Shadowbridge

by Gregory Frost

“But—” He stopped, thought. “You’ve never even set foot on a dragon beam—you said as much.”

  “Is that the only way one is granted gifts?” Her voice teased now.

  The question being too enormous in implication, he could only laugh with her. “I don’t know. I don’t know much of anything, do I?”

  A cloud passed over the sun, and the empty street became suddenly dusky and vaguely ominous. At the crescent, where the body had been lowered, nothing had been left to mark the spot. Every building appeared to be deserted. Leodora gathered herself up.

  Diverus asked, “How did you know what story to tell them?”

  “I had three vegetables. The tale of Death was the first thing I thought of with three characters.” She faced him as a look of doubt crossed his face. She let it go. She didn’t want to explain herself, didn’t want to answer how stories found her or how she’d looked into the faces of those children and their mother and known what they needed to hear. She would have to admit that she didn’t understand how it happened, either, as he didn’t know where his songs came from. “Right now I’m famished. We have a long walk ahead of us still, and I wouldn’t care to have to join that parade of monsters again—they might not let us go this time.”

  She offered her hand and drew him to his feet, and they walked off together.

  . . . . .

  After their performance that second night, Soter informed Leodora and Diverus that they would be journeying on following the third performance. “We need to spread your reputation far and wide, can’t be falling into the trap of staying in one place too long, even if the audiences are respectable.”

  “Respectable?” Leodora all but laughed at the word he’d chosen. The central garden had been filled. People had crowded into all three entrances to see the performance.

  Soter pretended not to hear the sarcasm. He rocked back and forth on his feet as though the matter they’d spoken of was closed. Judging by the look on her face, he could not have infuriated Leodora more.

  “I understand none of this,” she said. “We stayed on in Vijnagar even when the mistress of the theater very nearly exposed us by trying to have her way with Jax, even after I complained of it to you. We were going to stay on even when I told you we needed to go. In fact we would be there still if it weren’t for your encounter with that elf.”

  “Grumelpyn.”

  “What did he say that has you pushing us along now, before we’ve even set down our belongings and drawn a breath? Even when we thought Uncle Gousier might come after us, we didn’t flee where we had an audience. In fact, on Merjayzin you were willing to risk letting him catch up with us at the thought of a paying house. We stayed there for two full weeks!”

  He’d stopped rocking on his heels by then, and focused on Diverus as if he might appeal to the musician and the two of them outvote her. “Those were early days,” he explained. “We needed the reputation to build, to fly ahead, to do the work for us so that by the time we arrived upon the next and the next span, they had already heard the rumors of you and I could haggle over a larger percentage of the take for us than if we’d just come in off the street like two vagabonds who hoped to swindle them a bit before climbing out a back window and making off with our loot.”

  Before Leodora could respond, Diverus asked, slowly and thoughtfully, “So by the time she found me, her reputation had grown enough that now you don’t need to worry whether the next span has heard of her, yes?”

  “I—” Soter hadn’t been prepared for that question. Why couldn’t they just do as he asked for once, instead of requiring a more thorough explanation of why he expected them to do as he wished? The little musician was as bad as she was. “Of course we need to have her reputation spread. Of course we do.” He tried to laugh, to make it all light and unimportant that they might not wonder at the tension that underlay every word he spoke—the tension of fearing that he might have to give up more than he wanted. “But you know, there are infinite spans, infinite peoples and tales, and don’t you want to see more of them?” He knew, even as he spoke, that he’d taken a wrong turn, because the question itself offered her the power to decide—the very thing he wanted to avoid.

  “I do want to see them all,” she said, “but I also want to learn every story, and I can’t do that if I leave each span so rapidly that I haven’t time to find the stories, hear them, add them to what I know. You said my father did the same.”

  “Yes,” replied Soter, knowing there was no other answer, and no way to distract her from what she would say next, which he heard as if it were an echo preceding the sound that made it.

  “I want the time to collect the stories.”

  “Lea.”

  “No, don’t grease your words to me. Don’t make promises and don’t explain my behavior to me when you can’t account for your own.”

  “All right then.” He hung his head. It was the only option left him. “How long do we stay?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Yes, and that is because it’s not your responsibility to know,” he insisted, but carefully.

  She shook her head in frustration.

  “Three nights?”

  “Longer,” she said.

  “Five then.”

  “I don’t know.”

  He sighed. “Once again, Lea, it is my part, my role, to ascertain the best venue, and how long we can rely upon the people to attend, and who will pay us the most. This is a job I do well. I’m certainly no puppeteer, but without me, you would have no way to prove that you are.”

  She leaned forward then and said, “All right. Five nights on this span.”

  He nodded, and said, “Done!”

  She got up heavily, as if the argument had worn her out. “I’ve two hours before the performance. I’m going to rest.” The courtyard seemed to tremble at her passing.

  Left behind, Diverus fidgeted, stealing glances at Soter as he commented, “I’m new to human interactions, but I wonder that anybody understands anybody.” He, too, took his leave of the garden.

  Alone, Soter toasted himself and, after downing the small cup of liquor, said, “Five, then. I can live with that. For now.”

  . . . . .

  The next three days, Leodora collected stories. Each day she checked the park before looking elsewhere. On the first day she did find a group playing go there, but it wasn’t the fox and his friends, who never did reappear. “Maybe it takes a long time to go to the end of everything and come back,” said Diverus.

  “But they invited us to come back the next day.” Even as she argued, she guessed the explanation, and before Diverus could say it she countered herself: “Days and nights aren’t the same to the demons in that parade.”

  “That’s what I think, too,” Diverus replied. “What I meant.”

  She roamed the entire span, eventually crossing onto the split on the far side of the valley of stilt houses, seeking groups, clusters of people at leisure whom she could chat up and ask for a story. She even came across the same palanquin bearers she had used in explaining story collecting to Diverus, and as she’d told him they did indeed serve up a plethora of salacious stories about their mistress. None of these could be performed, but they contained images and ideas and moments she might borrow, retool, and fold into some unrelated telling to make it unique.

  She received stories such as the tale of the priest who was so lonely that he created an artificial friend, but got the spell horribly wrong so that his friend wanted most of all to eat him—a story she performed the same night, provoking both laughter and gasps.

  The courtyard filled earlier each night. People declined to take dinner until afterward in order to get close to the booth.

  The final performance in Hyakiyako, she concluded with a repeat rendition of “The Ghost of Nikki Danjo.” While the puppet of Masaoka pressed against the side of the screen and bit into her arm to keep from screaming, her son died in agony of poisoning. She dared not cry out, as the audience knew, else give away tha
t she had discovered the identity of the real villain of the piece—Nikki Danjo himself.

  . . . . .

  Soter sat off to the side of the booth, both to watch Leodora’s skillful performance and to mingle with the crowd. Once again the courtyard was full to overflowing. Mutsu would be deliriously happy, almost as happy as he had been furious when Soter told him that they could not stay beyond five nights.

  The crowd booed when the evil regent Nikki Danjo slid onto the screen again. The body language of the puppet implicated him as he crept across the room to advise his lord, and the puppet of Masaoka, behind him, equally betrayed her fear. Soter, though he was used to Leodora’s craft, found himself swept up in the tale. The puppets became real people. He could see the room that surrounded them rather than the shadow of doorways, screens, and lanterns. He heard not Leodora’s voice, but the voices of the overlord and the woman and the evil Danjo. He shook his head as if he’d begun to fall asleep, and blamed the many cups of rice wine he’d consumed. It was powerful stuff, and he wasn’t used to it. Plus, he conceded—if only to himself—Diverus’s music made her voice seem to change, adding weight and depth to the male voices. Soter drifted into it, his head nodding.

  He straightened up on his stool, then rubbed his eyes while glancing around himself at the crowd, all so riveted by the performance that not one met his gaze. He found himself similarly drawn back to the pale screen, glowing lightly red now as the story neared an explosive climax. She had learned to increase the colors subtly, slowly, so that the audience hardly noticed that it had gone from white to crimson by the end of the play. Gods, he was proud of her! She had no idea how proud. Why didn’t he tell her? He ought to tell her.

  Then, as he stared at the screen, it seemed to draw him in, growing darker the closer he came.

  When he looked up, the courtyard had turned the color of blood, as if the light from her lantern had become liquid and smeared every surface. Soter dragged the back of his hand across his eyes. He looked first at the starlit sky above to confirm that it was still in place; but when he glanced down again the audience had transformed into puppets—giant, articulated puppets, their profiles translucent, features sharply drawn. He yipped and craned away in his chair, only to find that he was leaning into more puppets. The closest one swiveled its leathery head and gave him a nettled glare. He stared at the booth then, straight at the screen where Leodora performed. He clung to the identifiable shadows, denied the room. The performance continued, the story unfolded. In her fiction lay his truth. Without daring to glance away, he reached to the small table behind him and patted about for his wine cup.

  A moist hand closed over his wrist and held it.

  He stiffened. He sat paralyzed.

  Close behind him a voice said, “So here we are at last.” It was Gousier’s voice and it was all Soter could do not to leap away screaming. Instead, denying the hive of panic whirling through his belly, he made himself slowly turn around, outwardly calm, his mouth fixed in a ghastly smile. Even that little resolve deserted him the moment he saw the speaker.

  Behind and above him stood the Coral Man. It glowered down at him—he knew it though there were no eyes in its head, no distinct features at all. The grip on his wrist was some sort of clammy tentacle extending from beneath the table, as gray as the figure but alive and slick.

  “Soter,” it said, the voice no longer Gousier’s, but distantly familiar—a voice from a void deep inside him that he wanted to deny. “Soter, you’ll be found. Make no mistake. Found wanting.”

  He could not bear the force of the scrutiny, which seemed to split him open. It was as if all the wriggling creatures that had once lived in the pores of that chalky coral were burrowing into the wound and feasting their way through him. Soon he would be nothing but bones, enveloped completely, a husk. He had to break away, face the performance, the red screen—he trembled with the effort of dismissing the apparition—turning in time to see the fitting end of Nikki Danjo, haunting it was, yes, and Remember the story, he urged himself, it was a puppet ghost, but somehow he was in the story now, seated among puppets with a ghost of his own looming in their midst. He stared so hard at the red light and the shadow figures that his eyes burned with tears from not blinking. He squeezed them shut, then jolted upright in his seat again. His arm, twisted behind him, ached horribly and he moved it, clutching his cup. His hand slid freely upon the table. Only then did he blink and glance around, wiping again at his eyes, this time with the meat of his palm. He opened one eye while he covered the other, warily peeking at his neighbor who, sensing his movement, grinned at him and said, “Very good, yes?” A normal face—bad teeth, certainly, but a normal face, not one of her puppets. Soter knew before he’d twisted around on the stool that no Coral Man would be hovering at his back. Everyone wedged into the courtyard looked normal, joyous with recognition of the masterful storytelling they’d just witnessed. They raised their hands and applauded—a burst of noise that made him jump.

  “I slept, that’s all it was. I dreamed. Bardsham—” He rolled his wrist and saw it then, the one perfect circle, the sucker mark, purple where it had bruised him. Everyone else was clapping and cheering.

  The screen had gone dark, the lantern extinguished. Instinct took over and Soter leapt to his feet, walked forward, clapping his own hands and calling, “Jax, my friends, the artistry of Jax!” while the crowd shouted and pounded their cups on the tables, and someone broke out a flute and began to play a frenetic melody above the din. The cheering flowed to follow and then accompany the flute, becoming a song.

  After a minute Leodora stepped through the side of the booth, her head cowled, her face masked, and the song dissolved into a roar. She had played their stories and won their hearts. This was how it had been with Bardsham. The impeccable skill of a genius had overwhelmed the crowds. The energy of their pleasure flowed right through him to the artist. It was wonderful. Behind her, Diverus came out—it was becoming a routine now—and waved the shamisen he’d been playing; the audience cheered for him, too.

  Here was everything they sought and he was making them leave because he was afraid. And the Coral Man had stood right there and told him it would do no good. Run to the next span, he would be found. If you wanted to remain hidden, you could not have great talent. Talent made noise; people would notice you, remember you. Jax—they would be speaking of the master puppeteer from one end of the span to the other tomorrow. A few more days and news of these performances would overtake the stories Grumelpyn had heard, louder now and more certain, the way it had been with Bardsham. “You’ll be found”—he muttered the warning.

  Why, he asked the air, why did she have to be brilliant? Why did she have to shine so brightly? Why had she made them leave the damned backwater of that island? He blamed her, knowing full well that she wasn’t to blame. He made his smiles to the crowd. Then he realized she wasn’t wearing the band that restricted her breasts. She’d forgotten to put it on after the performance. Someone would see, someone would fathom the truth. He thought to move, to step between the crowd and the object of their adoration.

  Then Leodora did the unthinkable. She pushed back the cowl and drew her braid free.

  Watching the crowd for any sign that they’d recognized her womanliness, he only glimpsed the flash of her hair. “No,” he said, more in disbelief than as a warning, but no one heard him over the din of the song they were singing.

  He faced her then, crying, “Don’t you dare!”

  But she’d already reached a hand in front of her face, and she pulled the black mask up and away. The crowd yelled louder. She tugged loose the cord binding her hair then shook it all free, a shining red fan, a copper waterfall around her. They simply went mad then.

  She shouted her name and they gave it back. Cries of “Leodora!” drowned out “Jax!” Coins flew through the air and rained all around her.

  Soter wanted to sear her with a look the way the Coral Man had crushed him with its regard, but her stance defied him, den
ying him the right to hide her any longer. It’s too late, said her pose, you may dictate the dates and the venues and the spans, but you’ll not control my identity any longer. He knew this story; he’d told it to her: How had he thought it would have a different ending this time? “Bardsham,” he despaired.

  Something broke inside him. He could not oppose her, he had no will any longer, no strength for the battle any longer. Chaos was coming after him, bearing down upon them all, and it would find him whether he hid her or not. It was what the Coral Man had been saying. He stared at the mark on his wrist.

  There could be no going on to the next span now. No simple passage through a tunnel would disguise her identity, her name. That would travel, too, now: the skill of her father and the shape of her mother, the name so close.

  She had unleashed herself, and now they had to flee.

  THREE

  “What do you mean, by boat?” Leodora asked Soter.

  “I mean,” he said, leaning upon the undaya case, “we have ourselves taken to another spiral of the span. We abandon this trip north along this arm of the spiral and begin again—”

  “—where we’re not known! It means everything I just did on four spans is for nothing. I go back to being Jax, a boy, because they won’t know anything about what happened here tonight. The story of this will carry up the line, maybe even as far as your elf friend’s span.”

  “Grumelpyn.”

  “I know his wretched name,” she snarled, and for a moment he actually feared she would strike him, pick up a cup or a knife and attack him; but her anger, boiling up beyond her control, brought tears to her eyes, and despite her every effort she began to cry. “Daimons damn you, Soter, I won’t do it!”

  Diverus, standing uncomfortably behind her through it all, raised his hands as if to place them on her shoulders to comfort her, but seemed at the last to lose his nerve; he drew them back against himself like a mantis about to fall upon a victim. Soter saw it, registered the significance—that a bond had grown already between them that he would be foolish to try to sever—and bowed his head, pinching the bridge of his nose. His head hurt. He should have objected to such language from her, but he couldn’t work up the false ire. He deserved every invective. Worse, he had no good argument to justify this change of plans. In that tense moment he could think of only one story, lame as it was, and only one promise that might convince her.