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.
THREE
It may have been ridiculous ever to have believed that she had no father, but it seemed reasonable at the time. Gousier and the villagers called her mother a witch, and Leodora had simply concluded that the witch had conjured her into being. If nothing else the explanation allowed her to be magical, and she liked being magical.
Suddenly she had not only a father, but a father of legendary stature. Even in Tenikemac, isolated from the tumultuous life of the bridges, she’d heard his name—the name of the greatest shadow puppeteer who had ever traveled the myriad spans of Shadowbridge: Bardsham. And there before her, in the care of a grizzled old drunk, lay the puppets Bardsham had used. As it had been with her mother, her father was a revelation.
Soter soon had all the compartments and both cases open. He judiciously selected more puppets and spread them around him. They belonged to a dozen different stories, but he assembled them to tell his own. Then he asked her for Meersh. The grotesque Meersh was going to represent her father. For her mother he picked a sinuous figure he called Orinda.
He began the performance, sometimes looking at her, sometimes squinting as though pained at having to squeeze his memory through the cracks in his hangover.
“Your father,” he began, “came from a span far to the south of here, and at least three spirals away. You do know about the spirals, don’t you?”
“They’re other bridges,” she answered uncertainly.
“Other great long, unimaginable arms of bridges, yes, child. And each one, sooner or later, curls up like a nautilus shell, or so it’s said, because you can walk a thousand different spans, a thousand different great, wide communities filled with all sorts of people and creatures, and not ever reach that curled-up point where the bridge started or maybe ends. Who knows which. But your father, he came out of one of those places, one of those spiral ends. Or so he said…”
BARDSHAM’S TALE
His parents had their own troupe of traveling players, the Mangonel Circus. That was his real name, too. They played in public for money. They juggled and danced on cords strung high above the streets. They performed a skillful whip act with your grandmother holding up things like flowers or torches that your grandfather snipped the heads from or extinguished with a snap of his whip, until finally she held a jeweled ring lightly between two fingers and he snatched it without her fingers even moving—snatched it and with the same movement sent it into the audience, where a fight inevitably broke out over its ownership. It was a cheap ring, but a dazzling trick. The way your father told it, no one had ever seen such skill before Mangonel. There was quite a bit of sleight of hand in among the crowd, too, which had to be done most carefully if they wanted to avoid any trouble. The boy—that is, Bardsham, your father—he had a natural dexterity. Right from the time he could walk, he could steal coins from between your fingers and you wouldn’t feel so much as a breeze—just like his father did with that whip. Plus, he was so sly that anyone would have sworn he’d been across the avenue the whole time. He was a child, none too large, and who noticed him down around their hips when people were doing handsprings on a rope way up there?
The family did not overlook his talent. They trained him and trained him until he had the most skillful fingers in the world. His only limit then was how much he could make off with before the weight of his boodle pulled the pants off him.
One night another member of the troupe, a fellow called Peeds, took sick an hour