every detail. You do see that, don’t you? We’ll have to find a new name for you…on the next spiral. Come on now, grab your burden and bring it along. I know you’ll hurt all over come morning, but one thing’s certain: If he is still breathing, he’ll come looking. We need to be tucked away before the sun’s up.” He went through the gate.
Leodora remained standing there until Tastion had vanished into the darkness of the trees. “Reneleka, take care of Dymphana,” she said softly. She picked up the case and followed. Her final view was of the whole dark half of Bouyan, her home.
She was never to see it again.
II
DIVERUS
This is the way, when someone asked, that Leodora told his tale:
There was once a silent boy who lived beneath the bridge. He lived neither on an island nor on land, nor even upon the water, but within the frame of a span itself. Chiseled supports and struts formed the foundation of the span, beams and cross-ties created an intricate latticework of layers between them, and upon these platforms were laid surfaces on which huts and fortifications were erected, all at different heights and lengths because no one who built there required the permission of anyone else, and few there were who sought others’ opinions. Mad geometries were the result.
As a baby the boy had sat outside his tiny hovel and looked without understanding upon the random sections of this sub-rosa city. From his platform a ladder ran to the next, which was suspended at a slightly higher level and broad enough that three dwellings had been erected across it. Another ladder, of rope, declined to a level below theirs on the opposite side.
Few houses beneath the bridge had roofs because there were no elements to protect anyone from—save the prying eyes of those situated above. The thick stalactitic surface of the span provided all necessary protection, and just acquiring the materials to erect walls was hard enough. In most cases divers, who lived on the lower levels, brought up the stone from the sea bottom, especially from around the piers, where the rocky ocean floor had been crushed and heaped as far down as anyone could see. It cost money to pay the divers, and more to have the stones hauled up on ropes and pulleys from layer to layer through the underspan hierarchy. Everyone knew that a stone was going to disappear here and another there as the pile of rock ascended, and if you were lucky and the pullers not too greedy, perhaps half of the original pile made the journey. It was the way of the underspan and no use railing at its unfairness; it had been thus for centuries and would be thus for centuries more. What it meant, however, was that walls were not built very high, but more like boundary markers than sides of a house. Most were not even as tall as the inhabitants themselves. There would be one entrance, and only the one great room. Privacy was at best an untested notion. There was always someone on a level above yours. You learned quickly which corners of your home offered sanctuary or at least deep shadows, and you conducted your intimacy there.
The boy often spent his time looking down at other people, whose behavior was as alien to him as the life of insects. Like insects, they seemed to live in patterns. The patterns he could make out, though not their meaning.
All of this may seem uncommon and strange, but on almost every span of Shadowbridge we know, substructural societies flourish below the main boulevards. Many forms of life thrive in caverns, and more in shadows, in the dark. Some of them can’t stand the light at all.
By the time he turned fourteen, the boy had no family.
His mother died of a wasting disease, and her body was ejected into the sea with little ceremony; his father, a man of scant talent and less ambition, had only remained with her because she managed to bring in money by begging upon the surface of the span. She used the boy for this. Even as a baby he was clearly, visibly deficient. The impoverished mother clutching her damaged child while reaching one claw of a hand toward passersby tugged at all but the hardest hearts, and she did very well for herself, for her husband. When she died the father unraveled. He knew he couldn’t care for a child, never mind one