Shadowbridge (39 page)

She walked closer. Her bare feet left wet prints across the deck. “I’d rather know than not know, if that’s what you mean.”

His head bobbed back and forth as if he was weighing her answer, then suddenly he stretched toward her. She leaned back but otherwise didn’t move. She’d judged that he would have to unwind one coil to reach her; but close, she could see the remarkable blue and yellow facets of his eyes. He opened his mouth wide in a yawn. There were no fangs.

“If you must know, I’m an Ondiont.”

“Ondionts are water snakes.”

“So you know something then, after all. Yes, we are water serpents, my people.”

“Then what are you doing on a boat?”

“Being lazy. Actually, I’m supposed to be a sentry to protect the cargo these creatures shuttle back and forth from one span to another. I’ve been sentry now for months, and so far I haven’t had to do more than stick out my tongue to send off the occasional scavenger. Eventually, I’ve been assured, they will ferry me home.”

“Do Ondionts have a span of their own?”

He snorted. “A span? What would we do with a span? How would we get up the stairs from the sea?”

“I’ve no idea.”

“Nor does anyone else. No, we have an isle, mostly rock, full of caverns—very nice, cool caverns out of the sun to sleep in.”

“So, what
do
you eat?”

“Everything. Same as you.” He rubbed the side of his head against the mast, his eyes closing ecstatically. “We squeeze it to death first. If necessary.” His narrow pupils settled on her again. “Now, what is it you’re buying, storyteller?”

“How do you—?”

“I listened to all you were saying to one another when you boarded. People will tell you everything if they don’t realize you’re listening. Stillness is a great skill. I’m sure you know this. I’m sure there are moments when you hold your puppets absolutely rigid to draw in your audience, and then
strike.
” She thought if he’d had teeth he would have been grinning at her.

“If you know what I am, then you must know what I’m seeking.”

“You would like a tale of the Ondionts, as different from your own people as I am from you.” When she nodded, he said, “My price for this is that you must sit beside me.”

“So that you can squeeze me to death before you eat me?”

His tongue flicked in irritation. “So that you and I have a pact of trust. You must trust that I won’t crush you.”

She rubbed the bottom of one foot against the other ankle. “That would seem to put all the trust on my side of the bargain. What are you trusting me to do?”

“I am trusting you to honor the story every time you tell it on the spans of men and other creatures, by telling it true. Mine is the greater trust, because if you break it, there’s nothing I can do about it.”

“There’s nothing I can do about it, either, should you choose to crush me.”

“That’s quite probably true. But you might attract the sailors and your comrades, who are inside, and they could certainly kill me before I could finish my meal. And anyway, they would see. It’s not as if you would be easy to hide once I did eat you.”

They faced each other in silence then, and if the snake was thinking anything at all, she couldn’t tell. Yet she sensed that, like the kitsune who’d led the procession of monsters, the snake meant her no harm.

She walked boldly up beside him and sat down cross-legged on the deck. “What story then pays for my trust?”

The snake opened his mouth wide and hissed. She tensed to flee until she realized that he was laughing. “You’ve steel in you, storyteller.”

“Maybe not as much as you imagine.”

“Oh, the contrary. I’m a judge of such things. But now to your reward. Here is a story you do not know.” He lowered his head and, very delicately, laid it upon her lap. His crystalline eyes swiveled to look up at her as he spoke. “There was once a serpent woman who collected souls.”

THE STORY OF MISSANSHA

Her name was Missansha, which means “the lonely one” in the Ondiont speech. She was born blind, and this is very rare among my people. Perhaps because of this, she schooled her other senses. We have a strong sense of smell, but hers was superior. She could flick her tongue and tell you what lay beyond the horizon, picking up its scent long before anyone else could.

However, as she came of age, she developed one particular talent that no other of us has—she could sip life itself. When she came near anyone else, she drank from them. She surely didn’t know this was unusual. It was how she was. Nor could she control it, any more than the living can control the urge to breathe. Inadvertently, like a basilisk, she drained the life from two playmates.

We have elders among us in whom we place our governance, and she was taken before them for this crime; but even as she was escorted into the room, she was draining those guards who accompanied her. One collapsed at her side; the other slithered away for his life. No one, nor especially her family, could come near her. The more she cared, the more absolutely she absorbed.

Now, we do not slay our own, least of all for things they cannot control, and Missansha bore no responsibility for this. She wept for those she destroyed. We could not harm her for it.

The elders chose the only solution they could imagine. They would commission a tower for her, high enough that she would never again come near them. As you can imagine, for snakes such an undertaking was near impossible, and so we sent out messengers to the bridges, to ships, to other islands, asking for assistance. There were few who accepted our very generous offer to come and erect our tower. Serpents have an unsavory reputation among other species, most of which we’ve done nothing to earn. We’re simply distrusted for our appearance and stories concocted about us, our decency dismissed. But I digress.

There were humans who deigned to set foot on our island. They were paid handsomely for their masonry skills, their talent, and their labor—we have much gold in our caverns. And there were no unfortunate incidents of the sort that can spoil a relationship…that is, until the tower was complete and it was time to place Missansha in it.

Some of us there were who speculated that Missansha’s powers might only hold sway over her own kind. The long, ascending rampway that spiraled around the outside of the tower, though it was built for snakes, still posed a burden to us. We asked that these foreigners would escort her to her chambers. None of us wished to be close enough, and we could not have her slither off the edge of the narrow ramp.

We made another generous offer, and two of them volunteered. The rest waited alongside us.

Only one of the volunteers returned. The other died as he reached the top. His body became as glass, transparent and stiff. The survivor managed to lock her in before he stumbled back down the spiral to safety. We offered to nurse him back to health—we had much experience by now with the effect of her—but, no, the foreigners did not trust us after that, these alien creatures. They departed our shore and never returned. The tower they’d built was solid, well constructed for the ages, and we left her there, banished with us but never among us.

Once a week someone carried food to her, leaving it where she could reach it. At least for a long time this was so. Over time, the act of delivering food became a ritual. To be chosen was an honor. Because it was codified as ritual, no one asked if the food was taken, if there was a sign she still survived. She surely had long since died. The ritual continued nonetheless.

And so it was for centuries, the lonely one isolated safely above us. We congratulated ourselves that we had found a benign solution to her existence.

What happened then was that Death paid us a personal visit.

Death as you know looks like anyone. When he is among you humans, he looks like one of you. Among the Ondionts he was a serpent, and yet dissimilar. Obsidian of eyes and sheathed in bone. Unlike us, he had arms, thin as reeds and supple, down the sides of his body. We knew him the instant he arrived, and he did not dissemble, but came right to the point.

“I want to know,” he said, “how it is that you have all stopped coming to me.”

The elders, who had been unborn when Missansha was sent away, shuffled meekly up to him. They replied as one, “We don’t know what you mean.”

“There are rules,” he explained. “I for my part must adhere to them, as must you. Else what sort of a world would we have? You, for your part, seem to have ceased to die, and I wish to know how you have done this—what magic or art now protects you. I’ve traveled a long way for the answer and I will not leave without it.”

Now, none of them understood Death’s accusation. Ondionts had been born and had died as always. Our insignificant island would have become surfeited otherwise, and our caverns jammed with wriggling tenants. Death saw this for himself even as they protested their innocence. He noted the tower rising in their midst—something no snakes had built—and his sinister arms pointed at it.

“Why is that erected?” he asked.

Before they had even finished reciting the now mythic story of Missansha, Death gestured them to silence.

“You think then that by placing a problem out of sight, you resolve it? That is your notion?”

“But how could we punish her?”

“Forgive me, did I suggest you should have punished her?” answered Death. “And yet you are of the opinion that she relishes her imprisonment. That placing her in a tiny room in the sky is not a punishment to her?”

“But…but she wasn’t put to
death
!” exclaimed one of the elders, who immediately regretted his outburst and shrank away. For a moment he had forgotten to whom he spoke.

“No,” agreed Death, showing his teeth. “She was not. Not to
death,
but surely to madness have you condemned her. You are not people who fare well when isolated, and she began life more isolated than the rest of you.” With that Death passed through the crowd. One by one they lay down before him. At the tower’s base he stared up into the sky, to the very tip of it. He imagined himself there and a moment later he stood at the top, for that was how Death traveled.

His hands pressed that barred door, and it opened to him. Inside, it was dark and cobwebbed. Spiders had busily taken over the space. They dropped from their webs as he passed beneath them.

Deeper into the chamber, Death saw tiny lights burning—an entire wall of them. This struck him as unlikely. The lights sparkled. They were round like the eggs laid by Ondionts. They
were
eggs, in fact, and the fire in each was a spark of life. He reached the wall and pried one loose from the mucilage that held it. He held it in his hands, and with his needle-like fingers, he cracked it open and let the light escape. Like a flame it leapt up at him, and then through him. He heard it, saw it, experienced its life in a burst, because that is what the soul is—every moment of the life that was known, compressed into a flame of existence. It sang to him as it passed from this plane of being. And from the darkness behind him, a voice unused to speaking croaked, “What was that? How did my little song escape?”

Death turned and there she was. Impossibly alive, thin and ancient, and yet to him unutterably beautiful.

“I let it go,” he said.

Missansha gasped. She uncurled and rose to his height, the height of his voice. She’d learned to do that as a child, as a way of protecting herself. “How did I not hear you enter?”

“No one hears me enter, just as no one can surprise me. And yet you have just done that impossible thing.”

She didn’t need eyes to identify him. The sense of him burned her like heat.

“These,” he said, and turned back to the wall.

“My songs,” she replied. “Long ago they began to come to me here in this chamber, I don’t know from where. They entered me, pierced me, and then I birthed each one. So long ago that began, I can hardly remember the time before it.”

“Another impossible thing, I think.” He could still taste the essence of that soul he’d freed; he understood now how she had lived for so long. The lives entering her had passed to her a little of their being, each one rolling back her age. “Once upon a time, you lost your wits. You had already a power, a great and fearful power that frightened your people, and in the madness of isolation this gift transformed. It grew. You became as I am.”

He drew beside her. His hands embraced her, and for the only time in her life Missansha felt what it was like for others to stand near
her.
There was no pain, but she was sundering from the world. “Am I dying?” she asked.

Death answered, “No. Something else.”

She could not think what to say.

When it was done, her metempsychosis, they opened the eggs together and let Missansha’s songs fly. It was orgasmic. The songs swirled and swept through her. She leaned back her head, and her tongue flicked at the sky. She moaned and would have swooned but Death caught her. “You’re not used to it,” he told her. “So many at once is dizzying.”

She would have agreed had she been able to speak, but her voice failed her. She looked into his empty eyes and realized that she could see. He, as if apprehending her confusion, said, “Your corporeal eyes could not see; but you no longer have need of them.”

Soon the last of the souls had been released from where Missansha had collected them. She had been preserving them—though she hadn’t recognized it—as a dowry for her groom.

When, after some days of speculating, the surviving people climbed the tower, they found the room at the top abandoned. No trace remained of Missansha save for her cast-off skin. Her body was missing and the floor covered with shattered eggshells, dry and empty; covered also with the bodies of a hundred spiders, curled and desiccated.

Of Death himself there was no sign, either.

“And that,” said the snake, raising his head from her lap, “is how my people met Death. In return for providing him with a bride, we were given very long lives. And we’ve never been sure if that was his blessing or his punishment for how we’d treated her. What do you think?” He leaned over Leodora; the sun had all but set now, and the penultimate orange glow glittered in his eyes like hunger.