By the time he had met everyone who wanted to be met, it was late. He locked himself in, although he never usually held with locking a church. With his back against the door he looked around at the room. It was all the same: the ladder up to the loft, the kitchen, the stiff side door into the chapel. But it wasn’t the same, either. The roof had been repaired twice and needed it again. There were books on the shelf behind the ladder that weren’t his. They were in English. His heart bumped into his diaphragm to think of Harry coming back to an empty church, but when he opened them, the Ex Libris notes said that they belonged to someone called Charles Backhouse. There must have been expeditions here; Harry had said there would be. It needled that they had been put up in the church, but then, they had left it all as they had found it and it wasn’t as though there was a nice inn and coach house in town.
In the deep silence, the clockwork in the pollen lamps clicked. So did the wood in the stove. The windmill rope creaked around its pulley and under it was the roar of the wind in the forest. The winter must have been long already, because there was almost no pollen in the air.
For a long time he looked down at the letter without touching it. Harry had told him about Heligan. Somewhere in a churchyard on that side of the Atlantic were familiar bones.
Or here they were, in this place. Somewhere was another church – his – where Harry was cutting up pineapples, but it was too far gone. Harry had kept sailing while he had stayed still and there was no tacking ahead to find him again, no catching up, and there would have been no waiting, the current being too strong. He had fallen too far behind.
Not able to sit any more, Raphael went upstairs to fetch the Indian cotton and laid it out on the table. With all the pollen lamps lit, there was enough light to unpick the stitching on his waistcoat. After a few hours it was all undone and he lifted out the worn-out old lining to lay it over the cotton as a pattern. It was complicated, but he had always mended things and it was only a matter, really, of cutting straight, and an obsidian knife was as good as a scalpel. It was light outside before he had finished, but he did finish. Once he had he went straight out, because there were people he had promised to see and, even if there hadn’t been, it seemed best to muck in. It would pass the time.
TWENTY-NINE
The Caravaya whitewood forest
1860
When he stopped talking, I gave him the little flask I’d brought from Bedlam. He frowned until he caught the fumes from it – I’d stolen some of his rum – and then laughed and shared.
‘Thanks.’
I swallowed some too and sat still to let it burn its way down, just as hot and good as the fire. I didn’t know what to say; I felt like more of a stranger than ever and I couldn’t say that. It had been Harry’s ghost keeping me safe. It was nothing to do with me.
‘Better go soon.’
‘Yes,’ he agreed, but then his focus turned inward and he frowned. ‘I’m tired,’ he said, puzzled.
I was too, so much that I was only just upright. It was past eleven now, and hard to think that this morning, we had been on the island with Martel. But I could see what he meant. He was always walking and always working. He wouldn’t have been unusually tired, if it were just the distance and the worry alone.
‘I bet you are.’
‘What? We’ve been sitting here for ages.’
‘Well – not only are you changing, you’re changing into something a lot heavier than you used to be. You’re lifting more weight every time you move,’ I said, and finished quietly, because I heard halfway through that it was what Harry would have said. It could have been a portrait of me, on the stairs at home.
‘I hadn’t thought of that.’
I looked out the window again. The light was just as dim as before. Anka was where we’d left her – I could see her pollen shadow. ‘There’s no reason to rush on if she’s not coming in.’
He didn’t say anything. It was like seeing clockwork wind down. He stopped gradually, and then it was that strange, absolute stillness. I watched him for a long time, hoping to God that it wasn’t going to be years. I had a feeling it wasn’t. Both the long spells I knew of had been when he was by himself, well away from people, and I would have bet money that the rest had been too, because otherwise someone would have accidentally buried him. The shorter spells, the ones I’d seen, came when other people would have daydreamt or dozed; he had been tired every time, and sitting still.
I went through our bags for some food. We had grapes and apples, and some phoenix eggs wrapped in a handkerchief. I cooked two over the fire, needlingly aware of the markayuq in the window, but he hadn’t moved at all. It didn’t come to me exactly, or not in the ordinary way of a cork popping to the surface of a pond. I must have known it since Raphael told me what they were, perhaps before, so it was sluggish, more like a cork in treacle. For years I had sat in a greenhouse opposite a breathing stone person who watched my father’s grave. And who came inside when it rained.
I fell asleep thinking about it, propped in a nest of blankets by the hearth. I didn’t know how long it lasted, though, before I came awake all at once. I listened, not sure what I could have heard. Raphael was still frozen. The fire was still going, just.
I jumped when I saw Anka outside. She was right by the window; right by the door. Not wanting to look away from her, I shook Raphael’s shoulder but it didn’t move him. The door opened gently. What had woken me was the catch. She was holding a tangle of candle ivy, full of glowing seed cases, each one as bright as a lamp. It was enough time to promise myself that she wasn’t interested in Raphael, snatch up his rifle and run for the loom room. Behind me, she lobbed the vines so close that the light slung my silhouette against the wall as pollen burst into the air. The other markayuq was exactly where we had left him, unmoving. I pushed the door to, not all the way so that it wouldn’t clank. I couldn’t see her through the gap, but I heard the hiss of her robes as she crossed the floor.
The window opened when I pushed it. I climbed out and dropped down. It was a floor and a half, because the loom room was up a little set of stairs, and the jolt jarred my leg. I pressed both hands over my mouth to keep quiet and crawled behind the woodpile.
The sparse pollen flared whenever I moved too suddenly. I tipped my hand to and fro, more and more slowly, until I found a speed that was nearly invisible. Getting up was difficult but walking wasn’t. What was hard was to stay so slow, much slower than she walked. My throat hurt with knowing I would be, to an ordinary person, in perfect, full view of the house, but no steps sounded behind me. Once I’d gone as far as I could bear, I knelt down to the level of the woods where the animals had eaten the shrubs back and shot through the clearest path I could find. The pollen trail of the bullet flashed brilliant and perfect and, because there was no wind so deep inside the forest, it hung there, almost without blurring. I walked fast to the next tree so there would be a person trail too, then stopped and forced myself to stand still. Then I eased back towards the house as she came out. Even going slowly was leaving a sparkle. I stopped again as she came nearer. She passed so close she almost touched me. A quarter of an inch more to the left and she would have knocked into my shoulder.
I stayed frozen there for a long time after she had gone. She was following the bullet trail. After I’d counted to fifty I started to move again. I kept leaving cinder snatches in the light, though never a whole ghost. She had left the door open and I felt absurdly resentful that she’d let out the heat. The cold had settled in by the time I got back inside, where the embers of her light bomb still breathed pollen on the floor. Raphael caught my wrist and pulled me up the steep step.
‘Christ, I thought she might have—’
‘She didn’t touch me.’ He pulled a blanket round my shoulders. ‘She was looking for you. I saw the last half of that. You didn’t try and snatch a coat before you went?’
‘How much can they see?’
‘They see you if you move.’ He looked out into the woods. My
rifle shot was still there, and so, more faintly, was her trail. There was nothing coming back towards us, although I divided the trees into imaginary quadrants and studied each one carefully in case she was doing what I had.
‘If she’s not coming now, I should change,’ he said at last. ‘If I stop anywhere in these clothes they won’t last long.’
By the light of our pollen lamps, after I’d closed the shutters so that the glow wouldn’t show, we changed his ordinary clothes for the heavy leathers he had been making. Once I’d fastened him into them, which was difficult because they were as thick as armour, he was only a few shades away from the colour the others were. I stepped back as soon as it was done. A fortnight was a short time for him to have conditioned me to wariness around the markayuq but he had managed it. It felt wrong to stand too close to him without a salt vial or a brush in my hands. It only lasted while he stood still. When he crouched down to find some wax in the pocket of his old waistcoat and run it down his knot cord he was only Raphael again.
‘Is there a reason the others are tall and you’re ordinary-sized?’ I asked, because I couldn’t stand the quiet any more.
‘Whitewood,’ he said. He traced a line down his ribs as if he were showing me the boning inside a corset. ‘Put it on a healthy person and they grow as tall as the markayuq. We stopped doing that when the Jesuits arrived. Bad idea for native priests to be clearly identifiable. Right, let’s go. Are you warm enough? You’re not useful if you keel over.’
‘Yes . . . yes, shut up, you pointless fossil.’
He pushed me gently into the wall. I tried to push him back and couldn’t.
The trees grew closer and closer together as we walked. We kept to the glass road now, because there was no use, in the thick pollen, weaving through the trees; if Anka wanted to follow us, she would see, whichever way we tried. But if she was, I didn’t see her, only the furls and switches of light where birds and bats floated between the branches. The path coiled upward, taking us slowly higher into new mountains I couldn’t see, but the cold sharpened and the glass road clouded with frost. All the temperate plants that had grown between the trees faded away. The trees were titans and their roots had tangled through each other, interlocking sometimes in impassable brambles of foot-wide bark that encroached onto the edge of the road, and sometimes in patterns that arched right over it, which must have been guided and pruned once by an ancient forester. They made living tunnels where the air was warmer and the candle ivy still flowered, so thickly that the glow in the air looked like sourceless sunlight and we lost every last shadow. Sometimes, a corner of stonework or a hopelessly eroded carving peeped through everything, but it was impossible to say how old it was.
Every now and then was a clear patch in the pollen. Nothing seemed to have caused it exactly; it was like the abysses in deep space, the patches of darkness where the stars happened not to have scattered, and whenever we reached those, Raphael hesitated. He didn’t ask for help, but I kept talking and steered us to the middle of the road.
I had to stop too when we came to a place where something had smashed down through the trees. It had left a hole in the canopy, a big one, and through it came a glimmer of the stars. Partly on the road was a gigantic chunk of masonry, old, part of an archway.
‘What . . . in God’s name is that? How did it get there? Catapult or . . .? Do people build in the trees?’
‘Don’t know. I haven’t been here since I was little. Which was . . . more than a hundred years ago.’ He looked brittle as he said it, like he might have slowed and never moved again if he stared for too long at the idea.
‘Give me a hand,’ I said, to bring him back to now. I climbed up on to the stone to see down under it. ‘Well – it fell a good way, it’s smashed the glass.’ There was a great shatterweb in the road’s glass bricks. Some of them had crumbled away, long enough ago for the rain to have worn down the sharper edges.
‘Careful,’ he said.
‘Of what?’ I asked, and then bumped my head on something as I straightened up. It didn’t hit me hard and I felt it veer away. ‘Ow. What was that?’
He climbed up with me and stretched across, past me, to catch it. It was a log, floating in the air, and when he let it go for me to see, it spun gently. Some moss tipped off the edge of it. I looked up. There were more of them, many more, half-branches, some of them still, some of them turning very slowly. The hole ripped through the canopy didn’t have ragged edges. Some of the displaced twigs and pine needles had already risen that high and bumped into the broken branches, and started to clog the gaps. There was no breeze to chase the pollen back into the space, which was much darker than everything else, a column of dark that came down in straight lines nearly like sunlight would have. I stretched up to tap the log. I had to pull it to make it dip, about half the strength in my arm. It would have been strong enough for a child to sit on.
‘Come on. Better not stay.’
I looked back. ‘I haven’t seen her.’
‘It isn’t her I’m worried about. I feel a bit . . .’ He shook his head. ‘The gates are just up here. You can leave me there. Someone should be about that way.’
‘All right. We’ll find someone and then I’ll go.’ I watched him slide down ahead of me and hesitated, because it was steep on the other side. He lifted me down. There was no strain at all in his hands now. I might have been a doll.
‘Thank you.’
He let me go.
‘Will you go back to Bedlam, once you’re . . . finished?’ I said.
‘No. They’ve got their markayuq, and Aquila. I’m allowed to return, but I think I might go mad and end up in bits on the riverbank. I’ll probably stay at the monastery.’
‘Will I be able to come back to see you?’
‘There are dispensations,’ he said slowly. ‘But I don’t think you’ll want to in twenty or thirty years, or whatever it is.’
‘How do you know it will be that long? You’ve just come out of seventy years and you’ve only been awake for a few. Why do you think it will be . . .’
‘It takes a hundred years to change. More or less.’ He paused. ‘If I’d been in a safe place and not out in the middle of the woods, last time – with Harry – I would never have woken so quickly. I shouldn’t be awake now. These last few years . . . it’s like waking up in the middle of the night.’
‘So the next one . . .’
‘I don’t know. It could be half an hour like just now or it could be much longer. It’s like falling asleep. It happens in snatches but you keep waking and then you don’t.’
‘And then after?’ I said, not able to say what I meant. If I woke up in the middle of the night, even if I walked around the house and talked to the dog and opened windows, I never remembered it the next day, and always felt strange about the open windows when I saw them.
‘And then afterwards if I’m lucky I’ll be like Thomas. You know. Up and about if I want. Thinking, talking. Slowly.’ He rubbed his hand over the knot cord on his other wrist.
I didn’t try to say it wasn’t what I’d meant. Asking if he would forget me, because I’d arrived in this tiny wakeful space, could only sound like bleating. He wouldn’t give a damn if he forgot me; I suspected he might even be glad to. All I’d done was remind him of a dead man. ‘Then what?’ I said.
‘Then they’re awake usually but then they sleep for a few months at a time. Then awake again. Repeat for six hundred years and then you sleep more and more, and then you never wake but you don’t exactly die either. They sink into the bedrock in the end. Dead markayuq don’t look like people. You wouldn’t know, usually.’
‘Which is why people used to build around the bedrock.’
He nodded. ‘You should have seen the fuss when they built the cathedral in Cuzco. Smack through the ground, huge trenches through the rock. I went once, when it was nearly finished. Gave me the creeps.’
I laughed. ‘No one explained to the Spanish?’
‘Of course they explained
, but the engineers told them not to be idolatrous and to sod off. Only reasonable response, really. I can’t think anyone approached them in a very measured or un-Indian way.’
‘Why do you hate Indians? You know white people are much worse, don’t you? It isn’t as though there’s some kind of international bar you’re not reaching out here. We’re terrible at everything. Lasting much past forty-five. Learning more than one language. It’s a miracle, actually; sickly prematurely ageing worryingly inbred horsey idiots have managed to convince everyone else their way is best by no other means than firmness of manner and the tactical distribution of flags. I can’t believe no one’s called our bluff yet.’
He laughed. It always took me by surprise when he did and I had to fight not to look too pleased. ‘I don’t like bad translation. I don’t like idiots who go around telling white men that the mountain’s alive and it thinks things, and that villages are watched over by special people who turned to stone.’
‘But that’s what it is.’
‘No it isn’t,’ he said, and smacked me in the chest with his knuckles. It was the very lightest tap but I could feel the weight behind it now. Any harder and I would have gone over backwards. ‘That’s terrible. That’s not how you’d say it in Spain or England, is it? You’d say, there is a particular hereditary illness in the Andean highlands that causes petrification and eventually renders the sufferers inert in a kind of permanent catalepsy and apparently part of the surrounding rock, which has led to a cultural tendency to be very careful of stone, and a religion that reveres it. That’s exactly the same thing, in the language that you actually speak rather than in Quechua but using Spanish words. Bloody Quespañol. Speak one or the other, or don’t complain when someone smacks you over the head with a Bible and calls you a moron.’