exist? No? Let me tell you, then, how Death came into our world.” She raised her eyes to the widow. “I think you should sit down to hear this. It’s not a long story, but it isn’t short, either.”
The mother knelt, and her children sat beside her.
“Now, does anyone here know who Chilingana is?” asked Leodora.
One of the twins said, “He dreamed Shadowbridge.”
“That’s right. He was the original dreamer.” She walked the taro potato forward and hid the gourd from sight, then leaned over and picked up a small cluster of enoki and set it aside. She said, “One day a different dream came to him.”
HOW DEATH CAME TO SHADOWBRIDGE
In those times the sun was called Lord Akema. He was a warrior god, terrible to behold, who would blind all those foolish enough to seek for his features. That’s why there existed the second—the false mask of Akema—Nocnal, upon which everyone might safely gaze, and which they could petition when they wanted a favor from the war god. Behind the mask of Nocnal, the warrior would listen and sometimes answer.
It was under Nocnal’s aegis that the fisherman Chilingana dreamed the bridges of Shadowbridge into place. Each night more bridges appeared—covered in structures, in houses and towers, in parks and alleys, but all of them were empty, lifeless, and still. Soon his dream stretched far across the world, and Nocnal observed it all as it unfolded.
By day, beneath the burning face of Akema, Chilingana’s life persisted as flat as bread. He fished, he ate, and he dwelled with his wife, Lupeka, in his stilt house. Although he could have stepped across the gap onto the first bridge he’d dreamed, he didn’t. He talked about going, almost every day, but each time he came to the edge of his own small world he hesitated, peered down the empty way until his eyes ached, and then gave up. He could not go traveling out upon these spans. To do so would have invited the unknown, and Chilingana, for whom everything had ever been the same, feared the unknown. He didn’t understand that the unknown needed no invitation.
One night while he lay upon his seaweed mat, a chill wind called loneliness came floating down the empty spans of the bridges he had dreamed. It swirled about his house. It slipped into the sleeves of his clothing and fluttered the cloth against him. His mouth filled with it and he rose and went out and stared off into the distance, across the near-black sea. He looked for what he knew not.
Chilingana thought his wife was asleep inside, but she lay awake. The wind had filled his house, and she had breathed it in as well as he.
She was aware of him outside, yet did not call him. No distance had ever existed between the woman and the man before he dreamed the bridges. They stretched into infinity like the lives of Chilingana and Lupeka. This new distance touched her with longing. She wondered: When had she come to be, and who had built her house? She assumed Chilingana had done it, but he never said. She had never before thought to ask. The two of them wanted for nothing: All the food of the world swam through the ocean beneath their house. Why, then, create such things as bridges? What purpose could they serve?
Fear gnawed at her then, that her husband wished to travel away from her into an unknown so vast that he might never return. The distance opened like a pit beneath her, and her breath caught in her throat.
The wind of loneliness heard her and was surfeited.
She arose and crept out the back of the house onto the balcony that surrounded it on all sides. She gazed out across the sea away from her husband. Her eyes followed Nocnal’s bright stripe upon the swirls and waves until she made out, just above the horizon, the black edge of a bridge’s line, and in the middle of it the black spire of a tower, and her fear frothed and foamed. She knew in wordless fashion that these spans connected to some other place, although she knew no other.
Her fearful musings disturbed Lord Akema’s rest, prodding the face of Nocnal to call down, “What troubles you, lady?”
“Well,” she answered, and then fell silent before the immensity of what she wanted to say. What was still emerging inside her soul had no words. She’d never known anything but herself; how could she express something so