The Leto Bundle

by Marina Warner

  Cunmar first fought with the Ophiri raiders who increasingly harassed our Lazuli merchants’ ships, and he rose as Ophiri influence spread. Settlements like Cadenas came under their new mastery: this was when our co-religionists at the holy fount were stripped of their authority over that sanctuary. In the Turquoise Quarter, a few remained: the Enochite Remnant who, as God willed it, were to become our enemies in the bitter struggles to control the outpost. Cunmar continued to serve the distant metropole, and when the farflung garrisons of our empire were reduced, soldiers of no breeding or connection, like Cunmar, were advanced.

  Nearly half a century of battle since had left other marks: an upturned chevron on his shin, milky against his skin, where he had caught his leg on a nail in the forge where he was apprenticed; a star-shaped hollow in his thigh where he had been struck by a flail wielded by a footsoldier, whose bravery at that vantage had inspired Cunmar to spare him, even while the spikes of the caltrop ate into his flesh. He was missing a kneecap from his left leg, the result of a fall during his third campaign. Though able to ride again, another unseating gave him trouble lifting his right arm higher than level with his shoulder. His clothes had been adapted; his breastplate had been remade in leather so that it weighed less (at the cost of giving him less protection), and the tunics he wore over it were looser over his back and across around the chest, which softened his military carriage and enhanced other qualities of his appearance: the musing irony in the corners of his mouth belied the soldier’s committed partisanship. But riding still kept his bearing tall and his diaphragm muscles tight over the growing heaviness of his belly and torso. His body was a chronicle; many women, and many boys (he knew the ways of the cities of the plain) had put their fingers to his wounds and told them off, one by one, learning the chapters.

  [Skipwith Add. Mss.: G. Fr. 64]

  The nest of spiders, the promised treasure that Ser Matteo had guaranteed against his daughter, did not arrive; nor were there signs of diminished raids on shipping on our sea roads. Cadenas began murmuring against Cunmar; secret reports were despatched to the Ophiri capital, citing instances of his lawlessness, his misjudgements and his profligacy. His alliance with the foreign merchant was only one false step of many the Procurator had begun to take in these last years of his power.

  Cunmar had held sway over the outpost for sixteen years, since the Year of Our Lord 1165 when the Ophiri invested Cadenas. He despatched punctually, every quarter day, the metropole’s dues and revenues, recounting in equable tones the events of the past three months, and adding blandishments with the fluency for which he was well known. After the first five years of his governance, no further visitations arrived to inspect the citadel: severe troubles on the sprawling Ophiris eastern border as well as continued strife with our Lazuli empire absorbed much of the central government’s attention. So Cunmar began to run the citadel as he pleased. After a long career in arms, he began to exercise power through traffic in goods – in so doing, he flouted many of our customs, trespassing against ancient and prescribed differences and degrees between peoples and worship and culture and morals, and inviting foreigners to tread on grounds forbidden them before. Cunmar overlooked pollution where others know it to lie. It is when a man thinks he is greater than the law, above the requirements of faith, alone and pre-eminent among humankind that woe becomes his lot. Presumption is a sin, against God and man: the Procurator of Cadenas also committed crimes against history, against revered tradition.

  The Procurator married, in order to pursue his diplomatic ends, Porphyria, a woman of our faith, who was five years older than him, and the widow of the commander Xanthos, from one of our noble families, whom he had taken prisoner in battle. The ransom for her husband’s freedom was promised, again and again, but it was never paid – the Lazuli coffers were drained – and so the captive remained several years in Cunmar’s custody: they played chess together and discussed the meaning of honour and the code of war. It was through the influence of this prisoner that Cunmar extended certain privileges to our people in Cadenas; we were glad of this, but in doing so he disrupted the harmonious distinctions, which kept order in the outpost.

  Then, it came about that a new pact was struck in the metropole, when our beleaguered Lazuli empire asked the Ophiri for help against the Enochite and Tirzahner armies gathering against them in the west. A general amnesty of all prisoners was declared: so the nobleman Xanthos, who had lived in Cunmar’s household for four years, was set free, without ransom, to return to his wife and children. Before they had parted, Xanthos begged Cunmar to care for his wife Porphyria, for his son Chrysaor, and for his other children should anything happen to him.

  So when Xanthos was killed soon after, in the bitter fighting against the Tirzahner rabble, Cunmar married the widow, and brought that highborn Lazuli lady to Cadenas.

  At first, no one murmured aloud against the breach in the rules that she, a Lazuli, shared a bed with Cunmar. But in this marriage as in other matters, the Procurator scandalised the people, and a great hue and cry was raised against him in Cadenas. It reached the ears of the metropole; the repercussions of his errancy brought about the return of the citadel to Lazuli rule, and the restoration of the sacred Fount to our control.

  [Skipwith Add. Mss.: G. Fr. 65]

  . . . rumours began that a ship flying the flag of Ser Matteo’s company had been sighted. If, as it seemed, Ser Matteo’s trade was seaworthy once again, then Cunmar was forsworn, since he had promised to keep Leto by his side as a daughter. He recalled the peevish letters that reached him from the Convent and knew, to his relief, that she was alive. Her loss of rank could be quickly remedied with a change of clothes and a move back to the court. He had also promised to care for her. He suffered a twinge over this, not for reasons of conscience, but for that sense of occasion, which had scarcely ever failed his diplomacy.

  So he summoned her from the Convent of the Holy Swaddling Bands.

  When Cunmar the Terrible saw the young woman Leto had become, in her gingham pinafore, with her scarf tight over her head, and her wooden box of tokens in her arms, she stirred that quickfire pity that in him lay close to disdain: how could a girl of her age be allowed to be so ugly? He went up to her and looked in her face. She bit her lip, it did not redden; she looked bloodless. She had been a solemn little girl who had sometimes cooed like a dove when he dandled her; or squealed when she twisted from him and he, in play, gnashed his teeth and crushed her to his chest.

  This young woman struck no notes of recognition in him.

  He told Doris to take off the scarf.

  ‘I should think so. At last!’ said Doris, with enthusiasm. To her great satisfaction, she too had been summoned back in attendance from exile in the Turquoise Quarter. ‘It’s been far too long that she’s been cooped up with the nuns and those poor orphans. She’s made of quite different stuff. If you give my young lady the use of some clothes and unguents, lotions and perfumes, if you allow her to go to the women’s baths – you’ll see, I’ll make sure she won’t disgrace a palace.’

  Cunmar paused, then nodded.

  Doris could not help letting out a till, so delighted was she with this fulfilment of her ambitions.

  Cunmar said, ‘Let’s not exaggerate. This is not a palace; but a military outpost. Still, I expect an improvement.’

  For Leto, there was to be no more polishing and engraving and punching of buttons or sewing of fancy goods, no more stealthy bulletins whispered up the convent walls, no more rationed access to her mementoes; she wore her earrings every day, and silver sandals were being beaten out to fit her again. Sometimes Cunmar ordered her to join him; he would scoop her up on to the pommel of his saddle and take her for a canter in the desert; he smelled of smoke and spices from the black bags of the pharmacists he favoured and his silvered, tight-curled beard and hair were combed out with potions; he would ride out with her into the sherbet hills and showed her the ruined hulks of desert outposts that, unlike Cadenas, had been abandoned. In this
way, her life of iniquity began and with it, the destruction of Cunmar.

  2

  Kim to Hortense, twice

  Subject: Leto Bundle

  Date: Fri, 12 June 199– 21:16:37 +0100

  From: kim.mcquy

  To: Hortense Fernly

  Hetty! You only stayed ten minutes why? When we’re finding out so much about the bundle – when leto’s life is unfolding now for us at last – but thanks for your help anyway

  your presence radiates makes windows open doors yield – I mean it kim

  Subject: Leto Bundle

  Date: Fri, 12 June 199– 22:07:12 +0100

  From: kim.mcquy

  To: Hortense Fernly

  Hetty ive been thinking because you seemed kind of sad about things yesterday and so rushed but it’s important we talk it’s not that leto comes back in another shape as . . . a wolf or a goose or a salmon or a cuttlefish or whatever . . . the way Buddhists believe this is

  different *she* is different she’s always in time present cutting across ours that’s always going by so she’s of all time of our time or put it another way she’s a story and stories have a life and a time all of their own when you read think how real the characters

  are miranda or frankenstein’s monster hamlet his mother too his father even and he’s a ghost! I could go on peter pan alice now even harry potter lara croft barney the dinosaur think of the things in your head the pictures you make when you’re dreaming or thinking or just imagining things an afterimage in my head doesn’t need to be outside my body to be real dreamers experience unreality intensely witchhunters really thought the devil copulated with women and the women agreed because in the night they had indeed known something and it didn’t have to be there in a physical sense these are human realities we can we all have experiences every day that dismantle the ordinary ways we know whether something or someone is real or true or *there* and these conditions are intensifying . . . this is the new air we breathe and I’m enjoying it my lungs are full of it I like figments they keep me company all the time when I’m alone I see you in my thoughts when you’re not there you’re real to me I like thinking about you I like talking to you like this you light me up even when you’re not there but you are in some real deep way and I we have to make do with that cheers kim

  [And Hetty finds herself thinking, against her better judgement, Does he mean me? Or is this the way he talks to everybody?]

  3

  ‘Of the Great Subterfuge of Cunmar the Terrible’

  [Skipwith Add. Mss.: G. Fr. 68]

  ‘Now comes the time for me to relate Cunmar’s most famous deed, for which he earned that sometime sobriquet, The Terrible. It thrilled all who heard it told, including Leto, for girls on the verge of womanhood can be kindled by tales of cruelty and skill and valour.’ Kim skimmed on: here was the shape-shifting god of the classical past he’d heard Hortense describe, changed again, rising up alongside Leto from her tomb and commanding him to listen. In the silence of the reading room, he found himself wanting to shout: the man compelled him to read, against his will. He wanted to destroy him; he wanted to shake Leto into awareness, prevent the plot unfolding. That was what he had to do: put her story out, as widely as he could. So that it wouldn’t happen again. He believed it, he was sure he could make his plan work. He was there to make a difference to the old story, the one that happens every time.

  . . . The maxim of the fox, ‘Know your enemy’, Cunmar learned, gradually, in his years of soldiering for the Ophiri empire; he began to turn observations he had made of his enemies’ ways against them to forward his own ends.

  He delighted in travestying the holy tenets of the faith, though he reserved the worst of his scorn for our Enochite brethren: ‘They believe,’ he would say of men of our faith, ‘that the spirit is like a shadow, bloodless, insubstantial; their ghosts have no bodies, they glide through closed doors, they walk on fleshless feet, they touch you with bloodless hands. There is no colour in their other worlds: their heaven is a blaze of light, their hell all murk and darkness. Both are filled with bodies that look like bodies but do not bleed or breathe or eat or drink. You need only look at the pictures and statues they put up in their churches to understand this. By contrast, after we quit this world, the earth is perfected in our paradise – and the men and women in it: warm and vigorous and full-throated. Every rose is essence of rose in every aspect of roseness, fragrant and blooming and dewy with the freshness of the morning and, in its singularity of hue, the full expression of that hue’s depth and extent.’ In this Cunmar at least spoke true: their abominable beliefs grant eternity to their lusts.

  ‘They love and worship the flesh and the blood of dead men – and sometimes women’s as well. They buy and sell parts of their saints’ bodies as relics, because these are still flesh, still coloured, not in any thing ghostly.

  ‘They fear that the shadows we cast in the sunshine are messengers from this other world, where all colours, and bodies and flesh and blood dissolve and become wraiths. For them, shadows exercise influence over the bodies they possess, over the persons to whom they stick.’

  And he boasted, ‘This was their folly, that I used against them. I entered the minds of my enemy, and prised their defences open. I chose to haunt them – to raise living ghosts before them.’

  The great siege of 1165 was in its fourth weary month: the Enochites had sealed the harbour of Cadenas and were thus preventing supplies reaching the outpost from the sea, while the land approaches were cut off from the south by their cavalry encampment. In the Rose Quarter, the tanners were marking up the price of hooves for soup from the horses and beasts of burden fallen in the fighting – the flesh was reserved for the army. The Pearl Well was under assault from slaves hacking into the rock to reach the spring; their actions fouled it. Desperation was growing inside the city, and against us, especially, the few remaining Lazuli in the outpost, since we were wrongly suspected by many Ophiri of secret loyalty and even collusion with the besiegers. Cunmar said (and alas, he did not lie): ‘Although they worship the same god, their conflicts are deeper and more bitter than our differences with them: the closer sects are to one another, the more terrible their hatred – that is the way it is, as we know from ourselves, let’s admit it.’

  But some elements were not persuaded. There followed riot and lynchings in the Turquoise Quarter: a young Lazuli nobleman was dragged out of his house and accused of spying for the Enochite army outside the walls; two of our brothers were caught in the doorway of their church: they were suspected of betraying some method of access to the Pearl Well. They too were beaten to death by the crowd.

  Cunmar studied the situation: the garrison was weak from lack of food, the besiegers still had the season’s coolness on their side for another six weeks at least. None of the promised reinforcements had arrived from the metropole and its extensive allies, either by sea or land.

  He decided, he told Leto, that since the way of the lion was failing, the besieged must adopt the way of the fox:

  ‘I gave the orders: the battered bodies of the two monks [Basileos and Gregorios of blessed memory] and of the young nobleman, to be delivered to the Rose Quarter: there, the tanners to behead them and flay their bodies carefully, preparing them as those leatherworkers prepare a hide; the head was to be rendered whole and restored to their likeness in life as accurately as possible.

  ‘Meanwhile I sent a messenger out to the camp of the besiegers under a flag of truce. I offered the commander an exchange: we would hand over these recent victims for honourable burial, and post the threat of capital reprisals against any more killings of this kind in return for a lifting of the sea blockade.

  ‘But Lord Laurent, who was in command, then entertained no fellow feelings for any Lazuli, as I well knew: they had not joined forces with his men in this phase of the long war.

  ‘He told the messenger, “God knows
your cruel savagery already and will mete out to you divine justice. He will deal for all eternity with those who die at your hands, according to their deeds. Fighting for His true faith, I can offer you nothing on this earth except my undying and implacable enmity.”

  ‘With these haughty words, the Enochite lord retired into his tent and dismissed our ambassador.

  ‘So when the messenger returned, I had the three heads impaled on stakes; the two monks’ were posted on the Sea Gate of Cadenas, the noble youth’s over the arch at the eastern entrance, facing the camp of the Enochites. For two days and a night the victims were displayed in their dishonour. But on the second night,’ and here Cunmar lowered his voice to lean into Leto’s ear, ‘I directed that simulacra be made to resemble the dead men’s heads. They were compacted of straw and clay and wax, and were secretly substituted. The decaying trophies were then joined again to their carcasses. The process of flensing and curing rendered the victims’ skins waxen and translucent, and I specified that they be carefully stitched together, that every rent of the assaults upon them be closed and sealed, every wound sutured, so that like the pig’s bladders you children use in play and the jester bounces on his target’s heads, they could be inflated.’

  When he described this to Leto, she huddled closer to him, in fear of the spectres he had made. Thus does a seducer soothe the terrors he himself has conjured.

  ‘Towards the end of the second night,’ he went on, ‘while the counterfeit heads were still in place on the walls, I had the grisly trophies raised on lances, the head fastened at the point, the feet fastened to the haft. I then mounted my light-footed mare, and ordered a company of horsemen to follow. We were to raid the Enochite camp for much needed supplies, I told them.’