I’m tired, he says. Tired of planning and plotting, protecting, fighting, moving. So tired. Am I allowed to say that? His laughter is ghostly.
I think a little honesty is permissible, I reply wryly. And you’ve never been one to hold back.
Nor you, he says. How we used to fight.
I hadn’t realised we’d called a truce! I say, before grinning.
He looks at me, really studies me in the darkness. It’s good to have you back. Even this way.
Don’t sound so delighted, I say dryly.
His expression grows embarrassed, even ashamed. When Raphael first devised a plan to find you and preserve you, I admit to being against it. I thought you were dead the instant you were cast down. All of Luc’s intent towards you was there in his face. But Raph kept insisting you were alive, and that Luc would throw everything he had into looking for you because of that vow he made, word of which had already spread to us. Even for creatures as we are, there are no secrets. Someone always hears, always knows.
To be honest, we didn’t know what condition you’d be in if you ever ‘woke’ again. Of us Eight, I think Gabriel missed you most. He missed your friendship and your singularly opinionated take on every aspect of every thing. Raphael’s idea of you is clouded by too much dangerous emotion, but Gabriel just missed you. He said you used to make him laugh — and very few things in life make Gabriel laugh. He will be glad to see you again.
If he’s still alive, I think fearfully, and Uriel squeezes my hand before releasing it.
We’ll find him alive. His reply is too quick, too certain, as if he’s trying to convince himself of the truth of his words.
We sit in the darkness for a while, shoulder to shoulder. And it may not be a feeling with any basis in reality, but I’m somehow connected again, to my people, if only for a moment. I’m part of something far greater than I am, which goes beyond merely existing, merely surviving. I hadn’t realised how much I needed to know that. Just sitting in the dark, with Uriel beside me, Ryan breathing at my shoulder, has a healing quality.
But time marches, we two can feel it. We are its keepers, its historians; it beats in us, can never be denied.
We should wake him, I say finally, reluctantly, indicating Ryan.
It is time, Uriel agrees.
He rises silently, holding out his strong hand to me, and I take it.
We’re on a tourist train bound for ‘Kilometer 104’, a station at Chachabamba, about sixty-four miles from Cusco.
Watching Uriel pick a carriage, pick a seat, had reminded me of me: he’s sitting with his back to the wall right beside the exit to the next compartment, in an aisle seat that gives him an unimpeded view of the entire carriage, which is empty save for us. I’m between Uri and the window, my back to the wall, too, because old habits die hard. Across from us, Ryan’s staring, awe-struck, at the rain slicing down the sheer faces of mountains that drop away into deep ravines, wave after wave of them.
Just before the train left, Ryan had tactfully suggested that maybe Uriel wouldn’t want to be seen climbing the Inca Trail in a cashmere sweater, chinos and leather loafers with tassels. A blistering silence had ensued, but Ryan and I had exchanged covert glances when we’d looked up from counting the stash of money in our pack to see Uriel dressed in an anonymous-looking, red and navy hip-length hooded parka with a drawstring waist — like one we’d seen on some other gringo at the station — a heavy rollneck sweater, kind of like mine except in navy, and black trousers with cargo pockets, heavy boots, sunglasses, and a black beanie.
Okay? Uriel asks inside my head, when he catches me staring at him, and I give him the thumbs-up.
‘Though you could lose the sunglasses,’ I say. ‘We’re inside.’
Ryan’s mobile phone rings, drawing Uriel’s gaze immediately. Ryan puts his hand inside his leather jacket and pulls it out, surprised.
‘Lauren?’ he says suddenly.
Across from him, Uri and I are instantly still.
‘What is it?’ Ryan asks anxiously into the screen. ‘What’s wrong? I just checked in yesterday, right? From Tokyo.’ He looks at me for confirmation.
I nod. It feels like a lifetime ago to me, too.
Lauren’s voice comes across loud and clear and frightened, ignoring his questions. ‘Ryan, is Mercy there? I need to ask her something. Can you put her on?’
I swing across to the window seat beside Ryan and we put our faces together in front of the screen. ‘I’m here, Lauren,’ I murmur. ‘Shoot.’
‘There’s a man standing outside our house, right now,’ she says, her voice high and panicky, ‘and I think I’m the only one who can see him. Whenever I look out the window, he’s just … there. He raises his head when I do it — like he’s looking into my eyes.’
I go cold at her words. ‘Describe him,’ I say.
‘I can’t, not really.’ Her words tumble out in fits and spurts. ‘It’s, like, when I look at him I can’t make out the details because he’s, like, glowing in this robe thing. Maybe he has dark eyes and dark hair, but I can’t be sure. When I look at him, I feel sick. It’s like I can’t focus. He’s there, but he’s not there. I can’t explain it.’
Uriel says suddenly inside my head: The colour of the light. Ask.
I lower my voice, trying to sound as calm and normal as possible. ‘It’s okay, Lauren, it will be okay. Just tell me what colour the, uh, aura, he’s giving out is, if you can.’
Lauren’s almost crying. ‘It’s bright, bright but kind of grey. It doesn’t make any sense … God, I know I’m not making any sense. I can hardly stand to look at him, but when I asked Dad whether he could see anything through my bedroom window he said there was nothing there. But he’s there all the time. Not Dad, the watcher. Even when I sleep. When I wake up, he’s there. When I look out, he’s there.’ Her voice has risen rapidly, like a scream.
‘How long?’ Uri asks sharply.
‘Lauren,’ Ryan says soothingly, as his sister holds one hand over her mouth and weeps. ‘Lauren. How long has this been going on? How long?’
‘Two days, three?’ she sobs. ‘I’m not sure when I first actually noticed. What do I do? What do I do?’
Ryan says fiercely, ‘You get our parents and get the hell out of there. Take Rich with you, too, if you have to, just get them out of town. Tell them anything.’
Uriel and I exchange worried glances, and he murmurs, ‘I’m not sure that’s the best idea, Ryan. Away from Paradise, they might be even more vulnerable to —’
‘Luc’s having the house watched,’ Ryan explodes. ‘We’re not like you.’ He jabs at the air. ‘You can’t expect me to tell my family to stay there like, like targets!’
I go cold as I remember what Luc said in Milan, inside the limousine, when he’d appeared like a vision to me: Come to me. Only then will you be safe. Flee the Eight and their legion at whatever cost. But if I should somehow fail, then locate that human boy and return with him to the place where he lives, to Paradise. He, too, will play a part in the final reckoning, when all debts due and owing to me shall be met in full and repaid in blood.
‘Send help!’ Ryan says violently, glaring at Uriel. ‘You could do that, right? If you wanted to.’
Uriel frowns. ‘All the elohim and malakhim that can be spared to fight Luc are massing somewhere only Michael knows of, awaiting his orders. He is our Viceroy, the one who commands us in the name of our Lord. But now he’s missing, and I am just one upon this earth; alone except for Mercy, with no word of where the others are. As soon as we locate Gabriel, we’ll send what help we can. But we need to free Gabriel first. It’s imperative.’
‘How is Gabriel more important than the people I love?’ Ryan thunders.
He says into the screen, ‘Get out of town, Lauren, get them out of there. If they don’t know already, don’t tell them why, just make it happen.’
Still weeping, Lauren doesn’t reply, she just hangs up.
Ryan throws his phone at the back of his seat, then
strides down the length of the carriage to get away from us, his arms folded around his head in anguish.
He doesn’t come back, not until the train pulls into the station known as Kilometer 104, and he’s forced to get out with us.
Ryan doesn’t meet my eyes, and he won’t look at Uriel at all, as we pull up our hoods against the downpour and walk the four hundred or so feet to a small guardhouse by a narrow suspension footbridge over the tumbling, swollen Urubamba River. The ground is slick and heavy with mud, but I think I’m the only one who notices how Uriel seems to glide across it without stumbling, how the rain and dirt don’t seem to touch him at all.
We line up with all the other trekkers and their local guides and porters — about twenty people at most, some of them clearly having second thoughts about pressing on. Mateo makes his way over to us, his head bent. He’s wearing a hooded, heavy-duty khaki parka over dark pants, a pair of battered shoes in place of the rubber slides he’d been wearing the night before, and a large backpack as wide and almost half as tall as he is. We’d requested no porters the night before, and Uriel looks at the large pack enquiringly as Mateo reaches us.
‘Food, water, rain ponchos, blankets, first-aid kit,’ he explains.
Uriel gestures at him to hand the pack over, offended to see anyone carrying anything on his behalf. Mateo hesitates for a moment, before shrugging it off and passing it to him. Uriel slings the pack over his shoulders, ignoring the waist and chest straps because it weighs nothing to him.
I get the wad of euros Gia gave us out of my pocket and shove them into Mateo’s hand. He hasn’t yet mentioned any kind of payment.
‘This is for you,’ I say. ‘Thirteen hundred and seventy euros, to cover the three of us. It’s everything we’ve got.’
Mateo shakes his head, tries to push the money back into my hands. ‘I can’t take it, señorita,’ he says earnestly. ‘It is too much. It is only a few hours of walking — you tell me no porters, no bus, no overnight hotel. I would do it for nothing. It is my pleasure.’
‘Please,’ Ryan shouts, over the sound of the rain, ‘take it. If you can’t use it all, share it with Gabino and his family. To thank them for taking care of me, for giving me help exactly when I needed it.’
His voice is bitter and I know he’s thinking of his own family.
Mateo nods, finally, and zips the money away in his jacket. He retrieves some paperwork from another pocket, enclosed in a battered plastic sleeve, and blinks at me, at Ryan, through the rain. ‘Remember that today you are Estelle Jablonski of Mississauga, Canada, and you are her boyfriend, Clive Butler, also of Mississauga, Canada.’
Ryan looks away without replying.
‘And you, señor,’ Mateo says to Uriel, ‘are Gerry McEntee Junior from Johannesburg, South Africa. Okay?’
Uri shrugs, and Mateo hands out the three permits that bear no relation to any of us. The two bored guards at the checkpoint barely lift their eyes to look at them, and then we’re on the swaying Chachabamba footbridge, white water roaring below.
Ryan’s already in trouble as we begin our ascent up a steep, grassy hillside surrounded by a vast mountain range on all sides, snow lying on distant peaks. From valley to valley, I see dark storm clouds, the occasional flash of lightning. It’s only just after nine in the morning, but we’re moving through a strange kind of grey half-light and even I’m having trouble making out Ryan below us. He’s fallen so far back that another tour group coming up behind has almost overtaken him.
I walk back down the slope towards him. When I reach him, it’s automatic what I do: I take his arm. He’s still so angry that he tries weakly to shrug me off, but I don’t let him. His chest is heaving, the almost horizontal rain running down his face in rivulets, like tears.
‘I’m so far away,’ he grates, as he stumbles along, looking at his feet rather than the astounding, almost prehistoric grasslands around us, and certainly not at me. ‘Anything could be happening. I should be there.’ Then it slips out before he can take it back. ‘I wish I’d never met you.’
‘You don’t really mean that?’ I say, as wounded as if he’d taken a weapon to me. Despite all that has happened, I never wish that. Ryan is synonymous with life for me.
He drops my arm like it’s burning him. ‘I don’t know what I mean. Without you, I wouldn’t have Lauren back. With you, I feel helpless, when I used to be known for my strength and speed.’ His laughter sounds as harsh as his breathing. ‘I’m just some guy you keep around,’ he murmurs. ‘I don’t know why you even bother with me.’
He won’t let me defend us, just holds up a hand to silence me.
‘Don’t go snooping around in my head right now,’ he mutters, ‘because you won’t like what you see there. Go be a superhero, or whatever, with your superhero friends. Just give me some space — I need to think.’
He walks away from me then, deliberately pushing himself to pass Uriel and reach Mateo up ahead, though it looks like it’s killing him to do it. And it’s such a Ryan thing to do that I want to smile as much as I want to cry.
I rejoin Uriel, who’s walking easily. He seems taller, more alive out here, even in his human form, even though the elements are throwing everything they’ve got in our faces. Wind and water. But not fire. We’re bringing the fire.
Ryan falls back again, his face set and miserable, as we continue ascending sharply in driving rain, through the thinning air, thousands of feet up. Mateo warned us the night before that it would take at least three or four hours to reach the first set of ruins along this stretch of the trail, but the punishing pace that Uriel is setting is pushing Mateo, Ryan, even me, to go faster and harder. The other groups we left with are nowhere in sight.
In the middle of a raging downpour, Uriel starts to sing:
Lulley, lullay, lulley, lullay,
The falcon hath borne my mate away.
Suddenly, there’s no wind, no rain, just the sound of his voice. I stop dead in my tracks in astonishment — at the aching beauty in his voice, in the words, in the melody, cast in some ancient and peculiar minor key.
All of us have stopped, in a ragged, drawn-out line down the narrow, rocky trail, except Uriel, who keeps walking in long, easy strides, singing in a pure, clear, resonating tenor that seems to come back at us from all the surrounding mountains.
He bare him up, he bare him down,
He bare him into an orchard brown,
In that orchard there was a hall,
That was hanged with purple and pall.
And in that hall there was a bed,
It was hanged with gold so red.
And in that bed there lieth a knight,
His woundes bleeding day and night.
By that bedside there kneeleth a maid,
And she weepeth both night and day.
And by that bedside there standeth a stone,
Corpus Christi written thereon.
Mateo points into the sky, astounded, and a giant, winged shape seems to coalesce out of the darkness above us, out of the rain. I tense instantly, preparing to duck, or to fight if it be demon born — until I see that it’s a bird. Not the falcon Uriel sang of, but a giant black condor, its wingspan at least nine feet across. It passes so close overhead, in a single smooth sweep, that I feel a rush of air, hear the sound of its wings passing over, as Uriel finishes with his original refrain:
Lulley, lullay, lulley, lullay,
I join him, feeling almost compelled to do it, singing in an alto counterpoint that is rusty and hesitant, but as weirdly resonant as the thread of Uriel’s melody:
The falcon hath borne my mate away.
Our voices echo back at us from the stone before dying away. As the song ends, Uriel just keeps walking, as if we have not just produced the most glorious sound anyone will ever hear on this mountain.
Mateo shouts in wonder, ‘I have walked these paths for many, many years and I have never seen a condor pass so close! It’s as if he brought it down from the sky.’
S
till awe-struck, he hurries to catch Uriel.
I continue uphill, occasionally glancing back at Ryan trailing behind us, head down against the rain. I wish he’d make some attempt to try and catch me; there’s so much I want to share with him. Carmen was a soprano, and I’m not! I want to tell him, though what use that information would be is anyone’s guess. Even when we’re not together, I find myself telling him things in my head, or storing up impressions, anecdotes, stories to tell him later, though we might never have a later. It’s got to be proof of love, or at least of madness.
I think this is the first bad fight we’ve ever had; and this edgy, unsettled, unhappy feeling I’m having is the feeling of being shut out.
My feet suddenly hit cut granite: an Inca stairway carved from living stone; and above the sound of the rain there’s the sound of something else, something elemental, that’s growing in power. Then I round a corner, and see a ruined city of light grey stone clinging to the cliff face, spilling down the side of the mountain in graceful, concave terraces, punctuated by ancient fountains and watercourses. Behind and above it, across a ravine, is a raging, tumbling waterfall — glorious, eternal, uncaring, vastly swollen by the interminable rain.
I turn automatically to share what I’m seeing with Ryan, but, of course, he’s not there.
Mateo shouts down to me from the pathway above: ‘Wiñay Wayna!’
And I know that the name of the place means ‘forever young’, but it is young as we are young. It endures, like we do, because we were made to.
I see him turn to Uriel and gesture. I can tell that he’s suggesting a break, but Uriel shakes his head. Mateo argues, and points down to Ryan, who is still struggling below me on the stairs, every line of his body telegraphing his sheer exhaustion and misery.
‘Ryan? Break?’ Mateo calls to him anxiously.
Ryan looks up and shakes his head, proudly, bitterly, before looking back down at his boots. So we don’t stop for a break because no one’s asking to stop, and Mateo has no choice but to agree.