Shadowbridge (40 page)

“Both,” she answered without hesitation, and the snake tilted his head thoughtfully and then gave a small nod.

“Ssseeyash,” he said and placed his head on her shoulder.

“What does that mean?”

His tongue darted. “It’s not translatable; you don’t have the concept in your language. It references the shedding of the skin, the death of the old shell and the life manumitted beneath, the balance of the two coexisting being true existence, and so it is a word that expresses ultimate truth.”

“That’s a very complicated way to say you think something is true.”

“Yes, which is why we have a simple word to hold all of it.”

She reached up and stroked his nose. He sighed and closed his eyes. After a moment he muttered, “You’re dangerously brave, Leodora.”

“Foolishly so?”

“That has yet to be determined, and won’t be by me. You imagine that stories protect you, and that makes you brave. But it doesn’t mean it’s true.”

“Is that a warning?”

“Advice. Nothing more. Death comes looking for everyone eventually.”

“I’ll try not to invite him.”

“I suppose you
must
take it lightly,” he replied. “To do otherwise is to admit your fear.”

“If I let it stand in my way, I’ll never get off this boat. I wouldn’t have gotten on in the first place. I wouldn’t have ridden a sea dragon. I’d have married the choice of my uncle.”

“All concrete objects of fear, real and tangible,” said the snake, and she knew by the way he said it that there was another kind of fear he didn’t speak of.

She would have asked him, but at that point one of the crew members raced past to the boat’s prow, and she turned to look where he did.

Riding the horizon, a black sail protruded against the sun’s ember. It was tiny, but clearly a ship.

Soter walked up beside her. She looked at him, and saw abject horror on his face. His gaze flicked over the water to where the crewman was looking, then down at her as he said, “You have to come inside. Now.”

“Inside?”

“In the shack, the house, here.”

“Why?”

“For safety. Please, don’t fight with me, just come inside till that boat out there has gone.”

“What about my friend the snake?” She turned, to find that the snake had retreated, his head down, eyes closed, back around the mast so that he looked like a rope again. His was the perfect disguise.

“What are you talking about, a snake?”

“Nothing,” she replied, and got to her feet. He grabbed her arm and drew her along beside him. As they hurried clumsily into the shack, one of the crew came out from it, carrying a large lit lantern. He carried it to the starboard side and hung it off a hook there. It dangled out over the water.

“Why not in the bow?” she asked.

“In case someone hostile comes, they’ll see the lamp, but from a distance they can’t tell if it’s fore or aft, or port or starboard, and so can’t gauge where to board till they’re close upon it. Every ship, every boat, puts the lamp somewhere different, and the only reasonable thing you can do is steer a wide berth around ’em.”

How, she wondered, did he know the way things worked on board ships? “Hostile?” she asked, but he didn’t answer.

By the time the new ship neared, the sun was gone, the sky black; the breeze had died away. For a while Leodora had watched the ship’s inexorable approach. One light split into two—two red glows like mismatched eyes of a behemoth slithering silently toward them. Soon the ship came close enough that she could make it out—at least the places where it glistened. It was black as the night around it. The red running lights were strung upon ropes, one off its nose and one off the stern. As it overtook the tail of their boat, Soter pulled her back into the blackness of the house. Where he sat behind them, Diverus looked up at the commotion. The nose of the black ship pushed into view.

The ship had a high foredeck that dropped off before the mainmast. It was a deep-bottomed craft, and its ropes and tackle creaked as it drew alongside. The red lantern on the prow rocked back and forth. The ship slowed.

Soter’s grip on her shoulders squeezed tight, and she almost cried out before he released her. She could hear him slide deeper into the darkness, his fear like an oil sprayed upon the air. The forward light glided past, and the side of the ship hove into view. It seemed to be lined with odd pillars. Then all at once she realized that the pillars were people, figures standing motionless along the side—she counted five of them, their bodies dark like the ship, edged only in the rolling red lantern light; their pale heads smooth, gleaming, hairless, their eyes seeming to welter in deep sanguine sockets. Their fixed stare like a braided force sliced through the protective shadows. Red light splashed along the deck ahead of her, doubling and bending the shadows, penetrating the depths of the three-sided house, steadily, rhythmically, like a pendulum as the forward lamp swung. She watched, hypnotized, as color flowed toward her feet and away, cast back again, closer, away and closer, away and closer. Then Soter snatched her into the depths of the shack, and the light splashed across Diverus where he sat staring at it, either unafraid or too ill to move. It lit the room, hooks and gaffs, ropes and tackle, all along the wall where Diverus sat. Soter pressed Leodora against the starboard wall and out of the light completely.

Yet for all that his dread was palpable, nothing happened. The black ship glided on into the night until the light from its rear lanterns had merged into a single spot, a cinder cooling, shrinking, until it went out altogether over the horizon.

“What was that?” she asked without turning to look at him.

“Nothing. Nothing at all,” was his answer. Then he pushed past her and strode to the stern, where he appeared to strike up a conversation with the tillerman, but too quiet to be heard.

“Could they have been pirates?” asked Diverus.

“I don’t know,” she answered, but in fact she was certain that the explanation lay elsewhere.

“Would the snake know?” He glanced up from where he sat; in the lantern light, his face devoid of anything she might call wry.

“How do you know about the snake?”

“I walked around the house before, to try to feel better. He was speaking to you about a tower. You had the same look you had with the fox, and so I knew you didn’t want to be interrupted and I came back here to wait.”

She thought a moment, then said, “You know about pirates.”

“Only from things said in the paidika. There were two boys, and they’d been stolen off a boat by pirates, far from Vijnagar, and brought to market there. I know no more than what they said, and so the black boat
could
have been pirates, couldn’t it?”

“I think it’s something else.”

“What?”

She shook her head. “Something that scared Soter.”

“Pirates would be enough to scare me.”

She replied, “Me, too.”

Stars smeared the sky overhead. The boat sailed on and Soter stayed beside the tillerman, while Diverus and Leodora hunkered down inside the house. Tension and the motion of the boat worked upon them, and they fell asleep against each other.

In the morning the light of dawn woke them, and they walked stiffly onto the deck, to discover that they were docked below an astonishingly high wall. It must have been twice the height of Hyakiyako. Pennants flew from its top. The wall was rough, the stone uneven, and scattered across its surface were small star-shaped objects, like medallions, that glinted in the early light. Farther along, away from the jetty, the wall opened into a dark and uninviting arch that wouldn’t even have accommodated their mast. Any ships wanting to pass to the far side of this spiral would have had to sail on to the next span up or down the line. The rest of the span repeated the pattern of massiveness broken up by low arches. The steps and the jetty appeared to be dead center along its length.

One of the crewmen, red-bearded, came up behind them, carrying a basket on his back. He passed them and, climbing up and over the prow via the step Leodora had used to look into the sea, he walked down the jetty to the wall. A platform attached to ropes lay there, with another of his shipmates standing by, and he set his cargo carefully in the center of it. Then the two of them gave two of the ropes a tug. The ropes snapped tight; the platform lurched slightly, then began to ascend. They steadied it until it slid from their reach. High above them but beneath the top of the wall, beams jutted out, and between the beams was an opening, another arch. The sound of a squeaking pulley echoed distantly down like a bird’s solitary cry.

As the crewman returned, Leodora asked him where Soter had gone.

“Up,” he said, and gestured his head at the wall. “First one of us out, he was.”

She turned, anger infusing her until she saw that the puppet cases were gone, too, already uplifted. Soter had accompanied them. She was chagrined then by her own overhasty judgment. Behind her, Diverus set down his bundle.

“Time to go,” she muttered, then looked around for the snake. He was nowhere to be seen. The mast he’d girdled was empty, the sail drawn down and wrapped in loops of rope.

The bearded crewman and another came lumbering around the house now, carrying one of the larger crates. The platform was still ascending, so they set the crate down and watched it from on deck.

“The snake,” said Leodora. “Where did he go?”

The two men looked at her, then at each other, then at her again. “Snake?” asked the bearded crewman.

“The snake who guards your cargo. He was wrapped around that mast there last night.”

The other one said, “She seen it, too.” They remained facing her, their faces tight with worry as if weighing what to do with her, and she thought that perhaps she shouldn’t have said anything, that the snake was their secret.

Abruptly, the bearded one said, “He weren’t crazy then. He were tellin’ the truth.”

“And we trussed him up for nothing,” said the other. The morning sun glistened off the stubble on his face. “This snake, he speak at you?”

She nodded uncertainly. Behind her, Diverus said, “I saw it, too. Talking to her.” They all looked his way then. “Last night. It was telling her a story.”

Said one to the other, “But why can’t we see it? Why these two an’ not us?”

“Does it matter? It’s real. That’s all, that’s what matters. We have us an avatar on board. We been blessed.”

An avatar. She’d spoken to an avatar before that no one else had seen…and Soter hadn’t seen the snake, either. But Diverus
had.

The bearded sailor grabbed her by the shoulders. Close up, he smelled of sweat and brine. “You brought on us luck, girl, you and your friend. You ever want to venture between spirals some more, we’re your men. We’ll take you.”

“Thank…thank you.”

He let her go and lifted his end of the crate again. To his partner as they carried it the rest of the way off the boat, he said, “We go back to Merjayzin and get him released first thing. We’ve committed a crime here, we have to make it right. Make it right with the avatar. Bring that poor sod back on board and let him talk all he likes…” They climbed onto the jetty, their words fading.

Diverus asked, “We saw an avatar?”

“Apparently.”

He stood still a moment before asking, “What
is
an avatar?”

“A spirit of the gods. Or a god made flesh.”

“Or snakeskin.” He smiled a little sheepishly and hefted his bundle of instruments.

“Yes, snakeskin.” With a final glance back at the mast, she followed him up and off the boat.

From right below, the stairs looked even more imposing than they had from the boat, impossibly steep. At least, she thought, they were wide.

Responding to the same view, Diverus drew a breath and started up. The sack of instruments rattled on his back.

As she ascended, the two sailors waved to her; they grinned as if the oyster girl, Reneleka, had arisen from the water and handed them her pearl. And, thought Leodora, perhaps she had. Perhaps the snake did indeed herald great good fortune.

 . . . . . 

Twice on the climb up the steps they had to stop. The second time they stood parallel to the pulleys that lifted the platform, still a dozen steps below the top. Turned around on the steps, they could see that the ropes securing the platform ran from the pulley in beneath the opening in the wall, and as they watched, hands reached out to grab the goods and drag them off the platform, out of sight into the darkness there. The workers remained ill defined in the shadows. Clearly a large space existed beneath the surface of the span—possibly nothing more than a place to store goods; but with the memory of their climb up Vijnagar still fresh, they both could well imagine a much more extensive underworld. The semicircle out of which the pulley beams projected was itself an ancient opening, the lip of pinkish stone grooved as from years of ropes cutting into the face of it as cargo was raised, perhaps from a time before beams and pulleys had been applied.

Down below, the sailors had become no bigger than gnats and the boat a toy in a crystalline harbor. Off to one side of the boat, something serpentine floated upon the surface. It might have been nothing more than the ridge of a reef. Farther out and to the south, a cluster of small islands rode the horizon. Leodora wondered if fishermen lived there.

Above them threadbare pennants snapped in a strong breeze, which buffeted them as they came up the final few steps.

If, as all the tales claimed, most ancient Colemaigne had once been made of spun sugar and other confections, then centuries of rain and wind had eroded the hard façade of the buildings, exposing and aging more traditional materials underneath—crumbling mortar and stone. The skinny buildings had lost their flat surfaces, their precise edges. Rooftops dipped, and tiles coexisted with thatchwork while the frameworks leaned askew. The roofs and the top floors had collapsed in most of them. It was as if monstrous claws had swung down from the sky and scoured them of their skins, leaving them to rot. The buildings were chalky ruins, their cracked beams like broken bones. The wounds looked old, and yet no one had repaired or rebuilt the houses. That seemed odder still.