I was still laughing as we rounded the bend and beyond it was an aqueduct, almost as tall as the trees. Four markayuq stood on plinths on either side of the columns that rose over the road and they turned their heads to watch us. They were much more like guards than the Bedlam shrines. Their clothes were different; it was the same leather, but it had been made in plates and greaves, and they all carried spears. Gold, because gold would never rust. They seemed wholly awake, as awake as we were. My heart bobbed up into the back of my throat. If they were keeping track of who went in and out, and when, then they knew only one markayuq boy had been delivered in the last hundred years and they knew he was only twelve. I might have looked nearly like a turning priest but the timing didn’t add up.
But none of them made any sign to stop us. The one nearest to us only nodded a little. I thought he looked sad.
‘They would have had whole retinues to bring them here from Cuzco when they changed,’ Raphael explained quietly as we passed them. ‘I don’t think they like seeing people having to make the run from Bedlam alone. I remember . . . there was some trouble with them on the way out, when I was little. They stopped us, because there was no provision for getting back.’
‘Shame Anka doesn’t feel that way.’
‘Anka turned in Bedlam. Or as far as I can tell she did. No one helped her; I can see why she wouldn’t have much sympathy for someone else whose foreign friend’s grandson arrived at exactly the right moment. It isn’t fair.’
‘Why didn’t anyone from here go and fetch her? Why didn’t they come for you?’
‘There’s no way of telling when we’ll turn, or not without a doctor following you around. You can gauge it more or less, but I wasn’t due, when I lost the time with Harry. And once we are asleep, it’s illegal to move us. Even if someone had found her they wouldn’t have been able to do anything about it.’
‘That’s a stupid law.’
‘Where a markayuq stands is important. Everyone assumes you stood there on purpose. It would be like moving the altar of a church, or . . . I don’t know. It is stupid, you’re right.’
From vents up near where the water must have been, valves sprayed a constant, fine mist down into the trees. It had made a slick patch of black ice in the road. To keep a decent footing we went round, climbing over roots until the road was clear again. It led straight underneath one of the aqueduct’s arches, where everything took on a tiny echo. On the other side the trees looked older. The water must have been to stop any forest fires from jumping into the oldest stock. Mist coiled around everything. The air was thin and I could sense that we were very high up now, but the forest was still the forest, too dense to see through even without the mist.
‘Merrick . . .’
The life went from him, even though it left him standing still and upright. I sat down on some roots and waited, but half an hour ticked by on my watch, and then an hour. After that I stared at the second-hand, not knowing whether to wait or not. I’d started to write a note for him before I wondered whether he could still read it. I didn’t know how to leave even a simple message on a knot cord. In the end I tied our cords together, one end round his wrist and the other to the loop of a root, and carved Gone to find someone 8.15am next to it. I left my watch wound up and open, balanced on the root. I waited for a few seconds after that, trying to think of a way for him to be sure of the date too, but my watch didn’t show that. He would know at least if it had been more than a day. The springs would have wound down by then.
‘I’ll be back soon,’ I said, in case he could hear me. ‘But this isn’t a busy road. I don’t want to leave you here if nobody ever comes. See you in a minute.’
It felt stupid to speak to him. He wasn’t there. It wasn’t like speaking to a sleeping person but to a coat he had taken off.
Carefully, because in places it was icy, I set off down the road, expecting to see houses or walls at any minute, but there was nothing except a tiny tumbledown something on the left. It was overgrown completely, the stonework pulled apart by some local version of saxifrage. And then, on the edge of an outcrop, not sheared away but finished neatly in a straight line, the path ended. The outcrop overhung a valley and suddenly I had a sprawling view down. The forest went on and on in a great mist-ringed basin. There was no city, no people. I could see what had used to be a town. There were stone towers, but they were crumbled. Something gleamed between the ruins: glass, an obsidian flow that ran down from the mountainside. The forest had almost claimed it all back. Vapour clung in rags around the masonry. It had been years since anyone was here. Decades. There was a lake too. Nothing moved there except some birds.
The back of my throat gone dry and burned-feeling, I started down the valleyside. It wasn’t steep. The tree roots made steps here and there that were good enough to get down by. I went down awkwardly, hearing nothing except my own breath and the squeak of the straps on my backpack, where the doubled-over sections under the buckles rubbed together. Outcrops of stone dotted the way. I didn’t see anything in them at first but then I started to catch the turn of shoulders and suggestion of arms. If I hadn’t known what I was looking at I wouldn’t have guessed at it. The markayuq had blended into the rock, mostly. If it was possible for them to wake again at all they would have had to tear themselves free.
I’d hoped there were still people living there and the ruins were incidental, but there were no new houses or huts, or anything. There were dead people in the glass, sealed in like flies in amber. It must have rushed down when it came. A markayuq was caught in it too at the edge, waist high. I couldn’t tell if she was dead or sleeping, or only thinking. The glass had splashed on the side it had hit her, which made her look like she had been frozen for ever just in the moment she walked into the sea.
Further on, some trees had grown over the flow of obsidian and cracked its surface where their roots pushed up, but since I didn’t know how fast they grew, it was impossible to tell how long they had been there, or if the glass was a thousand years old or fifty. It would be useless to saw through a root. Whitewood trees didn’t grow rings; the wood inside the bark was formed agelessly in those tiny honeycomb patterns. There must have been a way of telling – Inti would have known – but I’d never thought to ask her.
Raphael had last been here more than a hundred years ago. I sat down on the edge of what had once been a fountain, dry now, and tried to see any sign of the age of the place. I had no idea what people had worn here a hundred years ago or two hundred, or even whether it had changed much in that time. Not far away from me, a tower had collapsed into the lake. Chunks of masonry, big enough to walk around, with little stairways and archways that led nowhere, made an archipelago of stone islands. There were phoenix ducks there and petroleum-coloured feathers on the ground nearer to me. Whatever had happened, and whenever, there was nobody left now. I stayed away from the people in the glass.
Someone moved. It was Anka and she was watching me. I couldn’t tell where she had come from.
‘Do you speak Spanish?’ I said.
She didn’t move.
‘I’m not trying to trespass. I’m here with Raphael. He’s changing. I’m trying to find someone, to help him. Is there anyone left?’
She picked up a rock and I thought she would throw it at me, but she only used it to carve into the fall of glass beside her.
Holy ground.
‘I know it is. But I can’t leave him here in the middle of nowhere if there’s nobody to help him.’
Leave.
‘Is there anyone left?’
Don’t know. Not awake for long enough.
‘How long?’
I didn’t think she would reply, but she seemed to think about it, and of course she had plenty of time. A week here and there.
‘When . . . are you from?’
Born 1579.
‘And you’re only just properly awake now.’
Mercury. Turned after a miner’s funeral in the graveyard. Her hand had shaken over the l
ast part and my teeth hurt in their roots.
‘It’s been nearly three hundred years,’ I said, because I had a terrible feeling that no one else had been able to tell her yet.
She didn’t write this time. No wonder she hadn’t wanted to talk to anyone, in her waking weeks. She must have known she was in the middle of a fractured sleep, like Raphael, but far worse. She didn’t want to talk because they would all be dead when she next noticed.
‘I need to wait. To see if anyone comes,’ I tried again. ‘They have to move him; he can’t stand out here.’
You must leave. Bones cannot disturb stone.
It sounded like a translation of something that would have been well known if I’d been from here, but I caught the gist. I was an ordinary person, or less than ordinary with one good leg. It was a special sort of offence to try and move a sleeping markayuq. I could see her bristling and my heart sounded loud inside my ears when it occurred to me that maybe even thinking of moving one was illegal in itself. Like talking about the death of a king.
‘No,’ I said anyway, before she had finished writing. I would never have imagined that an argument as slow as this, where I had to wait for a stone woman to write on glass with a shard of broken rock, would feel urgent. But it did. Anxious heat had been building up in my chest since she began to talk and now my veins sang with the need to fight or run. She had to drag the rock around curving letters and the grinding noise of it hurt to hear.
Sacrilege.
‘I don’t care.’
She only set the rock down again. I watched her for a long second through my own breath, which was clear white. My leg already ached from having come downhill.
She started to move again and I got up and walked away as quickly as I could. She followed me, not in any rush. I struggled much more on the way up than on the way down and when I looked back she was still there, still following. Halfway up the valley the trees closed in again and the pollen was bright. I stopped at the top, waiting for the pollen to fade with my pulse drumming and knowing it wasn’t going to fade enough.
I had been aiming back to the place I’d left Raphael, for no real reason except the fairytale chance he might wake if I was just desperate enough, but when I found it, he was gone.
I looked up and down for a pollen trail I could hide in, but animals seemed not to like the road. I started back along the glass towards the aqueduct. It stretched on further than I’d thought. Anka was closer now. She didn’t make any effort to rush and she caught up with me slowly. When she did, she only reached out for my arm.
Raphael pushed me out of the way and hit her full in the chest. The noise was inhuman, stone smashing into stone. He was smaller than she was and he must have known he was going to lose before he even began.
She dragged him backward and hit him across his temple. If it had been me, the bones in my skull would have clattered into the nearest tree, but he had changed enough for his not to. I was still a good way from the aqueduct. The four markayuq sentinels watched quietly. They turned their heads as I came towards them, but they were so divorced from everything else that the fight must have been only a vaguely interesting flash in among the changing whirr of the seasons. Anka, though, wasn’t coming after me. Raphael had kicked her ankle out from under her and pinned her down, but she was holding something and it took what felt like a long time to realise that it was my matches.
The pollen went up much faster than it had before. The trees were ancient and so did they. Explosions thundered like a whole fleet firing its guns at once. I ran back for the aqueduct and fell on the ice and skidded the last few yards underneath, but the fires were so strong that the misty fall of water there didn’t make much difference. More trees went up, so hard the explosions shook the ground and knocked me over again. Shrapnelled bark tore down my arm.
Raphael shouted something, not in English.
Someone grasped my shoulder and pushed me down on to the ground, until I was crouching. As soon as I did, I stopped feeling any heat. It was still hot, but nothing from the explosions hit me. Wood clattered against something close. When I looked up, the four sentinels were standing around me, leaning down, their arms interlocked and blocking almost everything. They weren’t burning. Their robes were singeing but not much, or not on my side. What did reach me though was the smoke, which smelled of chemicals, and I choked. The dark closed in on the edges of my eyes.
THIRTY
When I came to, I was in a proper bed with a velvet pillow under my head. It was soft when I moved. I lay still for a long time, very sleepy. Some of it was altitude, that same thick feeling I’d had in Crucero but worse. Once I was sitting up, my head spun, not unpleasantly. I waited for it to stop. There was a bandage on my arm and the room was too bright. It was hard to see at all at first, but when I could it was all windows. Some were doors. A brazier burned low next to me.
I got up slowly. It was painful, but not impossible. Standing, I found all the cold air, which had a real bite now. I leaned against the wall on my way to the glass doors. Raphael was sitting outside, facing the balcony. He was very still and I thought for a horrible second that I was too late, but he twisted back when he heard the door and got up to help me across. It was even brighter outside than in and, in the brilliant light, the haze over his eyes was translucent. I folded slowly onto the bench, the L of my hand propped to my forehead to keep the sun out of my eyes despite how everything around us was mostly lost in fog.
He looked better, healthier. I said so.
‘It’s the altitude,’ he said. ‘We were made for up here. It’s twenty-five thousand feet. You won’t feel well.’
‘There are yak in Nepal that wouldn’t survive at twenty-five thousand feet,’ I grumbled. The fog made the cold cut-throat and someone had taken away my coat. He gave me a folded-up blanket I’d thought was a cushion. I hunched into it and then frowned. ‘Twenty-five thousand . . . there are no mountains that high in Peru. Are there?’
‘We’re not on a mountain.’ He pointed through the banisters of the balcony.
It wasn’t fog. We were in the middle of a cloud bank. Where the vapour was thin I could just make out the corners and roofs of buildings. It didn’t look like an ordinary city. Everything was on a different level, on whitewood gantries, and they didn’t stand on any ground. A garden floated at five or six different heights, just ahead of us. There were trees and flowers I’d never seen before, and colourful things in greenhouses. In a pavilion made of intertwining whitewood saplings was a bronze telescope, pointing down. A skiff with red sails wove along through the air, between the buildings. Now that I was looking more closely, they all had wharves and posts to tie up ropes. A fleet of boats hung like hot air balloons above one of them, all tied to the same ring.
‘Am I . . . allowed to be here?’
‘There are only one or two of us in a generation now. They left me in Bedlam for a hundred years and they’re feeling guilty,’ he said. ‘You can do whatever I want.’
‘They?’
‘The clerics in charge here, and the . . .’ He had to search for the word. ‘The Prior,’ he said eventually.
I caught the smell of smoke and held on to the banister. ‘Did they save the forest?’
He gave me a pair of binoculars. ‘Still saving it. There are aqueducts that cut through; it’s divided into fire zones. You’d never lose more than a fraction of it.’
I looked through the binoculars. There were ships below the clouds, waterships, moving slowly and spraying jets down on the still-smoking forest. I couldn’t see any more fires. I could taste the smoke, just, but we were a long way above it and the wind was taking it before it could filter too far into the city. I felt dizzy and had to give the binoculars back.
‘Jesus. Someone’s going to stumble over this place soon. There are rubber expeditions starting out round here, and that’s forgetting coffee and pepper farmers, and . . .’ I trailed off and tried to shake some of the fog out of my head. ‘Small countries with valuable resou
rces always have to give them away in the end or they’re crushed. You can’t live in the middle of a nascent whitewood monopoly. Is there some kind of plan here to deal with—’
‘I’ve been here two hours, I don’t know. Calm down. It’s been hidden for four hundred years; no one’s coming in the next ten minutes.’
‘No, I know.’ I lapsed back on to the bench. ‘This is . . . I’m too altitude-stupid for good adjectives. It’s incredible.’ I leaned forward with the heels of my hands against the edges of the rail. I wanted to go to sleep.
Someone tapped me on the shoulder, on my other side. It was a man with a tangle of knot strings.
‘Oh, he doesn’t want that,’ Raphael said.
‘You don’t know. What is it?’ I asked.
‘Permission to come back when I wake. It’s not . . .’
I looked at the knots and then back at him. ‘You’d rather I didn’t.’
‘You won’t want to. It will be years and years.’
‘Well – I will, but that isn’t—’ I had to stop and try again. ‘Look, I know I’m not Harry, I know I’ve been standing in. If you don’t want me to come back I won’t. But I want to come back.’
He watched me for a long time and then reached past me to take the tapestry from the now worried-looking man.
‘What are you writing?’
‘Your name and my signature. Not Harry – you’re damn right you’re not Harry. He would never have done any of this. He worried too much about getting home to do anything much at all.’ He gave the strings back over my shoulder. The man retreated inside. ‘That isn’t binding to you, only to them,’ he said quietly.
‘I’ll be here.’
‘Yes, well,’ he said. He didn’t believe me and I didn’t try to persuade him. I knew I was sure, but there was no way to measure that for him, or to prove it was permanent. He was still watching the scribe. Once the door swung shut, he touched my arm and held something out. It was a pine cone, one of the iron-strong ones from the whitewoods, but it was charred. The fire had cracked it open, and inside the seeds were loose. Some pattered into my palm. ‘Souvenir.’