Shadowbridge (5 page)

The family were escorted back to the market to find their stall a shambles. The fish had been stolen; some of the ceramics were smashed. Apologies from the nearby vendors, who might have intervened but more likely had participated in the plunder, did nothing to mitigate the damage or curb Gousier’s anger. His ribs were broken, his face was bruised and swollen, and he’d lost a tooth. The police pointed out that he had been caught in the act of murder and should be thankful he was alive to complain.

For weeks afterward he could hardly walk along beside the laborers he had to hire to cart the fish up the steps. The workers were hardly better than beggars, but no one else wanted the work. Once his bones had knit, he visited the Kuseks and paid them to see that the pathetic kidnapper was banished to a prison isle called Palipon. It was a bare chunk of rock so far out in the ocean that it could not be seen from any of the great spirals of bridges. No one sent to Palipon was ever heard from again. When he announced this over dinner, the whole family stopped moving as if upon a signal. They stared; they paled. Gousier retorted, “It’s where all her kind should go.” Then he lowered his head and ate as if no one else shared the table with him and his heart was as light as a cloud.

Later, from her bed, she heard the family arguing. Gousier snarled, “Well, what
sort
of a woman would sell a child into perdition? Or maybe she’s an Edgeworld goddess, do you think? It was a better life she was going to give the girl, in a tiny cell, chained in filth to a bed frame, waiting for her next customer? Because that’s what was going to happen. These people are worse than anything you know, Dymphana, I don’t care if you grew up in the same house with them!” Her aunt said something too quiet for her to hear, but Gousier drowned out the last of it: “Then maybe you’d rather have stayed up there! Maybe the street has more to offer you!” After that it seemed no one spoke again until after she’d fallen asleep.

Her grandfather, although he’d only been struck the once, seemed unable to recover. He suffered spasms, numbness, and headaches that rendered him helpless. A few months later he was dead. Her grandmother died of grief less than a month after that. Leodora was no less devastated than anyone by their combined loss. Her world was shrinking, closing in on her. She dreamed of the two of them with her in an alley where the buildings were sliding together to crush them, and both her grandparents were pushing her, trying to get her out before the walls met, but she could see the space narrowing ahead, and she knew she would never reach the avenue in time, never reach it at all, and then the walls did slam together behind her, so loud that it woke her up. The dream proved portentous.

Gousier forbid her ever to set foot on Ningle again.

Over time she would learn that he blamed her for everything that had happened that day, including the deaths of his parents, which became the foundation for unlimited blame thereafter. Gousier remained as bitter as patchroot wine. His retribution was bottomless.

It was during one of his tirades that he inadvertently called her “Leandra.” He caught himself, but the realization of what he’d said only fueled his anger, as if she had cleverly diverted him. Provoked him. After that, almost her every error or act of defiance was equated with something Leandra had done, although he never spoke the name except in anger, because he refused to acknowledge that he had ever had a sister except when too angry to help himself.

Leandra.
Her mother.

TWO

A name was almost the only thing she knew of her mother—but the lacuna hadn’t been apparent before her kidnapper had tried to assume the role. And while that was impossible because Leandra was dead, the impersonation lifted the pall on her knowledge and she saw that nothing lay beneath it, nothing of her mother beyond that name, spoken only in anger.

She was to learn nothing more of her parents until she ran away from home at the age of ten.

Running away had become something of a routine by then. Initially it was herself she fled from—part of her believed her uncle’s accusations, believed that she had been responsible for her grandparents’ deaths, and she tried to escape her guilt to no avail. Dymphana was sensitive to her pain, however, and comforted her when Gousier wasn’t around, telling her, “You are not to blame for this misery, and you mustn’t think that you are. You’re a little girl. You had no experience with such people as tried to hurt you, and those who are older than you ought to have been looking out for you. They should have protected you. Your grandfather knew this, and I think it wore him down. He blamed himself. Your uncle…his way of adjusting is to cast the blame on everyone else. And you are everyone else this time. It is not your fault, child. It never was.” The more times she heard this, the more she accepted it. For a while this was enough to compel her not to hate him for the things he said. But her compliance seemed only to anger Gousier more. When another worker quit and he condemned her to the odious job of cleaning the day’s catch in Fishkill Cavern, she ran away from him. The problem was, there was no place for her to run to. She didn’t dare run to Ningle again, and she knew only a little of the island. She’d long ago been scared off exploring its mysteries, too, with ominous warnings about things that lurked in trees, in bushes, in the dark. Her knowledge of the world was so small as to be nonexistent, and Gousier had only to wait for her certain return in order to effect retribution for her misconduct.

In the past when she’d run away, she had escaped to Tenikemac, where Gousier could always hunt her down. The village in general considered her tainted, contaminated by her association with Ningle and with a family that did business there daily; but most of the villagers overlooked this censure, since most of them did business with Gousier, too. She was, after all, a mere child. They always gave her up when he came looking.

She had two playmates in the village—a girl, Kusahema, and a boy named Tastion, neither of whom at that age would have understood the proscriptions against fraternizing with her. That would come later, or perhaps they were expected to discover it on their own. Within a few years Tastion would prove to be her only friend in that village.

However, on that particular day, she broke the pattern and didn’t flee to the village. Instead she ran to Soter, never imagining that this one element of change would alter the rest of her life.

 . . . . . 

Soter had taken up residence in an old smokehouse back in the woods, where he lived in relative seclusion. The family—her grandparents—had offered it to him as a reward for having brought Leodora home to them, and thank the ocean they had been alive back then. Her uncle surely would not have let Soter remain on the island.

Soter kept two vats brewing most of the time: His concoctions were always either cooking or fermenting. The main ingredients were fruits he picked himself. She knew that he sometimes went off by himself to the far side of Bouyan and returned days later, dragging bags of fruits behind him. Other items he purchased on Ningle. The product—those quantities he didn’t consume himself, for even then he was prone to imbibe—he sold to Tenikemac. Although they held him in no higher regard than her uncle, somehow Soter managed to be more tolerated. It may simply have been that he wasn’t related to the family—and that he was careful not to mention that what they were drinking included ingredients lugged down from the spans.

Before she even saw the gray hut through the wall of brambles, she smelled his cooking brew. The furious tang of fermentation clogged the air.

She crept around the brambles, listening for any sound of him. He was often irritable when sober, and had chased her away more than once when she’d interrupted him doing seemingly nothing. At first she thought to hide behind his hut, only to find that the accumulated sediment from one of the vats had been dumped out where she would have secreted herself, creating a noisome bog. Beneath the tiny rear window of the hut stood a line of small kegs he called barriks—half a dozen hogsheads of his wine. It was the first time she’d seen them all lined up—one entire vat’s worth. The window was unshuttered.

She climbed up on two of the barriks and poked her head in the window. The interior was dim and smoky. Maybe Soter was gone. She backed out and looked around.

The woods were empty of people. Overhead, leaves sizzled in a breeze. She heard no other sounds.

She put one leg in through the window, then had to double nearly all the way, head to knees, to ease herself over the sill. She felt with her toe for the floor, stretching so much that she slid off-balance. Almost immediately her foot touched the floor, which left her balanced on one foot with the other leg out the window and raised halfway to her ear. She couldn’t get her other foot inside until she had placed her hands on the floor as if about to perform a handstand. Then she folded her leg in through the window, crouched down noiselessly, and looked about.

She was inside Soter’s makeshift pantry. She had never seen inside the pantry before: It was larger than its narrow doorway implied. To her left hung a heavy tarp, which hinted at even more space. She stepped into the doorway, parted the curtain, and stuck her head into the main room. Almost at once she drew back.

Soter was there. His silhouette perched on a low stool, knees up high, his arms splayed, like some spider creature. He was muttering softly as if to a companion—whispery words that she was unable to catch. She didn’t see anyone else. He was not looking in her direction, so she stuck her head farther out. He gave a loud, abrupt curse, and she thought he must have seen her. She stepped back behind the curtain and glanced at the tiny window, certain that she would never get through it fast enough. She scrambled instead behind the tarp and, turning to pull it tight, backed into two black cases. As she stumbled, she twisted about and caught herself on the top case, but her weight made it slide. Something from a shelf farther back fell with an alarming crash.

Soter yelled, “Damn you louse-ridden rodents! How did you get in this time?” He marched into the pantry and flung back the tarp. He had a cleaver in one hand, poised to cut her in half.

She screeched and slid as far back on the cases as she could go. Half a dozen more items bounced and rolled and crashed onto the floor.

Soter closed his eyes and clutched his ears, nearly burying the cleaver in his own head in the process. “Oh, don’t squeal, Lea! Don’t shift about!” he hissed. He groaned and backed away, dropping the tarp. “Oh, I’ve got a Glauber’s head this morning,” she heard him say.

A minute later he returned without the cleaver. “What are you doing in there, anyway? Out, come out here now.” He gestured her from the room with one hand and pinched his temples with the other.

She told him about her fight with her uncle over the amount of fish she had cut up, valiantly trying not to cry while she did, and he nodded with care, rubbing his eyes, pulling at his nose. He offered her some biscuits.

“I’m surprised,” he said, “that he hasn’t come bellowing down upon me like the wind, hammering at my door. Then I might find a place for that cleaver. He doesn’t know you’re here, does he? Doesn’t know, doesn’t care. Just chased you off and gathered up his fish and went off to sell them to people who wouldn’t have anything to do with him otherwise on behalf of some other people who wouldn’t have anything to do with him otherwise.” He patted her head and told her, quietly, that she could stay as long as she liked, provided she made no more noise. He retreated to the outer room. She followed, and found him pouring a cup of his latest brew. After a few sips, he sighed. “Rejuvenation.”

Leodora nibbled at her biscuit awhile. Then she asked him about the long cases behind the tarp.

“The undaya cases, ah-ha, yes,” he answered, very conspiratorially. “Those are a secret kept from your uncle. He doesn’t know I have them, or he’d probably want to burn them, and me along with them.”

“Why?”

“Because,” he replied, and she thought that was all he would tell her. Then he added, “They belonged to your father.”