The Bedlam Stacks

  The others were still eating when Raphael nudged me and gave me the waxed string from round his wrist. It was kinked from old knots but there were none in it now.

  ‘See if we can’t convince them you’re one of us,’ he explained as he wound it round my wrist over the other string, the prayer from before. He did it in a particular pattern, each strand criss-crossed over the last, then tucked the end under them all. I tried to make out the shadows in the trees, wondering if he had seen someone. There was no sign of anyone, but I was much less confident about seeing anything in the surviving pollen after hearing what Martel had said. ‘That’s for if you find a markayuq without his own cord. When you clean them, you wax the cord too. They’re outside all the time. The cords rot if they get too damp.’

  I nodded.

  ‘Look.’ He gave me the glass-handled brush I’d seen him use on the markayuq every day in Bedlam. ‘You make a pattern in the pollen with it. Starts like this, see? Eights over eights.’

  When I tried, I could do it, but it was difficult, like patting your head and rubbing your stomach at the same time, and satisfyingly hypnotic once I got the hang of it. He watched the pollen and nodded.

  ‘Right. Go and try on her.’

  ‘Going native, Mr Tremayne?’ Martel laughed from where he and Quispe were sitting.

  ‘Eat your food,’ Raphael murmured. He took the wax jar from his bag too and gave it to me to carry across to the markayuq. He came with me.

  The markayuq was on a steep part of the bank and it was hard to climb up to her. Raphael stood behind me; getting in the way of any shot from Martel. He watched me brush the wax onto the statue’s breastplate past my shoulder. The pollen was so thick on her side of the water that our eyelashes combed lines into it.

  I stopped, because the statue had lifted her hand. There was no hydraulic hiss, only the creak of moving leather. She touched my chest. I thought it would stop there, but her fingertips hooked over the top of my damp shirt and skimmed the uppermost button. She pushed at it until it slid open; then, just as slowly, caught the button and tried to put it back into its hole. I propped the brush into the wax jar and did it up again, hearing my own pulse inside my temples.

  ‘How is it doing that?’ I whispered. It didn’t look like an accidental motion meant for taking salt. ‘Is someone controlling it?’

  ‘Tell her what they are,’ he said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Talk, I’ll write it.’ He unwound her string until he found a blank part. ‘Go on.’

  ‘It – they’re buttons. You fasten up clothes with them,’ I said slowly. He had to reach past me to tie the knots. He was far quicker at it than anyone else I’d seen, but it still took him almost a full minute. He wound the string back around her wrist.

  ‘Good,’ he murmured. ‘Right, have you got anything you can give her?’

  ‘I didn’t bring salt.’

  ‘Anything. Left hand,’ he added, catching my right. ‘Always the one that isn’t natural; it’s like not drawing a sword in front of the King.’

  In my left pocket were matches. I took them out. ‘What about these? I suppose nobody wants fire in here.’

  ‘No, it’s useful. But show her what they are.’

  We both cupped our hands around the tiny flame. I blew it out quickly, although the pollen showed no sign of taking. When I put the rest of the book into her hand, her fingers closed over it.

  ‘Good. Now come away.’

  I heard her moving as we eased back down into the water. By the time I reached the island again, she had opened up her hands towards us, like the Bedlam shrines asked for salt. The matches were gone.

  ‘Those things make my skin crawl,’ Martel said.

  Quispe was only watching. He looked worried. When someone laughed and threw a bone at the statue to see if it would move, he flinched. She didn’t move. Raphael touched the small of my back as we came to the rocks.

  ‘Can you get away quickly if there’s a chance, in the night?’ he said by my ear.

  ‘Depends what you mean by quickly. I don’t think I should try much more running. But I’ll walk where you tell me.’

  ‘Less conspiring,’ Martel said almost comfortably. ‘You won’t get away in the night, I should say. There will always be someone watching, so put it out of your minds.’ I wondered, unsettled, if he had recognised some English words, or if he only had a knack for guessing what we were likely to be saying. ‘Raphael, come up here. I don’t want to eat by myself. Mr Tremayne?’

  ‘I’ll be along in a second. My leg hurts,’ I lied. Sounding worse off than I was seemed increasingly a sensible thing to do, although I hadn’t thought beyond that.

  Raphael waved to catch my eye again and then jerked his hand to one side. I moved more behind the rock, so that nobody would have a clear shot. From there, I watched Martel brush his knuckle over the graze through Raphael’s eyebrow and ask how it was, like he hadn’t been the one to do it. Raphael knocked his hand away, but not hard, and under his ordinary roughness he looked glad. I let my forehead bump down on my arm.

  That night, Martel posted two men to keep watch, on us as much as for other people. The forest was still except for little animal trails on the pollen side. The dark where the pollen had burned clicked and chirped. I stayed awake a long time, but there was nothing to say that anyone was there, not even in the trees where the branches were broad enough to be walkways. Raphael sat reading just behind me, propped against the tree. I watched him through the open tent flap. He had given up on paper books and instead he had what looked, right up until you got close to it, like a neat ball of string, which he unwound through his fingertips and then round his hand, slower than I could have read by sight but not much. The knots were neat and almost invisible. If I’d only glanced at him and not known what he had, I would have thought he was spooling twine. Looped around his wrist like always, like another sort of knot cord, the cherrywood beads of his rosary clacked as he moved his hands and the cross plinked against the buttons on his shirt sometimes. It was such an ordinary sound that it made everything else seem less strange.

  I did sleep in the end. Even so I kept expecting to hear the snick of Martel’s filigree revolver.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  When I woke, I didn’t want to get up. The hot spring was heating the ground from below and the tent smelled of warm grass and canvas. The flap was still staked open. I lay watching the steam and the pollen twine in the air. After the snow, it was wonderful. I thought I was still deaf from sleep at first, but it was only quiet because no one else was up yet. I could hear the water well enough. The ducks were laughing further upstream. I closed my eyes again. I was so warm and so exactly comfortable that I felt like I was floating.

  It wasn’t until I shifted that I realised Raphael was asleep against my back, his arm across me so that it would have been almost impossible for someone, even standing right above us, to shoot me without catching him too. His rosary had imprinted a circle pattern in my arm, then a suggestion of a cross, just near the top of the anchor tattoo. I closed my fingers over the beads. It was the first time I’d been in bed beside anyone, having been tritely and pointlessly in love twice with other people’s wives until I was too old to start. I’d thought perhaps I wasn’t the sort of person who could have lived close to anyone else, but that was wrong, now I was here. It would have been good, always to wake up this way.

  Because I was holding that old sadness too I didn’t notice at first that there was a tremor in his hand. It wasn’t shivering. I squeezed his fingers to see if I could stop it but I couldn’t. It was a thrum, like he was lying close to a running engine from which I was insulated.

  I’d never felt the absence of a medical dictionary before, but it was only a few seconds before I had to sit up, too frustrated to lie still. He was fading in front of me and the cause would be something well known. If I ever got home, there would be a doctor at a dinner party one day who would say, oh, yes, of course it would have been this; you know
I didn’t think anyone died of that any more.

  All I could do was pull the blanket over him again.

  Once I’d ducked out into the open, meaning to see about food, I found that the other tents – there were three and all open to let in the air – were empty except for Martel and Quispe. The others’ blankets were still inside, but the men were gone. After everything that had happened to them it seemed especially stupid for them to have ventured off the island without Raphael, until I saw the shirts and waistcoats hanging over the lowest branches of the trees on the lake bank, on the pollen side. There hadn’t been enough room for everyone’s things on the island’s small tree, and there were some clothes on the ground around the markayuq as well. She had dropped her arms now but they must have tried to hang things on her.

  I frowned when I noticed that none of the blankets had been slept in. A few had been more or less shaken out but they held the last few square folds from having been fitted in packs. Watching the bank for any tall pollen trails, I lifted my shirt down from the tree. Although it smelled faintly of the sulphur in the water, it was dry and warm, like it had been in an airing cupboard. I stood holding it, surprised to be there and alive at the same time.

  Raphael jerked awake. ‘Merrick?’

  ‘Behind you.’

  He bumped back on to the ground again. His hair was auburn now. I blew the pollen near the tent flap to whirl it above his eyes. He waved his hand vaguely to say he was all right. I was still fastening my shirt when he sat up properly and came out into the light.

  ‘Where are the others?’ he said when he saw the empty tents.

  ‘Not sure. Their things are here.’ I rubbed at the rosary print on my arm, which still coiled across the anchor tattoo like rope. It didn’t go away, but then I didn’t want it to and stopped trying.

  Raphael was looking at the clothes in the trees. I saw him fall still but I didn’t pay any attention until he pointed down into the water, where Hernandez was floating face down, livid red marks around his neck. He had just drifted into view from beyond the rocks. Without deciding to, I went close to Raphael again and dropped his dry shirt into his lap, not wanting him sitting there alone and half-dressed. When he turned his head, the pollen light caught in vaults of his throat.

  ‘I can’t see very well,’ he said softly. ‘Where’s the markayuq?’

  I started to point to the statue’s outcrop on the bank, but the space was empty. I turned around once, thinking I must have lost my bearings, but everything else was where I thought it was: the tree, Martel, even the ducks and the roiling steam above the hottest part of the spring. The markayuq was gone and there was a patch of flattened moss where she had been standing.

  In fact, though, she wasn’t gone. She was standing under our sapling whitewood tree. The hem of her robe dripped, the water beading on the well-waxed leather. I’d almost walked into her.

  She caught my arm and slashed the pollen with her other hand to make it flare. It lit the anchor tattoo clear. She looked from it to my face and I saw her realise I was a foreigner, but she didn’t have time for anything else before Raphael tore her hand away from me. She held on and it left grazes across my arm, and there was a strange unwilling creak of stone before Raphael shoved me to the island’s edge.

  ‘Go, go now,’ he said.

  I slung my bag and boots across and dived. The sulphur in the water stung in the new cuts and for a second all I could hear was my heart banging. When I twisted back in the water, she had moved again, was moving, across the island towards Martel and Quispe. The height of the rocks took her out of view. Raphael came after me. We were only just out of the water when a gunshot boomed and the ducks went up like firecrackers. The fires sent up sparks that ignited the sparse pollen above the island. I saw it burn, and when it was gone, there was a deep well of darkness around the little whitewood tree. I could make out a shadow near the trunk, but that was all, and it was impossible to tell if the shot had hit her or, if it had, whether a bullet could do any damage.

  *

  We slowed down eventually and the pollen flare faded a little.

  ‘There aren’t lots of markayuq all through the woods, are there?’ I said. My voice came hoarse. I’d had a lungful of sulphury water. ‘The ones from Bedlam followed us. Or she followed us.’ Dead wolves on the border; no wonder. They had come straight between the markayuq. Arm’s reach. ‘What happened to the others? It wasn’t just her.’

  ‘They would have had to stop when the pollen on that side burned away. They need it to see by. She got to the island before, though. She was there just after us—’

  ‘Why didn’t you tell us about them straightaway?’ I demanded, because I’d realised I didn’t care what or how. I was almost shouting. I was less angry with him than with how wrong I had been. He had listened to Clem and me prattle about clockwork and odd religions when right beside him were stone men listening too. St Thomas had walked in front of me and still I hadn’t thought it could be anything but a trick.

  He stopped walking. ‘Why did I not tell the foreign expeditionaries about our very rare, very holy saints, which are from a place I’ve sworn to keep secret? And say I had. Unless one had walked in front of you, would you ever have believed me? I can’t make them walk. They almost never do. What was I meant to say, without sounding like another stupid Indian with stupid Indian neuroses? I sounded bad enough as it was, keeping you back from the border. If I’d sat you down and explained that the markayuq were real, you wouldn’t have listened to me even for as long as you did. I couldn’t have done anything that proved they were anything but good clockwork. Not without shoving one of you over the border, and they’re not slow.’ He glanced back. ‘Especially not her. She’s young.’

  I wanted to argue, because in my mind I was much better than that, but he was right.

  ‘What are they?’ I asked at last.

  ‘Just people.’

  ‘But they stand outside all the time. They barely move, how—’

  ‘They’re like trees; they don’t need to move. They do if they want to. It’s just not often that they want to.’ He was quiet for a space. ‘Just . . . we’ll be fine. All we need to do is keep out of their way. From a distance you look right.’

  ‘Is it far now?’

  ‘No. A few more miles.’

  I knocked his arm. ‘Well done, by the way.’

  ‘For what?’

  ‘You knew they’d do something to her eventually.’

  For someone who had reduced the odds against us so efficiently, he didn’t look pleased. ‘I wish it had been Martel.’

  I couldn’t tell if he meant it or if he was only saying it to make me feel more confident. ‘If he’s still here, he won’t be for long. Unless – do bullets hurt them?’

  ‘Not usually.’

  ‘Then . . . ’

  ‘Right,’ he said.

  The way was steeply downhill after that. There were steps in places, even the weed-choked ruins of little houses and towers sometimes, but never people.

  When we came out at the river, it was sudden. I hadn’t expected the sunlight or the heat, though I should have. We had come right down into tropical forest and the river was frisky, and over the far side, the trees weren’t whitewoods but everything else. Kapok roots poured over the riverbanks, full of green parrots and big monkeys. Right under the kapoks, shaded in their canopy, were calisaya cinchona, tall ones, never cut down or barked. With their quiet colours, they looked prim and European among all the brilliant jungle plants. I brushed Raphael’s sleeve and pointed, then put my arm round him and pulled him against me. He laughed.

  The hand on my shoulder was nearly gentle when it arrived. Martel was strong and he thumped me back against his chest without having to pull much.

  ‘Now then,’ he said, and Raphael spun around. I’d never seen anyone look more helpless than he did then.

  ‘Let him go,’ he said to Martel.

  ‘I’ll let him go once we’re in sight of Bedlam. Now come
along.’

  I closed my eyes when I felt the muzzle of his revolver press to my temple. It was cold.

  ‘No you won’t.’

  ‘Of course I will. Now back through the woods, my dear.’

  ‘You can’t shoot into the pollen.’

  ‘I won’t be shooting into the pollen. I’ll be shooting into his head.’

  Raphael was still for a second, then came back towards us. Martel pulled me away from him to let him pass.

  I let my breath out slowly and felt Martel’s arm sink as my ribs did, then lift again with them. He was strong but he had been living easily. His gun was an old one, well kept but not meticulously, a clunky thing, beneath the silverwork, that I couldn’t imagine had come from anything like the ferocious accuracy of the American workshops. He wouldn’t be able to shoot Raphael with it from here, or not with any real certainty.

  ‘You’re taller close up,’ Martel said to me in his friendly way.

  ‘I know. I’d forgotten too. It’s funny, isn’t it.’

  He laughed. I pushed my elbow hard into his stomach and twisted the gun out of his hand. As he lurched, I spun him onto his front on the ground and thumped down after him with my knee in his back. He was still stronger than me and so, although it might have been kinder to give him a moment or two to offer him some other chance, I wasn’t sure enough that I could hold him there, or of what he had said about not firing into the pollen, so I pulled the knot string from round my wrist and strangled him with it instead. I waited until well after he had stopped struggling. When I sat back, my arms ached. Raphael came to us slowly and unevenly.