The sand was soft and sodden between her toes. She jumped when an irate sandcrab nipped her foot before digging in deeper. Most of the little crabs scattered and scuttled and burrowed before she reached them. Later, when the tide had withdrawn, the shore would teem with gulls, squawking and fighting over the same scurrying snacks. Yet there would be new ones tomorrow, just one more of life’s mysteries.
After walking awhile, she climbed to the top of the ridge and surveyed the village, concentrating on the figures there, forcing the ocean’s call out of her head.
Moving her way were the usual group of women collecting seaweed. She spotted Kusahema and headed down the slope to their beach. Kusahema was married now, and pregnant.
When they were face-to-face, Kusahema smiled and held out her basket, and Leodora took all the strands of seaweed she’d collected and gave them to her.
“I liked your shadows the other night,” said Kusahema. “They were very funny.”
Leodora closed her eyes and bowed her head in thanks. Then she reached out and placed her hand on Kusahema’s protruding belly. “Will it be today, do you think?”
“Only the ocean can know,” came the ritual reply. Both the touch and the interchange were considered propitious. They grinned at each other, but then Kusahema’s smile faltered and she took her basket and moved on.
As recently as two years ago they had been close friends, sometimes swimming together. But as Kusahema became nubile, her family had forced her to withdraw her affection and cease meeting her friend.
Only Tastion remained close now. And that, as she had suspected for some time, was due to motives of a different sort; and even he was betrothed, soon to be married. He still told her that he would run away with her, a plan they’d hatched when they were seven, but she knew it for an empty promise.
Soon her only connection to the village would be the shadowplays that she and Soter performed for them, and which by their very nature connected her with the spans—even though most of the tales they performed for Tenikemac were its own myths and legends.
She stood alone and watched Tastion and his father, the two of them looking like two versions of the same man. They unfurled their net and moved into the water. They even moved the same way. Tastion of course pretended not to see her, which he must, just as she could not stare directly at him for any length of time. She pretended to watch the crowd farther up the beach, and so happened to be staring at Koombrun when he suddenly lurched away from the crowd and grabbed hold of one of the nets. He was trying to help, desperate to take part in the ritual, to accompany the other men. Before he’d taken two steps, he’d put his foot through the weave and tripped himself. He sprawled onto his back and turned to get up. By then his mother had come forward, and she slapped him with a series of blows that had him cowering, ducking, crawling across the sand, his foot still stuck in the net. One of the other fishermen, Lemros, came to his rescue. The crowd was laughing, but Lemros calmly unsnagged the poor brute then, wedging himself between Koombrun and his mother, helped him to his feet.
Koombrun was a year older than Tastion, which meant he should have been riding dragons long ago. He was large and strong enough, but mentally feeble. He had always been. Even as a child he hadn’t been able to keep up with Leodora and her playmates, and none of them had treated him very kindly, something she regretted as she watched his mother attacking him. His deficiency would have been no more than a tragic burden upon the family, except that his father had drowned three years earlier. In any other family the son would have stepped in to do the father’s work, but Koombrun couldn’t be allowed to fish. She often heard him in the audience during shadowplays, his nasal bleating laughter drowning out other voices. He laughed at the obvious jokes, and sometimes added his voice to everyone else’s, as if he thought it wise to pretend to understand. As if they would accept him if he did.
The village made sure that he and his mother were looked after, of course, but this came with a price for her—always to be humbled, humiliated, dependent upon others. No one else had come