Shadowbridge (18 page)

 . . . . . 

She didn’t dare light a lamp. She had to feel her way through the cavern.

Around the bend the Coral Man was glowing, but now no brighter than the farthest star. Just as well for her—she didn’t think she could have touched him again if he were brightly lit. This way, she could pretend that he was dull and harmless.

She stood the case up beside him to compare. As she had thought, he was smaller than the case, just like she was. Once it was open, she had to pat around in its depths to find the black ribbon. As she pulled up the false bottom, from the corner of her eye she thought she saw the Coral Man lean toward her. She jumped and looked straight at him. He hadn’t moved of course. It was, she insisted, her steaming breath in the air that had caused the illusion. “Why in the world am I doing this?” she muttered, and answered herself:
Because he wants me to.

She had to summon every reserve of courage to touch him. She lifted him by the shoulders, and, just as Tastion had said, he felt as light as a handful of sand. She stood him in the case. It might indeed have been his coffin. She closed the false bottom; it fitted perfectly over him. As she started to shut the lid, she paused. The cave seemed to tilt, her stomach to flip. In the midst of the moment’s vertigo she experienced a premonition that this had been pre-ordained, that no accident had provided the perfect coffin for her enigma, just as no random sea dragon had swum into her lagoon. From her mother to her, from the sea to this empty figure, forces were at work, conspiring, aligning. She was supposed to go. She was certain of it now. Nothing was going to stand in her way, she couldn’t be stopped.

The moment passed but her fingers trembled as she snapped shut the lid. She tipped, lifted the case, almost expecting the thing inside it to rap on the bottom and kill her with terror. But it did nothing. It weighed nothing. The case might have been empty.

In utter darkness she shuffled back the way she’d come, traveling by instinct this last time through the uterine cave and out the narrow cleft.

 . . . . . 

Soter asked where she had been, but she said nothing to him as she handed over the case. He held it in puzzlement, and she imagined that he was trying to feel the weight of whatever she’d added, and couldn’t. He set the case down beside the puppets, opened it. Before she could stop him, he pulled up the bottom. A small sound emerged from him—the word “What?” He dropped the false bottom back into place and immediately began replacing the puppets. After a moment he said, “Later you’ll tell me what that is and where it came from and why it’s going with us. Right now you’d better hurry. We don’t want to arrive on Ningle too late, or no one will take us in. Get your belongings and hurry back quick as you can.” He flicked his fingers at her. “Go!”

Obediently she hurried out and along the dark path.

In the boathouse she saw that the light in her garret was lit, then chided herself for having left it burning. She hoped Tastion hadn’t come back.

She crept up the stairs, but it was impossible to be silent in that building. Every step creaked or groaned. She sensed rather than saw movement behind her, but before she could turn something caught the braid of her hair and yanked so hard that she was lifted off her feet. Her scalp blazed with pain. She dangled, swung like a bell once, and flew the length of the room. She slammed into the wall beside the windows. An arm’s length to the left and she would have plunged through it to her almost certain death. The wall didn’t kill her but it knocked her half senseless.

She didn’t have to see or hear him to know it was Gousier. She tried to react. Her mind screamed; her body refused to respond.

Gousier lurched across the garret, caught her hair again, dragged her across the floor to the post beside the stairs. He hauled her up again and, with his hand on her throat, crushed her hard against it.

His face was all but inhuman, and his sweat stank of liquor as well as fish, but he wasn’t drunk. Drunk, he might have been escapable. “Well, my girl, you’ve done me up good, haven’t you? Bare-tit riding their dragons? I’m lucky they haven’t just come and cut my head off and burned my house down. They’ve condemned you. No wedding. No anything. And worse. They say they’ll find someone else to haul their fish up to market. Unless—” He winced as if saying this hurt, and his head swiveled as if the room were moving around him; he let go of her throat, let go as though forgetting she was there; she sucked in a desperate breath, but before she could act he struck her so hard across the mouth that the back of her skull hitting the post exploded lightning in her head. Colors, lights, blackness spun together, shattered.

The floor scraped her chin. A splinter stung her awake. She tasted dirt but couldn’t focus on it. She wasn’t even sure how she’d fallen—the memory had been knocked out of her. She heard her uncle raving. He smashed the bed frame, tore the bedding into shreds. She ought to get up, but she still couldn’t find the means to drive her muscles to act. Not in time.

Gousier came back to work on her. He curled her braid around his hand and jerked her upright, where she dangled at his eye level. She screamed at the pain.

“I can save myself. They want me to give you up. And I’m going to. I’m going to give you to Tenikemac. Agmeon says they haven’t had to use the purging ritual you’ll endure in more than three generations. No female’s been so stupid as you. Not even…not even her.” While he spoke, he tore the clothes off her, pushing her to tug and rip them down, and finally dropping her again. He used the shreds of her bedding to gag her and tie her hands. He recited all the while. “First they carry you out into the water and hold you under as a purification, see, appeasing the dragons’ spirits, penance for your outrage. He says most people pretty much evacuate out every orifice before they’re finished, cleans out everything. But then they stop. They want you alive, see, at the end. From water to fire, that’s how it has to go. They burn you next. In the long house. Over the center fire. They cook you slow on a spit shoved right up your arse and down your spine. You go crazy from the roasting, the pain, the fire. But you don’t die then, either. You’re still alive when they cut you up into pieces. The flesh is still alive and singing with agony. And they sprinkle you out across the water to make amends for the way you’ve violated the honor of the sea. You become part of the sea and the world goes back to how it was. Fish don’t disappear, storms don’t come to smash them. No one else has to suffer. Oh, my, yes, I’ll do that, my dearest little Leandra, yes I will. But first, first I’m going to have you right here, the way everyone else did. Everyone on the spans, everyone…you gave yourself to everyone and not even a thought for me. I’m going to ride you till you’ve got splinters in your back, and you’ll be asking for the fire at the end of your night, little bitch. You show yourself to them that pays, you’ll show it to me, too.”

He dropped her and then untied his own belt. His face was contorted and he whined in the back of his throat, as if even in madness he couldn’t hide from himself what he was about to do.

Leodora felt blood spreading like the chill of death through her hair. If she lay here he would rape her, and everything he promised would follow. Without knowing quite how, she made herself get up on one knee and started to climb to her feet. Gousier saw it and, though his pants were half off, he kicked out savagely.

She dodged his foot and threw herself with all her strength against him, struck his hip but tripped against another support post, which knocked her back against him again. Gousier’s foot was still in the air. He nearly caught his balance from the first blow, but was no more ready than she for the rebound. She knocked him sideways.

He twisted and swung his descending foot to catch himself, but it slipped off the floorboard and into the stairwell. He made a desperate grab for the nearest post, shredding the skin on his fingers as he tipped through the opening and fell down the steps.

Leodora pressed herself against the post as if it were consciousness. Blood was in her face, stinging her eyes. Inside her head, the world burned bright, and she lost the sense of where she was, or why she’d been tied. When she opened her eyes again, the room held steady, and she tried standing on her own. She worked her hands to get free of the bedding, but it was so tight that her fingers had gone numb. She thought her wrist was moving, but there might have been no skin left on it for all she knew.

The steps creaked, and she whirled about to see Gousier, his face filthy with dirt and blood, come rising up out of the hole. He looked for her, turned and saw her, and grinned the most terrible, feral grin. “Leandra,” he growled, the name an emblem of all that he intended. Now he would do everything he’d promised and worse. He put his hands on the floor and continued up.

Leodora threw herself against the raised trapdoor. It snapped off its pin and slammed down onto her uncle’s head. His fingers slipped and he fell partway, and the door, with her riding it, hammered into his head a second time and then banged shut. She heard his body tumble down the stairs. She lay on her side, dust erupting out of the boards.

Silence followed while the dust settled. Streaked with dirt, sweat, and blood, choking on her gag, she strained to hear if he was coming back, praying to any gods who would listen not to let him. She was finished if he did now.

She might have lain there forever before she heard the stairs creak once more. She rolled over and tried to sit up, but her arm beneath her had fallen asleep. She lay back across the door, knowing that her weight would not deter him if he could still use his arms. If he got into the garret this time he would win.

The trapdoor thumped once. Twice, trying to rise. A pause.

A muffled voice called, “Lea?” It was Tastion.

She whined a ragged breath and rolled off the door. He pushed it open. The moment he saw her, he scrambled the rest of the way up the stairs.

“Oh, Lea, Lea, are you all right? Oh, what a stupid question, of course you aren’t. Is he coming back?” He untied her hands and helped her sit.

“He’s not…not on the stairs?”

“No.” He wiped his palm across her forehead, smearing away some of the blood that covered her entire face in a crimson mask.

“Close the trap, Tastion. Close and lock it.”

She leaned back against the wall and flexed her hands, rubbing her wrists together. Her head throbbed. Her jaw ached. She rested a moment and Tastion, to his credit, didn’t bombard her with questions. He observed calmly, “The door won’t latch. You’ve broken it.” Then after another moment had passed, he added quietly but defensively, “I didn’t tell him.”

“No.” Her fingers tingled now. She tried to get up, pushing against the wall. Tastion closed his hands around her waist and drew her to her feet. “Help me down to the water please.”

Saying nothing, he opened the trapdoor, then preceded her down the steps, but Gousier did not strike. At the bottom she said, “Wait.” The light from above revealed the shape of a leg behind the steps. She edged to it, bent down. Sparks jittered across her vision for an instant.

Gousier had careened off the stairs before reaching the bottom and somehow ended up halfway beneath them. He lay with his head tucked under one arm as if hiding from the light. Leodora nudged the arm; a groan escaped him, but he didn’t move. She backed away.

“He’s not dead?”

“Not yet.” She limped away from him, out of the boathouse and down the beach. The quiet sea was warmer than the air, and she entered the water, wading in until it reached her waist, then sat with it up to her neck. She lay back, letting the water wash her hair and clean her wounds. The salt burned, and though it made her hiss, she was glad of it. Glad to be alive to feel it. The inside of her mouth was cut. Her cheek felt stiff and puffy. She submerged her head, and listened to the sound of blood in her ears, her heartbeat thundering, her head and mouth stinging.

Coming up again she was dizzy. Tastion had to help her out of the surf. She shivered in the chill air; her naked skin prickled with goose bumps. She began to cry.

Tastion let her cling to him. After a while, he turned her, then guided her back to the boathouse.

The wound in her scalp was superficial—not from the pulling of her hair but from striking something as she fell. It had stopped bleeding and would be only a bruise and a headache on the morrow. She discarded the clothes her uncle had torn off her. She couldn’t wear them now, even if they weren’t a ruin. She thought,
Just one less item I have to bring.
She’d finished crying. It was time to act.

She put on other clothes, whatever was hanging on the pegs—she hardly noticed what, even as she was pulling them on. Wiping her eyes, she began picking up items from around the room: a pair of boots that she’d made herself; a few combs of bone, one of which Tastion had given her; sandals; a shell that she’d found on the beach many years earlier, which was nothing extraordinary but all the more precious to her for that and because it, like she, had survived her uncle’s assault. Everything she gathered into the center of a cloak, and tied that into a bundle. There was her whole life, weighing practically nothing. “Light as air,” she said, thinking of the coral effigy, which she was stealing from them. She would not tell Tastion. Then he wouldn’t have to lie. He watched her with eyes full of worry.

With the bundle slung over her shoulder, she leaned forward and kissed him. Her mouth twinged.

On the second step she paused to look around the garret, to make it a space in her mind, her memory. Tastion followed her down.

At the bottom she set aside the bundle. In her hand she carried strips of cloth, the same ones he’d used on her; she went to Gousier and rolled him onto his face. This time he didn’t make a sound. His head lolled. She tied his hands over his head as hard as she could, then gagged him so tightly that his back teeth showed. She attempted to haul him by the arms. One of them was twisted the wrong way, and she knew it was broken. He was too heavy. Tastion grabbed his legs then, and they picked him up and clumsily slung him over the lip of his rotted boat. He landed with a sharp report of snapping boards. The boat shook as if it might split. It tipped toward them, and Gousier’s naked buttocks abruptly protruded out the rotted hole in its side.