The Leto Bundle

by Marina Warner

  Leto pressed her hands tighter on her children’s mouths, while the drumming under her own ribs sounded so loud to her ears she feared the angry cook must hear it, even over his own imprecations, the rhythmic soughing of the water against the boat’s sides, the reciprocal sighing of the ship’s timbers as the sails lifted her, and the slop of water in the bilges below them.

  Before the cook descended into the stores, she’d been drowsing to the rock of the boat; it was a fine evening for sailing, and HMS Shearwater, lying low in the water on account of her cargo, was pulling steadily through a calm sea.

  The cook turned over the cargo, looking for missing items, talking aloud – more impatient that he couldn’t determine what had been tampered with than pleased he could find no damage. Then he was gone, with his string of sausages in his fist; the small stars that had drilled into their hiding place went out.

  Leto took her hands off the children’s faces, patted their limbs as if to mould their slight flesh back together, whispered to them, ‘It’s all right now’.

  Phoebe whimpered, and reached for her mother; reluctantly, Leto let her; the three-year-old really should be happy with the goat’s milk by now, but the girl still needed the soothing and reassurance of her mother’s breast, which she kneaded with a small hand, almost indignantly, as if it didn’t meet her needs with enough eagerness. Phoebus woke at his sister’s writhings and opened his opaque, shining eyes and asked with the solemnity of small children, ‘When will we be there?’

  ‘Soon,’ she said.

  ‘Tell me what it will be like there,’ he insisted.

  ‘I will, soon. I’ll tell you all about it.’

  ‘Lycia told her cubs never to wander far – she said every city was dangerous to wolves.’

  ‘We’re human beings, my sweet, and we’ll be able to lose ourselves there. A city of the size of Enoch with so many people will be big enough for us to hide in.’

  ‘But I want to come out of the dark down here. I want to be He.’ He grabbed at his sister, who shook him off; though she was smaller than her twin, she had a whiplash tension that made her strong, and she attached herself even more angrily to her mother’s body.

  ‘I’ve found you, I’ve caught you, now it’s my turn to run,’ Phoebus persisted, cheerfully grabbing her again.

  ‘Sshhh,’ whispered Leto, urgently. ‘Soon, soon, you’ll be able to play again.’

  She was very afraid, and pulled the two children tightly towards her, wishing her body could open and fold them into her deepest recesses and close herself, locked fast as a bivalve, so that nobody could open her and prise them out to hurt them.

  ‘Tell me more, PLEASE.’

  ‘I only know what I’ve heard.’

  Phoebus prodded his mother, and she tried to assemble the fragments she remembered.

  But life – or was it death? – was playing tricks on Leto. Every time she moved or was conveyed from one place to another, as when she was abandoned in the tombs or now, when she came down to the shore and embarked under cover of the night on to the sailing boat bound westward, the distance she put between herself and what lay behind her became also a space of time, its measurements in feet and yards, in ells and furlongs transmuted into units of duration which transported her beyond the world that had been the Citadel and her home, where Abbess Cecily prayed, with her long freckled hands joined composedly, and Doris prattled excitably, where Cunmar’s hands tightened round her ribs.

  It seems, she worried to herself, that living with Lycia has deformed my human soul. But she said nothing of this to her children.

  Her lost loves still danced in her mind’s cave, but receded from her as they turned and gestured, the sound of the wind and water outside tearing the sounds out of their mouths so that, as she strained to hear, she couldn’t catch the words and she found herself running after them, but her legs rooted to the ground. Yet if she could not remember, who was she?

  In the tombs with Lycia and her cubs she would watch the fire that she had learned to lay and set light: the wolves shunned all fires of hunters and travellers in the area but they learned to watch hers. The wood she and the young wolves carried up the cliff was dry and light and soon blazed; it was mostly live oak, and it burned brightly, spurting white tongues of light from the cracking bark. Sometimes, her mind also caught alight in this way; she would stare into the heart of the flame, and when one tongue curled through to the heartwood and burned incandescent, the burst of light was so dazzling she could not look: the flash from metal in the sunshine, something that shot through her with anguish of longing and loss. Sometimes in the winter, when the sky grew laden and there was cloud cover, you could look at the sun; a pale halo of lambent light under the drifts of mist. When you looked away, though, you might stumble because even shrouded, the disc scored deep into your eyes, burning out their core.

  Mother Cecily and her nurse Doris and others in the convent had gone over the past again and again. Cunmar too had entwined her in tales of his past triumphs.

  Memories were their constant companion and surety; the past gave them compass points on the map of their lives.

  And Kim, piecing together her story as he read Skipwith’s bundle of papers in the Archives, heard Leto say softly to herself:

  But my memories are like splinters under my skin, they weaken me like spears stuck in a pig’s neck. For they attach me to the past and I’ve been flung out of time and don’t know what past belongs to me.

  Leto’s voice was coming through faintly. Kim put his head down on his folded arms and closed his eyes, smiling to himself as he listened closely.

  The present has a way of turning translucent for me, of opening up to me. Do animals remember? They know how to tell friend from foe, bane from berries – the yew from the redcurrant. They recoil from fire, unlike my babies, who’d have put their hands to the dance of the flames. But do animals keep particular memories, in the way human’s experience memory?

  It isn’t memories I need any more. The longing to return, to reel back the rope that’s being payed out will weaken me. I can’t be weak. Nostalgia for all that I’ve lost will shackle me. I – We – need the future. We need a future.

  Her voice was growing fainter, overlaid by another, more insistent. The librarian came over and tapped Kim awake, shaking her head at him. ‘We don’t allow sleeping in the Reading Room, I’m afraid.’

  In the hull, Leto was making decisions. She would soon have to come out of hiding. The twins couldn’t tolerate the darkness and the muteness and the immobility much longer, and besides, she wouldn’t be able to hide the smells any more or someone would notice the wrong kind of droppings in the goat’s hay.

  Phoebe’s head was lolling; she was quietened, drowsy. But Phoebus’s brow was furrowed: he wanted Leto to leave her thoughts and talk to him. His eyes stared at her hugely, the look of a child who is recovering from fever. Soon, they must climb out of the hull and into the light again.

  They slept, but woke to the wind, which rose in the depths of the night. The laden sloop began to groan and shiver under its lash, and the sleek mass of the sea heaved under the hull. Leto watched the children: they were curled together in a kindle, tiny hands raised near their faces as if in a gesture of entreaty.

  The following morning, Sir Giles Skipwith, Bt., was sitting on the deck, under a shelter he’d rigged from one of the sails, with the portable desk he’d devised set out on his knees; he’d had a strap attached to it so that he could hang it round his neck. ‘Like a pedlar!’ he’d explained to the carpenter on his estate. His hands were free to work and there was a socket for his inkwell, and a lip on the near edge so that his writing and drawing implements wouldn’t slip off. It was a gently misty day from the haze of early summer; the coast was visible on his right, the long promontories watchful like hunting dogs with their heads between their paws at the command, ‘Lie’ from their master. Captain Winwalloe at the wheel was quiet, apparently dozing, since the course was set and the breeze steady and
strong enough to carry the boat with its cargo of marble; no other vessels appeared. The boy, Teal, was sitting in the prow, scanning for pirates. It was on account of the pirates that they were steering close to the shore for as long as they could, though not every harbour was secure.

  One of Skipwith’s sketchbooks of the site was spread out in front of him, and he was annotating the drawings there, collating them with his notes; he was partly content with the results, but needed to work fast to add details from memory. When they reached home, he’d commission an engraver to redraw the monuments. His efforts at the picturesque weren’t ‘lamentable’, his mother’s favourite term of disapproval. For an amateur cartographer, they were accomplished, almost ‘delightful, dear old boy’. But every day, the gap grew wider between his pencilled outlines and the sculptures as he had beheld them in their setting among the rocks, before they were disassembled for safekeeping back home. His manuscript notebook was altogether most handsome: he had not wasted those daydreaming hours practising scrolls and flourishes on his ascenders and descenders during the tedium of morning school. He had a specimen box, compartmented with cotton wool pockets for fragments and small artefacts which he was entering into his register of the excavation.

  The day was clear, the early morning breeze still fresh from the dropped temperature of the late summer nights, the sea was still soft and velvety and the ship moved to its cradling hold; they were made on days like this, thought Skipwith, to fit together as bodily as a bean lying neatly in the wadded mould of a pod. The sun’s glare had not yet hardened to bounce off the surface of the water and flash, but stars winked deep down in its amethyst depths. His spirits expanded with the beauty of it till he felt his head might burst. Never had he imagined he would stumble across so much, that he would be able to rescue so many riches of the classical past, bring them back to safekeeping and to intelligibility. Twenty-four of the thirty-six cities mentioned by the sources for that area identified from their broken ruins. He felt he knew how God had felt at the creation when he brought order out of chaos, being out of nothingness. He, Skipwith, had found a trampled wilderness, strewn with stones, creeping with snakes, scorpions under the stones, crawling with tortoises and prowled by mountain lions and hyenas and wolves, a barbarous and desert place abandoned by the old gods and avoided by the new, and had gathered them so that they would speak again and tell their stories without risk from weather and war. Yes, it was god-like to halt time, to lift its fell hand from a world that was nearly lost.

  When Strugwell and the boy came back that morning from the market with a hank of sausages wrapped in a scrap of old parchment – what a stroke of fortune that had been! It was greasy from its employment at the butcher’s stall, torn by the nail on which he’d hung the pieces for use as wrapping, but clearly Greek, exquisite sepia uncials, some sort of chronicle. Then the furious ride back to the market, the cob steaming and heaving as he spurred him so that he’d catch the vendor before he disappeared; the wild search for the butcher, who had shut up shop before the furious heat of the day struck, but someone had directed him to his house and he’d roused him from his afternoon nap, and given him some money to remember where he’d purchased the scrap. Then the wait, because the sun was in the zenith, but as soon as they could set off again, he’d changed mounts and ridden to the mountain town where the butcher had told them the refuse trader lived. He’d enquired in the hamman, where everyone always knew everything, and it had turned out to be easy to track him down. A dealer in detritus and waste, with a cave for a storehouse. It was secured by a wooden palisaded gate and inside it, in the dark, Skipwith saw hundreds, perhaps thousands of documents stashed higgledy-piggledy, all mixed up together in a pile that rose under the steady powder of limestone dust from the cave’s roof – how long had it been there? How far back did the pile begin?

  ‘House clearances,’ said the dealer. ‘My father-in-law and his father before him.’

  Skipwith bought the lot, by weight.

  ‘What am I going to sell now?’ The trader shrugged. ‘You’ve emptied my stores.’

  Skipwith was busy ordering more donkeys to cart the stuff back to the boat.

  As the paper was boxed up, he saw bills, letters, receipts, wills, house deeds – but among this notaries’ jetsam, there must be more of that chronicle, and perhaps more like it.

  Still stowed behind the stones in their lagging of oiled canvas, Leto noticed how her children’s noises were taking shape. No longer mere squawks and gurgles and cries, she realised, but ribbons of words that they spilled to each other, like kittens batting at something dangled in front of their eyes. They were impatient to rove, too; she would follow them as they explored, her heart knocking, as they tried out their new steps. The twins tumbled around on the cargo of rocks, the binding ropes giving them handholds when the boat pitched. Leto crept after them, in their dim playground, keeping her ears pricked for footsteps from the deck above, so she could snatch them into a hiding place at the sound of someone approaching

  Apart from the cook, fetching up supplies, the long-limbed, flushed young man she had observed directing the haul of stones would climb down the companionway into the hold. He would rest a hand on the trussed haul from the tombs where she had lived, and stand there in the semi-darkness for a time, quite motionless, as if he wanted to drill through the oilcloths of the stowed packages and penetrate to their interior.

  On deck, Sir Giles Skipwith arranged the papoose of a frog corpse at an oblique angle on his pad so that it appeared to be poised to leap off the edge of his desk. He was attaching a label to the frog’s right foreleg, identifying the tomb by number.

  Teal, the cabin boy, appeared at Sir Giles’s elbow; he liked to watch the archaeologist working, and Skipwith enjoyed being watched, and, as he thought, admired.

  ‘Of no extrinsic value, Teal,’ he explained. ‘But every item must be recorded, down to the smallest shard. That is how the great chronicles of civilisation are made: from fragments. This creature was probably used in magic: “Double double toil and trouble/Tongue of frog and eye of newt . . .” in the cauldron, “Boil and bubble” – you know the kind of thing!’

  The boy was rapt, but did not look as if he understood.

  Skipwith ensconced the weightless, papery cadaver on its cushion of cotton wool.

  ‘AMULET?’ he wrote in fine black script.

  ‘Here,’ he said, ‘take a hold of this.’ He handed him a crayon. ‘We’ll make a start on your letters, Teal, and you shall be able one day to do as I do.’

  The boy was bunching his fist round the crayon as if it were a hammer, but was looking at Skipwith instead of paying attention to the task. His eyes were screwed up, and he was biting his lip. Skipwith tapped him on the forehead, and adjusted his fingers around the implement. ‘Now, we need something to practise on. We can’t use paper – never know where we’d find some again. We’ll make as if we’re on the beach – there’s a fine place to write. Fetch me some salt – there’s plenty of that about and we can always make heaps more!’ He laughed, and pulled at his clothes; they were stiff with brine. They’d spread the salt on something – the deck or the top of a crate and it would make a fine screen on which he’d trace letters for the boy to copy.

  But Teal wasn’t paying attention.

  ‘Come now, my boy, you lost your wits?’

  Teal looked scared. He stammered, ‘Can’t go down there, sir—’ His voice petered out.

  ‘Yes you can; if you’re frightened of Strugwell, I’ll square him. Tell him I ordered it.’

  ‘No, sir, I can’t,’ the boy was shivering.

  ‘Don’t be a little fool—’

  ‘I’m not going.’

  This was preposterous. Skipwith tossed his fair hair off his forehead with impatience. ‘I’m ordering you to.’

  ‘But I don’t want to be the one who finds them, ’cos then,’ he sniffed, ‘it’ll be me that’s ordered to kill them and I don’ want to go near such things nor whack ’em on the head.
They’re devils, not natural. If they get a nip at you you’re a goner . . .’ He danced on his feet and threw his head back, mimicking being throttled and foaming at the mouth.

  ‘What the devil are you gabbing about?’

  ‘Rats. Rats as big as . . .’ he stopped, searched. ‘Dogs! I heard them down there, snuffling and crying like babies.’

  Skipwith examined the boy’s face. It was red and blistered and smeared with dirt; the fair, almost white eyelashes dusted with salt, but beneath this crust, he could see Teal was truly frightened.

  He unlatched the strap of his desk, lifted it off his lap, tidied away his writing tools and drawing materials, folded it all up into a compact box and took it into the cabin.

  ‘Show me.’ The treasures he’d found were thickly wrapped in waterproofed sheeting he’d had dubbed and oiled; then crated up in strongboxes. The smaller items of his magnificent haul – the fragments of carved reliefs and sculptures, the splinters of inscriptions, the pottery shards – were packed in crates the same carpenter from home had made to his specifications and would be proof against any rodents’ gnawing. But he did not want to risk finding the manuscript hoard shredded into rats’ nests.

  He swung his long frame down the companionway into the low, stuffy darkness below deck in the fo’c’sle; the boy hung back, outlined in the square light of the hatch, whence, in a shaky whisper, he gave Skipwith directions.

  ‘On, on, farther, behind your marbles, sir, right in the very depths of the fo’c’sle.’

  On the first night, Skipwith had sensed a presence when he was standing on the deck under the violet Lycanian sky giddy with stars, unable to turn in, so acute was his excitement that his marbles – the tomb sculptures and the temple bas-reliefs – were on board and bound at last for Albion. The marbles were stowed forward and the heaviest of the pillar tombs aft for ballast; while in the hold amidships, the mummified bodies and their beautiful painted masks – the pinnacle of his discoveries! – were wrapped in oilcloth and slung from cradles above the sculptures and the stones. He was trying to quell the mad din in his heart that broke out when he saw again the extent of his hoard, when his ears had picked up something – was it giggling?