I didn't want to go home. I wanted to stay out all night and make a bed by the river and light a fire. I climbed up the steps at Waterloo Bridge and ignored the racing traffic so that I could look out on either side at St Paul's and Westminster. It wasn't easy: everyone wanted to get home, the view didn't matter. It was autumn and so the sun was setting early and the air was sharp. I liked it hurting my nostrils and making patterns when I blew out. I watched the sun sliding behind the buildings, and as I concentrated the screeching cars and the thudding people and the smells of rubber and exhaust receded. I felt I was alone on a different afternoon.
I looked at my forearms resting on the wall. They were massive, like thighs, but there was no wall, just a wooden spit, and when I turned in the opposite direction I couldn't see the dome of St Paul's.
I could see rickety vegetable boats and women arguing with one another and a regiment on horseback crossing the Thames.
I had to get on to Blackfriars, there was someone waiting for me.
Who? Who?
Now I wake up in the night shouting 'Who? Who?' like an owl.
Why does that day return and return as I sit by a rotting river with only the fire for company?
Morning. Out at sea the ship held at anchor. Jordan's rowing boat pulled high on the beach. The fire is smoking, it must be blazing when he wakes. In Hell the fires will blaze eternally, there'll be no scouring the sands for driftwood.
When Jordan stirs I've already collected a great pile of salvage and I am opening oysters with my little knife - a fine knife with an ebony handle got from a dead Sir Somebody who happened to be a Puritan. That was before I reformed myself. After the untimely end of Preacher Scroggs and Neighbour Firebrace I vowed to live quietly again and restrain my natural capacity for murder. I do not think of myself as a criminal, and indeed would protest any attempt to confine me in Newgate. My actions are not motivated by thought of gain, only by thought of justice, and I have searched my soul to conclude that there is no person dead at my hand who would be better off alive. As evidence, if any need evidence, I will cite the good wife of Preacher Scroggs, she whose only pleasure had been his member poking through a sheet. When she heard of the death of her husband (I was too ladylike to describe the circumstances themselves) she raised her hands to Heaven and thanked God for his mercy. Such is my humility that I bore no resentment at this mistaken gratitude towards Our Saviour. I wanted no thanks myself, and Our Lord is often robbed of His due. She packed up her things straight away and went to live with her unmarried sister in the town of Tunbridge Wells. I watched her go with tears in my eyes to think what she had suffered and from what horrors she had been released.
And if on Judgement Day it proves I have made a mistake once or a second time, I know Our Lord will wrap me to him as he did the woman taken in adultery and ask, 'Who will cast the first stone?'
When Jordan and myself had each swallowed thirty-six oysters he told me he must leave for London immediately to present the King with his rarest find.
'I have it here,' he said, 'in this bag, but before long it will perish.'
'Not gold, then?' I said, disappointed.
He laughed and assured me there was gold enough on the ship.
'Show me your wonder,' I said.
He unwrapped his bag as tenderly as I had unwrapped him on that first day in the broth-coloured Thames.
'I think it is another fruit,' I said, when I looked on its hide like that of a reptile and its spiky green crown of the kind that would grace an imp in Hell.
'Another fruit?' He seemed puzzled. I told him of our trip to visit the first banana and what a shock it had been in both shape and colour.
'Since that day,' said I, 'there's no fruit or vegetable can unsettle me.'
'I remember that day,' he said.
Then he jumped up and began to collect his things together.
'We will engage horses in the town.'
'And what horse will carry me?'
After some argument it was agreed that we should go to the expense of a carriage. It is my custom to walk everywhere, but as the mother of a hero come home I deemed it undignified to limp into London two days after my son and carrying my own baggage.
'Is your necklace also a precious thing?' I said, feigning only a small interest. He looked at me sharply and stopped his bustling.
'It was given to me by a woman who does not exist. Her name is Fortunata.'
'I knew an Italian pirate of that name once,' I said.
Jordan was staring out to sea. 'It was a day like this she described, when she told me the story of Artemis and why she was in her service.'
'Tell it to me,' I said. 'It is only just light.'
The goddess Artemis begged of her father, King Zeus, a bow and arrows, a short tunic and an island of her own free from interference. She didn't want to get married, she didn't want to have children. She wanted to hunt. Hunting did her good.
By morning she had packed and set off for a new life in the woods. Soon her fame spread and other women joined her, but Artemis didn't care for company. She wanted to be alone. In her solitude she discovered something very odd. She had envied men their long-legged freedom to roam the world and return full of glory to wives who only waited. She knew about the heroes and the home-makers, the great division that made life possible. Without rejecting it she had simply hoped to take on the freedoms of the other side, but what if she travelled the world and the seven seas like a hero? Would she find something different or the old things in different disguises?
The alchemists have a saying, 'Tertium non data': the third is not given. That is, the transformation from one element to another, from waste matter into best gold, is a process that cannot be documented. It is fully mysterious. No one really knows what effects the change. And so it is with the mind that moves from its prison to a vast plain without any movement at all. We can only guess at what happened.
One evening when Artemis had lost her quarry she lit a fire and tried to rest, but the night was shadowy and full of games. She saw herself by the fire as a child, a woman, a hunter, a queen. Grabbing the child she lost sight of the woman, and when she drew her bow the queen fled. What would it matter if she crossed the world and hunted down every living creature so long as her separate selves eluded her? In the end when no one was left she would have to confront herself.
Then Orion came.
He wandered into Artemis' camp one day, scattering her dogs and bellowing like a bad actor, his right eye patched and his left arm in a splint. She was a mile or so away fetching water. When she returned she saw this huge rag of a man eating her goat. Raw. When he'd finished, with a great belch and the fat still fresh around his mouth, he suggested they take a short stroll by the sea's edge. Artemis didn't want to but she was frightened. His reputation hung around him like bad breath. He was, after all, the result of three of the gods in a good mood pissing on an ox-hide. And he was a mighty hunter.
The ragged shore, rock-pitted and dark with weed, reminded him of his adventures, and he unravelled them in detail while the tide came in up to her waist. There was nowhere he hadn't been, nothing he hadn't seen. He was faster than a hare and stronger than a pair of bulls. He was as good as a god.
'You smell,' said Artemis, but he didn't hear.
Eventually he allowed her to wade in from the rising water and light a fire for them both. He didn't want her to talk, he knew about her already, he'd been looking for her. She was a curiosity; he was famous. What a marriage.
But Artemis did talk. She talked about the land she loved and its daily changes. This was where she wanted to stay until she was ready to go. The journey itself was not enough. She got up to say goodbye. She turned.
Orion raped Artemis and fell asleep.
She thought about that time for years. It took just a few moments, and her only sensation was the hair on his stomach matted with sand.
Her revenge was swift and simple. She killed him with a scorpion.
In a night 200,
000 years can pass, time moving only in our minds. The steady marking of the seasons, the land well-loved and always changing, continues outside, while inside light years revolve us under different skies.
Artemis lying beside dead Orion sees her past changed by a single act. The future is intact, still unredeemed, but the past is irredeemable. She is not who she thought she was. Every action and decision has led her here. The moment has been waiting the way the top step of the stairs waits for the sleepwalker. She has fallen and now she is awake.
On the beach the waves made pools of darkness around Artemis' feet. She kept the fire burning, warming herself and feeling Orion grow slowly cold.
The fiery circle surrounding her held all the clues she needed to recognize that life is for a moment contained in one shape then released into another. Monuments and cities would fade away like the people who built them. No resting place or palace could survive the light years that lay ahead. There was no history that would not be rewritten and the earliest days were already too far away to see.
What would history make of tonight?
Tonight is clear and cold, the wind whipping the waves into peaks. The foam leaves slug trails in rough triangles on the sand. The salt smell bristles the hair inside her nostrils. Her lips are dry. The stars show her how to hang in space supported by nothing at all. Without medals or certificates or territories she owns, she can burn as they do, travelling through time until time has no meaning any more.
It's almost light. She wants to lie awake watching the night fade and the stars fade until the first grey-blue slates the sky. She wants to see the sun slash the water, but she can't stay awake for everything; some things have to pass her by. So what she doesn't see are the lizards coming out for food, or Orion's eyes turned glassy overnight. A small bird perches on his shoulder, trying to steal a piece of his famous hair.
Artemis waited until the sun was up before she trampled out the fire. She brought rocks and stones to cover Orion's body from the eagles. She made a high mound that broke the thudding wind as it scored the shore. It was a stormy day, black clouds and a thick orange shining on the horizon. By the time she had finished she was soaked with rain. Her hands were bleeding, her hair kept catching in her mouth. She was hungry but not angry now.
The sand that had been blond yesterday was now brown with wet. As far as she could see there was the grey water white-edged and the birds of prey wheeling above it. Lonely cries, and she was lonely, not for friends but for a time that hadn't been violated. The sea was hypnotic. Not the wind or the cold could move her from where she sat like one who waited. She was not waiting, she was remembering. She was trying to find out what it was that had brought her here. What it was about herself. The third is not given. All she knew was that she had arrived at the frontiers of common sense and crossed over. She was safe now. No safety without risk, and what you risk reveals what you value.
She stood up and walked away, not looking behind her but conscious of her feet shaping themselves in the sand. Finally, at the headland, after a bitter climb to where the woods bordered the steep edge, she turned and stared out, seeing the shape of Orion's mound, just visible now, and her own footsteps walking away. Then it was fully night and she could see nothing to remind her of the night before, except the stars.
On our way back to London Jordan apologized to me for talking so little.
'It was never my way,' he said, 'nor yours either.'
I was perplexed by this, since I like to think of myself as a cheerful person, ever ready with some vital conversation. Had not Jordan and myself talked for ever when he was a boy?
Then he said, 'On my travels I visited an Indian tribe known as the Hopi. I could not understand them, but in their company they had an old European man, Spanish, I think, though he spoke English to us. He said he had been captured by the tribe and now lived as one of them. I offered him passage home but he laughed in my face. I asked if their language had some similarity to Spanish and he laughed again and said, fantastically, that their language has no grammar in the way we recognize it. Most bizarre of all, they have no tenses for past, present and future. They do not sense time in that way. For them, time is one. The old man said it was impossible to learn their language without learning their world. I asked him how long it had taken him and he said that question had no meaning'
After this we continued in silence.
Whilst Jordan was at the Crown of Thorns, dressing himself to present his pineapple to the King, I busied myself as a good woman should, cleaning the hut and brushing down the dogs. He had not seen his home for so long, and I wanted him to be surprised, for I have risen in the world myself these last years. I have begun to sell my dogs to the nobility, and I hope tonight to interest the King in a fine hound with ears that can hear across two counties and legs to make a concubine envious. I have fenced off a plot of garden at the front of my hut, and with all the skills I learned from Tradescant in those six years at Wimbledon I have made a fine greenery with a vine curling up the side wall.
I intend to hide the hound beneath my skirts, and when I am presented to the King I will let it out a little and throw myself on his mercy, acting as though I had not known it to be there. Then, if all goes as it should by rights, the King will weigh the dog's head and note the eager slant of his body and his tail like a weather-vane in the wind. Then he will ask me if he can buy it and I shall become as coy as I am able and refuse and refuse, saying he is only a pet. The price will rise, I know, and then all the rest of the silly sheep will follow suit of the King and order more hounds than I can breed. I see I have a flair for enterprise. It was ever with me, but smothered, I think, under my maternalness and the pressing need to do away with scoundrels.
There is something to be said for this childless quiet life.
And now the bells are striking and I must drape on my pearls and get ready for Jordan. I have washed my neck.
Jack said, The trouble with you, Nicolas, is that you never think about your future, you just live from day to day.'
He was visiting me on board HMS Gauntlet. He was smart and confident. He was the youngest stock analyst in the City. I looked at him mildly and he continued.
'You'll be out of the Navy in a year or so and you don't know what you want to do. You'll turn into a loser, Nicolas, I'm only trying to help you.'
'Do you remember those afternoons in the park, Jack? You always brought your computer magazines and your father's copies of GP. One week you brought a canvas windshield and lay with your face to the sun.'
'And you brought those boat things.'
This is a boat thing, Jack, only bigger.'
'You can't make a career out of a hobby, Nicolas.'
And you? And you?
I tried to make sense of him as he sat at my table, his face in a scowl, his hands fiddling with the newspaper he'd got out of his briefcase. Outside sleet smeared the window.
'If you really want to know, I'm thinking of sailing round the world. The same route as Drake took in the Golden Hind. I'm going to do it alone.'
Jack looked up and gave me a flicker of attention.
'Will you break some record or other?'
'How should I know?'
He stood up and threw down the paper.
'See what I mean? Even when you have a chance to do something useful you don't. What's the point of sailing round the bloody world if you're not going to break a record? You could go round the world in a plane if that's all you want.'
'I want to sail it. They used to think, certainly Christopher Columbus used to think, that the world was five-sixths land and one-sixth water. It says so in Esdras, a book of the Apocrypha. It's two-thirds water, though. You wouldn't know that if you travelled everywhere by plane. Planes make you think the world's solid.'
'And I think the world's divided into two sorts of people.
Those who do and those who won't do.'
'And I won't do, Jack?'
He didn't answer, just fixed on the paper. Then he sw
ore.
'Stupid, some woman's at it again.'
He started storming round the cabin, smacking at the sleet sticking to the outside of the window, with his rolled-up newspaper.
'You'll never hit them,' I said, 'they're on the other side.'
It was the wrong thing to say. He launched into a tirade against all of us who were holding up progress and industry and the free market.
'Stupid woman's camping by some tiny river in the middle of nowhere and moaning on about the mercury levels. What does she want? Does she think industry can just pack up and go home? They've got to put it somewhere. It's not as though they're chucking it in the Thames.'
At the risk of sounding like the Buddha, I said, 'All rivers run into the sea.'
He didn't hear me. He opened the paper again.
'There's going to be a television programme about her, and an inquiry. God, the media's irresponsible. People are stupid. They panic. Before you know it they'll be selling shares and the company'll probably go under. And why? For some loony housewife and a few fish.'
'I don't know what's the matter with you, Jack.'
He came close and swung the chair round so that he was sitting on it cowboy style.
'I'll tell you what's the matter. I work twelve, fifteen hours a day at what I'm good at and I'm getting tired of nosy people poking about in the private business of perfectly respectable companies. Everybody wants jobs and money. How do they think we make jobs and money? There's always some fall-out, some consequence we'd rather not have, but you do have them and that's life.'
He checked his watch. 'I have to go now. Come to lunch some time?'
I nodded. He threw his paper at me. 'Here, keep up with the world, even if you don't want to join it.'
I flattened the springy newspaper when he'd gone and tried to find the article which had upset him. I remembered something he'd said after I'd decided to join up - what was it?
'Typical of you to make a career in the Navy after the Falklands crisis.'