do and was tired of carrying the burden unnecessarily, just for show. Just—as he saw it—for Mangonel’s amusement. “I’m done!” he shouted, and started away.

  The old man might have pretended that what he’d done to his wife was an accident, but what happened next was a hot-blooded assault.

  His whip tore at Bardsham left and right, striping him with welts and blood, ripping his clothing, driving him back and back against a wall. He fell over some jugglers’ props that had been assembled—some braziers and flags and large wooden pins. When he scrambled up against the wall the whip tore his shoulder open. If he’d been a second slower, it would have been his nose. He had nothing to protect him, nothing to hide behind. The old man might have been trying to kill him, too—he snapped the whip at his son’s face, just missing an eye and leaving him afterward with a scar to match his mother’s. Maybe it was seeing that scar that made the old man realize he’d never lost control of the whip in his life, not even once, not for a second. Not with anybody.

  He raised it again and snapped it, but slow enough that Bardsham caught it and pulled with all his might. Hauled off his feet, the old man flew toward him, and Bardsham, quick as lightning, let go the whip and snatched up one of the juggling pins and swung it all the way around, swung it with his arms stretched out, swung it with all his anger behind it. When it hit, that pin cracked and splintered, and bits of it flew off across the yard. It stove in the side of his father’s head.

  Bardsham said he stood there afterward for the longest time, feeling a terrible fire in his throat, as if he might cry, but boiling with such hatred that he did nothing for the man who lay twitching and bleeding on the ground in front of him. Of course he was bleeding, too. His shoulder and back. His face was a mask of blood from the slash beside his eye. He dropped the broken pin and walked away.

  He packed everything he owned, including the puppets left him by Peeds, and disappeared that night. Didn’t even say good-bye to his mother, which he regretted the rest of his life. But that was his choice.

  Mangonel didn’t die, as it happens, but he was never any good for anything after that. He couldn’t speak right, and he couldn’t walk a straight line from one end of a room to the other between one day and the next. The Mangonel Circus is what Bardsham had killed. The Mangonel name.

  The puppet that was her grandfather had jerked, stumbled, and fallen over. The figure of Meersh stood alone and somehow wretched.

  Leodora had asked, “Did he ever go back?”

  Soter shook his head. “He would send money to his mother whenever he had some and remembered it. But never a note, never a word. He was too ashamed to write, to say where he was. There was nothing he could say. He knew he would have killed his father. Happily. Of course his mother would have understood—you and I can see that, but not Bardsham. She must have known that she could find him, because he was famous, you know. Bardsham only grew in stature once he’d escaped from the circus. She could have found him anytime.”

  “Like my mother.”

  For a moment he looked alarmed. Then he smiled nervously and said, “Ah, I see what you mean—like your mother ran away from home. Yes. I often thought that his break with his family was the cause of much of his debauch—that is, his excesses. He drank and…well, drank more than any human being I’ve ever known. You could not be friends with him and not drink. He often said that he didn’t trust men who didn’t imbibe. They were afraid of something. Something inside themselves, and he felt he should be wary of it, too.”

  “So when did you come to know him?”

  Soter set down the last puppet figure. There would be no puppet for him.

  With obvious relish he said, “I came across Bardsham while I was selling nostrums. He needed a reconnaissance man, a vanguard to make arrangements, make sure we had a p
lace to perform and to sleep on every span, wherever we went. Make sure there would be no trouble. Likewise it must be someone with the necessary sophistication to announce him, a person of skill and wit to suss the nature of the place and its inhabitants. A person of reliable character and cunning and…” He paused, opened his hands as if tossing something in the air, and bowed slightly. “He had a need that I filled perfectly.

  “Without such a person, Bardsham had to handle these things. He had to come out of the booth between each set and announce himself, interrupting the flow of the stories. That made him seem ordinary, and you can’t seem ordinary if you want to perform. Besides, he was Bardsham—ordinary wasn’t an option. The cloak of mystery was crucial.

  “The two of us had been traveling parallel circuits, you might say. Every span’s different. Laws are different, permits are different. Sometimes you need one, sometimes you don’t. Sometimes you’ll get arrested if you set up without bribing the right fellow. Sometimes you get arrested if you try to bribe them. It’s half your life keeping on top of such things. A great artist cannot be distracted by such petty matters.” He sounded to her as if he were quoting someone. “An artist’s head is full of tricks and tales, not the names of who to pay off and how to finesse the obdurate authorities.”

  His tone was one of longing. They had been young men then, on an adventure together. She could hear it. “The world was all before us,” he told her, then fell silent. Warily, she asked, “What about my mother?”

  The dreaminess in Soter’s expression pinched into a look almost of pain. His eyes darted her way for a second. Not encouraged by his reaction, she pressed her point: “Is what Uncle Gousier says about her true?”

  He picked up the puppet figure of Orinda. It glided across the case as he spoke. “What your uncle knows of your mother on the spans, he’s pieced together like a quilt—a word here, a rumor there. He never spoke to anyone who knew her. That is, other than me; and he’d prefer not to know what I know because it might spoil the picture he’s framed. He knows nothing of how she lived or what she did to survive. His account’s a fabrication. When I arrived here with you, your existence only confirmed everything he’d invented about her. That she must have been a wanton to produce a child and then abandon it was all too clear to him, and he set it like a minaret atop the story he’d already invented. You’re the crowning piece whether you wish it or not. Here you are and Leandra nowhere to be seen.” He slid the puppet back inside the case.

  “But she was dead!”

  “Which made no difference to him. That she’d left you in my care, in Bardsham’s care, before she went off is what matters, you see. In his mind, she abandoned you. Her death’s a mere inconvenience after the fact. An orphan proved what he already believed. She was unfit. Unfit to be his sister. And that’s the real issue.”

  “Was she—” and here she stopped, poised at the brink of asking the critical question that would either vindicate or damn the image she retained, her mind shaping words the specifics of which were beyond her, but the depravity of which she’d inferred from the way her uncle’s mouth twisted and his eyes went hard as he uttered the name. “Was she really the Red Witch? Did she have powers?”

  “Red Witch?” The name troubled him, she could see. “Where do you”—he tried unpersuasively to sound amused—“where do you get such a name?”

  “From you,” she answered, and she watched as he hesitated, tried to recall when he had let this slip.

  He squeezed shut his eyes and rubbed his forehead. “Oh. Well. It was just a name, that’s all, Leodora. A reputation. The same way that Bardsham was a name.” Orinda fell over and lay still on the box. “That’s enough now, I’m tired.”

  But she would not be diverted by his pretense of exhaustion. This was too important. Her world was taking shape. “Was she the Red Witch? Did she lure men to their deaths?”

  He stiffened. Slowly his hand uncovered his face. His bilious eyes distorted his haggard features into something inhumanly furious—gaunt and hard and evil. One corner of his mouth curled as he replied: “Ask your father. She lured him.”

  He rose up, gathered the puppets, and shoved them back into the cases. Ignoring her as if she were no longer in the room, he carried the cases back to the dark pantry.

  Although he let her stay through the night, Soter remained unapproachable, refusing to answer when she tried to speak to him. The subject was closed.

  After that he tried never to mention Leandra again. If she asked a question, he wouldn’t answer with anything concrete or helpful. Mostly he feigned that he remembered too little to be of any use.

  She couldn’t trust her uncle to tell her anything concrete because he did nothing but call his sister “the witch,” much the way the villagers did. To ask him was to invite trouble. Her aunt was especially reticent when Gousier was around, but even when he was absent she professed to have come to the island only after Leandra was gone and so be unable to provide any help. Leodora suspected this wasn’t true, but she didn’t want to accuse her aunt and lose the sympathy of the only person who ever sided with her.

  Beyond Bouyan, her mother was nothing but a half-condensed phantom, a legend, a myth. On Bouyan she was a scourge, a harlot, an abomination.

  While she couldn’t probe him for information, she did induce Soter to teach her about the puppets. He accepted her apprenticeship reluctantly at first, but with increasing devotion as, over time, her dedication and skill emerged. It wasn’t just a casual interest in puppetry she displayed. Nor were his first impressions of her dexterity off the mark. Leodora had her father’s gifts. Many times during the first years of her training, Soter proclaimed it.

  The secret practice sessions gave meaning to her life. They made the indignities suffered at her uncle’s hands almost bearable. They gave her a goal to strive for—a means to leave the island, to strike out on her own.

  The goal had no date. She didn’t know when or how she would leave, and she might not ever have gone at all. She really had no idea then what she was inviting—how much effort would be involved, how much of her life she would devote to practice. She would train and train while Soter forever reminded her that she wasn’t quite ready, that her skills still needed sharpening; that there was a world of detail she didn’t know, of subtlety she didn’t yet possess. As time passed, she began to think that she might spend her whole life preparing for just one performance.

  FOUR

  Life on Bouyan ran along with a tedious sameness.

  Each morning she awoke in her small garret atop the boathouse. It was a room she had taken as a sanctuary after discovering it on one of her flights from her uncle. It had a small bed and sparse furnishings in it, suggesting that someone had lived there before her. Her aunt and uncle didn’t resist when she asked if she could move into the garret. In truth, she had asked Dymphana, who as always had acted as go-between for her; but she had watched the interchange, had seen her uncle’s hooded gaze shift to her with an incomprehensible look of relief, as though he wanted her gone. For once his desires and hers agreed. She was thirteen. Her body was changing and with it her emotional compass: She wanted privacy, she wanted her own places on the island. Her uncle’s one stipulation was that she cease all complaining about her assigned tasks.

  Once she had arisen, she dressed and went down the beach to Tenikemac to watch the sea dragons surface. The village dotted the whole curve of the bay just over the north ridge. The ridge took half an hour to reach, and as she walked she watched the people already up and working, especially the half a dozen women gathering seaweed in baskets along the beach ahead of her. Soon she had reached them, but for the most part they ignored her, letting her by as if she didn’t exist. On the ridge, she stopped and watched.

  The men in teams of two carried their rolled-up nets down beside the water, where they unfurled them. Tastion and his father made up one team. He pretended not to see her, so no one was suspicious of the true relationship between them.

  Soon f
our younger boys waded into the water up to their waists, each carrying a large conch with pierced ends. In unison they raised the shells to their lips and blew a trumpet call.

  Everyone stopped what they were doing and turned to study the surface.

  Farther out, the water rippled. Slithers of yellow appeared, darted beneath the grayish waves. Then the heads rose up, one after another, strange, long-snouted, magisterial heads with large, black, and protruding eyes. These were the sea dragons.

  There were sixteen of them in all, and she knew every one. She had never ridden them, never touched them. As a female, she wasn’t allowed. But she’d given them names. Her favorite was Muvros, the youngest, his head yellow and black, freckled with the red spots of youth, and his snout as thin as a reed. The tiny mouth at the end of it seemed forever puckered, as if sharing a kiss.

  The conch boys fed the dragons long strips of the gathered seaweed and would feed them again when they returned. Meanwhile the fishermen, dragging their nets, moved into the water two by two. The dragons seemed as fascinated by the men as Leodora was with the dragons. They bowed their heads and let their riders clamber over their necks and sit. They seemed not in the least encumbered by the riders.

  With a storyteller’s inquisitiveness, she wondered when this ritual had begun, and who had tamed the first dragon. Even the village itself didn’t seem to know, or else she would have known the story, too. Soter had taught her every one of their tales with the intention of having her perform them for villagers—once he was satisfied that she was skilled enough.

  The dragons snaked off into deeper waters, their riders rocking from side to side. Some of the men would return early with full nets. Others stayed out all day, hunting a more difficult catch but one that might earn them more money on Ningle. Tastion and his father were among those who hunted farther away.