[story] the bridge and the abyss

[ib_archive]

author: chris (aefallen)
email: edgeofdawn [at] gmail.com



The problem with a love story, any love story, is this: for it to work, for it to even happen, you don’t even need to believe in love.

That sucks.

Love's a little bit like the monster under your bed. Just because you pretend it isn’t there doesn't mean it doesn't exist. Not believing in it won't make it go away.

And for good measure, love's also a lot like trouble: if it wants to happen, it’s damn well going to happen. I’m not sure love is as universal as stupidity or human cruelty, but it would be nice if it were.

But I get away from myself. You're here for a story, and since you've come this far, I suppose I'll have to give you one. You may not quite get what you're expecting, but love's like trouble that way, too: there’s more than just one kind of it.

So I'll start at the beginning.

When I was still young enough to believe everything my mother told me, she told me: no matter how terrifying that chasm between two hearts, love was the surest and most enduring bridge across that abyss. That's all anyone ever needed to know about love.

Even then, I laughed. And told her that love wasn’t a bridge but an abyss. Because people fell in it.

Speaking of bridges: let me tell you a little about the world I walked as a child, to help build that bridge between your world and mine. The world that was mine was a city of bridges and mirrors, of mirages and tricks of the mind.

And the very first trick that my city played on you was convincing you that it was not one, but two.

There is but one way to set foot upon its cobblestones and Byzantine mazes, and it is over the water. On a clear, still day, as the sun blazes down upon the sea, sunlight and water conspire to create one of the most splendid illusions this world has to offer: a second floating city, twin to the first, meeting at the edge between real and reflection.

The first time I saw it, I thought it was a beautiful lie.

But from the start I could tell them apart: you breathed air in the first city, water in the second. Men spun out the tales of their lives in the first, but turned to the second when they had lost everything except the will to end it all.

My father's calling was fitting; the city brought all the work he could want to his doorstep. Carnival flashed by our city every year, bringing hordes of revelers who wanted a way to look as if they were wearing the ducats they weren’t willing to spend. The commedia dell’arte, the elaborate and interminable operas, all the glamour and glitter of all the arts of the stage – all these called for the work my father loved most in the world: creating replicas.

My father was a simple man, but the work he did was anything but. He fashioned the most stunning recreations of originals I have ever seen. What he did made it possible for the common man to pretend he was a lord, for the ordinary serving girl to style herself a princess, for a prince of the gutter to crown himself a king. While the originals could easily fetch a Doge’s ransom and more, my father’s work fetched more modest sums. It wasn’t enough to make us rich, but it was certainly enough to make us comfortable, and who really needs more than that?

My father fashioned his replicas for everyone and anyone: young, earnest lovers wanting the best they could afford for the ones they loved; wealthy matrons terrified of losing their heirlooms and wanting decoys with which to fool thieves; performing troupes with little to spend and even less to lose. People, said my father, enjoyed the imitations even more than the originals. They weren’t afraid to lose them or break them, and this made them happy to use them.

My father's workshop was my home as soon as I was old enough to toddle across the floor and grasp a polished stone in my hands. I spent my childhood on his knee and at his feet, learning his craft. There I learnt how pewter and brass took the place of silver and gold, how very much mother-of-pearl resembled pearl itself, how dyed serpentine could be mistaken for jade. I can work bone so it looks just like ivory, and know how well exquisitely cut glass passed for diamond.

So passed the years til I turned seventeen. A week to the day, my father said, gently and kindly, that the craft of a jeweler was but one half of his art, and that to be a true master of the craft, I had to master the other: that of anticipating, and knowing, what a customer wanted. And, said my father, to learn how to serve in this way, one had to first be a servant. Also, said my father, it would be good to for me to learn a little humility, and more importantly, the world would still need servants when it had run out of use for jewelery imitators.

Thus it was that I found myself the newest servant in the Doge's Palace. I took to the life better than I feared I would, but there was one thing which I could not accept with as much good grace as I had accepted scrubbing pots and pans: the Doge’s only son, Giacomo.

Giacomo was ten years old and the greatest bane of my existence. He was spoilt beyond belief, and the surest test of my will and endurance that I had ever met. While Giacomo could've passed for one of Botticelli’s angels made flesh, his soul belonged to a creature even Hell's abyss could not endure. He was a terror unto all the world that knew him, a legion of chaos in the body of a little boy.

As I was new, I had stupidly agreed to be assigned to him, thinking that a mere boy could be no more trouble than an afternoon of scrubbing the splendid floors of the Doge’s residence.

As it was, I was wrong. By noon each day he would inevitably have tried my patience to breaking point no less than five times, and I had to stop my evening lagoon walks because I would think about throwing him into it every time I passed by.

The days danced swiftly, and soon, Carnival settled onto the city, filling the streets with revelers, the canal with gondolas, and the very air with a sense of unbearable excitement. Men, masks and masquerades were underfoot, and it was in this whirl of activity that the Doge’s only son managed to get himself kidnapped.

In a way, the kidnapping was entirely Giacomo’s fault. He'd cut himself slicing an apple that morning, and cried as if he'd been born ten months ago, instead of ten years. The cook, already annoyed by his intrusion into her kitchen, and now not wanting anything to do with the wailing child, commanded me to take him to the festivities.

I held his hand and walked him out to the piazza. The distraction worked like a charm: Giacomo, distracted by the gaiety and spectacle of Carnival, stopped crying. Soon, he was tugging at me, wanting to see everything all at once. When a jester tumbled past and beckoned at the boy, he dashed forward, drawing a yell from me, and followed the gaily coloured clown through the crowds.

I followed in hot pursuit, but the jester led Giacomo and I a merry dance through the piazza. I nearly lost them half a dozen times before the jester ducked under a massive Carnival float, and Giacomo followed.

Just then, a reveler in Plague Doctor garb loomed before me, his massive beaked mask leering. I jerked backwards, and just as quickly, another reveler tripped me. In all the commotion, Giacomo’s float had moved forward, and a chattering crowd had gathered in its wake. Cursing, I tore after the float.

Ducking under it, however, didn’t bring me Giacomo. I surfaced, and made a circuit of the float as panic shot through me. As many times as I’d wished for the boy to disappear, I didn't want it to be like this. I ducked under the float once again. Still no Giacomo.

Where could the boy be? I asked myself. Panic would do me as much good as attempting to reason with Giacomo.

"Looking for me?"

I whirled, and there he was, looking a little too smug. He looked unruffled, although his clothes were in terrific disarray.

I do not know what it was that made me instantly wary. Perhaps it was my knowledge that I should have had to search half of the procession before finding Giacomo, and that a Giacomo distracted by the Carnival would never have returned to my side of his own accord. Perhaps it was the boy's voice, its accent and cadence more resembling that of a child of the Lower City than that of the Doge’s son.

Perhaps it took more to fool a child of a jeweler who’d spent all his life learning how to tell the real from an imitation.

I cursed Giacomo once more for running, and I set out to find out the truth of this lie. I would bring no changeling back to walk the Doge's palace wearing Giacomo’s face.

I was taking too long, and the boy was starting to wonder at my delay.

"Yes, my liege," I answered, smoothly. The boy didn't remark on this: another mistake – Giacomo demanded everyone address him as "My lord," and would soundly rebuke anyone who did otherwise.

I was almost entirely certain by now, but I needed to make sure.

"May I attend to your cuffs?" I asked, solicitously. "They appear to have been utterly savaged by your romp through the revelers." The boy had no reason to suspect me. One glance was all it took to confirm that this boy’s hands were smooth, unmarked, and didn’t bear the cut that Giacomo had accidentally inflicted on himself this morning.

I don't know why I did what I did next. Maybe, knowing what it was to be forced to live away from one’s home and family, I would have done anything to stop the making of another me. Nobody should have to live through that, especially not a child.

Even a child like Giacomo.

I made my decision, and my hand went straight for the knife I always carried on me. Within a heartbeat of my fingers finding the hilt, I was holding it to the changeling’s throat.

The boy's eyes went wide with shock and then narrowed in anger. Even as I caught his hands and twisted them behind his back, where they would do me the least mischief, I admired his spirit. Whoever he was, he was no wailing weakling.

"What the hell did my father hire you for?" yelled the changeling, and the look on his face told me that if he could have faded away, like the changelings of legend, he would have.
It was far too bad that he remained stubbornly corporeal.

As did the knife against his throat.

"To play servant to his son," I snapped. "But while you look just like the boy I was told to take care of, you sure as hell aren’t him. Where. Is. He."

He insisted one time too many that he was indeed the boy he very clearly wasn’t, and I lost what little bit of patience I had. Perhaps I was too rough with him. But I didn’t make him bleed, and it was more mercy than he deserved, in any event.

I dragged him across the market square with my knife to his back, my arm slung, with all appearance of camaraderie, around him. I didn’t trust him farther than I could throw him, and I'd warned him that if he attempted any more tricks, I’d drown him into the lagoon. I must have looked like I meant it, because he went pale and gave me no trouble at all. I immediately felt guilty, because it was hard to have Giacomo’s face look at me as if I was a murderer.

It didn't stop me from telling the changeling that as long as the Doge knew that he had a kidnapping on his hands, I could live with murder on mine.

I found the idiot boy soon enough, upon following the changeling's directions. He was safely ensconced in a rickety boathouse past the palazzo, hidden in plain sight, and in a stroke of blind luck, unguarded. Those who'd kidnapped him were even bigger fools than he was, to think that their ruse would remain so long undiscovered. He was bound and blindfolded and still brave enough to yell at us when we approached; and though my heart breaks for no one, it came closest then.

When I freed him, he looked up at me the way I imagine Adam must have looked upon the face of God. It unnerved me. "Save those eyes for the one you marry," I growled, and hoisted him up over my shoulders. I knew that he wouldn't be able to walk right away after being bound so long, but I didn’t have time to waste.

As I crossed the threshold to the boathouse, I turned around and my gaze fell upon the changeling, still and quiet in the centre of the room. I had released him in order to free Giacomo, and to tell the truth I had not cared what he did then as long as he did not come between me and freeing the boy. He had not run, as I had half-expected him to do, and he had not attacked me, as I had expected him to. He merely looked at us, alone in the boathouse, and I wished to God that he and Giacomo had not shared the same face.

I don't know why I did what I did then. Maybe I saw myself in him, in the face of a boy all alone in the world. Maybe I thought no ill deed should go unpunished. And maybe I remembered what my mother told me when I was as young as the boy standing before me.

Love is a bridge. I reached out.

"Since one of you makes enough trouble for everyone, two of you shouldn’t make that much of a difference," I muttered as I grabbed him by the wrist, and set off to haul him back.

He made no remark. Neither did he try to get away.

But midway back to the palace, a small hand slipped into mine.

And I had no heart to let it go.



The Doge, as it turned out, was twice as happy with two sons as he had been with one. The changeling was fussed over, welcomed with riotous (and in my opinion, entirely undeserved) enthusiasm. He was given a name, or rather, his real name was finally returned to him. That name was Giovanni (the Doge, it appeared, was far from original), and the entire tale finally spun out.

It would appear that the Doge had been absent from the city upon the birth of his sons, and their mother had seized the opportunity to escape the marriage that had been foisted upon her. (I didn’t blame her, the Doge had apparently been nearly three times her age, and she had never wanted to marry him) She had taken one child, and left the other with the Doge. Giovanni was the child she had stolen. Somehow, in between the thrilling escape and the Carnival where Giacomo had been kidnapped, the lady had fallen in with interesting company, and little Giovanni had been left in the care of the gypsies and thieves of the Lower City. They soon realized that his striking resemblance to the Doge’s son could be exploited, and planned an audacious kidnapping. Fortune smiled on them at Carnival, and little Giacomo was spirited away and replaced.

Time in the loving care of the palace’s people soon revealed that Giovanni was a quiet, thoughtful boy, as given to introspection as Giacomo was to indolence. Tutors soon found out that he had a mind as sharp as any knife. As much as it pained me to admit it, the changeling was a fit son for the Doge, and even at this early age, showed great promise. If he carried on as he had begun, he would be a fit custodian for the Palace.

I could not regret my bringing him back, but that didn't mean I was entirely happy with his presence. As it was not my place to say otherwise, I kept silent. Giovanni seemed to sense my unease with him, and kept out of my way.

On my last day at the Doge's Palace, however, he came to me, to thank me for bringing him home.

"I hope," said Giovanni, speaking to me for the first time since I’d returned him to the palace, "That had our positions been reversed, you would have done the same for me." He turned and walked away without waiting for my answer, almost as if he were afraid of it.

And so it is that I find myself thinking back to my mother's words, to that bridge and that abyss. I don’t know what it is that made me go after Giacomo. Nor what it was that made me bring Giovanni back with him. Predictably, upon hearing of the entire tale, my mother named it love. To my heated denial, my mother simply smiled, and said that there are as many kinds of love as there are kinds of trouble. Love, she added, was like the rain: pretending it wasn't there didn’t unmake it.

I do fear I’m going to grow up to be just like her, one day.

Though I still don't know if love's the bridge or the abyss.

I've said it once, I've said it twice, and I guess you're pretty sick of it by now, but: love's like trouble, sometimes, it comes looking for you, even when you want no part of it.

end

Comments

[braintastic.livejournal.com]

arg. lj ate my comment. >(

anyway, I loved your narrator a lot, and I thought the setting was really neat. :D