The Bedlam Stacks

by Natasha Pulley

  Raphael looked like he might have laughed if he’d been younger and more cheerful. ‘Why are you using the Jesuit dictionary?’

  ‘How do you know what I’m using? And it’s the only Quechua dictionary.’

  ‘It’s probably shrine,’ I said, and then when Clem frowned, not understanding, ‘not idol.’

  Raphael nodded to me and I smiled, because he was taking it so gently. I would have burst out laughing if someone had translated Christchurch as Heathen God Temple in front of me.

  Clem sighed and I wished I hadn’t said anything. I’d always thought he was a languages genius – he was perfect in Spanish, at least. But Spanish and English aren’t different languages, only extreme dialects of Latin. It’s almost possible to translate word for word. Translation from a language unrelated to English is nothing to do with equivalent words. Whenever I’d tried to do that in Chinese I’d come out with unbroken nonsense. I had to forget the English, hang the meaning up in a well-lit gallery, stare at it hard, then describe it afresh. I was starting to think Clem was looking at Quechua like he would have looked at Spanish. He was trying to link, not translate. I couldn’t think of a way to say so without sounding like a patronising twerp, so I stayed quiet.

  ‘And to answer your previous question,’ Clem said to Raphael, ‘the matter with it is this. Spelling it Huancavelica, from the Cuzco dialect, crystallises one pronunciation and makes the others irretrievable unless you meet a native speaker, of which there will be none in two hundred years’ time at this rate. Come on, you know very well what I mean.’

  Raphael was unmoved. ‘Spend a lot of time weeping over the lost phonemes of Pictish, do you?’

  ‘Phonemes.’ I murmured to no one, or to the river. I had no idea how in God’s name he could have learned a word like that. I barely knew what it meant. Neither of them noticed.

  ‘What’s Quechua for “philistine”?’ Clem said waspishly.

  He thought about it. ‘Philistine.’

  ‘Oh, God, it just goes on, doesn’t it.’ Clem sighed and tapped his pencil against the map, still unhappy. ‘And this river doesn’t seem to have a name except “the river”. Or something about glass, which I guarantee also isn’t written anything like it’s pronounced.’

  ‘What’s written Quechua like? Can’t you write it that way?’ I said. ‘You know, in brackets.’

  ‘There isn’t any,’ Clem said bleakly. ‘There is no record whatsoever of an Incan writing system. The closest they had was a kind of knotting, for counting and so forth. Looks like very clumsy tapestrywork.’

  ‘How can you have a whole empire without legal textbooks and public records?’

  ‘Oral traditions, one supposes. Wiped out when the Spanish arrived.’ Clem shook his head. ‘It makes a horrible sort of sense. Writing evolves not when you want to wax lyrical about the daffodils but for tax purposes. Numbers. Nouns. Five sheep. No need for adjectives or adverbs or grammar, not at first.’

  Raphael had covered his nearer eye with the heel of his hand so that he wouldn’t have to look at us.

  Clem finished putting down guessed names and tipped the map towards me. ‘You’re part homing pigeon – how does that look to you? More or less?’

  He had sketched a long, rounded right-angle as the river veered south towards Bolivia. His compass was still balanced on his knee, but the solar storm must still have been churning around us, because the needle was skittering in no steady direction. I steepened the curve with my fingertip. The river was starting to meander, just little swerves at the moment, but because of that it was difficult to feel that it was tilting more broadly as well.

  ‘Are you sure?’ Clem asked, frowning.

  ‘No,’ I said, not wanting to start another fight. ‘I just feel like we’ve strayed a bit further to the right.’

  ‘Right isn’t a cartographical term, darling,’ he laughed.

  ‘It looks like a dragon if you’ve got it right,’ Raphael said. His eyes caught on Clem for too long. ‘Darling’ was the sort of thing Martel would have said.

  ‘Nor are dragons,’ Clem said, but he tipped the map to see if he could find one. I traced out the hump of a wing, one that would be there if it leaned more to the right. The meanders made paws. ‘Oh, yes. Well, that’s neat, isn’t it? Have you got a map, then, Raphael, if you know what it all looks like?’

  ‘At home I have.’

  ‘Why didn’t you bring it?’

  ‘It’s carved on the wall.’

  ‘How useful,’ Clem said. ‘Just like the rest of you, hey?’

  Raphael watched him with the same distance as when he shot Manuel. I vacillated for a long few seconds, but there were a hundred things out here he could claim to have no control over if Martel asked and, in the interest of his not ensuring that some of them happened to us, I shut my eyes and shoved Clem over the side. He landed with a splash and an explosion of swearing. I had to pretend I’d slipped, but Raphael smiled and looked more ordin-ary as he helped Clem back onto the boat, which only got him a round of his own accusations, although he hadn’t been in arm’s reach.

  We all stopped talking when we saw the body on the cliff. It was hanging by its hair from a sturdy vine, not much but bones now. I couldn’t see how anyone might have got it up there, much less how to take it down. There was a Spanish sign around its neck: I stole quinine trees.

  ‘That’s Edgar,’ said Raphael. ‘He used to live opposite. Took cinchona trees to a Dutchman.’ He was watching me with the smallest cinder of a spark, as though he were quite looking forward to hearing how I meant to talk my way around that.

  TEN

  The cliffs leaned towards each other until the river was more of a creek. Even so, I didn’t expect to see what we did when it tipped us round the last, sharp bend, past the deep caves with their salt stalactites and scatterings of glass boulders.

  Where there used to be a bridge of land, the river had worn through and made three towering stacks. Clem worked out later that they were six hundred and twelve feet high. I couldn’t see the tops of them properly, but around the bases were wharves, arranged like spokes, and then stairs and stairs and stairs, up to a tangle of wooden scaffolding that supported the corners of houses and spiralling gantries. As we came closer, I could see people moving; there was a man with a wheelbarrow full of pineapples.

  The sun came out suddenly. Greenish blue shadows fell across the boat and turned the riverwater turquoise. The light was shining down through translucent parts in the stacks, which weren’t rock but glass. It had been worn shiny and clear by the weather and the river. When I put my hand out to the coloured shadow beside me, the light was hot. The boatman steered us away from it but he didn’t quite move quickly enough. Where the tip of the boom swung into the light, the grass sail caught fire. The boatman squeaked. Raphael, who had been drinking something from the cup of a flask, lobbed the contents at the little fire and put it out before it could spread. He didn’t seem worried by it, but the boatman looked shaken and steered us square down a line of unlensed sunlight.

  ‘My God,’ Clem said. ‘That’s obsidian. Blue obsidian. It’s formed in a strata over the – that isn’t possible.’ He said it in a nearly accusatory way towards Raphael, who was either too tired or too graceful to take him up on it.

  ‘Black swans,’ I said, fighting to stay mild. Raphael knew why we were really here. That he hadn’t told anyone so far didn’t mean he might not lose patience if we blamed him personally for one too many geological unlikelihoods or linguistic abnormalities. I would have told Clem to shut up if he had been Charles, but I wasn’t afraid of Charles’s temper. I’d forgotten I was afraid of Clem’s. ‘You know. More in heaven and earth. You don’t know it’s there until it pecks you.’

  Clem snorted, still too annoyed with me to laugh. Raphael looked back slowly as if someone had walked over his grave. I frowned, but he shook his head to say it was nothing to do with me.

  Where the light made the water clear, there were ruins on the riverbed, chunk
s of old masonry. I looked up again. The two bridges that connected the first and third stacks to the land were stone, but the middle ones, between the stacks, were wooden. They were recent. The whole great structure must have been eroding always.

  I stood up by the prow as we reached the wharves. The river had carved out combes and caves that sang with drips as we passed. It smelled cleanly of hot salt. Rather than flowing straight between the stacks, it had cut deep gullies in the weak places and made a glass beach, almost the same as the rocky ones at home. But here the glass had been smoothed and worn into twisting shapes and dips that whirled the light and played perspective tricks. Nothing was sharp.

  The trader steered us to a flat outcrop. Raphael stepped across easily. Clem struggled with it more, still pale from altitude sickness and wet from the river. The boatman held my elbow to help me down. I thought he would get out too to unload, but he only gave the beach an uneasy look and started back straightaway.

  ‘He wasn’t coming here, then?’ I asked, confused.

  ‘No, there’s a warehouse back that way. Keep out of the sun,’ Raphael added. He didn’t sound like he thought we would listen.

  We followed him in the cooler, safer, unlensed path of sunlight between the left-hand and middle stacks. On the far side, the river was much stronger and foamed over rocks and little crevasses, and from further away was a quiet roar that sounded like waterfalls. The cliffs stayed close after the stacks; a kayak would have made it through, but nothing substantial. Though I could just make out the green of trees at the top, it was impossible to see what sort they were or how dense.

  I tripped into a well in the glass beach and thought for a long suspended instant that I was going to fall, but it was an illusion. The dip itself was only a few inches deep, but the glass was clear for about twenty feet. The bottom was a frozen riverbed. There were fish caught mid-turn around weed caught mid-furl. None of it was burned. I leaned down, but the surface was warped into wave-shapes, and everything blurred and distorted. It sharpened again when I straightened.

  Nearer the wharves, the smooth glass turned pebbly and green-blue shells lay heaped everywhere. Most of them were stuck to rocks just like ordinary shells would have been. The rocks themselves were all either obsidian entirely or half-vitrified, great chunks of glass and stone all twisted together. The granite made shapes like ink unwinding in water. The boat had been cold, but the beach was so warm now that I had to take off my coat. When I strayed into a stronger patch of sunlight, having drifted sideways trying to get out of one sleeve, I had to jerk away. The heat was fierce there. The glass stratum was about two hundred feet high in the stacks and up to that point the cliffs were pockmarked with black spots and burns, like another waterline where the light was magnified. Birds, little black coot things, had all made their nests well above it. Except for the places exactly beside the stacks, where they were glass, the cliffs were ordinary rock. The obsidian had poured down in its own narrow stream when it was first formed and drawn a great glass stripe across the land. One of the mountains must have been a volcano.

  Once we were well out of the hot shadows and in ordinary sun, Raphael stopped and waited.

  ‘Right. Don’t come down here around midday if it’s sunny, you’ll catch fire. In the forest there is a border marked with salt and animal bones; don’t cross it. There are Indians in the woods and they do not like wandering foreigners. You’ll never see them but they’re there. Just stay away from them and they’ll stay away from you.’ He waited for us to nod. ‘This place is a hospital colony. Most people up there are sick or deformed, so don’t expect help carrying and lifting. You see to yourself, as much as you can. There are no servants.’

  ‘We didn’t expect to be waited on,’ Clem said.

  Raphael made an unconvinced sound and turned away towards the last stack and the wharves there.

  ‘How quickly can we start out?’ Clem said. ‘For the coffee, I mean.’

  ‘I’m interested to know when you’re going to admit you’re lying about the coffee and ask me where the cinchona woods are,’ Raphael said over his shoulder. Like it often did, his voice came quiet at first and then strengthened. ‘You’re going to need to. This place is full of coffee but it isn’t full of cinchona. Look around.’

  ‘Now,’ I said. ‘Where are they?’

  ‘Merrick,’ Clem snapped.

  Raphael looked back. ‘This was shut down as a supply region years ago. Everything that could be harvested has been. Anything left is in Chuncho territory. I can take you round on the road they used to use, but it’s old now and you might not find much even if it is passable. Why did you come here?’

  ‘We have reports from a few years ago that imply there’s something here worth going for,’ I said.

  He frowned. ‘You’re talking about the Dutch. And Backhouse’s expedition. He brought an army battalion, and half those men were killed. You could have gone north. There’s boatloads of the stuff up there.’

  I shook my head. ‘Those varieties have a two per cent quinine yield. What you have here is nine per cent at least. Look, we can pay. It will be worth your while, even if it is a trek.’

  ‘As I say, I’ll show you the path. But I don’t think you’ll find anything.’

  ‘And if we do?’

  ‘If you do – then there’s going to need to be some negotiation.’

  ‘Well, let’s have that out now,’ Clem said. ‘How much do you—’

  ‘We’re not talking about it now.’

  ‘Come on, man, a rough figure would be—’

  ‘I said,’ he interrupted, not loudly. He had never been loud. ‘Not today. It would be a long talk. I’m tired enough already.’

  ‘All right, all right,’ Clem said. His crossness had taken on an edge of alarm. I felt it too. I had to step back. Raphael was too sharp and too strong, and he was standing side on to us as if he meant to punch one of us in the face. It might only have been how he happened to stop, but I was nearly sure he knew exactly what it looked like, and whether or not he was really thinking of hitting someone, standing close to him had made my spine fuse up. The need to back off was there in the air, like negative magnetism.

  ‘Mr Martel will burn this place down if anything happens to you, and it’s not safe for you to go off by yourselves,’ he said quietly, more to me than to Clem, like I was an almost acceptable halfway mark. ‘Do you understand? You don’t go anywhere alone. I will take you round on the supply road in the morning. And you can see for yourselves that there’s nothing left, and then you can get out of here before anyone guesses why you came.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  He didn’t look as if he believed me, but he started towards the wharves again. We had to rush through the blue shadows of the stacks in the shade of boulders. The smell of steam hung in those places. The air writhed and the water boiled as it came in over the glass beach.

  Chiselled on all the wharves were notices to keep out of the sun in Spanish and that odd, Spanish-phonetic Quechua. There was a barnacle-rough ladder and a set of steps. When we reached the top, there were more steps, far more, spiralling up the stack. They were stone for only a few yards, then the stone crumbled and was replaced by weatherbeaten wood. I thought Raphael would start up them, but he stopped instead by what I thought at first was a cargo winch whose pulley was a dot hundreds of feet above us. There was a loop at the end, the knot cemented into place by age and run through a straight metal bar to make a flat step, broad enough for two or three people to stand on or one to sit down on it like a swing. He nodded us across.

  ‘On there and don’t fall off.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘It’s higher than St Peter’s. Walk if you like.’

  I stepped on and wrapped my arm around the rope. Clem followed me, more unsteadily. He had never been a rigging sort of sailor. Raphael kicked a lever. As we started to rise, he stepped up with us. His weight made almost no difference to the speed. His clothes smelled of burned honey now, from the wax
he had used on the statue.

  After a few seconds we were well above the docks and passing the great twists in the glass. The winch had been built just where the strongest sun never reached, but there were still intensely hot patches, as hot as open ovens, while snow still feathered only forty feet away downriver. When we rose up beside the falling counterweight, it was an old Spanish cannon stamped with a pomegranate sigil.

  ‘How big is the obsidian flow?’ Clem said. He was still shivering from the river. ‘If you ever stirred yourself to find out.’

  ‘It comes from up there. Those mountains are all volcanoes. There are streams of it all around these hills, if you dig.’

  By the time we were near the top, the view back down the river must have been fifty miles long. Further up, where it disappeared into steep turns and spars in the cliffs, the water churned white and was soon lost. Away in that direction, the mountains were flinty. Waterfalls made fine white lines down their faces, so far off that I couldn’t see them moving.

  The gantry was built just in front of a rock that had been carved into the shape of the nearest mountain, a sawtooth monster capped with what must have been permanent snow.

  ‘Don’t snigger too much,’ Raphael said, ‘but people are going to ask if I introduced you to the mountain and they’ll think it’s strange if I haven’t.’

  ‘Introduce us to the . . .?’ Clem said.

  Raphael motioned over his shoulder at the replica. ‘Consider it an introduction to the local lord. If I have, everyone will know you’re all right. Leave him an offering.’

  ‘Like what?’ I said. ‘What do mountains like?’

  ‘Silver. Shells. Salt. Nothing stupid; people will look to see what you left.’

  I put down some of the glass shells I’d found and Clem turned out his pockets for his shinier coins.

  ‘People believe the mountain is alive?’

  ‘Mm.’ He watched us. ‘Stand straight, look polite. Cultural experience,’ he added when we exchanged an uncertain look. ‘This is the Inca tour.’ He glanced towards the mountain and said something quiet in Quechua, which made Clem squeak.