Authors: Gregory Frost
Soter brought his fermented product to the long house to sell. Often, after he’d bartered the liquor for food, clothing, or utensils, he would linger to drink with the men. “Absorbing my expenses,” he called it.
Tonight he seemed to have absorbed rather a lot. She walked in on him regaling half a dozen others with a rude story about a hermaphroditic mermaid. Leodora entered at the far end of the long house and had passed the first two, untended fires before anyone noticed her.
A couple of the men turned at once. One of them was Agmeon. His eyes were bloodshot. They went wide as he recognized her. He jumped up, barring her way. She nodded, making the requisite shallow, respectful bow, but when she looked up again anger still burned in Agmeon’s eyes, and he still blocked her way. “What are you doing here?” he demanded.
Soter had stopped talking. He gazed at her, bleary and unfocused.
“I came to get him. I need to talk to him.”
“Have you no decency, girl?”
She looked at herself as if expecting to find she’d forgotten to wear clothes. She shook her head. “I don’t understand. I come here all the time. I was here only a few nights past, performing for you. You saw me.”
“That was before. Now you’re betrothed to Koombrun. You do know you’re betrothed?”
“Yes.”
“It’s unseemly to be found in one man’s house with him, even worse to be here. It’s the behavior of a mispel. You leave now.” He thrust a finger past her and spoke with such vehemence that she started to turn, to leave; but her will overrode her instinct and she stopped. She had never been a part of their world, nor governed by any of their rules. Now suddenly she was required to submit, even though she would gain the respect of no one for it. Their women had to ask permission to enter the long house. She had seen it enough times to know. After the shadowplays the men stayed and the women left. She wondered if they would even consent to her using the puppets afterward. To consort with Soter. He was a man, too, however besotted, and to practice she must enter his house. They would brand her a mispel for that, most certainly. No, they would never allow it, maybe not even if Koombrun accompanied her. She could imagine the pleasure Agmeon would take in controlling her, the same as Gousier. There wasn’t a soul on the island who wasn’t allied against her.
She stood considering long enough that Agmeon circled her. “What’s the matter with you? Leave!”
“Not without him.”
Agmeon looked as if he would strike her then. Soter suddenly lurched upright and stumbled in between them, slurring his words: “What’s all this nonsense, you two? Agmeon, this is Leodora, you know who she is. Lea, what
is
so urgent?” He hung there like a great tortoise, with his head pushed out and swinging back and forth. When he received no reply from either of them, and the two continued to stare each other down, he waved his hands loosely and said, “All right, all right, I’ve had too much hospitality anyway. I’d get lost on the way home without a guide. Come on, child, help me with my goods and let’s go.”
Agmeon’s glance flicked between them. He seemed to weigh the matter. She could almost hear him thinking that at least with Soter she would be gone. He released an exasperated sigh and sharply withdrew, allowing the two of them to collect Soter’s payment. She gathered up loaves of bread, dried seaweed, and a shirt, stuffing them into his net bag along with a few empty jugs. He shuffled up beside her carrying his own jug and nothing else. For once she didn’t mind being his drudge. He kept turning and bidding everyone good night the whole length of the house.
Outside they had barely gone a dozen steps when he said quite soberly, “Now, what was all that business about, Agmeon not letting you in? What did he mean, you’re betrothed?”
. . . . .
By the time they reached his hut, she’d told him the whole story and he had launched into his own verbal assault upon Gousier: “The utter fool. Does he truly believe the village will warm to him for this? Or to you? Link with his family? They can’t possibly have told him that. He’s made it up from what they didn’t tell him.”
He stumbled approaching his hut, quickly caught himself, then stopped and stared at his own feet for a moment. “Some of us are foolish,” he said, “you from youth and I from drink. And we try to compensate for our weaknesses when we’re not giving in to them. But your uncle, Lea, is the worst kind of fool—the cocksure fool. Malicious and proud in his certainty. No one can tell him anything, and the more he stands on his points, the more wrong he is. And the more vicious.”
He entered the hut, then spun around to face her, his arms flung wide. The jug in his hand tugged him sideways. “Look at your mother!”
Not following his train of thought, she glanced about. “Where?”
“On the spans, of course!” He set down the jug. “Your uncle chased all over trying to locate her. Would not be dis…dis…wouldn’t be put off from it. Never once did he consider she might not wish to be found, and that he could’ve better used his time selling his damned fish. Idiot. Idiot.” He collapsed on a stool, repeating the word now almost as if chiding himself.
She put down the netful of crockery. “Soter,” she asked, drawing closer.
“Mmm?”
“You have to tell me now, no more dodging. No more maneuvers.”
“What?” He looked up. Though she was right in front of him, he seemed to have to search for her.
“You have to tell me now, am I any good.”
He said, “Dunno what you mean.”
Apprehension colored his attempt to fall back upon being drunk as an escape. His eyes glistened with such fear that she found herself glancing around, expecting to discover the ghosts of his conscience condensing behind her. Those ghosts, whether she saw them or not, would keep him in check unless she rattled his world enough to dissolve them. She said, “I have to know, Soter, because no matter what the answer, I’m leaving the island. Now. Tonight. I don’t have a choice anymore.”
“There’s always a choice.”
“You know there isn’t. I won’t marry Koombrun, but I have to marry Koombrun. What choice does my uncle leave? If I stay, he and the village control my life forever. I will never be allowed to come here and train, to work the puppets, to learn. So I’m taking the puppets with me. All of them. They’re mine—you said so—and I’m taking them. But I have to know now: Am…I…any…good?”
She watched the fear drain out of him as he assessed what she’d said. She had broken the wishful bubble in which he lived—the lie he perpetuated to keep things as they were, which he’d admitted to her mother’s specter. He was no different from Tastion. Or Gousier, for that matter. The three men dwelled in fantasies of their own devising, with never a thought for her as anything other than an object within the frame. One after the other, she was showing them that she neither shared nor accepted their worlds.
When Soter answered her, it was in the quiet, attentive voice of a man focused upon a single, critical issue; one who had reasoned out his course of action before this night.
“Where do you intend to go? Ningle?”
“Of course.”
“How will you hide from your uncle? He knows many people up there. How will you know whom you can trust?”
“I—I don’t know. I won’t trust anyone.”
“And you’ll carry both cases by yourself? You couldn’t carry them both from here to Tenikemac, much less up that stairway. Do you know how long a span is?”
“No.” Worry warped the syllable.
“Will you head north or south? Which is better?”
“I don’t know.”
“It’s good, then, that you’ve thought this through, worked out the details.” He spoke without a trace of sarcasm. He didn’t need any to make his point. “Lea, dear, you can’t be a performer by yourself up there, either. Proper shadowplay needs three or four. I’ve told you this, I wasn’t making it up. Who’s going to play your music for you? We’ll have to find someone. Can’t be a girl puppeteer up there—the way they treated you in the long house just now will be nothing to how you’d be derided on most of the spans near here. How you go about by day’s no issue. But on stage…” He reached up and pushed his fingers into her long hair. “You’ll have to give this up. We have to disguise you. Do as your father did, starting out.”
“We have to do it?
We?
”
“You and me.”
“Soter, I don’t want anybody—”
“It doesn’t much matter if you do. Haven’t you been listening, or must I ask you the questions all over again? I’m coming along.”
“But why? Why do you want to?”
He pulled at his nose. “Well, first, because as I said you can’t do this on your own, no matter what you think. Second, because Gousier will make me pay in your absence once he’s done beating your aunt, and I don’t care to take your punishment when the whip comes down, thank you very much. Third, there’s no one better’n me at arranging these things. I’ve told you that.”
“Yes, but—”
“I’m not finished,” he said testily. “Fourth, I’m coming along because, Leodora, you have in you the skill to be the greatest shadowteller that the whole endless spiral of Shadowbridge has ever seen. With my guidance you might achieve such recognition as no one has ever had. As for if you’re good”—he smiled slyly—“let us just see how you perform when the audience isn’t an inbred village of sea urchins.”
She wanted to cry and laugh at the same time. She forgave him his need to dramatize the answer. She wanted to run and embrace him, thank him, but she did not let herself. She grinned but kept her passion in check. She had, after all, known she was great all along.
He drummed his fingers on the seat of the stool and said, “Now, when are we leaving?”
It was not a simple question, but a test. He wanted her to think about all she had to do. “Tomorrow night?” she ventured.
“He will come after us, same as he did your mother before you. You’ll have humiliated him in front of the village. He’ll be worse off than he was before he dreamed up this scheme. We must be careful how we go initially.” He relaxed, as if something had been decided. “Now you ought to get your sleep. He expects you to be at work in the morning, and you don’t want to give him a reason to suspect anything. He’s already angry with you. Don’t provoke him, however much you want to. Let him lord over you. Let him gloat. He doesn’t know what’s coming, which is how you want it to stay. I’ll make some arrangements meantime. Go on now.”
She shuffled her feet, made a lopsided bow, feeling idiotically in his debt for something she’d forced upon him. She withdrew before she could embarrass herself in some other way.
. . . . .
The boathouse was strange to her then. She lay in her bed, conscious that it would be her final night here, curling her toes against the coarse blanket as if she’d never felt it before, listening to the surf outside crackle and hiss upon the sand.
Sleep took forever to arrive. It had to catch her unawares.
. . . . .
The restive night delivered her to the morning tired, dreamy, and distracted. She saw everything as if in a mirror, all of it real but lacking its former substance—as if an interloping spirit had taken residence in her head. Her preoccupation blinded her, until she was climbing down the stairs, to the silence. She stopped.
Nothing called to her from across the sea.
She strained to listen. Gulls screeched. Waves spread upon the shore. Her curtains flapped. The sound beneath the sound was gone.
She was still listening for it as she wandered down the beach toward the village, not really aware of her surroundings until she saw Kusahema on the ridge. Quickly gathering a few strands of seaweed, she carried them to the pregnant girl. Kusahema refused to meet her eyes, and held her basket out shyly.
Perplexed but wishing to follow Soter’s admonition, Leodora asked, “How are you this morning?” and reached to place her hand on her friend’s belly. Kusahema jumped back, wild-eyed, shoving the basket between them. With her head tilted, she looked as if she were cringing from an attack.
“What’s wrong? What is it?”
The girl made no reply. She shook her head, shrank away, backing into the surf in order to get around Leodora. Then she hurried up the beach, a desperate waddle, while casting backward glances to make sure Leodora wasn’t pursuing her.
“Yesterday’s blessing is today’s curse,” she muttered—a line from a shadowplay that suddenly made sense to her. Gousier’s arrangement had altered her relationship to the whole village, even more than she’d imagined. Who knew how many proscriptions now weighed against her?
She walked over the ridge but refrained from approaching too close to the fishing party gathering their nets on the beach. She’d come to bid the dragons farewell, not the people.
Tastion had promised many times to take her with him to fish, but it had been another child’s promise made first in ignorance and later in mock-defiance. He would never have dared, not really.
The men unfurled their nets and waded into the choppy sea. Tastion glanced her way nervously, then kept his back to her. The women stared straight at her, a gazed barrier.
She saw Koombrun. He could only bring himself to look at her askance, shy now, maybe even fearful. His mother saw her and began slapping him, driving him away. He ducked and clutched his head and shrank back with the speed of someone who’d been beaten many times before. She regretted the misery she was bringing to him. None of this was his fault.
When I’m gone,
she thought,
they’ll punish him for that, too. She’ll be more humiliated by that than by the union itself. The island’s no more your friend than mine, Koombrun. I’m sorry.
The other women watched him driven away. A few looked back at her as if to say,
See what you’ve done?
There was no point in remaining. All she was doing was defying some other rule that she was about to abandon anyway.
She glanced out at the dragons again. To her astonishment, the creatures had all turned and were facing her. Their riders, nonplussed, were gesturing helplessly. The dragons beneath them just floated in place. For a moment they seemed to acknowledge her estrangement. Then the moment passed, and the creatures swung about as one and headed out to sea. The women’s stare after that was furious. Leodora turned her back on them and set off for Fishkill Cavern.