Shadowbridge (9 page)

She’d only glimpsed him for an instant—an impression of tangled, matted gray hair and ragged clothes. And that word—that word lined with horror.
Witch.

She dressed in the sandy, sodden clothes then and ran to her uncle’s house. Dymphana was outdoors, digging corms from her garden.

Her aunt’s features pulled tight with concern at the sight of her. She asked, “What’s happened, child?”

Trembling, fidgeting, Leodora told her. A man had appeared, a stranger. He’d seen her and then run away. She clung to her aunt and cried, “But why
witch
! Why did he call me a witch? Why did he say that?”

Dymphana replied, “Oh, child, it’s not you, it’s your mother used to swim there, too, and I’m—”

Pressed against her, Leodora felt her aunt stiffen as both of them realized what had been said.

“How do you know that?” She pushed away, no longer frightened. “You said you didn’t know anything, that my mother was gone before you came to Bouyan!”

It seemed for a moment that Dymphana might try to bluff her way out of the trap, as if she weighed whether she should compound the denial with another obvious lie. Finally, however, she set down her hoe. “You must promise me never to tell your uncle nothing you hear from me. He’d know in a second where you learned it, because Soter doesn’t know a thing about Leandra’s life on this island. Gousier never told him nothin’, neither.”

“I promise,” she swore.

“You are so like her, you know that. More each day, to my eye. When I promised your uncle never to speak on your mother, it was when you was so tiny, and it seemed right then not to have you burdened with what we knew. Your uncle said he didn’t want you growing up like her. That seemed good wisdom then. But you are her daughter—and no one who knew her could ever mistake it.

“Your mother thought the ocean belonged to her, same as you—that lagoon especially, same as you. It was hers. Oh, you didn’t think anyone knew?” She smiled with tenderness through her exasperation then. “Dear heart, I keep track of you far more’n you realize. I know perfectly well that you lie about nude in the sand over past them dunes. Just like your mother did.”

A thrill ran through Leodora at the thought of her mother lying in that very same spot, seeing the same sky. The pleasure was followed a moment later by the realization that her private spot was no longer private. Like everything else, she shared it.

“The man you saw, he’d be an Omelune,” said Dymphana, as though that explained everything. “I expect he thought you were your mother.”

“Everyone calls her a witch. Everyone in Tenikemac. Uncle Gousier. Even Soter. He calls her the Red Witch.”

“Oh, does he now? To you he says this? That old fool. He has no right to talk on her at all, even if he does know such things as we don’t.”

“Well, at least he doesn’t
lie,
” she snapped, and for a moment she thought her aunt was going to weep.

Instead, her expression still pinched, Dymphana explained, “
Red Witch
is a name from the spans. No one ever called her that here. To be sure, the Omelunes called her worse. I always wondered if she adopted the name on purpose to mock Bouyan. Thumbin’ her nose at everything. That’d be like her.”

“What are Omelunes?”

Dymphana took her by the hand. “Come here and let me sit.” They walked over and sat on a broad stump in the shade. The breeze on her wet clothes quickly chilled Leodora, and she scooted off the stump and onto the ground, where she could face her aunt from within a warm patch of sunlight.

“You understand that I was no part of the household in her younger days. I didn’t meet your uncle till perhaps two years before she’d gone. She would have been a few years older than you are now when I arrived. Whenever I look on you, I can’t help seeing her like she’s a ghost right inside your skin. I’ve almost called you by her name more than once. You have so much of her—her body, her face. Your uncle sees it, too. I know he does. Even your stubbornness is your mother’s, although I’m inclined to think that being stubborn just runs in your family. For that brief while after I came, it was we two women and your grandmother living together in a small wood house all day long—it was smaller then. Your grandfather extended it three times with them extra rooms. He was a great carpenter, a builder.”

“I remember.”

“We all thought it would be filling up soon with more…” She paused, her face pinched, her eyes casting now toward the woods. Leodora knew that her aunt had given birth three times and that none of the babies had survived beyond a few months. She knew where the graves were, and that the final stillbirth had almost killed Dymphana. Her uncle would have no sons.

“Leandra told me all sorts of stories about herself. She didn’t mind telling them on herself, either. Didn’t mind looking the fool if it made for a good story. You might not have guessed, listening to her laugh at herself, make fun of herself, how much iron there was in her backbone. I came down from Ningle to live with your uncle, and I had certain airs when I first arrived here: thinking I was above this place, better than it was, and that I was above everyone born here. I needed to pretend that then. My family on Ningle—they’re all gone now—they were so poor that this life is much better than I could have hoped for there. I’d have been in a gutter or worse. Gousier was so fine and strong. He used to laugh. You wouldn’t know it now. He used to be like your mother that way. Or maybe she let him share some of her joy, so that he seemed happier than he was. All I know is, when she left, she took that joy away with her. I’ve missed it so long, it’s like something I dreamed of once that never really happened.

“It didn’t take me long to learn my limits. Your grandmother straightened me out about who I was and what was expected of me. Your mother, though, wasn’t about to be straightened out. She challenged everything.

“She used to swim out past your lagoon, where she weren’t supposed to—over the rocks and into the deep. One morning she vanished altogether out there. She was missing so long that your grandparents feared she’d drowned. Gousier went out in his esquif, paddling all over, looking everywhere. Even some of Tenikemac came out to hunt for her in sympathy. They’d lost swimmers of their own to the hidden currents and undertows—some was never seen again. And it was no balm to your grandparents’ spirits to have their standoffish neighbors come and console them over their loss. That was like the final proof that she was gone.

“It fell dark. Everyone had returned from the sea. Your grandmother was wailing now. They’d all given up. And in walked your mother. She came in stark naked and exhausted, and not a bit ashamed of her deed or her body. Proud, if barely able to stand on her own feet. Worse, in the eyes of Tenikemac especially, she claimed she’d ridden home on the back of a sea dragon. No one gave her much credence. They thought she was saying it to stir them up more. She didn’t mean to be evil. She didn’t do it to hurt them. She did it to tear down a limit. It was like she had to beat the gods of the ocean themselves. She would have been, I think, just as happy if they had destroyed her for the challenge. It would have meant something had happened, she’d gotten the gods’ attention at last.”

“Did her parents punish her? What did they do?”

“Oh, they forbade her to swim, but you know they never enforced it. They were happy that she wasn’t dead. It’s difficult to be angry when you’re so elated. And then she collapsed right there in front of them, so mostly they were too busy nursing her well to threaten her much. Her task was gutting fish, same as you. There was no worse punishment they could have inflicted on her, and none that would have done anyone any good. Couldn’t keep her from cleaning the fish unless someone else did it, and when you’re all covered in blood and guts, well, who’s going to forbid you to wash? They don’t want the stink of you like that, either.”

“So she went back to swimming?” Leodora rather liked the idea that her mother had bested them all.

“Yes, she did, child. In the end, though, that willfulness of hers boxed her in. No islander would have her. The family was even more cut off from Tenikemac then. It’s only in the past few years Gousier has opened them up a tiny bit again, at least some of the men. The women are harder. If there had been a chance for Leandra before with them, there wasn’t one after that night. Their own men had been out hunting for her, and if she’d drowned, they’d have all mourned her and made sacrifices to the sea in her name, but she weren’t drowned nor even in peril, and after that the women shunned her and made their men shun her. If she’d ever gotten into real trouble after that, they would have lifted nary a finger to help, an’ probably would have hoped the gods destroyed her.”

It was clear from the look her aunt gave her that she was supposed to take instruction from her mother’s folly. She said nothing, and Dymphana seemed to regard this as acquiescence.

“Leandra had already given up on that village anyway. I don’t know exactly when she began to look elsewhere on the island.

“The Weejar people were on the far side of Ningle as they are now, isolated by the legs of that span, and half a day’s walking around the beach unless you can find the paths, what I could never do. But back then there was a third group lived down around the southern tip a good three hours away—”

“The Omelunes,” guessed Leodora.

“That’s right. You’re so clever, you got there ahead of me. The Omelunes were a fishing village, the same as Tenikemac, only they didn’t have the skill with dragons. They used boats. Some of their people also took their fish up to Ningle, and so Tenikemac would have nothing to do with them. Weejar is more like the Omelunes were—boats for fishing, and rice swamps inland. The rice is the only reason Tenikemac trades with them.

“One day, while the men of Omelune were out fishing or selling fish, Leandra swam all the way around to their village. The women on the beach saw her splashing in the waves, and damn them if they didn’t pick up stones, every one of them, and walk to the edge of the water and start flinging them at your mother to keep her from coming in to land. They knew she didn’t belong to them. They thought she was one of the merfolk that overturn boats and drown the sailors.”

“What merfolk?” asked Leodora, half disbelieving and half curious, wondering if Soter had any figures of merfolk buried in his stacks of puppets.

“Tenikemac knows of them, too, you can ask someone there. It were such a long swim to Omelune, you can well imagine that no one from here had ever tried it before. It’s not like somebody was expecting her. What else were the women of Omelune to think?

“Leandra must have been very tired, but she turned back—they left her no choice. The problem was, the women chased her along the beach, throwing rocks wherever they found them. Finally there was this spit of land, a little peninsula sticking out in the water. Leandra wasn’t watching ahead—she was keeping her eye on them women and diving down when something looked like it would hit her. So then all of a sudden she found the women coming right at her as if across the water itself. They cut the distance in half before she understood what had happened and leapt to swim away. One of the rocks struck her in the head, and she floundered, and she sank. The women must have thought they’d killed her. They left her alone and went marching back home in triumph. They’d killed a merwoman, and wouldn’t that be something to tell the men when the men came back from fishing?

“It was pure instinct kept Leandra afloat. Pretty soon the currents had her. She kicked up her legs when she thought of it. When she was sensible. Blood stung her eyes, and it was about all she could do to keep her head above the surface. She was drifting, she didn’t know where.

“The next thing she knew there were hands on her body, and she was being dragged through the water. She said she thought that the gods of the ocean had finally got her for all the times she’d taunted them. She tried to fight, but she had no energy left and fainted dead away. Then she was being pushed up into the air and onto something hard.

“Some young fool—and a brave one, I expect, to chance rescuing a merwoman—saw her floating there and pulled her into his boat. He was from Omelune. He had no idea what had happened; he just saw this naked girl in the water and dove in after her. When he found out who she was, he paddled her back home. By the time he’d got her back to our beach, your mother had decided he was the one for her.”

“And that’s the man who called me a witch?” guessed Leodora.

“Hush, now. You want this story, don’t try and race around it.

“Afterward, the two of them met in secret. Even in Fishkill Cavern if your uncle can be believed—which he can’t. He thinks the worst of them both, of course, even though he doesn’t know anything at all. She didn’t tell him half what she told me. She was in love. She wasn’t going to tell her brother about that, was she?

“Now, the village of Omelune must have had some inkling what was going on, but maybe they didn’t know just where he was going. Surely they couldn’t have guessed that the red-haired creature they’d fended off was the same one he was visiting regularly.

“Then one night he and Leandra arranged to meet on that ridge of rocks that makes your lagoon. He was such a fool for her that he decided to swim from Omelune to the lagoon just to match her feat. To prove to her or to himself that he was worthy. He didn’t tell a soul, just set off.

“Leandra, she waited and waited and he didn’t come and his boat never appeared. She could have got into Gousier’s esquif, but not her. She had to swim off to look for him. I think she was still planning to tease him: She would creep up on his boat just to scare him. That was her intention.

“In the morning we couldn’t find her anywhere. The family looked all over. It hadn’t been so long since we’d thought her drowned, so we weren’t quite given over to panic this time. She wasn’t in the cavern. She wasn’t at Tenikemac. We had no idea where she’d got to, so it was late in the day before your grandfather thought to go looking for her in the direction of Omelune. He found her on the beach. Somewhere between here and there, not all that far from home. She was sitting, just sitting, cold and wet and rocking back and forth, with that poor dead boy’s head cradled in her lap. He’d drowned trying to match her. You see what happened—her willfulness undid her in the end.”