Shadowbridge

by Gregory Frost

  “Just because he is mentally deficient don’t mean your children must be. Probably, they’ll all be normal. I’m sure they will and so’s his mother.” He beamed at her with affected bonhomie, beneath which an edge of malice glittered.

  Her first instinct was to throw her bowl at him, but she grabbed the table instead and tried to maintain control over her terror and hate. “I’m not marrying anyone,” she said.

  “Oh, but you are, Leodora, my little niece. You’re in my house, and my keeping. And I’m telling you that your only hope on Bouyan is to marry into that village. The normal ones there would never even consider you. You’ve been up on the spans yourself and the fact that you were a toddler, not aware of the rules, the choices, that cuts no fish with them. This widow—she needs providing for, she’s a burden on her neighbors, and you can fix that with your share of the takings every morning. The three of you’ll live in the boathouse for a time, till we can build something more substantial. Or better, maybe I can toss that old bastard Soter out and you can have his shack. That’s roomier.” He turned to his wife. “Yes, that’s what we’ll do. We’ll get rid of him in the bargain, won’t we?”

  When neither woman said anything, he gave a shrug, took another bite of his food, and with his mouth half full added, “This is the opportunity for our family finally to join the village. This imbecile—call him what you want—your children will be their children. You’ll have to guide him in that, too, won’t you? But he’s equipped.” He smiled and chewed. “You ask him and he’ll show you. Happy he is to show you.” He laughed and shook his head.

  Softly, almost kindly, Dymphana rebutted, “They won’t see it your way in Tenikemac. They won’t bring us in.”

  “Of course they will. They’ll have to.”

  “How long have you been working at this, Uncle? All the little things you’ve said, the funny little looks—you’ve been winding up this woman’s hopes for weeks now. This didn’t just happen tonight.”

  His eyes narrowed although his smile remained. “I don’t know that I care to be accused, my girl. Especially with all I’ve done for your future. You’d see that if you—”

  “Liar,” she snapped. She rose to her feet, and now her control deserted her. She heaved the bowl of rice into his face.

  Gousier erupted from his seat with a howl of anguish. “My eyes!” His hands swiped at the rice stuck to his cheeks. He shook his head, pressing palms into eye sockets, and lunged all at once across the table, knocking over a pitcher and a bowl, which shattered, spreading more rice underfoot. But his hands closed on nothing.

  Leodora’s place was empty.

  He blinked and squinted. “I’ll kill you, you ungrateful bitch, I will!” His words burst the walls, sped through the night, pursuing her like a maleficent spirit. “Get done with your petulance, girl—the ceremony’s in two nights and I’ll deliver you to it if I have to carry you there in a net like one of their catches! Two nights hence!” Then she heard his laugh, and she knew she’d been right to run. There’d been a knife right in front of her on the table. If he’d hit her, she would have stuck it through his eye.

  . . . . .

  She fled to the boathouse but not to her garret. If he followed, Gousier would have her all but trapped up there. She went halfway up the steps instead, ready to jump if the door opened. She stuck her head into the room above and called, “Tastion?” The silence of emptiness answered her.

  She took a seat on the lowest steps, with the boat close by. If Gousier came in, she could squeeze through the rotten hull of the esquif before he even saw her.

  She stared through the hole in its side. She and the boat were identical. Both helpless, trapped here at her uncle’s whim. Kept from the life they were meant to live. The boat was meant to be on the ocean—it should have been on the ocean. The boat had no recourse; but she did. She must.

  Again she wondered where Tastion was. Twice today she’d needed to talk with him and he’d failed her. Now she had to concern herself with the prospect of bidding him farewell. Whatever had bound her to Bouyan before, whether it was the thing that called from across the sea or the impossible hope that she and Tastion might find a life together, it couldn’t hold her any longer. Tastion would marry his chosen wife just the way he was supposed to, and the dark, slithering call would have to find a new listener. There was—

  The boathouse door swung open.

  Leodora slipped from the step and through the hole in the boat. Footsteps skittered past—too quick to belong to her uncle. Then she heard her name called, her name sharp with excitement. Had he heard about the arranged marriage?

  He came back down.

  “I’m here, Tastion,” she said through the hole.

  He jumped back against the stairs. “Zarya’s teeth! That’s a mean trick to play. What are you doing in there?”

  “Hiding from Gousier.”

  “Oh. What have you done this time?”

  “Thank you for your confidence.”

  “I didn’t mean—I meant that he always blames you for everything. The bastard looks for excuses to beat you.”

  “I know that’s what you meant.”

  “Right now you have to come with me,” he insisted.

  “Why? Where have you been all evening? Did you stay out all this time?”

  “We had a—it will be easier if I show you. Come on.” He held out his hand. “Come on. What I found can even make you forget about your uncle.”

  She extended her hand but said, “I don’t think so.”

  He found her fingers in the dark and drew her out of the boat. “Just wait.”

  She shushed him then. They both stood listening, hardly breathing. She decided that she hadn’t heard anything after all.

  Tastion, unable to keep still, began whispering to her. “We found it this afternoon. The net got caught the way it does sometimes. It wouldn’t come loose and I had to dive down to it.” He pulled her out of the boathouse while he babbled softly. “But it wasn’t caught. I swam all the way to the bottom, and there was this thing in the net. We’d been dragging it along, just like…like I’m going to drag you if you don’t speed your step.”

  She looked around, back toward the house. There was no one there. Absently she asked him, “What was it?”

  “That’s where I’m taking you. You’ll see.”

  . . . . .

  Soon she knew they were going to the cavern. The entrance was dark. Leodora complained that they’d brought no lamp.

  “You won’t need one,” he told her, and tugged her inside. She thought he meant they would be kissing in the dark. But as her eyes adjusted, she realized that the deeper cavern was lit by a feeble bluish glow. “We put it in here,” Tastion explained, “to keep it from drying out too much. It seemed only right that it should stay with the fish. It took four of us with two nets to lift it from the bottom, and all the afternoon for our dragons to haul it back.”

  They rounded the bend. The whole chamber was visible. The stone table where she cut fish was outlined in a blue halo. The source of the light lay hidden behind it.

  She tugged free. Tastion released her hand, and she strode boldly to the edge of the stone. What she discovered made her inhale sharply and step back. She bumped against him. He was looking over her shoulder.

  A body lay on the cavern floor.

  It was not a normal—not a living—body. Its luminescence she had seen before: the color of the ocean at night when tiny sea creatures clustered, darting and swaying. The color of their radiance. It seemed to emerge from within the shell, the husk that had condensed, making the features into shadows, not unlike the puppets on their sticks when the lantern shone through them; but this body wasn’t hammered fish bladder. It was a crust—a coral grown into a human shape.

  A coral man.

  A lump defined the nose, and shallow cavities the eye sockets. Water pooled in them, creating an illusion of wet and shiny eyes rolled back in its head. The mouth might have been invisible were it not fo
r a darker vein through the coral there. Swirls and ridges of accretion created the illusion of clothing, too. Maybe, she thought, beneath the crust there lay a statue, and the coral had merely built up and up over that original form, so that with each new layer the unknown sculptor’s work became less defined. Maybe…But it had no discernible feet, as if it was still growing.

  When Tastion spoke again, she flinched.

  “It weighed as much as if the whole of Shadowbridge had been poured inside it. I tugged at the net, but it wouldn’t budge with just me pulling. Finally I had to swim up for air, and I told my father what it was. We found Lemros and Sel on their dragons, and Sel and I dove down with their net and looped it beneath our own, and then the four of us hauled it. The dragons never worked so hard. Then in the shallows we four stood on the beach, and others came and helped, and we pulled it up out of the water. We unfolded the nets to see it, and then we just marveled. No one knew what they were looking at any more than you do. But here’s something more peculiar, as if the look of it weren’t enough. After it had lain on the beach awhile, when we went to pick it up—” He stepped around her and cupped his hands under the figure’s head. “—it weighed hardly anything at all.” And so saying, he lifted it upright as if it were a stick of driftwood. “It must have been the water that weighted it, in all the little holes.”

  He prattled on about their being afraid of it, and who had argued for taking it back into the ocean and who was for keeping it; but Leodora barely listened. Gingerly, she raised one finger to its cheek, straight across from her own. On contact a current flowed up her arm. Sparks spun from where her finger touched. They circled her arm, danced upon her shoulder and up her neck, around her head—sparks that only she could see, for Tastion, though he stood just beside her, kept right on babbling about bringing the figure here. The sparks dazzled her. Penetrated her as if she were coral, too.

  Tastion’s hands gripped her, and she recoiled, only to find herself incongruously dangling from his arms, as though she’d fallen.

  “What happened to you? What made you swoon?”

  “Did I?” she asked. Her mind was a vacant beach. She let herself be drawn upright, held on to.

  “You just tipped over like you’d fallen asleep. Am I that boring?” A joke to disguise his worry.

  She could only shake her head. Tastion drew her away from the upright figure and stepped between them. Now the glow surrounded him. In his shadow she blinked as if she’d been asleep. Where were her thoughts?

  Tastion turned her and led her out of the icy chamber, away from the figure. She went passively, too confused to contest his judgment, although she muttered “I’m fine” to reassure him. She glanced back at the figure.

  Out of the cave, he guided her down the path toward Ningle and then beneath a stand of fir trees, a spot they had come to more than once to be alone. No one traveled the path to Ningle at night, and no one could have seen them sitting on their bed of needles in any case.

  He said, “You aren’t taking care of yourself, my girl,” and brushed her hair back. “You shouldn’t fight with your uncle until after you’ve eaten something.”

  “But I—”

  “You need to have someone look after you.” He kissed her neck. “Someone to care for you.” He kissed her cheek. “Someone to provide everything.” He turned her chin and leaned forward to kiss her.

  Leodora pulled away. His shadowy face seemed to wear a smile of mild exasperation, as if he was saying to her, Well, I had to try.

  “Someone to provide everything for me? Why, Tastion, how thoughtful. Who has been assigned the task?”

  “Don’t mock me.”

  “Why? You can’t fulfill any such role yourself, if I asked, which I haven’t and won’t. We both of us know to whom you’re already tied.”

  “That’s just ritual. I have to pledge to her when she comes of age, but my heart, Lea—”

  “Your heart. Your heart is not the part that throbs for me, Tastion. What am I to be? Your whore in the garret?”

  “What is the matter with you all of a sudden? We’ve kissed like this, made these promises—I haven’t said a thing I haven’t said before, and you liked it before.”

  “I wasn’t the bartered bride of Koombrun before.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “It means that in two nights my uncle will have me married to the one creature in your village wretched enough to accept the tainted daughter of a witch.” She felt the heat of tears flooding her eyes, and swung her head sharply to fling them back. She would not cry over this.

  “He has no right!”

  “He has every right. I’m his ward. His property. He can sell me the same as any fish in his basket.”

  “Well, then we’ll just…” He hesitated, finally grunted in defeat. There was no idea he could come up with that she hadn’t visited already in the boathouse. So long as both parties wished to see the union through, she would be married. Unless the village interceded. Which it wouldn’t. “Fine, then,” Tastion said. “It’ll be perfect. You can live with Koombrun and still meet me. No one will be the wiser—certainly not Koombrun. It’s the perfect camouflage, even better than the boathouse—”

  She got to her feet. “I’m really nothing to you, am I? Just convenient. If I’d given in to you before, you wouldn’t even be here now. You’d have had your ride and finished with me and passed me on to your friends. Lemros and Sel could have a turn. I could carry your child and there’d be no consequences for you. Oh, maybe a rebuke from the elders, a retreat until you came to your senses, were purged of my spell. I’m not of the people. What happens to me can be kept outside the village. It won’t embarrass anybody, will it? Outside. You can’t be made to marry me. You can’t share with me what you can share with any other woman on this island.”

  “That’s not so, Leodora.”

  “It is so. We’ve pretended for so long that something would simply appear when we needed it to change everything. We made our pact as children, Tastion, and we’re still trying to be children. But we’re feeling things beyond what children feel, and almost doing them. Sooner or later we’re going to do them, because we want to. There never has been a solution. Not on Bouyan. The whole world here would have to change for us.”

  “Where, then?” His uneasy question.

  She turned, pointed through the trees to lights no brighter than stars. “Up there.”

  “Lea, you know I can’t go up there.”

  “I can.”

  . . . . .

  Tastion seemed lost then, as if he’d never before considered the real limits imposed upon her and upon him, as if for him things were always going to roll along, allowing him the freedom to glide through the imposed rules. She was sorry for what she’d said because of what could not, as a result, happen between them, but what she’d said was the truth, and they both had to acknowledge it now. She had. Tastion was not prepared to, and he left her.

  She called to him but he didn’t stop. The darkness swallowed him up.

  Leodora returned to the path and followed it to Soter’s hut.

  He didn’t seem to be home. She entered anyway, going straight to the rear. In the doorway to the back room, she lingered, regarding the two stretched undaya cases lying in the recesses. She’d always had a plan of sorts, unformed but lurking at the edges of her life. Now she must shape it. She needed Soter’s help to do that.

  She left the hut and continued on the path to Tenikemac.

  The long house lay at the center of the village. All the other abodes were built along paths radiating from it. It had a low, nearly flat roof containing smoke holes for three different fires. Off the side facing the ocean, a huge carved merwoman figure reached with both arms as if she had been transformed in the midst of jumping through the wall, though her presence there, Leodora knew, was supposed to represent the bestowing of her blessing upon the whole village. Meetings, ceremonies, and entertainments took place in that house, and the goddess’s name was
never spoken except inside it. Leodora had performed there numerous times. In two nights she was to be married there.

  Soter brought his fermented product to the long house to sell. Often, after he’d bartered the liquor for food, clothing, or utensils, he would linger to drink with the men. “Absorbing my expenses,” he called it.

  Tonight he seemed to have absorbed rather a lot. She walked in on him regaling half a dozen others with a rude story about a hermaphroditic mermaid. Leodora entered at the far end of the long house and had passed the first two, untended fires before anyone noticed her.

  A couple of the men turned at once. One of them was Agmeon. His eyes were bloodshot. They went wide as he recognized her. He jumped up, barring her way. She nodded, making the requisite shallow, respectful bow, but when she looked up again anger still burned in Agmeon’s eyes, and he still blocked her way. “What are you doing here?” he demanded.

  Soter had stopped talking. He gazed at her, bleary and unfocused.

  “I came to get him. I need to talk to him.”

  “Have you no decency, girl?”

  She looked at herself as if expecting to find she’d forgotten to wear clothes. She shook her head. “I don’t understand. I come here all the time. I was here only a few nights past, performing for you. You saw me.”

  “That was before. Now you’re betrothed to Koombrun. You do know you’re betrothed?”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s unseemly to be found in one man’s house with him, even worse to be here. It’s the behavior of a mispel. You leave now.” He thrust a finger past her and spoke with such vehemence that she started to turn, to leave; but her will overrode her instinct and she stopped. She had never been a part of their world, nor governed by any of their rules. Now suddenly she was required to submit, even though she would gain the respect of no one for it. Their women had to ask permission to enter the long house. She had seen it enough times to know. After the shadowplays the men stayed and the women left. She wondered if they would even consent to her using the puppets afterward. To consort with Soter. He was a man, too, however besotted, and to practice she must enter his house. They would brand her a mispel for that, most certainly. No, they would never allow it, maybe not even if Koombrun accompanied her. She could imagine the pleasure Agmeon would take in controlling her, the same as Gousier. There wasn’t a soul on the island who wasn’t allied against her.