Shadowbridge (36 page)

One night while he lay upon his seaweed mat, a chill wind called loneliness came floating down the empty spans of the bridges he had dreamed. It swirled about his house. It slipped into the sleeves of his clothing and fluttered the cloth against him. His mouth filled with it and he rose and went out and stared off into the distance, across the near-black sea. He looked for what he knew not.

Chilingana thought his wife was asleep inside, but she lay awake. The wind had filled his house, and she had breathed it in as well as he.

She was aware of him outside, yet did not call him. No distance had ever existed between the woman and the man before he dreamed the bridges. They stretched into infinity like the lives of Chilingana and Lupeka. This new distance touched her with longing. She wondered: When had she come to be, and who had built her house? She assumed Chilingana had done it, but he never said. She had never before thought to ask. The two of them wanted for nothing: All the food of the world swam through the ocean beneath their house. Why, then, create such things as bridges? What purpose could they serve?

Fear gnawed at her then, that her husband wished to travel away from her into an unknown so vast that he might never return. The distance opened like a pit beneath her, and her breath caught in her throat.

The wind of loneliness heard her and was surfeited.

She arose and crept out the back of the house onto the balcony that surrounded it on all sides. She gazed out across the sea away from her husband. Her eyes followed Nocnal’s bright stripe upon the swirls and waves until she made out, just above the horizon, the black edge of a bridge’s line, and in the middle of it the black spire of a tower, and her fear frothed and foamed. She knew in wordless fashion that these spans connected to some other place, although she knew no other.

Her fearful musings disturbed Lord Akema’s rest, prodding the face of Nocnal to call down, “What troubles you, lady?”

“Well,” she answered, and then fell silent before the immensity of what she wanted to say. What was still emerging inside her soul had no words. She’d never known anything but herself; how could she express something so much larger? She kept silent. If Nocnal had to ask, then he didn’t understand.

Yet he continued asking her till finally she retreated inside where the walls were near, the territory small and safe. When her husband came in later and lay down beside her, she rolled over to clasp him and he held her tight. “I know,” he said.

“What?”

“Something is coming.”

The certainty in his words terrified her more than her own inexpressible unease. “What is? What’s coming? Tell me.”

“When it arrives, I’ll know it.” He couldn’t tell her more, and they lay like that, tightly bound in unshared fear, too conflicted even to remember shared desire.

Chilingana tried to forget what he’d told Lupeka. He continued fishing as he had always done, but with uneasy glances over his shoulder, down the length of the adjoining spans, across the ocean to where they vanished over the horizon.

One afternoon the face of Lord Akema was particularly fierce. Chilingana lay on the shadowed side of his house as people still do to escape the god’s fury, and he happened to glance up to find a stranger walking up the next span.

The fisherman who had created the world leapt to his feet. Other than his wife, this was the first person he had ever seen. Whatever he’d dreaded for so long, this had to be it.

The stranger was tall and gaunt. He wore robes that we would say belonged to a mystic. They were deep red and glittered with powerful designs woven with silver thread, thick as fishbones. The hood of his robe kept the stranger’s features in shadow. All Chilingana could determine was that this traveler was very dark indeed.

The stranger came to the place where the dreamed bridge ended and stepped across the gap onto the balcony encircling the stilt house. The stilts groaned beneath him as if he weighed as much as the world. He walked right up to Chilingana, who huddled shivering in the shadows. It took all the fisherman’s reserves not to cry out and flee inside. He stared into a face of sharp cheekbones and high polished brows, looked into bottomless eyes. “Who are you?” he asked.

The traveler replied, “I am Death.”

“What sort of name is that?”

Death laughed. “One new to you even though you’re the Dreamer. Your bridges have grown to encompass the world, reaching even as far as the land of the dead, which is a barren and uninhabited place I was happy to leave. Your creation invited me to walk the world, and I set out directly to find you.”

The fisherman raised his shoulders. “You aren’t making sense.”

“I think you’ll see that I am, once you’ve come inside me.” Death opened wide his robes, and Chilingana saw a place so cool and inviting that the harsh rays of Lord Akema couldn’t find him there. He must have fallen into those robes, for he had no memory of walking. Once he was inside the cool place his mind tumbled with memories. The robes that had been held open closed, and at the core of the darkness within them lay a red glow of life out of which came discordant noises he’d never known—crackling energies and devices that rang and then spoke, the barking of dogs, the canister rumble of machines as they rolled along an empty boulevard, the clicking of a metal thing that unfurled strips of paper covered in indecipherable symbols, and the voices of people—more people than he could hold in his mind—all speaking at once and shouting through objects in the sky that were nothing like Akema, lifeless creations, but spraying chatter out and down like rain in a million different tongues drowning him under their flow. He saw impossible blue-glass buildings across which clouds slid like oil, and lighted things that were not fish but traveled far beneath his perfect sea, and he knew that all of these things, however they were new to him, were also ancient, long gone, dredged up out of a collective silt of memory, from some other time and place before he and his wife had arrived. And he knew torment, for in all his new recollections, his birth was nowhere to be found.

He sank to the stones before the traveler. His head hung, too heavy for his neck to lift. Death spoke. “Now you know mortality. Now you’ll live and age and cling to what memories you have, because you will always be falling away from them.”

Then Death left the fisherman there and entered his house. Chilingana tried to crawl after him, to shield his wife from this terrible conjurer. Why should she have to know these things? She hadn’t done this—she hadn’t made the bridges. But she couldn’t be spared, else gaze down upon a mortal man whom she no longer would recognize as her husband.

Death did not leave, but when the fisherman dragged himself feebly inside, the traveler had gone, and his wife lay upon the bed, naked and open to him. She had been made fertile, able to bear children. Thus did Death plan to people his realm.

Nearing her, Chilingana recovered his strength, and they folded together and slept, safe so long as they touched.

In the morning, when he awoke, he was alone and certain that he had dreamed the traveler. He stretched, to find that his body ached unfamiliarly.

As he stood, he kicked something from the mat. It clattered across the floor. It was a silver object, small enough to lie in the palm of his hand.

Grooves threaded the length of it; at the top was a large single slot. He had brought it back from the realm within Death’s cloak.

When he stooped and lifted the thing, Chilingana dropped to his knees with his fist closed, and began to weep because now he could remember his entire life and he recognized that each day would hereafter be different from the last, and farther away than the land of Death itself.

Time upon Shadowbridge had begun. Life had arrived, carried by Death.

Leodora laid down the taro and the enoki. The gourd she’d already hidden in one sleeve, and she let it roll slowly out. It came to rest sitting up, its “head” canted as if toward the children. For them it had become the figure of Death; and for their mother, as well. She smiled at the storyteller, and now that smile was proof against grief. Her tears had dried and those of her children. “Thank you,” she said.

Some members of the funeral procession had stopped when they found the widow missing, and had wandered back. They’d clustered close enough to hear the story, and complimented Leodora by dipping their heads in an informal bow. The widow turned to her people and then folded the children back in among them, but the two kept glancing over their shoulders at Leodora and the gourds as they were drawn away, and then lost from sight.

She got up, weary, her legs stiff from all the walking followed by sitting awkwardly while she performed the tale. She saw the expression on Diverus’s face. “What is it?” she asked.

“I—I’ve no words. I stand amazed.”

Blushing, she lowered her eyes. “You’ve no call to be. You have a far more remarkable talent than mine.”

“No,” he said. “Mine was a gift from the gods.”

“How do you know mine isn’t?”

“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.