Shadowbridge (8 page)

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.

FOUR

Life on Bouyan ran along with a tedious sameness.

Each morning she awoke in her small garret atop the boathouse. It was a room she had taken as a sanctuary after discovering it on one of her flights from her uncle. It had a small bed and sparse furnishings in it, suggesting that someone had lived there before her. Her aunt and uncle didn’t resist when she asked if she could move into the garret. In truth, she had asked Dymphana, who as always had acted as go-between for her; but she had watched the interchange, had seen her uncle’s hooded gaze shift to her with an incomprehensible look of relief, as though he wanted her gone. For once his desires and hers agreed. She was thirteen. Her body was changing and with it her emotional compass: She wanted privacy, she wanted her own places on the island. Her uncle’s one stipulation was that she cease all complaining about her assigned tasks.

Once she had arisen, she dressed and went down the beach to Tenikemac to watch the sea dragons surface. The village dotted the whole curve of the bay just over the north ridge. The ridge took half an hour to reach, and as she walked she watched the people already up and working, especially the half a dozen women gathering seaweed in baskets along the beach ahead of her. Soon she had reached them, but for the most part they ignored her, letting her by as if she didn’t exist. On the ridge, she stopped and watched.

The men in teams of two carried their rolled-up nets down beside the water, where they unfurled them. Tastion and his father made up one team. He pretended not to see her, so no one was suspicious of the true relationship between them.

Soon four younger boys waded into the water up to their waists, each carrying a large conch with pierced ends. In unison they raised the shells to their lips and blew a trumpet call.

Everyone stopped what they were doing and turned to study the surface.

Farther out, the water rippled. Slithers of yellow appeared, darted beneath the grayish waves. Then the heads rose up, one after another, strange, long-snouted, magisterial heads with large, black, and protruding eyes. These were the sea dragons.

There were sixteen of them in all, and she knew every one. She had never ridden them, never touched them. As a female, she wasn’t allowed. But she’d given them names. Her favorite was Muvros, the youngest, his head yellow and black, freckled with the red spots of youth, and his snout as thin as a reed. The tiny mouth at the end of it seemed forever puckered, as if sharing a kiss.

The conch boys fed the dragons long strips of the gathered seaweed and would feed them again when they returned. Meanwhile the fishermen, dragging their nets, moved into the water two by two. The dragons seemed as fascinated by the men as Leodora was with the dragons. They bowed their heads and let their riders clamber over their necks and sit. They seemed not in the least encumbered by the riders.

With a storyteller’s inquisitiveness, she wondered when this ritual had begun, and who had tamed the first dragon. Even the village itself didn’t seem to know, or else she would have known the story, too. Soter had taught her every one of their tales with the intention of having her perform them for villagers—once he was satisfied that she was skilled enough.

The dragons snaked off into deeper waters, their riders rocking from side to side. Some of the men would return early with full nets. Others stayed out all day, hunting a more difficult catch but one that might earn them more money on Ningle. Tastion and his father were among those who hunted farther away.

She watched until he was gone from sight, then turned and set off into the trees to perform the most hateful task in the world.

 . . . . . 

Fishkill Cavern lay not terribly deep inside the hill—the entrance was barely out of sight behind her before the passage turned and widened into a broad chamber. Close to the outside or not, no matter what the temperature on the island might be, the cavern remained as cold as an iceberg. Water barely dripped from the stalactites; when she was little it had been fun to watch and watch until a single drop fell. Now she felt as if her life was measured out in those drops, slow and icy and suspended for eternity.

Halfway between home and the village, nature had created the perfect repository for the village’s daily catch. A congeries of fish and mussels and other, articulated creatures surrounded Leodora every morning, laid upon reed mats that covered most of the floor. A large table comprising boulders and one flat slab stood close to one wall. That was where she spent her mornings, gutting, cleaning, and filleting; cracking and splitting and deveining. The offal poured, cold and slick, into baskets beside her, most of which would be taken back by the fishermen and thrown into the sea, sometimes as bait for other fish. The product, ready for market, was heaped on other mats and placed inside round wicker panniers with straps.

She didn’t clean all, or even most, of the catch—most of it was sold as it was. Even so there was enough work to keep her busy through the morning.

She wore her ragged clothes in layers. They kept her warm even as they became spotted with gore. Her feet were well wrapped, too. She always made a point of drying them before entering the cavern. If she hadn’t, she could have lost her toes, like the fabled trickster Meersh, against the icy cavern floor. Her hands could not be so protected. Her nimble fingers grew chilled and red, and finally numb. Her greatest fear was that she would lose so much feeling in her hands that she would chop off a finger and not notice it until her own blood was mingling with that of the fish. It was a fear grown into a phobia. Outside the cavern she kept a basket of ocean water placed in the sunlight. When her fingers numbed, she ran out and plunged them in the water. The flesh tingled to life and soon felt as if it were ablaze, the ends of her arms boiling. She did this four or five times a morning, preferring discomfort to dismemberment.

At some point her uncle would arrive, sometimes alone, sometimes with whatever vermin he could hire from Ningle to help tote the fish up onto the span, another half an hour’s walk from there. Gousier’s assistants turned over almost as often as the tide. They tended to ogle her, this young girl whose body was developing its adult shape earlier than some they knew. While they might have been the lowest of creatures on Ningle, down here on the island they were in a place that they could consider below even their station; and she, being of the island, was a pleb at their disposal. At least, so Soter had warned her. He predicted that, sooner or later, one or both assistants would try to grope her. He told her what to watch for—those subtle, vulpine glances being one of the signs. But so far no one had harmed her.

When her uncle had taken the panniers full of fish onto the span, then Leodora was freed from servitude.

Sodden with fish blood, she left the cavern and followed a small path south of the house, past Dymphana’s garden, and up over a few weedy dunes to the far side of a low promontory there. His claim on the land ended with the dunes, where the grass turned quickly into brush too thorny to cut down and the beach beyond narrowed to a footpath. The brush might have been a wall to fend off invaders from the sea—it was that thick. But if one continued along the strip of beach to the far side of them, the shore made an abrupt hook, creating a natural jetty of rock that doubled back upon the promontory like an index finger almost pressing against a thumb. When the tide was out, finger and thumb did close completely, and the small isolated inlet became a lagoon for a while. Even with the tide up and the waves coming across the hook, it remained free of strong currents and riptides, a hidden stillness. The dunes hid the lagoon from view on Gousier’s side, and the rocky hook rose inland like a low wall, as if a failed span had once upon a time attempted to push up out of the island, producing finally nothing but the thorny wildwood. No one had any use for it, and no one else ever went there.

On the sheltered strip of beach she peeled off the foul clothes. Underneath, ruddy patches marked her skin where the blood had soaked through. She immersed the clothes in the shallow water, and like coral smoke the blood swirled lazily out of them.

She left them soaking in the shallows and waded past them into the depths of the lagoon. Untied, her red hair fanned all the way to her waist.

Tiny creatures nipped at her toes, and she yelped and dove in, swimming out to the far rim of rocks, locating in them the gouge through which she could slip into the deeper water. She plunged headlong beneath the waves, kicked back up to the surface, and broke free with a gasp, in imitation of the sea dragons. She liked to play at being a dragon, at wriggling through the water with her feet together like a tail.

She had been born swimming, she thought.

 . . . . . 

The lagoon had been her private retreat for more than a year. She kept this secret even from Tastion; and, anyway, he was always out fishing or else working the fields on the distant side of the village when she went there, so there was no reason for him to know. She wanted—she needed—something to be hers alone. Even the puppets she had to share with Soter. And with the ghost of her father.

That day as on most days after swimming, she lay sunning herself, warm and muzzy and so nearly asleep that she didn’t hear any approaching footsteps. She had the impression of a sharp intake of breath, and then a voice poked through the membrane of dream with a single word: “Witch!” So loud and so near that she didn’t think it was real at all until she opened one eye and found him standing right beside her. He stepped up and his shadow blocked the sunlight.

She screeched and rolled away across the sand, scrambling for her wet clothing, draping the tunic over her budding figure before she turned to confront the intruder.

No one was there.

She roughly brushed the sand from her face, thinking she’d dreamed it all. But in the sand were his footprints, clear and cautious impressions in approach, wild gouges upon retreat. He’d fled past the wildwood and right up the rocks. She ran to them and climbed up high enough to look over the rise and saw him far away, still running in the shallows, not even daring to look back, his arms flailing ahead of him. A moment later he had disappeared around the curve of the beach.