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.”

It was a revelation that tore the breath out of her. She set down her biscuit. She had always known that she’d had a mother, but no one, not even her aunt, had ever mentioned her father.

Soter, wincing against his headache, shifted his gaze, as if wondering whether he’d revealed too much.

“But you said—” she began, much more loudly than he would have liked.

Hissing violently, he raised a hand as if to ward her off. “I know what I said,” he whispered. “I know.” His gaze held her steady. “I promised your uncle, you see. He can be very insistent when he threatens. Which you know better than I. He did not want you growing up with a lot of dreams and ideas in your head about your father. Did not…want you to know.

“I gave in because I wanted to stay here, too, where your grandfather had permitted me. Gousier does have the power to remove me. He could banish me from this island if he didn’t find it more satisfying to be able to tell me that he can do it. All of this is his property, this dung heap amid the thorns, and so long as I keep to his path I get to remain.” He grinned unevenly, which made him press his palm to the side of his head and close that eye. “I seem to have stepped off today. Wonder how we should handle this? Discretion will be key, I think. No reason he has to know anything about anything—which anyway I’ve maintained for years.”

“But what’s in the cases?” she demanded.

“Oh, well, lend me a hand with them and we shall find out together, hmm?” He held up the curtain to let her enter the pantry again.

The two cases were as long as Soter was tall, and brown with dust, spattered darkly where wine or something else had slopped over them. The nub of the leather was worn off in places, too. One case was decidedly heavier than the other. Kneeling, one eye still squeezed shut, Soter fumbled at the hasp on the smaller one. He slipped the pin free, then pushed and prodded the top up. He didn’t remove the lid, but peered secretively underneath.

Then suddenly as if he wanted to drive her back, he shoved a clicking, clattering thing at her. She leaned away but refused to be startled. She stared at what he was holding.

It was a shadow puppet, the first she’d ever seen. The body was articulated: the wrists, elbows, shoulders, and knees all revolved on pins, and each segment was fitted with a hinged rod. She pinched one of the loose ones and the puppet’s jaws opened in a great leer. She pushed on another, and from behind his legs his penis emerged. It was almost as big as his thigh, and the tip was cut with small swirls that made it seem to have a face of its own. Despite the monstrousness of his anatomy, Leodora had to bite her lip to keep from laughing.

“His name is Meersh,” said Soter.

“Meersh,” she repeated. She moved his arms and legs, flexed his wrists, marveled at the green tissue-thin skin stretched over his form. She held him up admiringly, and with an ease that surprised her circled the rods so that the puppet appeared to give a gesture of welcome to Soter. Something stirred within her. She forgot her uncle, the cavern, the hatefulness of the rest of her life. Some shape that had possessed no shape until that moment collected and formed deep inside her, and drew its first breath. She leaned around the lid to look into the case. There in three compartments lay stacks of puppets as deep as her arm, and each unique. She looked up past Meersh to Soter; tears were already forming in her eyes.

Soter gaped in awe or terror at her fingers twirling the rods of the puppet, as if staggered by what he saw. She wanted to speak but only a croak emerged, and she sobbed. Soter looked her in the face and recoiled. He dropped the tarp, escaping the sobs, escaping her, escaping the future that in his drunken cleverness he had just cast. He did not in that moment understand that what he had pried open was her life.

Her life incarnate: the puppets of Bardsham.