It is just after dawn when they see the box. They are returning to port, exhausted and ill-tempered with yet another meagre catch in the half-empty baskets at the stern—wrasse, bream, a young tiger shark which does not look healthy. They are tempted simply to sail by. The box contains something, certainly, given how low it is riding in the water, but the gods have shunned them so doggedly over the last few months that it will doubtless turn out to be filled with rancid meat or sodden flour or shattered earthenware. It promises some small entertainment, however, and none of them can resist the faint hope of treasure which will transform their lives. So they pull alongside, slip a rope under each end and heave.
It is very heavy indeed, doubtless full of seawater, though why someone should go to the trouble of tarring it like this is a puzzle. And if someone went to the trouble of tarring such a box why would they do it in so amateurish a manner? “I’m breaking my back for a piece of junk someone threw overboard.” “Do you really want to hear another crew bragging about how they hauled in a crate of opals?” “Here it comes.” The box bangs down hard onto the deck and rolls over. There’s water inside, certainly, but some heavier mass sloshing back and forth in the water, something big. “Open it, then.” Gaius grabs a knife and stabs it into the point where the lid meets the corner under the sticky black covering. The wood splinters. He lifts his foot and stamps on the handle of the knife to drive the point further into the gap, as if he were driving a spade into hard earth. The lid splits away and water gushes onto the deck. And with the water out flops a hand, pale, thin, unmoving. Everyone steps back. “Neptuno has ago gratias meo patrono,” mutters Nonus to himself, “qui salsis locis incolit piscolentis…” “What if it’s not human?” says Nikolaos.
“You are a child, Nikolaos,” says Mettius. “Do all of us a favour and hold your little tongue.” Gaius drives the knife into the opposite corner of the box. The lid comes away in its entirety and a woman’s body is washed onto the deck by the remaining water. She is wrapped in sodden grave clothes, bruised and bloodied with a broken nose. Nikolaos makes a noise like a small, frightened boy. This scenario did not feature in any of their imaginings. Then Mettius stoops and picks up a sodden hessian bag none of them has yet noticed. He hacks it open like a rabbit’s belly. Gold coins clatter onto the wet deck. Tetradrachms? They have no idea. They have never seen currency of this value before. Mettius throws his head back and cries like a wolf and everyone feels the mood shift. They are poor men, everyone has a knife in their belt and accidents happen all the time at sea. “Hoist her overboard,” says Mettius. No one moves or speaks. “She’s no use to anyone now.” But Korax is holding a sheaf of parchment he has retrieved from the bag Mettius has dropped. “Nikolaos?” Nikolaos takes the parchment. There is writing on it, in Greek, which he can read after a fashion. The ink has run badly but the script is still legible. His shipmates are illiterate. If he thinks fast he might be able to invent a message which will get them all back to harbour alive. “Read it, philosopher,” says Mettius, who is picking up the gold coins one by one. The message is so extraordinary, however, that any thought of saying something different slips from Nikolaos’ mind. “…and use this money to grant her a burial befitting the daughter of a king.”
Mettius takes the parchment from his hands, rips it into four pieces and throws them overboard. “What difference does it make who she is?” He lifts two stacks of gold coins between his forefingers and thumbs. “This is what matters.” He holds everyone’s eye in turn to make sure they understand. He drops the coins into his pockets and grips Nikolaos’ chin. “What did we find in the box?” “We found a woman’s body.” “So clever but so stupid.” He slaps Nikolaos’ face and grips his chin for a second time. “What did we find in the box, boy?”
“She’s moving.” It is Nonus.
Mettius lets go of Nikolaos. Everyone looks down. The woman twitches, then rolls over, coughing bile and seawater onto the deck. Mettius bends down and grabs her arm. “Let’s get her over the side before you bed-wetters start having qualms.”
He has lifted her by the armpits when Nikolaos hits him. The boy is not strong and the playground blow lands awkwardly but it is enough to knock the bigger man off-balance so that he lets go of the woman and stumbles face down onto the washboard. Gaius takes the woman and drags her under the standing shelter. Nikolaos has no plan. He is simply no longer able to control the anger which he has stoppered up over three years of humiliation. He pulls the knife from his belt and stabs Mettius in the back of the thigh. Mettius roars. Korax and Nonus look at one another, then over at Gaius. It is obvious what they must do right now, but they need to know that they are all going to share responsibility.
Mettius cannot stand. “Help me!”
Nikolaos lifts the knife again but the other men move him aside. He has already done his part. They each put a hand under Mettius’ legs and hoist together so that he pivots over the transom into the water. He turns and grips the rudder. Korax raises his own knife so that Mettius has to let go before his fingers are sliced off. “Row!” shouts Korax. Nikolaos grabs an oar. Nonus grabs an oar. Mettius flails in the water. He cannot swim. Nikolaos and Nonus fit the oars into the rowlocks, sit themselves on the bench and pull hard. Gaius is wrapping a tarpaulin around the sodden woman.
“I have the gold!” yells Mettius. He is holding up one of the coins and laughing, as if he is going to paint hell red at their expense. Korax rehoists the sail. Mettius slips under and resurfaces for one final time. Then he is gone.
His erstwhile colleagues are an hour out of port, enough time to hone the details of the story of how their captain roped a lead weight to his own ankle before stepping overboard. It seems plausible that a man filled with so much anger should finally turn it on himself. Besides, no one is going to ask questions, least of all his widow, though they would like to have given her a gold coin or two to help her feed her children.
Each man donates a piece of dry clothing. The woman is shaking and cannot talk but she is alive. None of them have seen royalty in the flesh before, and none expected to see royalty in so sorry a state. The wife of Pericles of Tyre, so the parchment said, though they can tell no one, lest someone comes asking for the other contents of the bag. She looks as if she has lost a long boxing match against a much stronger opponent. Was it a punishment or a mistake? Did family or enemies do this to her? The men are in a fairy tale. They fished a princess from the sea, for a whole minute they were rich beyond their wildest dreams, they killed a man and then they were poor again. The loss feels like some kind of recompense for taking a life, but those coins will glitter in their dreams for the rest of their lives.
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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.
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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 Artemis, 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 Artemis presiding over a childbirth. Here is the Lady of the Beasts 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 Lady Moon 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 the Huntress 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 Artemis 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 ---antlers--- spring from his forehead, his neck lengthens, his ears grow pointed, his hands become hooves, his skin a spotted hide. His hunting 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 deer 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 blackbirds 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 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 songbird 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 the Goddess. 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.
