The Bedlam Stacks

  ‘I think he could have dragged you quite far,’ I said. I found his handkerchief and scooped up some snow with it so that he could hold it to his chin. ‘But I don’t think he’s mad. Martel will raze the place if anything happens to us and everyone certainly thought something was about to happen.’

  ‘Yes.’ He sniffed, then winced. ‘That was interesting. That was fear-of-God shock, not fear of some fellow with a bow and arrow. Or Martel. You know, I’ve got a theory about this place.’

  ‘What?’

  He pushed his wet hair back. I’d never noticed before, but he was beginning to lose it, just up from his temples. ‘You know the Incas practised human sacrifice? You find the bodies sometimes, miles up in the mountains. All the victims are children. Completely perfect children, which isn’t a coincidence in a society that didn’t know siblings marrying was a bad idea. Perfect teeth, virgins, everything. The idea is, you see, nothing impure for the gods.’ He lifted his eyebrows. ‘Notice it was him who fetched me. No one else crossed, even though it was an emergency and they wanted to. He’s the only healthy person we’ve seen here. That’s why he can go over. It’s holy ground.’

  I looked back at the town and the ragged line of people limping over the bridge. ‘So cripples and invalids are . . . impure.’

  ‘Right, exactly. So not allowed. They’re left here, past a clearly marked line, in salt, which in itself is all about cleanliness, isn’t it. And the graveyard, and the altar, look – both beyond the salt.’

  I hadn’t noticed before about the altar but he was right. It was exactly on the salt, or where the salt would have been under the church floor. Standing in front of it yesterday, Raphael and I had still been on the Bedlam side, but the statue behind it wasn’t. Which was why, I realised, the church’s layout was inverted, with the altar at the wrong end of the cross. The building was a lot older than the Conquest; it must have been a native shrine long before it was a church. When the Jesuits arrived they must have tacked on the spire and kept the old altar in place.

  ‘That’s interesting,’ I said dutifully. ‘Was testing your theory worth being punched in the head?’

  ‘Are you joking? There are about fourteen academic papers in that, which you’d know if you ever stirred yourself to join any societies.’ He looked back at the border. ‘I wonder why he went in after me.’

  ‘Martel.’

  ‘I bet he could get away with losing one of us,’ Clem muttered. ‘One could be an accident.’

  ‘You’re right, I probably could,’ Raphael said. He pushed the door open and dropped a towel on Clem. ‘So don’t do that again.’

  ‘Is that what happened to the last expeditions?’ I said. ‘They crossed the border?’

  He nodded.

  ‘Why would they do that?’ Clem asked.

  ‘Because the cinchona woods are that way.’ I pointed. ‘Through the forest. The river path traces a big loop. They thought they could save time.’

  Clem looked towards the salt line again, then the path that stretched on around the river – or what should have been the path. It was nothing now except a space where snow heaped five feet high against the tree trunks. ‘How long did you say the snow would be here for?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Raphael said, ‘but I doubt it will be long. It’s summer now, it should be warm. Why? Just be patient; it won’t kill you. Crossing the border will.’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘It’s not impatience. We’re going to have timing problems if we wait too long. If we hit the Indian monsoons, we won’t be able to plant anything. They start in June and last until September. We need to be well clear of them, which means we have to arrive in Ceylon at the end of May, at the latest. It will take a month to get back to port from here, and another three weeks at sea, if everything goes smoothly. If we’re to have any kind of safe leeway, we need to leave in three weeks. If we don’t stick to that, we’ll reach India with nothing but a handful of very expensive firewood, even if we manage to retrieve cuttings.’

  He watched me for a second and I thought he would hit me. I leaned both hands on my cane and decided he would just have to do it, because I wouldn’t be moving.

  ‘That it’s problematic for you doesn’t change anything. You can’t cross the border.’

  ‘Can we employ someone to help clear the snow on the path around?’

  ‘No. People here aren’t fit enough and you can’t take the fitter ones from the cocoa farm. They have to hit their quotas or Mr Martel won’t pay. Just wait,’ he said quietly. ‘Wait another week. No one knows what the weather’s doing. This might all be gone tomorrow. This is summer. There shouldn’t be snow at all.’

  ‘Then I can write to Martel and ask him to send men to help clear the path,’ I said, aware I was rubbing him up the wrong way but I didn’t want to think of what I was meant to do if we couldn’t get through. ‘We can say the coffee we want is down in the valleys. After this snow, the stuff you grow around here is definitely dead now.’

  ‘Someone would have to walk on the river back to Azangaro for you to send a letter to him,’ Raphael said, a little dangerously.

  ‘We can pay. Money isn’t in short supply,’ Clem broke in. ‘I think that’s an excellent idea.’

  Raphael didn’t reply at once and I could see him making a survey of the possible futures. If he forbade us from sending the letter and the snow stayed, there would be no choice this time next week but to try through the forest, and he couldn’t watch us for every minute of every day. If he said yes, we would wait for Martel. He didn’t seem angry about it any more; we were making him anxious. Not even anxious. He was starting to look frightened.

  ‘You won’t make yourself any friends if he comes in two days’ time only to find the snow has already gone,’ he said.

  ‘I’ll say I made you. He can’t be angry with you.’

  ‘Fine,’ he said, almost too quietly. ‘Ask around town, find someone who has the time.’

  He had brought his bag out as well as the towel for Clem and he went back to the St Thomas statue to wind Maria’s prayer around its wrist properly. Once he’d done that, he took out the same glass-handled brush and wax he’d used on the way here. When he began to clean the statue’s breastplate this time, though, his hand left soft trails in the pollen and before long there was a perfect geometric pattern hanging in the light.

  Everyone had gone by then and the morning mist had cleared just enough to show the farmland. It was a patchwork of allotments, crammed into the space between the cliff and the border. I helped Clem up.

  ‘Let’s write that letter and see if we can’t find someone to take it,’ he said. ‘I’d feel a damn sight better with twenty strong men keeping an eye on Raphael, even if they can’t do much about the snow.’

  ‘Yes. Good idea. And we should send off your maps too. And make a sketch of the one on his wall.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because then if we’re killed, the India Office will still have their charts. Which is what will be important, for whoever comes next.’

  He looked queasy at that. ‘They do train you up a particular way, don’t they,’ he said.

  ‘I know, I’m sorry. But we still should.’

  ‘No, no, you’re right. The map’s done.’ He paused. ‘Em, what the hell are we going to do? It will take days for Martel to come, if he even feels like coming.’

  ‘Settle in, do some drawing.’

  ‘And wait for his temper to fray?’ He nodded back at Raphael, then winced and mouthed a much worse word than he would have said aloud. ‘It’s pretty damn frayed already and we shot ourselves in the foot telling him about the cinchona plan. All he has to say is that we were here for quinine after all and judging from what you told me, Martel would be only too glad for us to be killed by Chuncho instead of caught by quinine barons who might hold him responsible for letting us through in the first place.’

  ‘If he were sure Martel would believe him, he wouldn’t be so worried—’

  Clem was already
shaking his head. ‘No. We can’t bet our lives on that. Look, he has to like one of us at least and it’s not going to be me.’

  ‘I’m not his favourite soul either—’

  He caught my arms too hard. ‘Just – you need to find a way and you need to start now.’

  I looked across to where Raphael was still cleaning the statue. ‘Right. All right, I’ll try.’

  ‘Good,’ he mumbled. He made himself another snow poultice. ‘I’ll go and draft that letter to Martel.’

  ‘You should go.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘To Martel’s. Raphael can’t hurt you if you’re not here.’

  Clem swallowed. He wanted to go.

  ‘I don’t want to leave you here with him, Em. I don’t like this at all. He doesn’t want foreigners here – he certainly doesn’t want us round the border or the markayuq and I think it might be verging on sacrilege for us even to be asking about them, never mind disturbing them – and there are so many accidents that could happen in snowy weather if he gets it into his head that you’re pushing too much or . . .’

  ‘No, look – it’s better if you go. Then you can courier the maps to Minna too. I’ll be fine.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Fifty-fifty. It’s good enough.’

  ‘All right.’ He deflated, relieved. ‘I shouldn’t be more than four days.’

  I crushed the little boy in me that was frightened of being left behind. Clem wasn’t a coward. Someone had almost killed him and if he stayed, he would be resentful, which would annoy Raphael even more. He had to get away for a while.

  ‘Well, you go inside, I’ll . . . be with you in about ten seconds, I imagine, after he’s thrown something at me. There’s something I want to ask him.’

  Clem patted my arm and turned away and into the church. He went slowly, holding his head at a careful angle. I crunched over the frosted pine needles towards Raphael and the markayuq and stopped two yards shy of them.

  ‘If you’re trying to be quiet, you’re not,’ he said without looking around.

  ‘No. But . . . listen. The statue – the markayuq, I mean – that my father brought home. My mother thought it killed her dog when I was small. Went to an asylum for it. Could a markayuq do that?’

  He didn’t seem to think it was an unusual question. He went back to the waxing, and I thought he wouldn’t speak again, but he did. It sounded unwilling. I wondered why he bothered to make an effort. Martel hadn’t said he had to be polite to us. ‘What was the dog doing at the time?’

  ‘Biting me, I think.’

  I’d been sitting with Dad, outside. It had been a hot evening. Heat is a difficult thing to remember in cold but I’d only had one jumper at the time and I hadn’t been wearing it, and there had been flowers everywhere. The dog had been a gigantic thing that, like Caroline, was well meaning but had a snappish disposition. It had come up to us calmly enough and tried to nudge me away from Dad, who it didn’t like. When we tried to chivvy it on, it caught my sleeve firmly enough to drag me up. I pulled back and it had clamped its teeth round my arm instead – that I remembered clearly, because now, under the anchor tattoo on that arm, there were still tiny scars. Caroline came out from the house to see what the noise was about and they argued over my head.

  And then they’d both yelled, and the dog was dead on the ground. The crack of its neck had been like a thick twig snapping hard.

  I still wasn’t sure if Dad had killed it, or me, or someone else.

  ‘You set them off standing near, never mind having a fight with a dog,’ Raphael said. ‘They move slowly but if they catch you wrongly they’ll break your arm. Certainly kill an animal.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Yes. Write to the asylum. She’s not mad.’

  I nodded, although I couldn’t imagine that Charles would believe me even if I told him.

  By then, Raphael had been standing there for long enough to set the clockwork off again. The statue put its hand against his chest to give him the same little push it had given me, but instead of stepping back, he leaned into it, letting his weight hang forward against the stone. More than anything the statue looked as if it had just picked up a rag doll, a good one, but worn out. I went to another to watch it move. Clem had sneered at the idea that Indians had made them, but the Ancient Greeks had had clockwork temple marvels, hydraulic doors, steam-engine toys, everything. There was nothing to say that somebody else, undisturbed by Christians burning the libraries, hadn’t thought of it too.

  PART THREE

  FIFTEEN

  Once Clem had written the letter – I said he needn’t bother since he was going himself, but he pointed out that if he was laid up by mountain sickness again he would need something to pass along – we waited for the hazy sun to reach noon for a sextant reading and spent an hour or so going over the map, adding latitude lines as best we could estimate them. I drew Raphael’s frieze map and annotated it as much as I could, with a guessed scale and an explanation of the border and the size of the stacks, and how the lensed light through them affected the river route.

  I saw Clem off from the base of the stacks. He knew where he was going and he had a revolver, but four days in the Andean highlands alone was not a stroll from Hyde Park through Kensington, and when we parted we were both nervous-brash and brief. I sat down on a glass boulder to watch him go, my heart thudding still too quickly in the thin air. Between the massive cliffs and the sweep of the river, he was miniature. He had to go carefully at first because the glass of the stacks had intensified the sun and melted the ice in long strips, but after a few hundred yards he was past that and out on to the river. He was walking near the bank, the side where the salt wasn’t. The ice looked likely to hold; or, if it didn’t, the water there was only knee deep anyway. He turned at the sharp bend and waved. I waved back but stayed where I was, not sure what to do now. The sun had come out for an afternoon foray and the glass near me was heating up, the river steaming.

  I had to move before the water started to boil, and by the time I was at the top of the stacks again I was frozen. I retreated back to the church. Raphael came in before long and asked what I’d done with Clem. For a second after I told him Raphael stood very still, then nodded and cooked some lunch. He didn’t mention it again, but the terseness he’d had at Martel’s was back, although I couldn’t tell why. I’d thought he would be glad to have only the slower of us to watch.

  ‘Do you have a barrel of pineapples somewhere?’ I asked, for something to say, when another appeared.

  ‘Mm. Help yourself. On the left without.’

  ‘Without what?’

  He pointed outside.

  ‘Right,’ I said, feeling stupid. ‘Thank you.’

  He coiled into himself like a fern, and I gave up and tried to concentrate on eating. I would have gone out to explore the town but I couldn’t face the idea of risking the ice on the bridges again. The heel of my hand already ached where I’d leaned too hard on my cane on the way back from seeing Clem off. It was starting to bruise. I was relieved when Raphael went out instead. Part of me knew it would be hard for anything to happen to me if I stayed inside by the stove, so I did, and drew one of the pollen lamps to show Sing. Raphael was out until dark, when I saw his pollen trail coming back from the border. I hid in the chapel and wondered what he had been doing out there for so long.

  The snow didn’t melt. In the morning there was another new, brilliant layer, and the cold was deeper and sharper. Clem was right to have gone; there would be no thaw soon. But with the pipes in the chapel running hot, I slept well again. Impatient with myself for feeling worried about walking into town, for all the nearest stack and the houses perched on it were thirty yards away, I went out with my sketchbook to draw some of the howling carvings on the border. There was mist again and they were eerie where they faded off into the white, which glowed sometimes where things had disturbed the pollen.

  I jumped when a pine cone landed in my lap. It was stone sol
id and completely closed. I sat back suddenly, annoyed with myself for not having understood sooner.

  ‘Of course they’re bloody explosive,’ I said to St Thomas. ‘They’re sequoias. And we’re sitting on glass cliffs in damp weather.’

  It should have been obvious as soon as I saw the obsidian stratum in the stacks. The glass lensed the sun hot enough to burn ordinary wood and grass, so any other kinds of tree that grew here would be periodically wiped out. But sequoias love fire. Here, because the climate was wet and fires otherwise might not have caught often enough, the whitewoods helped the process along. Something in the heartwood was inflammable. The big trees had bark like armour, so they survived, but the pine needles and the twigs went up like dynamite. The whole forest floor would blaze, damp or not. The fires opened the fallen pine cones and the heat rising into the canopy opened the unfallen ones. All the other vegetation would be burned off, which left the new whitewood seedlings room to grow. They were perfect for the place. I couldn’t think of another tree that would manage forest fires and rain or snow at the same time.

  ‘Well. Do you suppose my brain will grow back or that I’m permanently slow now?’ I slung the pine cone over the border and into the denser pollen, where it cometed away into a patch of candle ivy. St Thomas managed to look sympathetic. I smiled a little. The markayuq were all unsettling, but there was something kind about the way his eyes had been carved.

  He turned his head. I only had time to think I hadn’t moved enough to set off his clockwork, and that there must be someone behind me, before whoever it was hit me hard over the back of the neck and knocked me forward into the pine needles.

  His clothes smelled of charred honey, the same as Raphael’s, and for a second I was sure it was him; but in a spinning-penny moment of clarity I remembered that Raphael was smaller than me and whoever this was most certainly wasn’t. The man let me collapse and did it again, and then everything exploded into a bright black. By the time I could turn over, whoever it was had gone. St Thomas was still looking beyond the border. Knowing it was a terrible idea in the snow, I let my head touch back against the ground and waited to be able to move.