The Bedlam Stacks

  ‘There you are,’ Martel said, standing up. ‘My God. We arrived and Mr Markham was dead and you two were gone and the wretched carver was telling us mad stories.’

  ‘I was only out for ten minutes just now,’ I said. ‘Raphael was coming back when I went.’

  He smiled. ‘Coming back from where, my dear?’ he said to Raphael. ‘Just at the moment one of the expeditionaries dies and ends up on your altar. Think about it carefully.’

  ‘I was in the forest. I lost a day and a night.’

  Martel must have known about the catalepsy, because he didn’t question it. ‘And what happened to Mr Markham?’

  ‘He tried to go into the woods last night,’ I said. ‘They brought him back about an hour later.’

  ‘So, Raphael. Did you kill him or did you only tell someone else to?’

  ‘Neither. It was just – I was just stuck. It’s happened before. You know it has.’

  Martel’s gun was on the table, a pretty revolver with filigree work on the handle. When he picked it up, around the barrel, I thought he only meant to put it away, but he hit Raphael in the face with it. ‘Not good enough. I’m afraid I’ve got to arrest you. We’re going back to Azangaro.’

  ‘I don’t think—’ I began, less because I was sure of Raphael’s innocence than because it wrenched at something in me to see how the blow had spun him. ‘He’d have killed me too if—’

  ‘In a world that ran on common sense, yes. But he didn’t want to kill you. He did it because Mr Markham crossed the border, nothing else. It’s held a particular kind of sacrilege and you haven’t seen gibbering religious madmen until you’ve seen these people and their border. But we can’t go now, we’ve just walked up the river. Quispe, keep an eye on him, make sure he doesn’t kill anyone else. If that door has a lock on it, use it,’ he added, nodding towards the chapel.

  ‘I need him for the funeral,’ I said.

  ‘Then we shall go straight after.’

  It was the moment to tell him about the quinine, but I couldn’t stand there talking any more. Raphael looked like he was about to collapse and I had a strong feeling they would have been happy to leave him on the floor. He had turned his head away just in time and the butt of the gun hadn’t taken out his eye, only grazed the bone below it. I couldn’t tell if he had felt the pain, but he had definitely felt the impact. I levered him out by his elbow to get some snow against his eye and the rest of him away from Martel. I took him into the chapel and put him by the pipes to warm up, and a blanket around him. Quispe followed but he kept back. He looked worried, like he had just watched a boy flicking pebbles at something in a zoo with flimsy fences.

  ‘I’m fine,’ Raphael said quietly, but he sounded hazy.

  ‘You can’t feel what you are, don’t be stupid. Stay there.’

  ‘Wait. Harry, don’t . . .’

  ‘I’ll be back. Torment Quispe for a few minutes.’ I stayed where I was for a second, my heart thudding. I’d believed him about the catalepsy. There was no need to try and make me believe in fairytales too.

  If the catalepsy was a lie, it was one he had thought through very well and maintained despite everything. As if he were just carrying on the day he had lost, from mid afternoon and not early morning, he was exhausted by six and in bed by seven, though usually he was up until midnight. He got up at three in the morning, his internal clock still apparently skewed by hours. There was no lock on the chapel door to keep him from walking straight past Quispe, who was asleep in a chair by the threshold. Like always, Raphael was quiet, but something about the pitch of the water bubbling in the stove woke me up. Half to see if he really was as awake as he would have been at a normal time, half to see if he was all right, I dragged myself up to have a cup of hot water while he made himself coffee. When he saw me, he took down a little jar of rich brown powder and handed it over, with its own small spoon. Because he had been over the border for so long, breathing pollen, it had seeped into his blood and showed now in the veins in the underside of his wrist.

  ‘Cacao,’ he explained. I’d started to avoid saying cocoa too. It sounded too close to coca, and coco, which meant coconut, and since we both dropped Spanish into English and English into Spanish, it was a bit dangerous.

  I didn’t take it. ‘Everyone says that might as well be gold dust.’

  ‘Someone gave it to me. It’ll help you sleep, anyway.’ There was half a jug of milk almost frozen on the outside window ledge. Raphael tipped it into one of the bronze pans. He paused with his fingertips still on the handle, then picked up a tea towel and folded it across his hand before he moved the pan, which was already hot from having sat on the stove all evening. I smiled, much more pleased with that than I should have been.

  ‘Four spoons,’ he said, nodding at the jar. ‘It’s already mixed with sugar.’

  He had taken his coffee back to the table and, while he let it cool down, he started to rivet together a new seam on what was going to be a set of markayuq leathers, the same I’d seen upstairs. The pegs were all gold but never the same shade and all shaped differently: puma heads and leaves, acorns. Although he had two pollen lamps ticking just in front of him, he was slow with the rivet gun.

  ‘Why aren’t you escaping?’ I asked. ‘If he accuses you of murder . . .’

  ‘He won’t. He knows I didn’t do it.’

  Outside, in among the tents, a couple of fires were still burning, though I couldn’t see anyone moving about. Martel’s men had put their tents up in an interlocking row so that they all shielded each other from the wind. There was still lamplight inside one of them, and the silhouette of a man reading.

  When I came back to the table, Raphael watched me as if he was about to talk, didn’t, then started after I’d almost forgotten that I’d thought he might. ‘I’ve been putting off the bees. We’ve a hive, for wax. I need to take out the honeycombs before we go. Could you help me?’

  I put my cup down. Part of me thought I shouldn’t be going into the dark with him while I still wasn’t sure what had happened to Clem.

  ‘I hate bees,’ he said, and I believed him then, because he was too rigid and too proud to have chosen that for a lie.

  ‘Let me find my coat.’

  He was rewinding the pollen lamps and gave me one once I came back. I put it in my pocket while I got my scarf on and the buttons done up, and it glowed a little even through the thick wool.

  ‘If I do anything you don’t like, shoot me.’ He gave me his rifle too. The strap was much older than the gun; it was so well-worn that the leather was soft, even at the stitched edges. I looped it on and felt strange to have the familiar weight against the back of my ribs again after so long. It made the bruises ache.

  When I followed him out, he took me to the front of the church and the cliff, where the view of the town was full of lamplight that glittered in the glass places. A little stairway in the rock led to a small plateau. There wasn’t room for much, but it was full of useful things – opium poppies, a dense crop of them, dead now in the snow; cooking herbs; a stout coffee tree, planted to one side so that it would have room to walk; and, screened by that, a beehive. He hung his lamp over a hook in the side. It had a glass front. Inside the bees were sleepy but moving, just, in a way that didn’t look like it was supposed to be seen. It was more like the peristalsis inside one big thing than lots of small ones. The bees stirred more when they saw the light.

  ‘Can’t someone else keep a hive, if you don’t like it?’ I asked as he hinged up the lid. The bees mumbled.

  ‘The wax is for the markayuq, and the knot cords. It’s hieratic.’ He took his hands back too quickly. ‘You take out each rack and scrape the wax off. They won’t hurt you. Just go slowly.’

  ‘They’re lovely,’ I said, stroking a big one with my knuckle. It wiggled. They were black and a fine deep red. Peruvian bees were stingless, I knew from somewhere, although they did bite.

  He gave me a pipette. ‘Sugar water. Put it in the leftover cells.’ He stood back
with his arms folded. I ran his knife down the combs and watched them crumble. The honey was sticky enough to make them fall slowly, slowly enough for me to catch it all in a bowl. The quiet welled and I didn’t break it, waiting for him to say why we were out here.

  ‘Martel is a quinine supplier.’

  I looked back.

  ‘You have to come back with us to Azangaro. Tell him you’ve given up and it’s not worth all this. Don’t argue with him, don’t try to arrange another guide. The men he’s brought, they are not here to help clear the path. The path doesn’t go anywhere. They blew it up years ago. He isn’t angry with me because Markham’s dead. He’s angry because you’re still alive and still here. He never believed you about the coffee; he knew what you came for. Those men are here to find you if you run. They’ll kill you.’

  ‘Did you kill Clem?’ I said again.

  ‘No.’

  I foundered. ‘But if you were just supposed to kill us both – why did Martel send us with you in the first place? He could have just let us wander off and get shot by someone like Manuel.’

  ‘It isn’t impossible to go through the forest,’ he said, very quietly. ‘People have come out alive before, with quinine. I was supposed to make certain that you didn’t. Either persuade you to turn back or shoot you.’

  ‘Then why did you keep us waiting, why did you say there was a way around? Why didn’t you just let us go over the border when—’

  ‘I hoped you’d give up and go home.’ He let his breath out. ‘I’ve been trying to keep you safe. I only let you send word to Martel because I hoped waiting for him would keep you out of the forest for another few days. That was a few more days to scare you into leaving. The – man who attacked you. I asked him to, I’m sorry.’ He really did look sorry.

  ‘I knew it. I was too bloody polite to say. Serves me right.’

  ‘It seemed like the quickest way to make you leave. I didn’t know you were going to stick with it like a donkey—’

  ‘Or like a person who does his job properly—’

  ‘God, you’re mad, all of you from the bloody India Office! What, have they got your children in a shed somewhere?’

  ‘I’m mad – what the hell were you thinking?’ I said, feeling like I might drown in the senselessness of it. ‘What if Clem had managed to get through? You were keeping us safe but – we were walking bombs for you, all that time! If he had got anything out of those woods, the quinine suppliers would have known it had to come from round here. High-yield quinine doesn’t come from anywhere else! Bedlam would have been destroyed. Wouldn’t it? Why in God’s name didn’t you shoot us the second we arrived? Or before, when Manuel attacked us? Letting us wander about, and when you have such powerful catalepsy you might not know if you’d lost an hour or five – we could have done anything! It was idiotic! What were you playing at?’

  ‘What’s the point of not taking innocent men into the woods and shooting them in the head?’ he said sharply. ‘How about not wanting to? I’ve had enough.’

  I was already shaking my head, annoyed to be given a moral scruple instead of a reason from someone who was plainly used to doing whatever he had to, before I heard what he had actually said. ‘Hold on. You’ve had enough – you mean you did it before,’ I said. ‘The Dutch.’

  He nodded once. Everything about him exuded that old anti-magnetic pressure he’d had at Martel’s, the one that said not to ask him anything else about it and to leave him the hell alone, but I had a decent resistance to it now, like the altitude.

  ‘Why are we different?’ I said, still softly, because a shadow had come into the window of the church above us. Quispe, fetching a glass of water.

  ‘If you don’t believe me, stay.’

  ‘No, answer the question. If I turn back now with no quinine, I’m finished, so I need to know. Because it sounds to me like you don’t want foreigners tramping through your holy woods, so you’re telling me the one thing that will force me to leave. I can’t march up to Martel and ask him if he’s a quinine supplier; he’ll shoot me if he is. I only have your word. Come on. What’s different? Your village depends on it but you can’t bring yourself to kill me despite having done it before – why? Do you need me for something? You want me to go back to the India Office and tell them nothing’s here? I can’t. Half of India is dying of a disease that can only be cured by the medicine in those woods, so—’

  ‘Because I knew your grandfather,’ he snapped, and then all the fight went from him as fast as it had come and he only looked hopeless. ‘And you look like him.’

  I couldn’t face him and think at the same time. I turned back to the hive and edged the last of the honey wax on to the plate. The bees had come to explore my hands, but it was a nice feeling. From the corner of my eye I could just see Raphael watching fixedly in the way I would have watched someone performing surgery on his own eye. ‘Take the honey,’ I told him. ‘I can’t carry that and the cane at once.’

  I held the door open for him on the way back in. He set the honey on the table, then took out a bottle of Jamaica rum from a cupboard and poured us both a glass. Once he had given me mine, he stood breathing the fumes of his and I realised he didn’t like the smell of the honey. Of course he didn’t; he spent every day of his life smelling of beeswax from cleaning the markayuq. Which accounted for his hating the bees as well.

  ‘Where did you find Jamaica rum out here?’ I asked, picking up the bottle. It was three-quarters full still, although the date on the label was from the middle of last century. ‘This is what the smugglers at home bring in,’ I said.

  ‘I know.’

  I felt the way I did when I was about to dive into deep water. The last pause was to look for shadows that might be rocks. There were plenty that might have been, but nothing broke the surface and the more I looked the fewer there were. ‘Which is . . . why you speak last century’s English. And you recognised me. At Martel’s. And . . . that letter was for you, not your uncle.’

  He nodded once, very slightly.

  ‘Inti’s story was true. You disappeared for seventy years.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Just . . .’ he waved towards the forest. ‘About half a mile inside. It was the same as yesterday. But longer.’

  ‘Jesus, Raphael.’

  ‘What was I meant to say?’ he snapped.

  ‘I’m not Jesusing at you. I meant, what a bloody horrible thing to happen to anyone. What happens, how do you not starve to death? Or – age?’

  He lifted his shoulder. ‘It isn’t sleep. You stop, it’s like being frozen. Blink and it’s gone. When you wake it looks like the light changes suddenly.’ He was quiet for a while. ‘You go out for a few days at first when you’re small, then a month, then a year, then three; little intervening spells in-between – fifteen minutes, twenty – but those get longer too when you come up to a big one. Anyone here will tell you, everyone knows how priests are, everyone . . . counts, from the second you arrive.’ He looked tired. ‘Harry soon found out. I mean your grandfather. He was here when it happened.’ He was looking into the rum. ‘When I came back there was a letter from him with his address.’

  ‘Did you write?’

  ‘No. Inti said his son had stopped coming. It seemed a bit late.’

  I poured us both some more rum, thinking. ‘How long can it last? One of these . . . frozen spells.’

  ‘A hundred years, if you’re healthy otherwise. If not . . . two hundred. Longer. You never wake properly.’ He sounded like he was staring into an endlessly deep gorge. I didn’t ask if he knew anyone who had slept for two hundred years.

  ‘So all priests have it . . . how?’

  ‘Other way round. If you have it, you become a priest here.’

  ‘How do they know which children to send? The – people who bring children, I mean,’ I said, not wanting to say Chuncho when he didn’t like the word. ‘You wouldn’t know if a baby had catalepsy.’

  ‘They bring us when we?
??re ten.’ He breathed between sentences, for long enough to let me squeak if I wanted to, to make him say what was in the forest, who the people were, but I didn’t want to. ‘There are only a few families left that carry the disease, so they know more or less who to watch. It’s rare now; sometimes you wait a hundred years for a child to manifest it. Which is why it was so late, before they brought Aquila. He’ll be next, after me, when he’s old enough. Well. He almost is. I was his age when I took over.’

  ‘And when he can take over, what happens to you?’

  ‘I can leave.’

  ‘And go where?’

  He nodded towards the forest where the pollen glow looked black-striped, because it silhouetted the trees. ‘Home. You do your time in Bedlam and after that they take care of you. There’s a monastery.’

  ‘We’re not talking about some little tribe of raiders getting ratty about their territory, are we?’

  ‘No.’ He hesitated as if he wouldn’t go on, but he was only choosing words. ‘The border isn’t about territory, exactly. It’s a quarantine line. Sick people on this side, healthy people on the other side. It’s a religious . . . do you know?’

  ‘Clem said you have to be whole, for the gods. He said human sacrifices were always healthy virgins, in Inca times.’

  ‘Oh, they still are,’ he said, shaking his head. He put his hands up a little when I widened my eyes at him. ‘I knew a boy. But yes. And that’s holy land, in there. Like the Vatican. So. If you’ve got a limp, you’re out. But priests are immune to everything; it’s something to do with what we already have. I don’t know. So we’ve always been sent out to the hospital colonies.’ He was rubbing his hand down his other wrist like he was pushing away something crawling. ‘Then there was smallpox in Cuzco and it became much stricter. No one from this side could cross. Then the Spanish arrived too and they closed it permanently. There used to be half a dozen hospitals all along this river but Bedlam is all that’s left and they only maintain this place because they need the salt. I’m not supposed to be talking about it,’ he added abruptly.