‘“O where’s all the men of this house
That call me Lamkin?
And where’s all the women of this house
That call me Lamkin?”
‘But I haven’t seen Enoch for a long while now. You’ll like it, Lettie, when we get there.’
‘Tell us something about Enoch then,’ demanded Bebe.
Teal hummed at her,
‘“They’re at the far well washing,
’Twill be long ’ere they come in.”’
‘No, Teal, please tell us something real.’ The little boy was solemn. Teal’s bruised face brightened as he continued teasing the children,
‘“O shall I kill her, nurse?
Or shall I let her be?”
‘What do you think, Bebe? Shall he kill the wicked woman?’
The little girl laughed and sang out with him:
‘“O kill her, kill her Lamkin,
For she ne’er was good to me.”’
‘I’ll tell you what I learned, today,’ Leto began, as the twins squirmed, giggling at Teal. ‘Listen, come.’
But Teal went on, teasing them:
‘“O scour the basin, nurse
And make it fair and clean,
For to keep this lady’s heart’s blood,
For she’s come of noble kin.”’
‘Do people do that in Enoch?’ asked Phoebus.
‘Oh yes,’ said Teal.
‘No, no,’ said Leto, and hurriedly began whispering a smiling story, about Enoch, that Skipwith had told her, remembering a tale of Parthenopolis from his grandfather:
‘The Bronze Fly.
‘Once upon a time, Enoch had a severe problem with flies. Flies everywhere, in the soup, in the eyes of ponies, swarming on the food displayed in the markets; when you went to bed you had to wrap yourself in a cloth from top to toe to stop them buzzing you while you slept. The ill were especially vulnerable. The rich would pay someone to fan them all day and all night. But it was impossible: more and more flies spawned and grew – some of them were small and black and darted about, stinging people . . .’
‘And animals,’ put in Bebe.
‘Yes, and animals. Even the most placid milchcow could be maddened by them and go on a rampage.’
‘Flies come to Enoch when it’s thundery, in late summer,’ said Teal. He was still piping, softly, looking out to sea with his back to them. But Leto could sense the boy was listening; every day he moved his vantage point closer to them, and the children provoked more frequently the quick smile of comprehension that unfurrowed his thin face for a flash.
‘Other flies were huge and electric blue and bumbling. But all of them were foul pests and in their wake they left tainted meat and rotten fruit, dirty water, disease, death.
‘So the people of Enoch were desperate. Then, one day, a man appeared and said he could free the city from the plague – on condition they rewarded him handsomely. He wanted to rule over Enoch in return for ridding the whole city of flies, and they said, yes, but secretly, in their hearts, they plotted not to do anything of the kind.’
Phoebe was cuffing her brother for more room, closer to her mother. Leto rearranged them to sit side by side, and hushed them.
‘Go on,’ urged Phoebus, pushing at his sister in return. ‘You stopped the story.’
Phoebe opened her mouth to bawl.
‘Listen and be quiet,’ said Leto, moving her hand as if to smother her. ‘Don’t you want to hear about the fly-catcher?’
She was feeling very weary.
Phoebus was cub-like when he romped, but usually alert to the danger zones in the games that he and his sister played. He was the sunnier child, but something vulnerable also stirred in his depths. A deep seam of solemn concentration ran through his cavorting: his urchin ways arose from a determination to please, because he knew, from all they had been through together, what the consequences of failure might be. He kept a close watch, and Leto recognised something of her own tenacity in him.
Phoebe was much trickier, for she would draw her brother on, and then, at the first opportunity, she would start to wail, and batter him with her fists or bite his arm until she left ring-marks in his flesh, and cry for her mother to punish him. Again and again, Leto would try to make peace between them.
‘Try not to be so rough. She’s smaller than you.’
Phoebe was much smaller, but her head was big, too big for the tiny, peaky features that appeared in her round face. A furrow between her brows gave her the anxious look, sometimes, of a little man in the moon, frowning with down-turned mouth, isolated and melancholy in the night sky wiped of stars by his bright presence. Sometimes, Phoebe even filled her mother with a kind of revulsion – not all the time, but often enough for Leto to have to make an effort to quell her irritation. The child was clinging and whiny, but Leto knew her whining wasn’t only the effect of the assault on her when she was a baby. She called her mother’s attention to her puniness and frailty in ways she knew better not to do with others, for whimpering invites kicking, she had learned young. So with strangers, she was mutinous, using Leto as a shield, ducking into the shelter of her mother’s lap, her arms, only to peep out now and then, with her thumb stuck angrily in her mouth.
Phoebe was thumping her brother now. ‘He hit me first!’ she wailed.
‘Do try, Phoebus.’
But Phoebe squealed, and so her mother stroked her head as she took up the thread of the story. The child’s hair was sticky with salt and matted. Phoebe’s neediness only brought back many things Leto did not want to remember or relive.
She made an effort and began, ‘The fly-catcher made a very, very big fly, which looked just like a real one. But it was made of metal, like a clasp or a buckle, and he had it trundled by carthorses to the main gates of the city, and winched up to the top. And the other flies, when they saw it, they fled. Every fly in the world, even if it didn’t see the bronze monster the wanderer had made, kept away from Enoch because it looked so ferocious, so hungry, as if it would eat anything and everything that came its way.’
‘And then?’
‘And then suddenly, what?’ Phoebus prodded her.
She wasn’t certain she knew; Skipwith’s version had been very quick. It was strange how difficult it was to describe a safe place. Perils faced, dangers overcome, sickness conquered, troubles quelled, all manner of evils staved off – she had no other way into the secrets of the haven she still hoped might lie ahead, within their reach.
Homesickness for the Citadel stabbed her. Even for Karim, who had turned coward, even for Cunmar, who had bragged and overestimated his power and failed to protect her. She pulled the twins closer, the vital principle pulsing under their warm flesh reassuring her that the future was possible.
She was improvising:
‘So the fly-catcher went to the ruler of the city and to the councillors and asked for the reward they had promised. But they said, “Please Sir Fly-Catcher, can’t you help us with the leeches which are breeding in our water supply and poisoning all our wells?”
‘And he said, “All right, I’ll do my best. But then you must give me my reward.”
‘And he made a beautiful, intricate leech that was twelve foot long and articulated from head to toe so that it slithered and wriggled as if it were alive – and it terrorised all the leeches in the whole province because it was . . . twelve foot long and as thick in the waist as a thirty-year-old oak tree.’
‘Ugh,’ said Phoebe, squirming with pleasure.
‘Yuck,’ echoed her brother, a little uncertainly.
‘The same thing happened: only this time, the fly-catcher, the leech-killer, was getting impatient and angry.
‘So when they said to him, whining, that the population was suffering from tapeworm and that sometimes children opened their mouths and out came a snake, twelve inches long, he thought to himself, should I bother with this ungrateful city any more? But he did. He made a coiled and scaly dragon out of gold. It had only one-eye, lik
e a tapeworm, and a big, loose, baggy mouth ready to snaffle up anything. He set it up on a marble plinth in the main square of the city and it so alarmed all the smaller, skimpier tapeworms that were planning to invade the intestines of the people that they flung themselves into the marshlands far beyond the city walls, where they were all caught by herons very quickly.
‘Then he went to the ruler and the councillors and he asked for his reward.
‘And they said, “Sir Fly-Catcher, Sir Leech-Killer, Sir Worm-Slayer, we are very well now and we don’t need you any more. Thank you for your trouble.”’
The children giggled. Teal smiled: he was beginning to catch the drift.
‘He protested, and showed them the agreements that had been drawn up, signed and sealed. But the lawyers in the council scoffed, and pointed to the small print. When he still stood his ground, they started threatening him, and then hustled him out of the council chamber under armed guard and marched him to one of the city gates, the one where the fly was suspended.
‘They threw him out of Enoch and he fell in the mud outside on his face and bruised his right hip and his right elbow, but he turned himself over and he spoke out in a big voice to the bronze fly above him.
‘It began to shiver and shake and its bronze feelers to rattle and its metal wings to whirr and rustle until it roused itself fully and looked about with bulging eyes, took off jerkily from the gate and landed with a bumpety-bump beside its wounded maker.
‘He gave it a key, and instructions what to do with the key, and the fly took off again, its shadow darkening the streets where it passed so that the people screamed and ran under its flight path, until it came to the west gate of the city, where the silver leech was hoisted in trophy. The fly manoeuvred the key into the place in the leech’s head where its brain would be if leeches had brains, and wound it up. It began jerking and slithering down from the wall into the street, where it slipped through a manhole cover down into the city sewers. Enough citizens of Enoch saw it dropping itself down coil by coil for the word to spread fast that the most gigantic and indestructible and disgusting leech ever known in the history of the world had slipped into the water supply of Enoch, from where it would suck the marrow of human bones, the lymph from human tissue, the blood from the hearts and livers of every man and woman in the city until they were sucked as dry and friable as the last withered leaves rustling on the twigs of winter trees.
‘But the leech would pick on only those who were strong and powerful – its mechanism was wound up so that it avoided children’s bodies and old men and women’s.
‘The bronze fly, seeing its orders accomplished with regard to the silver leech, whirred on with zeal and reached the main square, where it landed, scattering all the market stallholders and the shoppers and the ceremonial guardsmen who dropped their musical instruments and ran for their lives. The fly inserted the key into a hole in the side of the giant tapeworm’s head, in the small round lidless slit that serves for an ear in lizards and dragons, and the giant tapeworm began to move, to writhe and undulate and spool where it stood so that its oiled metal scales scattered sequins of light all around. Then this loathsome kind of a dragon – this terrible machine – suddenly darted off its plinth and began to rampage through Enoch. It swallowed everyone who came across its path and minced them in its mechanical guts and turned them to scrap metal fit only for cheap cauldrons for boiling soiled line.
‘Meanwhile Sir Fly-Catcher got up from his prone position outside the gates where he’d been tossed, and, hearing the screams of fear and howls of dismay rising all over Enoch, he sauntered off with a smile twitching the corner of his mouth and a merry song on his lips.
‘Nobody ever saw him again in Enoch, though there have been other wonders that might be his handiwork in other places – but they can wait for another time. Sometimes you may spot him going by and you’ll know him by his song:
“Tirra-lirra, my sweet pretty,
Your shadow walks with you,
But not as close as I,
Oh, never as close as I,”
sings Sir Fly-Catcher, as he goes jauntily along.’
Teal was breathing into his whistle to Leto’s singsong.
‘Because the fly and the leech and the great tapeworm didn’t attack or eat the children of Enoch, the children paid attention, and, as they were growing up and taking charge themselves, they always remembered the mean way their ruler and councillors had behaved. And they resolved to be different.
‘Since then, Enoch still suffers from flies and leeches and tapeworms and other problems and parasites and poisons. But not as badly,’ she added, seeing the twins’ expression. ‘And the main thing is, Sir Fly-Catcher, Sir Leech-Killer, Sir Worm-Slayer taught Enoch a lesson. And I’m told that, in consequence, Enoch prides itself that it is the market and factory of the world, but that its people are always paid a fair wage on time for their labour.
‘This happened some long time ago, but the story hasn’t been forgotten and its effects are still felt.’
‘I don’t think I want to go there,’ said Phoebus in a tiny voice.
‘I do,’ said Phoebe. ‘I want to see the big fly.’
‘But it’s gone, it’s flown away,’ her brother scoffed.
‘No,’ Leto promised them. ‘It must be there still. In a museum. Enoch has many museums – for all its treasures. This boat is bringing them more.’
5
In the Caravanserai
Sir Giles Skipwith, lying in his starboard cabin, sleeping smilingly in his heavy curtained mahogany and brass box bed, did not hear the longboat draw up on the Shearwater’s other side, did not wake to the sounds of Strugwell unlocking the crate where Lettice the stowaway was quartered, using the key that Captain Winwalloe had made available to the cook; nor did he stir when the cook pulled Phoebus out, squalling and screaming, and dropped in an undertone the terse threat to his mother:
‘Want to see the boy again?’ He paused. She was struggling with cramped sleep. ‘Follow, then.’
Skipwith did not hear his ward, Lettice the stowaway, object of benign experiment and future daughter of Albion, whom he had won honourably at cards, scramble to her feet and snatch up her scared girl child, he missed the thumping of a body clambering down a ladder against the ship as Strugwell got into the longboat, which Teal in the stern was steadying against the Shearwater’s side as best he could. Nor did Giles wake to the sound of her scream, or to the threats of Strugwell that he would throttle Phoebus, whom he had by the neck in the crook of his arm, if she didn’t leave off that noise, or the clatter of hull against hull as the dinghy pushed off, or the splash of the oars as Strugwell seized hold of them from Teal at the rudder and began straining hard to put distance between himself and the Shearwater. He was dreaming of cards, of opening hands magnificent and costly, flush with crowns and sceptres and ringing down coin for him; the stowaway woman was now an ace, now a jack in a tight fitting suit and rakish cap, bringing him a twist of fortune that almost made him chuckle aloud as he slept on in the silence that poured down from the fiery stars that perfect spring night, as the young mother and her children were carried ashore.
Teal was behind her, at the helm, and when she turned to look at him, he did not meet her eyes, but kept his look straight ahead; his small face pinched with tiredness; brought along as Strugwell’s sidekick, doing what he was told. She could not read his thoughts. She was on the bench facing the cook, who had tossed Phoebus down in the prow like a bag of provisions.
‘Give him to me now?’ she asked.
‘Do you want to get him drowned? Just sit still.’
Phoebus was whimpering, but she obeyed.
They entered a small harbour, as the sea turned to smoked silver in the first light of morning. Fishing tackle, hung up to dry, stood against the sky like gigantic cobwebs, and large butterfly eyes painted on the bowsprits of the fishing boats loomed through the grey freshness of the dawn. The cook pushed her up and off on to shore; after her sojourn on
board, the ground tilted sickeningly underfoot.
Using a coil of rope lying in the bilge water, Strugwell tied a length between her ankles, then looped one end around Teal, the other around his own waist. Still with Phoebus in his grip, chucked under one arm like a roll of bedding, Jed Strugwell headed off, jerking his head to them to follow. People were stirring, in the cool of the morning, and they stared at the sight of the big-boned foreign man in his soiled breeches and tunic, with the limp child slung from his hip, and at the ragged threesome he was chivvying along.
‘Don’t you make a sound, or I’ll . . .’ he warned.
But the stowaway would not have made an appeal to the bystanders anyway; she knew better than to count on the kindness of strangers. To Teal, Strugwell need only start raising an arm for the cowed boy to flinch.
They left the small harbour square and turned down a covered market colonnade, where brightly wrapped women were settling down in front of large baskets of goods; the cook strode down the length of it to the end, Leto shuffling as best she could after him in her trammels. Phoebe was clinging to her like a squirrel up a tree; slung against her mother’s breast with the silk scarf woven with silver thread that Skipwith had given her, one of the few things she had managed to scrabble together from the crate when Strugwell summoned her. The child was still so flimsy, still all fluff and no substance, still a nestling at three years old. She was bound to her offspring; all three of them victims as if buried alive in the same grave, grappling with one another, and as they struggled they only breathed in more earth to choke them. Their mother felt a rush of fury. Would she never be rid of this burden? Could she have left the girl on board, for Skipwith to take to Albion instead of her for his experiments? Would that have been the better choice? The twins were holding her, to an interminable destiny of maternity.
The Leto Bundle Page 24