‘Geoffrey, old boy, it’s the key to the attitudes of the past. Nobody before – oh, when was it? – the fifteenth century, Venetian glass – knew what their faces looked like. Except in glimpses in metal or ponds. She’s just experienced Narcissus’ primal discovery – except that, ha, I don’t think she fell in love with what she saw.’
The captain gave Skipwith a weary look. But Skipwith continued to rejoice: ‘She’s a perfect subject of study: she’s canny, that No one. And she comes from somewhere – we don’t yet know where – where no images of the self have adulterated her relation to the world of phenomena. She’s been living like an animal with her children like pups – on the run from something, in the ruins of the necropolis. I’ve managed to establish that much by questioning her. She’s not much older than fifteen, I reckon. I want to observe her very carefully. She holds all kinds of clues. A rare chance. Wonderful priceless raw material – a treasure above rubies!’
Captain Winwalloe saw Strugwell hovering at the cabin entrance – and waved him away, impatiently.
Skipwith continued, exultant, his dish of brown hash hardly touched, but his glass emptying rapidly. ‘We may’ve traced and identified more lost ancient cities than any of our competitors, and brought back treasures doomed to fall into utter ruin, but I feel almost more delighted with this living fossil of ancient intelligence than I am with all our discoveries in stone!’
‘You mean that she’s a savage,’ said the captain.
‘Come now, old chap.’
‘And you put a high value on such things, where others don’t.’
‘Geoffrey, do put aside this old seadog curmudgeonliness. You’re an enlightened man, you don’t have to entertain common prejudices. You see a young woman, some sort of foul siren with smelly feet, as a risk to our voyage and our whole enterprise – but I – I see a key to a puzzle, the greatest puzzle – the human mind.’
Winwalloe muttered, ‘You’re a fantastic dreamer, Giles.’
‘That is exactly what I’m not, Geoffrey! I’m an explorer, a scientist – I look for the natural, physical laws that govern all the stuff and nonsense carried in our heavy baggage of beliefs. I want to explain, not accept all unknowingly. Saint Thomas is my patron saint: Thomas the Doubter. He had to stick his fingers in Christ’s wound before he agreed to the truth of the resurrection. I’m convinced there’s a perfectly reasonable explanation for almost every occurrence, however preternatural or supernatural it might appear. But on account of our ignorance and idleness, we don’t know how to explain it – not yet. For example, I’m beginning to realise that most people are entirely mistaken about mermaids.’
‘They’re walruses,’ said Winwalloe.
‘No, no, my dear fellow! Anyway that simple-minded school believes they’re manatees – even worse. Sea cows! Aquatic mammoths. Even uglier and fatter.’
The captain pulled open the drawer of the table and put out two packs of cards.
‘How about a game, what?’ He wanted to stop Skipwith talking.
Skipwith accepted a pack without answering and began shuffling. ‘A shilling a point? What d’ye say?’
The captain sighed. His debts to Giles over the piquet they’d been playing were mounting.
‘I’ll offer you a deal, Geoffrey. Give up your authority over our stowaway and invest it in me. I’ll cancel your debts for it. If I recall rightly, they’re standing at 34 guineas, 5s. and 6d., I’m afraid.’
‘I’m not a slaver.’
‘I’m not proposing to buy her. Consider her salvage. Wouldn’t you be able to assign me your interests in salvage in return for – your losses?’
The captain didn’t reply.
‘Come on, what d’ye say to it?’ Skipwith pushed the pack over the table. While Winwalloe cut for the major hand, lost, and began paying out the cards, first five together, then three, then one, with a stack of eight left in the middle, Giles continued, ‘I need her. For my work. I’m not going to say anything more now than this: I just realised that sirens aren’t admiring themselves, they’re mirroring the world and other people in the world. They lure you and enthral you by showing you your own face in their mirror – this must be what Homer meant when he said they’d knowledge of the future and were fatal to men. Narcissus wasn’t in love with his own image – he thought it was someone else – that’s why he became besotted.’
The captain poured himself some port and pushed the decanter over to Skipwith.
‘You’ve the major hand, Giles,’ he reminded him.
‘Are we agreed, then? – Before you look at your hand!’
Winwalloe nodded. ‘But you will have to explain matters, when we reach port.’
Skipwith was looking at his cards; he reordered them, pulled three and changed them for three in the pile on the table.
Winwalloe threw five and scooped up the remaining five cards on the table to replace them.
Skipwith’s ardour was brightly blazing and was not to be damped. He would start his enquiry now, on the Shearwater, he’d find out the depths of the stowaway’s ignorance and misapprehensions, the pattern of her understanding of the world. Then, once they reached home, he’d begin her proper education there and, while educating her, make notes on the ways she thought and her feelings and responses and see if a human creature who had no grasp of herself as a face and a body and a being in space could learn to be a lady according to the customs and expectations of modern society. And beyond that – his mother Fidelia would impart the accomplishments required of a young woman; she would spring at the opportunity of moulding the raw material of a wild girl and her cubs, too – they’d live in the fresh air, grow strong and well and ruddy.
He was possessed of his vision: his propitious fate had delivered this wild creature to him with a purpose.
His hand was very strong: he opened the bidding with a quint.
Winwalloe nodded. ‘That’s good.’
‘I also have a tierce. And a septième.’
‘That’s good, too.’ The captain was leaning into the lamp on the table to see his cards better, as if by examining them they might change.
‘And fourteen tens.’ (How astute he’d been not to use all five of his possible discards, but to hold on to the three tens, throwing the jack of hearts and the queen of diamonds, hoping for the fourth ten and keeping his length in spades.)
Winwalloe groaned.
‘Come now, as they say, the night is young.’
Skipwith laid down the card for the first trick with an exultant declaration of his opening score.
‘So I lead, my dear captain, with sixty-eight in my hand . . . Sixty-nine . . .’ He began paying out his long suit in spades. ‘Ninety,’ he said, ‘with an unbroken run, as you know, old boy, we move ahead by leaps and bounds.’
Winwalloe’s fingers hovered miserably over his hand, trying to pick the right discard.
‘Ninety-one . . . Ninety-two, ninety-three, ninety-four,’ continued Skipwith, implacably. ‘Ninety-five.’
Now, with his spades out, he had to use his memory. He’d have to lose the king of hearts that he’d unfortunately picked up from the table to the ace in Winwalloe’s hand, but he’d play it last. That left him exposed to his opponent’s diamonds, including the ace-king, so he mustn’t allow Winwalloe to lead, though he might be able to use his singleton ten of diamonds to capture the king, and bring his ace of diamonds down in the last trick.
He saw a way, and led the ten of clubs: ‘Ninety-six.’
Winwalloe slowly fished out his king, laid it on the trick, muttered as he took it, ‘One’. He looked wretched, as if Skipwith’s playing would make the card disappear. Even if his luck changed, this single round had augmented his losses by an amount that seemed irrecuperable.
On the afternoon of the third day after their discovery, when Leto came up the companionway from the cabin, the eyes of the whole crew were on her and Skipwith. Strugwell was watching from his post by the chicken coop, where he took out his fury on this turn of eve
nts by cursing the hens for not laying more, kicking at the wire till they fluttered and squawked in panic. Behind his eyes, he could see that woman writhing and squealing in the cabin; kissing and swallowing as that fop stuck himself into her, shouting no doubt. They were spreading a malignancy through the boat; turning it to a floating stew when such things should happen on land, down dark alleys in cities that could be left securely behind. Carrying the infection with them: Strugwell’s whole being churned at the thought of such dissipation on board and he picked out a chicken whose neck feathers had been pecked out, leaving the scrawny mottled skin exposed, and twisted the bald place till she stopped squawking.
The children stirred various emotions, by contrast; on the afternoon of the second day, for alliances and enmities moved fast in the closed world of the ship, they had almost become mascots; the second mate had stopped carping at Teal for neglecting his usual post and duties, and first showed the boy, Phoebus, and then Phoebe, when she wanted to be included, how to pull at the goat’s udders. They were apt learners, curious as kittens.
‘What kind of a name is that?’ asked Teal when Phoebus told him.
Phoebus pointed to the sun, with a solemn gesture, then to himself; this was followed by a quick grin. So the crew started teasing the child, calling him, with not a little touch of sarcasm at first, Little Sunshine, and Sonny Boy, until the nicknames grew shorter and shorter and the note of mockery faded. As for Phoebe, she was already called Bebe by her brother, and this stuck.
The captain no longer gave the order that the twins should be shut back up again in the crate, and even smiled at their antics as they scrapped and tumbled together in the shade under the longboat which they had demarcated ‘Home’. As the captain looked on, misgivings at this softening of naval discipline shadowed his eyes even while he held back from protests. For soon, the problem would be over.
When Leto came up that second afternoon, she was holding a second orange Skipwith had given her in her hand, and she ran over to her children and squatted down with them and began peeling it; its sharp sweetness pricked the air.
Teal said, ‘I want some’. Since Leto had been discovered, his lessons with Skipwith had ceased. The boy only came to mind when Skipwith needed him to keep watch on the twins, and he wanted to engage the attention of Leto, who would only comply with his early tests if Teal stood somehow between the children, the cook and the rest of the crew.
Leto plucked off a segment of the orange, and handed it to him.
On this occasion, the crew were watching; oranges weren’t taken on board, or any fruit for that matter. A luxury, useless and expensive, perishing fast, spreading mould to other foodstuffs, taking up room: there were dozens of reasons that Strugwell rejected fruit.
Now the cook caught the whiff of the orange on the air, and sniffed, and he lunged out and snatched the piece from Teal’s hand and dashed it on to the deck and then seized first Phoebus and then Phoebe and pulled what remained of the orange from their grasp. Clutching Teal by the hair and ear, he hauled him away, bouncing him like a stuffed doll along the deck and down the companionway to the galley.
‘No more fun and games for you,’ he roared. ‘This ship isn’t a bloody nursery.’
Leto shrank into the crate, cradling the twins against the sounds of the beating that rose from the galley and were amplified in the hull, resonating out over the calm of the sunny sea.
So two more days passed, on the open sea under the gently waxing moon after nightfall. In that time, they did not see another vessel.
But on the following day, Skipwith noticed markers in the water, where nets had been sunk below the surface by fishermen for collecting in the evening; the occasional gaff-rigged small craft began to appear in the distance.
‘We must be nearing land,’ he said. ‘Why? I thought we were making straight for more friendly waters.’
Winwalloe’s weathered countenance turned pale with determination. ‘I’m in command of this ship, Giles, unless you’ve forgotten. And we cannot proceed another seven hundred miles with this stowaway and her accursed sprogs. She’s an evident danger—’ His eyes met Skipwith’s for an instant, and his reproach was clear. ‘We’re heading for port, for Feltimye. It’s a comparatively civilised place, sees a lot of traffic. We’re putting them off there.
‘She’s caused quite enough trouble – the order of the boat and the men have been disturbed. That lad’s mind hasn’t been on his duties, either. Occupied with keeping those children out of mischief – have you ever seen such climbers? In and out of the tackle and the rigging and the sail store as if this was a playground. I’ve penalised Strugwell for that outburst by docking his pay, but that’s not adding to the warmth and fellow feeling on board . . . And you’re not yourself, Giles. Stop to consider. Have you given a thought to your inventory, your notes, your sketches, the apparatus you need to present to the Admiralty to preserve your finds in the way they doubtless deserve? If I wasn’t a man of good, common sense, I’d say she’d bewitched you.’
‘You can’t mean this. You know I won the girl off you fair and square. I want to take her and her whelps back home, train them up to our ways, and see what happens. She’s a crucial part of the expedition’s discoveries.’
Skipwith’s habitually light manner was failing. The captain did not meet his eyes. ‘Oh in God’s name, don’t, Geoffrey, don’t do this. It’s shameful. It’s ungentlemanly. I never thought I’d be reminding you of your relation to your maker, but in this case, you will be doing something, I swear, that’s wrong in the sight of God. Of your god. Who happens to be hers, in case you’ve forgotten? You can’t just hand her over to the heathen. I’ll denounce your actions in the Admiralty, in the newssheets, in the report on the expedition that I’ll see to the press, up and down St James’s. I won’t allow it.’
Winwalloe was trembling in his attempt to control his indignation. ‘You are threatening me, Sir Giles, when I am doing my duty as the captain of this ship to deliver us and the cargo safely home. Go ahead, make your complaints. I don’t think your interest in this common female criminal will convince many of your lofty ideals.’
‘In that case, I will call in my debt, and you, as a gentleman, are required to honour it.’
The captain jibbed, and made another attempt at asserting his will. ‘You have the most extraordinary notions of value. First these battered old featureless bits of rock and stone, retrieved and shipped at such a cost to man and beast, and now, in broad daylight, even when the port is locked way and the night’s fancies are banished, you want to persist in your folly about a worthless vagrant and her savage brood. I feel, as the commanding officer on board this ship, and as your friend, Giles, that I can’t even entertain the idea.’
‘If that is so, I require you to write me a banker’s draft now, for the full amount, Geoffrey.’
The captain put up his hands. ‘There are many days’ sailing still.’
‘No, there’ll be no more piquet between us. I expect that note, in my hand, today.’
‘You’re cold as steel, Giles. I wouldn’t expect it of an Englishman, of Her Majesty’s guest on this ship.’
‘I could say the same to you, of an officer of your rank, indeed. And it shall be made known, up and down the city, that you do not honour your debts when they’re called in.’
So the bargain was struck, it seemed.
Skipwith, sitting across the table from Leto in his cabin, opened the map and indicated their passage.
‘We’ve another week before we sail through the straits, and up to Parthenopolis, where we’ll take on supplies, water, and so forth. Then depending on the winds, a few more days before we reach the Pillars of Hercules. Once safely through them—’ He paused. ‘We’ll face some wild water, but we’ll survive. We’ll make libations to the old gods for calm conditions,’ he said, laughing. ‘Then we make for the south coast of Albion and put into shore; we’ll travel by coach to Enoch. The marbles will follow. You’ll be coming with me. You and the chi
ldren. You’ll be under my protection. My mother will help me educate you in our ways. You’ll see, in a short time, you’ll become just like one of us.’
4
The Bronze Fly
Sir Giles Skipwith showed his new protégée, Lettice the stowaway, the map of their destination; he pointed to the long cloud shape that the city of Enoch made where it lay along three bends of a wide, thrusting river; he described its towers and temples, its arsenal and barracks, palaces and smaller dwellings. ‘It glitters,’ he told her, ‘from the glass in the buildings – imagine! Glass sheeting used as if it was cheap as straw-baked brick.’ It was a city in ferment, as he described it, pullulating and loud, a crossroads, a hub, an entrepôt, a market for a myriad goods and services and currencies and manufactures – and foodstuffs. ‘It’s the city built by Cain – and did Abel build one? Could Abel have built one?’ It was a place on this earth teeming with angels of the old order, who may be fallen into the corruption of the world, but were mighty, vigorous, full of energy for new enterprises, more strivings, fresh inventions.
‘He painted a bright picture to us,’ Leto told the children. ‘He said, “I want you to feel at home there”. We’ll be safe, and you won’t be hungry any more, or thirsty. You’ll be part of somewhere – you’ll belong.’
She couldn’t help letting a small sigh escape.
Teal was sitting on a bale of rope, within earshot, playing quietly on a whistle, observing the twins and their mother. He put it down and called out to the little boy.
‘Enoch’s where I lived when I was your age,’ he said. ‘Near the river. I know it – as well as I know my own mother.’ He stuck the whistle back between his lips, and breathed out the sad tune,
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