Shadowbridge (3 page)

Some nights statues spoke and women dressed as men.

 . . . . . 

Inside the hall, torches in wall sconces to each side of the doors had been lit, as had the main chandelier. The oil burned brightly, smoking, above a noisy crowd. She didn’t see Nuberne, the owner, but his wife, Rolend, stood beside the serving bar. Moonlight trickled through the lancet windows, splashing milky radiance upon the tables. Between tables and wall lay deeper pockets of shadow. Leodora skirted the main crowd, trying to keep in the shadows, trying to avoid Rolend’s attention. But it was Rolend’s nature to notice everyone who came into her hall, no matter how crowded it was. Before Leodora was halfway down its length the mistress of the hall had swept out from behind the bar, snaked among tables and revelers, and blocked her path.

“Jax,” Rolend said, taking her hand, “I’d begun to worry that you weren’t going to perform tonight.” She thrust forward her ample bosom as though stabbed from behind, then gave a look of coy embarrassment as both breasts settled on Leodora’s arm.

Leodora drew back but bumped up against a chair. She forced a smile while she tried to maneuver around the mistress without making contact again. She replied with Jax’s deeper voice, “I always perform.”

Rolend’s smile grew sly. “I’ll bet you do, my Jax.”

Leodora’s smile never faltered, but in trying to step around the chair her foot caught behind one of its legs, and it clattered along with her. She couldn’t seem to untangle herself. Rolend gripped her fingers tight with one hand and smoothed the other across her palm. “You have such
hard
hands, my dear Jax. So rough for someone of such delicate skill—”

“Ro!” From the kitchen Nuberne’s voice cut through the din. “Where’s the damned yarrow, damn you?”

Rolend’s eyes hardened for an instant. She released her hold and smiled as if she hadn’t heard. She said quickly, “After the show I’ll bring you some dinner and we can dally a bit. He’s already in his cups.” Then she called out, “Yarrow’s on the bottom pantry shelf…dearest!” so shrilly that Leodora’s eyes teared.

As the mistress of the house turned away, Leodora sighed, and a voice from the table in front of her said, “She’s taken a real shine to you,
lad.
”

“Soter!” He had his back to her, his feet up. The bald dome of his head rested below the high back of the chair. She wriggled around the table to sit facing him. “Soter, something strange has happened. I need you to explain—”

Instead of hearing her out, he interrupted, “
I’d
begun to worry ’bout you. It was
my
misgivings that top-heavy tart related, not hers. She has none. She merely wants to make certain you’ll accommodate her after.”

Soter had been tanned by every wind that had ever blown across Shadowbridge. He was lean and dark and dry as leather. His was neither a happy nor a sad face, but one that had encountered some version of every possible eventuality. At the moment it was flushed from an extended encounter with a wine bottle.

“What am I going to do?” she asked.

He puzzled for a moment. “Feign death?”

“What did my father do?”

“Well, generally, he was about the most accommodating man there ever was.” With the two fingers of his that were missing their last joints he scratched his stubbled chin, then winced at what he’d said. “That is to say, until your mother performed his reconstruction. I don’t believe he’s the paradigm you’re looking for at the moment. ’Course, he wasn’t pretending to be somethin’ other than what he was.” She glared at him, and he waved his hands in defense. “I didn’t say you had a choice, dear heart. Prejudice is the way of the world. A few more spans up the line here, you’ll have gathered yourself a reputation to bank on, and you can come out of your headgear like a turtle out of her shell—make a big production of it, a spectacle, if that’s what you want to do. Not that I’d advise it. And there’ll still be some stretches—Malprado, for instance—where you might be prohibited…where women have no business doing business ’less it’s illicit. The mask they’d make you wear there would cover your mouth, too. Be very anonymous there. I doubt we’ll go that way. No, somewhere like old Colemaigne’d be better for you. They won’t care at all, except about the performance. Most places’ll be swayed by the wonder of you, the mysterious masked wonder called Jax. Make you an exhibit, a treasure. ’Course, if you want to remove the mask, I can’t stop you.” He poked his finger into his chest. “Not me.”

Someone in the crowd shouted out, “Jax!” but at the booth, not at her.

“Yes, but what do I do about
tonight
?”

Smiling crookedly, Soter sank back. “Perform, m’girl, perform. Get that idiot musician to play decently for more than five minutes at a time and we’ll do all right.” He got up, seeking his balance. The small bronze libation bowl in the center of the table rocked, splashing out liquid dark as blood. It was nearly full. How many drinks did it take to fill a libation bowl when the offering from each drink was but a drop or two?

That lush,
the god had called him. It was amusing on a puppet: When Meersh drank himself stupid, people all laughed. Leodora’s jaw clenched. She needed advice and he dismissed her with a line he thought amusing: “Perform.”

“So, anyway,” Soter said, “where in the Great Spiral were you?”

“Talking to a statue,” she snapped, then marched off, leaving him staring after her in his befuddlement.

 . . . . . 

At the far end of the hall from the doors stood her booth. Twice her height, it was three panels of black drapery making up three sides of a tall box, open at the top. The ends of the upright poles protruded above the drapery. In the center of the front panel, she lifted a smaller flap of material that acted as a curtain covering a flat, featureless white silk screen. As she pinned the curtain up, some of the patrons began whistling and clapping. Without acknowledging them she circled to the side of the booth, parted the drapes near the rear corner, and stepped into darkness.

Inside, the booth’s framework of stout wooden poles, tenoned and pinned into each other, was more obvious, and all the secrets of her skill were revealed.

Behind and above the silk screen—covered on this side by a small curtain of fabric identical to the one she’d pinned up—stood a stanchion on which her lantern hung. Unlike most other lanterns, one side of it was solid brass, dull with age, another had been cut with tiny holes and two crescent moons, and a third had been fitted with a plate of blue glass. Only one side—the one facing the screen—contained anything like a lens, as a normal lantern might.

In the back right-hand corner were stacked two coffin-sized trunks in which the entire show was transported—the bottom one for the poles and drapes, the top for her puppets—and on top of the trunks, on his back and making a noise somewhere between a snore and a gargle, lay the accompanist. He was a small dark-haired man, unshaven and in clothes that were better suited to mop buckets. The unwashed smell of him wouldn’t have posed a problem on the boulevard, but in the small booth it could bring tears to her eyes.

Nevertheless, she had to wake him now; she held her breath as she tapped him on the shoulder. His head rolled. Then he jerked awake. His eyes shifted, found her, and he sat up, drawing back on the case, knees up, almost fearful in his pose.

She had no time to be concerned about his confusion or fears. He wasn’t a particularly good musician to begin with, but he was all that they’d been able to find. Soter complained that they needed a
good
accompanist, that they weren’t a troupe without one, but thus far they’d had no luck acquiring anyone else whose playing warranted keeping him on. Authoritatively Leodora said, “Come now, you, we have to begin. Go help Soter, set up your things beside the screen. They’re already getting sour out there.”

The musician jumped down, then slouched out of the booth. She quickly secured the ribbons that tied it closed so he couldn’t get back in.

She unfolded and set up two low trestles, one on each side of the silk screen, then lifted the top from the upper trunk and placed it squarely over the right-hand trestle, forming a table.

Then she set to work. She knew what stories she needed to tell tonight. The necessary pieces for Shumyzin’s tale were scattered in different compartments inside the trunk. She would have to root around for those during an intermission. Soter ought to know where most of them lay. Right now she was late, and the audience was hooting.

With the first box prepared she took off her tunic and mask, and stood wearing only trousers and the wide elastic band that pressed her breasts nearly flat against her ribs. She would have been happier if her chest had been smaller and easier to conceal. The band was giving her a rash. She peeled it off, then quickly took a towel and patted the perspiration from beneath both breasts. For the show she could be free of the harness, her sex hidden entirely from outside view. The beautiful thing about being a puppeteer was that she remained anonymous. She disappeared into her stories.

Dry, she wrapped herself in the loose, comfortable black shirt that she always wore to perform. She took a deep, calming breath, stood for a moment longer, then undid the ribbons on the booth flap.

From a punt she lit the lantern, rotating it so that the blue-glass side faced front. Then she knelt on the padded stool beside her box of puppets and lifted the inner curtain covering the screen. As the curtain came away, the stretched silk glowed a deep, submarine blue. Outside, the musician’s flute sounded and the crowd cheered. There were cries of “Shut up!” and “Sit down!” and “Quick, bring me another nabidh!”

From the box she took the first piece: the image of a single stick-legged house. She deftly hooked it upon the silk. Then she lifted by its rods the first puppet, a magnificent construction. She waited.

The audience muttered, settling in. The flute played an introductory trill, slipped a note, but finished, held fairly steady, then faded.

The room fell silent.

Soter’s voice filled the quiet. “We bid you welcome all. Tonight, if you’ve never witnessed it, you will see a rare thing. If you’ve been here before, then you’ve come back because you now know that I did not lie when I promised you this the first time.

“Many years ago I traveled these spans. There was a master puppeteer in those days, to whom people flocked from sometimes two cityspans distant.”

She heard the name of Bardsham carried on murmurs as upon waves. “Bastard,” she whispered. He’d never done this to her before: However sober he sounded, he was indeed drunk, and she was helpless to shut him up if he went too far. She held the rod puppet at the ready, beneath the screen where the light couldn’t throw its shadow onto anything.

“Yes, that’s right—Bardsham, a magical name. The greatest of all entertainers, so great that, although he’s been gone for near twenty years, we still speak of him in whispers, in awe. Well, I make you a promise that anyone who can recall his skill as I do will be bedazzled by what they see here tonight, for this is as near as…no, no, I won’t say that. Rather, judge for yourselves. Ladies, gentlemen, princes and paupers, foolish virgins and wicked libertines, lovers of story one and all, please dedicate your attention to the entertainments…of
Jax
!”

Applause followed, some cheering, a few whistles that might have been in mockery of the old man. She heard him walk past her on the far side of the drapes, sensed his entry behind her. He stumbled in the constricted darkness, chuckled to himself, then found his seat. By then the crowd had fallen silent and the light filtering in over the top of the booth dimmed—Nuberne had doused the central chandelier.

Leodora went to work.

THE TALE OF CREATION

There is a story that explains Shadowbridge to itself.

At the beginning of the world the first fisherman, Chilingana, caught the first storyfish. No bridges existed then. Even the first dragon beam had yet to appear. Chilingana lived in a stilt house built on rough pillars that climbed straight out of the sea. From Phylos Bar, looking south, you can see the ruin of them still. Chilingana was down among the pilings around one of these pillars when he caught the storyfish. He had never seen one before, because they swim so deep, and Chilingana did as he would with any fish on his line—he dropped it into his creel along with the others he’d caught already and went on fishing.

At the end of the day he hooked a line to the creel, then climbed home on the steps that curled up around one of the pillars. When he reached the top and had gathered his breath, he drew up the line to raise his catch. He could smell the fire his wife was preparing.

Behind his house Chilingana had a huge stone on which to clean the fish. From there he could throw their entrails back into the sea, a ritual to feed the kraken that dwelled below the pillars, in this way keeping it appeased as they still do off Phylos Bar, lest it surface and pull down the pylons of their span.

Chilingana reached down into the creel. Its weave was so tight that water would remain in it for a day and a half. His fingers clutched one of the fish. Holding it by its tail, he slapped its head against the stone to stun it.

He split the fish down the middle.

He cleaned it and threw the guts into the sea.

He made ready the first fillets.

He killed and cleaned each one thereafter until only the big storyfish with its dark blue head and golden eyes remained. He dipped his hand into the creel and hooked his fingers into the fish’s gills; this caused a hidden barb inside the gill to pierce the crease of his palm. Chilingana cursed and yanked back his hand.

He stared suspiciously at the trickle of blood veining his wrist, then at the fish watching him from just beneath the surface, only the tip of its snout protruding. He could see its tiny mouth and harmless knobby teeth. He couldn’t see the barb and thought maybe he’d foolishly impaled his hand on one of its spines.

With much greater care he started to reach into the container again, but before he could touch the fish, the world began to tip over. Chilingana grabbed the big gutting stone, sure that he was about to tumble right over the edge and into the sea. He tried to cry out, but poison in the barb had numbed his lips. His legs trembled and gave, and he fell like the moon rolling across the sky.