Gregory Frost

Gregory Frost, a website designer and technical writer, is the author of a bi-monthly column on Macintosh software that appears on the Internet. In addition, he has been a technical researcher on two episodes of the Learning Channel’s Science Frontiers. Mr. Frost is currently working on a novel set in the same fantastic Shadowbridge universe as the one in which we discover…

HOW MEERSH

THE BEDEVILER

LOST HIS TOES

Y

ou know this story already. You know it from great Bardsham’s performances, which, like so many of his skillful shadow works, portray Meersh’s adventures to resounding acclaim. When Bardsham controls the rods, he is Meersh.

There are as well the paintings collected and permanently exhibited inn Colemaigne, and from these—If you didn’t know it already—you would deduce that the events happened long ago, in the earliest of times before all the gifts of Edgeworld suffused, altered, reinvented every element of life in Shadowbridge. It all took place on a Span called Valdemir that has long since disappeared, collapsed into the ocean and been swallowed up, or transformed by the Edgeworld into another place.

Meersh the Bedeviler had many adventures. Not all turn out for the best.

One morning Meersh’s neighbor woke him. He slept in a net hammock that snared each of his dreams and kept him from rolling loose while embrangled in them. His dreams were as real for him as being awake is for most of us.

The door to his house shook and rattled as if a storm had arrived outside. Meersh sat up and glanced about.

At first he had no idea what had awakened him. He smacked his lips because he had just dreamed a great feast that he’d managed to steal from someone wealthy—a governor of Valdemir he thought it was. He could still taste the spices in the stew and the lemons in the pie. If someone hadn’t pounded again on his door, he might have plunged back into the dream; dived into that vat of stew. He could do that.

Instead, he rolled out of the hammock and tiptoed to the door. There was a small window filled with multicolored, leaded diamond panes beside it, and he sneaked a glance at his visitor.

His neighbor’s name was Sun-through-Clouds. It was she who had banged at his door. Even through the distortion in the quarrels he recognized her shape.

Sun-Through-Clouds was a beautiful woman, black-haired and golden-eyed, just as Bardsham’s puppet represents. A great silver stripe ran over the top of her head and through the fall of her long hair. She’d come to Valdemir from one of the mountainous islands on the far side of the world, where trees grew as thick as sargasso and the people hacked them and roped them together into wooden lodges—at least, so she’d described it to him. It was too remarkable a story to believe, but Meersh asked her to tell it to him now and again so he could sit and inhale her fragrance. He could have listened a million times if it meant he could close his eyes and breathe beside Sun-Through-Clouds. She seemed to have no idea of his devotion, which on the face of it makes her naive or else cunning. But perhaps her ignorance of Meersh’s affections was due to her preoccupation with her children—two fitful demons who thwarted him every time he came near to fondling their mother.

Seeing no children but only his neighbor in all her beauty, Meersh willingly opened the door. Sun-Through-Clouds’ smile drank him up. He basked in it, joyful in its radiance.

“Meersh,” she said in a voice that chimed at least three perfect notes, “I’m so very glad you’re home today. Have I wakened you?”

“Oh, no, sweet cousin,” he said, yawning, “not at all.” This in spite of his shaggy hair pushed up flat in a wedge, the result of his sleeping on it, and the fact that he was dressed only in a nightshirt that his alerted penis even now prodded toward her in its eagerness.

Sun-Through-Clouds nodded as if to say she was satisfied with his answer; in doing so she looked at the protrusion in his nightshirt, but did not react at all. “I have a difficult favor to ask,” she said. “You know I would never ask anything frivolously.” She met his eyes. Her eyelids fluttered like sails. Like the wings of doves.

“Anything!” he cried.

For a moment she hesitated as if weighing his devotion. “I must travel the spans for a day or more and can’t take little Vek and Jurina with me. I have to travel fast, that is. And peripatetic.” She was always using words like “peripatetic”—words out of some vast lexicon; especially plosives. She loved plosives. “With my wares, to make some money. And they both adore you so. And when I told them—”

“You wish for me to look after your children?” He was unable to disguise his consternation. It was as if she had asked him to drive hot spikes into his eyes. It was as if she desired to make candles of his fingers. It was as if she’d demanded he become a tax collector. He would have agreed to all that more readily.

“Oh, but they’re exquisite children. Really very good. After all, they’re mine. And they adore you so. Don’t you, my dears?”

In unison, the two miscreants stepped out from behind their mother’s ample hips. They had the same face, Sun-Through-Clouds’ children: oval eyes as dark as coffee; and rings circling their eyes like some deeper pigment in their tanned skin, which had led Meersh to the suspicion that their father was a nature being, maybe a Raki. She depicted him as huge and dark and so full of malice that he’d driven her to sail across the world and take up residence here on this little circular close, where Meersh had the good fortune to dwell. Sun-Through-Clouds described her own people in something other than human terms, too; although never had the specifics of their natures been—as she might have said—pellucid. Their suggested alienness confounded Meersh: She seemed the summation of round, soft, perfect flesh. Why had someone so luscious ever had anything to do with such a malevolent creature as a Raki? She deserved better. She deserved Meersh.

She said, “They’ll do whatever you tell them.”

Meersh eyed them doubtfully.

“Won’t you’ my doves?” she asked them.

The children exchanged a glance and then, smiling pure innocence, nodded.

Oh, yes, thought Meersh, they’ll do what I tell them.

But he had no real choice. Whatever else he was, Meersh was a creature of his appetites, and all of them were focused upon Sun-Through-Clouds. “All right, bring them in if you must—I mean, my dearest neighbor. But for how long are you gone?”

“Ah, possibly three days if the market is good.” Sun-Through-Clouds wove baskets and chairs. She had woven the dream-catching hammock in which he slept. Her strong hands were the only rough part of her. He was certain of it.

She said, “Here,” and handed him a low ceramic jar.

“What’s this?” he asked. It was covered by a paper wrapper stuck down around the mouth of the jar.

“It’s their physic. Give them one good spoonful each night before they slumber. It’s critical they have that much. That much and no more.”

“Physic?” He eyed them eyeing each other. “They won’t be soiling themselves, will they? Curatives always affect me that way—that is, I have to be very careful. That is to say…I must tell you, they don’t look at an sickly to me.”

“No, and because I give them this. Otherwise, they could never prevail in this pelagic place so unlike their natural home, so woodsy and lush.”

“Lush”‘ he repeated, with a meaning all his own.

“You mustn’t forget. And feed them their one meal a day promptly then. Take good care of them, my dear, and when I get back…” She let the unspecified promise linger.

“One meal and a spoonful. Before they sleep,” he said. “Yes,” he said, “I promise.” He could hardly swallow.

“You are so kind.” She took a step away, but hesitated on the threshold and turned back to him. “Dearest, sweet, pliable Meersh.” She leaned forward and kissed him. He hardly heard her words. He was looking down the front of her bodice and thinking of pears.

“She is gorgeous,” said his penis.

“Beautiful, yes,” Meersh answered vacantly.

“I think before she leaves you should have her,” the penis urged.

“Have her?”

“Have her in. She gets thirsty like anyone. A few cups of purple wine, and who knows what might happen? What you might see, eh?”

Meersh’s voice creaked with desire. Tongue-tied. He couldn’t even hush his lusting member.

Sun-Through-Clouds pretended not to hear. She offered him again her promissory smile, and he hung upon it as she departed. He watched her supple silhouette shift back and forth against a view of the main avenue of Valdemir and the green distance of the sea.

When even the afterimage of her had faded from his eyes, he withdrew. The gulls on the eaves watched him charily.

He turned. The paper-covered ceramic pot was still in his hand.

The children had taken seats around his el-quirkat board. It sat on a low stone table, its inlaid nacreous strips gleaming. The two children were attempting to pry one of the strips out. He gasped.

“Vek,” he yelled. “Jurina! Stop that, you little fiends.”

How would he deal with them? He glanced around the room, at the huge pillows, the tables stacked with old chipped dishes and a cold coffee urn; at the disordered piles of antique and arcane games he collected and sometimes sold; at the burgundy tapestry curtains on brass rings fluttering lazily behind them. The scene depicted was of an excited crowd clustered upon one of the hexagonal tabulae beside a span such as Valdemir while a mountainous glowing gift from the Edgeworld was bursting into being there.

The children ran to other parts of the room. Vek picked up a pachinko machine and shook it so that the loose balls inside rolled about, mad as hornets. “What’s this? What’s it do?”

Alas, he couldn’t say, because the knowledge of its method had never been found anywhere.

Jurina had unrolled a Hamamatsu kite, throwing up a cloud of dust. “What’s this?” she cried.

Vek shoved aside an oil lamp, carelessly spilling the oil, and wrestled loose a boar’s bristle dart board. “This, what’s this?” The darts stuck loosely in it fell out, clattering to the ground.

“All right!” Meersh shouted. “Enough! Put my things down. You want a game, I tell you what we’ll do. We’ll play a card game I know. It’s called ‘Lawyers’ Poker.’ Heard of that one? I learned it in a tavern, and it’s very clever. All the cards refer to real creatures and places and concepts of day-to-day existence in Edgeworld. Very funny pictures. The original deck was found on a hex—that’s what they say. You come sit here and I’ll just get them.”

He set down the pot and went behind the tapestry, where his more exotic collection resided. He found the cards quickly—the last thing he wanted was to leave the two demons unattended. As he crossed the room, he said, “This game has an interesting history. The information for playing was bestowed upon a king who happened to be standing on the tabula when the original deck appeared. Oh, he wasn’t a king at that point. The knowledge to govern accompanied this game, too. Timing is everything in life. I’m sure your mother has said.” He contemplated the pot of medicine he was supposed to give them.

“What’s Edgeworld, then?” asked Vek. “Where is it?”

Meersh sat cross-legged across from them. He began to shuffle the card deck as he spoke. “Well, where it is remains the mystery. No one sees it, you see. Its existence is hypothetical—which means—”

“It means nobody knows,” Jurina interjected. “Mother uses ‘hypothetical’ all the time.”

“Yes, she would,” he muttered, “it has a p in it.” He dealt the cards, seven to each of them. “Anyway, all the things that appear are from some other place that’s nothing like our Shadowbridge. A different world.”

“You’re making this all up,” said Vek.

Meersh glowered. “What if I am? You’ll certainly never know. You don’t even know how this game is played.”

“You haven’t told us yet.”

He gave up trying to score any sort of point against the child. Either Vek was beyond insipid or else posing as a fool just to goad him. “Well, I will explain it. As we play.”

The game went well for at least three minutes. He had them lay down their cards and instructed them on what they needed in order to move, what to look for when they drew from the deck, and how two players could work as a team in a four-handed match. The children questioned every detail of every rule. They teamed up against him almost immediately.

When he explained that he could block the construction of their apartment complex by playing both a lawyer card and a writ card (secretly one of his favorites), they threw their hands down and pouted. “You’re cheating,” accused Vek.

“I’m teaching you, you—”

“What’s a writ, then? Ha-ha, he doesn’t know.” Jurina joined in. They sang “ha-ha” together.

Peevishly’ Meersh replied, “I’ll tell you what it is. It’s the past tense of ‘write.’ It’s something that’s already been writ, so it was prepared in advance, and that’s how I can use it against you. There, satisfied? Look, Jurina has a Supreme Court ruling card that cancels it out. Why don’t you play that and we can go on.” Only grudgingly did they take up their cards again and continue.

He had to work much harder to lose than he liked.

By the end of the game they could hardly sit still. They’d lost all interest and expressed no desire to play a real hand of Lawyers’ Poker—a pity, as he itched to sue them for damages. The more pressing problem was how he was going to rein them in for two days and still get any serious sleeping done.

Meersh liked to sleep more than anything else in the world, except for eating. He had a great many things to do in his sleep, projects he’d begun—like the dream-mapping of Shadowbridge. He had diagrammed the unwinding Spans, year upon year, in his sleep. The map was accessible only in his dreams. And there was that stolen feast to get back to—the wienerschnitzel wouldn’t stay warm forever. He couldn’t imagine so much as catnapping ill the presence of the two ring-eyed demons.

Rather than let them dictate what happened next, he set the cards aside and said, “I’m feeling hungry, what say we have something to eat.”

“What do you have for us?”

Meersh picked up the ceramic pot.

The children backed away as one. “Get it away,” they said. “It’s horrid.”

“I’m required to give it to you and that’s what I’ll do. Let’s not have any fighting.”

“We’re not fighting. We’re running away.”

“And where would you run to?”

“Back home,” they said.

“Across the close? Your mother left you with me and went away.”

“Back home to W—.” The word splashed over him, more like a sudden chill upon the air than anything spoken. Meersh listened to his memory but the word had eluded him, eel-like. It writhed between syllables, wriggled through consonants and vowels. The very absence of its name made him set down the pot upon the table. It was nowhere on his dream map. “She’s abandoning us and never coming back!” wailed Jurina. “She tricked you into taking us!”

He knew this wasn’t true, despite which the words troubled him. He wanted to get on to something else.

“Look, we’ll eat and you’ll have your medicine afterward. I have some hard cheese—”

“You do?” they exclaimed. “We never get cheese. It’s so expensive.”

He thought to himself’ “Never get cheese, that’s ridiculous. One can hardly endure without it. It’s cheese or fish or seaweed in this life.” The thought made him crave some fish, but he would have had to go out for it and that was out of the question. Besides, his frying pan had cracked and he had nothing to cook in.

“Yes,” he muttered slyly, “cheese first.”

He brought out a wheel of bright yellow cheese and set it on the playing board. With a small knife he removed a layer of mo1d that coated the top of it and then cut three triangular slices, the largest for himself.

“There now,” he said, handing the slices to the two of them. He set down the knife and picked up his own slice.

Meersh opened his mouth to take his first bite. The children were staring at him, empty-handed. “Where’s your cheese I gave you?” he asked.

“Gone. We ate it. It was so good. Can we have some more?”

“Certainly.” He set down his slice and cut two more, larger than the first but still not as big as his own. “Now, this time don’t eat so fast, or you’ll get sick. There’s no fun in it if you don’t savor the food.”

They held their slices close under their noses and sniffed, nodding to one another. He watched them surreptitiously as he reached for his own slice again; but there was a moment when he had to look away, and in that moment the food he’d given them vanished.

“Oh, it’s good. Give us more, please!” they cried. He huffed, but cut them two more slices, bigger than his. A third of the wheel was gone now, but he wanted to make sure they couldn’t hide these slices. Where the cheese was going he couldn’t guess.

He grabbed his own as he handed out the first one, and held it before him as he handed out the second. His eyes shifted from child to child. Jurina and her brother sniffed the cheese again, grinned to each other, then faced him, not eating.

Waiting.

Watching, he took a large bite of his slice of cheese. He chewed it, and oh it was delectable, better than he remembered. His eyes c1osed with pleasure. He really couldn’t help himself. But when he remembered himself and opened his eyes, the children’s cheese was gone, and with it went the pleasure of his own.

“More,” they insisted, “give us some more.”

He set down his slice. “Nope. That’s all for now or there won’t be any left for later, and you do want more later, don’t you? I’m sure you do.” They couldn’t have eaten it, he thought, not that quickly. And yet…where else could it be?

“We want it all now!” yelled Vek.

Meersh uncrossed his legs and took hold of the pot. “Everybody wants it all now. What you’re going to have now is this. ”

“It’s not bedtime.”

“Yes, it is.”

“It isn’t even dark!”

“One meal, a dose of this and then sleep. That was my promise. Don’t make me lie to your mother.”

“That’s not fair,” they complained. However, when he pulled the paper up, they remained sitting where they were, their gazes firmly on the pot. Inside it was a thick greenish fluid the like of which he had never seen. It had a sheen to it much like the nacreous embellishment in the el-quirkat table.

Meersh dipped his cheese knife into it and squinted as the gooey mass hung from the blade. There seemed to be tiny granules embedded in the stuff. It might have been made from seaweed.

He scooped it again and held it out to Jurina. Although she had protested violently before, she leaned forward and stoically closed her mouth around the blade. She drew back and the blade was clean. He repeated the procedure for Vek, who did as his sister had, smacking his lips afterward. Meersh noticed for the first time how odd his teeth were—stubby and sharp. Vek made a strange, dreamy face.

“You look more like an animal than ever,” Meersh thought.

Jurina looked up at the ceiling and began to tilt, back and back and back, slowly, steadily, until her head rested on the floor. Vek placed his head on her breast, and both closed their eyes and breathed in unison. The rings around their eyes seemed lighter than before.

“It must mean they’re healthier.” Meersh set the pot on the table and slid over beside them. “Jurina,” he said. “Vek.” Neither child responded. “Well, this is perfect. I can do as I like now.” He eyed the pot. He dipped his finger into it. The jelly was oily to the touch. Hesitantly he stuck his finger in his mouth. His face pinched in immediate reaction to the bitter flavor. He spat in every direction.

“Idiot,” muttered his penis. It loved to make fun of him.

All he wanted in the whole world was to get rid of that taste. He jumped up and ran to his hidden cache of fermented juice, unstoppered the bottle and took a great swig. Over the bottle he paused to consider the snoozing children.

“The last thing in the world I could do after this is sleep. The flavor won’t go away!” He took another long drink.

Eventually he exchanged drinking to mask the awful flavor for drinking as its own pleasure. He began to laugh: He was brilliant. He was a genius. He was soused. Eventually, in wordless bliss, he passed from consciousness.

Meersh slumbered six hours. Because he was drunk, it was an aimless, directionless sleep. When he next awoke the children were still asleep. He lounged at the game table and ate his cheese, taking his time now. Then he made a search through the children’s clothing, but found no trace of the cheese they’d hidden. They had to have eaten it somehow. He did find a set of bronze knucklebones on Vek that the boy must have swiped while he was picking up everything in the place. Meersh had no sympathy for them after that. He waited them out.

When they began to stir, he dipped his finger quickly into the pot and then stuck another dollop of green slime inside their mouths. They smacked their lips without ever opening their eyes and fell back to the f1oor.

Six hours—now he knew how 1ong they would sleep. He really could go off and leave them without worrying. All the fermented juice was gone, and he wanted more. He prospected through heaps and layers of possessions until he found something with which he could bear to part—a co1lection of mahjongg tiles. He set off to barter for supplies.

He was gone four hours, and returned reeling in triumph and drink. He’d traded the ivory tiles for food and juice, sampled the vintner’s latest batch, and even acquired a nice new pan for cooking. He set down his goods, then stumbled about in the dark of the house until he located his lamp. After feeling his way across the house without stepping on anyone, he lit a taper out of the belly of his oven and ignited the lamp.

The children were still unconscious in a heap in the middle of the room. And Meersh thought to himself, if one dollop was good for six hours then why not another to keep them out all night? Then he could get in some really terrific sleeping. His penis, which often had a very good time in dreams, roused a little. “Why not keep them asleep till their mother gets back?” it suggested.

Meersh dipped his finger in the jar and rubbed another glob across their teeth. Jurina moaned deeply but didn’t stir. Vek slept like the stone idol of an abandoned faith.

Satisfied that they were taken care of, he clambered over to his hammock again. He tugged his nightshirt to his knees, curled up in the netting and went to sleep.

The first thing he did was go back to his feast. But someone had found it by now and eaten everything. Hardly a scrap remained for him. Disappointed, he went looking for another.

He inserted himself into a world where people traveled through the air inside enormous ribbed fish, and he rode along in their midst. They held masks on sticks in front of their faces when they spoke, which made it easy for him to disguise himself among them. Their voices were all snobbily nasal. They tittered, and said such things as: “The life one leads is rarely one’s real life” and “It’s my opinion that madam’s corset is too constricting.” He suspected they were Edgeworld beings, the dreamers whose dreams, according to all the philosophers, associatively created Shadowbridge. They did have a marvelous banquet laid out, and Meersh filled himself with pickled oysters and sparkling wine whilst peering through glass portholes in the bottom of the fish. Beneath wispy clouds, bridges unwound across the globe in nautiloid spirals. For one g1orious moment, as the clouds parted, he thought he saw the point of origin, the great hex at the convergence of the lines—a place of myth that no one had ever located. He ought to have been mapping instead of stuffing his face; but he was awakened before he could start.

His house was still dark, and for a final moment he hovered airborne in the flying fish. Then someone went clomping around overhead, and he came to his senses. Someone moving across the second floor. It would be his neighbor, Sacatepequez, who woke each day just before dawn to begin pacing the floor in wait for the “dry season.” There was no such season here on Valdemir and the nature of the obsessive walking suggested he’d been cursed by someone. It must have been the sound of those enormous leaden feet that had awakened Meersh. He turned on his side to go back to sleep.

Across the room, something slapped the f1oor impatiently.

The children. Meersh sat up. How many hours had he been flying and feasting? He stared into the darkness but could make out nothing, not even the vaguest shape. He couldn’t remember where he’d left the oil lamp; couldn’t remember blowing it out. He felt around on the floor beneath the hammock for a flint and a wick.

He struck the stone until the sparks caught the waxed wick; then, as it flared, glanced across the room.

What he saw was quite impossible. Startled, he huffed and the wick blew out.

But he had seen, and an image too grotesque to be real remained with him in the sudden blackness.

Furiously he sparked the stone to light the wick. Then with one eye to the scene in the middle of the room, he located the oil lamp and touched the wick to it. Holding it aloft, he slung his legs over the side of the hammock and stood.

On the f1oor lay the rumpled clothing of the two children, but the children were gone. They had vanished. Poking out of the necks of their shirts were the heads of two large fish. The smaller one, in Vek’s clothes, fixed its glassy eye upon him and slapped its tail weakly one final time as it died.

Meersh thought, “This must be a trick. They’ve put these fish here to punish me.” He called out, “Jurina, Vek, this isn’t funny at all!” But even as he spoke he spied the greenish jelly dripping from their inhuman, toothless mouths and he knew those were the children of Sun-Through-Clouds.

He had turned them into fish.

He sank down, stunned, staring at the pot, wondering if they’d been fish all along. But the fish had been in his dream, not outside it. Then he understood: He had tasted the awful jelly and dreamt of fish; he had overfed them the same and they had become fish. Once a day—Sun-Through-Clouds had told him to feed it to them once a day. He hadn’t listened, because he wanted her and did not want her children.

What could he do now? Tell her that her children had died? He considered it seriously for at least four seconds. Then he asked himself, “What bodies can I show her?” He could say they’d been kidnapped. But she would see through it, through him. He was not a good liar. His cousins always caught him out whenever he lied, and wasn’t everyone his cousin? She would know.

His best hope lay in flight. That was what the dream had augured: People in flying fish—yes, there could be no doubt of it.

“This is all your fault, you,” he said into his nightshirt. “Wake up now, and see what you’ve done.”

“Don’t blame me,” countered the penis, stirring. “However you dress it up, we were both of the same mind. If you’d listened to me in the first place, at least you could have been amply rewarded. I told you to plunge in when you had her.”

“Is lust all you can think about?”

“Yes!” Penis happily replied.

“Fine, please yourself. You always do. But tell me how to get out of this.”

Penis said nothing.

“Come on, what am I going to do?”

No reply ensued. Meersh set down the lamp and ran outside. The sky was just lightening, but all the houses in the close were dark. He turned and ran down the lane, out onto the main avenue. It was nearly deserted in both directions. A few covered carts being hauled along were all that moved. He raced to the shop of Beedlo, the vintner. Huge swollen bags of wine hung in the window like the carcasses of strange animals. He hammered on the door. “Beedlo, wake up. Beedlo, help me!”

“What, are you hurt?” came the cry from the second f1oor.

He stepped back and stared up at a round, balding face.

“Meersh, is that you? What are you doing at this time of morning in your bed clothes? You can’t have drunk up everything already.”

“No, no. It’s an emergency. I’ve killed them! What do I do?”

“Killed whom?”

“The chil—the fish. I’ve got two dead fish in my house! What do I do?”

Beedlo replied, “Why don’t you fry them up? A little butter’s my favorite. And that white wine I sold you is excellent for a little sauce.”

“Fry them?”

“You’ve got a new pan, haven’t you?”

Meersh slapped himself. “I’ve got a nice new pan’ yes! Yes, that’s it. That’s what I’ll do. You hear that, you stupid penis? Ha!” He bounded off Beedlo’s stoop and ran straight for his lane.

“Mad as a mayfly,” Beedlo muttered, and closed his shutters.

Back inside his house, Meersh took the fish out of their clothes. He gathered up the clothing and threw it behind the tapestry. He placed them in the new frying pan on the black stone stove and considered them. Just two dead fish in a world of fish. That’s all they were. Well, he thought, it wasn’t as if he’d wanted to kill them.

He gutted and skinned them and tossed the heads aside where he didn’t have to look at them. Then as Beedlo had suggested, he mixed butter and wine and began to fry the filets. The fish smelted better even than the meal he’d consumed in his sleep. Once they were cooking, he pulled off his nightshirt and dressed. After breakfast, he would take the remains out and throw them in the ocean.

The fish sizzled and Meersh sang a wordless song in anticipation, and between them made enough noise that he didn’t hear the knock on his door.

The room suddenly grew brighter. Meersh turned from his cooking to see a figure silhouetted in the open doorway. There could be no mistaking her ripe form. Sun-Through-Clouds had returned early.

“Oh, you lying children!” he cursed beneath his breath. “You evil penis!”

A1oud he exclaimed, “Why, Sun-Through-Clouds, I didn’t expect you for days!”

She smiled at him—the smile that had ignited his desire on many occasions—but which faltered now as her eyes sought her children in the depths of the large room. She reached the 1ow table and stared down at the cards and the open pot.

Meersh swallowed.

He watched in helpless horror as her hands lifted the pot. She peered into it in bewilderment, and from it to Meersh and then back again. He knew what she was seeing, what thoughts would be tearing through her brain at this very moment.

He blurted out, “I have to tell you, your children ran off. I was hoping they’d only gone somewhere to play but alas I fear now it’s me—they’ve run away from me. I would happily help you look for them. Oh, yes, that stuff. You know, I tried it myself, it’s not really very edible, plus I’m afraid I spilt some on the—”

Her look silenced him as severely as a muzzle. She set the pot back on the table.

He wanted desperately to turn his back on her as though he had no reason to fear her. It might have gone a long way toward reassuring her; but he couldn’t. Despite her voluptuous beauty, what he saw in her eyes warned that something ghastly hid within. With one hand, a simple movement, she shoved him aside as forcefully as if she’d struck him. He skittered into a stool and tumbled headfirst into his hammock. It spun, wrapping him up like a tuna.

Sun-Through-Clouds saw the severed heads of the fish. She cried into the pan, “My children, my children!” She tried to touch the lightly browned bodies but could not. She swung about. “You did this. You did this to me!”

Meersh fought his way free of the hammock. The anger spreading from her heart was changing her already. She seemed to grow larger and darker, as if absorbing the light in the room. Her eyes became steel, and her body sharpened and molded into parts both flesh and metal. In places her skin parted, revealing black iron like the stove behind her. Rivets popped out along her forehead and her jaws shifted from side to side with a painful, grating squeal. Meersh knew all about shape-shifters, especially the ones who transformed in anger. They were the most dangerous.

He tumbled from the hammock and bolted out the door and down the narrow lane. He skittered into the main thoroughfare narrowly missing a scrimshaw-hawker’s, cart set up at the corner. He fell on the stones, sprang up and ran. People on their knees scrubbing their stoops stared at him as he ran past. Fishmongers glanced up from where they knelt, pouring water onto the stones where they’d gutted the morning’s catch. Fish blood was a libation spilt across his path—a terrible, terrible omen.

He dodged around baskets of fish, of fruit, strips of seaweed hung out to dry, a jeweler’s glittering cart. To his left, the masts of fishing boats clustered motionless above the ocean. He never stopped, never slowed. Too close behind him he heard shrieks from the same people he’d passed. He didn’t have to look back, nor did he wish to for fear the sight of Sun-Through-Clouds completely transformed would ground him to the spot.

If he’d had an inkling how to swim, he might have leapt the railing into the sea. He cursed himself for the life he’d wasted, rejecting knowledge and skill in pursuit of base desires of the moment. It was true, completely true, and if he could only elude this monster and relocate to some other span of the eternal bridge, why, he would definitely change his ways. Become a priest. Devote his life to charitable duties. Become the eyes for someone blind or work to feed starving children—no, no, bad idea. No children, he should never be allowed near children. He should go on a pilgrimage instead. Soon.

On his right he passed a five-story apartment building with shops on the ground floor. A turret ran up the corner. Higher towers prodded the sky above the apartments, with pennants hanging, waiting for the winds. He ran past alleys and lanes, and looked down every one for some idea of an escape. He had to get off this empty thoroughfare before she caught him.

With no more plan than that, Meersh turned down the next lane he saw, then into other, smaller offshoots—dodging blindly through a section of the span full of treacherous alleys and subversive streets. He wove in and out, hoping that such a maze might save him. Even he didn’t know where he was.

He dodged around sacks of milled grain and kegs of wine waiting to be hauled in. Any other time the smells would have beguiled him.

He turned mistakenly into a stinking alley that ended in a fence. He had to throw three crates up to dive over it. His tunic caught on the rough poles and tore. He landed hard on dungy straw, amidst a f1ock of goats that whickered and neighed. They sprang aside, but some came back and nudged him in friendly fashion. One started to chew on his torn tunic. He shoved them all aside, waiting and listening. Hoping. Then he heard the whuffling of something rushing down the alley. Guttural, grating noises behind the fence.

A hand clutched the top of the fence. It was black and shiny, spiked at every joint, and as big as his face. Smoke boiled up behind it. A colossal blackened skull with smoldering eyes peered down into the pen.

Meersh screamed. He bounded over the railing and ran on.

He ran so long that he lost all sense of what he was doing. Running became the only thing in life. He crossed the entire span that morning—four hundred wyrths at least—until he could see ahead the great south gatehouse of Valdemir.

The span ended in a barbican. The one tunnel going in split off into two beyond the portcullis, each with its own turnstile. A single guard regulated all traffic through the barbican, between Valdemir and the two other spans that met there. The guard did a comfortable business collecting bribes from those who wanted to cross for reasons they couldn’t have named: Two spans ensured that he did very well indeed. He had grown lazy and corpulent from the easy pickings. His breakfast of beer and egg soup could last sometimes two hours or more. Meersh shot into the tunnel and dove over the turnstile so quickly that the guard, 1ooking up from his bowl, glimpsed a blur that might have been a trick of light. It might have been a fluttering gull. He didn’t feel 1ike getting up for a blur.

Meersh had arbitrarily picked the right-hand tunnel. He emerged out the other side upon a span called Lukhan, where he had never been before. Lukhan was older than Valdemir and not so pleasant. Its stones were worn and uneven, the center avenue unswept and unwholesome. The tattered awning fronted shops might have sold the secrets of dead empires. More likely they sold lies. The houses were narrow and not very high. A seedy crowd milled about, hawking and buying, cajoling and thieving. Looming above them were two great towers, linked by a narrow wall and topped with crumbling turrets. Meersh wove toward them through the crowd, putting as many people as possible between him and the gatehouse. His sorry state raised any number of scornful looks, even from those most shabbily dressed. People stepped aside to let him pass. The essence of goat manure helped.

Almost beneath the towers, he entered a smaller, tighter throng that seemed as ragged as he was. A few men in tidy black uniforms hemmed them together. He slipped deep among them to hide himself. The beggarly throng moved slowly but steadily away from the barbican and toward the twin towers, for which he gave thanks.

A moment later, his pursuer emerged.

The iron monster had reverted. She’d become her own beautiful self again. Crouching low, Meersh was well hidden among the beggars, and they behind the 1ooser crowd. Yet Sun-Through-Clouds stared straight at him across the plaza. To his amazement she smiled. Her smile flew to him and whispered in his ear, “A poor fate you’ve picked, dear Meersh. I won’t set foot in there to retrieve you. My punishment would have been quicker than death in Lukhan.” Her fingers pressed and moved as if snapping a wishbone.

She turned on her heel and walked back into the tunnel.

Meersh cheered. He had won. Sun-Through-Clouds was giving up. Now he could slip away, start over somewhere else where she would never find him. He straightened, straightened his ripped tunic, pushed his mane of hair into some kind of order, and tried to depart from the shuffling throng.

A large hand fell upon his shoulder.

“Where you think you’re going, louse?” asked a voice as large as the hand.

“Hey? I, ahm, forgot something, cousin,” he said.

The hand spun him around. “I’ll bet you forgot to bathe.” The hand belonged to one of the uniformed men. He’d closed in from the side. His sleeves sported lightning-bolt patches. “And what an appalling pong! Taken a goat lover, have you?”

“No, I forgot something important.”

“Didn’t we all? Else we’d be off somewhere with the living. Maybe on that span over there, heh?” He pointed to the bridge span Meersh had not chosen. Brightly festooned with banners and flags and pastel spires, it receded sharply into the mists, much more inviting than the dark towers looming overhead. The hand on his shoulder turned him again.

In front of him lay a black hole cut in the wall between the towers. As he looked on, the beggar at the head of the line stepped into and was swallowed by the blackness.

“No,” Meersh protested fearfully. “I am living. I mean, I should be somewhere else than this, cousin.”

“Sure you should.” The hand slid from his shoulder to the back of his neck, where it clamped tightly. If you want to be excused, cousin, at least come up with something original.” The guard hauled him around the others ahead of him. “Special acknowledgment, louse, of your special stink. You move to the head of the line. Bye now.” He propelled him into the blackness.

Meersh dropped like an anchor, straight to the center of the world.

At this point in his performances, Bardsham blows out the lantern behind his screen and all is dark. The audience shifts edgily, wondering if a tale can end at such an unsatisfying juncture: They know Meersh gets into trouble in every story, but they expect some resolution—a satisfying conclusion. Bardsham is a master at sensing their collective mood.

At the very moment when they would begin to leave, a dull red light comes up behind he screen—the lantern now enclosed in red glass—and the audience settles back.

Meersh’s figure comes into focus against the screen, but it’s a pthisic shadow now, wasted as if by disease. The leather of this puppet’s torso has been hammered so thin that the light passing through it reveals the thicker shadow of his skeleton. Years have passed in no time at all. Press-ganged into the mines of Lukhan, he has outlived those who fell in with him and others thrown in later, mainly because he has willingly eaten anything—abso1utely anything—in order to survive. Propped up around the edges of the screen are the corpses of unfortunate pickers.

The mines of Lukhan were as ancient as the world. Indeed, much silver and marble had been recovered from them, some at one level and some at another. Levels were used up and then sealed off to allow a new crop of metal and marble to grow.

Over centuries, the mine shafts sank ever deeper until finally, inadvertently, they broke through into the Land of the Dead: A wall collapsed.

For the abject miners, life was already death, but the collapse brought the dead directly to them. On the other side of the large hole, the dead drifted in to watch the miners work themselves into the afterlife. The manner of dying seemed to fascinate them.

The dead were most peculiar. Their features often were flat, as if lightly drawn upon a smooth face. They were adorned as in life: Clothing shifted form with memory, as spirits reminisced. Except as memory, time did not exist in the Land of the Dead. The future would never arrive. For the ghosts, as for the miners, time ended with the present.

The Land of the Dead appeared to be a vast grotto receding into infinity. Figures wandered aimlessly throughout, dressed in costumes of ancient times, of other spans and stranger places. In the opening to the grotto, Meersh beheld strange finery every day: linen robes and striped headdresses beside smudges that looked like tailcoats and ruffles, bustiers and hoop-skirted ball gowns, liripipes and lithams. They might have included spirits from the Edgeworld. He couldn’t say.

An aura surrounded each of them—a sphere of influence that gained dimension the closer one came. From a distance it was a bright mist, but closer it took on detail, becoming a mutable view hovering about the spirit.

One ghost that drifted past the opening had no hands but strange boxes on the ends of its arms with glowing centers that projected bluish moving images and music and voices as if each contained a tiny world of its own. A jungle aura hung around it.

The Land of the Dead as he knew of it was surrounded by molten rivers and guarded by monstrous creatures. Yet nothing seemed to separate the dead from the miners. Nothing except fear, and that derived mostly from stories about hapless fools who’d attempted to escape through the opening.

“What happened to them?” Meersh had asked his rheumy-eyed neighbor, a miner who died two weeks later at his side.

“Become ghosts themselves, the instant they crossed over and stepped on that misty green floor. Like that.” He snapped his dark fingers. “Ate ‘em right up.”

Looking upon the suffering, slope-backed filthy workers around him, Meersh had replied, “That might not be so terrible.” Nevertheless, he thought, no more about sneaking into the grotto of dead souls—until the day the shades came looking for him.

The pickers—those who tore the silver from the open seams—worked constantly throughout the day with only one resting period, when the food was brought around and they sat and ate, hardly speaking to one another, barely looking at each other. Speaking would have taken too much energy.

Meersh sat against a rock and wiped his grimy fingers across the tin pan on which he’d been fed. He licked the grease from them and leaned back to enjoy a minute’s peace. As he did, he spied two figures hovering at the edge of the fissure, watching him.

They were small, their faces oddly pointed, their eyes at the side instead of straight ahead. They 1ooked a little bit like fish. He hadn’t eaten fish in a very long time, and his stomach growled with longing. Their clothing looked vaguely familiar. And the blurry aura hanging between them—didn’t it remind him of the interior of his house? His house. The recollection stirred memories a thousand years old.

Yes, of course they 1ooked like fish.

He glanced around to be sure none of the guards was about, then crawled near the collapsed cave wall. “Vek!” he whispered. One of the two fish-spirits floated nearer.

“You know us?” asked a voice so icy that his head froze hearing it. But, like the clothing, it was familiar to him.

“Yes, cousin, I know you.”

“We know you, too,” accused Jurina. “You’re the god of sleep who put us here.” She asked, “When is our mother coming to get us? We don’t like it here.”

“Wake us up! Take us home, please.”

“It’s not so easily done. As you see.” And he dragged his leg up to let them behold the shackles on his raw and festering ankles.

“We want our mother!” They began keening like the lost souls they were.

“Hush,” Meersh hissed. If they kept on wailing, he would be in plenty of trouble; the guards would take away his meal and work him till he dropped. He glanced around at the other weary pickers, most of whom sagged over their tin plates, too exhausted to take interest. Almost dead themselves.

A plan took shape in his mind—an escape, at least a possible one. “Children,” he said, “go back into your world there and find me one of my former cousins from this mine. Quickly now, if you want to get out.”

“Why? There are plenty of them behind you,” complained Jurina. Vek had already turned and moved off as fast as spirits could do.

“Yes,” he told her patiently, “but look at them. They have no thought any longer of escape—not dead, but hardly alive. They’re ruins.”

“Why?”

“Civilisation used them up.”

She stared at him silently—at least he thought she was staring. It was hard to know for sure with her goggle eyes.

Vek came back shortly, towing another spirit behind him. Unlike the children this one was accompanied by a wide, crisp aura in which Meersh recognized an avenue of Shadowbridge. “Then it’s you”‘ said the spirit.

“And who would you be that you know me?”

“You know perfectly well, trickster.”

Meersh recognized the voice of Rheumy Eye, the miner who’d died beside him, but the epithet troubled him. He remarked, “Your condition looks much improved.”

“I’m dead, you bastard. How much improved is that?”

“You tell me. But first tell me what happens if I step across into your grotto. The truth now.”

“Thinking to leave the mining profession? Escape your condign punishment?”

“I did you no harm in life. Why gibe me? Tell me—is the story true?”

“I see into you. They’re too young to have the skill, but I know your lazy soul. You will nothing. You create good things and evil things all across the world, but you perceive none for what it is. You know no morality, and kindness comes only when you want something. Like now.”

Meersh hung his head. He didn’t have to try very hard to look despondent. “Have pity. Isn’t this punishment enough?”

“Pah.”

“Show me so that I can escape this dreaded place that killed you. So that I may take these poor little fish—er, children—back to their mother, who even now grieves at their untimely loss.” He worked up tears, and slapped both hands to his face, shaking as if he wept. He peered at the shade between his fingers.

“What’s the good of that? They’re dead, same as me,” argued the ghost. “Same as you soon enough.”

“I can save them if we hurry,” he blubbered. “They’re barely anchored. We can bring them back, you and me. Just tell me.”

Rheumy Eye’s aura now projected images of the mine itself. Meersh knew his resistance was breaking down. “Won’t do you any good anyway. The story you have was put about to keep pickers from shambling off through the hole. If someone was to slip in here, they wouldn’t know which way to go. Be lost forever, which ain’t long, considering. Death does come for you. But slow and steady. Comes crawlin’ up you from the ground, till your whole body is pale as the moon and cold as night, and you 1ose yourself in what you knew. So it’s no lie, what the guards say. Just not so quick.”

“But you know how to navigate it.”

The ghost bobbed agitatedly. “What if I do? I can’t leave. I’m not lightly dead. I’m very dead.”

“But you can show me—show them—the way out so that I can rescue them. Don’t you see?”

“Like I said—if you was to save these two, it’d be an accident of saving yourself, else there’s more to it than you’re telling.”

He had to laugh at the reversal of things: The ghost could see right through him. He dropped his pretense of misery. “Happenstance, so be it,” he said, “let accidents occur and fortuity reign. Who cares for my motives? Let them be saved. You alone can do that.”

In the tunnel far behind him he heard the snap of a whip. The return of the guards. The daily meal was at an end. A hundred men groaned as they found a little more strength and got up on their swollen feet. Meersh hurried to collect small scrapings and nuggets of silver he’d concealed nearby while he dug. Over time he’d acquired enough silver to fill his pockets until his hips bulged on each side.

“You been planning.”

“Escape was inevitable—just a question of how and when. Let’s go.”

Rheumy Eye shook his pale head at fathomless self-interest, then leaned down and wrapped an ethereal hand around the shackles. The iron froze, becoming instantly frangible. Meersh pulled his ankles apart and the chain snapped. The leg irons split. Quickly, he bounded into the grotto beside the ghost. The bottoms of his feet burned as if seared. “Yiiiee! Hurry now.” He reached for the children’s hands but then stopped himself, recalling what had happened to the leg iron. “You stay close to me—not too close, Jurina—and I’ll take you to your mother.”

They trekked across the Land of the Dead. Meersh yipped and hopped as coldness like frostbite wormed through his feet. “Gods, this is excruciating,” he hissed.

“It’s your greed. All that silver weighs you down, you mire in death the faster. If I were you, I’d get rid of it.”

Meersh shook his head defiantly, but soon the pain attacked his ankles. He thought, “I can do without some of it,” and he reached into his pockets and sprinkled a few of the nuggets around him, where they dissolved instantly, leaving only icy puddles to mark where the ground had resorbed them. He was dismayed by the dissolution—leaving silver behind was one thing, eliminating it another. But like a balloon that’s cast off ballast, he rose above the chill of death. His ankles felt all right again. Death stayed confined in the bottoms of his feet.

Deeper into the grotto, they encountered clusters of ghosts surrounded by small villages of their own dreaming. The proximity to other eidolons with shared memories redoubled the power of their projections. Their collective aura extended well beyond them, forming a landscape that might have been real. He walked through a farrago of places as alien to him as the realm of death itself was: a place where the houses stood on legs, shifting from side to side, and could run away from floods; another where people in close-fitting silver and gold costumes strolled arm in arm as if in a processional along a broad avenue overarched by impossible trees. A world underwater: Sunlight rippled eel-like across everything and the phantoms floated above the f1oor, swimming through the air. There were hundreds of such scenes; thousands more he might have beheld if he’d elected to remain.

Death soon imbrued his legs again. He groaned as it climbed his calves. He could no longer feel his feet.

“Throw away that silver,” his penis begged. “Do you want to lose me, too? If it gets any higher, you’ll be sorry!”

Peevishly then, he flung away more of the silver. In his anger he threw a large lump at a nearby group of ghosts. It struck one of them on the back, and the whole group turned as one. Their vague features darkened. Their heads followed him. He crept closer to his guide for protection.

“Really asking for it, ain’t you? “ said Rheumy Eye.

“It’s because of this damned place that I have to give up my hard-earned riches. I have a perfect right to be upset.”

The ghost made a grunt of dismissal and continued on. Beneath his temper, Meersh noted that his feet were still blue, and his ankles still burned with cold. He pondered the dead man whom he’d struck. The fact was, the lump had hit him. It hadn’t dissolved.

Meersh withdrew more of the silver from his pockets and said, “Vek, Jurina, you carry these for me, will you? It won’t harm you as it does me.”

The fish-children accepted the riches; he was careful not to let them touch him. Vek commented sharply, “Now maybe you won’t slow us up so much.”

“I? I’ve all but led this flight. Remember who arranged this for you.”

The boy made no reply.

They came upon another cluster of ghosts, whose ambit was a desert land filled with towering temples and statuary. Some such spirits had passed them previously, dressed in the same linen skirts and headdresses and necklaces of lapis lazuli. In this group, however, Meersh spotted two—a bearded man and a woman—seated on cushioned chairs in front of a board game that he had never seen before. He could not help but intrude. The ghosts took on definition. Both the man and woman had dark makeup circling their eyes. The woman wore a gold band around her head, and her breasts were exposed. He barely noticed the inclination of his penis at the sight of her. He was staring at the board. It had three rows of ten squares each. Four of the squares had markings on them. The playing pieces were black and white carved figures of mythological creatures. He watched the woman take four thin dice and throw them. The dice were curved a1ong one side and flat along the other. The curved side was black, the flat side white. The woman moved one of the white pieces forward.

“What is it called, this game?” he inquired of her.

She looked up at him as if she hadn’t noticed him before. “Senet,” she replied. It was a game he had never heard of.

Behind him Jurina asked sharply, “What are you doing. We’re carrying your silver; you should be going faster!”

Rheumy Eye replied, “He gives in to his urges wherever he goes. His appetite for games is stronger almost than his instinct for survival. He gives you his silver to stay alive, then dallies here to watch stones pushed along a board.” He came up beside him. “You want this for yourself, pawky?”

“It’s exquisite.”

“Take it, they won’t miss it.”

Meersh stared incredulously at the miner’s ghost.

“Don’t trust me? Think I might treat you the way you do everyone else?” The ghost laughed. He stepped in and whisked away the board. He handed it to Meersh. There was a drawer in one side of it for storing the pieces for safekeeping, but the pieces had disappeared. When Meersh glanced back at the couple, the board and pieces lay on the table in front of them as before. Rheumy Eye chortled at his confusion. “Time,” he said. “It’s no river here.”

Meersh’s feet were burning again because of the weight of the board. He handed over the last parings of silver to the children.

“Not much farther,” promised the ghost.

The burning cold did not abate, but Meersh would not part with his board. Pretty soon one of his toes fell off. He yelped and picked it up. It was frozen solid. He put it in the drawer of the game board. Before long he lost another.

They headed for a heap of loose rock leading to a cavern wall. “That’s your way,” their guide said. The last of Meersh’s toes came off. He put it with the others in the tiny drawer; now with every step he stumbled off-balance.

Rheumy Eye drew up. “I’m too much dead to go farther than this. The climb is yours to make, all the way to that tiny dot of light up there. You do good in taking these children with you, even if it’s that box full of your toes that moves you to it. Your reward suits you.” He left them.

Meersh quickly climbed off the floor of the grotto and up the rock face. The children kept with him but not through any effort on his part. If he’d still had his toes on his feet, he might have climbed fast enough to leave them behind.

The circle of light grew brighter as it grew larger. It played across them in their ascent. The shades of the children brushed up against him. He cried out in fear at their touch, but nothing happened to him. Steadily, they took on form and definition. They were no longer fish, but were becoming something else animal-like. As they tired of the climb, they grabbed onto his legs and hung from his pockets. To brush them off, he would have had to let go of the rock face or the game, and he would do neither. He dragged them along fast as he could go.

At the top Meersh poked his head out into the light. He found himself over-looking the whole of a span. A gull squatted beside him, watching him incuriously. “Hello, cousin,” he said to it. The gull disdainfully ignored him and walked away. He pulled himself halfway out of the hole, enough so that he could fold himself over the lip of it and free his hands. He set down the senet board and took hold of each child, one at a time, and drew them out over his head. They were wholly transformed. They had round, furry faces, and black rings encircled their eyes, though that might have been soot. When they looked at him, they showed their tiny sharp teeth. At least, he thought, they weren’t fish anymore. He climbed out after them and snatched up his game board before anything happened to it.

He stood on a ridge of clay pantiles along the peak of a house. He was battered and torn and covered with greasy chimney soot. A great vista surounded him: the vast ocean; the great broad span with its single main avenue off which capillary lanes twisted every which way; the high, cupola-topped towers where the wealthy and the governors dwelled, many of whom had paid handsomely for his games and his knowledge. A thousand rooftops distant stood the weathered twin towers of Lukhan like two smudges impressed upon the clouds; and, directly below, a small circle of houses like petals on a sunflower. “This seems awfully familiar,” he remarked.

Vek looked up, disgusted. “We’re on top of your house,” he said. “How do we get down?”

“Call for help I suppose.” He was dismayed by their location. But, sure enough, what they had emerged from was his chimney. He peered into it, at the edges of blackened bricks dwindling to darkness.

The children cried for help, which brought some of Meersh’s neighbors with a ladder; it also caught the attention of people on the main avenue, who gathered close to the railing and pointed and watched as the three of them clambered to the edge. Word of them spread like disease.

The children refused to be quit of him then. He pleaded to his neighbors, “Cousins, please, someone take them over to their mother, she only lives across the way. Isn’t she home? Well, let them wait for her, then.” His rescuers plainly felt they’d done enough. In helping him climb down two stories. “You’d have been able to shimmy down the drain if you took care of yourself,” one of them told him. “You’re starving to death, Meersh.” And, “What’s happened to your feet, then?”

With the greatest reluctance, he took the children inside. He inspected the interior. The pot of green jelly was gone. There were no fillets in his frying pan, no fish heads beside the stove. He hazarded a look behind the tapestry where he’d stuffed the children’s clothing, and the clothes were gone, too. These miracles left him addled.

There came a loud knock on his door. Thinking it was one of the neighbors, he flung it back to find Sun-Through-Clouds standing there. Her look changed from fury to joy as she spied the animal-children behind him. The thunderhead vanished; the sun broke upon him. “Oh, my darlings!” she cried and swept in while he leaped as far from her as he could. But he couldn’t balance without his toes and fell into the hammock she’d woven for him.

Sun-Through-Clouds dropped to her knees and hugged her children to her. She kissed their faces, inhaled them, her babies, her Raki babies. They whimpered excitedly to her, words on top of each other, the way children do.

She looked over her shoulder at Meersh with large and liquid eyes. He untangled himself from the hammock, clutched the game board tightly to him chest, and took a step toward the door.

Sun-Through-Clouds rose and barred his way. “And you!” she cried. “You are my hero. You penetrated the realm of death to bring them back to me, just like in great stories. How I misjudged you, my dear.” Her arms circled him and her mouth sought his. He remained rigid with terror. She pressed herself tightly to him. His penis had nothing to say about her now. It had retreated as far as it could. Had it been able, it would have detached, slid surreptitiously down his leg and scooted under the nearest heap of games.

Her nails raked his back. Didn’t she notice the soot and grease, how awful he smelled?

“I swear to reward you with every peccant pleasure you desire, my dearest, dearest Meersh,” she whispered in his ear. Her thighs wrapped around hi leg. Her teeth pinched his earlobe. All he heard was the whuffling, creaking breath of the monster that had pursued him across the whole of Valdemir.

She pushed him back with one hand. The other caught the drawstring of his trousers. He fell again into her net.

His penis screamed, and he fainted dead away.

The articulated puppet lies swinging in the hammock. The other figures—the beautiful woman and the transformed children—silently withdraw. Then he rises from the hammock to take his bows. There’s always plentiful applause and cries of “Pe-nis, Pe-nis!” more often than not, until it, too, appears, rising from his torso. Both sexes, all creatures, cheer him. They know he speaks the truth about the caprices of life.

The lamp goes out on the shadow-puppet screen.

Bardsham emerges to more applause. His assistants hang back behind him.

When the theater empties, they jump to action. One takes down the curtains and collapses the framework. One replaces all the puppets in neat pile in their cases, ready for the next performance. There will always be a next performance somewhere. And there will always be another story of Meersh. Meersh did many things, awake and asleep, in the earliest times on Shadowbridge. He did everything. His escapades are cautionary.

Bardsham will leave them to dismantling. If they’re performing in a hall, he goes to the tavern; if they’re in a tavern he goes to the bar. If he’s lucky, someone will show her interest. If she lingers before him, he’ll smile and do his best to enchant her. Though he tells many tales, it’s Meersh who’s won him fame. Meersh she’ll ask about. He’s not a handsome man, Bardsham, and it’s a rough life, traveling the spans. Closed up playing in a space not much larger than two kegs, he probably stinks as bad as Meersh did climbing out the chimney. By the time she finally accompanies him, he’s often five parts drunk as well. But in his room, there’s the magic of love and laughter. He’ll strike up a conversation with his own penis to entertain her, and it will answer always in the affirmative. Always “Yes!” it wants her. “Yes!” it loves her. “Yes!” it adores her. Yes, it is no different for him.

Meersh the Bedeviler speaks the truth. Here and there and halfway round the world. Truth is usually good for a night.

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