The Leto Bundle

by Marina Warner

  To: Hortense Fernly

  Dear Dr Fernly thank you very much for the offer but it’s hard for me to come weekdays now term’s started unless it’s after school hours one afternoon/evening. Is the archive open on a Saturday? Is there a chance of your being there?

  Yours sincerely, kim

  p.s. is there anything you can send/bookmark for me in the meantime?

  Subject: Archives

  Date: Tues, 26 May 199– 09:04:17 +0100

  From: Hortense Fernly

  To: kim.mcquy

  The Archives are suffering from cutbacks like the rest of us, so opening hours are severely curtailed – late night Thursdays, but I don’t stay on, and I’m rarely here on Saturdays. However, I can arrange for the material to be out for you to look at in the reading room. We can take it from there. Yours, HF

  PART TWO

  In the Convent

  (A Petition and Two Chronicles)

  1

  ‘Item, One Frog’

  Kim McQuy opened the brown, crinkly folder the librarian had brought him from the shelves in the back of the Archives Reading Room. On the inside of the cover, Hereward Meeks, keeper of Near Eastern Antiquities, had inscribed his name in a precise, legible hand above a list; the first, loose, handwritten sheet was headed: ‘Inventory (Unfinished)’

  There, Kim read:

  Item, One mummified frog, bound in linen, basketweave pattern.

  Item, Woman’s leather sandal; silk and silver gamp; traces of gilding on the leather straps.

  Item, Tortoise shell, pierced with holes around the edge. Comparison with examples found in better condition elsewhere suggests that this was strung with stones to make a baby’s rattle.

  Item, Upper left canine of a wolf (amulet missing accompanying charm, probably used to fend off danger from roaming wild beasts) cf. surviving rings inscribed against scorpion bites, insect stings, etc.

  Item, Three infant’s (milk) teeth in a drawstring leather pouch, much damaged.

  Item, One earring, with gold beads as bunch of grapes. Lazuli work, c. 1250.

  When he reached the seventh item, Kim felt his pulse bang, in his eardrums, in his throat, in his heart:

  Item, One mother-of-pearl button, inscribed ‘KIM’ – ? standing for ‘Kalē Iērē Mnemosynē’, as in the opening invocation of a prayer to the goddess Memory (‘Lovely, Holy Memory!’)

  He looked around the quiet room; there was no commotion to match his excitement. The atmosphere still sounded as deep and still as when he arrived, as if he and the few other readers were enclosed in a submarine; their several absorption with the words on which they were travelling was carrying them down below the earth to the silent aquifers below where lost things, forgotten things fell, settled, and waited to be raised to the surface again.

  ‘Lovely, Holy Memory,’ he read again, with his pulse quietening now to a tingle. No, he said to himself. No, we must begin again. Start a new story. Shake the pieces of the past into another pattern.

  He went back to Meeks’s precise script:

  Item, One cuttlefish bone, once possibly inscribed, but entirely effaced.

  Item, Silver lamella or sheet, good condition, engraved with charms, originally rolled up in a silver phylactery (this much damaged):

  ‘Turn away, thunderbolts and lightning flash. Flee, death by fire.

  ‘The goddess Artemis raises her voice to her father on high and its sweetness recalled the music of swallows twittering in the eaves of home. He smiles and nods. “Bind up all the demons,” he orders, and the mountain peaks sway to his command . . .

  ‘And the place of meeting was in flames,

  And the earth cracked beneath them.’ (Homeric Hymn to Artemis) (here the text breaks off).

  A rare survival, ?450 AD. Amulets telling such historiolae or short mythic tales, were usually inscribed on wax, parchment, wood, and so have perished.

  Item, Scrap of orange peel.

  Item, Residue of haschisch resin.

  The list ended:

  See separate catalogue of Mss., for various fragments and documents on papyrus, linen, vellum; maps, drawings, sketches, etc., comprising:

  G. Mss. 1–72.1841

  Lat. Mss. 73–89.1841

  Eng. Skipwith Add. Mss. 90–122.1841 (GS’s diaries and ship’s log)

  Eng. Skipwith Misc. Mss. Fragments 1–227. 1841 (GS’s notes and sketches from the Lycanian excavations)

  See also related material: Anon., Adventures of a Ship-Boy. Of the Most Barbarous Abuses of the Press-Gang & the Cat; of his subsequent Adventures among Slavers and of his Providential Deliverance & Happy Return. Written by a Well-Wisher. With an Appendix and an Appeal to Her Majesty for his Pardon and for the Improvement of Conditions in Her Navy . . . Printed for private circulation of Her Majesty’s subjects (Portsmouth, 1859) Shelf mark: SK892.1889.

  Kim leafed through the folder; Meeks had pinned pages together with dressmakers’ pins, now rusted and seeping haloes of reddish-brown dust on to the paper. He began with a slender sheaf somewhere in the middle of the folder, on which Meeks had written:

  Evidence of one Karim, formerly an equerry in the entourage of Cunmar, taken by the commission of enquiry at Cadenas in 1200, held seventeen years after the martyrdom of Leto, also known as Laetitia Deodata; the necessary preliminary to the Petitio in causam sanctitatis Laetitiae, the submission to the Congregation of Rites to plead for her eventual canonisation.

  [Many lacunae.]

  2

  The Deposition of Karim the Equerry

  (From the Petitio in causam sanctitatis Laetitiae)

  [Lat. Fr. 16]

  ‘. . . the lady Leto was exchanged against another child, a small boy with a turned foot – no use to our armies or to the Lord Cunmar. Moreover, birth defects – and this was counted as one – were considered unlucky; but Ser Matteo, Leto’s father, was a boastful man, and he declared that surgeons in his country would soon fix the boy’s gait, and that he only wanted to show his own people what an Ophiri native looked like; in this respect, the child would serve despite his deformity. He would introduce him to his people; maybe to the Pope himself. The Holy Father took a deep interest in our heathen brethren, he said, as he had a great respect for the learning and civilisation of our ancestors.’

  We rebuked Karim for this blasphemy.

  ‘Lady Leto’s father loaded his vessel with a great cofferful of treasures from our country; it was a matter of wonder to us that the Lord Cunmar trusted him. Around the child he left in our keeping, laughing that she was the pledge of his good faith, there played a kind of crackly fire, we sensed; she looked so different from anyone else in Cadenas. That strangeness was part of the reason for the effect, but not the whole of it. We used to say then that she had been breathed out when a god, sated with pleasure, had yawned.

  (We rebuked Karim for this blasphemy also.)

  ‘That was the Ophiri way of thinking, he persisted. I’m not saying that I think it’s the truth. But it’s a pretty enough thought.

  ‘When she first came to the Keep, we dressed the child after our own fashion, and would have done so even if she had not grown out of the stiff corsetry in which she was bundled when she was first left with us. Together we attended Lord Cunmar; sometimes in the baths. Slippery with the soap, her light fists following mine on his back, we pummelled him. She could sit on him, then, she was still small; how he sighed and rolled his eyes with the bliss of perturbation she gave him. You see, she did not know her power, but we were all beginning to feel it.

  ‘Now and then a message arrived in the trade documents, from Parthenopolis and other ports of our Inland Sea, addressed to Leto; eventually, someone would be found to read it to her.’

  We reminded Karim we had collected such evidence of this nature as we could.

  ‘Leto was placed in the Convent of the Swaddling Bands, when she was seven and her father had failed to return and keep his promise to Lor
d Cunmar. Even though the nuns are great chatterers and they told the child of other times and other places, of threads that linked Cadenas to metropolitan centres far and wide, Leto told me, after her return to the Keep, that she felt she was suffocating. She experienced her childhood as if she were living in a bottle, like a spirit in a flask cast to the bottom of the sea. All she could see through the glass walls of her captivity was the huge, formless mass of water, now turbid and churning and moonless, now light-speckled with looping rays, and visited by fish with gloomy smiles on their whiskered lips, sometimes revealing a double row of tiny transparent fangs.’

  These morbid imaginings, if true, were sent to test her faith; we made Karim desist from repeating such assaults on her unless absolutely central to the question we put.

  Next we asked, ‘Why did she leave the convent?’

  Karim said, ‘She returned to court after she had her women’s flowers, because the Procurator remembered that he had promised Ser Matteo he would look after her and there were reports of new business from that quarter. Although it seemed Leto was now an orphan, without family or fortune, Cunmar was too crafty not to make a show of keeping his side of the bargain. He was considering an appropriate match for her. But, then suddenly – as children like to hear one say in the story – everything changed. He was seized by a passion for her: you know the rest.’

  ‘Be that as it may.’

  So did we order him to continue.

  ‘Lord Cunmar was seized with a passion for her; there was to be a wedding. But . . .’

  We pressed him. ‘I was given orders to take Lady Leto – she was about to give birth – and kill her outside the walls of the citadel and leave her as if bandits or wolves had attacked her. So we – Doris, her maidservant and I – threw her down on the nightsoil cart leaving that night. We wanted to save her by this means, by trusting her to divine providence.’

  We forbade him to blaspheme. We commanded him to admit his part in the death of the sainted and suffering child. We threatened the screw and the rack if he continued to deny his part in her martyrdom.

  He shook his head. ‘I am proud that my heart led me not my head and I disobeyed the orders of my lady Porphyria.

  ‘What happened to her after that?’

  He continued to lie. ‘I’ve heard rumours, but I know nothing.’

  The old man was returned to the dungeons again, the better to refresh his memories and repent his sins, in preparation for being put to the question the following day.

  In Kim’s head, connections formed, faded, returned. He shuffled back through the folder, and began to read the contents from the beginning.

  He could hyperlink the story in Karim’s testimony, he was thinking, under the catchword, ‘Saint’ on the HSWU homepage.

  3

  Homepage: http://www.hswu.org

  Leto Lives!

  The Angel of the Present is Here!

  To Open the Bundle Click on:

  [hyperlinks]

  Treasure

  Frogs

  Prayer

  Saint

  Wanderer

  Join our database: send an e-mail to

  4

  Kim to Hortense

  Subject: Re: Archives: Help!

  Date: Thurs, 28 May 199–02:11:38 +0100

  From: kim.mcquy

  To: Hortense Fernly

  Dear Dr Fernly looked at the boxes of papers after school today would welcome a steer :- thought you said there was writing *on* the mummy wrappings – that the bundle was made of them after the body was taken away/disappeared/resurrected? thats what I’m after and thought I was going to find – the charms and texts you talked about –

  best kim

  ps visited room xix – lots of hswu people about we discussed the *return* of the Leto approval expressed all round for your plans for the big new display – though I want to see a new building she needs space, lots of it there’ll be *huge* crowds – it’s growing the planetary diaspora needs a figurehead someone like them to focus all their feelings of belonging and unbelonging there was some surprise felt I must pass on that you still haven’t opened a comments book which we’ve all been asking for since this started – I’d like a see a whole glass tower/cube/pyramid in a park somewhere – a crystal palace –

  people want to write down their feelings their wishes their hopes – they – we – feel let down

  not by you personally – you’re not rubbish like some people – I trust *you*

  by the way when is Leto coming back she says she’s already hanging around all amongst us but people need a focus for their feelings where they can find a reflection of their experience a shrine would do the job nicely cheers kim

  5

  The Plane Tree and the Lotus

  In the body of the letter, past the customary overtures, Gramercy Poule read:

  ‘What is our national identity? What are our national identities? How do we define today, in a world beset by strife, international and civil, an idea of home and belonging? How do we enable this country to maintain the civic pact of openness, tolerance and citizenship for which we have been renowned since the Mother of Parliaments was founded as the expression, instrument and servant of modern democracy? Has our national pride withered? Is even the notion unmentionable in today’s climate? Multiculturalism is enmeshed in difficulties and contradictions – indeed the very word is seriously contested. The purpose of this committee is to examine the thinking behind the current critical turn that the question of national identity has taken, and to look at the language in which it is expressed and the laws in which it is enshrined.’

  The letter came from the junior minister in the newly created government department of Cultural Identities. It surprised Gramercy, and flattered her even while she dismissed it, scorning it to herself: ‘He’s just an old sleazebag, most likely, who thinks he might get his end away.’

  ‘Your participation,’ the letter continued, ‘would bring an essential ingredient to our deliberations. The idea of national identity has undergone profound changes, and popular culture, of which you are a leading light, has been a vital ingredient in these historic shifts. We are anxious to represent a full range of age groups, interests, ethnicities and communities and we would greatly value your input.’

  The invitation was clearly the outcome of that party of media and entertainment folk she’d been invited to at Number Ten, when in an access of pride – and even patriotism – she’d expressed her desire to ‘do something’ in some way. Besides, she was getting on – Keats was a decade dead at her age, and . . . well, Blake at least grew into middle age and stayed wild. Gramercy could still stamp and whirl for her audience, as she whispered and squealed her songs. But there were times when she, Gramercy, flew outside her body and roosted somewhere up in the flies above the stage, among the lamps hung to strafe her fans, and from that perch watched with curiosity her small, panting, gyrating figure as it beseeched the audience to join her down the paths of woe and love and anger: were these the lineaments of gratified desire? Hardly. She could split herself in two and suffer only a slight thinning of her octane, but the experience of performance was different from the utter self-forgetfulness that used to carry her away. She hardly dared admit it, but she was getting bored with her old self. The problem wasn’t so much how to astonish others: that was still a doddle, in the concert hall. The hard part was astonishing herself.

  The day of the workshop, she dressed the part of an entertainment star: she wasn’t going to pretend, to betray her own constituency, her own tribe of incoherent resistance: an off-the-shoulder lilac cotton T-shirt which showed off the sleek gleam of her skin, plum-coloured lipstick, a suit of figured black satin with breeches under a stiffly lined hacking jacket, boots of glove-thin emerald suede, with arabesques cut directly into the leather, giving an effect of wings flaring out at the ankle, with no stitching or lining; a medieval look in which her legs
, in cherry tights, looked firm and sturdy and somehow hoofed, like a calf’s. She powdered plum eye shadow around her eyes and across the bridge of her nose in the clubbing Sioux style: why not warpaint for this skirmish on new territory?

  Monica had approved when she left her that morning: that was a good omen, as she was not easy to please, especially when maintenance would present a problem, as it would in the case of this footwear, light as underwear, made for polished interiors, not Enoch’s broken and puddly pavements.

  Jeff Noakes, the minister, had been a fan forever, he’d told her at the party, though she could hear, through his phrases, the operator’s stratagem of drawing someone out. Testing, testing. It was a strange feeling, being the same age as a government minister. ‘Freedom Days’, the ballad she’d put out nearly twenty years ago, had made a big impression on him, he ran on, eagerly. ‘I had the tape with me when I was backpacking through virgin rainforest, in my student days. Listening to you far from home kept the connection live somehow. If you aren’t home, a song can be a pretty good substitute. It was our national anthem – against the corruption of that long, long dreadful time when the last government . . . But we’re back now, and it’s never going to be like that again.’ He laughed, and hummed a phrase or two, ‘Freedom Days/Billy Blake/You say to want to have it all . . .’

  Gramercy’s voice was naturally reedy, but she knew how to use this weakness; she always knew how to use her weaknesses, she had learned the art early of throwing an opponent’s strength against him – or her; she bent her voice around the words and around the notes in an eerie warble, punctuated by clusters of trills against her palate and the occasional frenzied squeak – the higher the better to take her audience up with her, through the welter of the backing arrangement.