The Bedlam Stacks

by Natasha Pulley

  He was asleep. Wanting to let him spread out if he liked, I took the other pillow and the spare blanket and set up on the floor next to the stove.

  It took me a long time to go to sleep. Somewhere in the ceiling, the guinea pigs scuffled. I still felt like I was having to push through mist to think. I wanted to believe that we had just stumbled over someone who hated the quinine suppliers enough to help strangers, and perhaps we had. But Martel had said the land at New Bethlehem was his, and he was rich, and Raphael had been with the Dutch, who had died in the forest. Those things spun and spun in my head but I couldn’t make them link up, and it kept me awake because it was maddening. All the doors in my brain had come down and locked. In the end I slept badly, sourcelessly afraid, my heart drumming.

  EIGHT

  The Indian boys ran away in the night. There was no note and no message to say why. They had taken the mules and the horses too. I strayed out into the frosty street to see if they were still in view, because it was early when I noticed they were missing, but they must have gone hours ago. There weren’t even tracks in the road; it had all been covered over by a new dusting of snow, disturbed only in one line of small footprints where a tiny girl wrapped up in a thick poncho and what must have been her father’s leather hat was going into the church.

  ‘It doesn’t matter about the mules,’ Raphael said when I told them over breakfast. Quispe looked disapproving that Martel had let him sit at the table with us. ‘You’d never get them over the mountain passes and you don’t want them on a boat.’ He spoke more slowly than Martel did, and far more clearly. I’d been tired even at the idea of sitting at a table with people who only spoke Spanish so early in the morning – except for one mystery English-speaker, though I was starting to think I must have dreamed that – but Raphael was so easy to understand that his Spanish was only a bit more work than Edinburgh English. It was a tiny thing, but it went a small way to soothing the loss of the boys and the animals, and I felt less unsettled. I’d forgotten what a knife-edge my mood sat on in the first few weeks in a new country.

  ‘I know, but I can’t walk,’ I said. I was opposite him again. They had set another place next to me for Clem, who was awake but hadn’t come down yet. ‘You might have to leave me here until I can find a horse.’

  ‘There are horses here.’ He glanced at Martel. ‘Quispe can come with us and bring them back.’

  Quispe stared at the floor.

  ‘Fair enough,’ said Martel, who was making something at a side table where there were steaming kettles and cups. ‘But if any of them come back with a broken ankle, my dear, I’ll break yours.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Raphael.

  Martel stopped by me and gave me a cup of chocolate. I looked down at it and then up at him, surprised.

  ‘It’s good for you,’ he said gently. He gave a second to Clem, who had just eased in, holding himself tentatively. ‘You need to keep having something sweet at this altitude. Keeps your blood going.’

  ‘Oh, lovely,’ Clem murmured. I moved my cane, which I’d propped against his chair, over the back of mine instead, and put my hand out to give him something to lean on. He did and smiled, but it was watery.

  ‘It’s local,’ Martel said. ‘From my cocoa farm, actually.’ He nodded towards Raphael to say he meant the one at New Bethlehem. ‘Marvellous stuff. Grows back very fast if somebody sets it on fire too,’ he said cheerfully. ‘Doesn’t it?’

  He was talking to Raphael, who almost smiled. ‘I don’t know. I’ve never set your cocoa on fire.’

  ‘Look, take care,’ Martel said to him, more seriously. ‘The weather’s mad. It’s going to be madder up on the passes.’

  ‘I’ll be careful with the horses.’

  ‘I did mean with yourself too. Here you are. Sugar cake for the way. Make sure you don’t give it all to other people.’

  Raphael lost some of his usual stiffness and took it. Martel rubbed his shoulder. In his fine velvet waistcoat, he looked like the most accomplished sort of ringmaster, with a lion that was just getting used to him.

  The way after Azangaro was frozen. That night we stayed at a horrible place called Crucero, huddled at the foot of the jagged mountains. When I boiled a cup of water and dunked a thermometer in it, the reading in Clem’s logbook said we were at almost fifteen thousand feet. It had laid him out flat, although it was a variation, at least, on his nosebleeds. I was queasy too, and slow and tired. I couldn’t think properly to read and even working out that I could put a shirtful of snow on my leg to keep it from hurting so much was a long, creaking exercise. I went through my bag to find an old shirt but then gave up when it occurred to me I’d have to go back outside again for snow.

  When we arrived, Raphael had lifted me down from the saddle as if that were as ordinary and certain as taking down the bags. He must have been used to doing it for someone else, because he knew not to let it become nothing but a controlled fall. He took my whole weight until I was almost on the ground and then still kept it slightly more on the right while I found my uneven balance again. Usually I was too tall for anyone to help reliably but he didn’t struggle. He seemed like he could have managed someone twice as heavy before it gave him any trouble, though he was a good few inches smaller than me.

  ‘Thanks,’ I said, surprised. I’d been about to ask Quispe to give me a hand.

  He looked just as surprised to be thanked, and disapproving, but he didn’t say anything and only dropped my bag into my arms by way of telling me not to get too used to it.

  Inside the inn, I wedged myself into a corner with a blanket, near Clem, so that I’d notice if he stopped breathing. It was a bizarre feeling, having half my brain taken away, but it meant that to sit and do nothing was much less boring than it would have been usually. We were sharing the place with other people, Indians crossing back over the mountains after trading, so I watched them for a while. Closer to me, Raphael drove an old tent peg into the dirt floor and looped a piece of string around it. He had a book open in his lap in Spanish, and while he read, he tied knots into the string. After a while, I noticed that all the other Indians had crowded over the far side of the room, although there was plenty of space to sleep nearer to him if they had wanted to stretch out. Eventually, one of them came up to him and crouched down to give him a vial full of something white, and spoke in earnest Quechua. He nodded and put it into his bag. He saw me watching, but he didn’t explain.

  Beside me, Clem was almost translucent, his lips colourless. He was breathing hard.

  ‘We need to get him down from here,’ I said to Raphael, barely able to bring out Spanish at all now.

  Raphael glanced across, too quickly to have taken in much but that Clem was lying down. ‘He’s fine.’‘No, look at him. I know you were born up here but he could die of this, for Christ’s sake, people die—’

  ‘No.’ He left the knots and knelt down in front of me, and caught my shoulders. I shied, certain he meant to bang my head back against the wall to make me shut up.

  ‘Don’t—’

  ‘Listen. I’ve seen men die of it. It doesn’t look like that.’ He nodded at Clem. ‘This panic you’re feeling is part of mountain sickness. It’s nothing to do with him. Feel how fast your heart’s going.’ It was thundering when he put my hand against my chest.

  ‘What?’ I said weakly. That he hadn’t hit me was confusing more than it was any relief.

  ‘You can’t get enough air,’ he said, quiet and slow. ‘That’s all. You panic when you drown, you panic up here. It’s the same but stranger, because you’re still breathing. But neither of you is anything like close to dying. If you were, I wouldn’t be sitting reading. Do you believe me?’

  I nodded, shocked to find I was starting to cry. ‘God, it’s strong, isn’t it.’

  He dipped his head once and didn’t seem surprised or annoyed that I was so upset. ‘Very. You’re right, it can kill you. But it’s not going to kill you this minute.’ He gave me some coca leaves. Like everyone he seemed to c
arry them around always. ‘Take those.’

  ‘How do you . . .?’

  ‘Just chew. Keep them behind your back teeth.’

  I took them from him like a little boy and concentrated while I tried them. It was a bitter grassy taste, much worse than the tea. He tucked the bag of it next to me under the hem of the blanket.

  ‘Thank you,’ I said, too grateful.

  He studied me for a long objective moment. ‘You’re all right,’ he concluded. ‘And stop bloody lisping. I know it’s a Madrid accent but someone’s going to rob you. You sound queer.’

  I laughed. As if I’d only needed to be told firmly enough, I calmed down and realised that Clem didn’t look so bad after all. When I turned again to tell Raphael he was right, he had gone back to the nail in the floor and the knotted string.

  The weather fined up the next morning just as we reached the top of the pass through the Andes. The way behind us stretched back for miles, bleak and snowy, the road a purer white line because it was flat. The cold was cutting. Up ahead, the pass plunged us down through ravines. Halfway down, a chunk of snow sloughed away from the surface under Raphael, who was leading his horse, but he didn’t fall and only let himself glide for twenty yards or so.

  ‘Well,’ said Clem. He had stopped to wait for me. He hadn’t talked yesterday, too ill, but he was better today. I was too, but shaky. I could remember having been frightened in the night and that Raphael had said something, but I couldn’t think what. It was like a fever dream. The more I chased it, the less real it felt. ‘Do you suppose he’s a wronged but admirable man, or just a grumpy bastard?’

  I laughed. ‘Not sure.’

  ‘Did you talk to him much at Martel’s?’

  ‘No. Martel locked him in his room straight after dinner.’

  ‘Locked?’

  ‘They seemed to think he might attack someone otherwise.’

  ‘Or maybe he’d fuck off home before you idiots could remember what he looked like,’ Raphael called back, and we both stopped, because he had said it in English. He had no accent, or rather, he had our kind of accent, with what might have been a foreign edge. ‘Get down here. It’s a way even to the river and we’ll have ten miles on the boat after that.’

  ‘Interesting English you’ve got there,’ Clem said after a lag. ‘Where did you learn?’

  ‘Hurry up,’ was all he said.

  Clem lifted his eyebrows at me. ‘Told us. Off we hop.’

  I couldn’t let the horse go any faster than I already was without the jolt hurting too badly to sit through, so I fell behind. Through a fog of altitude stupidity, I tried to think why Raphael had said one thing at Martel’s table and then told us to turn back when he had spoken to me through the wall. It felt ominous, but in the end I couldn’t decide why. Ahead of me down the slope, Clem’s nose started to bleed again and he slung a handful of blood sideways to sprinkle vivid and steaming against the snow.

  It was soon obvious why Raphael wanted us to go quickly. There was nowhere to stop. Even up to Crucero there had been inns, but there was nothing now. On one side of the road the cliffs rose up black, straight into clouds. They were a thousand feet at least, sheer and snowy. On the other side was a kingfisher-blue lake, and beyond that, the white mass of a glacier, which mumbled somewhere inside the ice. It must have been moving fast, because every half-hour or so another chunk fell from it and smashed over the rocks. It was all too huge to seem real. Before long I started to feel edgy. It didn’t seem like the sort of place humans were meant to be. But only a couple of miles after the glacier, we found the farming terraces: gigantic steps eight feet broad built into the mountainside so that crops could be grown on the flat surfaces. They were Incan, abandoned, but the shapes of them were still clear. There were a hundred and five on one side, stretching up and up the cliff. It was bigger than anything I’d seen in China, any tea plantation or temple. Perched in impossible places were the ruins of houses. Clem knocked my arm. If he had still been annoyed with me for agreeing to a guide, it was all gone now and he had turned glowing and joyous.

  ‘How about that? Eat your heart out, Emperor Hadrian.’

  ‘I didn’t know it was like this.’ The terraces covered such a great swathe of land that although the grass and overgrown trees were nodding in the wind, the only things that really seemed to move across them were the shadows of the clouds. It was grand, but there was something horrible about it too.

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘I don’t know. Just . . .’

  ‘Actually brilliant, rather than comparatively brilliant?’ He was grinning. ‘I know. One’s so used to saying, yes, your stick-man painting is marvellous, considering you’re a pygmy in a mud hut. They weren’t pygmies in huts, though. They were as good and as strong as Rome. Historical fluke the Spanish ever managed to get the better of them.’

  ‘How did they?’ I said, wanting suddenly and badly to know.

  ‘Smallpox,’ he said. ‘It wasn’t strategy or anything like that. The Spanish brought smallpox with them when they landed in Mexico. It arrived in Peru before they did. And the Inca had built a wonderful, efficient road system for it to travel on. The royal family was obliterated in five years, the administration of the empire collapsed, and Pizarro took the whole thing with five thousand men. One of the most ridiculous confluences of bad luck in history.’

  I’d never been interested before, not even a bit. Whenever Clem talked about South American history, it sounded as though there were a hundred uninteresting abortive empires kicking around and the Inca had blurred into it all, but they were almost still here. Someone must have been proud to live in those mad houses. There weren’t ghosts – I don’t believe in ghosts – but standing there I wished I did, because ghosts would have meant they were less lost.

  ‘Do you know who built this?’ Clem called to Raphael. ‘Which king?’

  ‘Won’t have been a king. The royal estates are much bigger.’

  ‘Bigger,’ I echoed. I was lagging again.

  ‘How’s the leg?’ Clem said.

  ‘Fine,’ I said, having decided we’d stop when I fainted and not before.

  Raphael had decided something else. ‘We’re stopping, I’m starving. We’re out of the wind here at least.’

  ‘I thought you said we should hurry along?’ Clem said.

  ‘Not when there are grapes up here.’ He climbed straight from his saddle up one of the terrace walls to sit on the edge of the second lowest level, where he snapped a handful of dusky grapes off a vine and hummed at me to catch my attention before he dropped them and a piece of Martel’s sugar cake into my lap. ‘Eat something sweet. We’re still high up, you’ll get tired fast.’

  Clem looked up. ‘Where are we now?’

  ‘This valley is Sandia.’

  He was right – the grapes were sweet and I did feel better for them. They were perfectly ripe, taut in their skins.

  ‘Right, I see. Not much after this is charted,’ Clem said to me. He was unfolding a piece of paper from his pocket, already sketched with the tentative shapes of the mountains and the rivers. Before Crucero he had wanted to work out latitudes with the sextant he’d brought, but the sky had been clouded over all night and there hadn’t been even a glimmer of the pole star. It must have been getting towards noon now, but the sun was lost in haze. ‘We’ll have to start being more systematic soon.’

  I eased down from my saddle onto the first step of the terrace, which was exactly at ankle height. The horse, an expensive mare, stayed more or less where she was to nose at some of the plants nearby. She ate them delicately. I rubbed her neck, missing Gulliver, who had good table manners too. Along from us, about twenty feet away, Quispe dropped down nearly as stiffly as I had.

  Clem was hovering a pencil just above his sketch map. ‘There’s a river, isn’t there, soon. What’s it called?’ he aimed at Raphael.

  ‘Depends which village you’re from.’

  ‘Aren’t you a fountain of information.’

&nbs
p; Raphael only looked tired and swung his legs up onto the terrace. Because he was almost directly above us, he disappeared then. If he wanted to he could walk off and leave us. He could have been doing it then and we wouldn’t see until he was a hundred yards away. Hoping Quispe knew the way too, I gave Clem some of the grapes. He sat down beside me and looked me over.

  ‘Well, you’re shiny and healthy at this generally atrocious altitude. Obnoxious, really. You couldn’t develop some sort of awful complication with the leg so my fragile constitution looks less ladylike, could you?’

  I wished he wouldn’t lie. He wasn’t very good at it. All he did was say the opposite of what he thought and hope for the best. I was sure I’d never looked worse. ‘If Raphael will leave me a map, I can come after you at my own pace.’

  ‘Does it hurt that much?’

  ‘As long as I can take the weight off it sometimes it’s all right,’ I said, quietly because the old Navy feeling was coming from him that if I were to just buck up a bit, I’d forget about it.

  ‘Yes, no, obviously,’ he said. He looked away, embarrassed because, however much he didn’t want to be, he was getting impatient. I looked down at my knees. We were both at halfcapacity, but I was starting to think that only meant neither of us had the brain power for good lies. Even Quispe had folded up in an exhausted heap. His horse nudged at him to see if he was all right.

  ‘Raphael, are you still there?’ I said.

  He dropped some more grapes at me to show that he was. When I looked up, the terraces above us were strung about with mist. It was forming in threads all along the valley. There was a sound like soft rain, but it was only the moisture dripping from the leaves of the overhanging plants.

  It was uncomfortable that I was having to call him by his first name. ‘And do you have a last name?’

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘Are you sure?’ I said. It was hard to tell whether he was only being polite or if he was holding it back so that he didn’t have to give us everything.