“We are at your mercy. I am trading my life for his, that makes you my master,” she insisted, taking his hand, the one with the karis, in hers.
“Let go, lest you cast some vile curse on me.”
“I am swearing myself to you.”
“Then, walk five steps away and keep that distance from me.”
Bulan did as she was told. Things were going a lot better than he had expected. “You are not as fearsome as I’d always imagined.”
“Neither are you. You are the son of a great datu, but you seem to have none of his gifts.”
Soliran was taken aback. So the Talunanon did know this. “Maybe so, but I’m the best hunter in my village. Your brother didn’t even sense my approach.”
She blinked with those vile serpent eyes. “That is true. That is quite impressive, but your skills won’t save you against the more powerful spirits. Many do not need bodies like ours. They do not attack your village only because of Samakwel. What would happen when he’s dead?”
Soliran was undaunted. “Are you saying you are among the weak ones?”
Bulan paused, studying him. “If we were weak, we would not have survived until now. We’ve secured a place among the spirits with our own strengths as Taung Asu.”
“Then we are not that different. In our village, strength is all that matters. I may not have my father’s gifts. But I have strength and skill.”
“You seem to have something in mind.” Bulan glared at him.
“I will spare Adlao, and in exchange, you will both serve me as guardians of my village.” He chose his words carefully.
Bulan laughed without mirth. “Adlao and I! What makes you think you can control us both?” she growled.
He pressed the tip of his sword against Adlao’s neck, drawing blood. “What makes you think I will spare this weakling at the price of your life? What value are you to me? I want you both to serve, otherwise, I’ll just take Adlao’s head, and then I will go my way.”
Bulan crouched, hissing like a snake. “The others were right about you people. We offer you a plot of land and you take the entire fields!”
Soliran was no longer afraid. “It is not greed, Bulan. You are the one who acknowledged me master. You know I will kill your brother and you will be alone in this monstrous wilderness. That is why you didn’t attack. Instead, you swore yourself to me. Does your word amount to nothing? If you do not even have the honour to keep your word, then truly, I, the weak man, have bested you and Adlao.”
It may have been a bluff, but it was worth a try.
Bulan’s face twisted. Dark coarse hairs appeared on her skin, and her shoulders swelled with muscle. Her voice deepened into a monstrous rumbling. “You despicable creature. I have sworn myself to you in good faith!”
“Wake your brother. We are returning to the village,” he ordered.
She howled. Crouching, she whispered into Adlao’s ear. He twitched in response. Groggily, he opened his yellow eyes. He sat up and kneeled on one leg before Soliran in a gesture of submission.
With his sword, Soliran carved a line on the inside of his forearm. He rested his bleeding arm on the wound in Adlao’s neck. “We seal our pact,” he said.
“No! How can you do this to us?” Bulan tried to stop him, but it was too late for their blood had already mingled in sanduguan.
Adlao stared at him wide-eyed.
“It is your turn,” Soliran said to Bulan.
“Y-you can’t do this.” Her eyes watered with what might have been tears. “You mean to tie us for the rest of our lives?”
“Only a fool would trust a Talunanon’s word. Your arm,” he demanded.
Bulan hesitated, but she looked to have lost her strength and ferocity. She didn’t stop him when he slit her shoulder. He held her and shared blood, an act that was reserved for comrades. “We are brother and sister now,” Soliran said.
The worms of Himabuyan wriggled under his bare feet. Were they protesting against what he had just done? A blood compact with spirits was unheard of in the land. Through a break in the canopy, the moon was a reproachful eye that bore down on him like a curse. At the back of his mind, Soliran saw an image of Padi Owada’s scowling face, her eyes like dying embers. What were the repercussions of the contract he had forged tonight? He had no idea if he had done the right thing, but there was no looking back. He turned and made his way back to Barangay Mangangasu, Adlao and Bulan trailing behind.
Author’s Notes:
Moon Halves: Terms taken from Maragtas, a false pre-Hispanic history source
The Bridge of Dangerous Longings
Rati Mehrotra
In the twilight, Sumadru Bridge looked beautiful, towers and cables silhouetted against the lavender sky. Hard to believe that the murky depths between the foundations were mined or that the blood of thousands stained its decks. Harder still for Nira to believe was that her great-grandfather had designed it, before he disappeared along with everyone else who had worked for him.
Nira craned her neck out of the window for a last look before the bus turned around a steep bend. Small branches snapped at her face and she withdrew inside. Eighty-three people crammed together in this ramshackle riverbus, making their slow way to the capital, Jayakarta. The scent of rain and jasmine mingled with the odour of human sweat and fatigue.
“No one’s crossed Sumadru and survived since it was built,” said a voice, making her jump.
The speaker was the passenger sitting next to her, a skinny young man in a frayed t-shirt and baseball cap. Nira had ignored him for most of the eleven-hour journey from Koti, refusing his offer to share a lunch of meat-stuffed rice cakes, though her mouth watered at the sight of the leaf-wrapped delicacies. It was better not to get too friendly with anyone, her mother had warned. So she’d eaten her own frugal meal of rice crackers and dried fish, keeping her face resolutely turned away from his.
Somehow she was unable to stop herself from blurting out a reply. “More fool anyone who tries, then.” Although wasn’t Sumadru Bridge the reason she herself had agreed to go to Jayakarta?
“It’s not just the desperate or the crazy,” said the young man. “It’s ordinary folk too, as often as the bridge-worshippers and the suicides. We get someone almost every day. Most, we’re able to turn back. But some still slip through, poor fools.”
“You’re a bridge-watcher?” Nira couldn’t stop the scepticism creeping into her voice. The city employed bridge-watchers to prevent people from trying to cross Sumadru to the fabled “other side,” perpetually shrouded in mist. It was a highly-sought after and well-paid post, though the mortality rate was high.
He grinned. “I’m an apprentice. I took a couple of weeks off to help my father with the summer harvest, but usually I live with the other guards, right next to the bridge. Need any help, just walk across the docks and ask for Adi.”
“I won’t need help, thank you,” said Nira. “I have family here.”
“Well, lucky you,” he said, without a trace of rancour. “My family is almost two days’ journey from Jayakarta. I had to take two buses to catch this one.”
Nira turned back to the window. They were in the outskirts of the city now, by the looks of it. Garish neon signs advertised everything from soap to sex clinics, eye-phones to implants. And the traffic! She had never seen so many different types of vehicles crowding the same stretch of road—rickshaws, tuk-tuks, bikes, cars, scooters, all honking madly.
An hour later, the bus trundled into a dimly lit station and ground to a halt. Nira took her time gathering her belongings. By the time she descended the steps, everyone had dispersed. She scanned the bus station, trying not to be obvious about it. Her uncle had promised to pick her up, but she couldn’t spot anyone with the jowly face that had popped into her mother’s screen last week.
Nira sat on a bench and phoned him. No one answered. After the fifth try, she gave up. Her uncle would be there soon. No way he could have forgotten the date. Her mother had fixed it all up. Dhanu Paman own
ed an antique store in the biggest covered market in downtown Jayakarta, and he had offered Nira room and board in exchange for help running the place.
Nira hadn’t wanted to go, at first. She would have preferred to stay in the coastal village of her birth. But last winter her father’s fishing boat was lost at sea during a storm; her gentle, laughing father, who always caught the biggest fish and told the most exciting stories. Nira barely had time to grieve before her mother began finding ways to get her out of there.
“It’s no life for you here,” she’d said when Nira begged to stay. “The storms get worse every year. No one’s going out to sea any more. What would you live on? What would you eat?”
“You could teach me to dive,” Nira said, without much hope.
Her mother took her by the shoulders and shook her. “What for?” she shouted. “So you can die like your father did?”
“You didn’t die,” Nira pointed out. “We’re still living on the stuff you found last season.”
She knew there was no point arguing. The sea had risen and it wasn’t safe, or even lucrative, to dive any more. The abalone and the pearls were gone. None of the younger girls in the village had learned to dive and the older women died, one by one. Her mother was one of the lucky ones. If it could be called luck to survive the death of a husband, when you had no sons.
Still, Nira would not have agreed to go if not for Sumadru Bridge. She had always longed to see the perilous legacy her great-grandfather had left behind. His disappearance was a mystery. The story was that something had landed on the water over a century ago—something terrible that could not be destroyed and must never be seen. That was why the end of the bridge was shrouded in mist and the water fenced for miles around.
But why build the bridge in the first place if not for people to walk over it? Perhaps it was originally intended for special forces or government scientists. Nobody remembered any more, or perhaps some section of the government knew and chose to keep it a secret.
“Waiting for someone?”
Nira cursed her inattentiveness. Adi hovered near the bench with a concerned look on his face.
“My uncle,” she said. “He’ll be here soon.” She took out her phone and fiddled with it, hoping he would leave.
Adi sat down beside her. “I’ll give you company until he arrives.” He jerked his head toward the shadows on the edges of the bus station. “This isn’t the best place for you to wait alone, not at night. How old are you?”
“Seventeen,” she said, adding a year out of habit.
“I’m twenty,” he said. “I have three younger sisters back home in Mariapelly. They used to drive me crazy when I lived with my parents. Now I miss them more than anything else.”
“But Mariapelly’s inland,” said Nira. “The land is rich and there’s no risk of flooding. Why did you leave?”
“Nothing to do except what my father did and his father did before him. I’m not cut out to be a farmer.”
“You want to die on the bridge instead?”
“You know, there’s a story I’ve heard late at nights in the guardhouse, when the kettle is boiling and the pipes are all lit,” said Adi. “That there are people who can see through the mist and cross the bridge safely.”
“Yes,” said Nira, “and there’s a story in my village about fish-women that lure unwary sailors down into the water so they can gobble them up.”
Adi laughed. “A children’s story.”
“Just as likely to be true as yours. And harmless because it makes us more careful, not less so.”
“You sound like someone from the government,” said Adi, “always warning people to be careful of the bridge, as if it’s a bomb that could go off any time.”
“If you’ve seen someone die on the bridge,” said Nira, “you know they’re right to warn people to stay away from it.”
Adi was quiet. Even if he hadn’t seen anyone die on the bridge, he’d have seen the news feeds, like she had. Even the memory of the vids was enough to make her shudder. Still, she wanted to go to the bridge—not on it, of course, but close enough to hear the hum of cables and the crash of waves.
A shadow fell over them and she looked up. With relief, she recognized the fleshy face and portly frame of her mother’s younger brother. She sprang up and bowed.
“Dhanu Paman,” she said, “I was afraid you were not coming. I called—”
“Yes, yes,” he said, ruffling her hair and picking up one of her bags. “I couldn’t answer, was in an important client meeting.” His gaze went to Adi, who had risen as well. “Who is this?”
“Just a fellow traveller giving her company,” said Adi. He waved to Nira. “Stay safe.”
“Thank you,” she said, feeling awkward. She watched him melt into the darkness of night outside the bus station.
“You should be careful of strangers,” said her uncle. He had a thin, reedy voice that didn’t go with the rest of him.
Nira kept her eyes down, but she couldn’t help thinking that her uncle’s shop must be doing really well for him to have so much to eat every day. No one in her village was fat except the money lender. Every extra ounce of food was sold or pickled for the hard times that were always just a hair’s breadth away. A slip of the knife in your hand, a misstep on the boat, or a sudden storm—anything could take away days or months of earnings. Perhaps it was different in the city. Nira hefted her second bag, the heavier one, and followed her uncle out of the station.
Dhanu Paman lived alone in a spacious flat above the antique store. The shop was right in the middle of the covered market, on the slope of a hill facing the Indian Ocean. From the rooftop, on a clear day, Nira could see Sumadru, the bridge curving like a black ribbon from the docks of the old city over the water and disappearing into the mist.
Not that Nira had much time to loiter on the rooftop, gazing at the bridge or the boats in the harbour. Her uncle made sure of that. He expected her to cook and serve his meals, wash his clothes, clean the house, and mind the store. All this in exchange for three meals and a pallet in a closet-like space next to the kitchen.
One evening, when they had finished eating a dinner of rice and fish curry, which Nira had cooked, Dhanu Paman said, “I know why you’re really here.” He withdrew a syringe from the underside of his forearm. His arms were speckled with needle marks; he had told her he was diabetic and needed insulin every day.
“What do you mean, Uncle?” said Nira from across the table. “I’m here to learn how to make a living.” She stood and began to stack the plates.
He waggled his finger at her. “You’re here because of the bridge. Don’t tell me you’re not. Everyone I meet, when I tell them who my grandfather was, they want to know about the damn bridge.” His face twisted. “He vanished before any of us was born, and yet people think I have some secret knowledge they don’t.”
And don’t you? Nira wondered, but did not say. She carried the plates to the kitchen sink and returned to the table to wipe it with a rag. Her uncle’s eyes had become glazed, his face slack. It made her uncomfortable when he got like this. She hoped he would go to his bedroom and sleep it off. Those insulin injections were unpredictable; sometimes they made him act drunk, and other times he became hyperactive, following her around the house, talking too fast and weird for her to understand.
“I have a bit of advice for you, little girl.” His speech slurred, and he looked at her with flat, pale eyes. “Come here.”
Nira dropped the rag and went to him, stifling her distaste. He grabbed her arm and began to stroke it. “Don’t go near the bridge,” he said. “Don’t be stupid like me.”
“What did you do?” said Nira, curious, although his hand felt like a spider on her arm and she longed to shrug it off. He hadn’t mentioned the bridge at all in the three weeks she had spent with him.
“Tried to cross it once,” he said. “I was caught and dragged back. It was only because of the family connection that they didn’t put me in cold-sleep. Would have mad
e bad press. But they seized my house and boat and whatever I had in the bank. I had to start afresh. I’m still paying every month for the loan I had to take.”
“I’m sorry,” said Nira, wriggling out of his grasp. “It must have been hard for you.”
“Hard?” Tears leaked out of his eyes. “My wife died in penury. I couldn’t even buy medicine to ease her pain in the end. All because of that stupid bridge. I swore to myself I’d never be poor again. Look at me now, eh? I did good.”
“Yes, Uncle,” said Nira, backing away. Mercifully, his head lolled forward and he fell asleep on the table.
She finished cleaning the kitchen and climbed to the rooftop. Lights twinkled in the harbour; shouts carried up to her from the street. She rubbed the arm her uncle had stroked, as if she could delete the memory of his touch.
Three weeks in Jayakarta, and Nira longed for the fresh air of her village and its familiar faces. She missed her parents with an ache that was almost physical. If only she could go back to a time or place where her father was still alive, still the best fisherman of Koti. She wouldn’t leave her village then, not for all the mysterious bridges in the world.
She made sure her voice was light and cheerful whenever she talked with her mother, which was not very often. At first, of course, she had called her mother every couple of days. But when the money for her phone ran out, Dhanu Paman refused to recharge it.
“An unnecessary expense,” he said, as if to a foolish child. “You can just use mine.”
In her lowest moments, she fantasized about running back to her mother. She still had a bit of money. She could take the rest from the till. It wouldn’t be stealing, not really. More like back pay.
But always the thought of her mother’s disappointment held her back. Not just her disappointment in Nira, but also in Dhanu Paman, in a world that seemed to just take, take, take and not give anything back.
Lights began to wink out in the harbour and the streets below, and Nira went back downstairs. Her uncle was no longer slumped at the table; he must have made it to his bedroom.
Where The Stars Rise: Asian Science Fiction and Fantasy Page 29
