The Bedlam Stacks

by Natasha Pulley

  Although everyone else we saw was Indian, white men must have been common enough because there was no particular curiosity about us. People just smiled and kept on herding their llamas or their geese along the broad road. Before long I had the impression it was unobjectionable but still funny for us to be there, like camels in London.

  On the far side of the lake was Azangaro, the last proper town before the Andes. What had been a pretty good dirt road became muddy in the light and frozen in the shade. A lot of people had passed through recently; it was to do with the war in Bolivia, though the boys were too young to know much about it. When the storm arrived, the sleet was cutting. It got down collars and into lamps where it made the flames flicker and hiss. By the time the town came into view, with its cobbled-together church spire that tipped at an angle, Clem had real altitude sickness and rode with his handkerchief clamped over his nose, blooming red every hour or so.

  The town was a big cluster of doorless houses and straw roofs. Raggy curtains writhed over the thresholds, sometimes enough to see people inside, wrapped up and hunched round braziers on dirt floors. I sent the boys on ahead to find a post house. I hoped we hadn’t gone too far east for them now. The idea of stopping in a mud hut instead of somewhere with a proper roof was terrible. The wind howled and I had to keep my head turned to one side.

  Clem groaned and half-collapsed. I caught up with him just in time to get my arm under his shoulder and keep him more or less upright. We rode like that, awkwardly, until the boys came back with a man. He was Spanish, with a good coat and two Indians. It was just then, just before he met us, that we turned the corner into what must have been the main square. The houses had doors and windows and there was firelight inside most of them. It wasn’t anywhere near dark yet, but the storm had folded everything into a twilight gloom.

  ‘We’ve been expecting you!’ the man called, and I was too cold and tired to ask who he thought we were. When he was close enough, he lifted Clem down. While they headed away, I started the painful business of getting down from the saddle too. I could do it, but the horse had to be understanding, because I had to dismount at a difficult angle and hold the reins to keep the weight off my bad leg. It hurt more each time.

  ‘You’d better come in,’ the man shouted back. ‘It’s not much but at least you won’t freeze. It’s just here.’

  His was one of the houses opposite the crumbling church. In Lima or Cuzco it would probably have seemed poky, but here it was palatial. There were shutters on the windows and, when we went inside, deep rugs over a tiled floor. I leaned gratefully on my cane and held the door open for the boys and the two Indian men who had rescued our bags without being asked. They put the bags down in the hallway and went straight back out to see to the mules and the horses, nodding for me to go in alone. I pulled the door shut behind them. It fitted well and didn’t let in a draught.

  When I turned back, the hallway led out into a broad room with bearskin rugs everywhere and a fire tall enough to fill the big hearth, and candles all over the place, because the shutters were closed against the storm. In front of the fire was a table. They were halfway through a meal. Or, someone had been halfway through. It was only laid for one.

  ‘Sorry to have disturbed you,’ I said. I frowned into the effort that Spanish had become. I hadn’t noticed before, but parts of my mind were shut off in the anorexic air.

  ‘Don’t be silly,’ the Spanish man laughed. He was lifting Clem onto the couch near the fire. His face was broad, harsh strokes that would have been ugly if he hadn’t had huge eyes and a sweep of well-cut hair. His clothes were meticulous too, his coat richly cut with a green velvet collar that would have been dandy on me but suited him. Everything about him was expansive and I had a feeling he might be the Spanish version of Clem.

  ‘Thank you,’ I said, feeling shabby and English in the fallingapart, ill-looking way English people always seem whenever you stand them next to someone from a healthier latitude. I moved to the side as the Indians came back in with the smell of damp leather from their coats. One of them had such long hair that the tip of his plait flicked my elbow as he passed.

  ‘My name is Martel, I’m a trader here,’ said our unexpected host, and something about the way he inclined his head said he could see that I felt shabby and wanted me not to. ‘Will you give your coat to Hernandez there?’ He nodded to the younger of the Indians. ‘I know it seems cold now but you’ll warm up in no time.’

  I did as I was told and Hernandez took my coat. ‘We can pay you for the night, if we can have some blankets and some floor.’

  ‘My God, don’t worry about money. There’s a spare room, you can have a whole bed.’ He was looking down at Clem. ‘Well – he’s fainted clean away, but he’ll come round soon. It’s just the altitude. Has someone got some coca?’ For a second I misheard and thought he meant chocolate, which seemed inexplicable and benign, until the other Indian handed over a little canvas bag that rustled with dry leaves.

  ‘You give it to him, I think, Hernandez, I don’t know how much is right. Quispe – go upstairs and fetch Raphael out. Make sure he’s fit for human company. Mr . . .?’ he added to me.

  ‘Tremayne. That’s . . . Mr Markham. He’s normally the one who makes the good conversation.’

  ‘Oh, never mind, you and I shall manage. Come and sit down, there’s plenty to go round.’

  Almost as soon as I’d sat down, new crockery appeared in front of me, and a girl with more food. I gave the first serving to the boys and she looked perturbed, but fetched down two more bowls. I handed along the next one too and nearly fainted into the third. Martel motioned for the boys to sit by the fire. They knelt down with Hernandez to use the hearth as a table. If they were offended not to be invited to sit at the real table, they didn’t show it.

  ‘Actually, why don’t you all go into the kitchen?’ Martel said to them.

  ‘I promised their mother not to let them out of my sight, if you don’t mind,’ I said quickly, in case the kitchen fire was less grand.

  ‘They’re grown men, I’m sure they don’t need watching,’ he laughed.

  ‘I did promise.’

  ‘I suppose the world would come to nothing whatever if we broke promises to people’s mothers. Is she Spanish?’ he said curiously. ‘Are you mestizos, boys?’

  ‘What does mestizo mean?’ I asked before they could say anything.

  ‘It means half-white and half-Indian.’

  ‘Is that different to mulatto? My Spanish isn’t very good, sorry. Especially . . . not up here,’ I said.

  ‘God, don’t worry about that, of course it’s hard. Arriving here for the first time is like breathing with one lung. Mulatto is half-black. Mestizo is half-Indian. And if one parent is mestizo and the other is Indian, that’s something else again.’ Martel smiled. ‘We’re so short of real white men out here that mestizos tend to be counted as white these days, I’m afraid. It’s shocking, but . . . well, we’re all Peruvian now, of course. No more Spain.’

  I watched him while he was talking. I couldn’t tell if he was the kind of person he would have been if he had said it in English in London, the kind who wanted to round up all the Jews and sink them in the Thames again. He was cheerfuller and gentler than that type at home. Although we had crossed Peru widthwise by then, we had never stopped anywhere for long enough to have a proper conversation with anybody, and I had only a hazy idea of where the walls built by the good men were, and what they walled in or out. The only thing I was sure of was that the boundaries would be different to the English kind. Not as different as China, I hoped, because that had been exhausting – to be friends with people who were kind and amiable to me but kept their wives like crippled prisoners in a back room somewhere – but it would be different.

  ‘You look very thoughtful,’ he laughed.

  ‘No, I’m just slow.’ I pushed my hand across my forehead. The altitude headache had become familiar and comfortable, but I could nearly see the fog. I would have been able to
decide what sort of person he was at sea level, easily. I looked up when Hernandez set some coca leaves down by me too. Martel smiled a little as he leaned across and dropped them in a cup, which he filled with water from the kettle between us. A deep grassy smell steamed up from it.

  ‘The Indians say it’s a crime to have it as tea, but I think sometimes half the problem is the cold,’ he explained. ‘Just give it until it goes green.’

  ‘Thank you,’ I said again. I faded back in my chair, listening to my heart thump loud around the bones inside my ears, which hurt.

  ‘Pardon me, but did you say your name was Tremayne?’ Martel said. He had taken his coat off too and underneath he had a beautiful brocade waistcoat, the same red as the wine. ‘I feel sure that sounds familiar?’

  ‘My family have been here before. My grandfather came in . . .’ The unexpected numbers pulled me up short. They never had in London. Like a fever echo, I heard how slowly I was talking. It wasn’t unnatural, not like being drunk, but it was noticeable. I prodded the coca leaves with a spoon to hurry them along and tried a sip while I hauled together the names of the years. It tasted like any other herbal tea. ‘Seventeen . . . eighty?’

  Martel nodded encouragingly.

  ‘He was stealing quinine bark. He got caught and he had to hide in an Indian village for a while, then got interested in Quechua and kept coming back for twenty years or so. My father was born there. He came for a few months every year.’

  When he had mentioned Raphael, I’d thought Martel was talking about a dog, but Quispe came back with a man. Martel pushed out the chair opposite mine with his ankle but didn’t introduce him and left a vague impression in the air of some kind of clerk or bodyguard, someone whose name wouldn’t matter. The man didn’t seem like either. He held himself very straight, not like a servant, in good but old clothes that must just have been ironed, because I caught the smell of hot cotton when he came in past me. He was Indian, but from a different nation to Quispe and Hernandez and the boys. He didn’t have the Incan nose and his hair was cut short, and he was far taller. He moved so slowly it was ostentatious, the way very strong men do, and I wrote him off after about half a second as probably an arrogant bastard, although after meeting so many beaten-down people on the road, it was a relief to see someone who looked like he might punch anybody trying to make him sweep a yard.

  He stopped when he saw me, just before reaching his chair. His expression opened as if he knew me, but then he saw he was wrong and sat down. Martel thumped him to say hello. It didn’t sway him in the least and Martel looked as if he might have hurt his hand. Raphael was still watching me hard, taking measurements. Whoever he had mistaken me for, I must have been a good lookalike.

  ‘Merrick Tremayne,’ I said, when nobody introduced us properly.

  They still didn’t, and nor did he, but he shook my hand. He felt like he was made of hydraulics. He only glanced at me before his eyes skipped past my shoulder. Our boys were staring at him. Quispe was trying to give them some bread. The younger one shrank close to the older one, who finally noticed the bread and took it quickly. Hernandez rubbed the little one’s hair and said something in Quechua to distract him. Raphael looked away from them and down at the edge of the table. That he knew he had frightened them was written across his face, but he seemed resigned too and I wondered if there was caste trouble I didn’t know about, something that couldn’t be made better by smiling.

  ‘What was all that?’ I asked him, but it was Martel who answered.

  He was pouring me some wine. ‘The Indian nations beyond the mountains are known for their savagery, you see. It’s often hard to make any Indians from this side work with them. They call them all Chuncho. They say it means barbarian, but I think barbarian sounds rather more genteel than what it really is. Heard the term?’

  ‘Viking,’ I said, feeling odd, because I knew them from stories, but since Dad had put them in with elves and dragons I hadn’t thought they were real. They were the men who came from the deep woods in winter and burned everything they didn’t take, from Indians or from white men. They weren’t either one, and nobody – not the Inca nor the Spanish kings – had ever made much of a dent in their lands beyond the mountains; if anyone tried, all that was left in the end was charcoal and salted ground. ‘I mean . . . raiders.’

  Martel laughed. ‘No, that’s good. Vikings. I’ll steal that from you, if you don’t mind. It’s rather difficult to explain to foreigners what they are.’

  Raphael looked away from us in a way that made it clear he thought it was all hyperbole. It was hard not to agree with him. If he was from one of the tribes in the rainforest, he was thoroughly hispanicised. His clothes were all Spanish and he had a rosary around his wrist; no tattoos, no native jewellery, not even an earring.

  ‘But . . . you two are colleagues?’ I said, not sure why Martel had called him down.

  ‘Raphael works for me. He’ll take you over the mountains.’

  ‘Mr Martel,’ I said in the pause that followed, struggling, ‘you said before that you were expecting us. I’m . . . worried that you might have mistaken us for someone else.’

  ‘No, no. Someone came up early last week from Lake Titicaca to tell me to expect a pair of Englishmen. I have a sort of . . . alert out,’ he said ruefully. ‘Anyone planning to go over the mountains comes this way; it’s the only decent pass for miles. It can be dangerous for foreigners. This used to be quinine country and there are still men working for the northern suppliers who would shoot anyone who might threaten the monopoly, you see?’

  ‘Sorry – what? Quinine monopoly?’ I said. I only just had the thinking capacity to lie, and felt pleased to have managed it. The coca tea was clearing the haze, just. There were still some dry leaves left, so I made myself another cup. ‘I didn’t know any quinine came out of Caravaya now.’

  ‘Well, it doesn’t any more. It used to. It’s mostly been harvested out – certainly there’s nothing like enough trees to be of any commercial use – but the northern suppliers pay a great deal to make sure no one takes anything. Every so often we have expeditionaries coming through here trying for cuttings, and you only need the one tree for that. The Dutch are trying to raise a plantation in Java, apparently. There are rumours that the India Office are too.’

  He and Raphael were both watching me hard. In spite of the altitude, gears I hadn’t used for a long time clicked into place and my thinking sped up. It shouldn’t have been remarkable, but I’d been worried that they were all rusted and I had a surge of happiness at hearing them whirr like new again.

  ‘Oh. That sounds . . . complicated,’ I said.

  ‘Does it?’ said Martel. ‘God, I suppose I’m too used to the whole headache of it. Essentially . . . there are cinchona woods up and down Peru, as I’m sure you know.’

  I nodded.

  ‘But we’re a poor country. In order to drive up the price, there is a monopoly. We make sure that no one but local suppliers take quinine or cinchona trees from Peru. If they did, our economy would be crippled overnight; it’s quite as simple as that. Do you know what our largest export is? The one we’d rely on entirely without quinine.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Guano. Oh, you laugh, but it is. Anyway, there are a few cinchona woods in Bolivia but it would be hard work to get through. Too much rainforest, not enough road. Peru is the only country in the world with a meaningful supply of cinchona trees. You follow so far?’

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘Now, it would be stupid to have everyone growing the stuff and selling it. There would be a huge supply and the price would go down. Not good. So it’s run like the diamond trade. You let only a few diamonds out of the country at a time. There are cinchona forests elsewhere, but they’re kept untouched now, except for one cluster in the north. If someone is caught trying to set up a cinchona farm or a quinine supply unauthorised . . .’ He made a gun of his first two fingers and touched his own temple. ‘So, members of the northern monopoly pay to keep people o
ut of the southern regions. If someone catches you and convinces the right person that you’re here for quinine, he would be paid a lot of money and you would be shot. It’s an unfortunate place to be white at the moment, the Andes.’

  ‘Oh. I didn’t . . . how dangerous? Should – we not be here?’

  ‘Well, may I ask why you are here?’ he said gently.

  ‘We – coffee.’ I was good at being nervous. I’d always had the right face for it, and with my leg now, it suited even better. I pushed my hand through my hair. ‘We’re hoping to get into the Sandia Valley – towards a town called New Bethlehem. Something above five thousand feet anyway. We’re hoping to find plants more resistant to colder weather.’

  He swept his eyes down at the wine and then back up at me. ‘That is exactly where the last of the cinchona woods are.’

  ‘Yes, I . . . know that. I’m a gardener. God, I know what this must sound like. I knew they were an indigenous plant, I just – I didn’t know about the politics around them.’

  Hernandez and Quispe were listening too now. Over by the fire, the boys looked up, worried. Clem was still unconscious. I’d missed it often, but it came back with a nasty sharpness then, that I’d used to be as strong and slow as Raphael. I lifted my hands up from the cutlery and let them shake a little. It was easy; ever since China, they had had a tiny natural tremor when I was anxious, although usually I could stop it if I concentrated. It was much worse here than at home.

  ‘I’m not who they’d send if it was something as dangerous as all that.’

  Martel nodded. ‘No, quite. But listen; I would hate for you to be offended, but have you any way of proving it’s coffee you want, and not cinchona?’

  ‘I can’t prove a negative, all I – I can tell you how I know about the coffee, is all.’