Shadowbridge (32 page)

There, seated beneath a low table, Soter twisted around as they entered. He held a small cup in one hand, and a small pitcher in the other, caught in the act of pouring. “About time,” he said. “I’m famished.”

The meal proved to be sumptuous and exotic. Neither Leodora nor Diverus had ever tasted anything like it, and once sampled, she could not imagine never having it again. When she raised the question of the central space they had seemingly walked around, Soter confirmed that it was the courtyard where they would perform. “It is outdoors but protected from the parade. Oh, yes, Mutsu told me about the parade. A horrifying thing, to be avoided at all costs. Your very life could be forfeit.”

“Mutsu. You remember his name?”

“Naturally.” He sipped his tea under her critical gaze, which exerted a kind of pressure on him. He set down his cup. “The truth is, he came up to me, called out
my
name, and said,
Don’t you remember me? I’m Mutsu.
So, there. He remembers
me.
All I remembered was the banner. Satisfied?”

“For once,” replied Leodora.

They ate awhile in stiff silence after that, until Diverus asked: “What happens now?”

 . . . . . 

“Now,” said Leodora as she stepped around a cart peddling fruit, “we hunt for stories. It’s what my father used to do wherever he went. It’s how he learned everybody’s tales.”

“Soter doesn’t come?”

“No. He makes arrangements, asks questions, tries to find out if there are other places on a span we should play, promotes us to the local people.”

“He angers you,” Diverus stated.

She eyed him askance. They walked through a bazaar of stands, most sporting bright awnings. The smells of fish and confections mixed with more human, bodily smells. It all reminded her of Ningle and her childhood, back when her uncle had been clement. Those memories were intertwined with Soter, too. “He angers me because he lies,” she replied. “I don’t always catch him out, but the occasions that I do only make me assume he’s lying the rest of the time, too.”

He changed the subject: “How do you hunt for stories, then?”

“Well”—she glanced around—“you look for signs that stories are about.”

“Signs,” he repeated with evident confusion. The confusion wasn’t his alone, either, for in truth she had little experience looking for stories. Prior to arriving on Vijnagar, Soter had been too nervous to let her go off on her own for very long, and when she could sneak off at all she’d climbed the bridge towers to escape from him. Yorba had been the first place she’d asked about a story and been given one, by a group of workers who’d been mortaring a building. That was the Dustgirl’s tale.

A palanquin crossed their path. Four men hefted it by two poles, which rested upon their shoulders. A woman’s silhouette was just visible behind the gauze curtains.

Leodora tilted her head at the passing vehicle. “There. Like them.”

“The palanquin?”

“Not the palanquin itself—the carriers. If you could spend time with them, there would be stories in it for you.”

“Why not the woman hidden behind the curtains?”

“First, she would be reluctant to tell a complete stranger very much. Second, her carriers would tell me all about her because they’re paid to transport her but also to be blind and dumb about it. They’ll have seen things. They would want to talk because they’re not supposed to. They carry her
and
they carry her story.”

“I see. That is, I think I see.”

She grinned. “I’m making this all up.” Doubt clouded his expression, and her smile grew wider. “The truth of it is, so far anyway, stories seem to find me.”

“The way mine did?”

“Exactly. I didn’t attend the paidika in search of a story, but I found an extraordinary one that even has elements in it from other tales I’ve been taught by Soter. Your life up till now is a story.”

“So he
does
know something.”

“He knows quite a lot,” she admitted, and stepped through an open space between two stalls selling various aromatic kernels, the combined smells making her nose twitch as if she might sneeze. “But I think he withholds more than he tells. When he was training me, that was helpful because he forced me to knit stories together out of scraps. As a test.”

Diverus was thoughtful for a while after that, and soon they passed the stalls and the crowd thinned, at which point he asked, “How can you be sure that the tests are over?”

She had no ready answer to that.

Ahead, there lay a park lined with intricately shaped trees and shrubs. Some looked like exotic animals. Others were either abstract or imitations of things she had never seen. In the middle of the park, a group stood clustered beneath one tree, watching two figures in their midst. The two were engaged in a game of some sort, sitting opposite each other across a square board, with the rest ringing them as though they represented the height of excitement.

Diverus followed Leodora through the park. The group might have been her ultimate goal, but she took the most circuitous route to arrive there—pausing to contemplate the unusual displays of flora: One bush had been sculpted into a flock of pigeons just leaving the ground. The fronds that represented the outstretched wings even seemed to be shaped into feathers. The artist had cleverly linked them so that from any angle some of them looked completely separated from the rest.

Eventually she did make her way to the game. Members of the group glanced her way. One nodded in so formal a manner that it seemed a shallow bow. That man had a narrow spear-shaped beard growing off the point of his chin. He turned his attention back to the game immediately but as if his look had been a signal, the people to either side of them edged away to give them space to join in.

The two players hadn’t acknowledged any of this. One was a small, thin man with a shaved head save for the wide stripe of red hair that hung from the back of his skull. He would have been the most striking member of the group were it not for the second player, who had the long-snouted head of an animal, completely white, and who sat beneath a strange ball of light. Fist-sized, it floated just above his head. Diverus touched Leodora’s shoulder, his eyes wide. She understood his startlement, and whispered to him, “Kitsune. A foxtrickster.”

The kitsune gazed intently at the crosshatched board and the array of small stones dotting it, as if the stones might change position if he looked away. If there was a pattern there, neither Diverus nor Leodora could fathom it.

The stones—some light and some dark—looked as if they’d been polished by the sea, like the little stones and shells that washed up on the beaches of Bouyan all the time; in fact, some of the white “stones” proved to be small shells. The aggregate of dark and light remained obscure to Leodora even as two more stones were laid, one by each of the players.

With the kitsune’s placement of the next dark stone, some of the watchers exchanged knowing glances as if something significant had occurred. The fox-player picked up a group of the lighter stones from the board, placing them in the lid to a small clay pot at his side, and she gleaned that he had surrounded them somehow, and thus won them. Even as he collected the “dead” stones, she noted, his black eyes remained locked on the board, his expression hard and his whiskers bristling. She had the sense that he was not certain he’d made the best move. The excitement wasn’t necessarily in his favor.

The other player picked a white shell from his pot and held it a moment while he pointedly assessed the arrangement of the remaining stones. As if following his thoughts, the fox’s seemingly permanent smile fell with resignation. He muttered something that sounded like
shimata.
The light stone was placed. The fox nodded. Then he and his opponent eyed each other. The dark-stone kitsune waved a furry hand once—he would not take his turn. The other placed another stone, and the fox waved away his turn again. The group relaxed and began to talk to one another as if picking up from an earlier conversation that had been suspended by the game.

The two opponents clasped hands across the board.

Diverus leaned forward and asked, “What just happened? I couldn’t see why they stopped—there are still lots of open lines.”

“I don’t know, either. Let’s find out.” She moved around some of the observers and approached the white fox. He stood now, stretching cat-like, his orange-furred arms above his head, the loose sleeves of his gown falling down around his skinny arms to his shoulders. In that position he turned to them as they approached. Leodora repeated Diverus’s question to him.

He gestured to the board, where three of the observers were bent over and discussing, apparently, earlier moves in the game. “I arrived at the point where I could see the outcome. The battle is engaged where I removed his stones, and that and this other are the only two open areas remaining. But the most I will be able to do from this moment forward is expend more stones before he deprives me of them. If this were truly war, what a foolish general I would be to send more and more soldiers into a place where I know in advance they cannot prevail. Those already taken are lost, and I cannot have them back.” He reached into his pot, raised a handful of black stones, opened his palm. “Should I not preserve these soldiers for another day and a better game? Only an idiot would do otherwise.”

Leodora met his eye and smiled.

Diverus asked, “And you both knew this?”

“We both—” He sprinkled the stones back into his pot. “—both concurred.” He looked at them critically. “This is your first game, then,” he said as he stepped away from the board.

“We’ve just arrived.”

“Then you’ve made good use of your time. And if you stay for another, you will discern how one arrives at such a crossroads.” He gestured behind himself where two other audience members were seating themselves and removing the stones, which they returned to their respective bowls.

“What is your interest here then, young travelers? You don’t know
go
,
so is it the park, the topiaries?” He scrutinized Diverus closely. “You need more stain for your skin, perhaps?” Diverus moved back behind Leodora.

“Stories,” she said.

The fox tilted his head and considered her again. “How so?”

“I collect stories,” she said. “It’s my…calling.”

“That is a
grand
calling. But tell me, how do you keep them? Are they in a satchel? Do you have them tied up somewhere? Because the ones I know are disinclined to sit still.”

She laughed at that. Behind the fox, the new players eyed her as if warning her not to laugh while they were engaged in play. “It’s quite true, they don’t sit still and they like to change shape, one place to another.”

“Exactly so,” the kitsune agreed, and showed his prominent teeth in a smile. The player behind him made a shushing sound. “Ah,” the fox said, “we must be polite and move away if we’re to talk…or would you attend a game from the beginning? It is greatly rewarding, as I said.”

She glanced at Diverus to find him leaning around her in order to witness the opening moves. “All right,” she told the fox, “one game and
then
stories.”

“Excellent!” the fox replied. Then he also turned to watch.

 . . . . . 

Unlike the previous game, the one they observed from the beginning ended with a definitive final move followed by the counting of open squares—or intersections, as the fox explained it—and captured stones. “Shells has won again,” he proclaimed. “Next time, I’m going to insist on being shells.”

Some of those nearest him laughed and slapped him on the shoulder. “You can’t have shells, not with your white fur!”

He told Leodora, “They think I’d cheat. Imagine.”

“Yes, ridiculous,” she said, but she knew enough about kitsunes to side with the group.

As they were laughing and discussing the game with the players, the fox waved his arms about and said, “My friends, my friends, these two are itinerant story collectors and would like to add to their collection from our repository. Does anyone have a story they would particularly like to tell?”

The entire group began to babble at once. She heard “ghost” and “tanuki” and “When Oiwa became a lantern!” before the fox waved them to silence once more. “Please, please, we can all tell our tales but not at the same time, if they’re to make any sense of it.”

“Well,” began the one with the sharp beard, “tell her about the emperor who forgot about war. That has one of your kind in it!”

The fox waited to see if anyone objected to this choice. No one did. He asked, “Do you already have that story?” Leodora shook her head. “In that case, I shall tell it, and if there’s time we’ll pick another—or, better, you can tell us one of yours.” Everyone nodded enthusiastically and settled down to listen. The fox strode around as he declaimed and acted the various parts.

THE EMPEROR’S TALE

Way over there our span touches land. You can see the hills and the tower that stands high upon the tallest hill. We call that land Kochokana, and legend has it that’s because it looks so like the fluttering wings of a butterfly. The truth, however, is that we named it after a legendary empire. We don’t know where this original kingdom is now—some say it’s sunk beneath the sea; others claim it lies at the farthest end of the eternal bridge. Whatever the truth, at one time in our history the original land called Kochokana was ruled over by a warlord. As this title suggests, he was a man who came to power by violent acts, and who maintained his power in like manner.