The Leto Bundle Read online

  The area was named, not after the jewels worn by the wicked harlots, sycophants and catamites of the court, though many who at that time saw the abominations with which Cunmar the Procurator’s wife, Porphyria, bedecked herself, the encrusted brocade jackets she wore and the pearl-stitched cuffs of her silk trousers and gem-strewn uppers of her mules, might have thought so without incurring contradiction. It was called after the Pearl Well that was sunk three hundred and fifty feet down into the stealthy aquifer in the rock below the level of the ravine floor, the wet walls of which gleamed with a soft luminescence that had given that part of the outpost its name. Donkeys trod the spiral stairs that an engineer from Parthenopolis had ingeniously devised so that their descent and the subsequent ascent, loaded with the heavy, filled, leather water bottles, formed one continuous unbroken journey, the twists of the shallow gradients passing one another in a double helix without intersecting.

  The survival of the outpost depended on its supply of water, not only for all the needs that water meets, but also for our main traffic – in the blue and crimson glass that was poured and blown in the Turquoise Quarter. So the well, and the ancient shrine at its head, was holy to all who lived in Cadenas. But in the course of the bitter conflicts that have torn apart the citadel and its environs, worship at the shrine at the wellhead fell under the control of the Ophiri, and their priests have taken over from us the custodianship of the sacred pierced stone that stands there, and prohibited access to others since the fatal battle of Lacarina. It was forbidden to enter the Pearl Quarter without specific business or appointment; no one unsupervised could stay overnight. Only we in the monastery of the Holy Fount were granted special dispensation to remain within its bounds, though access to the sanctuary of the Fount was, as I have written, controlled by the Ophiri. This was a matter of grievous hurt to us.

  At the Shrine of the Fount, under the dome sparkling with gold and ultramarine mosaic, water bubbles from the core of the omphalos, wetting the rock till it gleams like the hide of a dolphin when it leaps from a wave, and winking in the penumbra as if it were flowing with splinters of stars fallen from the roof above. It is the very rock that Moses split with his wand in the desert, brought here from Sinai; the Ophiri also claim Moses as a prophet on account of their Book and allow us access to venerate the true God at the shrine but three times a year.

  Without this blessed source of water, which does not fail, even when the desert around and the sea seemed to go molten as the sand in the glass foundry after its firing, the citadel of Cadenas would never have remained hospitable to our settlement. Preserving access to the well, from above, and keeping its waters unpolluted from below, were the crucial responsibilities of the Procurator. He was also responsible for patrolling the borders of our bastion, and for checking the wording on passes and permits so that no strangers could infiltrate unbeknownst to the authorities. Cunmar’s duty was to enforce the segregation on which the subjection – and hence the tranquillity and the wealth – of Cadenas was founded. He was to assure that trivial disputes and struggles over footling points of etiquette profitably tangled up energies which might spill out elsewhere to more serious ends. Sumptuary laws strengthened every link in the chain of command. The brothel where a courtesan must learn to make twenty-six movements when she takes a single step is one where she will always be enslaved, for she will inevitably fall short – her neck will bend at the wrong angle on this occasion, her right wrist will flex to the wrong rhythm on another. Cunmar was no stickler on his own account, but he watched for infringements in his subordinates. The long, ravelled threads of surveillance spun by the Keep into the Cadenate communication system formed an essential weapon in his statecraft; they sustained his jurisdiction like a net that is specially knotted to allow certain fish to slip through but catches designated prey in its mesh.

  Laetitia grew up accustomed to the clashing music of rival claimants on significant days in the calendar: the wailing of an Ophiri hicrophant would rise from their temple, while from below, in the street, another sect, returning from their place of worship, beat drums to call their followers to prayer. If any of our pilgrims heard this baying after heathen gods, they would pray aloud to drown the clamour; this was not always to the taste of the Lazuli priests, who would keep up their chanting ever more loudly to silence us. And so the air of Cadenas rang with the strife between believer and unbeliever, each sequestered for safety and harmony in their designated Quarter. But these settled inhabitants of Cadenas in their demarcated quarters were admixed with a raggle-taggle of sailors, dockers, harbourmasters, longshoremen, hostellers and victuallers in the Poppy Quarter by the harbour; they were required to supply the strangers, those many transients who landed and occupied the arcaded caravanserai that stood on three sides of the port area. There too lived the descendants of the Tirzahner captives; once few in number, they were growing; nobody trusted them, for they adhered to a sect of the Ophiri faith, which sowed division among us all in Cadenas. Ser Matteo, born in Tirzah, scorned his countrymen; he had adopted others, for as a merchant, it suited his ambitions to sail under different colours.

  Lord Cunmar strengthened the system of security we had instituted in the outpost when he first took power in Cadenas. Permissions, passes, badges of rank, symbols of identity, controlled us all; our different peoples and faiths in that stony place – Enochite, Ishmaelite, the Children of Isaac, Ophiri, Lazuli, Tirzahner, and all the rest of the godless ones – were forbidden to mix or mingle or merge: the very use of such adulterated verbs excited censure.

  Groups of petitioners would gather at the gates of the Pearl Quarter, some of them pilgrims hoping to worship at our Shrine of the Fount, others pleading for an audience with Lord Cunmar. When someone appeared to be leaving, they rose in a wave of hope, but then fell back with a great collective sigh of disappointment when the traveller’s purple seals revealed that he was not a pilgrim, but a pharmacist from the Hospital, and therefore could not make way for one of the crowd who wanted to touch the holy rock at the Shrine of the Fount.

  The importance of maintaining the Pearl Well’s sweetness gave pharmacists licence to circulate in Cadenas; many of them practised as masseurs and masseuses, profiting from their comparative freedom to bring comfort and excitement to more housebound Cadenates of both sexes. Apart from the pharmacists, nightsoil carriers were also provided with passes that allowed them to move through the streets – but only in the two hours before dawn – as they went about their business of collecting the slops and stews and worse to transport out of the citadel on to the orchards and vegetable plots reclaimed from the desert beyond our walls. These two groups could infiltrate anywhere, look into every dark corner and privy, and so they acted as informal eyes and ears for whomever could pay them: I have been glad of their intelligence as to the events in the Pearl Quarter, and would not be able to recount what I do here without their tale-bearing. Doris liked to denounce their bags of sinful instruments, smelly oils and essences; ‘that Lazuli woman Porphyria’ – she would lower her voice here – ‘has corrupted the citadel and all who lived in it.’

  There were also other kinds of men and women who moved with unprecedented lightness of foot from Quarter to Quarter under Cunmar the Procurator’s rule: moneychangers and arms-dealers had no trouble – they either came with the foreign visitors and prospectors in the first place, or they simply wormed their way into foreign deputations upon disembarcation and slipped through the city on their clandestine business, unchallenged.

  During the sainted Laetitia’s childhood, when Cunmar had reigned in Cadenas for over a decade, the boundaries between the districts were no longer as clear as they had been. Older people complained that the rule of law had once been less slack, and order had prevailed. Once it had been impossible to smuggle anything through the alleys between the stacked dwellings in order, say, to pass from the Rose Quarter to the Turquoise Quarter: the paths were barricaded with packed cullett and rubble, mortar and rusted metal. If a shard pierced you under a
nail, corruption seized your joints and stained your flesh, like tainted meat in the butchers’ market in the dog days. But as Cunmar grew complacent, passes became easier to come by if you had the right contacts – and who did not know a guard or a guard’s daughter? The efforts of beggar children who habitually disregarded danger, combined with the clever scavenging of rats for scraps on the other side down by the harbour, opened corridors through the walls and barriers and allowed the forbidden circulation of people of different faith and loyalties, increasing the dangers in the crowded fortress.

  Among the many who yearned for the old days, Doris, the child Laetitia’s nurse from infancy, was forthright in her denunciations of the collapse in standards. ‘From one day to the next,’ she would complain, ‘everything changes for the worse. They make the old mauve permits blue, cancel the yellow ones altogether . . . It’s a crying shame.’

  In spite of the watchtowers that overlooked the harbour, and the beacons that lit the wharfs and warehouses all night, new arrivals spilled into Cadenas, drawn by its reputation for security and wealth. Their presence caused grave disturbances, but Cunmar seemed to pay scant attention. ‘Strangers who come off ships without documents,’ cried Doris, ‘who then hide like mice in the walls, scuttle under our feet like rats in the drains. The guards try to pin them down – but if you penetrate their hideouts you can disappear, trapped in their shebeens for ever. Years later, someone will be redoing a floor, or turning a plot of land, and they will find the bones of one of their victims.’ She lowered her voice, pulled Laetitia towards her. ‘Someone I know bought a geranium in the market, and it flourished so well that she decided to repot it, and you know what she found?’

  Laetitia knew, but she still asked, for the pleasure of hearing Doris say the terrible words again.

  ‘A human head – with bits of cheek and one ear and hair still stuck to the skull. That’s what they do to you in the Poppy Quarter.’

  For the first two years after Laetitia was left behind, she was the painted idol, the poppet of that pagan court, its pet, its mascot; bundled in woven silver wire veiling, with a brocade sash showing two lionesses passant and raised slippers of beaten silver on her henna’d feet with toenails burnished, she would be seated on the steps of the dais during audiences given by Cunmar the Procurator to merchants, financiers, emissaries from various cities and powers from over the sea; she waited, without impatience, on these occasions, for her father to appear; or at least, for someone to appear who would bring news. Every time she was dressed up by Doris for public display, the hope that she would see him again, that again he would swing her up into his arms, revisited her and made her heart pound hurtingly against her ribs. Sorrow and solitude were her schoolmates in those days; she bowed in obedience to her fate.

  Gradually, the confusion about identity documents grew and with it, a happy shiftlessness developed, so that the child Laetitia and her nurse, on their weekly visit to the Convent of the Swaddling Bands, where Laetitia was learning her letters under the direction of Mother Cecily, found they were frequently waved through the gate with a cheerful gesture. Doris did not approve; she liked it when the special status of her charge was acknowledged after careful scrutiny of their identity badges and permits.

  [Ms. Lat. 77]

  . . . two years passed, and Laetitia was no longer called to the hall where the Lord Cunmar received his visitors; or to meals to be sat on his lap and fed from his square, reins-calloused, brown fingers. One day, when she and Doris were returning from the Trendle to the Keep as they habitually did after one of her lessons with the Abbess, the guard on duty that afternoon gave their permit a look of contempt, and took it with him into the guardhouse where the records of every permit and every card were kept, casually meanwhile waving them to take a seat on the bench where some other petitioners were already sitting. From the condition of the ground at their feet, littered with peanut shells, sunflower seeds, and orange peel, this gathering had been keeping a longish vigil.

  Doris pulled a piece of material ostentatiously across her nose and gripping Laetitia by the shoulder attempted to give orders to the disappearing back of the guard:

  ‘Don’t pretend you don’t know who we are,’ she rebuked him. ‘We have been passing through this gate weekly for several months; this child’s identity is . . . well-known to the whole of Cadenas.’ She tapped Laetitia’s badge.

  The guard vanished into the gate office, and another of a higher rank came out to replace him. ‘It might be,’ said the guard, ‘that you have passed through this barrier between the Quarters before. But no longer.’ He pinched Laetitia’s cheek so slowly and hard that while Laetitia refused to cry out, realising the moment did not call for a response of any kind, Doris started forward to hit his fingers away. ‘But that badge you’re wearing, my pussycat,’ he continued, ‘means you should be over there, with them—’ he jerked thumb and head towards the shambles of the Poppy Quarter. ‘And you, young lady, you belong in the Turquoise slums. These passes you’ve produced have expired.’

  They returned to the Convent of the Swaddling Bands. Doris wept and raged, and made continual efforts to recapture the Procurator’s attention through missives furiously despatched with the pharmacists and the nightsoil carriers whom she despised.

  Meanwhile, she found herself lodgings near the convent, and Laetitia was left to live on the charity of Abbess Cicely. There the blessed child’s education in the true faith her mother had desired for her began at last.

  10

  Kim to Hortense, twice

  Subject: Re: Meeting up

  Date: Fri, 05 June 199– 02:12:42 +0100

  From: kim.mcquy

  To: Hortense Fernly

  Hello Hettyit turns out I can clear the whole day next thursday the class outing to the mcdonald’s rainforest in the docks is happening then and I’ve done my stint there in past years and so can be excused – any chance you coming earlier than 6?

  thanks kim

  Subject: Re: Skipwith 673

  Date: Tues, 09 June 199- 09:38:12 +0100

  From: Hortense Fernly

  To: kim.

  I’ll come and find you in the reading room at around 4.00 pm. You can of course arrive earlier (the Archives are open from 9.30). I would be pleased to be of help, as in my profession, we too work with memory, and I’m all too aware of the gaps in the records – history is a very old man, and, as the saying goes, old men forget. Yours, Hetty

  Subject: Re: Leto bundle

  Date: Tues, 09 June 199– 18:11:42 +0100

  From: kim.mcquy

  To: Hortense Fernly

  Great. I’ll be there lots to talk about looking forward :-) kim

  Subject: Re: Skipwith 673

  Date: Wed, 10 June 199– 10:38:12 +0100

  From: Hortense Fernly

  To: kim.mcquy

  Kim, Just a PS, really : I can see you’re really fired up so do bear in mind Meeks was one of those eminent muscular Christian Victorians who wanted every document of the past to confirm the truth of the Bible, and when they didn’t, he tossed them aside. If it doesn’t fit, chuck it . . . It’s a lesson to us.

  I found a note Meeks left in the box saying the text was ‘so corrupt it was better hidden than published’! He used old-fashioned standards of editorial purity to suppress a picture that challenged his rosy vision of the past.

  We think we’re better, but are we really?

  Yours, Hetty

  Subject: Leto Lives!

  Date: Wed, 10 June 199– 16:47:01 +0100

  From: kim.mcquy

  To: Hortense Fernly

  Hetty I know we’re meeting tomorrow but I wanted to say there’s more there than I’d ever dreamed of even more than she tells me but it all figures she *is* she
truly is the goddess of diaspora embodiment of the dispersed and the drowned and every generation who’s come in contact has seen it in her they’ve recognised it – but not been able to grasp it fully till now and hswu –

  History’s full of hidden files of memories that have been drowned and drowned it seemed for ever – so what happened to the unstoried, untold, unremembered? we’ve found such an extraordinary work we can do together on the bundle – you and me I mean it – I know you feel awkward when I explain my flashes my messages my revelations because in our time this language has lost its claim to any kind of truthfulness But you see that I really knew how she’d suffered – and in ways that are still so alive to us now – and those stories bore out my wildest visions – the rape the kids the orphanage the wanderings – we must go back to start again.

  I strike people as a charlatan or a madman – but you know I’m not and I can tell you can tell – you’re a wonderful generous beautiful woman and I revel in your trust – from the beginning you didn’t dismiss me and I’ll never forget that – through thick & thin come hell & high water you name it I’ll do it anything & everything for you if you need me – please remember that call on me *trust* me I’ve been having tremendous thoughts – truly –

  Kim

  ps can’t wait for term to end – six weeks to go and two whole months free – I’m inspired and Leto is too – we’re communicating *nightly* never miss a day –

  11

  An Anniversary

  (from Annals of the Convent)

  [Mss. Lat. 78–83]