CONTENTS
ABOUT THE BOOK
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
PROLOGUE
PART ONE: Lycania
(‘The Letoniast Version’)
1. A Grainy Blue Egg
2. Protest in the Museum
3. In the She-Wolf’s Den
4. ‘A Vanished Mystery Religion’
5. ‘The Angel of the Present’
6. A Tirzahner Baby
7. The Rushcutters’ Assault
8. ‘People Like You’: The Rise of Gramercy Poule
9. Kim to Hortense; Hortense to Kim
PART TWO: In the Convent
(A Petition and Two Chronicles)
1. ‘Item, One Frog’
2. The Deposition of Karim the Equerry
3. Homepage: http://www.hswu.org
4. Kim to Hortense
5. The Plane Tree and the Lotus
6. Hortense to Kim; Kim to Hortense
7. ‘A Witch’s Duel in the Hellenistic World’
8. Kim to Hortense; Hortense to Kim
9. A Desert Outpost (from the Chronicle of Barnabas)
10. Kim to Hortense, twice
11. An Anniversary (from Annals of the Convent)
12. Kim to Hortense; Hortense to Kim
PART THREE: The Keep, Cadenas-la-Jolie
(The ‘Cunmar Romance’)
1. A Hostage in the Outpost
2. Kim to Hortense, twice
3. ‘Of the Great Subterfuge of Cunmar the Terrible’
4. Hortense to Kim
5. In the Necropolis
6. Kim to Hortense
7. An Earring Recovered
8. Kim to Hortense, again and again
PART FOUR: On Board HMS Shearwater
1. Stowaways
2. A Cheval Glass
3. Some Oranges
4. The Bronze Fly
5. In the Caravanserai
6. A Lump of Haschisch
PART FIVE: Tirzah and After
1. The Road to Tirzah
2. In the Basement of the Hospital
3. An Encounter in Pontona
4. An Animal Refuge
5. A Scrap of Scarf
6. Hortense to Kim; Kim to Hortense, again and again
PART SIX: Freedom Days
1. An Interview, Cantelowes
2. At The Blue Moon
3. The Fellmoor Cluster
4. At Feverel Court
5. A Midsummer Night
6. In the Playground
7. ‘History Starts With Us’
8. The Harvest Fair
9. Threnody
EPILOGUE
CHRONOLOGY
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
COPYRIGHT
About the Book
When a mummy in the Museum of Albion is unpacked it is found to contain a bundle of curious objects and documents which tell of the wanderings of an unknown woman, Leto.
On the run, in a far-off era of civil strife, Leto gives birth to twins, shelters with wolves, survives in a desert stronghold as the lover of its commander, stows away on a ship loaded with plundered antiquities and then works as a maid in a war-torn city. She loses her son but saves her daughter during a long siege.
As the novel sweeps from mythological times and the Middle Ages to the treasure-hunting of Victorian Europe and into the present day, Leto reappears in different guises. Eventually she becomes a servant to a rock singer, and begins to search for her son.
About the Author
Marina Warner’s fiction includes Indigo, The Lost Father (winner of a Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and shortlisted for the Booker Prize), as well as a collection of stories, Mermaids in the Basement. Among her acclaimed studies of myth and fairy tale are Alone Of All Her Sex, Monuments and Maidens, From the Beast to the Blonde, No Go the Bogeyman and Managing Monsters (the 1994 Reith Lectures on BBC Radio). She has recently been a Getty Scholar, and a Visiting Fellow Commoner at Trinity College, Cambridge. She has also been appointed a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Government.
ALSO BY MARINA WARNER
Fiction
In a Dark Wood
A Skating Party
The Lost Father
Wonder Tales (Editor)
Mermaids in the Basement
Indigo
Non-Fiction
The Dragon Empress
Alone Of All Her Sex
Joan of Arc
Monuments and Maidens
From the Beast to the Blonde
Managing Monsters
The Inner Eye
No Go the Bogeyman
THE LETO BUNDLE
Marina Warner
FOR IRÈNE, BELOVED FRIEND
PROLOGUE
In the customs depot on the airfield in Shiloh, several crates were padlocked behind chainlink fences in a single pen. Bonded goods, perishable and hazardous materials, special interest cargoes to declare, valuables and treasures of all kinds were stored there, randomly, awaiting clearance; although the containers wore precise dockets, labels of provenance and destination, and many warning notices in HAZCHEM liveries of red, black, and yellow, most kept their contents secret. Doctor Hortense Fernly could pick out the bulky, well-buttressed pine crate that she was conducting; she was pleased to see that it had been placed right side up. Near it, through the bars of the small windows on either side of a special airfreight box, the eye of a racehorse could be glimpsed, and a groom was standing close up against the wire: ‘There there, my beauty, there there,’ he was cooing. ‘Don’t fret, it won’t be long now.’ He made soft sounds against his teeth and the mare heaved and stamped in response, but quietly, as if familiar with the wait in her constricted quarters. And in a corner of the shed, a widow keened quietly through the wire over the coffin of her husband.
Hortense Fernly was a museum curator, the deputy keeper of Classical Antiquities at the National Museum of Albion. When she was at work in the building, she kissed an electronic scanner with the special card round her neck to gain access through nuclear-proof steel doors to the vaults where the most precious objects, paintings, sculptures and documents were kept. But treasures were unpredictable these days: no longer dragons’ hoards of precious stones, shooting such bright lights they lit up their hiding place, no longer verdigris’d doubloons spilling from crocks of pirates in concealed coves of palm-fringed islands. Hortense had colleagues who exulted over a chipped badge from a failed protest movement or the end of a roll of film in a rusty can; meanwhile the salerooms were full of luxuries and souvenirs – celebrity relics, preferably hauled from the site of a shipwreck, or the bedroom of a suicide. In her field of expertise treasures were usually broken and lustreless: potsherds, moth-casings of papyri, tatters of painted linen. She might find, in a tray of rubble, the single, crooked piece of elbow that solved a shattered marble figure’s pose, or the fragment with a speech from one of a great tragedian’s lost plays. The vital bit that changed the picture might look, at first, like nothing at all.
In one corner of the depot, the widow was hugging herself, though it wasn’t especially cold; now and then, with an impatient movement of her head, she walked up to the fence and stared hard at the coffin.
‘That’s my husband in there,’ she announced to the air, and paced back as far as she could, taking up her post against the wall. ‘Keeled over in the hotel shower,’ she wailed. ‘I was always telling him, Herb, you should cut down on these trips. But he wouldn’t listen, and then he has to go and die over there and they put him in this damned ugly box. I can’t wait to get him out of it. I want a nice one, white with brass handles. I told them that was what I wanted.’
Nobody responded; they kept their distance from her grief, and this drew the rest of them a littl
e closer. One man, in a slim-cut, light-coloured and crumpled suit, with expensive trainers, took out a pen like a jeweller’s punch and began tapping the keypad on a pocket calculator. Another found an empty packing case and sat down: Tom Bampton, also known, on account of his pallor and thinness, as TB, was waiting to clear Gramercy Poule’s stacks of electronic equipment for her tour. Taking out a copy of a music magazine, he waved it in the direction of Hortense, who was flexing her knees to get the circulation going after the flight. She was small and neatly made, in a dark maroon skirt cut from a surprising lavishness of soft cloth, over espadrilles she’d worn for the flight but were still pinching her swollen feet. She came over, shook her head at his offer of the magazine; he understood, and offered her the packing case instead with a mock bow; she accepted.
‘Are you an old hand at this?’ she asked him. Her eyes were sore-rimmed from the dry air inside the plane; she blinked hard to moisten them.
He shrugged. ‘This is routine. I’ve seen volatile medical supplies worth millions – standing out in the heat while some puffed-up arsehole keeps everyone sweating. I’ve waited next to dodgy doctors who wouldn’t say what they were carrying in that special refrigerated cabinet: a liver? An expensive kidney or two?’ He was whispering, and eyed the man in the pale suit speculatively. ‘No endangered species here today – sometimes there’s parrots, caymans, even one time a rhino. Huge great beast. Crossing the world to breed. “Handsome, intelligent, white, successful rhino, likes classical music and Cajun cooking, looking for a long-term relationship with like-minded rhino partner – no beauty, but must be under twenty-five years old.” What’ve you got in there?’
‘Art.’
‘Oh right – Old Master?’
‘Not exactly.’ Hortense Fernly looked at TB with surprise – she’d rather expected less animation from the starveling young man. ‘I’m a museum curator. In fact I’m also escorting a body – oh my god.’ She began to laugh behind her hand, then looked shamefaced at the newly widowed woman hugging the wall. ‘Oh, why am I laughing? Stop it, Hetty,’ she said to herself. ‘It must be the jet lag. Or the bad air. They say they thin the oxygen to save fuel.’ She overcame her fit and answered, calm now: ‘I’m accompanying a mummy – and she’s very very old.’
‘Very Gothic,’ said TB. ‘How old?’
‘We don’t really know – the tomb was carved around eighteen hundred years ago – but the rest . . . We don’t treat it as a corpse, of course, not as a person . . .’ She hesitated. There had been difficulties over taking it out of the country for the travelling exhibition. She changed the subject. ‘What are you carrying?’
‘Electronics.’ He gestured at a stack of matt black, chrome-cleated boxes. ‘Gramercy Poule’s touring. Six cities in a week. Or that’s what it’ll feel like.’
‘Gramercy Poule?’ Hortense echoed him.
‘You must’ve heard of her—’ he paused. ‘It’s a three-week tour, more like.’
‘Pop music isn’t exactly my area of expertise.’
‘Not pop. Folk rock.’
‘Like . . . Joni Mitchell?’ At his silence, she hesitated. ‘Does that date me?’
TB paused again. ‘Naw. Gram wouldn’t like it, but you’re not so far off the mark. Gramercy Poule was really big ten years ago – she sings high, too.’ He warbled, ‘“Peeeoople like you . . .” Think Kate Bush. No? Well. I’m her roadie, and it’s always toothcomb time for us with customs. They think, Drugs, sex ’n’ rock ’n’ roll. This airport’s especially uptight. Fucking nuisance, they’ve seen too many hard guys on TV and they like to swagger a bit and push you around. So who’s in the box, then?’
Hortense Fernly hadn’t spoken to anyone since her special charge was, as it were, smuggled out of the Museum. The man in the seat beside her on the flight had been intent on his special dietary needs, which were elaborate and involved prayers, and she didn’t want to talk at all, let alone about the problems.
‘Gramercy’s a singer-songwriter,’ TB went on. ‘With an agitprop edge. Not, absolutely not, a pop star. She’d savage you for thinking it. Go on, who’s the body?’
Hortense took a breath and answered: ‘We’ve always called her “Helen”, because the cartonnage – the face mask – is very beautiful. We don’t really know – there are other stories. It’s the sarcophagus she’s buried in that’s the real treasure – and the mask. She’s just a bundle of old bandages. But Greek, and very late Greek at that.’ She hesitated again, then plunged on. ‘We had some trouble taking her out of the country, in fact. There was a protest. A rather noisy protest.’
From TB’s saddlebag came a light squeal. He fished inside and answered the phone.
‘Monica?’
‘. . . ’
‘Yeah, everything’s excellent. We’re just waiting for clearance.’
‘. . . ’
‘No, no boa constrictors this time. Just the usual. A racehorse and . . .’ He lowered his voice. ‘Two corpses. How’s Gram doing?’
‘. . . ’
‘Excellent. “The village shop is selling organic tofu.”’ He glanced over at Hortense, who looked away, but smiled, too. ‘Wow – wish I could be there. Tofu and blackberries! Most likely I’ll do room service and the mini-bar tonight. But we’ll have this lot set up by tomorrow at the latest. And I’ll make sure your rooms at the Clairmont are OK as soon as I’ve checked in.’
‘. . . ’
‘No, nothing exciting, no bullet holes, no men in black looking us over. Just a museum curator and her mummy. How’s things with you?’
‘. . . ’
‘Yeah?’
‘. . . ’
‘Maybe it is.’
More silence as he listened.
He looked across at Hortense. ‘There was a protest, you said?’
She nodded.
‘All right, I’ll ask her.’
‘You’re escorting the Leto Bundle?’
‘Yes,’ said Hortense, with a funny kick inside, of pride and of apprehension. ‘People do seem to be calling it that.’
‘I’ll see if I can find out more,’ said TB. ‘Cheers.’ He switched off and stowed his phone.
PART ONE
Lycania
(‘The Letoniast Version’)
1
A Grainy Blue Egg
[G: Skipwith 673.1841: Misc. Mss. G. Fr. 17, papyrus, c. 325–350 CE, translation in the hand of Hereward Meeks, keeper of Near Eastern Antiquities, 1858–76.]
Leto licked the girl’s head, working with her tongue at the flakes of albumen on the scalp, where Phoebe’s scant hair, so fine it seemed gossamer, was wadded together. The savour was whey-like, saline, and came at her taste buds in starbursts, as strong as sherbet, and as surprising, so much more powerful than the tiny forms of her twin babies. She swallowed, but her throat was dry; it was difficult to make the saliva flow. Here and there, her tongue discovered a speck of shell, and she crunched it, lightly, hoping the calcium might replenish her sapped forces a little. The twins had been entwined as one and hidden inside her; now there they were, two of them, miraculously entities, separate, different from one another, a boy and a girl, lying beside her. She was not prepared for their neediness. Shell and bone, albumen, lymph and milk: could the three of them survive by exchanges of their substance, their fluids, their flesh?
The pelican might peck her own breast till the blood flowed into the open beaks of her young, or so her own wet nurse had told her, voluptuously, when Leto was a little girl and her nurse was dreaming of founding dynasties. Leto had laughed, but inwardly she thought the pelican sacrificed herself to excess and folly – a weakened or dead mother was no good to anyone. Surely there were sounder strategies for survival – the little sea-mouse lifts the thick eyelashes of the whale so that it can see where it is going, and in return is allowed to ride on the whale’s back and share its feeding grounds; the tiny toothpicker fish that swims into the jaws of huge ocean predators and cleans their triple rows of teeth, feeds on parasites swarmi
ng in the host’s gums and so staves off rottenness and toothache for its host, so the shark or stingray or whatever realises where its best interests lie and does not snap, but lets the small fry prosper. This was how she would adapt, how she would struggle and survive.
When Leto was flying from her lover, and the god, now man, now dove, now fish, now hawk, was pursuing her, they had skimmed and swooped over the surface of the water together in their long, hard duel, and it was when his strong wings had beaten to enfold her and his extended neck had gripped her and his soft silken breast had pressed her to the ground under him that she had opened to him; and conceived. Her children were born of saltwater, of marshland and reedbeds and the tang of the mist hanging in the fringed river where it ran into the sea. Given their origins, they could have taken on the scales and fins of fish, or the claws of raptors; she was glad that they looked like babies and their peculiar hatching could be concealed. Who would know that her twin children had no navels? That no bud of flesh peeped stickily from the infants’ taut, chestnut-smooth, domed tummies? That there had been no umbilical cord for her hatchlings?
When she had made a small improvement to the girl’s head, she turned to the boy, to loosen the rime on his narrower head, and longer, even more fragile and lighter limbs. She worked her teeth and tongue to make saliva, and succeeded in bringing some spittle to her swollen lips. He had a kink at the apex of his left ear where he’d been bunched up against something inside her; both babies had three crowns on their scalps as if their skulls had been doodled on by a creator dreaming of shells: the usual central whorl, another at the peak of the forehead, and another behind the ear, the left again on the boy’s head, the right on the girl’s.
The babies’ salty natal flesh might give her meagre nourishment but could not quench her, only exacerbate her thirst. Yet the sight, the feel, the smell of the twins made something inside her leap brokenly, the slow legato of her normal breathing had been jolted into a wild rhythm, and she was whirling to it.
Where was she? Under the bent scant tree which, of all the spirits on earth, had agreed to give her shelter, on the stones that had answered her implorations, in a parched wilderness that had accepted her when she begged for an end to her flight; condemned every one to barrenness, they had defied the goddess’s vengeance. ‘What can your enemy do to me?’ asked the tree. ‘I’ve not fruited since the day the seed that bore me caught in the cracks between the stones.’
The Leto Bundle Page 1