The Leto Bundle Read online

  ‘Why did he let it happen like this?’ Leto managed to wail. ‘He could have protected me. I didn’t have to end up giving birth – in a wilderness. He said he loved me. He promised to take care of me – he said he would always love me.’ Leto glanced upwards to the roof of the cave, to where the stars would be, had they been outside under the night sky. ‘He said he was miserable with his wife and that she never did anything to give him pleasure . . . That’s what he said. The other girls were nothing, he said. He said he didn’t care for anyone as much as he cared for me.’

  The wolf clicked disapproval. ‘Love! You don’t have to love someone to enjoy them! You humans justify your actions with grand passions and grander promises. What hypocrisy, in the name of Love! Another god who’s full of nothing but excuses. You’re a child, Leto, you’re still simple as sky after rain. But you’ll find the less candid shadows far more kindly and their colours, once you get your eyes used to the dark, so much more interesting.’ She batted a cub out the way, as it tried to attract its mother’s attention. ‘Try not to believe a word men say. They’re different, different from us creatures, different from you people, different from women, from mothers, from our kind.

  ‘And part of their power lies in your belief in that power, remember. Don’t give them that satisfaction. I forbid you to love, to believe in love, to let that kind of love rule you. Remember what I say when you feel that rush to the head, that heat in the gut, that melting sensation between your thighs, that swoony feeling behind your eyes . . .’

  ‘But I’m cursed,’ cried Leto. ‘I’ve given birth to strangers, to children unlike any others in the world. Until someone takes me – not for a stranger, not for an intruder; until someone takes me in, takes me home . . . I’ll never rest. That’s the curse I bear.’

  ‘That’s a heavy burden.’ The she-wolf was quiet, reflective. ‘If that’s your destiny, to wander until you and your babies are no longer taken for strangers.’ She paused. ‘Then it’s even more crucial that you don’t throw yourself on the mercy of others without full knowledge of what you’re doing. Never make yourself needier than you are, and the love of men does that, believe me. So keep your heart closed, the better to defend yourself. Remember how we survive: we look to our own kind.’

  ‘But you came to my rescue.’

  ‘It happens, sometimes, that kindness goes beyond kin.’

  4

  ‘A Vanished Mystery Religion’

  Five minutes into her talk, Hortense found to her surprise that she was enjoying herself; compared to the usual soporific lecture audience, this one was restive, like a huge unruly classroom of children. She quelled the thought – now she was being condescending. But their murmurs and sighs and even grunts at what she was saying and showing made her feel that the audience, as a mass, wanted to find something out, rather than acquire a gloss of culture to preen before their friends.

  She was saying, ‘So, in spite of the long tradition that the tomb represents a scene of drunken revelry in the cult of Dionysus, the god of wine, everything points to a different story. The site was dedicated to the goddess Leto, who was one of the Titans. The Titans were the rather mysterious giants whose power Zeus and the other Olympians took over – in the case of the Titanesses, usually through rape.’ She departed from her prepared notes at this point, lifted her head, and spoke directly into the darkness of the hall where her audience sat, invisible to her. ‘This is still going on, of course: in wars everywhere soldiers kill their male enemies and rape the women – leaving them to have their offspring.’ She sighed; an echo of her sigh rose back to meet her out of the dark.

  Pressing the button on the console, she brought up a slide, a photograph of the site where the tomb had stood. ‘Although almost nothing remains of it now, a famous temple stood there.’ She changed image, to an artist’s reconstruction of the necropolis, as it would have looked, around a thousand and five hundred years ago. It was Skipwith’s sketch, from his notebook on the excavations. ‘Leto’, she went on, ‘means “Lady” in Lycanian, the local language there in antiquity – it’s like the Virgin Mary being known as Our Lady or Madonna, or even – some of you may have seen the film of Rider Haggard’s classic – simply being called “She”.

  ‘Leto was a very important goddess in that part of the world: she was the mother of the twins, of the god of the sun Apollo and of the goddess of the moon Artemis, after she was pursued and raped by the father of the gods, Zeus. Like many other objects of Zeus’s desires, Leto was then harried across the world by the fury of the queen of the gods, Hera, his wife, and couldn’t find anywhere to lay herself down to have her babies – there are various different endings to this story . . .

  ‘The carved relief on the cist – that’s the front slab of the tomb – is terribly damaged, as you saw, but the creatures on either end – always taken previously for sphinxes – are more likely to be wolves, who were sacred to the goddess because one helped her when she was fleeing. In the middle you can see her seated on the ground with the two babies playing at her feet – this is the kind of antique composition Leonardo had in mind when he painted the Virgin with Jesus and John the Baptist as infants. Then there are the frogs, carved on the inside of the sarcophagus . . . Leto turned her enemies into frogs.’ She paused. ‘I expect many of us would enjoy having such powers!’

  No laughter greeted this remark, as she would have expected from the usual lunchtime audience, acknowledging that such a hope might exist, in another world, among another people, rather more naive and less stoic than themselves. But in this company, her words met a kind of high-pressure wave of hope: as if, she could almost hear them murmur. If only.

  She continued, bringing up a view of a papyrus fragment, minutely pecked with script: ‘There hasn’t been much work done on the huge heap of materials – artefacts, remains, and many, many manuscripts – found inside the tomb, packed around the body. After the middle of the last century, the biblical scholar and palaeographer Hereward Meeks, one of my predecessors here at the Royal Museum (as the National Museum of Albion was called then) – he began cataloguing the deposit made by Sir Giles Skipwith. But, for various reasons, he left this work unfinished.

  ‘Recently, by serendipity, I was looking for something else in the Archives here and I came across Hereward Meeks’s editing notes, working papers – and, best of all, the drafts of his translations from the Skipwith hoard. It was his work on Misc. Mss. that made it possible for me to identify the myth of Leto’s persecution and the birth of the twins on the tomb.’ Here she returned to a slide of the relief carving of Leto and the twins, hatching at her side. ‘The rediscovery of this fragmentary, late Hellenistic romance opens an important and exciting new chapter in the history of the Skipwith deposit. The narrative, with its discordant echoes of the Infancy Gospels – of the Flight into Egypt and the Massacre of the Innocents – throws light on the flourishing syncretism of religious cults in the period.’

  There was a stir in the hall; she couldn’t decipher it: impatience? excitement?

  She began again, moving more rapidly through her technical notes: ‘Hereward Meeks’s palaeographical expertise can only astonish us today. However his methods betray the characteristic wishfulness of his times. He was able to identify the hand in these strips as belonging to the Circumflex Scribe, so-called from his habit of decorating the end of every other line with a redundant chevron made of two indentations of his reed stylus.’ She pressed the button on the console and brought up a close up slide of a line of serried writing, and pointed the red dot of her laser at the mark at the end of each line.

  ‘According to the conventions of his time, Meeks assumed that the scribe was male; this is likely to be the case, but shouldn’t foreclose the possibility that the author might have dictated to a scribe. In which case, the writer could have been a woman. This distant, Hellenistic author, who was most likely working in the mid-fourth century of our era, Meeks called “The Letoniast”. His or, as I think, her – narrative brai
ds disparate strands of mythology from the region in order, it would seem, to enhance the status of the sanctuary that Skipwith was excavating. We can make an informed guess that the Letoniast may well have been a priestess of the cult, but the Circumflex Scribe who, before the fifth century CE, wrote down the story of the goddess for her cult followers, may have been taking down dictation from one of her successors in the temple.’

  The hall was stirring, impatiently: she was boring them. Hortense pressed the button again and now showed a map. ‘In 1841,’ she continued, ‘Skipwith’s archaeological explorations revealed an extensive complex, with capacious storage space for wine and grain, living quarters for pilgrims and temple attendants. Analysis of traces on the three sacrificial altars’ – she pointed to A, B, C – ‘marked on the map here and here and here indicate abundant libations of red wine and olive oil. The burned offerings did not consist of large or small mammals, but only of the local frogs (rana silvestris), still plentiful in the marshland on which the temple stands. This of course helps to clinch the identity of the female figure in the carving. The many tortoise shells also found on site indicate that these were used for divination: the cracks made in the shell by a heated tool were read in augury: like tea leaves or coffee grounds! Or,’ she added as an afterthought with regard to her audience, ‘cutting open a tomato or an aubergine and finding a sacred message inside.’

  There was a light sprinkling of laughter at this. Encouraged that she hadn’t been offensive, Hortense Fernly ran on rapidly towards her conclusion: ‘The wolf – the region of Lycania is named after its wolves – was the animal familiar of goddesses of childbirth, like Leto herself, and to Artemis, her daughter. This story of Leto is profoundly coloured by the exaltation of pity and suffering in the new religion that supplanted pagan myth.

  ‘Through these surviving fragments of the Letoniast’s mythography, in the recension of the Circumflex Scribe and the patient mediation of Hereward Meeks, we can perhaps catch the voice of a woman who presided over a cult of a female deity, featured here not as a Titaness, or a towering mother goddess, but as a young, persecuted fugitive.

  ‘We can perhaps hear, in this story of pagan metamorphosis and survival, the far thunder of a vanished mystery religion.

  ‘Of course it’s all a myth,’ she added, as she switched the lights back on and the two slides of the tomb, one in close up showing the swirl of figures on the relief, the other a shot of it in toto, faded into the weave of the screen.

  There was commotion, some cries like the start of questions, sputtering applause as the director left his seat in the auditorium and joined Hortense at the podium. He stilled the hubbub:

  ‘Thank you, Hetty, for this fascinating account of an important item in the National Museum’s collections. I think that everyone will agree and want to join me in a show of our appreciation.’

  He led more clapping, which he managed to rouse to a greater degree of enthusiasm than before. Hortense took a place to the side of the stage, wishing she could leave it and go back to her office. She loathed this use of first names; the director’s new style of common touch made her writhe.

  ‘Some of you . . .’ he stilled the audience with a look and turned up the wattage of the lights to extinguish the slides altogether, ‘will have been surprised, perhaps, that Hetty didn’t show you the film that many of you have seen on your screens, at home, at school, or elsewhere – the film that so dramatically materialises the body in three dimensions through the latest technological methods of tomography. You will have been disappointed, I sense, not to have seen again the beautiful face and figure behind the mask known as “Helen”.’

  Shouts and murmurs of agreement followed these words.

  ‘Hetty is a scholar, and she keeps to the strict paths of intellectual enquiry. She knows she must only explore within the limits of what can be verified. Myths, fairy tales aren’t to her taste. I too love truth. Of course. But other considerations apply in running a great public institution that is dependent on revenue for its survival.’

  He paused, and walked out with the laser beam pointer in his hand.

  ‘First slide, please.’

  The lights went down again. The cartonnage of Skipwith 673 reappeared.

  ‘This is one of the most beautiful faces we have in the collection of late antiquities, a face as appealing as Kate Moss or Isabella Rossellini or any of the divas and supermodels whom companies pay to acquire exclusive rights to the use of their features. It was chosen to represent us. For very good reasons.’

  He pointed at the projector, and an image of a mummy appeared, with a plain case beside it.

  Hortense realised, He’s going to tell them.

  ‘This is another mummy from the collection, which, as you can see, was buried in a case that possesses none of the glorious, splendid cartonnage casing of the one you know by now so well.’

  He paused, and faced the audience.

  ‘I have something to confess. We took this body, which is very well preserved, to make the “Helen”.’

  The audience stirred, hummed, asked one another what the director was saying and if they’d heard right.

  ‘Yes, you are quite justified in being taken aback. The woman you’ve seen come to life isn’t in fact the same as the woman of the cartonnage and mummy case of Skipwith 673. Do you follow me? We have combined the two in the interests of aesthetic impact.’

  He paused; sighed; continued: ‘The Museum has withdrawn the publicity material and is in the process of rewriting the accompanying commentary. We did not set out to deceive. We simply wanted to display the kind of body that would, in more usual conditions, have been found under such an exquisite face mask.

  ‘I have also drafted an explanation in a press release that will be available as you leave.’

  There was a pause, a silence in the hall, as the audience tried to understand what they’d been told. Kim McQuy leapt to his feet. He wasn’t alone in waving excitedly towards the speaker.

  ‘What was in the tomb then?’ he called out. ‘Where is she? You owe us a full explanation. Whose is the face on the mask? What were the other things you found there? Were they hers? Her treasure? Her hoard?’

  More stirring and murmurs of approval accompanied his demand.

  The director paused, looked at Hortense, who shook her head and left it to him.

  ‘There was no body,’ resumed the director. ‘That’s why we used another mummy to illustrate the way the mask and case were used to enclose the deceased.’

  Kim McQuy was on his feet now, a slim, whippy-bodied young man in a dark suit with a plain tie and a white shirt. ‘What do you mean “no body”?’ he cried. ‘How can a tomb like that contain “no body”?’

  The director cast a look at Hortense, but she gestured for him to go on. So he nodded, and continued, ‘There was a bundle of stuff, linen strips braided in mummy style. But the X-ray showed, to our very great surprise, that there was no body inside them. There were some traces of human remains, of hair and skin, but no more than you’d find on a hotel carpet. You know the tomb was used as a midden – if you like, it was the equivalent of one of those big wheeled recycling bins the council puts out, and there were lots of odds and ends dumped inside it, of varied interest and value. Then, there were the wrappings themselves. But no one, it seems, was ever buried there, odd as it sounds. It’s just like Andy Warhol – he said he wanted for his epitaph, “Here lies a figment”. Well, the Helen is a figment, I’m afraid.’ The director paused, then, in the reproachful silence that followed, added, with an elegant spreading of his slim fingertips, ‘More than a thousand years ago, our post-modern condition was foreshadowed – hah! That’s life, we’ve got to accept it.’

  Kim was leaping along the row, too fast for the people sitting near him to move out of his way, and he ran up towards the podium and turned to face the auditorium. A Museum guard tried to restrain him, but he brushed him aside and addressed the room.

  ‘You can’t just say one thing and
then another. How do we know what to believe if you can mislead us and then just turn around like this?’

  Hortense shifted uncomfortably, trying, as she realised later, to put distance between herself and the director, even though she knew it would be appalling cowardice to leave him alone on stage.

  ‘We are doing everything in our power to rectify the . . .’ he began.

  But Kim was carrying on, while the audience were getting up, some of them in support but others in embarrassment, looking for their bags and coats, looking away, made shy by his earnestness, his vehemence.

  ‘We want a full analysis of the bundle, we want to see the same tests, the CAT scan and the tomography photographs and the computer-generated 3D model and all the things you’ve done to the other mummy, we want it all done to the stuff in that tomb, to the Leto Bundle. You’ve misled the public, and we demand you make reparations.’

  Hortense looked at the young man, startled. This young man, in his boring dark suit with his cheap haircut, who had taken in her research and baptised Skipwith 673 just like that, no fuss, no problem, with the name of her highly contested speculations. She found herself almost laughing. His excitement was contagious; his indignation refreshed her after the director’s double tongue, after the detective’s speeches. There was the light of outrage playing about Kim McQuy, with a vitality that jumped like lightning from him to her to the crowd in the hall, from whom there came shouts of encouragement, assent.