The Leto Bundle
Page 18
when light moves her presence through the ether or the interstellar medium as they now call whatever it is out there between the stars she picks up dust and smears and scars and that’s what we call history shes getting nearer all the time but we don’t know when we’ll see her in the here and now when in time present the light and space become one and so we start again – hswu!
But Hetty it’s not just the story in the bundle – it’s how it links her and me and you all together – your spirit’s beautiful you know you understand you cast a special brightness all around you – I feel *irradiated* as I say when I’m near you – you’re all charged up with these beautiful ancient things you’ve handled and worked with all this time – their light is saturating you and so you’re magic in the true sense – when I was looking at that eerie silver sheet of charms I felt your mind was travelling into mine and fusing with it and lighting up the cobwebby shadows in there and it made a shudder run down my spine–
when the sarcophagus comes back we’re going to have a huge celebration – you’ll be amazed by the crowds that will gather – Shareen Ghopil says that on balance her panel will support the idea of the new shrine a proper setting a new temple for our times – housing the bundle the question now is – where?
Hetty – Hortense – Dr Fernly – you were the first to listen really to listen and you’re going to be the one everyone wants to talk to – it’ll be you who’ll be bringing the beautiful face of Our Lady back and you’ll be asked to go on the telly talking about everything that happened before she reached us – you’ll be the interpreter the voice everyone will want to hear –
after looking at the bundle together – your curiosity – your interest – sustain me
even the poor toxic deadbeats behind the station can’t dim the rush I get from all this
its late must go to bed my heads full of the vertiginous stars yours always *I mean it* kim
7
An Earring Recovered
[Skipwith Add. Mss.: G. Frs. 1–3]
Hereward Meeks: ‘On linen strips, much damaged, with several lacunae. The hand on this group of manuscript fragments used to make the shroud of the mummy shows regional characteristics, C. 250 AD.’
[G. Fr. 1]
. . . the tortoise shell, a bone, a reed, a pebble would do for toys, for the twins to rattle and whistle . . .
. . . she applied spider’s silk to Phoebe’s welts after the beating. The wounds were fading but not disappearing. The livid bruising paled in the delicate web of her flesh, but lumps of keloid tissue had hardened under the lesions, and as the child grew, they stretched under the skin of her back and legs into taut wedges of inert, paralysed flesh. When the little girl first began taking her tottering steps, Leto thought that Phoebe was imitating the wolf cubs’ gait, as she ambled crookedly, often dropping to crawl again, but as their first year of hiding passed, she could see her daughter was developing a lopsided, angular walk; she would skip forward three steps at a time, come to a stop, and then start up again, while, to counterbalance this asymmetry, she leant her head over to one side. Beside his sister, her son toddled purposefully ahead, his head balanced securely straight between his shoulders. The difference in their growth filled Leto with anger; she massaged Phoebe’s scars, trying to ease the knots and stimulate her limbs’ ordinary growth; she crushed and packed tight poultices of capsicum leaves, dotted with their fiery seeds, to try and draw out the pliancy that her childhood body deserved. Phoebe submitted; she did not roar with pain at the treatments Leto tried and tried again, for the battering she had received as an infant had numbed her sensors of pain, brutalised her nerve endings and cut her off from the quick flood of pain – and pleasure – that would sweep over her brother all of a sudden, provoking furious bellows of red rage in his tiny clenched body, or catching him up into crowing gales of laughter.
But what Phoebe could not feel bodily wreaked havoc on her at night: like a wolf cub, Phoebe twitched in her dreams . . . she fended off attackers with her fists bunched as she slept . . .
[Gr. Fr. 2]
. . . for three years Leto and the twins lived with the she-wolf Lycia; she saw a new litter of cubs grow and leave the cave but still she shared their dwelling and their food for she could not yet find a way to return to the society of her own kind . . .
. . . but also, scavenging after dusk, they found many useful things in the surrounding territory. Leto’s prized possession was a knife. It had a short blade twined to a handle that was a little large for her hand, but it served. She came across it when Phoebe was chasing a last persistent cricket of the day; she was following her and saw the knife, fallen through the crack between two boulders; its owner must have been gathering wild fennel or thyme. Phoebe could slip her hand in between them and draw it out . . .
[Gr. Fr. 3]
. . . when she thought back to the assault, the loss of her gold necklace and her earrings galled her most bitterly. One day, as night was falling, she left the twins and went down to the lagoon again, and her heart was tight in her chest and drumming, like a call to battle from a long way off. She heard the frogs croaking and as she came nearer, plop-plop into the water. She waded in, like before, but this time she was strong and clear. She began fishing in the mud. They were cool to touch when she slid them out of their hiding places. They palpitated in her hand, with their hearts fit to burst. The creatures’ bulgy eyes popped even wider as she pinched each one of them by the neck between finger and thumb and slit the panting belly open. One after another she tossed them on to the bank, where she’d once lain, and she was certain that fortune would work on her side and deliver up to her the frog with treasure hoarded in its guts.
And so it came about: she killed dozens of frogs, no, scores of them, hundreds, one after another. She slit them with her knife from gullet to rectum. Some were puny, too small to be guilty, perhaps, but she did not spare any. Then, she found she had caught a gnarled monster, and she knew. She cut him open, and there lay the unmistakeable glint of gold. It was one of her earrings: the fine bunch of tiny bead grapes in soft gold gleamed against the shining slither of the bullfrog’s pink and green innards.
For a while she kept plunging her arm into the mud, and bringing out more of the silly trembling brutes, flipping them over, cutting them open. She wanted to find the other earring, she wanted to retrieve the necklace, too. When she left the mountains, it would show who she’d once been. It would be something that she could use to persuade others to help us, something, too, that she could sell.
Now she had one memento from the lost world of gifts, of made things, of precious objects of virtue. But she never found the fine gold chain twinkling in the frog’s gut, or the other earring, and she quit the murders and turned back up the mountain.
. . . carrion birds tossed themselves into the wind from their roosts in the cliff-faces overlooking the sea and with deep swirling wingbeats located the source of the powerful and appetising reek rising from the wetlands, and in a great din of cawing, swooped to feast on the rotting remains of Leto’s revenge.
8
Kim to Hortense, again and again
Subject: Re: Re: Leto, You, Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow
Date: Thurs, 18 June 199– 22:46:11 +0100
From: kim.mcquy
To: Hortense Fernly
Hetty please come and find me this weekend in the reading room I know you’re not meant to be working then but I need to talk to you im finding out so much its not special to me you know everybody when they hear a story sees things in their mindseye I just pay more attention to them they’re the future echoes of the real coming through time
your kim
Subject: Re: Re: Leto, You, Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow
Date: Sat, 20 June 199– 20:32:15 +0100
From: kim.mcquy
To: Hortense Fernly
Hetty I waited and every time someone came past
I thought its going to be her with that ship-boy book you’ve taken out (and I now can’t get hold of) where are you? I dont even know where you live and *** directory enquiries say ‘we don’t give out numbers without an address.’
I need to talk to you Hetty
your kim
Subject: Worries
Date: Mon, 22 June 199– 07:12:21 +0100
From: kim.mcquy
To: Hortense Fernly
Dear bright shining Hetty through my nights I’m rushing for school but didnt you get my last emails? haven’t had a reply – I am paying attention to what you say truly I’m not completely carried away by my own concerns. I do want to learn from you yes! you’re an integral part of my whole project – I will write with you and your work in mind and I can’t move ahead without you – you’re the one with the key to the meaning of what I just see ‘through a glass darkly’ – one of my mum’s favourite expressions which she still says sometimes when she’s more lucid than at others –
as I understand it you were trying to explain to me that there are two possible reasons for Meeks abandoning the edition – apart from overwork exhaustion or sudden lapse of interest:
a. Meeks decided there was no historical value whatsoever in the bundle’s chronicles: when he began testing the information they contain against other sources he found they were full of implausible events and straightforward mistakes – but you said he’d obviously mistaken the kind of texts he was dealing with: not the annals of some real life history but another kind of story another way of telling
b. Skipwith’s notes etc – Meeks got nervous at what he was finding about the goings on on board the Shearwater
you see how I do pay attention to what *you* say – hswu isn’t invested in historical truth – but we need the historical record to show how things panned out how the story we know is only part of the story – like the Truth & Reconciliation commission said – there’s healing truth and there’s other kinds – yes! this leto bundle matters – Hetty, please reply to this email – I’m being interviewed by jacko kirby – you’ve probably never heard of him or his prog but he’s a dj who’s big with kids as young as mine as well as older ones – I’m going to tell him everything I know so much more now – thanks to you yours always yes! please write soon –
Kim
Subject: Where are you?
Date: Tues, 23 June 199– 23:16:37 +0100
From: kim.mcquy
To: Hortense Fernly
Hetty! where are you? answer me!
I’m going again on saturday to read more – I need to see how much matches what she’s told me, what I’ve already seen –
send me a word – kim
Subject: Where are you?
Date: Wed, 24 June 199- 19:12:23 +0100
From: kim.mcquy
To: Hortense Fernly
Dr Fernly, there’s a lot to discuss as I’m posting new info about the Leto bundle on my website Skipwith’s stuff excellent and lots of it so it’s in the public interest for you to reply to my messages.
Please
Yours, Kim
Subject: Where are you?
Date: Thurs, 25 June 199– 19:05:43 +0100
From: kim.mcquy
To: Hortense Fernly
Dear Hetty I telephoned your office in the school break today – its difficult for me to find gaps in the schedule as the new government tests for six-years olds have been taking up a lot of space – (I need to talk to you)
as ever, kim
Subject: Skipwith 673
Date: Fri, 26 June 199– 09.46:16 +0100
From: Anna Vignole
To: kim.mcquy
Attachment: 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.
Dr Fernly is away and in her absence, she asked me to let you know that the material you requested has been relocated – you can now use the attached reference to call it up. She did want me also to draw your attention to its date of publication, for reasons she said you’d understand.
Yours sincerely, Anna Vignole
PART FOUR
On Board HMS Shearwater
1
Stowaways
When the ship first anchored in the bay the woman watched from among the tombs: many a boat had passed by, a sail on the horizon, like a broken promise. But this one stayed, and its crew appeared to be loading it with cargo of rocks hewn out of the necropolis and carried down to the sea.
She told the children: ‘We must find a way to reach it.’ Her blood was pounding as she wondered and watched.
The crew ferried themselves from the moored ship in a small tender; Leto could also see another, bigger rowing boat, hanging from a cradle on deck; one day, they winched this longboat down into the water and four of them rowed to the shore. There seemed to be two men left on deck, one a speck, maybe a mere slip of a boy. She left to reconnoitre, taking once again the path from the cave of the wolf and her cubs towards the sea across that rocky place, and as soon as she reached the flatter ground she heard the hubbub and saw for the first time the long man with the pale flat hair and flushed cheeks. He was sitting on the ground rubbing a stiff cloth over the marks on one of the fallen stones, and now and then he stopped and stood up and looked about him, and held out his arms as if the mountain was a wind and he was spreading himself before it to fill and lift. A team of men were working among the monuments, under the direction of an armed guard of some kind, who was mounted on the only pony; the men were loading stones into baskets and heaving them to the waiting line of mules who stepped with heads bowed and legs apart down the steep flank of the necropolis to the shore; there, the men untrussed the burdens from the animals and gave them a nosebag of feed and some water before whipping them to make the climb up the cliffside again for another load.
Slabs and fragments of the tombs were left standing on the beach, like an ancient city exposed by the withdrawal of the sea, waiting to be loaded aboard.
Leto stole closer. A new life, she thought. A new world in a new place far, far from here, where nothing will be known about me or about the babies. Where they won’t be recognised and ashamed: somewhere we can become anything we want, where we can put on a new life like a suit of clothes, if only we could find some.
Mister Jed Strugwell, the ship’s cook, rummaging among the kegs in the hold for the smoked pepper sausages he’d chosen from such regional foodstuffs as he’d been able to stomach in the market of their last port of call, found the tarpaulin differently arranged, and cursed, assuming that Teal had been pilfering food. The look-out boy’s thin, sad, weakling physique and longsighted peer offended Mr Strugwell’s standards of manliness in sailors and sailing.
‘A little lesson in discipline, that’s what’s needed,’ he barked to himself, with some satisfaction at the crime he’d uncovered; he’d long desired a pretext to lay his hands on the boy. ‘Nobody else on board to see to him, is there?’ Strugwell had cooked for many a crew, and was in a high temper on this voyage. The merchant navy’s proper business was manufactures, trade, goods that could be sold and exchanged. Not piles of old stones and boxes of dust which jeopardised the proper handling of the vessel in anything stronger than force four.
He stomped over to the goat where she was tethered under the gunwhales and felt her udders.
‘This damned animal – eats like a horse and never fills.’ He undid the halter and began leading her out – ‘Some fresh air will put
an edge on your appetite, but it’d better make you yield more.’
Leto heard the cook approach their hiding place. She pulled the children closer to her, and covered their mouths and curled up so that her face was burrowed deep into the smells of tar and salt cod and pemmican that were stacked and suspended around and above, presenting only her back concealed under empty sacking she’d drawn over herself and the twins. The timbers under the cook’s tread creaked as he went – to fetch the lantern, it turned out, for when he pulled the tarpaulin heavily aside, the weave in her protective covering scattered pinprick lights on parts of their bodies. Phoebe reached for one of them and danced it slowly on the palm of her hand, then bent her head forward, poking out her tongue to lick it. The child wanted to swallow it, as if it were a star, and her mother quelled her, brusquely, tucking her in closer to her body.