The Leto Bundle

by Marina Warner

You’ll see the episode described here in rather different, flattering terms, as a kind of witch’s duel. As such it’s related to several myths about Zeus and his amours. It’s of great interest, as the earliest extant fragments from the story of Leto, written down around the same time as the cartonnage was made.

  For the time being, this is ABSOLUTELY NOT FOR CIRCULATION – or scanning into your network! I’ve still got a very long way to go with the material. But I do want you to get a feel for the complexity of the story, for the sheer amount of stuff associated with the sarcophagus. This bit is connected to other bits, but they’re much later, at least in the form we have, so the relationships hook up across any ordinary time passing. Don’t even allude to anything here, at least not until you’ve run it past me. All right?

  Yours sincerely, Hortense

  PS Appropriately, the writing on the wrappings is in sepia – cuttlefish ink (as I’m sure you know).

  7

  ‘A Witch’s Duel in the Hellenistic World’

  [Misc. Mss. G. Frs. 32–35]

  . . . he caught Leto in a passage one night, on her way from the bath in the women’s quarters; he was not allowed in that part of the building, whatever his authority overall. He bunched some of her dress into his hands over her stomach, and bent his head down to find her mouth; she smelled his beard that she had known tight curled as lamb’s fleece when he took her riding on the pommel of his saddle to see the long cat stretching her shadow on the honey sand; she swallowed his hot winey breath down her throat. But she broke away from him and ran down the passage, trying not to make any noise at all. She wasn’t heavy, but her high silver and silk slippers slapped against the rush matting on the floor; the other young women in their quarters might not all be sleeping, but, in the Keep, there were noises at night it was best to pretend not to hear.

  She felt she would like to be heard, to be seen, in order to be sure that what she felt was happening to her was indeed taking place and not a phantom in her sleep. She would like to be watched over, too, by an older woman – by Doris – who had warned her and excited her beforehand by her talk, who had anticipated so often in her stories this flight of her body away from him, towards him, her trembling, her anticipation.

  He had stopped her in the passage, whispering to her to come with him, to let him wrap her in his coat so her nightclothes wouldn’t shine under the stars so brightly.

  ‘You could make me so happy, little one,’ he said.

  She cried out against him, but he clutched her tightly and slurred in her ear, ‘My dove, let me see your sweet body, let me feel your silken limbs. For my wife can’t return the fire that burns inside me so brightly – beside you I feel like a new colt, like a young goat on the mountains . . .’

  [Fr. 33]

  . . . she struggled to fly from him again, but found that she was curving her body towards the slow softness of the voice; he made a sound in his throat as she came up against him, and his neck stretched high, as he lifted his long head and crowed; his arms had become wings, their wing beats struck her between her shoulder blades until she gasped for air and her breath broke out of her in moans. He twined his lithe long neck around her waist and rose up under her armpit and bit and nuzzled her breast. Then she too sprouted wings, her arms grew into strong pinions, but flecked blue-grey, unlike the silvered moonlight of his big body that flapped and struck her; she unfurled her full span and ascended, throwing her head forward and stretching until, arrow-like, she lifted from the bent bow of his clasp and soared upwards on the current. But he rose with her, and brought her face to his dark, hair-curled belly, and held her there and begged her ‘Milk me’.

  Her head jerked away from him then, she would not; she gagged and tore herself away from the suffocating closeness of his heat, his smell, his wanting.

  As she pulled away, her new wings stretched and lifted her; she soared, but he was coming after her. Together, they were skimming the earth: swan, goose: swan mobbing goose; goose chasing swan. She was laughing now, the whinny of fear as she rose high in the thinner air above; her strength was waning in her wingtips. He was gaining on her. Then she dropped, suddenly, in a flurry of feathers, as if shot from the sky; shrunk into a small ball of quail-tender dappledness, cooing as she squatted down in the dust, fluttering and dragging a wing to plead her weakness. ‘I know these tricks,’ he answered, mocking her, with a flash of pleasure in his round shining eye as he caught her in his claws and pierced her here and there, breast, lips, vulva, buttocks, with his curved falcon beak and his sharp talons.

  [Fr. 34]

  . . . Leto cried out for help, for a god, any god, of her lost people, of her new family, to come to her aid. And it happened that one heard her prayer, the goddess of the outcasts, she answered her, and Leto began turning shiny and scaly and slipping from her divine lover’s grasp, as they went tumbling over the bluffs at the land’s end and dropped on to the stiff breezes that sweep the edge of sea and earth; they floated there, descending from wind current to wind current, swirling through, his falcon giving chase – now to the leaping salmon she had become as she sprang from him again, blood streaming from her flanks as she flashed into the coastal waters where he could still see her, with his hawk’s eye, flecked against the pebbles, a twisting, squirming banner of gleaming skin and pink flesh exposed where he had mauled her, trailing wisps of blood in her wake.

  He hurled himself into the water after her. The light looped and spooled as he unfurled himself far and wide to hold her in his mesh, to wrap her in the bane of his stickiness. She was flailing now, her fins and her tail slapping against the toils in which he was winding her, gasping as they met in the embrace of his several limbs. The sea was pouring liquid light over them and the salt quickened the sensations in every orifice that had been prised open, every rubbed patch and pore where they were combining, where their bodies joined.

  He hauled her; she hung, a dead weight, dripping, mute, and just as he felt that he had at last vanquished her as was his due, she sucked the last of her reserves from her body, summoning all her reserves, sugar from her liver, juice from her kidneys and the air brightening her heart’s blood, and flung their full mass of energy at him. She drew him into the spiralling tendrils of the several limbs she too could now throw out, each one blistered and stamped with a round mouth, fastened on his body. He was nothing but a man, and a man well past his first youth at that, and she now knew how to entangle him in her flesh, flesh that was all mouth, fringed about with lips and tongue to lick and swallow, to suck and consume. She closed the waving tentacles of her new form around his spent energies and with a last throe of her powers, clouded the water that lapped them in the musky jet of her black ink.

  [Fr. 35]

  . . . the children will be born from an egg the blue of a wild hyacinth. Fish roe, cuttlefish spawn, quail’s eggs: it would resemble all of these, though it is sui generis, a species unknown. On their downy bodies, beneath the first chick feathers, in the starred interlacing of their epidermis, there will be tiny calligraphy, the spoor of their inky matrix, from their mother, the cuttlefish, who squirted sepia at her lover during the rape when they were conceived.

  And the time will come when this will be a sign, to those who come after that they belong to a sacred line.

  May these words as I repeat them unbind the demons, O goddess, from the body of my daughter . . .

  [Kim: This formulaic invocation is found on numerous amulets of the Hellenistic world. Its presence here reveals that the myth of Leto’s hierogamy, or rape by the god, was told to avert blows of fate, and especially to safeguard young women from similar torments.]

  [There follows a lacuna in the text.]

  8

  Kim to Hortense; Hortense to Kim

  Subject: Re: Leto

  Date: Wed, 03 June 199- 18:46:07 +0100

  From: kim.mcquy

  To: Dr Hortense Fernly

  Dear Hortense Fernly,

  After w
hat you’ve sent me I must talk to you but just in case you’re thinking that kim mcquy’s a nutcase and he wants something I want to assure you I am not I’m not after money or sponsorship I’m not going to stalk you or fill up your voice mail or ask you to read my latest message of genius I know that my saying this won’t make you believe me but you talked to me that day in person at the museum and you didn’t treat me as if I’d crawled out from under a stone and you don’t know how rarely that happens. That’s a political statement – NOT whingeing.

  This is all by way of saying I’m a primary schoolteacher not the scholar you are and I’ve read what you sent and I’m excited but would you take me through it please? The piece you sent me reads like today’s news but in fancier language than your average correspondent in the war zone can manage story styles change anyway could we meet for a cup of coffee after school one day? won’t take a lot of your time I promise *thanks* so much – hopefully kim.

  ps the handlist you attached didn’t arrive by the way please try again I want to hyperlink the tomb contents to my homepage

  Subject: Leto

  Date: Thurs, 04 June 199– 14:38:13 +0100

  From: Hortense Fernly

  To: kim.mcquy

  I’ll meet you on Thursday, a week today (late night opening). I’ll come and find you in the Archives around 6. Yours, Hetty Fernly

  9

  A Desert Outpost

  (From the Chronicle of Barnabas)

  [Mss. Lat. 73–77]

  ‘The author of this fragment’, Hereward Meeks’s notes read, ‘was writing around 1200, around thirty years after the events he relates. He was a monk at the Shrine of the Fount in the Pearl Quarter of Cadenas-la-Jolie, a fortified citadel in the desert on the eastern shore of “Our Sea”. This fortress changed hands frequently between the different faiths and peoples who came to power in that contested territory, as divers manuscripts in the Skipwith deposit reveal . . .’ Kim’s eyes travelled to the final sentence: ‘Through Barnabas, a chronicler loyal to the Enochites, we catch a glimpse of the trials suffered by the martyrs and heroes of our true religion, who struggled to defend the holy places.’

  [Ms. Lat. 73]

  When the child Laetitia first arrived, on the boat from the other side of Our Sea, she lived in the Keep; Doris lay at the door of her room, on a mat. She was called Leto then, for her name in God, Laetitia, was given to her in the Convent, later. Abbess Cecily did not consider Leto, the name of a pagan idol (and one of the savage generation of Titans at that), a suitable name for a little child Deodata, given by God. In defiance of her dying mother’s vow, Laetitia was handed over to the Procurator, the infidel Cunmar, by Ser Matteo, her father, as surety for his trade; he was allowed to load his ship with Cadenate glassware, mirrors and lenses, and other precious manufactures, for he made a promise: ‘I will return with a treasure you have never before seen, one that will make you the strongest fortress in the whole of this territory.’ And he confided its character in secret to Cunmar, who laughed; for all his warlikeness, that lord loved new devices, tricks and traps as a young boy loves his first catapult. Ser Matteo also brought Cunmar a pair of peregrine falcons from an oak forest in their country, trained to hunt, with tooled leather harnesses, hoods and jesses of the finest quality; Cunmar patted the little girl, and handed her over to his consort and to her attendants. The Lord Cunmar then went hunting with Ser Matteo – in our desert coloured like the sherbets at his table, to test the foreign birds against the kind reared and trained in Cadenas. Not to be outdone, for the Ophiri pride themselves on their largesse, Cunmar picked out a boy to send with Ser Matteo to his country to learn its ways.

  Then came the time for the child’s father to leave: at the harbour, this lad was there, already fitted out in long, coloured hose and short-waisted tunic in the shameless style of Ser Matteo’s paymasters; these had been copied from Ser Matteo’s wardrobe by an Ophiri tailor who sucked in his breath as he worked at the strange geometry of the stranger’s garments. The boy had a twisted foot, which was cruelly revealed by this flaunting apparel.

  When he was about to re-embark, Ser Matteo threw Laetitia up in the air above his head and she crowed with the thrill of it. Prophetically, he cried aloud, ‘Cunmar, see how this one’s fearless! Good as any lad of yours – even better! You’ll see, she’ll be teaching you what’s what – you saddle-sore battle-hardened Ophiri don’t know what’s coming to you from my little baggage!’ Laetitia caught the words; they seemed to be streaming out to both sides of her hurtling body like wings as if a voice beyond this world had spoken them; her father himself was a shadow tipping away from her, only his hands that caught her as she came down returned her to earth.

  So Laetitia at the age of four was left in a special position in Cadenas; she lived in the Pearl Quarter, in the Keep itself, in the same suite of apartments as the Procurator and his wife and their household. But Laetitia’s father did not return the following season as he had promised, according to the terms of his agreement with Cunmar. A ship from Parthenopolis arrived, bringing a few paintings and some books, as well as great packages of chandler’s tackle – candles, ropes, sails, capstans, winches, and other large metal manufactures – felloes for carts and waggons, nails, axles, knives, and chains. It did not bring the hitherto, unknown treasure he had promised the Procurator in payment; but it did bring a letter for Laetitia:

  [Ms. Lat. 74]

  Sottoportego San Teodoro, Feast of The Invention of the Holy Cross, May 3, Year of Our Lord 117 –

  Beloved daughter, It has been a bitter January here and riots have followed bread shortages, with some loss of life. I am endeavouring to raise support in the City to provision a new ship, to sail this spring and bring some manufactures which are lacking in the outpost in exchange for some Cadenate armour and mail, for they are much prized here for their lightness and strength.

  I trust in God that you are well provided for –

  Your loving father

  [Ms. Lat 75]

  Rumours about Ser Matteo travelled with other cargoes: lost fortunes, shipwreck, diversions into trade to the south-west, beyond the pillars of Hercules; sometimes, stories of promotion, a Cardinal’s favour, the bestowal of gems, princely apartments in a great city, a library, a title; others also spoke of a cardinal’s disfavour, of treachery and beheading. It was a jumble, it was a broken line or two from fragments of annals that courtiers and nuns related to her, for the outpost teemed with rumour.

  The outpost of Cadenas-la-Jolie was founded in the year of Our Lord 998 by the sainted Cyriacus, he who was granted a vision of the Swaddling Bands of the Holy Infant, and who led us to the fragments of those sweet relics where they lay concealed. By divine providence, these have survived the Ophiri sovereignty over the holy places, and they are still enshrined in the convent of that name, where Laetitia of blessed memory was rescued, through the workings of divine providence, from the grasp of the infidels.

  For these infidels came to triumph over my people the Enochites who had come from the far west across land and sea to defend the holy places for our faith: in 1170 AD, the Ophiri, led by Cunmar, drew us by guile to fight them on the plain below Cadenas at the battle of Al-Ziza (which we call Lacarina for it signifies the same in our languages); the citadel passed into their hands; many times since then have we battled to regain it, but the Lazuli, our presumed allies in the outpost, are men of little faith. Their soldiers do not deserve the name of warriors before the Lord, since the men wear silks from the renegades of Ophir while their women spoon rosewater jams into their painted mouths without thought of due fasting and encircle their lascivious eyes with ashes for they have no proper dread of death. Their sinful ways brought about the decline of Cadenas, once the fairest bastion in God’s earthly kingdom.

  Laetitia was drawn into their snares, but, through the mercy of Our Lord, she found grace and repented, and as we shall relate here, she expiated her early vanities and heedlessness and
wantoness and shed her blood to cleanse us.

  May this chronicle that I, Barnabas, once gatekeeper of the Shrine of the Fount, have set down, bear witness to the blessed life of this pure child, who herself testified to the faith through her travails and through them has surely gained the martyr’s crown in paradise.’

  [Ms. Lat. 76]

  . . . [the Citadel] stands on an almond-shaped bluff of crumbly desert rock a hundred and forty feet above the spirited sea, where star sapphires bounce in the play of the sun. It was once our triumphant holy fortress, immoveable, implacable, unassailable from without, seated on sheer spurs of golden-pink rock with the swirling pastel desert stretching away to the east, and guarded on its seaboard to the west by a natural harbour; our wise founders extended the arms of this providential haven, narrowing its mouth with fortified breakwaters. On all sides, to sea and land, geography has been assisted by dressed stone walls garlanded at the top with toothed martagons and shored at the foot by a steep slithery glacis that once upon a time took three hundred wretched captives whom we had brought to serve us from Tirzah, landlocked and impious city of the mountain passes that lie midway between the realm of Enoch and the holy places. Tirzah was the original native city of Ser Matteo, the holy child Laetitia’s father: like the blessed virgin martyrs Barbara and Agnes and so many others, her persecutions began at home, at the hands of a cruel and godless infidel.

  Laetitia’s blessed mother died vowing her infant to the care of the one true god (hence her name, Deodata), but the child Laetitia was abandoned in the godless Keep in the fifth year of her short life by her father. The Keep stands in the steep, dark centre of Cadenas, near our holy Shrine of the Fount, in the heart of the Pearl Quarter, where the power of Cadenas was concentrated, and where Cunmar, the Ophiri general and thereafter Procurator appointed by their metropolis far away, kept his state.