There are whole days when Pericles forgets that he has a daughter. Perhaps it is for the best, since every memory of her is followed immediately by a memory of that blood-spattered chamber and a vision of the box being nailed shut and tarred and tipped into the sea.
Cleon is pained that his friend is suffering and disappointed that they cannot talk as they once did. No volcanoes, no leviathans. Dionyza’s feelings are more complex, as they always are. She is more intelligent and more capable than her husband but has never been given a task befitting her skills. So she must ape subservience and act upon the world through subterfuge. No one will say this, but she steered the royal house through the roughest of storms. In that part of the mind which works neither by reason nor by argument she believes that Pericles was both the city’s saviour and her own reward. Then he was taken from her. Now he has come back, married, widowed, destroyed, in the company of a child born at the same time as her own. The universe is mocking her.
And Marina herself? If she has no father then she has Lychorida. It is taken for granted that the nurse will remain here then continue to Tyre with her charge when the prince is no longer indisposed. She is not asked for her opinion about this. She is rarely asked for her opinion about anything. She is fifty years old. She earned her freedom in Pentapolis. One more year and she would have been sharing a smallholding with her sister and her brother-in-law. She was looking forward to an old age in which she learns how to please herself, how to use time and make friends, sewing her own clothes, growing walnuts and figs, keeping chickens, watching whole sunsets and sleeping past dawn. It will not happen now. Such agreements are never written down and to remind new masters of old obligations is unthinkable. There are compensations. She is not washing soiled linen or tending to an incontinent uncle with a softened mind in some distant outbuilding. She is past the age when her body could be used freely by young men of rank. She is genuinely fond of this tiny child who lost the wrong parent at the moment of her birth, and increasingly Marina is treated as a companion to Phoebe, which places Lychorida within a charmed circle. She is safe, she is warm, she is fed well. How many women of her age and status can say such things?
There is no answer from Pericles’ father in Tyre so after a diplomatic interval Cleon writes a second letter, hypothesising that his previous message may have gone astray. A swift reply from a praetor explains that, “The king was not minded to answer your last, being aggrieved by his son’s continuing absence. He was sick, however, and grows sicker. I write therefore, privately and without the king’s knowledge. He will, I fear, not last. I therefore urge that the prince returns home at the earliest opportunity.”
Pericles has few feelings about either his father’s impending demise or his own subsequent accession, but duty and expectation compel him. The journey has lain ahead for the last three years. He will let it happen. He asks Cleon and Dionyza to look after Marina. She is a complication he does not need, they are better parents than he will ever be and only the gods know how a tiny child will fare in the anarchy that will overtake Tyre if he cannot stay the jackals who will doubtless gather around his father’s corpse.
The Serpent and its crew are gifted to him. It is the least they can do, thinks Cleon, though he cannot help but see it is a reasonable price for lifting a cloud from his own mind in particular and the palace in general.
Pericles steels himself to say farewell to his daughter. It is a measure of his lack of interest that he needs directions to the chamber overlooking the third court where she spends the greater part of each day. She is lying on a rug of black sheepskin in a tiny chair which rocks back and forth as she wriggles. The polished wooden sides are silhouettes of elephants. The nurse is leaning over her, shaking peas inside a sealed length of bamboo. Pericles is relieved to see that the queen’s daughter and her own nurse are also in the room. Their presence will keep the encounter formal.
He holds the nurse’s eye. Lychorida. He remembers her name now. He is afraid that if he looks at the child, if he uses her name, then something vital will give way inside his chest. “I am returning to Tyre. My father is dying. I fear that the inevitable chaos…” Why did he come here instead of simply leaving? Did he want absolution from this old woman? “And I am not good company for anyone. I would not like those near me to be preyed upon by that which preys upon me.” The confession surprises him. Why is he saying this to a slave? It does not matter. He leaves in the morning. “The ocean will be a kind of quarantine.” He imagines sailing on, past the harbour mouth at Tyre, to Cithera, to Syracuse, between the Pillars of Hercules then turning north and ploughing the Atlantic to where the maps run out and the ice begins.
Lychorida is angry at his coldness, and scared lest he see this. It is the first time he has shared a room with his child in a month. Even now he cannot bear to look at Marina. In truth he is not looking at anything. His eyes are blank. Her anger evaporates. There is no one to be angry at. This is not the man who left Pentapolis. He looks like a dead body—smaller, paler, emptier. He could enter a room and no one would turn their head.
“I take my leave…”
The departure is not publicised. Cleon does not want to advertise an opportunity to ogle a great man broken. There is no ceremony. There is unseasonal rain. If it were not for the royal couple and their guard the boat could be returning a minor diplomat or shipping a cargo of painted tiles to the coastal cities of Egypt. Gulls squabble and hop. A shirtless strongman quarters a tuna with a cleaver. A trio of Moroccan sailors play jacks under a half-mended sail propped up by oars.
“I have been a tedious and ungrateful guest.”
“We have had far worse,” says Dionyza, but no one is in the mood for humour.
Cleon says that they will treat Marina as if she were their own daughter.
“I’m so sorry.” Pericles says this to the sky.
“There is nothing any of us can say which will make this easy. We can only wish you well.”
Everyone is relieved when Pericles turns and walks out from under the canopy into the fine rain. A stray dog spooks a horse which rears and whinnies at the back of the tiny gathered crowd. He steps onto the gangplank. A slight wobble where it refuses to lie true on the cobbles. Some small comfort in that, leaving the hard and unforgiving earth. The captain greets him. Dark, weathered skin, a single gold tooth and a lopsided smile. Khalid. Hand flat against his chest and the smallest of bows. No sense of the man’s character. Pericles has lost the ability to judge other people. He turns at the rail and looks back at the city. The whistle is sounded. Ropes are unwound from capstans on the quay and hurled up to the waiting sailors on deck. The gangplank is stowed and the pilot skiff roped to the prow, ten rowers ready to heave the ship through the harbour’s narrow mouth on this near-windless day. The hull is poled away from the hemp buffers lining the quayside.
Should he wave? It would surely make him look like a child. But to do nothing would seem ungracious. He is about to lift his hand when Cleon and Dionyza turn and start to walk to the waiting carriage, four courtiers walking beside them so that the canopy remains over their heads. The rowers take up the slack and the pilot begins the raucous song that will keep the oars in time.
He is going home.
It will take him fourteen years to realise that this is the most foolish thing he has ever done.
When they have docked, Gaius and Nikolaos unload the baskets while Korax and Nonus take the woman up the hill to the doctor’s house. He is not a doctor as such but he owns books, which is qualification enough in this tiny town. They do not mention the gold which they found then lost but ask politely if they may hear news of the woman’s condition and old man Kerimon promises that he will leave a message with the harbourmaster in a few days’ time. He gets his house slaves to wrap her in clean, dry blankets and sends the two fishermen away with the salt-caked shirt, the waistcoat, the woollen cap, the breeches and the boots in which she was delivered.
In truth she does not need a doctor. Her bruises will heal. Her nose will set of its own accord, if a little off-centre. But something important has broken in her mind and it will never heal completely. She will not sleep for many days and even then she will never sleep deeply, knowing that she will wake at some point during the night to find herself back inside that floating coffin. Every time she enters a small chamber or a dense crowd her heart will race, she will start to sweat profusely and feel sick and find it hard to breathe. She will always leave doors open and if one slams behind her she will weep. She will never enter a cave, a cellar or a tunnel. She will, after many years, agree to travel by sea but it will be painful and she will do it only once. She will only ever feel truly comfortable out of doors, in sunlight, away from the coast. Even then she will be struck by moments of blind panic that overtake her with neither warning nor explanation.
She talks for the first time towards the end of the third day. She thanks Kerimon for his kindness and asks that similar thanks be given to the fishermen. She apologises for the fact that she can tell him nothing of how she came to be here. It is both a lie and not a lie. There was a king’s daughter who married a prince and they loved one another beyond measure. It happened a long time ago and far away and there is nothing to connect that woman to the woman sitting here on the terrace under the vines.
She says, “My name is Emilia.”
She was at sea for a couple of days at most, but it was enough to rip away the shell in which she had lived her entire life. She is ordinary now. Life is fragile and she can no longer take anything for granted. Days are all she has and they can be wasted or cherished, difficult as they sometimes are. To walk on warm dry stones is good, to eat fresh bread is good, to drink clean, cold water is good. If she met that prince now, what would she be able to offer him? What could he offer her? And her child? Thinking about this is the hardest thing of all, a hole in her belly which hurts like the labour that very nearly killed her. She does not even know whether the child survived. If they did then they will grow up cosseted and pampered and have nothing in common with Emilia, not unless they pass through a similar ring of fire which strips away the privilege and the presumption. And who would wish that on anyone, least of all on a child of their own? Better that Chloë is dead to all of them, to her child, to her husband and to herself.
It is a chill November afternoon. In the shuttered light of a great chamber the body of an old man lies on a bed, his lower half covered respectfully with a linen sheet. Branches of cypress and pine flank the doors. Thirteen people in dark togas stand around the bed. Two young women stand closest to the corpse, one on either side. The air is so still that smoke rises from two gold frankincense burners in fine, white flutes to head height. Then a physician steps forward and moments later they break into curls and clouds. The physician gently rolls the man’s head to one side. Discreetly he pushes a short ivory spike into the back of the neck, taking care that this seeming outrage is not directly visible to anyone present. The dead man does not react and the wound bleeds only a little. The physician retracts the spike, covers the hole with a folded swab and returns the man’s head to its original position. He nods to each of the women in turn, then retreats. The older of the two bends to kiss the man on the lips. The gesture is more formal than tender. There is an uncomfortable silence which is finally broken by an obese middle-aged woman who says the dead man’s name out loud. A bearded man with lined, conker-coloured skin and a tremor in his hands says the man’s name out loud. Two more of the gathering say the man’s name out loud. The two women are the last to join in with the general chant. There is little enthusiasm at first, but once individual voices begin to blend with the greater noise it gathers weight and feeling, not heartfelt lamentation perhaps but something released and given voice. The sisters become silent and one by one everyone follows suit. The oldest sister says quietly, “Conclamatio est.”
Four burly slaves, freshly laundered, closely shaved and hitherto invisible at the room’s corners, lift the man from the bed and place him on the ground just as he was lifted in the arms of a nurse and placed on the ground when he came into this world. A priest kneels. He is elderly and his legs are stiff. He removes the stopper from a small glass bottle and pours a little oil onto the first two fingers of his right hand. He anoints the forehead of the dead man. He wets his fingers again and anoints the man’s chest. The smell is sweet and sickly and does not complement the incense. Terebinth and cardamom. He stoppers the bottle and is helped to his feet.
The dead man is then dressed in a fresh toga. This could be clumsy and comic but the slaves have done it so often that it has become a kind of performance. There is a brief pause after they are finished, as if they are waiting for applause. The man is adorned with a wreath, a cunning arrangement of wires slipped under his briefly lifted head so that it remains firmly in place.
The priest kneels again. The dead man will need an obol for payment lest he remain stranded on the shore for ever watching legions of the dead being ferried to their final home. But the man’s jaw will not open. The priest leans in to give himself more leverage but to no avail. The corpse is as intransigent as the living man. In different circumstances the priest might twist a knife between the teeth so that the coin could be slipped through as if the head were a money box, but he cannot risk doing this to the king. He must think fast. He parts the toga to reveal the man’s chest. There is uneasy movement in the crowd behind him. He places the obol on the man’s sternum, the sticky film of oil keeping it in place. He covers the coin with the rearranged toga, then, one by one, places the hands over it, hoping that he has performed the actions with sufficient aplomb to suggest that they are an official variation on the standard procedure.
He stands, crosses his own hands in front of him and waits for the room to come to attention then says, “Rex mortuus est.”
Just out of Tyre the Serpent is intercepted by a cutter flying the royal colours. If the portly civil servant is shocked by the change in Pericles his demeanour registers nothing. The man offers his condolences for the death of his wife. Pericles feels again that sick lurch in his stomach every time Chloë is mentioned, one more confirmation that it really happened. “I am afraid to say that I have more bad news.” Pericles is too late. His father died only the day before. “The citizens, however, do not know this yet. They know only that the king is gravely ill. The secret can perhaps be contained overnight, but no longer than that.”
Pericles looks at the city framed by the jaws of the harbour. The architecture of his childhood—the temple to Athena, the long retaining wall of the dam, the cupola of the eastern tower where he hid with Kremnobates. He is now king of this city. Once upon a time he would have taken the elevation in his stride. The presumption that he is superior to everyone in Tyre now seems preposterous. The portly counsellor is wrong. He is years too late. Even before Pericles set sail his father was turning one man against another. It seems unlikely that he has become a healer of wounds in the interim. The gods alone know what is about to be unleashed. Pericles is about to walk onto a battlefield. He needs advisers, he needs staff, loyal troops, knowledge. He is utterly unprepared for the most difficult task of his life. Why did he not plan for this? He must be very careful indeed. If he gets this wrong, people will die and yet again it will be his fault.
“I recommend travelling to the palace incognito. Rumours of your father’s serious illness have stoked strong feelings. Your safety is my primary concern. I fear that dignity must wait.”
Pericles is rowed ashore and ushered swiftly into a closed carriage. There is a crowd in the agora. Soldiers ring the temple to Proserpina. A mob have set a shop alight. Fishmongers, bakers, carters. Two bodies lie slumped against a trough like dozing beggars. There is a crackle in the air like the crackle before a thunderstorm. A statue of his grandfather has been toppled and covered in mud or excrement. Chloë’s ghost rides beside him the whole way. He will speak to his sisters. Blood is the only thing he can rely on now. They will tell him which men he can trust. Think of the city as a ship. Think of a mutiny brewing.
They move swiftly past a noisy crowd waiting for news outside the palace and enter through a small gate in the rear of the main wall, normally used for goods and slaves and waste. Following the portly counsellor and flanked by two guards, Pericles walks through the kitchens. A few heads are dipped as he passes, but what he sees mostly is puzzlement and blankness. Perhaps they see only a nameless dignitary with a military guard, perhaps they recognise the young man but despise him for his long absence, perhaps they are biding their time before deciding their allegiances.
There is a faint oceanic roar echoing in the building which he does not remember and which unsettles him. He understands only when they pass a second-floor window which overlooks the central court whose fourth side opens onto the ornamental lawns between the main buildings and the northern wall. The area has become a camp for a thousand, two thousand, armed men. There are seven rows of tents, there are horses and wagons and water barrels stacked in towers; a field of spears thrust shaft-first into the earth glitters like grass after rain. He can smell dung and leather. Whinnies, yells and the clatter of metal on metal dissolve into one general din. He pauses. The soldiers accompanying him pause. He does not want to appear foolish by asking what is happening.
“It is best if we keep moving,” says the counsellor.
They walk down the Hall of Shields and along the corridor whose swirling blue marble floor he lay on as a child, imagining that he was swimming like a fish through the depths of the ocean. They lead him up the final flight of stairs and enter the council chamber through the big double doors with their curled brass hinges and intricate carvings of knotted snakes and hovering falcons. And in the next long moment he is simultaneously saved and humiliated. His sisters sit beside one another at the head of the table where his father raged and banged his fist. Polished walnut, the zigzag mother-of-pearl inlay running round the edge. No one gets to their feet, no one calls him king, no one performs obsequies of any kind. Is he in danger? He had not expected this.
Ennia stands and walks over. His sisters have become women. Why should this be a surprise? Was time meant to stand still in his absence? “Brother, welcome.” Her voice is stiff and official. “We were all very sorry indeed to hear your terrible news and we will later be able to give your story the attention it deserves but for the moment it must be put to one side.”
He wants someone to tell him exactly what is going on, but when he imagines himself making this angry demand he hears it spoken in his father’s voice and it throws him off balance. Take a breath. Proceed with caution. Be gracious. “I apologise for the lateness of my arrival.”
“If anything, you have arrived too soon.” This is Corinna. “You are a complication we could have done without.”
Ennia touches him on the shoulder. “You must be exhausted from your journey. Perhaps you would feel better if—”
Corinna cuts her off. “He needs to be here.” She fixes him with a hard stare, all the better to examine his response. “I presume you are relieved by our father’s death.”
Suddenly he wants to defend the old man. He looks around. His armed escort stand by the door.
“We have no time for diplomatic niceties.” Corinna will not look away. “People are dying.”
“I left to escape our father. I would have thought that spoke for itself.”
“Some of us did not have that luxury.”
He is being outplayed. He was outplayed before he knew the game had begun.
“Take a seat,” says Ennia.
Diodoros stands and offers Pericles his chair. Or is it Pleuron? One of his father’s generals. He cannot remember their names, yet he had expected to command them. The seat is near the head of the table but it is not at the head of the table. He gathers himself before sitting. “Will someone tell me what is happening?”
Corinna pauses, turning some unspoken question over in her mind. “Lykomedes is gathering troops for a coup.” Pericles does not recognise the name. “A third of the army will support him, a third are stationed here in the palace, a third will follow the prevailing wind. There are riots. People are using the cover of wholesale unrest to settle old scores. It will get rapidly worse if something is not done. My sister and I will go before the people today to announce our father’s death and offer them an alternative to a military dictatorship. It would help a great deal if you kept your head down and did not muddy the water. Rumours have preceded you and the way you look does nothing to contradict them.”
He realises now that the counsellor was waiting in the cutter not to welcome him but to hide him. Fourteen granite-faced men are staring. They are impatient and their sympathies are not for sale. There was a time when he could have walked into this room and taken command of it. There was a time when he could have walked into any room and taken command of it. He has never believed in the Fates. You shape your own life, you see the available futures laid out before you and you choose the most advantageous. He can see now that this is a delusion from which you suffer when the path chosen for you is a profitable one. When the path veers into darker, more difficult terrain you finally understand that what you thought was weakness in others is not weakness at all; it is simply the structure of the world.
Pericles sits down. There is a map in the centre of the table. There are tiny stones on the map, presumably showing the locations of garrisons—at the barracks, the hippodrome, the harbour. There are two boards of bread and olives and halva, all uneaten.
Another of his father’s generals whose name he does not recall says to Corinna, “The promise to lower taxes makes you seem weak. Nor will they believe you. They will assume it is an empty gesture.”
Diodoros says, “Lykomedes offers nothing but nebulous ideas of glory and patriotism.”
“And the fact that he is a man.”
“Offer them trade and stability. Everyone who matters will understand. Glory and patriotism are indulgences which come second to feeding your children and keeping a roof over your head.”
It is a way of working he would never have considered. He is embarrassed to think that were he in his sisters’ shoes he would have simply played a less confident, less competent version of their father. He gets to his feet and says that he will retire. The atmosphere in the room stiffens a little. Two of the guards step forward. Corinna says, “Let him go.”
The portly counsellor appears at his shoulder. “Your old suite has been made ready.”
He is escorted from the room. The conversation resumes as soon as he has crossed the threshold.
He stands at the window of his apartment. He was born in a room at the end of this corridor. The nursery is a stone’s throw away. Halved limes float in a glass bowl of water on the table. There is sausage, there is incense, there are two carved ivory giraffes. He can still feel the airless panic that drove him away, but he no longer has the energy to fight it. He wants to hide in the storeroom at the back of the kitchen eating lokum and salep. But Mustafa the cook died years ago and his father had Kremnobates strangled when he took a bite out of Ennia’s hand. He is fairly certain that the soldiers would not allow him to go to the cupola in the eastern tower. He is so unmanned that he no longer has the energy to feel outrage. A fresco covers the wall opposite the table. The capture of Briseis. The burning of the ships. The suicide of Ajax.
A tiny scorpion scurries along the hot sill. His rooms are at the rear of the palace. He can hear nothing, he can see no gathered troops, no rising smoke, no insurrection, just the overblown town houses of wealthy merchants rising and giving way to hills.
You grow up learning that kingship is natural and eternal, royal lineage a great arch with curves overhead from the forgotten past into the unknown future, giving a city protection and purpose. But it is, in fact, a piece of grand theatre, nothing more than a custom, like money, like honour, and if the majority decide that they will no longer agree to tell the old story then it collapses. At which point there is no turning back. One cannot re-believe when the veil is torn.
There are storks’ nests on the taller chimneys, spatters of white shit on the roof tiles around them.
Let it all burn. None of it matters any more. If this city did not exist, if there were only kelch grass and stone pines and spider crabs and black-backed gulls and the perpetual, unwitnessed accounting of the waves, would the world be richer or poorer?
On the far side of the palace his sisters rise with their generals and counsellors and take their claim to the people.
Angelica sleeps for a little longer each day and rarely leaves her bed. Occasionally she sits in the armchair by the fire. She no longer comes to the kitchen or the dining room. Still she does not talk. She no longer reads or draws or watches videos. It needed work at first, pushing further into this strange country. It is easier now. Perhaps it is the knowledge that she has come too far and that the journey back will be more arduous than continuing. Perhaps it is the gravity of the dark interior which pulls at her with increasing strength as the distance shrinks and her own strength fails.
Philippe insists that she will give in to her growing hunger after two days, after four, after a week, but it is obvious even to him that Angelica needs medical help. To ask for such help, however, would risk his daughter being taken to a place where she may say things they will both regret. He will look after her at home, as he has always done. He will devote himself to this task. They will weather the storm as they have weathered others.
He tells her that he will give her anything she wants if only she will stop hurting herself like this, if only she will stop hurting everyone. He asks Dottie to make the foods Angelica liked best as a child—smoked salmon bagels, tiramisu, whitebait, steamed pears in vanilla custard. He takes them to her room and leaves them on the little table by the window. Even the smell of them makes Angelica queasy, the sweetness, the fatness, the physicality. It is the same queasiness she used to feel when they were travelling abroad and she saw gutters filled with sewage or amputees begging at the roadside with their stumps uncovered. Too much of the world.
Philippe asks Dottie to talk to his daughter. Dottie sits beside the bed. Again, Angelica smiles and holds her hand and again it is hard to suppress the feeling that, despite her failing health, Angelica is the stronger of the two.
Dottie confronts Nikki. If they do not tell someone outside the family then they are complicit, legally and morally. The question of why Angelica has stopped speaking and eating hovers unspoken. To ask it now would be to admit that they should have asked it a long time ago. Nikki says that she will do something, if only to end a conversation that makes her profoundly uncomfortable, and perhaps for half an hour or so she really believes that she will indeed do something, but she has worked for Philippe for too long and absorbed a view of the world in which difficult problems are offloaded to someone who has been paid to deal with such things, the difference being that Nikki does not have the money to pay for someone else to solve this problem.
She does not sleep for two nights. Every time she lets herself drift off she is haunted by the images she has kept behind a locked door for many years and it is less the images themselves that horrify her than the fact that she is seeing them and doing nothing. She has her phone in her hands several times, the dial tone whining. Who can she ring? A hospital? The police? Some local GP with whom Angelica has never been registered? She writes a letter of resignation citing a serious illness in her family. She leaves the letter for Hervé and takes a thousand pounds from petty cash, a sum so small it will hopefully go unnoticed in the confusion her departure will create. She drives to Manchester and knocks at the door of a brother who has not seen her for five years. She sells her car and takes a temporary job as a hospital receptionist and hears nothing more about Philippe and Angelica until they appear on the front page of the national newspapers.
In other circumstances Hervé might find a replacement for Nikki and tell Philippe only when he has resolved the problem, but he is not going to be able to replace Nikki and he is not going to be able to solve this problem. It is the beginning of the end and he is intrigued by the way it will play out, as if he were watching the final episode of a TV drama.
Angelica has lost twelve kilos. She had precious little spare fat to begin with. She no longer leaves her bed except to walk slowly to the toilet and back. Her breath is bad. Her joints hurt. It seems to those around her that she is becoming increasingly confused, but inside her head she is increasingly clear that Darius will come back to her once he has learnt the meaning of love and loss.
Hervé calls a private doctor whose details he was given some years ago by a wealthy friend of Philippe’s. The fee is shockingly high but when he arrives at the house the doctor treats the situation with sangfroid. His name is Kellaway. He is clean-shaven, a small, forgettable man with spectacles who smells faintly of old-fashioned furniture polish. He examines Angelica while Hervé sits in the corner of the room and Philippe stands at the window looking down at three magpies bouncing between lawn and trees. Three for a girl, is that right?
Angelica acts as if the doctor does not exist. It is impossible to tell whether this is an act or a symptom of her deteriorating condition. The doctor says, with no readable intonation, “So, it has been decided that the patient cannot be moved to a hospital,” as if that decision has been taken by God himself. He wriggles his left hand into a thin, blue rubber glove.
“Tell me what can be done,” says Philippe, but Kellaway is not an employee, however much he has been paid.
“Let us not jump to conclusions.” He takes Angelica’s pulse. He listens to her heart. He taps her chest. He shines a light into her eyes. “Catabolysis. The body is digesting muscle and tissue in order to protect the heart and the nervous system. She is also badly dehydrated.” He touches the dry cracked skin of her left elbow. “She has a yeast infection in her throat.” Philippe flinches. Kellaway throws back her bedsheets. “Skin rashes but no oedema. I will assume some level of non-compliance so it’s hard to accurately assess her level of consciousness.” He clicks his fingers in front of Angelica’s face then clicks them above her head. “But she responds to noise and voices.” He pinches her arm as if she were a piece of meat. “And she responds to painful stimuli so I am not greatly worried for the moment. However, she is on the verge of becoming very sick indeed, heart failure being the primary concern. I am going to send a nurse. We will put her on a drip to rehydrate her. Will she need restraining?” He turns to Philippe who simply shrugs. He is both reassured and scared by the way in which this man has taken charge of the situation.
“If necessary we will then fit a nasogastric tube so that she can be given liquid food.” He removes his glove and drops it alongside the stethoscope inside an accountant’s black briefcase.
Philippe watches from the window as Hervé escorts him back to the green Volvo parked discreetly in the far corner of the gravelled rectangle. When the car is gone he turns back to Angelica and feels that bruising wrestle of love and hate. What if she dies? And behind that question, unspoken, its dark twin—what if she lives?
Kerimon is a generous host. He, too, found himself washed up in this coastal town, in his case after his fellow senators died in a coup in Samaria. He has been deprived of the company of social equals for many years and with the exception of this one bloody episode, about which he says nothing, the details of which Emilia later learns from Drusilla, the oldest of the house slaves, he recounts stories constantly, about his childhood and about the town news he hears via the documents he is asked to write and decipher for the illiterate or innumerate. He tells her about the early death of both his parents and the paternal uncle who beat him daily till his maternal aunt stole him away in the middle of the night, how he then grew up in his maternal uncle’s household as Allectus moved through a series of civil service postings along the Persian Gulf. He tells her about the lesser marvels of their own town—the sailor’s son with no toes who could see the future, the widow of seven years who remarried a month before her shipwrecked husband finally returned home, the man who bequeathed his small fortune to a horse.
Kerimon is nearing sixty, a saggy man with a hangdog face and a tendency to drop objects and bump into furniture. He has no sexual interest in her. He is, however, besotted with a succession of young men whose attention is never wholly free of mockery. He has a large library—“a sad fraction of what I once possessed”—and is devoted to the garden laid out along a series of terraces descending to the river which feeds into the harbour. Every so often a grizzled traveller will arrive at the villa bearing a seedling from the world’s end and be rewarded with the kind of money other people spend on carnelian or garnet—mountain rhubarb, a bottlebrush tree, evergreen magnolia, fiercely spiked orange cacti…On occasion, instead of supervising his slaves, he gets down on his knees and digs the earth with his own hands.
She thinks, sometimes, about her rescue. There was money in a bag. If the fishermen took it then they will have made better use of it than she could. One of them tried to throw her overboard. His fellows then threw him overboard. He will have drowned, surely. She has difficulty thinking of these acts in terms of right and wrong. What does she know of the stories which lie behind their actions? How much does one ever know of the stories which lead to the present moment? She has stepped out of life. She no longer has an investment. She can see it clearly now. Everyone inhabits a different world.
She needs to be useful, to do something with her hands. So Drusilla is teaching her how to weave. It calms her, the way the body starts to operate without the mind’s bidding once you have learnt a skill. She is a good student this time around, she takes more care, she has more patience. She weaves a bedspread patterned with orange and blue diagonal lines. She is starting to learn how one weaves figures, landscapes, stories.
Sometimes Kerimon finds her weeping. He seems embarrassed. He fetches a rug and places it over her as if it is cold from which she is suffering. He sits beside her and says nothing. Sometimes she looks at him and finds that he is weeping, too, though whether he is weeping for her or on his own account she never asks.
Four or five weeks after her arrival one of the young men beats Kerimon about the head before stealing a ruby necklace and two silver cups. Emilia finds him in his chamber, sitting on the floor, a bloody gash running through his thinning hair, his right eye puffy and purpled. She cleans the wound then leads him to a stone bench in the corner of the garden where vines create a wedge of dappled shade. She lays the same unnecessary rug over his lap and sits beside him and reads from the Argonautica.
’Aρχόμενος σέο, Φοι˜βε, παλαιγενέων κλέα φωτω˜ν μνήσομαι…
Beginning with you, Phoebus, I will describe the famous deeds of men of old, who, at the behest of King Pelias, drove the well-benched Argo down through the mouth of Pontus and between the Cyanean rocks, in search of the golden fleece…
Autumn is turning to winter. It has been three months since her rescue and she is growing restless. She needs movement, purpose, responsibility, she needs to engage in some kind of business with other people. But none of the skills she possesses have much value at the end of this particular road where every woman weaves and Kerimon has cornered the market in the interpretation of legal documents and the writing of letters. But where else would she go, and why? She is fond of Kerimon. He welcomed her into his home when she had nothing. And as she once needed him now he needs her. Since the beating he moves like an older man who is nervous of falling. She does not like the idea of him living alone.
One of her pleasures is walking in the hills behind the town, about which these maritime people seem largely incurious. She enjoys the quiet and her own company and likes the idea that she could simply carry on in any direction and nothing could stop her, the absolute freedom of it. She is returning to the villa one afternoon by a winding route she has not taken before when she chances upon a small deserted temple once dedicated to Diana but now derelict. Four columns under the portico and a single room behind the rear wall. The former priestess died years ago, Kerimon tells her later, and these are Neptune’s adherents, albeit sceptical ones, too inured to the weather’s fickleness to put anything but superficial trust in prayer.
Her walks keep leading her back to the same spot. It is not the most beautiful of locations, a junction of five cart tracks, used enough to churn the mud but not enough to discourage weeds, two wooden byres left to rot, trees and scrub all around, a view of sorts down to the scruffier end of a scruffy town, other unremarkable hills beyond. There is a row of swallows’ nests behind the pediment. The temple must have been falling into disrepair even before the last priestess left. The wall paintings are sun-bleached and peeling, moss has made its dogged inroads, the initials of children and courting couples are scored into the plaster and builders have begun purloining the more extractable stones. But she belongs here in a way she cannot articulate. Perhaps it is the very unexceptional nature of the place which resonates.
Kerimon no longer has anyone else to indulge and the project promises to keep Emilia in the villa for the next year at least so he is willing to pay for the work. Two men take on the roles of stonemason, builder, roofer and plasterer. They are not craftsmen but one is hard-working and the drunkard is eventually replaced by the hard-working man’s son. The frescoes are restored by a painter of figureheads and shop signs. They are not accomplished pictures but they have a rough vigour and they are certainly eye-catching. Here is Diana hunting with her companions, a large dog at her side. Here is Diana presiding over a childbirth. Here is Diana in a forest, surrounded by a troupe of not wholly believable wild animals, one of which appears to be the offspring of a badger and a horse. Here is Diana bestowing authority upon an unspecific ancient king.
Emilia never becomes the priestess in any official sense. Rather, she realises belatedly that she has been something approaching a priestess in the eyes of the townspeople for a long time, even before she chanced upon the temple. She has possessed since her arrival an aura of the preternatural, the woman fished from the sea, dead then not dead, about whom nothing is known and who knows nothing about herself, the woman who walks alone in the hills and dwells in the villa of the wise man, casting her gaze over them all.
She thinks they are coming to see the results of the restoration or to catch a glimpse of the crazy woman who has taken on this ridiculous job. She does not realise that the conversations these people strike up are anything beyond the ordinary, and it is this perhaps which gives them some of their power. They talk about children who have died of fevers and young men lost at sea. They talk about pregnancies and legacies, about violent husbands and unhappy wives, about wilful children, about wounds to the body and to the heart. She listens. And being listened to by someone held in such high esteem, by someone not quite of this world, makes them feel a little stronger, a little more in harmony with a discordant world, a little more able to solve their own problems without divine intercession. Most go away thinking they have been given wise advice which in truth they have told themselves. Perhaps this is what all prayer is, when the ceremony and the theology are peeled away, a serious stillness in which one talks quietly to one’s own best self.
Marriages are consecrated. Funerals are performed. Small sacrifices are made at the little altar at the rear of the portico. Votive tablets are hung on the wall, plaster tiles bearing crudely drawn names and pictures of fishing boats and babies and naked couples and ploughs and farm animals and coins.
Belatedly she finds herself thinking about the goddess whose intermediary she has accidentally become. Chloë gave the gods little consideration. They were a large and restive family ruling a neighbouring kingdom who demanded regular tribute and needed careful diplomatic handling. Even in her floating coffin she called out to none of them for intercession. But now? As Emilia she pictures Diana in the woods behind the temple, bow in hand, dogs at her side. Increasingly, at dusk, she will see flashes of something between the trees, and while she knows that it is probably the scut of a running deer, she feels…unalone, watched over.
She returns to the story of Actaeon which had appalled her as a child—how the grandson of Cadmus is hunting in the valley of Gargaphie when he stumbles upon Diana bathing in a clear, shaded pool in a sacred grove. Her nymphs cry out but are unable to shield the goddess on account of her height. Having no weapon to hand, she throws water at him and cries out, “Go and tell the story, if you can, of how you saw me naked.” Horns spring from his forehead, his neck lengthens, his ears grow pointed, his hands become hooves, his skin a spotted hide. His dogs can no longer see their master, only a frightened stag. They give chase and drag him to the ground. Forming a ring around the fallen animal so that each dog has a place at the table they fix their snouts deep into the flesh. Terrified and suffering unbearable pain, Actaeon fills the valley with screams which are neither human nor animal. Then he screams no more.
The story is still cruel and unfair, but she knows now that life can be cruel and unfair. There is perhaps some small justice in an innocent man, for once, being the victim of a woman’s capricious anger. But the myth hints at something else, the dangers of looking into the heart of the mystery. Questions always lead to more questions which lead to more questions. Do not seek out the sacred grove. Better to keep running with the hunt. She thinks too about those dogs. Were they, like Actaeon, human once? Did Ovid simply not have the time or the ink to tell their stories? She imagines them, sated and bloody-chopped, looking around for their master, finding themselves abandoned, their warm kennels far away and night coming down.
She never utters the name Pericles, even in the privacy of her own mind. It edges into her field of vision sometimes. She pushes it gently away. She doesn’t know the name of Chloë’s child. It is perhaps better that way.
Winter turns to spring. The hills smell of thyme and sage again. There is chamomile and dittany. There are heliotropes and gladioli. She sees kingfishers and, occasionally, a hoopoe. Two boats go down in a freak storm. Nine men are lost. A wife is left blind in one eye after she is punched in the head by her drunken husband. A house is destroyed by lightning. Nine couples are married. Thirteen people die, five of them babies. The body of a teenage boy is found high in the woods a month after his disappearance. A monstrous fish is caught, its weight beyond anyone’s guessing. It has to be towed back to harbour where a crowd of men haul it up the beach on log rollers. It has an ill-tempered expression, a mouth a child can climb inside and grey skin so smooth and shiny you can see your own blurred portrait in it. Opinions are divided as to whether it is a blessing or an ill omen, though everyone agrees that the meat is delicious. Only a small amount of it can be eaten, however, before the carcase starts to rot and emit a stench so strong it can be smelled leagues downwind. By this point the fish is more substance than object and must be put back into the sea over several weeks, stinking greasy shovel by stinking greasy shovel.
Spring turns to summer. Kerimon is more frail, more easily fatigued. He takes as much interest in the garden as he ever did but he no longer clips and weeds and plants himself. The illiterate and innumerate come to the villa just as frequently, but after untangling a poorly drafted will or a long bill of lading he will sometimes sleep for an hour on the terrace. The difference in age would make them father and daughter but Emilia pictures them, instead, as two birds sitting on a wall, two horses at a fence, the way animals sit so peaceably in one another’s company with neither noise nor fuss nor explanation. She asks him if they should seek the advice of a doctor from another, larger town. He believes that doctors are charlatans and that it is the quality of years which counts, not their number.
Autumn and winter, mild as they are, take their toll. He finds it increasingly hard to breathe and is often racked with a cough that can be soothed only a little by Drusilla’s concoctions of honey, gentian and liquorice. He sometimes dozes off while Emilia is reading to him. He can no longer lie down at night but must sleep propped on a bank of pillows.
Emilia deals with much of the paperwork that continues to arrive at the door. It blends seamlessly with her role at the temple. So much sadness flows from broken promises and monies unpaid, so many tragedies leave bureaucratic chaos in their wake.
Both Kerimon and Emilia know, without speaking of it, that he will die in the spring. He is able to comfort her less and less when the memories ambush her during the day, but caring for him lightens her own burden. He can no longer read. His sight is milky and he cannot see much of the garden. His life has become a small thing.
In his final month he talks about the coup in Samaria, how he watched from an attic window as one of the other senators was skinned by a mob, how he himself escaped by burying himself in a pile of dung on the back of a cart pulled by a merchant friend and how he still bears the scar left by an investigatory pitchfork thrust into the dung at the city gates. She tells him in turn about Chloë and Pericles and the child whose name and gender she never knew. She tells him about the wrestling and the marriage and the birth at sea and how she woke to find herself adrift in a sealed crate.
In his last two weeks he becomes increasingly confused. He thinks he is in Talmena. He thinks he is sailing on the Sea of Azov. He sees elephants. Woken by noises in the small hours they find him sleepwalking, moving with an ease and energy he has not possessed for years. They steer him gently back to his chamber. Come morning he is bed-bound once more. He asks repeatedly about an escaped bird called Autonoë and cries, asking his uncle to stop beating him. He has moments of clarity. In some he is frightened. In others he seems utterly at peace with the world. One afternoon he says, “I seem to be making rather a performance of my departure. You must be exhausted.”
He dies at night in the garden. They find him in the morning curled around an acacia. Drusilla assumes he became disoriented, went outside, could not find his way back in and died of the cold, but Emilia finds a key in the earthenware bowl from which she eats her wine-dipped bread every morning. He must have known that it was his final day. She likes the idea that death did not come to take him away but that he decided to go and meet it.
She finds the locked box which the key opens. It contains papers which transfer ownership of the property and fortune to her. As if such things matter here in Ultima Thule, Kerimon has written in the accompanying letter. You have been my one true friend. Live well.
His body is burnt in front of the temple. The crowd stretches into the shadows beneath the trees in every direction so that the forest seems to have grown from a field of people. One by one men and women climb the steps of the portico to share stories of his generosity. She sees none of the young men who hung about the villa in the early months of her stay. She waits long into the evening for the crowd to disperse. Dark descends and the last embers are still glowing inside the ashy pyre when a woman comes up to her and says that her mother died a year ago but that she still wakes in the night and sees the old woman standing at the end of the bed. Emilia listens. Life has started up again already.
She gives a generous parting gift to the house slaves who wish to leave. Drusilla and Hamda, one of the younger women, choose to remain.
Spring turns to summer. The heat is vicious. A forest fire comes close enough to the temple to leave the southernmost side of every column smoke-blackened. Many plants die in the garden. Someone breaks into the villa at night and steals a little marble bust of Eurynome and an oil lamp in the shape of a lion. The bust reappears in the garden ten days later, slightly chipped. On the same day she hears news of a young man falling to his death from a roof. It is pointless asking whether the events are connected.
Summer turns to autumn. She reads several treatises on plants from the library. She starts to restore the garden. She has never done physical labour like this before. She is surprised to find that she likes the dirt under her fingernails that she can never wholly remove. She walks to the temple every day. She is rarely alone. She prays to Diana. She draws up contracts and tries hard to soften the impact of letters containing bad news.
Autumn turns to winter. The days grow shorter. They close the shutters at sunset and put logs on the fire.
This is her life. It is simple. It is complete.
The gold sits in a small crucible suspended over a fierce little fire which burns white in a tube of stacked stone. It starts to bubble and spit. It is hot enough. Wearing thick leather gloves Hazhmek places the clay mould between the claws of the blackened iron tongs and holds it over the fire. The mould looks like a large and heavily crusted scallop shell. There is a hole in the top no larger than the end of a child’s little finger. Hazhmek sings quietly to himself to time the process. The mould blackens. The song ends. He lifts the mould away, turns it upside down and pours the liquid wax back into the pot which sits on the smaller, cooler fire. The translucent liquid goes pearly as it folds into the parent mixture. He returns the mould to the hotter fire and picks up the crucible of molten gold by one of its two long handles. He lets out a long, slow breath because the gold is precious and spillages are hard to recover. Gently he rotates the handle and a slender tongue of hot metal pours from the narrow spout into the narrower hole. He keeps pouring until a luminous button of hot metal rises in the hole. He rights the crucible and places it back over the fire. He waits for the hot button to scab and darken, then drops the mould into a pot of water sitting behind him.
He removes his gloves, quietly sings another verse to himself then takes the mould from the water. He cracks it against a stone, takes out the cooled metal, brushes away the remaining crumbs of clay, polishes the object on the corner of his jerkin and passes it to Pericles. It is a buckle. There is an emblematic tree in the background. In the foreground a hunter has released an arrow. It is mid-flight in the centre of the buckle. On the opposite side a fleeing boar twists its neck, mouth open, eyes wide. It is a design Pericles has never seen before. The very briefest of moments snatched from time and made into metal.
“Good?”
“Very good indeed. The best yet.” He pats the crouching man’s shoulder.
Hazhmek takes the buckle back. He selects a file from the tool kit and starts to rub away the plug of gold which rose in the mould’s mouth, so that it becomes the base of the hunter’s quiver.
Pericles walks past the wall of wagons to the edge of the encampment. They will all remain here until the growing warmth brings the horseflies and midges and they are forced to drive their flocks further up the valleys. Smoke rises like horse-tails from the chimney hole of the other tents. He can smell mutton boiling. He can hear the whoops and hoots of children, the whinny and jingle of bridled horses, the scrape of men whetting blades. Women sing as they mend felt and leather. He reaches the small tent they have loaned him and for which he is very grateful. It is only the beginning of spring, the nights are still bitter and his journey has been a long and cold one. His camel is resting, bony legs folded under its belly on the moss bed under the little stand of pines. The three packhorses are cropping grass. He sits on a cut log and looks down the valley. The mountains to his right are still white above the deep green of the treeline. The topmost peaks will remain white all summer. The first of the wild flowers are starting to appear in the ungrazed grass on the far side of the river. The pinks and yellows are the ones that always shock him the most, colours he has not seen since the previous year and still does not quite believe. The river is in spate. Come summer you will be able to walk across by hopping from boulder to boulder, but right now it is a rage of meltwater. Sometimes, early in the morning, he sees chunks of ice tumbling downstream. Directly in front of him the little plateau drops away to a sea of bright spring grass which runs unbroken to the horizon. A lammergeyer turns. He unclasps the lid of the iron pot sitting beside the log and takes out some hard mare’s cheese and a length of dried goat sausage.
He does not wear the pointed hat but he has adopted the weasel-fur cloak, the felt leggings, the long boots. His hair is cut short but he has a thick beard. His face is sunburnt and webbed with fine lines. He has lost two fingers on his right hand to frostbite. Under his jerkin his upper arms, chest and shoulder blades are covered in tattoos, a rolling cartoon of hunting scenes—lions killing rams, an elk brought down by two dogs, a vulture pouncing on a small fantastical monster. The seamstress Azhana did it during a long ceremony whose meaning was opaque, the obscure details doubly obscured by the pain and the hemp he smoked to dull it. Lampblack, urine and a bone needle, the most exquisite handiwork. He is half barbarian now.
He has been travelling and trading for fourteen years. The ocean betrayed him so he turned inland. He took two slaves, eleven horses, rolls of embroidered cloth, dried fruit, double-lined leather bags stuffed with cinnamon, nutmeg, star anise…One slave was killed and five horses were stolen along with most of his saleable goods in a short, brutal encounter on the shores of the Black Sea. The second slave slipped away into the back streets of Trapezus. He thought briefly of returning to Tyre but did not want to fail at simple trade, an activity by means of which numberless unremarkable men paid their way in the world. So he used the coins stitched into the underside of his saddle to invest in more produce and kept riding north-east.
It was easier alone. He could move more swiftly, drawing less attention to himself. He was reliant only on his own devices when he entered a new town or met new travellers on the road. He spoke three languages. He could be whoever he needed to be at every fresh encounter. He has travelled to the Greek-speaking colonies of Odessus and Apollonia in the west. He has travelled to Samarkand and ridden east through the Hindu Kush and over the Taklamakan Desert to Tun Huang. He has journeyed south into the deserts where the Persian empire thins to nothing and north by boat into the great frozen forest where there is no summer. He is exhausted. He has deliberately chosen a life in which he is seldom allowed to rest and must be always on his guard and it has worn him down so that he feels and looks like a much older man. These days he sticks to a route he knows well, moving back and forth once every year between Paphlagonia on the southern shores of the Black Sea in the winter then eastwards to the foothills of the Altai mountains during the summer, staying and trading with the same families and villages every year.
He has bought felt hats and silk stockings. He has sold tiger skins and earrings. He has bought dried amber, carnelian, peppercorns and gold toothpicks. He has sold ointments and powders for tumours, impotence, migraines, diarrhoea. He has bought tiny models of men and women carved from deer antlers which can be given the name of one’s enemy and thrown into a fire to bring them bad luck. He has tried it himself, giving the tiny man his own name before burning it, with no discernible ill-effect, unless the continuance of his present life were already damnation enough. He has traded star charts from Chang-yeh and mathematical treatises from Athens. In lonely drunkenness he has paid to lie with women but seldom finished the act, their face overlaid suddenly with the remembered face of Chloë or, worse, the invented face of Marina.
He has seen holes drilled into men’s skulls to release malign spirits. He has seen a chieftain’s dead wife eviscerated and stuffed with hay and chamomile and parsley to keep her body fresh until the ground thawed enough to permit her burial in a holy place. He has seen raiders sweep into a camp at night, hurl lit torches onto tents, rope men to horses and ride in circles over rocky ground for an hour until one can no longer tell whether the meat they are dragging is human or animal. Having misjudged one journey in seven different ways he slept in a cavern dug from a snow bank and, after lighting a small fire, found it not unpleasant, though he came out the next morning to find that two of his four horses were dead. He has seen men who, whilst riding at speed, can fire two arrows simultaneously from one bow and kill a pair of running deer. He has smoked opium and felt an easeful bliss surpassing any he has ever felt and would have smoked it repeatedly were it not for the demons that visited him in the hours following.
He hears, every so often, of a city ruled by two sisters. Some assume that the story is a fabrication. How could women rule a city? Others assume that it is a dire portent of some greater collapse. He hears of their cruelty and of their magnanimity, and gives little credence to either rumour. More significantly he hears of no threats to their reign from inside the kingdom or to their borders from outside. He hears sometimes about their brother, Pericles of Tyre, the would-be king who lost his mind and became a beggar or possibly a disciple of the Buddha, or who died of a snake bite or who lives off fish and meltwater in the great northern forest. Sometimes the story is told as a tragedy and sometimes it is told as a comedy and sometimes it is told as a cautionary tale. He listens long enough so as not to arouse suspicion then leaves the fireside to take a turn in the dark.
For the first few years he is haunted daily by thoughts of the daughter he abandoned, berating himself constantly for his dereliction, his cowardice, trying to palliate the hurt by reminding himself that he would have made a desperately poor father. Occasionally he convinces himself that his actions were altruistic, a self-sacrifice that allowed her to live a better life, but those moments are rare. In the last two or three years, however, he has found himself thinking about her less and less. He no longer feels in control of his life. It is merely the string of events which happen to this body. He can no more blame himself for what he has done than he can blame a dog for killing a rabbit or an old horse for failing to climb a slope of scree.
But today everything will change.
Evening is coming on, that long moment when the light in the valley is both dim and luminous, the colours glowing before they disappear. He finishes his sausage and cheese and has removed his left boot to cut his toenails with the little knife he carries in a tin scabbard on his belt. He can hear drumming from beyond the wagons and the insect buzz of a khomus being played. His horses are settling at last. There is no wind. This is when he sees it, a dark object in the sheer white froth of the churning water.
It is one of the girls from the village, he is certain of it. She will have been playing with friends upstream and lost her footing. He gets to his feet and starts to run, trying to keep pace with the tumbling body. He can see her arms raised. She is alive. “Hoy!” he shouts, though she will not be able to hear anything above the roar of water. “Hoy!” He is wearing only one boot. The current is carrying her too fast. He stubs his toes on a stone hidden by the grass. Only later will he find that two of them are broken so that for several weeks he will be able to ride but not to walk. She snags on a rock and her descent is momentarily paused. Now is his chance. If he leaves it any longer she will be carried over the falls and he will be forced to take a longer route to descend the rocky escarpment to the plain below. By the time he rejoins the river, if she has not cracked her head open on a rock, she will have been swept beyond anyone’s help. He thinks of Marina. This girl is someone’s daughter. He runs into the shallows at the river’s edge. The water is spectacularly cold. The stones under his feet are slippery and though the water is only up to his knees the current is muscular and relentless. The girl’s parents turned away for a single moment and lost her. He turned away from his own daughter for fourteen years. She could be dead. He has managed to keep this thought at bay for all that time. He moves deeper into the angry water. The girl is nearly level with him. He has only moments to reach out and grab her. The river sweeps his legs from beneath him. He is underwater, thrashing in the dark and the cold for a foothold. The drowning girl is his daughter. He is convinced of this. He must save her. If he can save her then he can undo those years of wrong.
Something solid thumps him across the shoulders. He twists and grabs hold. A dead larch trunk has been wedged against the rocks by the force of the current. He grabs it and hauls himself upwards. His jerkin snags on the snapped-off stump of a broken branch. He is still underwater. He rips his jerkin free. He is desperately short of breath. He breaks the surface and looks left, expecting to see the river empty and Marina gone, but the larch must extend halfway across the river because she has been trapped in the same way. “Hoy!” If only she can hold on long enough, if only he can get to her. Reach, grip and haul. Reach, grip and haul. The water yanks and twists at his lower body. He grabs her forearm. There is no time for niceties. He needs to get them both back to the bank before the temperature of the water does the job the current could not do. This will hurt her. He will apologise later. He must drag her along the trunk, yanking her free of the snapped-off branch-stumps in the way he was forced to yank his jerkin free. A third of the way. Half. He can feel rocks under his feet. He has a double purchase now. Ten strides left. He counts them. He must pause to take a breath and gather his strength between each stride and the next. Three. Two.
He grabs a shank of reed and hauls himself onto the bank, dragging Marina behind him. When her feet are out of the water and he knows that she is safe he loses consciousness and falls face first into the grass. He is a bird, seeing the world from high up. It is night and the endless forest below him is split from horizon to horizon by a ragged line of fire which is doggedly consuming the world. He can hear the echoing shouts of Dorkas, his old nurse, telling him to come and eat with his sisters. He opens his eyes. He is lying on his back looking up into a sky of dark blue velvet, his clothes are sodden and he is shaking. Figures stand over him. Twenty-five years in a moment. His daughter was drowning and he pulled her out of the river. He rolls over and reaches out to stroke her hair. She stares back at him blankly. Something is wrong. She is not moving. “Marina?” Her eye sockets are empty. One of her arms is missing. His daughter has been replaced by the corpse of a deer, broken, half-rotted. “Marina?”
He is lifted up, arms over the shoulders of two big men. A group of children lift the deer, swing it once, twice, then launch it back into the river. He wants to cry out, to tell them that it is not really a deer, but he does not have the energy. His daughter sails into the dark. A splash then she is swept away.
He is carried back towards the camp. Snowy peaks float halfway up the sky. Silhouettes of wagons. Tents are lit up by the light of the fires which burn inside. Everyone is watching. He doesn’t understand the language. Then he does understand the language. The foreigner has lost his mind. They strip his clothes. “Bring him inside.” It is Berlan, from whom he buys the horses. He is placed on a low stool facing a fire of turf and bones. Smoke rises into the high cone of the tent. A pelt is laid around his shoulder. It is the skin of his dead daughter. Berlan’s wife, Madya, hands him an earthenware cup of hot milk. It is not the skin of his daughter. He must hang onto these dependable, earthbound people. He looks at the zigzag weave of the carpet under his feet, the flame-light reflected by the tiny squares of silver stitched to the breast of Madya’s smock, her young son and daughter who watch, half terrified, half fascinated, from the shadows. He knows now what he has been looking for, and the only mystery is why it has taken him so many thousands of miles to understand something which would have been obvious even to a fool on that rainy quay at Tarsus.
“Drink,” says Madya.
He drinks and shivers. In the centre of the fire the hot bones crack and spit. He has one final journey to make.