The Chronicle of Barnabas document broke off, and Meeks’s translations passed on to another manuscript, ‘written’, he noted, ‘by a nun of the Convent of the Holy Swaddling Bands at the Hospital in Cadenas. ?c. 1200 that is only seven years after the putative date of Leto’s martyrdom, possibly as part of a Vita of Leto the Well-Beloved, for submission to the Petitio in causam sanctitatis Laetitiae, the proceedings of her canonisation.’
[Ms. Lat. 80]
. . . we survived, we of the faithful Remnant of Enoch, and we survived in grace and dignity, then; the Hospitallers remaining in the building that abuts us still gave us what support they could afford, though when a certain Doris, who had been Laetitia’s haughty nursemaid in the Keep, was able to bribe and wheedle her way through the barriers to visit her former charge, she insisted I pen letters to the Vice-Procurator about the continued exile she and Laetitia suffered from the Keep. I took down her dictation, though I was very doubtful of success.
‘Your Excellency!’ she cried. ‘Think of the reputation of Cadenas! We are nothing but poor little women, without strength or influence, but you in your wisdom and justice are known to the whole world.
‘There is a taint in the blood of your dominion which risks envenoming the whole . . . You cannot condone corruption and injustice. Please find it in your noble heart to reward the community of the Convent of the Holy Swaddling Bands, and rescue us from the straits in which we are foundering.’
There was no answer, and indeed, we were never sure that the long laboured over letters themselves were ever delivered, as the correct stamps required to pass the gates had become difficult to identify for they changed from day to day according to the vicissitudes of power.
Laetitia joined a group of nine girls of different ages; each of these stray lambs had arrived at various times in the last decade when the Procurator Cunmar ruled in Cadenas. Our girls wore plain straight pale blue pinafores over a paler blue, checked undershift which they washed twice a week; the same gingham cloth covered their heads.
I once caught a glimpse of Agatha, who was Laetitia’s neighbour in the room where they slept during the cooler months, twisting the cloth over itself to form a higher turban and bending to try and see the effect in the reflection in Laetitia’s eyes. We were strict with them; they had to tie the cloths tightly at the nape of their necks at the back, covering all of their hair and the tops of their ears, flat to the skull; to Laetitia, it made them look sombre as the harbour cormorants, sleek and wet from fishing. But she also told me that she enjoyed the visits of our, ‘Red’ bishop (by contrast to the Lazuli prelates, who are always dressed in black), for when he came to say Mass for us, our abbess Cicely crowned herself and us in his honour with tall purple velvet turret-like wimples, while our beloved orphans were issued starched white veils, in which the folds from the linen press showed like the chequered shadow of the Keep’s precious leaded window panes.
When the nights became cold, as happens in our desert climate, they were issued woollen hose; in the winter we issued them with cuffs which protected the long-sleeved versions of their usual dress, tucked in when they were doing the cleaning and dishwashing and laundry and helping in the garden.
[Ms. Lat. Fr. 82]
Child scavengers who picked over the refuse on the wharves at the Sea Gate called regularly at the back door of our Convent; in return for the occasional bowl of meal, or for a sprig of grapes from our vines or a couple of tomatoes or a bunch of radishes, produce of the vegetable garden our community kept on every available surface of our huddled buildings’ roofs and balconies, these harbour rats provided us and our young wards with shells; these were scoured and filed until our girls could cut out pearl buttons from them, make tiny polished sequins and round studs. Some were inscribed with blessings, invocations of protection and prayers such as AMDG (Ad maiorem dei gloriam) or OPNVM (Ora pro nobis Virgo Maria) in order to spread the good news of our faith. Our girls then stitched ribbons and trimmings with these ornaments, or used them to spangle collars and ribbons and belts, purses and slippers. We lived by delivering their handiwork to a dealer who had procured a pass which allowed him to trade throughout the citadel.
He was an Ophiri, a pharmacist who could move from household to household, with many fingers in many pies; a young man of high colour in his cheeks and a blurred edge to his large wet irises, given to laughing for no reason, except, it was my opinion, that his trade involved him in delightful (to him) and unexpected intimacies. As indeed it did when, together in the small vestibule by the door, we would examine the sparkling slippers and other fancy goods we three sisters and our little wards in the Convent had completed that month; but I learned to control my feelings in such encounters. I know from the ancient naturalists that blushing is unique to the human creature. Its clear signal of shame arouses male lust: we warned our charges.
The young man was never dissatisfied with our work – we gave him no cause, and he gaily provided us in exchange with the unadorned cloth and cut garments and accessories to ornament, as well as the thread we needed to sew on the buttons and beads; he occasionally introduced novelties among the patterns: garments for dowry chests which needed some further, mother-of-pearl detailing. He also handed us a purse with a little Ophiri money with which we could buy what we could not make ourselves, or grow in that season . . .
[Ms. Lat. Fr. 83]
On the anniversaries of our foundlings’ arrival in our care, Abbess Cecily would tell the child her own personal history, as far as it was known, while the other girls rasped the shells with sandpaper, or stitched; then there would be honey cakes with curd cheese for a treat, and each of our charges would give the child something to celebrate her new year: a feather, a song, a picture she had drawn, a packet of seeds gathered from one of the plants for her to grow herself, a paper twist of honey-coated nuts, or, most prized of all, a dried poppyhead threaded to wear like a locket.
The little girls called all three of us nuns Mother; but it was tacitly agreed that ‘Mother Cecily’ was mother superior in more ways than one, and we were poor copies, like a text that has many scribal errors and lacunae; or, like the cotton, as it were, that has been placed in contact with a holy relic to be given to pilgrims, not the living relic itself. Her large eyes with the roan flecks in them fastened with a passionate exalted and holy affection on the children; her voice, when she recited to them the rules of the order, was steady, soothing; it too had bright gold lights in it. She appeared, with her long-legged step and her unusual height more like a migratory bird than a woman: her presence among us gave us a glimpse of grace and power no less memorable than the visit of the flocking storks that made a land bridge in our city and the territory around every Easter. Sometimes, she clasped the children to her; this was not motherly behaviour, however, not in the sense of fleshly connection and even possession intended by the general. Laetitia herself understood the abbess’s love: she told me that in these embraces she felt her body bending, becoming that instrument of God’s will that only Mother Cecily knew how to handle to achieve the purpose for which God had first formed it. It was she who had renamed the child, giving her the name meaning joy, to celebrate her belonging to our community and our faith . . .
12
Kim to Hortense; Hortense to Kim
Subject: Skipwith 673
Date: Wed, 10 June 199– 19:37:23 +0100
From: Hortense Fernly
To: kim.mcquy
Kim, You’re definitely confusing things by taking Leto and Laetitia to be somehow connected. The Cadenas chronicles were just thrown into the tomb by chance – they’ve got nothing to do with it. Don’t become one of those conspiracy theorists who see arcane patterns where only random chaos rules. [She deleted this and wrote instead:]
Of course you realise that none of what we looked at has anything to do with the Leto of the frogs episode. You’ll be saying next that gods and goddesses are back among us. Neo-paganisml The orig
inal Leto was a Titan in classical Greek mythology a religion that doesn’t even have any followers any more. Which makes it an admirably rare creature, in fact.
The web’s good on mythology – as I’m sure you know! Put in Leto on MissMarple or Etherprobe or any one of the search engines and her CV comes up: the mother of Apollo and Artemis, patron of mothers and childbirth, the goddess who struck down Niobe and her children after Niobe rashly boasted of their beauty. Aka Latona. Related to Leda in some complicated way. But as for the twelfth century material, I suppose you could just about make out a case that the classical story influenced it . . .
[Hortense Fernly stopped. Really I am going along with him far too much. Why?
Because I’m bored?]
I’ll be coming into the Archives tomorrow afternoon, but it’ll have to be brief.
Yours, Hetty
Subject: Leto Bundle
Date: Wed, 10 June 199- 20:16:37 +0100
From: kim.mcquy
To: Hortense Fernly
Hello Hetty it has everything to do with Leto she’s the same person then now forever that’s the whole point she’s unreal so she’s hyperreal so she’s always live always alive see you tomorrow and we’ll TALK cheers kim
Subject: Skipwith 673
Date: Wed, 10 June 199– 21:37:49 +0100
From: Hortense Fernly
To: kim.mcquy
Kim, I know Buddhism is fashionable especially among health food shoppers. [She struck this. Instead she wrote:] Are you saying she came back under another form? I mean, are you talking metempsychosis?
[She didn’t send this e-mail. She would tell him this, and more, later.]
PART THREE
The Keep, Cadenas-la-Jolie
(The ‘Cunmar Romance’)
1
A Hostage in the Outpost
‘These leaves are the most precious manuscripts from the Skipwith deposit, so we can’t allow you to handle them yourself,’ said the librarian. ‘But Dr Fernly wanted you to have a glimpse of their splendour.’ She sounded puzzled.
Kim was in an insomniac’s state of dazed wakefulness, words and images disordered in his mind and clamouring for attention. He’d been to the courtyard café, but the latte he’d ordered was probably a mistake, however much it masqueraded as a bedtime toddy.
The librarian placed the grey acid-free box she was carrying on a different desk from Kim’s, one nearer her own presiding position in the room. She handed him some white cotton gloves, and herself put on a pair before opening the box. Between leaves of tissue, which she lifted gently to the side, Kim saw a vellum sheet, puckered and fleshy, covered in a pale grey-brown script in serried files, so regular and harmonious, that, looking down on it, Kim could hear sounding in his inner ear the rhythmic chant that pulses under high naves from dark choirstalls. Here and there, like the punctuating high note of the cantor, an ornamental gilded capital letter, picked out in the colour of damsons, swelled out of the page.
The librarian picked up the catalogue note in the box and read out: “‘Eleven folio pages, written around 1350, on parchment, in the miniature uncials most familiar from the scriptoria of the Lazuli court, and in a highly concentrated cuttlefish ink enriched with purple ornaments and gold leaf. This fragment constitutes one of the greatest treasures in the bundle of miscellaneous manuscripts deposited by Sir Giles Skipwith.’”
‘These are Meeks’s notes,’ she added, and gave him the sheet. Kim read, ‘Since Fol.i r bears the words “Of the Deeds of Cunmar, Vice-Procur . . .” I have called this manuscript the “Cunmar Romance”.’
The librarian’s voice dropped as she read on from the catalogue note, ‘“The writer reveals his official allegiance to the Lazuli, but cannot but fail to conceal his fascination and admiration for the Ophiri administrator of Cadenas, known (to his enemies) as ‘Cunmar the Terrible’, a soldier of fortune from the north shore, who rose to broker power in the contested borderlands of the Ophiri-Lazuli empires.” And so on and so forth. Strife. Mayhem. History.’
‘Yes,’ said Kim, smiling down at the parchments.
‘Let me relate now the pride of Cunmar the Terrible, and the cause of his fall,’ began the document that now lay before Kim, the vellum originals having been repacked in their tissue nest and swiftly removed to safekeeping.
This translation was freshly typed: Hortense Fernly’s initials, dated recently, appeared in the reference number under the heading. She had drafted this copy, he realised; he would be able to ask her about it, when she came to find him.
[Skipwith Add. Mss.: G. Fr. 62]
. . . Little does it become an old man to feel the heat and passion of a youth. But God is infinitely mysterious in His wisdom. The child Leto of the Remnant, called by the Enochites Laetitia Deodata, was the humble tool of divine providence in the tyrant’s fate, as I shall tell. Through the sins of Cunmar, He brought about his ruin and our salvation.
Ser Matteo, father of Leto, a trader of Tirzahner origin, longtime in the employ of Enochite merchant adventurers on our seas, promised to bring Cunmar a great wonder, a weapon of defence that had not been seen since the time of Archimedes, inventor of many wonders, but not of this one.
Cunmar was intrigued; he put aside his customary caution, for he valued rare and curious treasures. He urged Ser Matteo to continue, and the merchant began to speak of a certain kind of spider: ‘She’s tiny, no bigger than a midge over a standing pool in the close evenings that late summer brings in my country. You would never notice her, if it weren’t for her handiwork, to use a figure of speech, her webs. Brush one aside and the threads stick to your fingers; when you try to pick them off, they won’t break, but hold like tempered steel. This silk has healing properties: place a poultice made of it on a wound, and that wound will close. Continue to apply it, and the scar will fade and vanish. Nothing we know, none of our books or our wise men’s learning, can give an account of the power of this orbweaver’s web. It was perhaps one of God’s amusements – to make such a paltry creature as a spider a wonderworker of such strength and cunning. Think of it, Lord Cunmar! If you can possess this skill, there’ll be no more plaiting of straw that rots in winter and grows dry and friable in summer! No more siege gear raised by ropes that soon fray! Think of the weight of a fly that a spider traps in full flight! Think of the weight of that projectile, stopped dead by the thinnest threads of the web!’
Cunmar pondered this, and nodded.
‘If you dangle one of these spiders in the air,’ Ser Matteo went on, ‘it will run a line down to the nearest surface and then, if you lift the creature up again, it will continue to spin. You can wind the thread on a spool for as long as the spider lives – these spinners will yield a hundred times their weight in silken fibre – and these insects are plentiful in our woods and in our houses in the autumn. You need only breed them for use.
‘Their thread is far easier to harvest than silk – and think of the riches silk has brought. Those worms are the spider’s industrious kin; this silk is another, great natural wonder with as many uses as gold, and as imperishable!’
The merchant understood that he could flatter the Procurator’s vanity: ‘Consider the great kings and warriors who were not afraid to search for nature’s secrets: Ulysses who was determined to hear the sirens singing, though no man had ever survived the experience, and Hercules who travelled to the farthest west to pick the golden apples that grow there. Think of the great Khan whom Ser Marco Polo served as I serve you. Not to speak of the great Alexander . . .’ Now this was the truest stroke the trader could have struck with Cunmar the Terrible, for the Procurator of Cadenas in his folly fancied himself a new Alexander, in spite of the littleness of his dominion and the baseness of his birth. ‘Alexander! His curiosity about natural wonders inspired him to harness an eagle and fly up into the skies and drive fishes to take him to the bottom of the sea: follow his lead, Cunmar, and pluck
the mystery of the spider in her lair!
‘With the right skills you can apply her thread to many uses – and you Ophiri do not persecute your alchemists as servants of the devil, as we do. You can work with the silk, learn its secrets, copy it.’
‘Ah,’ sighed Cunmar. ‘Your great Satan is the ape of God and he proceeds by copying – falsely.’
‘Indeed so,’ said Ser Matteo. ‘Which is why I shall bring you a nest of such spiders as you have never seen and you will milk them of their silk as we pull at the udders of milchcows and then . . .’
‘We shall make nets that cannot be broken; we shall rig our ships with invisible lines; we shall harpoon our enemies and reel them in; we shall raise siege engines on gossamer—’ Cunmar was laughing, then he asked, ‘But you, do you not consider yourself a traitor to your creed and to your people?’
Ser Matteo shook his head. ‘The sea-roads are my native soil (if I may mix up nature’s elements). My people are traders, and we are in the habit of crossing borders. As for my creed . . . I trust in the mercy of God to all sinners.’
He was smiling as he said this, and Cunmar embraced him, and instructed that his ship be loaded with our blue glassware, our metalwork – chased silver vessels and knives in damascened sheaths.
In his rashness, Cunmar the Terrible at that time also accepted the child Leto as a pledge of their pact.
[Skipwith Add. Mss.: G. Fr. 63]
. . . as a young apprentice, working in a foundry in his native Deuteropolis, on the northern littoral of Our Sea, a spark had pierced Cunmar’s left eye; there was excruciating pain, and for ten days he wore a bandage and did not know if he had partly lost his sight. When it was lifted, he could see as well as before, but the iris had burned, and was now half the eerie aquatic green of some desert peoples, half a basalt blackness, and it no longer retracted. With this large, open pupil ringed by its pale halo, he resembled one of the desert creatures who prefer to hunt by night, shunning even the illumination of the moon.
The Leto Bundle Page 14