The Man Who Bridged the Mist By Kij Johnson

“It’s beautiful,” he said.

She rolled her neck. “I know. We make good boats. Are you hungry? Your busy afternoon must have raised an appetite.”

“Come on then. Thalla will feed us all.”

Dinner was simple. The Deer’s Hart was better known for its beer than its foods, but the stew Thalla served was savory with chervil and thick enough to stand a spoon in. Valo had friends to be with, so they ate with Chell and Lan, who turned out to be like Rasali, calm but light-hearted. At dusk, the Crossers left to explore the Nearside taverns, leaving Kit and Rasali to watch heat lightning in the west. The air was thick and warm, soft as wool.

“You never come up to the work sites on either side,” Kit said suddenly after a comfortable, slightly drunken silence. He inspected his earthenware mug, empty now except for the smell of yeast.

Rasali had given up on the benches and sat instead on one of the garden tables. She leaned back until she lay supine, face toward the sky. “I’ve been busy, perhaps you noticed?”

“It’s more than that. Everyone finds time here and there. And you used to.”

“I did, didn’t I? I just haven’t seen the point lately. The bridge changes everything but I don’t see yet how it changes me. So I wait until it’s time. Perhaps it’s like the mist.”

“What about now?”

She rolled her head until her cheek lay against the rough wood of the tabletop: looking at him, he could tell, though her eyes were hidden in shadows. What did she see, he wondered: what was she hoping to see? It pleased him but made him nervous.

“Come to the tower now, tonight,” he said. “Soon everything changes. We pull the ropes across, and make the chains and hang the supports and lay the road. It stops being a project and becomes a bridge, a road. But tonight it’s still just two towers and some plans. Rasali, climb it with me. I can’t describe what it’s like up there—the wind, the sky all around you, the river below.” He flushed at the urgency in his voice. When she remained silent he added, “You change whether you wait for it or not.”

“There’s lightning,” she said.

“It runs from cloud to cloud,” he said. “Not to earth.”

“Heat lightning.” She sat up. “So show me this place.”

The work site was abandoned. The sky overhead had filled with clouds lit from within by the lightning, which was worse than no light at all since it ruined their night vision. They staggered across the site, trying to plan their paths in the moments of light, doggedly moving through the darkness. “Shit,” Rasali said suddenly in the darkness, then: “Tripped over something or other. Ghost sheep.” Kit found himself laughing.

The took the internal stairs instead of the scaffold. Kit knew them thoroughly, knew every irregular turn and riser, so he counted them aloud to Rasali as he led her by the hand. They reached one hundred and ninety-four before they saw light from a flash of lightning overhead, two hundred and eighteen when they finally stepped onto the roof, gasping for air.

They were not alone. A woman gasped; she and the man with her bolted down the stairs, laughing. Rasali said with satisfaction, “Sera Oakfield. I’d recognize that laugh anywhere. Then that was Erno Bridgeman with her.”

“He took his name from the bridge?” Kit asked but Rasali said only, “Oh,” in a child’s voice. Silent lightning painted the sky over her head in sudden strokes of purple-white, shot through what seemed a dozen layers of cloud, an incomprehensible complexity of light and shadow.

“The sky is so much closer.” She walked to the edge and looked down at Nearside. Dull gold light poured from doors open to the heavy air. Kit stayed where he was, content to watch her. The light—when there was light—was shadowless and her face looked young and full of wonder. After a time she came to him.

They said nothing, only kissed and then made love in a nest of their discarded clothes. Kit felt the stone of his bridge against his knees, his back. It was still warm as skin from the day’s heat, but not as warm as Rasali. She was softer than the rocks and tasted sweet.

A feeling he could not have described cracked open his chest, his throat, his belly. It had been a long time he had been with a woman, not met his own needs; he had nearly forgotten the delight of it, the sharp rising shock of his release, the rocking ocean of hers. Even their awkwardness made him glad because it held in it the possibility of doing this again, and better.

When they were done they talked. “You know my goal, to build this bridge,” Kit looked down at her face, there and gone, in the flickering of the lightning. “But I do not know yours.”

Rasali laughed softly. “Yet you have seen me succeed a thousand times, and fail a few. I wish to live well.”

“That’s not a goal,” Kit said.

“Why? Because it’s not yours? Which is better, Kit Meinem of Atyar? A single great victory or a thousand small ones?” And then: “Tomorrow,” Rasali said. “We will take the rope across tomorrow.”

“You’re sure?” Kit asked.

“That’s a strange statement coming from you. The bridge is all about crossing being a certainty, yes? Like the sun coming up each morning? We agreed this afternoon. It’s time.”

Dawn came early with the innkeeper’s rap on the door. Kit woke disoriented, tangled in the sheets of his little cupboard bed. After he and Rasali had come down from the pillar, Rasali to sleep and Kit to do everything that needed to happen before the rope was brought across, all in the few hours remaining to the night. His skin smelled of Rasali but he was stunned with lack of sleep, and had trouble believing their lovemaking had been real. But there was stone dust ground into his palms; he smiled and, though it was high summer, sang a spring song from Atyar as he quickly washed and dressed. He drank a bowl filled with broth in the taproom. It was tangy, lukewarm. A single small perch stared up at him from a salted eye. Kit left the fish, and left the inn.

The clouds and the lightning were gone. Early as it was the sky was already pale and hot. The news was everywhere and the entire town, or so it seemed, drifted with Kit to the work site, flowed over the levee, and settled on the bank.

The river was a blinding creamy ribbon, looking it had the first time he had seen it; and for a minute he felt dislocated in time. High mist was seen as a good omen, and though he did not believe in omens he was nevertheless glad. The signal towers’ flags hung limp against the hot blue-white sky.

Kit walked down to Rasali’s boat, nearly hidden in its own tight circle of people. As Kit approached, Valo called, “Hey, Kit!” Rasali looked up. Her smile was like welcome shade on a bright day. The circle opened to accept him.

“Greetings, Valo Ferry of Farside, Rasali Ferry of Farside,” he said. When he was close enough, he clasped Rasali’s hands in his own, loving their warmth despite the day’s heat.

“Kit.” She kissed his mouth to a handful of muffled hoots and cheers from the bystanders and a surprised noise from Valo. She tasted like chicory.

Daell Cabler nodded absently to Kit. She was the lead ropemaker. Now she, her husband Stivvan, and the journeymen and masters they had summoned were inspecting the hundreds of fathoms of twisted fishskin cord, loading them without kinks onto spools three feet across and loading those onto a wooden frame bolted to the Tranquil Crossing.

The rope was thin, not much more than a cord, narrower than Kit’s smallest finger. It looked fragile, nothing like strong enough to carry its own weight for a quarter of a mile. The tests said otherwise.

Several of the stronger people from the bridge handed down small heavy crates to Valo and Chell Crosser in the bow. Silverwork from Hedeclin and copper in bricks: the ferry was to be weighted somewhat forward, which would make the first part of the crossing more difficult but should help by the end, as the cord paid out and took on weight from the mist.

“—We think, anyway,” Valo had said, two months back when he and Rasali had discussed the plan with Kit. “But we don’t know. No one’s done this before.” Kit had nodded and not for the first time wished that the river had been a little less broad. Upriver perhaps; but no, this had been the only option. He did write to an old classmate back in Atyar, a man who now taught the calculus, and presented their solution. His friend had written back to say that it looked as though it ought to work, but that he knew little of mist.

One end of the rope snaked along the ground and up the levee. No one touched the rope or even approached it, as though it were dangerous. They left a narrow lane and stepped only carefully across it. Daell and Stivvan Cabler followed the lane back, up and over the levee, to check the rope and temporary anchor at the Nearside pillar’s base.

There was a wait. People sat on the grass or walked back to watch the Cablers. Someone brought broth and small beer from the fishers’ tavern. Valo and Rasali and the two Crossers were remote, focused already on what came next.

And for himself? Kit was wound up, but it wouldn’t do to show anything but a calm confident front. He walked among the watchers and exchanged words or a smile with each of them. He knew them all by now, even the children.

It was nearly midmorning before Daell and Stivvan returned. The ferryfolk took their positions in the Tranquil Crossing, two to each side, far enough apart that they could pull on different rhythms. Kit was useless freight until they got to the other side so he sat at the bow where his weight might do some good. Uni stumbled as she was helped into the boat’s stern: she would monitor the rope but as she told them all, she was nervous. She had never crossed the mist before this. “I think I’ll wait ‘til the catwalks go up before I return,” she added. “Stivvan can sleep without me ‘til then.”

“Ready, Kit?” Rasali called forward.

“Yes,” he said.

“Daell? Lan? Chell? Valo?” Assent all around.

“A historic moment,” Valo announced. “The Day The Mist Was Bridged.”

“Make yourself useful, boy,” Rasali said. “Prepare to scull.”

“Right,” Valo said.

“Push us off,” she said to the people on the dock. A cheer went up.

The dock and all the noises behind them disappeared almost immediately. The ferryfolk had been right that it was a good day for such an undertaking. The mist was a smooth series of ripples no taller than a man, and so dense that the Crossing rode high despite the extra weight and drag. It was the gentlest he had ever seen the river.

Kit’s eyes ached from the brightness. “It will work?” Kit said, meaning the rope and their trip across the mist and the bridge itself—a question rather than a statement; unable to help himself, even though he had worked the calculations himself and had Jenner and Daell and Stivvan and Valo and a specialist in Atyar all check them, even though it was a child’s question. Isolated in the mist, even competence seemed insufficient.

“Yes,” Daell Cabler said from aft.

The rowers said little. At one point Rasali murmured into the deadened air, “To the right,” and Valo and Lan Crosser changed their stroke to avoid a gentle mound a few feet high directly in their path. Mostly the Crossing slid steadily across the regular swells. Unlike his other trips, Kit saw no dark shapes in the mist, large or small. From here they could not see the dock, but the levee ahead was scattered with Farsiders waiting for the work they would do when the ferry landed.

There was nothing he could do to help, so Kit watched Rasali scull in the blazing sun. The work got harder as the rope spooled out until she and the others panted. Shining with sweat, her skin was nearly as bright as the mist in the sunlight, and he wondered how she could bear the light without burning. Her face looked solemn, intent on the eastern shore. Her eyes were alight with reflections from the mist. Then he recognized her expression. It was joy.

“Not now,” she said. The rowers panted as they dug in.

“It’s like...pulling through dirt,” Valo gasped.

“Quiet,” Rasali snapped and then they were silent except for their laboring breath. Kit’s own muscles knotted sympathetically. Foot by foot the ferry heaved forward. At some point they were close enough to the Farside upper dock that someone threw a rope to Kit and at last he could do something however inadequate. He took the rope and pulled. The rowers pushed for their final strokes. The boat slid up beside the dock. People swarmed aboard, securing the boat to the dock, the rope to a temporary anchor onshore.

Released, the Ferrys and the Crossers embraced, laughing a little dizzily. They walked up the levee toward Farside town and did not look back.

Kit left the ferry to join Jenner Ellar.

It was hard work. The rope’s end had to be brought over an oiled stone saddle on the levee and down to a temporary anchor and capstan at the Farside pillar’s base, a task that involved driving a team of oxen through a temporary gap Jenner had cut into the levee: a risk but one that had to be taken.

More oxen were harnessed to the capstan. Daell Cabler was still pale and shaking from the crossing, but after a glass of something cool and dark, she and her Farside counterparts could walk the rope to look for any new weak spots. They found none. Jenner stayed with the capstan. Daell and Kit returned to the temporary saddle in the levee, the notch polished like glass and gleaming with oil.

The rope was released from the dockside anchor. The rope over the saddle whined as it took the load and flattened, and there was a deep pinging noise as it swung out to make a single line down from the saddle, down into the mist. The oxen at the capstan dug in.

The next hours were the tensest of Kit’s life. For a time, the rope did not appear to change. The capstan moaned and clicked, and at last the rope slid by inches, by feet, through the saddle. He could do nothing but watch and rework all the calculations yet again in his mind. He did not see Rasali, but Valo came up after a time to watch the progress. Answering his questions settled Kit’s nerves. The calculations were correct. He had done this before. He was suddenly starved and voraciously ate the food that Valo had brought for him. How long had it been since the broth at The Fish? Hours. Most of a day.

The oxen puffed and grunted and were replaced with new teams. Even lubricated and with leather sleeves, the rope moved reluctantly across the saddle, but it did move. And then the pressure started to ease and the rope paid through the saddle faster. The sun was westering when at last the rope lifted free of the mist. By dusk, the rope was sixty feet above it, stretched humming-tight between the Farside and Nearside levees and the temporary anchors.

Just before dark, Kit saw the flags go up on the signal tower: secure.

Kit worked on and then seconded projects for five years after he left University. His father knew men and women at the higher levels in the Department of Roads, and his old tutor, Skossa Timt, knew more, so many were high-profile works, but he loved all of them, even his first lead, the little toll gate where the boy, Duar, had died.

All public work—drainage schemes, roadwork, amphitheaters, public squares, sewers, alleys and mews—was alchemy. It took the invisible patterns that people made as they lived and turned them into stone and brick and wood and space. Kit built things that moved people through the intangible architecture that was his mind and his notion—and Empire’s notion—of how their lives could be better.

The first major project he led was a replacement for a collapsed bridge in the Four Peaks region north of Atyar. The original had also been a chain suspension bridge but much smaller than the mist bridge would be, crossing only a hundred yards, its pillars only forty feet high. With maintenance, it had survived heavy use for three centuries, shuddering under the carts that brought quicksilver ore down to the smelting village of Oncalion; but after the heavy snowfalls of what was subsequently called the Wolf Winter, one of the gorge’s walls collapsed, taking the north pillar with it and leaving nowhere stable to rebuild. It was easier to start over two hundred yards upstream.

The people of Oncalion were not genial. Hard work made for hard men and women. There was a grim, desperate edge to their willingness to labor on the bridge, because their livelihood and their lives were dependent on the mine. They had to be stopped at the end of each day or dangerous as it was, they would work through moonlit nights.

But it was lonely work, even for Kit who did not mind solitude; and when the snows of the first winter brought a halt to construction, he returned with some relief to Atyar, to stay with his father. Davell Meinem was old now. His memory was weakening though still strong enough. He spent his days overseeing construction of a vast and fabulous public maze of dry-laid stones brought from all over Empire: his final project, he said to Kit, an accurate prophecy. Skossa Timt had died during the Wolf Winter, but many of Kit’s classmates were still in the capital. Kit spent evenings with them, attended lectures and concerts, entered for the season into a casual relationship with an architect who specialized in waterworks.

Kit returned to the site at Oncalion as soon as the roads cleared. In his absence, through the snows and melt-off, the people of Oncalion had continued to work in the bitter cold, laying course after course of stone. The work had to be redone.

The second summer, they worked every day and moonlit nights and Kit worked beside them.

Kit counted the bridge as a failure although it was coming in barely over budget and only a couple of months late, and no one had died. It was an ugly design; the people of Oncalion had worked hard but joylessly; and there was all his dissatisfaction and guilt about the work that had to be done anew.

Perhaps there was something in the tone of his letters to his father, for there came a day in early autumn that Davell Meinem arrived in Oncalion, riding a sturdy mountain horse and accompanied by a journeyman who vanished immediately into one of the village’s three taverns. It was the middle of the afternoon.

“I want to see this bridge of yours,” Davell said. He looked weary but straight-backed as ever. “Show it to me.”

“We'll go tomorrow,” Kit said. ”You must be tired.”

“Now,” Davell said.

The walked up from the village together. It was a cool day and bright, though the road was overshadowed with pines and fir trees. Basalt outcroppings were stained dark green and black with lichens. His father moved slowly, pausing often for breath. They met a steady trickle of local people leading heavy-laden ponies. The roadbed across the bridge wasn’t quite complete and could not take carts yet, but ponies could cross carrying ore in baskets. Oncalion was already smelting these first small loads.

At the bridge, Davell asked the same questions he had asked when Kit was a child playing on his work sites. Kit found himself responding as he had so many years before, eager to explain—or excuse—each decision; and always, always the ponies passing.

They walked down to the older site. The pillar had been gutted for stones so all that was left was rubble, but it gave them a good view of the new bridge: the boxy pillars, the curve of the main chains, the thick vertical suspender chains, the slight sprung arch of the bulky roadbed. It looked as clumsy as a suspension bridge could. Yet another pony crossed, led by a woman singing something in the local dialect.

“It’s a good bridge,” Davell said.

Kit shook his head. His father, who had been known for his sharp tongue on the work sites though never to his son, said, “A bridge is a means to an end. It only matters because of what it does. Leads from here to there. If you do your work right they won’t notice it, any more than you notice where quicksilver comes from, most times. It’s a good bridge because they are already using it. Stop feeling sorry for yourself, Kit.”

It was a big party that night. The Farsiders (and, Kit knew, the Nearsiders) drank and danced under the shadow of their bridge-to-be. Torchlight and firelight touched the stones of the tower base and anchorage, giving them mass and meaning, but above their light the tower was a black outline, the absence of stars. Torches ringed the tower’s parapet; they seemed no more than gold stars among the colder ones.

Kit walked among them. Everyone smiled or waved and offered to stand him drinks but no one spoke much with him. It was as if the lifting of the cable had separated him from them. The immense towers had not done this; he had still been one of them to some degree at least—the instigator of great labors but still, one of them. But now, for tonight anyway, he was the man who bridged the mist. He had not felt so lonely since his first day here. Even Loreh Tanner’s death had not severed him so completely from their world.

On every project, there was a day like this. It was possible that the distance came from him, he realized suddenly. He came to a place and built something, passing through the lives of people for a few months or years. And then he left. A road through dangerous terrain or a bridge across mist saved lives and increased trade, but it changed the world as well. It was his job to make a thing and then leave to make the next one—but it was also his preference, not to remain and see what he had done. What would Nearside and Farside look like in ten years, in fifty? He had never returned to a previous site.

It was harder this time or perhaps just different. Perhaps he was different. He was staying longer this time because of the size of the project, and he had allowed himself to love the country on either side of the bridge. To have more was to have more to miss when he eventually left.

Rasali—what would her life look like?

Valo danced by, his arm around a woman half a head taller than he—Rica Bridger—and Kit caught his arm. “Where is Rasali?” he shouted, then knowing he could not be heard over the noise of drums and pipes, he mouthed Rasali. He didn’t hear what Valo said but followed his pointing hand.

Rasali was alone, flat on her back on the river side of the levee, looking up. There were no moons, so the Sky Mist hung close overhead, a river of stars that poured east to west. Kit knelt a few feet away. “Rasali Ferry of Farside.”

Her teeth flashed in the dark. “Kit Meinem of Atyar.”

He lay beside her. The grass was like bad straw, coarse against his back and neck. Without looking at him she passed a jar of something. Its taste was strong as tar and Kit gasped for a moment.

“I did not mean....” he started but trailed off, unsure how to continue.

“Yes,” she said and he knew she had heard the words he didn’t say. Her voice contained a shrug. “Many people born into a Ferry family never cross the mist.”

“But you—“ He stopped, felt carefully for his words. “Maybe others don’t but you do. And I think maybe you must do so.”

“Just as you must build,” she said softly. “That’s clever of you to realize that.”

“And there will be no need after this, will there? Not on boats anyway. We’ll still need fishskin, so the fishers will still go out, but they—“

“—stay close to shore,” she said.