The Bedlam Stacks

  I couldn’t find any binoculars, so I went to the trees but not right up to the border, and sat down on some roots by St Thomas, my back to him so that no one could come up behind me again. Inti had made me a carving of him from glass, tiny and perfect. It was a good-luck charm – he was the patron saint of gardeners, according to the local church – and I’d had it in my pocket for two days. She said that nobody knew his real name any more, but before the Spanish arrived, he had been a bodyguard for the King in Cuzco. When he first came to Bedlam to escape Pizarro’s men, he had told stories about the Inca courts, but nobody could speak to stone now, apart maybe from Raphael, who evaded the subject. More magic for children, probably, but I couldn’t fault it.

  I had been there for a while before I noticed Raphael was just beside the next markayuq on from Thomas. He was smaller than the statue, so he fitted inside its silhouette. He was watching me.

  ‘If you want to avoid me, don’t stay stuck there, just walk fast,’ I said. ‘I can only chase you for about eight feet.’

  He ignored me. ‘Are you sure it’s a good idea to sit there?’

  ‘No. But Clem wants pictures of these and I don’t want to annoy him again.’

  ‘Even less than you want to be beaten up and left half-dead on the ground.’

  ‘I wasn’t half . . .’ I sighed, because I’d breathed too deeply, which still hurt my ribs. ‘He got back this morning. He walked for four days, I didn’t. It’s the least I can do, isn’t it.’

  ‘For a whingeing little prick who quietly hates you for not being able to walk? I could probably manage less, if it were me.’

  ‘Which is why you’ve got queues of friends outside the church door,’ I said easily, because it was nice to be sympathised with, even in his annoyed way. ‘But listen, he got there. Azangaro. Martel should be sending men soon.’

  He let his weight tip back a little as if the idea of Martel was exhausting. ‘Good.’

  ‘If they can’t clear the way—’ I began.

  ‘I’m not taking you across the border.’

  ‘I know. But you can cross. If I taught you to take cuttings, then perhaps you could go? We’d . . . make it worth your while.’

  I thought he would ask what could be worth ending up like the thief on the cliff and I was ready to say we could take him to India with us if we had to, but he didn’t touch it.

  ‘Maybe,’ he said. He stood so still I thought it might have been catalepsy again. He had been working with his waistcoat undone and a breeze pushed it back to show a flash of the Indian lining. It wasn’t catalepsy. He let the same wind turn his head as if the bones in his neck were on as fine a balance as a weathervane. ‘Maybe,’ he said again, in a deadened echo.

  I hesitated, not sure where we stood with each other any more. ‘I’m going for some coffee soon, I can’t feel my hands.’

  ‘Right,’ he said. He stepped backward over the border, one slow step, and then walked away into the graveyard. If he said anything else, I didn’t hear him. I waited, but after half an hour he still didn’t appear and the snow was blowing in from the river. It sparked coldly in the pollen. Thinking he must have come out further along and gone home without me, I turned back for the church, expecting to find him in the kitchen. He wasn’t. The fire had burned down to embers. I built it up again and settled to finish drawing.

  I didn’t notice the dusk falling until I started having trouble seeing the pencil shading. I wound up a pollen lamp without thinking and then stopped as it began to tick around. I leaned back to see through the window to the forest. The wind was gusting in the pollen still, but there were no trails. Suspecting that Clem had stayed at Inti’s for dinner, I cooked myself some quinoa and a cut of the venison someone had brought for some ceremony or other Raphael had performed earlier in the week. I did enough for Raphael too but even after I’d eaten there was still no sign of him. By then the dark was inky. A point of light came over the bridge from the stacks. I thought it would be Clem, but when I opened the door it was Francesca, the baby tied to her back with a green shawl. She looked unsettled to find me and not Raphael, and when she spoke she did it in careful, halting Spanish.

  ‘I was wondering where Father Raphael was,’ she explained. ‘He was supposed to come and see Juan this afternoon, but he never – has something urgent happened?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘He’s in the woods still, I think.’

  She leaned back from me, startled. Her uneven shoulders moved back different distances. ‘He shouldn’t be at this time of night.’

  ‘Is there anywhere else he goes?’

  ‘No, he’s the priest,’ she said, as if that meant he was chained to an anchor caught between the stacks. She stepped back to see more clearly into the trees, whose white trunks looked amber in the glowing pollen. There was no sign of anyone inside. ‘God, they’ve taken him again. It could be years.’

  ‘Or he can’t feel the cold and he’s collapsed somewhere,’ I said. ‘If he can’t be anywhere else, we need to look for him. Can we find some people to help?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. She brushed past me to the ropes that stretched up into the dark of the church tower, above the loft space where Raphael slept, and rang the bells. They sang out and it must have been possible to hear them for miles through the trees, but still nothing moved there.

  NINETEEN

  Stars of lamplight began to come over the bridge to the mainland. When Francesca explained what was going on, there was a weird stir, more interested than worried, as if none of them believed at all in the chance of hypothermia or falling over a tree root, or bears. Even though she said we would have to look for him, they all ignored her and went automatically to the markayuq. The statues looked alive in the lamplight and they moved their hands to take things, almost constantly – salt vials and shells and knotted prayer strings – because whatever pressure pads were in the ground were being bumped on and off by everyone around them. Maria had propped herself against St Thomas, her fingers closed over his sleeve, watching the crowd with unhappy eyes.

  Inti took charge when she arrived and organised a long line down the border. Maria hung back. Her mother was nowhere I could see. I fetched her out from behind the markayuq and took her with me. She held my hand too tightly at first, and I gave her our lamp so that I could hold onto her and my cane at the same time.

  The pollen was just thick enough in the air to leave strange, half-visible illusion trails behind us. Further into the forest, beyond the border, the trees stopped the wind and it was possible to see where the bats were swooping, invisible themselves but leaving tangles of gold light behind them.

  The trees skittered. Sometimes a stream of pine needles fell down when something passed overhead in the canopy, and every now and then stingingly heavy drops of water fell and splashed on to us. Everyone was walking slowly down the border, calling and moving their lamps, or throwing pine cones to make light arcs in the dark. Maria slowed right down after a little while. We were at the back. She had a cord tied around one of her coat buttons and she was putting new knots into it, upside down if the way Raphael did it was normal.

  ‘Do you want to leave a prayer with one of the markayuq?’ I said.

  She shook her head. ‘My knots aren’t very good. And my hands are cold.’ I liked talking to her. Her Spanish was exactly at my level, about a middle-sized child’s. ‘I’ve spelled it wrongly.’

  ‘I’m sure you could just tell it to him.’

  She twisted her nose and then shook her head. ‘Nobody can talk to markayuq any more. They don’t understand.’

  ‘Why don’t they?’

  ‘They’re old. They spoke another language in those days.’ She was watching a big pollen trail in the forest, the wrong shape for a person.

  ‘Maria, Raphael is strong. And he can fight. I don’t think anyone has taken him anywhere. He’s here somewhere, we’ll find him.’

  ‘He wouldn’t have had a choice,’ she said, sounding suddenly far more adult.

  We
still hadn’t found him after half an hour. If he had gone back to town, he couldn’t have missed the lights; if he was anywhere nearby and conscious, he certainly couldn’t have missed them. After barely half a mile, the front of the line reached a place where there was only a narrow path between the border and cliff, blocked with snow. Inti turned everyone back the other way and still there was nothing.

  Clem came to walk with us.

  ‘Where do you think he’s gone?’ he said quietly. ‘I don’t buy that he’s been snatched. We would have seen something in the pollen, or you would have.’

  ‘I think he went out without a coat and it’s minus God knows. He can’t feel heat or cold. There’s something wrong with him.’

  ‘Christ.’ He looked out through the trees. ‘We should be looking over the border.’

  ‘We can’t go over the border.’

  He made a face at me. ‘Gone native, have you?’

  ‘A bit,’ I sighed.

  ‘Well, let’s put it to Inti.’

  But when we did, she shook her head. ‘No. You’ll be killed.’

  ‘But if he is out there, he isn’t very far in,’ I said. ‘I saw him go. He’ll be only just out of sight. It’s bitter out here, it’s a miracle nothing’s ever happened to him before. He was just in his waistcoat and shirt. I saw.’

  She was shaking her head again. ‘No. If that’s what happened then – then it’s what they wanted.’

  ‘Who, the people in the woods? Why is what they want so important?’

  Clem caught my arm. ‘They don’t see them like people, old man,’ he said quietly. ‘Listen to her. I told you, it’s religious. The salt line isn’t just about crippled and not crippled; it’s about unclean and holy, humans and angels. Flesh and stone.’ He nodded to the markayuq. ‘You and I are thinking of a town in there with gutters and markets and weavers, but that’s not what it means here. They’re looking at it like heaven, or Eden, and Raphael is a kind of Nephilim with one foot in either world. You’re running up against God’s will, almost. Am I right?’ he added to Inti. He had said it in Spanish.

  She nodded, and looked faintly appalled that I hadn’t understood before. ‘Well – of course. Merry-cha, if they want him, you can’t try and fetch him back.’

  ‘Inti,’ I said. ‘For God’s sake. They don’t. They don’t even know he’s there. He could be dying.’

  She caught my arm before I could cross the salt.

  ‘You can’t cross,’ she said, as if I were talking about going to the moon.

  ‘I can see him,’ Maria said, not loudly. I almost didn’t hear. She broke away from me and ran over the border before anyone could stop her. She had a bumbling, little-girl run and she laughed as she went.

  Inti yelled and so did everyone else. Maria didn’t come back. I started after her but Inti caught my arm and a man with one eye snatched the back of Clem’s shirt. He was her brother, or I thought I’d heard her call him that.

  ‘For God’s sake, she can’t—’

  ‘Inti—’

  ‘Wait!’ she said over us. ‘Just wait. They might bring her back. She’s really just a little girl; they might bring her back.’

  We could all see Maria’s pollen trail. It wove as she tried to find whatever it was she had seen. People were calling to her but if she heard she paid no attention and I had a sinking feeling in my diaphragm. She was about seven, on the inside. No amount of calling would have made much of a dent on me when I was that age if I’d seen Dad over an arbitrary line in the ground.

  Another trail flared as it came out from behind a tree.

  Clem caught my sleeve. ‘Christ, is that him?’

  I shook my head. ‘Can’t tell.’ But it was moving wrongly for Raphael, and although it was difficult to judge in nothing but light and black, I was nearly sure it was taller than me. Other people thought so too and the shouts took on a raw edge. Inti was quiet.

  When the man reached her, Maria’s pollen ghost straightened up as if someone had said something to her. They came back together. Whoever it was shepherded her, slightly in front of him. He didn’t come all the way but stopped just behind the roots of a tree to watch her keep going and around him the pollen started to fade. Maria’s light trail resolved into Maria herself as she came into the lamplight. Someone snatched her back over the salt.

  ‘Maria, you silly girl,’ Inti burst out. ‘What will we tell your poor mother?’

  Maria seemed not to mind. ‘I saw Raphael,’ she said. ‘It’s all right. He isn’t stolen.’

  ‘Who brought you back?’ I said.

  ‘St Thomas did,’ she replied, and everyone seemed to think that was a perfectly good answer.

  ‘Well, you’re damn lucky he recognised you,’ Inti said, still shaken. ‘Come on, let’s find you some holy water.’

  I stared hard at the place where the man beyond the border had stopped and moved away from the crowd so that I’d see the last of the pollen glow undrowned by everyone’s lamps. It was there, just, an afterglow still hanging in the air where he had walked. I lost it behind trees sometimes because they were so broad, and sometimes it looked as if he had walked under their high roots, but I followed the trail in stops and starts along the salt. It turned towards the border about halfway along, a straight right-angle of half-light whose end I didn’t see before the wind gusted and sparked the pollen fresh, destroying the tiny glow that had been left. But the line had been there and I followed it. I had to bypass another tree before I could see where the trail would have come out, if it had come out. It was where St Thomas had been standing before, but, although the grass and the frost were dented from the weight, there was no statue there now.

  Clem had hurried after me, and Inti’s brother.

  ‘How did they do that?’ I said after a long silence.

  ‘They could have . . . moved the original statue behind a tree and dressed a man up,’ Clem said slowly. ‘Make a bit of a show.’

  I couldn’t imagine anyone being able to move a markayuq with any subtlety. ‘What for?’

  ‘To prove there’s someone there. To prove to us that there’s someone there. To keep us out.’

  I had closed my teeth too tightly and when I spoke again I heard a tiny crackle of cartilage inside my jaw, like I’d bitten a few grains of sugar.

  ‘Sounds to me,’ Clem added when I didn’t say anything, ‘like he’s gone talk to them about us, doesn’t it. Perhaps give them a bit of a warning to watch out, if we can’t clear the snow on the path. I suspect he’s less missing than we think.’

  Rather than go back to her own house, Inti stayed with us at the church and sat by the stove for a long time. She must have known I was on the edge of crossing the salt, because she brought her brother, who could have stopped me just by standing in the doorway. He was a quietly mannered man, polite, but there was no escaping why he was there and in a graceless and resentful sort of way I made them both coffee and watched them wince over it. Neither of them had as much difficulty moving about as I did.

  ‘We’re going to have to get his things together,’ she said to me. ‘Aquila will live here now.’

  ‘Inti, it’s been less than a day,’ I said. ‘He might—’

  ‘He disappeared for seventy years last time,’ she interrupted. ‘It doesn’t get shorter. If he comes back at all, it won’t be in our lifetimes.’ Then, more gently, ‘He’s gone, Merry-cha. Everyone knew it would happen sooner or later. Honestly, I think he was just holding on until Aquila was old enough.’

  ‘So you’re going to move everything of his out and install Aquila? What if he does come back?’

  ‘We’ll put it all back again. But he won’t come back. And I don’t think he’s got much, anyway. I’ll get started in a minute.’

  I knew I couldn’t claim to have got an especially detailed understanding of him in a week, and he might not have minded in the least, but it struck me as something Raphael would mind a great deal, for Inti to see where he slept. He was in and out for twenty hours a d
ay, with no privacy except in that tiny loft beside the bells. It would have been horrible enough anyway that he should have to offer that up as well, but given that he must have vowed chastity as well as poverty and service, it was infernal. I couldn’t think of anything less sacerdotal than letting a brisk pretty woman go through his clothes. The idea of having to explain it to him when he came back made me push my fingernails into the wooden ladder.

  ‘I’ll do it,’ I said.

  ‘No—’

  I hooked my cane over a rung of the ladder by way of staking a claim. When I climbed up to the loft, I expected it to be full of the furniture and clutter that wasn’t downstairs, but there was hardly anything at all. There was a bed, a pallet exactly the same as the ones set up in the chapel, and by its side was a falling-apart copy of the Bible in Latin. Opposite, built into the wall, was a wardrobe, which was bare. There were shelves under the round window, empty and dusted. In the corner, once I’d wound up the lamp, I found a box. There were books inside, packed up, all in Latin. The bookplates on the flyleaves had the seals of the Vatican printed on them. Raphael’s name was written in, although they were thoroughly second-hand; the publication dates were from the seventeen hundreds. Harry’s letter was there too, and some sewing things; leather like the statues wore. He was making something for one of them, halfway through the riveting of a seam. Under those were his own clothes, clean and folded. That was it. I had to keep my head down because the bells were right above me. They moved slightly in the draught, not nearly enough to knock together, but the bronze hummed and gave a metal edge to quiet.

  ‘There’s nothing left to do,’ I called down. ‘Just a box. He’s . . . packed everything away already.’

  ‘Well, that’s something,’ Inti said unhappily from below. ‘All ready for Aquila then. He must have known it would be soon.’