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of the native speech fails to produceinstant amity). I wear the bent sword on a belt slung over my shoulder. My hands are scraped and burned. My hair is a mane.
    I am no longer beautiful, or French, or related to anyone, or learned. I think of my children, the one I gave to the servants long ago and the one cooking inside me now. I swagger with my belly thrust out, though in truth it is shrinking, sway like cow and vomit noisily in the morning. Once Richard espies me peeing in the light of assomaha. I say, Casigno agnydahoa. For once he seems to understand, and we make love beside the sleeping Bastienne, with the cries of the birds rising in the background.
    I have not told him about the baby. It would only send him into a panic. Richard thinks I have gone mad from being stranded on this island. He rescues me with his tennis court, while I gibber incomprehensible words. I cherish him for his faith in his own heroics, for the way he gallantly assumes the roles of father, lover, saviour and pioneering sports enthusiast. He will act the way he has learned to act, even though it is impractical in the New World and will lead only to starvation or other forms of premature extinction.
    The savages call their god Cudragny, according to M. Cartier. I wonder how different a god he is from ours. Of course, we have two now, which will be very difficult to explain. On the eighth day, it occurs to me there may be no God at all. Richard has come down with a fever. At midday, we sight a sail in the distance. I nearly set my skirts alight throwing wood on the fire, trying to draw its attention. Richard fires an arquebus. Bastienne kneels on the beach, throwing clods of earth over her head. I call on the saints and martyrs, the Mother of God. I promise my unborn child to the priests. I whisper a prayer to Mahomet and one to the Lord Cudragny. In this, I follow theancient Roman custom of adopting the gods of conquered tribes into their own capacious pantheon (I read about this in a book).
    But the sail disappears.
Laura’s Bones
    In 1533, King Francis had the bones of Petrarch’s beloved Laura retrieved from her tomb so that he could gaze upon her timeless beauty. It was a modern moment. No one knows what happened to the bones.
    Francis named the General King of Canada, but everywhere his wife goes, the backbiters call her Queen of Nadaz, Queen of Nowhere.
    The most up-to-date geographers, cosmographers, map-makers, astrologers, admirals, kings, court jesters and merchant adventurers of Europe contend that Canada is: (a) a thin strip of land running north-south and dividing the Atlantic Ocean from the Pacific Ocean; (b) an archipelago of large and small islands encompassing a labyrinth of channels leading more or less directly from the Atlantic to the Pacific; and (c) a continent enclosing a vast inland sea — some call it the Sea of Verrazano — with river outlets flowing east, north and possibly west to the Pacific Ocean (only one or two sharpish fellows note that this is physically impossible).
    In his delirium, my lover, Richard, Comte d’Epirgny, one-time boy wonder of the tennis courts of Orleans, takes me for a Spanish priest named Pedrosa Mimosa, who, by internal evidence,is corpulent, avaricious, bald, lewd, holy and wise — a true saint of the cross, much annoyed by the Lutherans’ allowing their clergy to marry. Evidently the good Catalan friar has been a confidante and familiar of my Richard’s dreams since childhood, a boyish fancy who took the road to holiness whilst Richard turned to sport.
    All this is startling to me, who had no intimation of my lover’s depths and complexities. In truth I am shocked when, with utmost gravity, he begs me to hear his confession and begins to list his infidelities, passions, passing fancies, regrets, petty thefts, embezzlements, forgeries and sundry small debts he left unpaid in France. But then, I think, he did jump over-board of his own free will and maroon