The Leto Bundle

by Marina Warner

  Phoebe was too scared to cry now, but her eyes were so wide that her whole face seemed to have become a single mask of fear. Her mother was floundering, as the salt in the sodden and chill rope quickly opened lesions in her legs.

  Small octagonal tables were set out under the canopy and a few slow-moving men were gathered, drinking some bright green liquid from tall beakers. Strugwell looked about him. Then he shouted across, calling out a name, and one group of drinkers laughed, and nodded, and pointed to a house across the street; a small boy came up and tugged at Teal to bring him to the right door.

  With Phoebus still dangling in his grasp, the child’s face bright red from his head hanging down and jouncing to the cook’s stride, Strugwell rang the bell to the side of the vast carved portal; the mother, hovering by, tried to reassure her son by making a silent face. A true note sounded, from a clay clapper within. Eventually, the scraping of the bolts was followed by the opening of the small door set into the larger one. Strugwell conferred. They entered. The door closed again; some moments passed; he muttered to them,

  ‘Now, don’t do or say anything until I tell you to.’

  He was quivering with anticipation, as they waited just inside the entrance. Phoebus was deathly quiet now in his fright.

  Deeper inside the building, the night had not yet drawn to a close: perhaps daylight never did penetrate the tiny, high inner courtyard, where a small fountain played on the patterned tiles of the floor and a sequence of slender arcades provided shelter that was neither indoors nor out of doors, but a zone in between. Men were reclining on couches there, smoking, talking, drinking. The murmur that rose from the company was muted, thick with slumber. Steaming scents of peppermint infusions and varied incenses suffused the enclave, drifting over other smells of spitting fat and roast meats. Though it was early morning, it was still night inside these walls.

  Leto’s heart leapt; she might be abandoned here, among the aromas and the slow slow business of this harbour hostelry, this caravanserai. She was thinking, This would be a better life, better than anything we’ve had till now, better than the wolf’s den, better than the ship’s hold or the crate on the Shearwater. To her then, slavery appeared a sweeter life by far than any she had yet known.

  She was reminded of the Keep and of Cunmar’s stories about his people, who were more likely to cram children with kisses and sweetmeats and cry when a favourite has scraped his knees in a fall and feed them than beat and starve them. She told herself she and the children could be happy there in the nocturnal comforts, for she was angry with Skipwith, and angry with herself for trusting in his promises, for paying attention to his plans, for imagining herself – and the twins – as Enochites, moving freely through that vast, bustling city.

  The bolt of the door shot home as the youth on the gate left to deliver his message. Her heart was pounding as they waited for him to return. Strugwell was running with sweat. His long forearms and shaggy calves exposed, his shirt and breeches patched and grimy, bursting out of his jacket that had gone at the armholes, he looked as comfortable in that pleasure house as a mule in a lace bed. He had never dealt with Ibn Hamiz directly before, but he had handled a consignment of blue-and-white porcelain that had been salvaged from a sunken ship; Ibn Hamiz and his great annual caravan to the metropole was the booty’s ultimate destination. Now he was going to meet him: a legend among sailors.

  Had Hamiz been a poet? Ballad-singers gave him the authorship of some of their tales. But he had left his inland, desert birthplace, and, rigging up a small craft with a single sail, moved southwards, showing all the daring that later made him a most feared pirate on the northern littoral. He gathered there a gang of followers, for he was attractive to many men – some called them malcontents, but others, as the songs sang, saw them as free spirits – and they ranged through the Inland Sea from the Pillars of Hercules to the harbours of the Ophiri to the east. From their island fastnesses, from a harbour that lay concealed behind toothed, red cliffs, he would dart out in rapid, light ketches that could outpace almost all the laden boats that were lumbering home along those sea roads; the swiftness and cruelty of Ibn Hamiz on his raids became the stuff of tales of terror, some of them no doubt enhanced by himself. Then, he tired of this way of life as well: after fifteen years of lucrative predations, he took his great spoils and set himself up in his palace in Feltimye, and concentrated on the traffic in . . . almonds and angelica. And in other goods and treasures in demand in the luxurious metropole to the east. His sumptuous style of living in his harbour stronghold, where the windows were made of perforated alabaster and the fountains were tiled with cunning geometry, where the baths flowed with almond oil and rosewater, continued his renegade’s glamour among all traffickers and sailors of those waterways.

  All this made Strugwell sweat with excitement. He had brought Ibn Hamiz something special and he expected a commensurate reward, and he was hitching up his belt and adjusting his balls in readiness for the deal he must strike, when the gatekeeper came back and conducted them along one side of the arcade to a private room.

  Excitedly, Strugwell said to his captive, ‘No making scenes now. And no crying.’ He glared at Phoebus, and with a rough hand pushed the curls off the boy’s face. ‘Must look pretty now.’ With a thick finger to his lips, he commanded Phoebe to stay quiet.

  Then he prodded their mother to precede him as he made his way into the circular room off the central courtyard.

  Lanterns hung low over the couches, the stars pierced in their polished metal sides glowing deep crimson. Against damson-coloured cushions, fringed and embroidered in golden gimp, lay the former pirate with whom Strugwell had business. Strugwell was taken aback: he hadn’t expected he could have become so very indoors in appearance. For Ibn Hamiz wasn’t ruddy, nor was he burly: the renegade who’d inspired terror on the sea by his savagery, and deep and widespread envy of his accumulated, ill-gotten treasure, now had a large, blue-veined nose and swollen hands, with blackened nails, and he was inhaling deeply from a coiled pipe on the low brass table. As he did so, the water-cooled flask belched a slow, sparkling bubble.

  The cook jabbed at the marine chart he pulled from the waistband of his breeches.

  ‘I’ve brought you, sir, something very rare, and that’s God’s truth’, began Strugwell.

  The figure on the couch patted the air languidly, as if Strugwell were an over-eager hound, and raised his eyebrows, appraising their ragged band.

  The cook pushed Phoebus forward towards the disdainful, lolling figure on the couch. His mother sprang after him, but was jerked by the rope till she lost her balance and fell against the cushions arranged at right angles to the couch. A servant pulled her to her feet; another instantly sprinkled rosewater from a special thyrsus on the places that she had sullied by contact.

  The merchant in almonds and angelica sat Phoebus down on the divan beside him, tickled his cheek, and offered him sweetmeats, powdered with fine sugar and dripping with honey and nuts. The boy checked with his mother first; she hesitated. Eating together creates a bond. Eating from his fingers will make an even closer bond between them. One seed, or was it seven seeds? It took so little to be captured by a living death.

  But at Phoebus’s look, hollow with longing, she nodded. Phoebus had never had a sweetmeat, only raw honey from the comb when they lived among the tombs.

  Ibn Hamiz caressed the boy’s cheek, with fastidious fingertips, testing the sunburned skin, but keeping him at a distance, and he watched, smiling, as Phoebus took one cake, then another, and then another. When he had finished a fourth, the merchant opened the child’s tunic, and looked at his throat and chest, lifting his arms and kneading his thighs. With a wave of his long hand, on which the veins stood out, he pointed to the boy’s crotch.

  ‘Go on,’ muttered Strugwell to Leto. ‘Show his jewels.’

  She knelt in front of her son and the merchant, and lifted the boy’s tunic.

  The merchant nodded. The child was, as was to be expec
ted in merchandise from Enoch, uncircumcised.

  ‘It can be done,’ said Strugwell, still very loud. ‘Easy.’ He made a gesture he knew well from his kitchen, as if shucking a peascod.

  ‘Ahaha, that’s very true,’ he replied, and Strugwell recoiled from his mockery. Again, the cook was startled, in spite of the rumours he’d heard: he could hear, in the merchant’s rumbling consonants, the sound of his native country.

  Then the merchant peered more closely, and, taking the edge of the tunic from Leto’s hand pulled it up to lay bare the boy’s whole torso.

  ‘Where is the navel?’ he asked, passing his hand over the thin, smooth stomach. ‘This is uncommon.’

  Leto tugged the tunic down again.

  Strugwell said, ‘I’ve been trying to tell you – they’re wonders.’ He paused. ‘They’re treasures: beyond price. He doesn’t have one! And nor does she!’

  Phoebe, standing on her feet and ignored while Phoebus occupied the others, crept near the table and surreptitiously took a cube of pale rose translucent sweetness, studded with almonds, and soft and snowy with sugar. Phoebus, too, as soon as the two men began bargaining, wriggled off the couch to be nearer the table and its heaped trays of bonbons and pastries. Teal followed suit; they competed for the pile, but as the plates were emptied, the attendants heaped them up again. Soon, even these children, never before acquainted with puff pastry or sherbet or sugar, were satisfied and sat back, licking their fingers.

  ‘How much for the boy?’ shouted Strugwell. ‘He’s the prize. But the whole lot is real value. They’re like you like them, and they’ll fatten up nicely.’

  ‘Buy me too,’ their mother began begging. ‘Don’t part us. Take me with them.’ She lay huddled on the floor, clasping the merchant’s arm and kissing his hand passionately till her tears bathed him. He looked down at her fastidiously, and Strugwell made a motion to pull her off. But Ibn Hamiz tapped the cook’s arm with the stem of his pipe to restrain him, and then indicated a hexagonal stool set some distance from the table. Jed Strugwell folded his big limbs on to the tiny seat. He was protesting, ‘We haven’t got all day, I’ve to get back to my ship. You’ve got to make a decision now. How much for the three of them? Teal, out of the way. I don’t want him buying you as well. You’re coming back with me.’ But the ship-boy didn’t move; he was sniffing entranced at the smoke rising from the flask.

  Meanwhile, Ibn Hamiz was indicating that the children’s mother should lift her face; keeping his distance, he signalled for her to open her mouth so he could peer at her teeth and gums; he made no nod. Then he beckoned Phoebe over, and tested her flesh, looked her curiously up and down, and when he found she had no navel, too, he glanced over at the raw-boned sailor from Enoch who had brought them to him.

  Strugwell leapt up from the stool, pulled out a map.

  ‘See here,’ he said. He jabbed at the edge of the sea on the chart. ‘Mermaids. We found this lot at sea. Mermaids aren’t fish-tailed, not the way it’s painted in pictures like here. Sir Giles Skipwith says they be birds, really. Sirens aren’t fishes, but seabirds. This little lot landed in our ship; they’re petrels turned human, dropped from the air. You’ll never find any other like them. They’re wonders, I tell you. You should hear them patter and tattle, like nestlings squeaking for food. But this lot don’t squeak, at least not much. They coo and sing, like they really are birds.

  ‘They’re rare, not of this world, more rare and precious than anything. I could take them to Enoch and show them there round the fairs for a fortune, but my captain thinks they’re ill-omened—’ he stopped short. ‘Captain Winwalloe gave me orders to get them off the ship, seeing as they’re eating our victuals and causing disturbance.’

  Ibn Hamiz tossed his head, and an attendant in the corner approached, to whom he gave orders.

  He said to the cook, ‘The woman is young, but she’s all used up. She’ll do in the scullery.’ He paused. ‘Take the children to be washed. And the woman. Dress her like one.’

  Strugwell made gestures at her body, shaping breasts, belly in the air. ‘She’s fertile. She’ll have more like this lot. That’s worth a lot of money,’ he emphasised. ‘They say you require foreigners to be special guards in the capital. The boy’s healthy, he’s pretty, it’s diabolical the way he talks at his age. He’ll soon grow strong.’

  Ibn Hamiz indicated a second pipe on the table. ‘Smoke, Mr Strugwell, to seal our pact.’

  Strugwell did so, and coughed.

  ‘Try again, it’s pleasant, you’ll see.’

  The cook obeyed him. He breathed in the blue, scented smoke, barely controlling his glee at the merchant’s consent.

  Teal exchanged looks with the stowaway and her twins, and, when the time came to say a silent goodbye, he was crying; they had not been so long together on the boat, but they had changed life on board for the ship-boy, and he was now condemned to return, without the solace of their company. But at that moment, from the very depths of the boy’s cowed and beaten being, out of that spirit that had been maimed by repeated brutality, he dug up a flicker of flame that was to make a bonfire of his tormentor’s glory and greed.

  6

  A Lump of Haschisch

  The caravan would leave for the capital in five weeks; Phoebus would be taken then with three others, for training as palace guards in the metropolis. But in the meantime, the boy’s new prison house became a playground; after a day of wariness, he joined the little gang of young boys and was soon skittering and rushing through the rambling rooms and corridors and courtyards of the winding establishment. Now and then someone fetched him a slap with a laughing shout of protest, but he was mostly indulged, with titbits to eat from the cooks and the maids, prodding of his ribs to deploring clicks and many exclamations at his beauty, accompanied by vigorous spitting to the floor to prevent the jealousy of demons harming a favoured child.

  The second week, Phoebe came to her mother to report in tears that she’d been banished from her brother’s games; lying on her tummy under the low table by the cauldron where Leto was washing dishes, she wailed into the dirt floor. Her mother shook her head.

  ‘Phoebus can’t own up to you as his little sister in front of those big boys – it’s far too much to ask of any man!’

  Now dressed in pink silk trousers under a white damask tunic, Phoebe petulantly kicked off the embroidered slippers she had been given and complained that the women in the household tickled and pinched her and chucked her under the chin. But she, too, would be going with the merchant’s goods and baggage; and she was already growing into her future part; she would be sold as a drollery, a funny-looking girl who was no beauty, but would amuse a connoisseur with her antics and her temperament.

  The twins’ mother still did not know what plans the great merchant had for her. As she carried out the long and heavy sequence of tasks allotted to her in the scullery from first waking to the last moments when she fell, like a lump of lead, on to the ground to sleep, the impending loss of the children was wedged inside her, an ache that continued unappeasable.

  The thought of being parted from them shadowed Leto’s every move. As she pulled the wood from the pile and built up the fire under the hot water cauldron, as she hauled water from the cistern in the centre of the yard, and filled jars to sluice into the copper basins to do the dishes, she kept seeing the scene unfold in her mind’s eye: the two of them hoisted on to the waggons with the baggage, with herself standing there, clutching at the load, running behind them, collapsing.

  There were five women on permanent detail, besides herself, in the pungent and steamy back courtyard where the cooking took place in one corner, where there stood a brick oven with low grills laid over wood fires on one side of it, while in another, the cauldron for the laundry squatted mightily on a platform of bricks. The laundry took place once a week, and she was conscripted to draw water and keep the fire going for the washerwomen as well, back and forth, back and forth, with the buckets slung on a yoke. Across the yard, the
cooks daily brewed and boiled, grilled and broiled lamb and sausage, rice and beans, peppermint tea and coffee. She wasn’t allowed to handle any food herself, but she was apportioned, at the end of the day, generous amounts of leftovers to eat.

  These times, in the scullery, were the first she had spent apart from the twins since they were born, for longer than a few hours – she’d foraged without them in the mountains, and there’d been the time spent in Skipwith’s cabin, at her ‘lessons’, but otherwise they’d been stuck fast together. But Phoebus didn’t even always come to sleep beside her any more, and she found that she craved him: his was the only love that was left to her besides Phoebe’s, and the little girl was so demanding then, she didn’t give out strength, but seemed to drain her mother for her own use.

  So her mind twisted and turned, however arduous her tasks were, as she cast about for a way to prevent them being taken from her. She had once possessed great gifts of transformation, but she had mislaid the trick of them on her way down the years. As her reflection stretched down over time it had thinned and faded, as she had seen in Skipwith’s cheval glass; the light that carried her form no longer gathered enough power to change things; she was lit wanly now. So instead, she entertained ideas from other kinds of stories, not of metamorphosis and escape, but of romance, rescue and recognition: of a young nobleman who, passing by, might peep into the kitchen yard and see through the grease and the grime and loosen her filthy hair from its headrag and see that it could be soft and scented and silky and bright. That Lycia, so so far away now, would fling herself to rescue Leto again, all teeth and tongue and foaming saliva and carry her off in her jaws to safety once more. Was any of the cats that meowed and prowled around the refuse a magic creature who would all of sudden give voice and talk to her and find a way out of the plot she was caught in? Perhaps somebody would turn up with a perverse love of slatterns and skivvies and want to spend a fortune to take her as his slave of the hearth, meeting all his insatiable desires for dirt and degradation. And want her so much she could set conditions. Yes, she would grovel on her hands and knees if he . . . Only if he . . . Might she find, in the refuse from the kitchens, in the piles of uneaten scraps in the dishes and pans she was scrubbing, a magic token, a ring she could rub and then vanish? Would a single feather plucked from one of the fowl being prepared for the table have the power of lifting its owner high above the rooftops? Or would Ibn Hamiz remember her with a sudden movement of mercy? Would he summon her, would he suddenly consider that the mother of wonder children must be a wonder herself? Would Skipwith come after her? She even hoped for that. She had been too wary with that man and his self-love. She hadn’t made him understand enough or he could have prevented the captain and the cook’s greed. They could be approaching Enoch by now.