Shadowbridge

TWO



Their performance of “The Emperor’s Tale” that night proved so afflated that it was to the audience as if two demigods had manifested inside the booth to render the story. Diverus plucked a delicate tune underneath Jax’s prologue, then switched to a small flute to represent the fox-empress, inventing a bittersweet theme for her on the spot. Even Leodora, in the midst of depicting the story, found her throat constricting with emotion. Every note was the perfect complement to the shadow figures on the screen. During an interlude, when she could glance back at him, she saw that his eyes were closed and his head was swaying as he played, as if while his body sat with her his spirit ventured into some other realm to bring back a music that no one had ever heard, yet all knew the instant it was played that it already lived in their bones, threaded through generations. Wherever he channeled it from, he was playing music that had formed the moment the story was first told—the music of the story’s origin. She knew, even before she took her bow afterward, that they would be weeping as they applauded. She made Diverus come out, too, with his flute, and presented him to them. The ovation doubled. “Kitsune Jax!” someone yelled, and coins rained upon them. If Soter had an opinion of the musician at that moment, he didn’t express it, but gestured, redundantly, to them both as if the audience needed instruction in where to direct their acclaim.

The next morning, with a mist hanging over the span, she and Diverus went back to the park, but the kitsune and his brethren weren’t there. The benches on which the players had sat the day before were empty. No one played go¯ today. The strangely cut and shaped flora seemed different, too, but Leodora couldn’t be sure if it was her imagination or if the topiary had been changed. She didn’t remember the one cut like a huge bird with a fan for a tail, nor the one that looked like a giant depiction of her Meersh the Bedeviler puppet—and surely she would have noticed that one if it had been there the previous afternoon. Who was it cut these bushes, anyway?

People strolled through the park in leisurely fashion; some passing nearby stared at her curiously. Diverus noticed this first and pointed it out to her, and the two of them watched people watching her as they passed. Then one woman, rather than just watching, approached her. With her face hidden behind a small fan that she fluttered, the woman asked, “Would you sell me, young woman, some of your hair?”

“My hair?” She self-consciously touched the fall of it at her neck. She wore it unbound today, enjoying the freedom of anonymity.

“Enough to make a wig for me. I’ll pay you well.”

“I’m sorry, but no.”

The woman made a slight bow of disappointment, then fluttered away.

Diverus said, “They must never have seen hair like yours.”

“But it’s just hair!”

“To us. We might want to leave this park, though, before she finds someone who’s willing to take it from you.”

“Take my hair?” Clearly she found the idea absurd.

“In the underspan of Vijnagar, if someone liked what you had, they took it. If you disagreed with them, there was usually an argument, sometimes a fight. Sometimes a murder.”

“You saw this?”

“Not every day, no. Own nothing to feed someone’s envy and you’ll live a good long time. Otherwise, you have to be willing to fight.”

“You had something to steal?” she asked, thinking that he wasn’t merely reciting but spoke from personal experience.

“No,” he answered. “I had nothing, less than nothing, so I was left alone.”

They continued to wander idly through the park, which appeared larger than possible. Beyond the benches and up a few steps the way was blocked by a stand of bamboo grown so thickly together that when they at last located a meandering path of small stones among the stems, they had to walk single-file along it, weaving through an increasingly impeditive forest, so dense that the clogged air hung motionless, while in branches overhead unseen birds chattered shrilly. The world became green, crepuscular, and claustrophobic.

When it seemed the forest could be compressed no further and remain navigable, the bamboo began to thin, until they were catching glimpses of the world beyond it again. Soon only a single, random row of stems stood between them and the outside. The path ended at a few steps, leading down a slope to a circular pond. In the center of the pond, water trickled over an odd pile of stones that seemed to have been arranged to produce the most noise possible—the trickling and burbling drowned out even the birdsong they’d left behind. Orange fish with large sleepy eyes suggesting a jaded intelligence swam lazily near the edge of the pond and followed them as they walked around it. There were benches at intervals, but no one sat. This whole portion of the park stood deserted.

The path led to a broad oval of sand, ringed by rocks. A solitary figure stood in the sand, his face hidden beneath a low conical hat. He held a small rake and, as Leodora and Diverus came upon him, he was carefully creating a series of crosshatches. The sand had been worked elsewhere into swirls and nautiloid patterns. In silence they watched him perform, and Leodora felt as if she were watching the creator himself, making the world. He paused to consider what he’d done, standing idly with one foot on his thigh and his weight upon the rake. He seemed then like a statue, as if she had only imagined his movement. Quietly she and Diverus crept past him. If he was aware, he didn’t show it. He didn’t move at all. On the far side and bordered by short conical trees, a few steps led down from this strange plateau and across another area of exotically shaped bushes, and to a set of polished wooden trellises that served as gates. Beyond them, people moved past randomly, as if unaware of this enigmatic park.

Exiting through the gates, the two found themselves on a secondary boulevard that paralleled the one they’d taken upon arriving on the span the day before. Looking back, they found that they had walked beneath the oddly canted central tower without noticing and viewed it now on the far side of where they’d begun, halfway to the end of the span. “Maybe the bamboo forest hid it,” suggested Diverus, as if reading her thoughts, but even to himself he sounded unconvinced. He added, “Maybe we want to walk back on the road instead.”

“There certainly wasn’t anyone to ask for stories,” said Leodora.

“I think it won’t be the same going back anyway.” She looked at him questioningly, and he explained, “I think it’ll have become another park.”

What struck her as the most odd about his observation was that she both understood and agreed with him.

This entire span seemed to be alive with elusive magic.

They walked along the avenue toward the center tower, passing other pedestrians, fruit and vegetable stands, pedicabs, and shops. The shops on their right hid the park from view, and when they did catch a glimpse, all they saw was a stone wall.

The two of them had only just entered the shadow under the middle tower’s swaybacked crossbeam when a procession cut across their path.

It was nothing like the parade of monsters from the previous night. The people—for they all looked human this time—wore white garments: robes, pants, shirts, all white. Only one woman, near the front, wore color—a bright red scarf upon her head. In the middle, lying upon a board but held up above their heads on a series of poles, lay a body. It, too, was wrapped in white, from head to foot.

Leodora turned and started after them. When Diverus didn’t tag along she turned back to him. “I have to see this,” she told him. “I don’t know why, but I have to.”

The street ran directly to one of the canted uprights supporting the swooping beam overhead. The street widened to circle the upright, and the procession flowed around it like water around a stalk of bamboo. On the far side the split road opened even wider, into a crescent at the span’s edge. The funeral group spread out to fill the crescent. Leodora and Diverus remained on its fringe, slightly separate from the others so as not to intrude. They didn’t know how they might be regarded.

The woman with the red scarf began a recitation: “There are two hundred levels to the universe. The higher we ascend, the hotter it becomes. The realm of the spirits would scorch us, and even they cannot reach the level of the fire and water gods, but are connected to it only by rays, as the sun connects to us.”

A woman standing beside her and clutching the hands of two children began to wail. The children took their cues from her and added their voices to the anguish.

Diverus moved off from the clustered group, to the rail at the edge of the span. Leodora trailed after him, curious about his response. She could still hear the priestess’s recitation, but the talk of levels made little sense to her. Through thin mist the other wing of the span was visible, separate but close enough that Leodora could make out the shapes of people in the nearest lane. As she approached the rail, she could see below them the darkness of the land that sloped out from under the surface of the span. A hillside. She leaned over and peered down into a deep valley that ran between the avenues. Houses on stilts dotted the lower slopes, and the ones at the very bottom stood in water, in a narrow stream that snaked through it. The course of the stream led back to a waterfall in the gray distance. On each side of the stream, the land had been flooded—a system of small gates and channels allowed water to be diverted from the stream, enough to cover the valley floor. Some sort of crop grew in the spread of water, and people worked there with hoes and other implements, with baskets slung over their shoulders, standing ankle-deep.

The funeral recitation had ended, and the body—still on its plank but now fastened to ropes—began a steady descent over the edge. She had to lean out over the rail to see where it was going.

The hillside below was cracked open, and inside the opening, directly beneath the descending body, lay a grotto. The sides of it were jagged; down in its depths lights flickered, like candles sparkling off faceted gems, revealing more white-robed figures. They stood awaiting the body, reaching up eagerly while it descended toward the open mouth of the hill.

Diverus said suddenly, “My mother died and they dropped her down into the sea.” She glanced sidelong at him. He seemed calm, almost entranced. “There was no land under Vijnagar. Just water. They wrapped her up like that and then they sent her under the water.”

“Diverus—”

“I came to believe she’d become a mermaid and lives now in a city at the bottom of the sea.”

She found she could watch the descent of the body by watching his eyes. He tracked it until it was taken by the figures in the hole.

“It’s the same, though, isn’t it?” he said.

The priestess recited: “After the Storm of Raruro, comes a reuniting, and all spirits join. Shukkon and fukkon will join. Until that day he must remain separated from us—that is the order of things.”

Diverus pushed away from the ceremony and through the many figures in white. Leodora followed after him. He didn’t go far but sat down against a wall where a cart had been standing earlier—a few cast-off vegetables lay scattered there. He rested his face on his fists. As she came up to him, Leodora thought he looked like a little boy. She knelt, and then sat beside him.

“It’s strange,” he said immediately. “I can remember it all, but in the way you remember the stories you tell, the way I remember the story that fox told us yesterday. It never happened to me, but I can recall that emperor and his fox-wife now—as if I was there.”

She said nothing, but considered that awhile. Idly she picked up a long-necked gourd and a taro potato and began toying with them, dancing them about. There seemed to be no answer, really. Diverus had been present, and yet from what she gathered, the Diverus seated beside her hadn’t existed then. He was a creation of the gods. A Dragon Bowl had made him.

Meanwhile the funeral procession was returning from the burial. The wails of the two children at the rear of the group reached them well before the children passed by.

Without looking at him, Leodora said, “It isn’t as if you could have saved her, Diverus. Any more than I could have saved my parents. They both died before I could talk.” She met his angry eyes and held his gaze. “You think she died on your account.”

His eyes widened with surprise and betrayal, and she knew that she’d guessed right. She spun the gourd around, then waltzed it to the potato. “There isn’t a day when I don’t miss my aunt Dymphana. I can’t see her again, maybe ever.” Her throat tightened and her face flushed. She’d thought she was saying this for him, not to express her own pain. She wanted to stop but had to go on. He had to understand. She willed herself not to cry. “It’s not my fault I can’t see her. I didn’t make it this way, my uncle did. He made the rules, and what I’ve done…is because of that.”

People were walking past now. She lowered her head, unable to look at him or anyone else, knowing that she might burst into tears if she did—and how stupid and pointless that would be—but she couldn’t help it. She focused on the vegetables, on making them waltz about and pirouette upon the stones.

The crying children came abreast of her but she didn’t look up, even when their noise was right on top of her. And then suddenly the crying stopped.

At that she raised her head slowly. The children stood directly before her. They were watching her hands in fascination. They might have been twins, both with black hair and almond eyes. Above, holding their hands, their mother, the widow, met her gaze and made a pitiful attempt at a smile, ruined by grief. Her tears had etched trails in the thick powdery makeup on her cheeks. The thought came to Leodora: All of us are here on account of death.

The rest of the funeral party moved on, but the mother couldn’t work up the energy to order her children away, and so she stood there as if expecting Leodora to read her a future.

Quietly, Diverus suggested, “Tell them a story.”

She glanced over at him. He seemed to have forgotten his despair. His eyes shifted from her to the children and back again.

She spoke what she’d been thinking. “We’re all here on account of death,” she said, and she spun the long-necked gourd about, as if it were turning to face the children. “Death is everywhere, but do you know that once upon a time Death didn’t exist? No? Let me tell you, then, how Death came into our world.” She raised her eyes to the widow. “I think you should sit down to hear this. It’s not a long story, but it isn’t short, either.”

The mother knelt, and her children sat beside her.

“Now, does anyone here know who Chilingana is?” asked Leodora.

One of the twins said, “He dreamed Shadowbridge.”

“That’s right. He was the original dreamer.” She walked the taro potato forward and hid the gourd from sight, then leaned over and picked up a small cluster of enoki and set it aside. She said, “One day a different dream came to him.”