The Leto Bundle

by Marina Warner

  ‘I’ve got the gold safe,’ he whispered. ‘Mister Strugwell’s gold, Captain Winwalloe’s gold. The price the old man paid for them – and for you. It’s yours by rights. I kept it close all this time, strapped under my thigh. Too scared to show anyone or buy anything with it. So it’s all here. For me. For you.’

  In the Reading Room, Kim tidied up the pile of papers and books on his desk. Adventures of a Ship-Boy ended with Teal’s return to Enoch, eighteen years later, a kind of Crusoe, a battered, time-tried, grown man, but still in the prime of life; he was jailed, and faced a court martial, but the climate of opinion warmed to his story and, if the book did indeed record a true case history, petitions such as this anonymous volume were got up for his reprieve from the gallows.

  Were they successful?

  The book, published during Teal’s imprisonment, didn’t reveal the outcome. Kim stood up slowly, picked up the pile of books and documents and returned them to the desk. It was peculiar, the closer Leto came, the less she seemed to speak to him directly. She was travelling nearer, moving towards him, into his zone of time and space, and yet – it felt as if she was dispersing, her signals breaking up under interference from so much that he’d been hearing, like bands of data from a radio probe bringing him news that he could not yet decipher.

  PART FIVE

  Tirzah and After

  Topography displays no favorites; North’s as near as West.

  More delicate than the historian’s are the mapmaker’s colors.

  ELIZABETH BISHOP

  1

  The Road to Tirzah

  In a crooked, creaking cart that Teal had commandeered, they had cheese and tomatoes, ham, bottled peppers, wine and oranges, clothing, a rug. On top, Teal had strewn some hay from the stables to hide the goods. His progress was jaunty, even as he hauled on the wooden pole of the vehicle. Phoebus was scampering ahead, doubling back and darting off again, so impatient to get ahead that he was covering twice the distance of his slow mother, who was sometimes carrying Phoebe, sometimes putting her down, urging her to walk.

  ‘You’re a big baby, and I can’t carry you, not any more.’

  Phoebe was wilful; she began to shape a bawl, twisting her mouth to insist on a ride.

  ‘I’m not listening,’ said Leto, and couldn’t help laughing at the sight of the child’s charcoal-smeared grimace of woe.

  ‘Come here, sit in the cart,’ said Teal, kindly. ‘I’ll pull you.’

  Delighted, Phoebe stuck her thumb in her mouth and jumped into the barrow.

  Leto shook her head. ‘Teal, you give in to her too much.’

  The dawn had brought with it a lifting gust of air so fresh and light that all her past shames and disgust seemed swept clean, as if her mind were a stale room on which the windows were now flung wide and the old linen stripped, the rugs beaten and the floor strewn with lavender water and mopped to a pale gleam.

  When morning lifted the air to a new lightness, they were already far from the sea, with no one in pursuit, or so it seemed; Leto then felt her feet begin to move dancingly along the dusty, broken road. For it appeared that in the disarray of the dying trader’s household, all the renegades and fugitives were looking to their own; an unspoken code was preventing further filchings and pickings from their fellows-in-flight. Ahead of them, bands were scattered with their laden barrows and bundled booty; no doubt there were others behind them. But each remained invisible to the other, even when they felt them moving nearby, so that what they were doing might seem not to be done.

  The four of them had money, they were free, for the first time for so long; she was moving unconfined, the road ahead was open, the country spread out on either side, some marshland where water buffalo sank voluptuously in the cool and rushy mud, the blade of an egret perched on their backs, feeding, Leto imagined, on blood-rich ticks or other parasites in the beast’s hide, using its stately rump as the perfect conveyance for hunting other prey – freshwater fish, big flat mussels, and of course plump frogs.

  ‘I’ll get down now,’ said Phoebe, after travelling a little way like a ship’s figurehead in the cart. She skipped off to join her brother, cuffed him as she caught up with him, and then darted ahead, hooting with laughter.

  ‘She just wanted a bit of a fuss made of her,’ said Teal.

  ‘So she does,’ sighed Leto. But as she said it, she wanted to bite back the words.

  It was hard for her to think about the twins, about what they were like, about their differences of character, and to face her own changeable, different feelings about each of them, because such thoughts plunged her back into the past and its hurts and loss. The best part of her recent adventures, she realised, was that she’d had no time to reflect on anything but the jeopardy they were in and how to extricate themselves. But now, as soon as they began to walk under the open sky towards a future, with food in their bags and money under their belts, she found herself assailed by this puzzling antagonism to the ties that bound her to these children, who struck her, sometimes, as complete strangers. Especially Phoebe.

  The times when the man who’d fathered them had seemed to love her and she had loved him and believed him were disappearing off the edges of her memory, leaving a dry and dirty residue: all at once, she remembered from long ago, Abbess Cecily swathed from head to foot in white veils at work on cleaning out the drawers of the hive on the terrace of the convent after the swarm had abandoned it; the husks of the dead cells and their dead occupants had to be scraped from the wooden forms. The pile of dirty, broken wax and disintegrating bodies of the insects grew on the cloth the old nun had spread by her side as she worked. The honey that once flowed in Leto had run dry; she was all husk, turning to a sere and bitter dust, and her twins, the children she had struggled so long to guard and nourish, had been hung around her neck. By the man whose step, falling softly in his beaded indoor shoes on the polished floor outside her room, made her heart jump and sent her flying to a seat to busy herself intently on some task so that he should not know she’d been as alert to his approach as a dormouse to the shadow of a hawk.

  Were they like him? Phoebus had his eyes, with the thick and curly eyelashes of a people who need protection from the relentless stare of the zenith above their homeland, and, she remembered grudgingly, he erupted with the same winning, mischievous self-delighting laughter that so often curved his father’s lips when he came to find her for a snatched moment, a quick caress, a kiss, before he was gone. Phoebus knew how to charm – his mother, and others.

  The sun was climbing; a few torn scarves of cirrus floated high up in the blue. A waggon swayed towards them, loaded with fresh-cut hay; the driver raised his hand in greeting as they clattered past on heavy wooden wheels, and Phoebus ran alongside, cheering on the heavy bullock under the wooden yoke and laughing with the little boy who sat up on the bench. It seemed a vision out of time, of a bucolic ease so deep and solid that it had escaped the hooked talons of history. They were moving away from the Shearwater, away from the caravanserai. Leto, who had long ago learned to weep only when it might serve, found spontaneous prickings behind her eyes as the two little boys, the one on the cart and Phoebus with his fright of a blackened face in the road waved at each other frenetically, making a game of it, having fun at their own exaggeration of normal greetings, raucously holding the other to the gesture until they had travelled out of sight.

  A few more carts, carrying hay and other feeds, rolled slowly by in both directions, going home after the morning’s work, to eat, to sleep as the custom was, though the heat of the day was pleasant and airy, since summer had not yet ripened. The landscape around them shone under the high sun, every leaf and blade shimmering in the soft breeze that now and then lifted a flight of lapwing from one field to another.

  Leto turned off the road, following a ridge between the water meadows towards a spreading tree that would give them shade. A few crickets hopped in the sparse grass around, and pale green velvet lockets of future almonds clustered on the t
ree’s broad branches.

  Teal went to fetch water from the stream; Leto broke the bread and cheese, and passed the pieces to the children. Phoebus was intent on catching a cricket, crawling on all fours as the insects hopped around him. Phoebe was ignoring him, and trying to climb on to Leto’s lap, watching her brother jealously, but with a touch of contempt for such doomed, childish attempts, her mother felt, with a moment of reproof.

  Teal was urging the boy to come and sit and eat, and for a moment Phoebus stopped the hunt and munched on a bite or two of the hard cheese and harder bread, but his concentration was soon recaptured by the activities of the crickets, as he jumped to catch them where they sprung.

  When he had eaten, Teal took out his whistle and lay down on his back and piped to the sky, and Phoebe and Leto began humming under the music the song he had sung on board now and then:

  ‘“Gin I may choose how I shall die,

  I pray you, draw your sword on.

  “But first your mantle lay aside;

  A maiden’s blood may spatter wide.

  ’Twere shame your clothes should a’be dyed.’”

  As they murmured along to Teal’s whistle, Phoebus left off his cricket hunt and came and lay down beside them, and they gradually all drifted off into sleep.

  ‘So many hairs as she unbound

  So many tears fell to the ground.’

  When the day began cooling, they hoisted their packages again and set out back down the road to Tirzah once more. Their progress was slower, for the children were tired after the morning’s efforts, and on the uphill stretches Leto and Teal couldn’t pull them in the barrow for long.

  ‘When will we get there?’ asked Phoebus.

  Leto said, ‘Soon.’

  ‘What will we do when we get there?’ asked Phoebe.

  Teal said, ‘First we’ll find lodgings. We’ll find friends as well, people to help us. Then we’ll eat lots.’ He sounded uncertain, then remembered something. ‘I’ll work. Maybe learn letters too – go to school. You lot too.’

  ‘I don’t want to,’ said Phoebe. ‘I want to stay at home.’

  ‘You’ll change your mind.’

  ‘You’ll come with me,’ said Phoebus. ‘I’ll look after you.’ And he put a paternal arm around his little sister, who shook herself free.

  Leto thought, Tirzah, where my father came from, they said. Maybe someone will recognise me – ‘Ahah!’ they’ll cry, ‘Ser Matteo’s little girl! You’re peas in a pod, would have known you anywhere, look at those eyebrows! That chin! That nose!’

  Then she faltered. But would the twins look right – would they belong?

  At a bend in the road, after a shallow dip and a gentle rise, Tirzah came into view in the valley: the curl of the river caught the light and flashed for an instant. Slender arched bridges crossed into it like the radial spokes of a rose window, leading into the cluster of tiled roofs, some yellow and black, alternating as on a wild tortoise’s back, some a high glaze emerald green, the vivid ensemble softened in between with plumes and clouds of trees and climbing plants. They couldn’t see into the streets and squares of Tirzah, since the houses were packed together, but smoke rose here and there, in spite of the springtime warmth, giving signs of activity and occupation – bread ovens, thought Leto, or family kitchens. The sun lit up the prospect so clearly that the stacked buildings seemed painted by one of those illuminators who can render the fly on a petal of a scarlet geranium on a distant windowsill. Chimney pots in baked clay, smoking white; whitewashed bell-towers rising near the brilliant gleaming glazed domes in their vivid livery; narrow grey spires and pinnacles of more shrines; the occasional dominant cube of a great edifice, and yet other buildings squat and low-lying: Tirzah was far, far bigger than any place Leto had yet seen.

  At this moment it looked to her as if the city had descended, whole and twinkling, from the sky, like one of the models held in his hand on a cushion by a patron saint in the illuminated manuscripts the priests had used in the convent; it beckoned to them, inviting possession, yet kept its own counsel. A great city, humming, singing to itself, calling them to a new future. Yet Skipwith had said that, compared to Enoch where he was conducting them, Tirzah was a mere village.

  Teal pummelled his eyes as the joy and terror of a new life there seized him, and Leto kissed the children and pointed, wiping her nose on the back of her hand in her commotion.

  The twins were bewildered at their mother’s unusual show of feeling, but then, reassured that she really was happy at what she saw lying ahead, Phoebe did a little dance on the spot, overcome with excitement at their prospects, while Phoebus clapped his hands and whooped aloud, crying out the city’s name, ‘Tirzah!’

  The approach took them down a gentle incline; Leto put her hand to the barrow, where Phoebe and her twin were riding together, as the going was easier downhill. The road changed, too; the beaten earth became a hard smooth surface, which ran to the verge and broke off, like a tough uneven crust of mineral deposit on the rim of sulphur springs; this new ground underfoot, unfamiliar to the little band of fugitives, wasn’t rutted by cartwheels or stamped with the hooves of oxen or donkeys or other animals. It wasn’t paved here, either, but became a solid, dark surface, although intermittently it was shattered by a huge pothole, its broken edges showing strata of grit and sand and stones.

  ‘Looks like battle scars,’ said Teal. ‘Heavy cannon. Not long ago, either.’ He glanced around, uncertainly.

  There was no more traffic coming towards them, nor any overtaking them either. The scattered members of the caravanserai must have gained on them, or chosen a different route, or hidden themselves in the countryside.

  The emptiness began to grow eerie, for nothing stirred now except the wind in the grass and the occasional crow, taking off slowly from the meadows upwards and then flapping down to settle again elsewhere. As they approached, they began to see the gaps between the houses ahead, missing teeth in the glittering assembly of edifices, with smoke wreathed in the crevasses; the silence became compressed into a dead weight, as if the very air were stuffing its fingers into their ears and plugging them till they could hear only the pumping of the blood in their temples. It was a silence of held breath, of sucked-in responses, of anticipation, of fear. The city, which from a distance had appeared to teem and seethe, was now as still as if it had drunk poison.

  Leto hesitated; Teal halted. The children twisted in the cart, clambered out, felt too the warp that held them.

  The ground didn’t buckle under them, to bring into contact two faces of rock that had lain far apart for centuries, yet time was bending down to them to lift them on to his high shoulders and then, with a heave, standing up to fling them forward into a space where Tirzah, seen only a short time ago winking and basking in the springtime light, lying aglow in the pastoral cradle of green meadows and greener hills, now sank under a long dark shadow as they drew nearer, and shook to the rumble of approaching armoured matériel and the boom of guns.

  The next bend in the road took them along a ridge, running parallel to the perimeter of the city, which lay just down the valley, over the river. In fear now, they were looking for shelter, but ahead of them the way was blocked. A small crowd had disembarked from assorted strange vehicles: shiny, metallic, painted a glaring crimson and blue, with windows, and then a tall, larger, house-like, long post chaise with lines of blacked windows, and a four-square, loricated rampart of metal, like a titanic woodlouse with the proboscis of a stinging insect. The passengers squatted in the shade near these unfamiliar, lumbering conveyances, waiting. There were some women, one with a baby on her hip. Some of them were smoking; a few of the men had long thin guns, on which they were leaning.

  Leto wondered, Should they turn around fast, try and escape? Back to Feltimye? The crowd did not look agitated, however. It seemed becalmed, the men, women and children numbed and silent, hardly moving, as if she were dreaming them and needed to dream more to bring them to life.

  They were
all turned towards Tirzah, watching, and when Leto followed their gaze, she saw now the gaily chequered roofs become scorched by fire, the towers crack at the seams and the walls turn black with smoke, while the sky ahead of them, so flawless a few miles back down the road, was dirtied by columns of more smoke rising greasily here and there, while smuts were now being blown towards them on the wind. The whitewashed walls were no longer gleaming, but streaked and smeared with the traces of burning. And, as the little band watched and waited, the preternatural silence was rent, again, and again, by a deep thumping from engines hidden somewhere. Invisible explosions followed; the earth shook so that the view in front of them vibrated as if she were trying to hold it in her hands and they were trembling too hard.

  ‘It’s just another raid,’ said one old woman, finally breaking the muteness of the group at a standstill. ‘We’ve just got to wait till it’s over.’ Her voice was patient. ‘I was visiting my son,’ she added, ‘In the barracks back in—’ She mentioned a town in the hills.

  Leto stood before the smoke-dimmed, smouldering city feeling a chill grip her heart, as if the darkness of solar eclipse had fallen on her world. Then a sudden quick shadow passed against the sun, and again, and again; three times, in the clear sky, the light was for a moment blotted out; and with a huge roar fire dropped out of the sky. Yet the air above their heads was still a flawless blue, the few clouds fresh as cream. Then there came a blast, and another, and another, very close, very loud, but Leto still heard through their concussion the high scream of Phoebe.

  Afterwards, Leto said many things about that time, during the first phase of the long siege of Tirzah, when they walked into the shelling of the besieged city of their future, and could not find their way back. She would repeat her sensation that everything had stopped stock still before the lurch and the blast that brought down the fire from the sky. She would remember, ‘I felt time was being balled up by a gigantic fist.’ Or, she would say, ‘I felt bodiless, as if something was lifting me high, high, high out of the world, and then dropping me back down, with a crash.’ Phoebus was gripping her round her neck, straddling her hip. But Phoebe had drifted apart from them. Leto was, she would repeat, spellbound; she didn’t even throw herself and the boy down on the ground. She was looking over towards Phoebe, crying out to her to come near.