Shadowbridge

THREE



It may have been ridiculous ever to have believed that she had no father, but it seemed reasonable at the time. Gousier and the villagers called her mother a witch, and Leodora had simply concluded that the witch had conjured her into being. If nothing else the explanation allowed her to be magical, and she liked being magical.

Suddenly she had not only a father, but a father of legendary stature. Even in Tenikemac, isolated from the tumultuous life of the bridges, she’d heard his name—the name of the greatest shadow puppeteer who had ever traveled the myriad spans of Shadowbridge: Bardsham. And there before her, in the care of a grizzled old drunk, lay the puppets Bardsham had used. As it had been with her mother, her father was a revelation.

Soter soon had all the compartments and both cases open. He judiciously selected more puppets and spread them around him. They belonged to a dozen different stories, but he assembled them to tell his own. Then he asked her for Meersh. The grotesque Meersh was going to represent her father. For her mother he picked a sinuous figure he called Orinda.

He began the performance, sometimes looking at her, sometimes squinting as though pained at having to squeeze his memory through the cracks in his hangover.

“Your father,” he began, “came from a span far to the south of here, and at least three spirals away. You do know about the spirals, don’t you?”

“They’re other bridges,” she answered uncertainly.

“Other great long, unimaginable arms of bridges, yes, child. And each one, sooner or later, curls up like a nautilus shell, or so it’s said, because you can walk a thousand different spans, a thousand different great, wide communities filled with all sorts of people and creatures, and not ever reach that curled-up point where the bridge started or maybe ends. Who knows which. But your father, he came out of one of those places, one of those spiral ends. Or so he said…”

BARDSHAM’S TALE



His parents had their own troupe of traveling players, the Mangonel Circus. That was his real name, too. They played in public for money. They juggled and danced on cords strung high above the streets. They performed a skillful whip act with your grandmother holding up things like flowers or torches that your grandfather snipped the heads from or extinguished with a snap of his whip, until finally she held a jeweled ring lightly between two fingers and he snatched it without her fingers even moving—snatched it and with the same movement sent it into the audience, where a fight inevitably broke out over its ownership. It was a cheap ring, but a dazzling trick. The way your father told it, no one had ever seen such skill before Mangonel. There was quite a bit of sleight of hand in among the crowd, too, which had to be done most carefully if they wanted to avoid any trouble. The boy—that is, Bardsham, your father—he had a natural dexterity. Right from the time he could walk, he could steal coins from between your fingers and you wouldn’t feel so much as a breeze—just like his father did with that whip. Plus, he was so sly that anyone would have sworn he’d been across the avenue the whole time. He was a child, none too large, and who noticed him down around their hips when people were doing handsprings on a rope way up there?

The family did not overlook his talent. They trained him and trained him until he had the most skillful fingers in the world. His only limit then was how much he could make off with before the weight of his boodle pulled the pants off him.

One night another member of the troupe, a fellow called Peeds, took sick an hour before the performance. Peeds was the Mangonel shadow puppeteer and a great favorite of the boy’s as well as of the audience’s. Bardsham had heard Peeds’s stories hundreds of times, and was always transported by them. He sat through every rehearsal, absorbing all the details like any small child. Like you. When he wasn’t outside fleecing the audience, he even sat in the dark booth with Peeds. Mind you, he wasn’t supposed to be in the booth at all. His father had a temper to make your uncle look positively unassertive. But the boy took risks. And he and Peeds were friends.

So, Peeds took sick and there was nobody could do his part. Your grandmother sometimes narrated a tale for him, but she knew nothing of the puppetry itself. Nobody else had paid any attention to his old stories—they had their own acts to develop and refine. The family needed an act to link the other acts together—that’s what Peeds did with his stories, his puppets. He moved things along from the jugglers to the knife throwers, weaving the distance between the two with some tale that touched both. The boy decided to risk punishment. He confessed to his parents that he’d been studying secretly with Peeds and could do the act. He swore he knew it by heart. They didn’t have time to argue or fight or punish him—not right then. So they capitulated. That was when Bardsham the Great was born.

He’d followed how Peeds used colors to change mood, how he spun the lantern, the different ways he moved figures off the screen. For the rest—what he didn’t know—he had the instinct to invent.

His mother came up with the name. She told him, long after, that she had walked out to the end of the dragon beam sticking off the side of span where they were performing—every span has a dragon beam, Lea, not just Ningle. She stepped into the tiled Dragon Bowl at the end of that beam and asked the gods for the name, and it had come to her right then and there. That’s what she told him anyway. During his performance she stood outside the booth, telling the stories where they needed narrating, doing the introductions.

The thing about puppeteers is they’re invisible. Never seen. All you see is the handiwork, the skill. So any story she fabricated about Bardsham, it was the real story. Who he was, where he’d come from. Anything she felt like adding. If the story changed from night to night or span to span—as it did—that only added to the mystery of him.

It all began as a single provisional performance, but poor Peeds never recovered. He got sicker and thinner, till he’d grown as thin as a puppet skin himself. On his deathbed he bequeathed young Bardsham all of his puppets, his tools, his stage. His stories.

From then on the boy spent less time thieving from the audiences and more listening to them tell the stories of their spans, their people, their families. He did something no one else had ever thought of—he started collecting the heritage of Shadowbridge. Diverse elements he folded all together, making something that had never been before. It became a great giant of a story, a spiral of a tale, just like Shadowbridge itself, all linked and spun together into something bigger than any of us can see. Except for Bardsham. And such vision, you know, it makes you a little bit mad.

His father was none too happy about losing his talented little thief permanently. But he was no fool, either. The Shadowplays of Bardsham were soon bringing in the largest crowds. Nevertheless, pigheaded creature he was, he insisted that while the other acts went on, the boy must mingle with the crowd. After all, they didn’t know who he was. He was a stranger, and still small. And still a skilled pickpocket. But it was a risky and foolish proposition. Anyone could see that sooner or later the child would be caught. What pickpocket hasn’t been? And there were spans where the authorities cut off fingers if not a whole hand by way of punishment. The circus would lose far more than their little thief if that happened.

Finally it was his mother who confronted the old man to keep the son out of thieving. His hands were pure gold, she said. If he was caught thieving, the troupe would be ruined. Picking pockets brought in so little. Puppets brought in crowds. She was right, but her husband did not like being shown that he was wrong; as with many a man, it only made him insist on being wrong. He refused to listen to her. They argued. He threatened to stop the shadowplays, instead, which would have been sheer folly. He didn’t care. He wanted the boy to obey him.

The time came for them to perform their show, with the two of them still arguing and as far apart as could be. They went out with that disagreement hanging unfinished between them.

That night at the end of the whip act, Mangonel missed the ring his wife held up. It had never happened before. The whip snapped against her face instead. He swore it had been an accident, but I don’t think even he believed it. After that she had a scar across one cheek. Her husband couldn’t look at her without feeling the twist of guilt in his own breast. The only way he could expiate his crime was to capitulate on Bardsham. He released the boy from the duties of thieving.

Now on every span they came to, the boy disappeared. Wherever they went, he sought out the elders almost immediately, returning only when it was time for his performance. He asked them questions, sometimes describing versions of the stories he knew, and listened to the oldest tales they knew, hearing endless variations on the ones he told. He brought back no money now when he mingled with the crowds, but his act became more and more refined, precise, taut. He was the lure for the Mangonel Circus. Placards portrayed him as a faceless figure in a swirling purple cape. They announced his imminent arrival before the circus had even set foot upon a span. Audiences whispered his name. He was the mystery puppeteer of a million tales. Bardsham had traveled the whole world. Bardsham had been a librarian in the mythical Great Library. He was an Edgeworld god, because he knew every story on every span and only pretended at mortality—an ingenious argument given substance when an old man in one crowd claimed to have seen Bardsham’s performances when just a child. He was a shill for the circus, of course, but the story spread. People watched the troupe arrive, counted their numbers, but failed to find this mystical genius. And that, too, fueled stories of him. By whatever magic, Bardsham could look inside the audience and read the stories in their hearts. Bardsham.

And what was your father’s reward for all his work? To vanish.

His father took all the bows, receiving the kudos while the boy stayed hidden in the dark, listening to audiences shout his name, but unable to reveal his identity.

Mangonel may have given in to his wife’s demands, but he still had the means to keep the boy in his place. He got to acting as if he had performed the shadowplays, even hiding out during some performances to reinforce the impression.

Meanwhile the gulf between him and the other two family members deepened. He took performance money and went out on his own after shows, sometimes not coming home until the next day. His wife knew what he was doing but said nothing about it. After he’d scarred her, she had nothing to do with him beyond rehearsals anyway.

The world went on about its business. The Edgeworld gods blessed some spans, showering their Dragon Bowls with gifts, and completely ignored others. Women gave birth. Lovers quarreled and made up. Fish swam and ate smaller fish. The troupe traveled its circuit of spans and spirals. On each they might play four or five locales before sailing off to another arm of Shadowbridge, and sooner or later back again. It was a small circuit, hardly anything compared with all the possible spans, but enough to keep them moving all year round without returning to any particular span more than once every few years. Bardsham the child developed into Bardsham the young man. As he grew older, he also grew more frustrated. He choked at having to hide in the darkness of the booth while his father accepted his acclaim. He had great skill and he wanted to be recognized. The mysterious phantom Bardsham received letters and money from admirers, invitations to palaces, even proposals of marriage. His identity continued to attract speculation. He was a djinn kept in a bottle. No, he was horribly disfigured. He was deformed. That was why he hid his face.

While not particularly handsome or tall, the real Bardsham was not unattractive, either. As he grew older, he became a more conspicuous member of the troupe. Mangonel required him to pretend to be an idiot lest someone suspect him of being Bardsham. Now when he was old enough to be accepted as the puppeteer, it had become imperative that the mystery be maintained. The mystery of Bardsham was what filled the benches. He helped set up the acts. He assembled and broke down the platforms. But he had to pretend to be less, always less, than what he was. He was finding other people more and more appealing. Women interested him particularly. After all, they wrote him invitations. But what chance did he have with anyone he took a fancy to when he had to play the gibbering fool? Inevitably some people taunted him as he set up. They even jeered, “Hoy, there’s Bardsham!” at him while they pointed and laughed. He was doing twice the work of everyone else in the troupe. He had to be seen working like a lackey and looking like a fool. Secretly, he had to practice, to perform. Even more secretly he had to find ways to gather information on stories without revealing his identity. He donned disguises or masks when he spoke to the elders on the spans. The whole process was exhausting him.

The critical clash with his father was inevitable—a mere question of when the two tempers would flare in unison. His mother did her best to act as intermediary, but she must have known she couldn’t do it forever and dreaded the day when the two men would collide.

That day came: Bardsham had shirked some onerous chore in order to lurk about the span and gather up new stories. Mangonel saw him returning and called him. The old man had his whip.

He asked him something like “Where have you been and why haven’t you done what I told you to do?” You know the sound of it, your uncle brays the same way—when he tells you to do one thing and then damns you for not doing another. Mangonel knew perfectly well that his son had been out doing his job as Bardsham. But he hadn’t shoveled manure or swept off the stage, or cleaned some animal’s pen, which were his duties, too.

Now, Bardsham wasn’t big, but he performed so much of the troupe’s donkeywork that he was much stronger than he looked. And right then he’d had enough of trying to placate, of appeasing when it was himself being mistreated and maligned. Instead of apologizing, he walked over and told the old man that he could hire someone else to do the grunt work from now on. Bardsham had more important things to do and was tired of carrying the burden unnecessarily, just for show. Just—as he saw it—for Mangonel’s amusement. “I’m done!” he shouted, and started away.

The old man might have pretended that what he’d done to his wife was an accident, but what happened next was a hot-blooded assault.

His whip tore at Bardsham left and right, striping him with welts and blood, ripping his clothing, driving him back and back against a wall. He fell over some jugglers’ props that had been assembled—some braziers and flags and large wooden pins. When he scrambled up against the wall the whip tore his shoulder open. If he’d been a second slower, it would have been his nose. He had nothing to protect him, nothing to hide behind. The old man might have been trying to kill him, too—he snapped the whip at his son’s face, just missing an eye and leaving him afterward with a scar to match his mother’s. Maybe it was seeing that scar that made the old man realize he’d never lost control of the whip in his life, not even once, not for a second. Not with anybody.

He raised it again and snapped it, but slow enough that Bardsham caught it and pulled with all his might. Hauled off his feet, the old man flew toward him, and Bardsham, quick as lightning, let go the whip and snatched up one of the juggling pins and swung it all the way around, swung it with his arms stretched out, swung it with all his anger behind it. When it hit, that pin cracked and splintered, and bits of it flew off across the yard. It stove in the side of his father’s head.

Bardsham said he stood there afterward for the longest time, feeling a terrible fire in his throat, as if he might cry, but boiling with such hatred that he did nothing for the man who lay twitching and bleeding on the ground in front of him. Of course he was bleeding, too. His shoulder and back. His face was a mask of blood from the slash beside his eye. He dropped the broken pin and walked away.

He packed everything he owned, including the puppets left him by Peeds, and disappeared that night. Didn’t even say good-bye to his mother, which he regretted the rest of his life. But that was his choice.

Mangonel didn’t die, as it happens, but he was never any good for anything after that. He couldn’t speak right, and he couldn’t walk a straight line from one end of a room to the other between one day and the next. The Mangonel Circus is what Bardsham had killed. The Mangonel name.

The puppet that was her grandfather had jerked, stumbled, and fallen over. The figure of Meersh stood alone and somehow wretched.

Leodora had asked, “Did he ever go back?”

Soter shook his head. “He would send money to his mother whenever he had some and remembered it. But never a note, never a word. He was too ashamed to write, to say where he was. There was nothing he could say. He knew he would have killed his father. Happily. Of course his mother would have understood—you and I can see that, but not Bardsham. She must have known that she could find him, because he was famous, you know. Bardsham only grew in stature once he’d escaped from the circus. She could have found him anytime.”

“Like my mother.”

For a moment he looked alarmed. Then he smiled nervously and said, “Ah, I see what you mean—like your mother ran away from home. Yes. I often thought that his break with his family was the cause of much of his debauch—that is, his excesses. He drank and…well, drank more than any human being I’ve ever known. You could not be friends with him and not drink. He often said that he didn’t trust men who didn’t imbibe. They were afraid of something. Something inside themselves, and he felt he should be wary of it, too.”

“So when did you come to know him?”

Soter set down the last puppet figure. There would be no puppet for him.

With obvious relish he said, “I came across Bardsham while I was selling nostrums. He needed a reconnaissance man, a vanguard to make arrangements, make sure we had a place to perform and to sleep on every span, wherever we went. Make sure there would be no trouble. Likewise it must be someone with the necessary sophistication to announce him, a person of skill and wit to suss the nature of the place and its inhabitants. A person of reliable character and cunning and…” He paused, opened his hands as if tossing something in the air, and bowed slightly. “He had a need that I filled perfectly.

“Without such a person, Bardsham had to handle these things. He had to come out of the booth between each set and announce himself, interrupting the flow of the stories. That made him seem ordinary, and you can’t seem ordinary if you want to perform. Besides, he was Bardsham—ordinary wasn’t an option. The cloak of mystery was crucial.

“The two of us had been traveling parallel circuits, you might say. Every span’s different. Laws are different, permits are different. Sometimes you need one, sometimes you don’t. Sometimes you’ll get arrested if you set up without bribing the right fellow. Sometimes you get arrested if you try to bribe them. It’s half your life keeping on top of such things. A great artist cannot be distracted by such petty matters.” He sounded to her as if he were quoting someone. “An artist’s head is full of tricks and tales, not the names of who to pay off and how to finesse the obdurate authorities.”

His tone was one of longing. They had been young men then, on an adventure together. She could hear it. “The world was all before us,” he told her, then fell silent. Warily, she asked, “What about my mother?”

The dreaminess in Soter’s expression pinched into a look almost of pain. His eyes darted her way for a second. Not encouraged by his reaction, she pressed her point: “Is what Uncle Gousier says about her true?”

He picked up the puppet figure of Orinda. It glided across the case as he spoke. “What your uncle knows of your mother on the spans, he’s pieced together like a quilt—a word here, a rumor there. He never spoke to anyone who knew her. That is, other than me; and he’d prefer not to know what I know because it might spoil the picture he’s framed. He knows nothing of how she lived or what she did to survive. His account’s a fabrication. When I arrived here with you, your existence only confirmed everything he’d invented about her. That she must have been a wanton to produce a child and then abandon it was all too clear to him, and he set it like a minaret atop the story he’d already invented. You’re the crowning piece whether you wish it or not. Here you are and Leandra nowhere to be seen.” He slid the puppet back inside the case.

“But she was dead!”

“Which made no difference to him. That she’d left you in my care, in Bardsham’s care, before she went off is what matters, you see. In his mind, she abandoned you. Her death’s a mere inconvenience after the fact. An orphan proved what he already believed. She was unfit. Unfit to be his sister. And that’s the real issue.”

“Was she—” and here she stopped, poised at the brink of asking the critical question that would either vindicate or damn the image she retained, her mind shaping words the specifics of which were beyond her, but the depravity of which she’d inferred from the way her uncle’s mouth twisted and his eyes went hard as he uttered the name. “Was she really the Red Witch? Did she have powers?”

“Red Witch?” The name troubled him, she could see. “Where do you”—he tried unpersuasively to sound amused—“where do you get such a name?”

“From you,” she answered, and she watched as he hesitated, tried to recall when he had let this slip.

He squeezed shut his eyes and rubbed his forehead. “Oh. Well. It was just a name, that’s all, Leodora. A reputation. The same way that Bardsham was a name.” Orinda fell over and lay still on the box. “That’s enough now, I’m tired.”

But she would not be diverted by his pretense of exhaustion. This was too important. Her world was taking shape. “Was she the Red Witch? Did she lure men to their deaths?”

He stiffened. Slowly his hand uncovered his face. His bilious eyes distorted his haggard features into something inhumanly furious—gaunt and hard and evil. One corner of his mouth curled as he replied: “Ask your father. She lured him.”

He rose up, gathered the puppets, and shoved them back into the cases. Ignoring her as if she were no longer in the room, he carried the cases back to the dark pantry.

Although he let her stay through the night, Soter remained unapproachable, refusing to answer when she tried to speak to him. The subject was closed.

After that he tried never to mention Leandra again. If she asked a question, he wouldn’t answer with anything concrete or helpful. Mostly he feigned that he remembered too little to be of any use.

She couldn’t trust her uncle to tell her anything concrete because he did nothing but call his sister “the witch,” much the way the villagers did. To ask him was to invite trouble. Her aunt was especially reticent when Gousier was around, but even when he was absent she professed to have come to the island only after Leandra was gone and so be unable to provide any help. Leodora suspected this wasn’t true, but she didn’t want to accuse her aunt and lose the sympathy of the only person who ever sided with her.

Beyond Bouyan, her mother was nothing but a half-condensed phantom, a legend, a myth. On Bouyan she was a scourge, a harlot, an abomination.

While she couldn’t probe him for information, she did induce Soter to teach her about the puppets. He accepted her apprenticeship reluctantly at first, but with increasing devotion as, over time, her dedication and skill emerged. It wasn’t just a casual interest in puppetry she displayed. Nor were his first impressions of her dexterity off the mark. Leodora had her father’s gifts. Many times during the first years of her training, Soter proclaimed it.

The secret practice sessions gave meaning to her life. They made the indignities suffered at her uncle’s hands almost bearable. They gave her a goal to strive for—a means to leave the island, to strike out on her own.

The goal had no date. She didn’t know when or how she would leave, and she might not ever have gone at all. She really had no idea then what she was inviting—how much effort would be involved, how much of her life she would devote to practice. She would train and train while Soter forever reminded her that she wasn’t quite ready, that her skills still needed sharpening; that there was a world of detail she didn’t know, of subtlety she didn’t yet possess. As time passed, she began to think that she might spend her whole life preparing for just one performance.