The Bedlam Stacks

by Natasha Pulley

  ‘I’m a Catholic priest,’ Raphael said.

  Clem laughed. ‘I know how people round here are with religion. You’re like Italians with cheese. I know you must pray to these things too, don’t be shy.’

  ‘I’ll tell you how to do it.’

  ‘Shy,’ Clem said happily. ‘Do you consider it more private then, the native side of things?’

  ‘I consider it not sanctioned by Rome or the Cuzco bishropic,’ Raphael said. He inclined his head at the nearest markayuq. ‘He might have been built by Indians but officially that’s St Thomas. Do you want me to tell you or not?’

  ‘Tell, tell,’ Clem said. He was bouncing on the balls of his feet, which was sometimes a restive habit or an enthusiastic one or both. Raphael took him to the statue and I half-meant to wander, but Clem caught my sleeve and said firmly that it was Culture and that a man couldn’t subsist altogether on chlorophyll. Raphael gave him a salt vial. Close to, the statue was looming, a head taller than me.

  ‘Why salt?’ Clem asked.

  Raphael lifted his jaw towards the forest beyond the border. Because we were so close, the pollen trails we left were brighter and it was possible to move only slightly but leave a clear line in it. There was no need for anything as strong as pointing. It would have looked like a firework. ‘It’s an offering for the people in there, in exchange for the children. It’s worth as much as silver this far from the sea. Are you doing this or not?’

  I looked again at the border. Martel had implied a tribe of angry savages, but something about that didn’t ring true. They had carvers, salt traders, and if they didn’t use all the salt, money. Guards for a hundred-mile border and enough children to reject three or four every year. That didn’t sound like a tribe. It sounded like a town, an organised one. If the other expeditions had assumed they were facing a few hunters with spears and then run up against half an army, it would explain a lot.

  As Clem held out the salt, the statue lifted its hand, palm up. It made us both jump.

  ‘My God,’ Clem smiled. ‘They’re clockwork. Hence the real clothes, is that right? Covers up the joints?’

  The statue was still moving. I thought it would stop to be given the salt, but it extended its arm sideways to invite Clem to put the salt vial into the glass amphora just next to it. There was no sound but the creak of leather. I stared at it for a long time.

  ‘Can I – so they do move, do they?’ I said.

  I’d thought Raphael would ask why I was being so dense, but he seemed to recognise what I might be talking about. ‘You’ve seen one before.’

  ‘We’ve got one in the garden at home. My father brought it back. I saw it move its hand and I thought I was going mad.’

  ‘Your father stole a markayuq?’ Clem laughed.

  ‘He didn’t steal it, he was asked to take it,’ Raphael sounded like he was measuring out words with great care now and he paused while he waited to see if the scales would tip. ‘The villagers . . . considered that it was unhappy here and ought to be taken somewhere else.’

  ‘They believe these things are alive?’ Clem said shining.

  Only half-listening to them, I looked along the line. Other statues were moving too. The next one along only shifted fractionally, but the one after that had put both hands right down, because the little boy talking to it was too small to reach the amphora. There was one that didn’t move at all, and the people praying to it were easing the salt vials into the amphora very quietly, as though they were edging around somebody who was asleep. Close to us, Maria, the unhappy woman who was shy about joining the lottery for the baby, had stopped to wait for her turn with St Thomas. She passed her salt vial to and fro between her hands, her eyes a long way off.

  ‘There you are, Em, not mad at all,’ Clem said to me. He dropped the salt vial into the amphora. It clinked somewhere near the bottom. As he straightened up, he looked at the tooling on the statue’s clothes. ‘So these designs are native, but the statues themselves . . . well, they’re obviously Spanish church marvels, aren’t they. So they were shipped over here as saints, and then reclaimed as markayuq?’

  ‘No. They’re from here, they were here hundreds of years ago.’ Raphael moved his hand forward as he spoke, like he was pushing something well away from himself. It was such an emphatic thing to do, and completely contradicted what he had just said, that I was confused for a second before I understood. Hundreds of years ago was about forty yards in front of him, near the graveyard statue. He had done the same thing at Martel’s, forward for the past, back for the future. ‘The Jesuits claimed them as saints.’

  Clem tipped his head. ‘You’re telling me that an Amerindian culture had, in the sixteenth century, invented clockwork set off by pressure pads?’ He bounced on the springy ground to see if the statue would move again but it didn’t. Pine needles skipped.

  ‘The first missionaries here wrote about them in their – don’t touch them,’ he said suddenly when Clem reached out to move the statue’s sleeve aside.

  ‘Catholic priest,’ Clem said, laughing. ‘They’re as important to you as anyone. I’m an anthropologist, not an inquisitor; you can just say, you know.’

  Raphael looked tired. ‘I don’t want you interfering with St Thomas any less than anyone else wants you interfering with a markayuq.’

  ‘Of course, of course. But I’m not making a report to Rome, honestly. Right! Merrick, stay there: daguerreotype time.’

  We both watched him rush back to the church.

  ‘What’s a daguerreotype?’ Raphael asked.

  ‘A sort of photograph,’ I said, then saw he was still waiting. ‘Which . . . is a way of recording an image on glass. The glass is treated with a light-sensitive chemical and when it’s exposed to the sun, it reacts to light in front of the lens, which makes a black and white image. Light and dark. It’s much more accurate than drawing. I don’t know exactly how it works. But it doesn’t affect the thing in the image any more than painting it would.’

  He had been listening carefully. ‘How long does it take?’

  ‘A few minutes.’

  ‘Minutes,’ he said.

  ‘You don’t have to be in it if you don’t want to stand still for that long,’ I said, and then realised he hadn’t meant that minutes was a long time.

  He was looking at St Thomas with a strange unhappiness, but he said nothing else.

  ‘Is it all right to have a picture of them?’ I asked.

  ‘Why wouldn’t it be?’

  ‘Some people don’t like it.’

  I had thought he had a habit of staring hard at whoever he was talking to, but I saw his focus change then. He was only thinking; he just didn’t look away to do it. Instead he retreated behind some closed doors inside his own skull and left the rest of himself exactly as it had been before. I saw him come back too. ‘Are those people usually stupid?’

  ‘Y . . . es.’

  ‘Maria?’ he added to the woman, who was still waiting. He moved a little aside to show the statue was hers if she wanted.

  She didn’t. She shook her head quickly and showed him a string she was knotting. ‘Not finished,’ she said in a child’s Spanish.

  ‘Can I?’ I asked.

  He gave me a vial. The statue did the same thing again. However it was made, it had been done better than any of the clicking little automata I’d seen in London. My heart was going fast and a startled animal part of me was sure it must be alive, but I hadn’t travelled enough to have seen proper church marvels before. There were saints who cried blood and moved in Spanish cathedrals still and lots of people believed they were real. They must have been convincing too. I stayed where I was to watch the statue let its arm drop again. Its sleeve moved gently, the creases levelling out into darker diamonds and lighter borders round them.

  Clem came back, the daguerreotype box under one arm and three sticks the same length to make an improvised tripod.

  ‘Got it!’ he called. ‘I think the light looks all right, don’t you? Good and
even? This pollen is a gift. Raphael, come and tie some string around this for me, there’s a good fellow.’

  Clem fussed and adjusted as the sticks tipped and didn’t quite do what he wanted, and eventually Raphael smacked his hand away and banged the tripod into the ground. It sunk an inch and a half and stuck.

  ‘Christ, what were you before the priesthood, circus strongman?’ Clem laughed.

  ‘Get on with it, he’s standing there on one good leg.’ Raphael said.

  Clem frowned, puzzled. ‘Did St Thomas only have one leg?’

  It came out sounding like a joke, but it wasn’t his sort of joke and because I was watching I saw his ears flush when he understood. I tried to catch his eye to say I didn’t mind, but he was tying the camera into place.

  Raphael looked like he was listing all the Christian reasons not to kick Clem in the head. When he glanced at me and the statue again, his expression opened.

  ‘Stay still,’ he said.

  The statue was moving again. I’d half-seen it from the corner of my eye, but it was so slow I hadn’t recognised it. It touched my chest, fingertips first, then flattened its hand to my breastbone. I shut my eyes to listen, but even so close I couldn’t hear cogs. Off to my left, Clem made a delighted squeaking noise. I heard him take the cap from the daguerreotype camera.

  ‘Stay absolutely still,’ he murmured, concentrating too much to have heard that Raphael had already said that.

  ‘What is it doing?’ I asked Raphael. I could only try to throw my voice a little towards him, not confident I could turn my head without blurring the picture.

  ‘Just a benediction. He won’t hurt you. It’s good. They don’t do it to everyone.’

  ‘There must be a counter in the pressure pad,’ Clem said. ‘You know: reach out to every fifteenth person who stands there long enough, or whatever. How often is it, have you noticed? Of course you haven’t,’ he said when Raphael shook his head. ‘However often it is, it’s bloody clever. I suppose you wouldn’t be amenable to my digging to find the—’

  ‘Touch that ground and I’ll sacrifice you to something made of teeth,’ Raphael said flatly.

  ‘Not so wholly Catholic after all then, are you?’

  ‘Clem,’ I said.

  ‘Merrick, old man.’

  ‘Less needling of our only guide?’

  ‘Oh, do shut up,’ he said, not as warmly as he could have. I did shut up, and felt bleak about the chances of their not having a furious row before the week was out. It was hard to see how Clem could have spent so much time in countries like this but never noticed that success or failure depended on being a water boatman, skimming, instead of a diver and getting everyone wet with an enormous splash whenever anything interesting passed through the deep water. Standing near him and Raphael together felt a lot like standing on the banks of a half-holy lake somewhere lost in the mountains, with a St Bernard dead set on winning a swimming medal.

  The statue still had his hand over my heart. If he had been a person, he would have been able to feel it beating, because it was going fast, or it had been at first. The longer I stood there, the more it eased. I felt as though there was calm coming up through the ground, and although I knew the statue was clockwork, the magic of it worked all the same. The tendons in his hands were standing and there were fine lines around his blank eyes. It would have been a lovely thing to believe in, if I could have believed in anything at all.

  Very gently, the statue gave me a little push. It must have been a way of moving people along if there was a line, but it felt like the pat doctors give you on the way out to promise that you aren’t made of glass after all and you’ll be all right in the end.

  ‘Clem, can I move?’ I said. It wasn’t until I spoke that I noticed they had been bickering all along. I hadn’t heard any of it properly, for all they were ten feet away. ‘He’s— I mean, it’s pushing me.’

  ‘Y . . . es. I think that’s long enough.’ He dropped the shutter.

  I stepped back and the statue let its hand drop.

  ‘Incredible,’ Clem said. ‘Absolutely incredible.’

  Maria, ready now, edged up to Raphael and gave him her salt. He reeled her back in by her sleeve and took her by the hand to St Thomas instead, who didn’t move this time.

  She hesitated, then wound her length of knotted string around the statue’s wrist. She stopped and turned away before she had quite finished when someone else came up beside her to put in some salt.

  ‘Maria,’ Raphael said. He gave it a Quechua intonation this time, which sounded regions warmer than that formal religious Spanish. A nickname would have sounded wrong in that. I wondered how the hell I knew. It was far too soon to have anything like a proper sense of register, but it had a weird, deep pull already. I twisted my hand to and fro on the hook of my cane, feeling, again, like I was brushing up against something I had used to know but had lost.

  She said something about her mother and hurried off. Clem was dismantling the daguerreotype box, but she didn’t pause to look.

  Raphael touched the trailing cord on the statue’s wrist and pulled his fingertips down it. ‘It says if she wins a baby next time, he’s invited to the baptism. I’m rigging the next lottery,’ he said.

  ‘It says that exactly? With a conditional and . . .?’ Clem asked. He looked like he had found heaven without having to go to the trouble of dying first.

  ‘No,’ said Raphael. ‘Conditional invitations are expressed indirectly with numerical adjectives and sheep.’

  I snorted and then tried to pretend I hadn’t.

  ‘No need to be snippy. There was never any evidence for anything else. There’s not a – I don’t suppose they all learned from a particular person – you know, a proper khipukamayuq. Sorry, Em, that means master-of-the-knots—’

  ‘There are no proper scribes here any more,’ said Raphael. ‘You’re three hundred years too late.’ He swept his hand forward again. The far past, far ahead, into the forest again.

  Clem hadn’t seen him do it at Martel’s. I understood much too late that I should have said something, but I was so busy thinking about how it worked, the past ahead, that it didn’t occur to me what it looked like to Clem, who gazed over the border, in the direction Raphael had motioned at. Without knowing what he meant, it seemed as though when he thought about an older, more complicated culture, he thought of the people in the woods.

  ‘No, you’re right,’ Clem said. ‘But this is a hospital colony, you told us, and it’s being replenished all the time by someone. There must be a lot more of them out there than there are of you here; maybe they still have scribes.’ He was over the border before either of us understood. Almost as soon as he was across, the pollen flared much more and he left a real wake.

  There was a yell from almost everyone who saw, and a surge towards the salt that jerked short like someone had wrenched their strings.

  Clem waved his arms to make the light flare. ‘Hello! I say? Anyone here?’

  People were turning back to Raphael and half-sentences came at us, all interrupted by the others: what is he, you have to, he’ll be, for God’s sake. It was real shock and it only lasted a moment before Raphael went after him. He didn’t go quickly. He came up behind him and tapped him on the shoulder.

  ‘Markham.’

  When Clem turned round, Raphael punched him in the face. It floored him. Raphael caught the collar of his coat and dragged him back over the salt. He threw him the last yard and Clem landed in a spray of pine needles, still conscious, just. No one seemed startled. Instead there was a collective easing. Some of the women sighed and turned away back to town. A few young men hovered near the border, watching the forest like they expected something to come howling out.

  ‘Jesus Christ,’ Clem coughed. ‘You – raving lunatic—’

  ‘Shut up.’ Raphael pulled him up and dragged him back towards the church. Clem twisted, but Raphael was exactly as immovable as he looked and none of the struggling swayed him so much as half an inch.


  ‘Put him down,’ I said. I sounded like a Navy officer still. ‘It was a mistake.’

  ‘I’m not going to hurt him, I’m going to rebaptise him.’

  ‘You’ll hurt him by accident. Stop.’ However badly balanced I was now, I was still taller and I thumped my forearm into his chest to make him stop. He thought about making me move and I saw it, and then I saw it fade, but not altogether. He leaned back slowly.

  ‘It was a misunderstanding,’ I said. ‘He thought you were pointing to the people in the woods when you talked about scribes. He hasn’t seen you talk about time. He was unconscious at Martel’s.’

  ‘People won’t talk to him unless he’s baptised again,’ he said, much more quietly. I felt like I was trying to stand directly in front of a furnace. It was worse for knowing he was justified; Martel had said that everyone here would be killed if Clem were. ‘Get out of my way.’

  I stood aside, and helped Clem up. He was too heavy for me to support and still foggy, so Raphael took him by the arm, not gently but not roughly either. The new baptism wasn’t much more than having his head dunked into the font, but when I looked back people were watching.

  ‘In nomine of whatever you think is looking after you. There. Congratulations.’ He dumped him on the ground, protected from any accusations of unceremoniousness because nobody else spoke English. ‘I’ll find you a towel.’

  Clem propped his wrists on his knees. ‘He’s bloody strong.’

  ‘I saw.’ I knelt down too, slowly, then had to sit and cross my legs. ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘I’m fine. I suppose being attacked by the natives is part and parcel of the job. Minna will love it.’ He cracked his jaw and winced. ‘I thought he was going to kill me.’

  ‘You’re all right.’

  ‘No more getting in the way of psychopaths, hey?’ he said, nearly smiling, but not quite. ‘He could have hurt you.’

  I nodded. He could have. But it felt good to have stood in front of him without flinching and, however stupid it was, I wanted to do it again. ‘He didn’t though.’

  ‘God, I really thought . . .’ Clem had the shaken look new recruits have when they see guns go off for the first time at a real ship instead of a hulk in the Bristol Channel. ‘He’s mad, isn’t he. He would have done it if I’d been too far in to drag out.’