The Leto Bundle

by Marina Warner

  She plotted as she did the dishes: she could show herself to her enemies as she had been when Cunmar loved her. She could amaze them with what she knew and what she had seen. But soon after, she would realise she was all used up, though she wasn’t yet seventeen years old. She saw the experienced trader’s dismissal in that expression of distaste when he examined her; she knew she wasn’t playing a part in a fairy story.

  ‘Yet sometimes, I have to admit to you,’ Kim heard her whispering from the screen, ‘I liked being on my own.’

  The children would be off playing somewhere else: Phoebe was beginning to find her way round the household, and Phoebus, after a week’s banishment of his sister, was now prepared to admit her existence to his fine, big new friends. They found her comical and appealing and let her take part in their make-believe. Phoebe was cast as the prisoner, the victim, the hostage, put in a chair, or against a door and told to stay there while the four boys, in two teams, fought for her future. When she got bored with her part, she trotted away to the bathhouse, where one of the maids cuddled her and fed her sugared almonds and marzipan.

  Sometimes, as Leto was rubbing wood ash into the big terracotta vessels to draw up the fatty deposits of lamb stew and pigeon pie, and then plunging them into the clear hot water to rinse them, she felt peaceful. With her back to the bustle of the courtyard, wrapped in delicious smells – fruit logs burning and meat spitting into the charcoal, rosemary crushed to spice a dish, nuts roasting in a copper pan on the oven, garlic frying in oil – then the heartache eased and she even felt happy, and she wondered what life would be like without them.

  ‘Maybe I should let them go,’ Kim heard Leto from behind the monitor as he worked on the HSWU website through the night. ‘Maybe they would flourish, as possessions of the court in the capital. Better than the continual series of catastrophes into which they were tossed, living with me. That’s when the idea began to form: maybe I should give up the children. Maybe I was preventing them from thriving.’

  And Kim’s thoughts turned to his own first mother, who had handed him over to Minta and Gerald; he tried never to think of her, or seek her out. He thought of the young women who hung around the station at Cantelowes.

  His life had begun again when she gave him up; he was glad of it.

  Though Leto had not cried before, except to bend the merchant’s heart, the caravanserai’s comforts were weakening her defences: now that she had food and shelter and – even – safety from violence and attack and death, it seemed, she found that she could mourn the future that she had lost.

  People came and went in the courtyard. The guard changed and became less vigilant, so two house masseurs who were rivals for one of the cooks began to steal into the working women’s enclave. They were feverish in their courtship, and Leto, overhearing, felt a quick stab of envy at the giggles and kisses she overheard.

  The name of the city in the valley, sixty miles north west of the port and the first stop the caravan would make, glittered and thrummed in their talk. Tirzah. If only she could join the caravan, somehow. Then maybe they could all reach the city together; disappear there, as she had hoped about Enoch when she was with Skipwith on board the Shearwater.

  She hardly dared think of it, since, for fear of more bitter disappointment, she was trying to manage without hope altogether.

  In Ibn Hamiz’s household, the preparations for departure changed the mood from ambling pleasure to a sharper restlessness. There was a ceaseless flow of farriers, clients, merchants, middlemen, brokers, petitioners, pedlars, factors, vendors, craftsmen, beggars, dragomen, tooth-pullers, leech-dealers, while a myriad hangers-on swarmed through the compound; they haggled and huddled in its labyrinthine passages; in the hubbub, whispered deals and shrieking protestations – of probity, of cheapness – mixed into the thumping of freight, the thud of wadded bales; in coops chickens fluttered against their bonds, and the goats, waiting tethered to a post in the outer yard, bleated with apprehension. A week passed, then another; though the date of departure was drawing imminent, it was still not certain when the great caravan would move off.

  Leto kept very quiet, trying to discover how she could join the train, who in the rambling household had the power to help her, who might give in to her entreaties. She paced her work in the scullery to the other women’s rhythm, to make sure they couldn’t reproach her with idleness, but not to irritate them by excess of zeal. She watched, and she was watched. Guards controlled access to the women’s quarters; her post at the dirty dishes was far from the outer doors by which she had first entered, and she slept on the ground beside it. But not everybody’s movements were as restricted as hers, and the children were the most mobile and the quickest to adapt and to learn. They told her things they’d picked up in a scrambled way, and Leto pieced them together with other bits and pieces she deciphered, and the rhythm that moved the tumult of Ibn Hamiz’s teeming household gradually acquired shape and measure, clarity and pattern.

  As Ibn Hamiz lay screened off from daylight at the centre of his operations, his influence coiled through the involutions of his establishment. Like the tendrils of some rampant, fast-growing and blooming vine, the kind that cascade in phosphorescent brightness on distempered walls outside in the sunshine, the former pirate’s power curled through his household, hooking on to this servant and that child, tangling them all up in a web of relations, formal and informal, legal and other: he was weakened by his habit, and his savage life had aged him, but he had granted many favours, he had secured many deals against as many boons and as many threats, he had taken from people in such a way that all his profits appeared to be gifts; he had provided for many and he still did so. He was beloved and he was feared.

  But Ibn Hamiz was ill.

  The rumour began with the servants who attended him in the curtained alcove.

  He was sleeping, sleeping, sleeping all the time. Business wasn’t being attended to. In the middle of negotiations, he slumped into oblivion. Decisions were being made without his full awareness. His body no longer smelled of perfumes and haschisch, but emanated a dead whiff of camphor covering something else, something rotting.

  The repercussions were quick and light but, to the twins’ mother at her stack of dirty dishes, they were palpable. The caravan seemed about to burst its bonds, its great agglomeration bulging in readiness, yet still the order was not given to go. As the wait frayed the drovers’ and merchants’ patience, the stores began to be pilfered, the serving of meals became erratic, the laundrywomen became locked in excitable gossip with one another and the flow of visitors grew into a mêlée, crying for this and that, and demanding answers. But the overseers with their manifests and bills of lading were confused; contradictory instructions kept being given as different members of the household grappled for power.

  In the alcove, Ibn Hamiz waved their demands away with a light moan.

  Panic gripped the household, as fights broke out between contesting powers: between Ibn Hamiz’s sons by different women and between them, the mothers of the chief pretenders, between his favourite bailiff and his overseers, and between their wives. The profuse tentacles of his powerful reach, which had caught up his business and his family into a tightly woven web, were being pulled down, just as a creeper is torn by a gale from its moorings against a wall.

  Death: the simplest plot device of all. The one Leto never thought of when she was casting about helplessly for a way to join the caravan.

  In the mounting quarrels and confusion, Phoebe suddenly heard a pipe playing beneath a window on to the alley that ran down one side of the building.

  The words floated in to her head on the music:

  ‘So many hairs as she unbound

  So many tears fell to the ground.’

  Teal. It was one of his songs. The little girl tried to pull herself up on the ledge and look out of the window. But she was too small to climb up and so she called out into the air,

  ‘Teal, Teal, is that you? It’s me, Bebe!’

>   But her own piping was weak, so she ran to fetch Phoebus, who hung out of the high window, and saw that it was the ship-boy down below, sitting cross-legged, begging. So he ran to find something to throw, until the song broke off,

  ‘“Gin I may choose how I shall die,

  I pray you, draw your sword on.

  “But first your mantle lay aside;

  A maiden’s blood may spatter wide.

  ’Twere shame your clothes should a’be dyed.”’

  Teal uptilted his head to look up and cried out with joy: ‘You’re there! I was so hoping you were there. I knew you couldn’t be far away, but I didn’t know how to find you.’

  He leapt to his feet, and he now put his mouth to the wall so that his words could travel up the surface without shouting.

  ‘Tell her I’m here,’ he whispered into the wall.

  ‘Teal, Teal,’ they chanted.

  ‘Yes, yes, it’s me. Tell her to come here, to talk to me.’

  They ran into the courtyard with the news. Leto looked quickly around. She wasn’t allowed to leave her corner of the yard, but vigilance was slackening these last days. She was tugged through the building by the twins, until they reached the window.

  Their whispers crawled up and down the wall.

  ‘Why are you here?’

  ‘I jumped ship. Couldn’t stand it.’

  ‘Oh, no, Teal, you’ll never be able to go back, you’ve turned yourself into a wanderer, a deserter, you’ll face death if they find you.’ The children’s mother said all these things, though she was overjoyed to find him again. Then, still sending her words softly down the wall, she added, ‘There’s coming and going all through the house now. Take advantage of the chaos. Just walk in, as if you’ve got business. If you’re challenged, say you’ve been summoned by—,’ she mentioned one of the names she’d overheard in the inheritance struggle. ‘Try it.’

  ‘Why don’t you come out?’

  ‘We’re more conspicuous than you. And the twins – they’re the most valuable things, you know that. Everyone knows they shouldn’t be let go, whoever gains control of all this treasure.’

  When Teal was reunited with them in the back yard, among furtively squeezed hands so that they should not attract attention by their joy, he told them his story:

  ‘I was sitting on the floor by the table an’ it was staring me in the face what that old slaver was doing – he was after softening Strugwell up with that drug so that he’ll get a better price from him. Well it worked. After you’d all gone away, Strugwell starts stumbling about when he’s making his goodbyes. That leather bag of gold an’ silver’s riches like he’s never seen – so it’s more than enough for him, more than he dreamed of, see. Though it’s cheap to Ibn Hamiz for you twins! Twins like you count for a lot with them, by all accounts.

  ‘While he’s staggering to his feet he falls down an’ starts giggling on the cushions like a girl, his red eyes streaming, his legs helpless with the laughter. I’m far too small to stand him up again, so Ibn Hamiz calls to two of them standing around to help him up, an’ while they’re doing that they’re not keeping an eye on me. An’ I’ve this sudden flash – don’t know where it come from – I lift the glass on the brazier an’ take the burning brown sticky lump that’s smoking in there. It burned me – look!’ Teal showed them the brown mark of a weal in the palm of his hand; the calluses from hauling on the ship’s ropes had afforded some protection. ‘But the pain’s right worth it an’ I’m able to spit gobs on the lump soon as we’re out in the street an’ heading back down the alley. I was afeared Ibn Hamiz’s men’ll come after us to rob us, to take back the gold. But he’s a big man, a well-known trader, a power in the land, an’ we are just small fry, he’ll not bother with us.

  ‘Strugwell’s blinking an’ shambling ’gainst the walls like a bat out in the light for the sun’s blazing out there by then midday an’ nobody about in the heat but us. He’s still swearing at me, fetching me blows an’ that, but he’s all undone by the stuff he’s smoked, an’ he keeps missing me. When he can’t land his fists, he just roars, laughing like he’s performing some invisible Punch & Judy show, acting puppeteer an’ audience all rolled into one.

  ‘We get to the harbour an’ he staggers over to the fountain there an’ makes me fill the pail an’ dowse him. He’s standing there gasping an’ shaking the water out of his eyes. “Drink some,” say I, “come on, you need water.” “Yes,” says he, “give me water to drink I’ve a godalmighty powerful thirst on me.” So I takes the copper scoop on the chain at the fountain an’ I fill it up to the brim. I’ve the lump of haschisch in my hand an’ I crumble it into the scoop. I’m trembling as he carries the scoop to his mouth for he’s that unsteady I’m afeared his hands’ll shake so he’ll spill it everywhere an’ all my plans with it. But he puts both hands round the bowl to keep it level an’ he tips his head back an’ pours the whole lot down his throat. He makes such a face, you should’ve seen it! “Stinking foul water they have here!” he shouts. Then, “Give me more!” I fill the scoop again an’ then we start towards the dock where the longboat lies – but we’re not gone far when he falls down, straight as a tree – a crash like a mast breaking under a southeasterly turning cyclonic. I couldna believe it, I couldna believe it. But I weren’t waiting more than a moment to see that he’s without sight or hearing or feeling or anything – out of reach, an’ that’s when I takes to my heels.

  ‘With the money.’

  ‘With the money?’

  ‘Yess! I’m half-crying half-shouting with the triumph of it. Then I’m hiding out in the back streets till I see the Shearwater gone from the mooring. But I had to find you again so I’ve been begging around playing my pipe, with my face blacked up, pretending I’m blind too, otherwise some might take me to sell. Thought you might hear an’ you’d know then, “That’s Teal, that’s him”.’

  Phoebe cried out, ‘Teal, I heard you first! It was me, wasn’t it? I knew that song you play:

  “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 . . .”’

  And she jigged about as she clapped and gurgled at her success. She was happy, Leto noticed, and she was plumper and glossier than ever before.

  ‘And the rest of them?’ Leto could not name Skipwith directly.

  ‘Well I kept scarce, didn’t I, couldn’t go near the boat, but when Strugwell doesn’t come back they must send the boat for him – lower the tender this time. They probably picked him up. With his head sore as a baited bear. I don’t know. The captain would’ve wanted to know where the money’d got to, but if Strugwell told him what happened he’d have him flogged half to death.

  ‘They’ll be past the Straits by now and sailing north, coming into shore, bringing all those stones to Enoch. Sir Giles really treasures them stones more than anything.’

  And the ragged lad, under his crust of grime, looked thoughtful. ‘They’re the real thing for him.’ He paused. ‘Well, that’s all done now. No more Her Majesty’s navy for Teal. I’ve deserted and if they catch me I’m done for.’

  The day came when those closest parties guarding Ibn Hamiz could not conceal any longer that the merchant was dead; the light unearthly smell of camphor turned to a gaseous stench; flies grew fat and stuck, heavy with satiety, to the walls, the floors, the furnishings of the enclave as the great man decomposed behind the curtains of his sickbed. The news started a rampage through the household, as one rival’s supporters began to fight another’s for control of his wealth. In the rush, some of his numerous dependants seized what they could carry and packed it on to carts and waggons, claiming as their own trade goods that Ibn Hamiz’s careful ledgers would have itemised with provenance, and sums paid and sums due. The sounds of wailing mixed with cries of rage and pleas for calm. Overseers struck at these looters with clubs and whips, but the ransacking continued.

  The guards of the d
oors of the warren, not knowing which of the contending heirs would prevail, now threw in their lot with one party, now with another; some joined in the chaos to filch what they could. Elder members of the old man’s family shouted their loyalty and tried to persuade others to follow them, but the factions fought among themselves, and, in between them, the pilferers and profiteers made off with piecemeal spoils from the great baggage train that would otherwise have set off, magnificent and orderly, under a drilled squad of overseers working together.

  Terrified of the muddle, of the marauders and their rapacity, Leto took the bung out of the cauldron where she rinsed the dirty pans, and hid the children inside, with unwashed dishes on top of them, and then took scraps and leavings of old meals from the midden and tossed them in.

  She was shaking, when Teal came back to the yard after an interval reconnoitring their possibilities.

  ‘Someone’ll kidnap them, to sell them for themselves,’ she clutched Teal. ‘So I put them in there.’ She was wild-eyed. ‘I can’t defend them or myself if . . .’

  So Teal responded, ‘We’ve got to run while we can. Waiting here for something to happen’s no good.’ He pulled a charred log out of the fire and rubbed his hands over it and then over his face. ‘Blacken them too.’ He pointed to the cauldron. Then he bent close to her.