before the performance. Peeds was the Mangonel shadow puppeteer and a great favorite of the boy’s as well as of the audience’s. Bardsham had heard Peeds’s stories hundreds of times, and was always transported by them. He sat through every rehearsal, absorbing all the details like any small child. Like you. When he wasn’t outside fleecing the audience, he even sat in the dark booth with Peeds. Mind you, he wasn’t supposed to be in the booth at all. His father had a temper to make your uncle look positively unassertive. But the boy took risks. And he and Peeds were friends.
So, Peeds took sick and there was nobody could do his part. Your grandmother sometimes narrated a tale for him, but she knew nothing of the puppetry itself. Nobody else had paid any attention to his old stories—they had their own acts to develop and refine. The family needed an act to link the other acts together—that’s what Peeds did with his stories, his puppets. He moved things along from the jugglers to the knife throwers, weaving the distance between the two with some tale that touched both. The boy decided to risk punishment. He confessed to his parents that he’d been studying secretly with Peeds and could do the act. He swore he knew it by heart. They didn’t have time to argue or fight or punish him—not right then. So they capitulated. That was when Bardsham the Great was born.
He’d followed how Peeds used colors to change mood, how he spun the lantern, the different ways he moved figures off the screen. For the rest—what he didn’t know—he had the instinct to invent.
His mother came up with the name. She told him, long after, that she had walked out to the end of the dragon beam sticking off the side of span where they were performing—every span has a dragon beam, Lea, not just Ningle. She stepped into the tiled Dragon Bowl at the end of that beam and asked the gods for the name, and it had come to her right then and there. That’s what she told him anyway. During his performance she stood outside the booth, telling the stories where they needed narrating, doing the introductions.
The thing about puppeteers is they’re invisible. Never seen. All you see is the handiwork, the skill. So any story she fabricated about Bardsham, it was the real story. Who he was, where he’d come from. Anything she felt like adding. If the story changed from night to night or span to span—as it did—that only added to the mystery of him.
It all began as a single provisional performance, but poor Peeds never recovered. He got sicker and thinner, till he’d grown as thin as a puppet skin himself. On his deathbed he bequeathed young Bardsham all of his puppets, his tools, his stage. His stories.
From then on the boy spent less time thieving from the audiences and more listening to them tell the stories of their spans, their people, their families. He did something no one else had ever thought of—he started collecting the heritage of Shadowbridge. Diverse elements he folded all together, making something that had never been before. It became a great giant of a story, a spiral of a tale, just like Shadowbridge itself, all linked and spun together into something bigger than any of us can see. Except for Bardsham. And such vision, you know, it makes you a little bit mad.
His father was none too happy about losing his talented little thief permanently. But he was no fool, either. The Shadowplays of Bardsham were soon bringing in the largest crowds. Nevertheless, pigheaded creature he was, he insisted that while the other acts went on, the boy must mingle with the crowd. After all, they didn’t know who he was. He was a stranger, and still small. And still a skilled pickpocket. But it was a risky and foolish proposition. Anyone could see that sooner or later the child would be caught. What pickpocket hasn’t been? And there were spans where the authorities cut off fingers if not a whole hand by way of punishment. The circus would lose far more than their little thief if that happened.
Finally it was his mother who confronted the old man to keep the son out of thieving. His hands were pure gold, she said. If he was caught thieving, the troupe would be ruined. Picking pockets brought in so little. Puppets brought in crowds. She was right,