The Bedlam Stacks

by Natasha Pulley

  ‘No, I’m up to my eyes in opium.’

  ‘I’ve got to catch a ship in an hour.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘They don’t need me here,’ he explained.

  ‘You mean you were here with me and they don’t need me any more. You can come with me to England. I’m not having you go where you don’t want to.’

  I saw something go from him; it was hard to say what, but when he spoke, it was more slowly than he usually did, and although his voice was still small, the measure of it was grown up. There wasn’t any little boy left in him.

  ‘There are things you wouldn’t do, if you had a motherless child waiting at home. Or with you. Places where you would turn back.’

  ‘What are you talking about? I won’t be going anywhere. Probably never again.’

  ‘You will.’

  ‘You know you can’t make sweeping statements just on the strength of being exotic and foreign.’

  He nearly laughed. ‘Of course you’ll go. You must. People are like bees. They’re all workers who could be queens, with the right stuff, but once a queen-making has begun, it can’t be reversed. A bee that’s halfway a queen can’t turn back into a worker. She’d starve. She must keep growing and then she must leave.’

  ‘Someone’s cryptic this morning. And I’m not a bee.’

  ‘I know. Sorry. I’m not much good at all this. Look, the point is, I’m going home. I’ve already been away too long. I know you’ve never asked, but I do have a family. Lots of brothers. They’ll be worried. This is my address.’

  He gave me a sheet of Japanese, the flyleaf of a Bible. The picture signs were almost the same as Chinese and I could understand, though I couldn’t have said them aloud. Clover Castle, in a place called Longshire.

  ‘You needn’t write, but there it is, if there’s an emergency. Or . . . well. The post isn’t very reliable anyway.’

  ‘I see,’ I said.

  He looked hard at a point on the floor as if he were suddenly dizzy.

  ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘I will have forgotten in the morning,’ he said.

  I shook my head slightly. Will have forgotten; there were English children who couldn’t have said that.

  He lifted his eyes again. They were full of tears. ‘I had better go or I’ll miss the ship. I’m glad to have met you, Mr Tremayne.’ He gazed around the room once more as though he were leaving it after years, not hours. I saw him catch himself and put on a smile. What he would look like in his thirties was clear, just briefly. He would be a late-bloomer, odd until middle age, but then he would come into himself properly and he would be lovely. I could feel them, all the lost years I’d never see.

  ‘Keita, wait—’

  ‘No,’ he said, but he stopped. He was struggling with something. In the end it made him thump the doorframe. ‘I don’t like doing this, but I don’t want you to have to live thinking there was no reason.’ He was looking at my leg where it was set straight with a cage under the blanket. ‘You don’t know what this means yet, but listen anyway. When Mr Markham crosses the salt at Bedlam, you must not. But it’s no good saying must not to anyone, so I’ve made it cannot. I’m so sorry, but if you were well, you would go with him and I want you alive at the end of it all. This was the only way I could think of to make sure of it.’

  Everything had warped into the feeling of an opium dream and even knowing I was awake, I couldn’t tell if I was hearing something real. ‘What? How do you know Clem?’

  ‘I don’t. Get some sleep. Good luck.’

  I could have made him stay. He was a little boy; if I’d told him not to talk such nonsense and to sit down, he would have. But I was opium-fogged and I felt like I was drowning, and I couldn’t gather together the presence of mind to do it.

  TWENTY-ONE

  Peru, 1860

  The church was echoing without anyone else in it. The dark pushed up against the windows and so did the cold. I kept the fire going and the pipes running, but although I’d plenty of things to do – half-finished sketches and Spanish to learn – I couldn’t settle to any of it and ended up by the window instead, with its diagonal view of the border and the streams of light where animals paced beyond the salt line. I saw a bear, but never anything tall enough to be a person. All I could think was that the border was a clever idea. It might as well have been Hadrian’s Wall, but they had taken the idea and distilled it down to all that was actually required of a wall in a perfectly policed world: a line on the ground. I wondered if it was perfectly policed.

  Eventually the lamps’ clockwork ran down and I had to wind them up again. Moving about brought me back to myself and I was thinking about cooking something when the bell in the nave jingled.

  I leaned to the window. There was nothing in the pollen, although I wouldn’t have seen anything from here unless they came at an angle. After a second, the bell rang again, then again, for longer, then silence. I put my coat on, and my shoulder to the door. It was frosted shut and I had to push hard. The idea of carrying a baby across the icy bridges made my ribs tighten.

  There was only one candle lit on the altar, but it was enough to show that there was no baby. It was the body of a man, half-laid-out, half-dropped, and the candlelight made his hair brilliantly red.

  I leaned against the edge of the altar and felt the rough places in the stone digging into my palms. It took me a long time to push past the feeling that I shouldn’t touch him. When I did, he was as cold as the altar. I had to cross my arms. He didn’t seem like himself, because he was never so expressionless, even asleep. Although I waited to feel sad or angry or something decent, all that arrived was fear, not of the woods or God but of Minna. I’d have to explain what had happened and I didn’t think I’d be able to lie, but I couldn’t decide what the truth was. When I tried to run through the memory I couldn’t tell if I’d let him go because it was right or because he had hurt me.

  It was Raphael’s voice that I heard at the back of my mind, asking what the hell I’d been doing. Since we had left the Navy, Clem had meandered about on archaeology expeditions while I’d been forged into a machine on the anvil of the East India Company. I was the stronger of us by far but I’d forgotten, because I was too used to feeling broken. Then I’d lashed out, and it was so much worse than anything he could ever have done to me. And I’d done it in the church of a man who was orders of magnitude stronger than the people around him but spent his life doing their laundry. I’d never felt shame like it. It burned, silent but concentrated like a welding torch until something in me vitrified. I had to burn myself on the altar candle to shock myself out of the certainty that I’d go mad with it. It helped, and I started to think more clearly.

  There were marks around his neck, deep and dark. Shaped like fingers. I measured my hand against them without touching him. They belonged to someone with a bigger reach than mine. I lifted up his hand. His fingertips were grazed. He had scratched at something hard. I tipped my lamp to his nails, some of which were broken, but if there was anything under them I couldn’t see it. Certainly no blood. Whoever had caught him, they had been wearing something substantial. I glanced out into the trees, where there was no light, though there should have been if someone had run back after ringing the bell. There were only the markayuq. No one and nothing had moved.

  Because the cold seemed a better idea than underfloor heating, I left him on the altar with the candle and crossed his arms over his chest as well as I could with his muscles stiffening. I went back inside and leaned back against the door, my fingers tapping at the hook of my cane. I wanted to fetch Inti, but there was nothing she could have done but insist Catholicly on sitting a vigil in the snow. It was only wanting to talk to another person.

  ‘You let him go,’ I said aloud to myself. ‘Live with it.’

  I went to sit by the stove and play patience.

  In the morning, I let myself out once it was light, which was late, because the mountains hid the sun so well, and walked up to the borde
r. There was something maddening about deducing things from light trails in the dark and I wanted to see the trees in ordinary light, looking ordinary. It wasn’t until I reached it that I saw the heaps of fur on the ground. There were dead wolves everywhere. They were all around the markayuq, some just on our side of the salt, some just before. Their necks were broken. I’d strayed in among them before I saw them and I stood still, listening hard, because it seemed too unlikely that they were all completely dead. But I didn’t hear any breath except mine.

  They must have come for the body; they would have known it was there from half a mile away. The top half of my spine seized at the thought of having slept through it. Wolf packs weren’t quiet. They would have been calling to each other through the woods and I hadn’t heard, even though I was sure I’d only dozed. And then someone had killed them all, and still I hadn’t heard. It made listening seem very futile now. In front of me, the salt line had taken on a weird anti-magnetism. Even if I had decided to, logically and carefully, I couldn’t have crossed. For a long time I stood looking into the trees, straining to see anything – a spark or a dying pollen trail, something moving – but it was all dead and silent.

  I heard leather creaking. When I turned my head, slowly because I didn’t know if I wanted to see what was there, the two nearest markayuq had twisted towards me. One was St Thomas and like always he managed to look less accusatory than curious.

  ‘I’m not crossing,’ I said aloud.

  ‘Who are you talking to?’

  I swung around. Raphael had paused on the border to rearrange his bag of markayuq-cleaning things on his shoulder beside the old strap of the rifle. Once he had moved it, it left a red stripe where it had pulled his shirt to one side. He was so pale from the cold he might have been Spanish, but he was very alive.

  ‘Where have you been?’ I said. It came out flat.

  ‘In the graveyard cleaning the – you watched me go in, why are you asking me?’

  ‘Seventeen hours ago.’

  ‘Seventeen . . . hours.’ His eyes went past me to the town, where the morning light was only just coming past the mountains. Some of the houses had glass roof tiles and they sparkled.

  ‘Where have you been?’

  ‘I haven’t been anywhere, I was just . . .’

  ‘For God’s sake,’ I said, nearly laughing. ‘Clem is dead on the church altar. You’re telling me you just wandered off for a night-time walk? Or did you disappear so that we’d cross the border looking for you and everyone would swear to Mr Martel it wasn’t you who killed us, and you could get rid of the idiot foreigners bothering your markayuq?’

  Of all the imbecile things to do, confronting someone who might have murdered half the expedition should have been high on the list. But I was ashamed enough and angry enough not to care if he was dangerous. I was dangerous too. Clem had made me remember that. I knew I could take the rifle off Raphael and shoot him with it if I had to. I was almost a head taller. People talk about seeing red, but I didn’t. I only saw in greater focus.

  ‘He’s what?’ His voice cracked and he put his hand to the mossy tree trunk beside us.

  ‘Was it you?’

  ‘No! Stop – stop.’ He was having trouble talking; he was breathing too fast and too shallow. Where he was holding the moss, his fingernails had lost all their colour. There were pine needles caught in the folds of his shirt, and pollen; whenever he moved, it glowed away from him in wisps, more where the wind was catching him down his left side. He might have been evanescing into the frozen morning. I frowned. It was hard to think that he’d look like this if he had been set up in a tent somewhere. A spider peeped around his collar. I scooped it off him and showed him, although not for long before it bounced out of my hand and on to the tree. He jerked away and then opened his hand properly. Strands of web stretched between his shirt cuff and the first joint of his fingers. He scrubbed it off, fast, then stayed very still. His breath was almost gone.

  ‘Come inside,’ I said at last.

  ‘I can’t move.’ He was nearly too quiet to hear. ‘I’ll be along in a minute.’

  Further towards the border, where the pollen was thicker, it made those cold cinder patterns. It was difficult to believe there could be so much of it in the snow, but then, the vines in the trees were barely dead – the frost had killed them only this week. It was supposed to be high summer. My leg panged from having been still and cold for too long, but I couldn’t bring myself to sit down in the roots, which were all grey with rime. He was holding his fingertips two inches off my chest, to stop me coming any nearer. They shook.

  ‘Tell me what happened,’ I said. ‘And please be convincing.’

  ‘Just – same as always but longer.’ He was struggling in English again and I saw him reach for the word, but he couldn’t catch it. ‘It is sometimes.’

  At first I didn’t understand, but then I fell very still and realised I was either being told the honest truth, or a lie he had been preparing since he had first frozen by the statue on the river in Sandia.

  ‘Catalepsy,’ I said for him. ‘For that long?’

  ‘There are long spells. Longer than this, but I didn’t expect . . . I wasn’t due one. Or I would have told you,’ he said, much more hotly than before. ‘I would have told you to watch for it.’

  I tried to decide. He didn’t meet my eye again. At Martel’s house he had been like something from a goldsmith’s, but he was as pale as me now and somehow even his hair was faded. It was brown, not black. All that seemed certain was that he had been outside for all that time. I couldn’t tell if it was a feat of endurance someone strong enough and zealous enough might just manage on willpower.

  ‘If I’d killed him, I wouldn’t be talking to you now,’ he said softly. He had to go into Spanish. If he was pretending panic, I’d never seen anyone pretend so well or so accurately. ‘I’d have shot you. No?’

  ‘There are a thousand things here I don’t know. I feel like we’ve been edging around a set of laws nobody can explain since we arrived.’ I motioned at the border. ‘I’m not nearly in possession of all the facts, I do know that. I don’t know anything beyond the border. I don’t know who you talk to in there, I don’t know how the hell they make statues look like they walk or why, I don’t understand what your religion is, or what it might require of you. None of it makes any sense. I am in no position to make grand sweeping deductions about what you might or might not have done.’

  ‘I swear to you, I didn’t do it. I thought I was only gone for ten minutes until just now.’

  There was nothing to say one way or another. Only whether or not I wanted to believe him. I did want to. The ferocious clarity that had let me stare him down before left me, draining into the pine needles, and without it I felt exhausted. Slowly, I took off my coat. He took it without arguing and shook out the last of the pollen and the needles from his own clothes before he shrugged into it. Without it, the wind cut straight through my waistcoat.

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Seventeen hours. You should be dead. You should have been dead sixteen hours ago, dressed like this. Were you sheltered?’

  ‘No. Just in the graveyard.’

  He pushed his hands through his hair. There was frost in it. He frowned when he noticed what was around us. ‘Wolves. When did this happen?’

  ‘I don’t know. I didn’t hear anything. I think they came for Clem’s body.’

  ‘They will have been – they won’t let a pack of wolves into Bedlam.’ He motioned back over the salt line to say that he meant the people inside. ‘The border works both ways.’

  I scanned the trees again. I couldn’t see how they could possibly stay hidden always. The pollen showed everything that moved; everything, even moths. Even trained soldiers had to shift and go for a walk sometimes.

  ‘Well – better go in,’ I said. I leaned against the tree to turn round on the uneven ground, which was all bumpy with roots. ‘Can you move now?’

  He glanced up and nodded.
At Martel’s his eyes had been black, but now they were shot through with grey penny-scratch lines. He was losing his colours. It had been happening all week. I thought of how often I’d seen red in his hair when there shouldn’t have been any, when it had been so black at first, like everyone else’s here.

  ‘Why did Markham go out? I’ve spent all week telling you not to.’

  ‘He thought that there was a camp of quinine suppliers over the border, not Chuncho, and that you’d gone to warn them we were here.’

  He didn’t seem indignant or worried or even surprised. ‘Everyone who comes here thinks that before long.’ He sighed. ‘We’ll have a funeral tomorrow, if you’re happy for him to stay here.’

  ‘Is it not possible to take a body back over the mountains?’

  ‘It wouldn’t be dignified.’

  ‘Tomorrow, then,’ I said. I heard my own voice like it came from a long way off. I hadn’t thought I would have to leave him behind.

  ‘Wish it could have been you instead,’ Raphael said absently, cat’s-cradling his rosary.

  ‘What?’

  He spun the cross once. ‘You’re quite light.’

  I smiled. He pulled the church door open and turned back to help me up the step. I took his hand and let him pull me inside, the backs of my shirtsleeves cold and damp with the snow blowing in from along the valley and my teeth aching from having been set hard for too long. I still couldn’t decide whether I should believe him or not. But I was too tired and too cold to argue, and for that moment at least I loved him for having made the idea of the funeral that bit less heavy, like he had put his shoulder under mine to share the weight.

  TWENTY-TWO

  While we had been talking, I’d heard chinking and voices in the background, closer than the village, but I hadn’t paid any attention. They must have arrived just as I was leaving, because when we went through into the kitchen, it was full of people, and so was the flat land just outside. Martel sat back and smiled. Hernandez and Quispe were with him, still in their coats. Beyond them, through the windows, ten or twelve men were clearing the snow to stake up tents. They had already started cooking fires with the efficient domesticity of people used to moving miles between meals.