The kitchen smelled of laundry powder and fresh vapour, because there were shirts draped over the glass pipes to dry. The baby, who was sitting on the table, burbled at me and held up a wooden building block, either to stretch or to show me. I went over to tickle her and she laughed a deep viola laugh that sounded like it ought not to have come from something so small. She had new clothes, white, and Raphael was dressed like a priest. It was odd to see him neat all in black. He looked like someone else. He didn’t say anything and I didn’t blame him – it was only just past seven and that was early for a third language – but he touched the little brass tap on the stove to say there was hot water. By the stove was a bowl of ground coffee and a little triangle stand with some calico stretched across it to make a filter.
The corner window next to the stove had a hazy view of the town. Because we were so hemmed in by mountains, the light was still dim and our lamps cast my reflection in stronger colours over the view. Everything was covered in snow. All the thatched roofs were white triangles now, the windmills brilliantly red. The trees on that side weren’t the strange pines, just conifers and sickly kapoks whose ambition had exceeded their tolerance for the altitude, and the snow in their branches made a thick new canopy. I polished the glass, which was clouding from the drying laundry. Up close, the panes were all odd thicknesses and irregular sizes – they were chipped-out shards, not blown and moulded.
‘The snow’s heavy,’ I said at last.
‘The river’s frozen.’ Raphael let his hands drop and the bones in his wrists thumped against the tabletop. The baby looked down to see what had made the vibration. It didn’t make her jump, though it did me. It was loud, one of those broad things that already broad men do to take up more space. However much he had mellowed yesterday night, he didn’t want me in his kitchen now. ‘You’re stuck here, unless you walk back to Azangaro.’
I clenched my hands when I found I’d backed myself almost into the window. I had to force myself to turn away and trust he wasn’t going to make any sudden movements. Out of all the difficulties my leg brought, the limping and the tiredness and everything else, that anxiety was the stupidest and most wearing and I was starting to think that what I really needed was to just get into a proper fight, win or lose.
I forgot about him when I saw the woman standing outside. She was in the long grass between us and the bridge, stock still. Her back was curved forward and she was propped up with a cane. It made her look old, but she was my age. She was staring at the house.
I had to reach for the thread of what we’d been saying. ‘Well, we’ll pay you for however long we’re here.’
‘Mr Martel wouldn’t hear of it.’
‘No need to tell him then.’
He frowned as though it was hard to think of Martel not knowing something.
When I turned back to the window again, the woman had come right up close to it and her face almost against the glass made me jump. I bit my tongue rather than make a noise. She had only come to look at me. After a second she limped away. The ghost of someone else was coming over the bridge, a man. He was huge, and he was dragging one leg behind him. I could hear it through the window, the grinding noise it made on the stone. He must have had metal encasing his shoe to keep it from wearing through. I stepped away from the window, not sure what was happening. Raphael must have heard the noise too but he ignored it. He was playing with the baby. She had his rosary and she was trying to find the end of it. Whenever she came to the cross she giggled. On the fourth or fifth time it sent her off into a burst of that deep laughter again. He smiled too.
‘We’ll see how it goes,’ he said at last. The baby was cheering him up. ‘It might all melt again this afternoon.’
I’d made two cups of coffee. When I passed him one, he frowned as if I’d offered him something dead. I didn’t move, ready to tell him not to be rude. But then he seemed to remember himself and took it.
‘Thank you.’
‘Who are those people?’ I nodded at the window.
‘There’s a ceremony soon, to choose her new parents.’
The huge man with the bad leg had stopped next to the woman. They waited close together now. Two more people had appeared in the meantime too, a young couple. The man was in a wheelchair. It had been made from an ordinary chair and wheels from a perambulator, but somebody had fixed wooden skis to the wheels so that it moved more like a small sleigh. His wife’s shoulders were uneven, so much that it must have been painful. It made pushing the sleigh-chair difficult.
‘Right; shall we go?’ Raphael said to the baby. He touched the top of her head so that she would know she was being spoken to and took her tiny hands, very gently, giving her time to get used to the idea that the rosary game was finished now. When she smiled, he took the beads back and lifted her up. He had put a fur blanket around her. ‘Up you come. Let’s go and find your new mama.’
‘Where are you going?’ Clem asked. He had just come in, bleary but better. When he wasn’t feeling well, his hair was less red. ‘Whose baby is that?’
‘About to find out,’ said Raphael. As soon as he opened the door and the cold poured in, I realised I’d only seen the latest arrivals. What I’d thought yesterday was open grass beyond the kitchen door was really an overgrown courtyard, and it was nearly full. There was no noise except for the sigh of the trees and the birds. I got up again too, at first to shut the door, but I stopped on the threshold, because there had been a tiny stirring when they all saw the baby. Clem pulled irritably at my sleeve and I explained about the bell and the church.
While I was talking, Raphael was too. He was keeping to Spanish which, even in such a short time, was starting to sound official. If he had been chatting it would have been Quechua. He was saying that the baby seemed not to have an impairment except maybe deafness. It caused another stir. Some of the people nearer the front clasped their hands. There was barely a straight figure among them. They were all twisted, or missing limbs or eyes, or whole but strangely made.
‘He wasn’t joking about its being a hospital colony, was he?’ Clem said by my ear.
‘No,’ I murmured, quiet because I’d had a sudden unexpected lash of envy. It was hard to be always the slow one and the one who everyone else made allowances for. If I’d lived in a place like this, I wouldn’t have felt so pointless. It was probably only a fantasy. I’d felt worse living with Charles. But it seemed different to that, the arrangement here.
A boy of about twelve hurried up to the front with a glass bowl, a nice one with strands of blue all through it. One by one, ten or eleven people, mainly women, came and dropped in a little piece of knotted string. I glanced back at Clem, who looked at me too with light in his eyes.
‘That’s Incan knot-writing,’ he said softly.
When he had mentioned it before, I hadn’t envisioned it properly. I almost said that I’d seen Raphael doing it on the way here, but I realised in time that doing so would mean a joyful explosion halfway through an otherwise serious public gathering.
As each person put in their string, they left something else too; a little basket of pineapples, or jars of pepper or cocoa pods, cloth.
‘Priests aren’t paid by the Church here,’ Clem explained. ‘They’re freelance. You pay them per ceremony, usually in money. He’d be rich in Azangaro, but I can’t imagine they see much in the way of real currency up here. In fact it’s probably a way to prove they have the means to look after a child, a valuable offering.’
‘Maria, you said you wanted a baby,’ Raphael said to someone. ‘Don’t be so shy.’
‘But she’s mad,’ someone protested.
‘If she wins she gets help then, doesn’t she.’
A short, round woman crept out from the crowd, holding her string too tightly. Raphael had to persuade her to let it go, then nudged her back to the others. She put down the pelt of something white and soft on her way. An older woman put her arm round her. Raphael glanced down at the pelt as if it was too much.
; Once all the names were in, the boy held the bowl out to Raphael, who spun the strings around three times one way, three times the other, then drew one out. He didn’t have to look at it; he must have been able to feel the knots. Clem’s fingers closed hard over my arm.
‘God, it’s like seeing into the past. This is incredible.’
‘Juan and Francesca Huaman,’ Raphael said.
The young woman at the front, the one whose husband was in the wheelchair, clapped her hand over her mouth then half-ran forward for the baby. Everyone else cheered and clapped, and things turned to a Spanish-Quechua mix that I couldn’t understand. Clem grinned.
‘They’re saying good luck. Christ, look at that, what is that?’
People were holding little glass vials and lobbing what was inside towards the Huamans and the baby. It was the same pollen that was in the lamps, and as soon as it was out of the vials it floated up, haloing them, and a brighter glow began to trace all their movements. Raphael gave the baby to Francesca very carefully, not in the sack-of-corn way of people who are used to children. Once Francesca had her safely, he stepped back and clenched his hands. He looked worried, and sad, but nobody noticed. They were all too taken with the baby. It felt like unusual attention; there was a kind of awe, that she was so perfect.
‘It’s pollen,’ I said to Clem. ‘It’s in the lamps in here too. Boatloads in the forest.’ I told him about the pollen ghosts from the night before.
‘They went into the forest? Chuncho then?’ He looked sparkly at the idea.
‘I only saw pollen trails.’
‘But that’s interesting,’ Clem murmured. ‘If someone’s keeping up a colony, then the colony must do something for them. Otherwise it would be Spartan-style over the cliff.’
‘I said that. Raphael says not, though.’
‘I think Raphael would withhold interesting facts just to be irritating.’ He went out to congratulate the Huamans.
Raphael came back to the door as everyone else closed round the new family. He went straight to the stove to make himself some more coffee. Outside, people were leaving over the bridge. Someone was playing a guitar. While he waited for the slow tap to fill his cup, he pulled the lacing of the cassock open down his back, his arms bent behind him and his fingertips precise on the strings. He had laced it crosswise so that he could get out of it himself, although it didn’t look as if it had been made for that. It had a red velvet ribbon in the back of the collar.
I’d always thought it was gaudy, but standing there watching him beside the gold and glass shrine, I realised that his was a candlelight faith. It didn’t work in the clear unforgiving light in London or Scandinavia, where even the dust in the cathedrals showed. But in the warm dimness and the shadows, what would have been tasteless at home made sense. The shrine looked like an oil painting made into real substance. So did he. England’s was a reading religion, one it was difficult to understand at the bleak unimpressive first glance, one that needed books to explain itself. But his was images and images, the same as the old stages, in a place where not everyone could read and good light was expensive.
He had an ordinary shirt on underneath. He pulled the sleeve over his knuckles and pushed his hand over his eyes.
‘That was astonishing,’ Clem laughed, tumbling in from outside. He brought snow and cold air in with him. ‘People can write their names on khipu – is that a revival or unbroken tradition since the Inca?’
‘Do I look like I’ve got a time machine in the cutlery drawer?’ Raphael said, halfway into the waistcoat he had left draped like a tea towel over the oven door. It was old, but the lining was new. It was blue Indian chintz, the best sort, handpainted with birds. I’d seen it before; it was the same as the lining of Dad’s coat sleeves. But that coat had been old by the time he had it. It had been his father’s. Harry Tremayne must have brought a bolt of it here as a present for someone who had used it sparingly enough for there still to be fresh offcuts. Seeing it new made me feel as if I must only just have missed him.
‘Shocking,’ Clem said, disappearing into the chapel with a very purposeful stride.
Raphael took his cup from under the tap and didn’t look when there was a clunk from the chapel, Clem tipping his bag out on the start of a pencil hunt. His eyelashes looked blacker because they were still starred.
‘If you can’t feel heat,’ I said.
He lifted his eyes. They were raw. Three or four children a year, he had said; hard if he wanted children. I didn’t ask, but pulling his own name from the strings seemed like the kind of thing a priest wouldn’t be allowed to do.
‘Does coffee not taste the same, hot or cold?’
‘I can taste if it’s boiled or not. And steam has a smell, so . . .’
‘Oh, right.’
‘Off out,’ Clem chirped, on his way back and halfway into his coat. He had his journal too and a pencil sticking out of his waistcoat pocket.
‘No you’re not.’ Raphael put the coffee aside. He hadn’t drunk any of it. ‘I’m taking you to see the forest and where you can’t go. I’m not having anyone say I didn’t make it clear to you.’
‘Honestly I tend not to get much out of topiary, it’s altogether more Merrick’s thing—’
‘There are six markayuq out there,’ Raphael interrupted.
‘Lead on.’
I lagged behind them with my cane hooked over my arm while I buttoned my coat up. There was new snow even since everyone had left. It creaked as we walked. Like last night, Raphael went without his coat and I realised that he couldn’t feel the cold any more than burns. After another few steps came a following thought I should have had earlier too. He was keeping the house warm for us; he would have needed the stove to cook, but whether the heating pipes were going or not wouldn’t have made a blind bit of difference to him. I looked hard at the firewood stacked round the church so that I’d remember, when we came back, to find out how much it cost, or at least, how much time it took him to bring it all in.
FOURTEEN
The trees cast everything into shade. The canopy had blocked the snow, but frost crunched in the grass and our footsteps stayed frozen in it behind us. The spider webs strung through the grass snapped and fell whole, winking where tines of light cut down through the branches. When no sun filtered through at all and we were past the first of the trees, each of their roots as thick as an ordinary birch, a shimmer started to follow my cane hand, like yesterday but much fainter and only as bright as the imprint of the sun on closed eyes. Ahead of me Clem was waving his hand to and fro in front of his face.
‘It’s the pollen,’ I said. ‘It’s thicker further in, you’ll see.’
Raphael looked back. He had left the ghost of a wake that looked more like a less shadowy patch of shadow than its own light. ‘If you can ever see by it, you’ve strayed too far.’
When we were both paying attention to him and not doing light experiments, he pointed to a broad line of dead earth, which was greyish although the soil wasn’t clay, then above it, to the animal bones hanging in the trees. It stretched in both directions for as far as I could see, disappearing into the hazy morning on one side and round the cliff on the other.
‘This is the border. You can’t miss it. Salt, bone,’ he said, pointing down and then up. ‘It’s well maintained for fifty miles in either direction. They’re always here; they always watch it, and they’ll see it like a lighthouse if you cross. They’ll kill you.’ He stood on the salt line and lifted both arms. It gave him light wings and showed the red in his hair. While it lasted, just for a few seconds, he looked like his namesake must have when archangelic work still hinged on wrestling prophets. ‘Please don’t wander,’ he said quietly.
‘Oh, God.’ I jerked back from what looked like a man clawing his way out of the ground right beside me, but it was only a clever carving in the roots of the nearest tree. Something about seeing it shifted the way I was looking at the trees and then I saw them all. They were everywhere: howling carvings strainin
g away from the salt. I stepped back again, then shuddered when something cold dropped down the back of my collar.
Clem touched the grain of one, which made me flinch. They weren’t for touching. The one he had chosen was a man contorted like a monster, tendons standing out hard from his throat. ‘I’ve never seen dendrographs like this.’
When the wind furled down through the trees, it moaned in the carvings. Raphael came back from the salt line and dropped the backpack he had brought among the roots of the closest tree. The thump made the pine needles on the ground jump.
‘That’s all I wanted you to see.’
‘What about these markayuq then?’ Clem said. ‘I was promised anthropoid markayuq, damn it.’
Raphael hesitated but after a second he pointed to our north-west, then north-east, then east. They were there, perhaps forty yards apart, statues seven feet high and standing just before the border. I could see the ghosts of two more further away through the morning haze. People who had been at the ceremony were walking towards them too, some very slowly, having trouble in the cold. Soon the first of them stopped in front of the closest statues and began to pray. I couldn’t see the sixth markayuq at first. It was closer than I’d thought, just by the church but beyond the border, its back to us. It was looking over a little clearing of glass crosses and cairns.
‘Don’t swear in front of them,’ Raphael said. ‘If you go up to one, give it some salt.’ He held out a handful of little vials to us, full of white crystals. It was exactly what the Indian man in Crucero had given to him. Along the border, glass flashed where other people were holding vials too.
‘No, no, no,’ Clem said. ‘Come on, show me properly. I want to see a proper prayer.’
The Bedlam Stacks Page 14