The Bedlam Stacks

by Natasha Pulley

  ‘It’s all right. I don’t care who they are. I was only asking because I was trying to tell if by monastery you mean a hut on a cliff somewhere or a nice place with hot water and proper doctors.’

  He smiled. ‘It’s not a hut.’

  ‘Good.’ I finished my rum. ‘Do you mind if I have some honey?’

  ‘Have the lot, get it off my table. I only want the wax.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  He watched me spread the honey over some bread. ‘Are you drawing a bee?’

  ‘Y . . . es.’ I tipped the bread so that the head-splodge would run and make antennae, then showed him.

  He laughed. It showed how he had been when he was younger. Mild-mannered and handsome. In a shilling-spin of an instant I realised that he wasn’t crude work but the ruin of something fine. The same as everything else here. I felt ashamed for not having noticed before. There was a knack to seeing how things had used to be but I’d never had it; I was no archaeologist. The new understanding lit up the edges of my mind and like always they were closer and more worn than I would have liked or thought.

  ‘Listen,’ I said at last. ‘Once I’m gone, get everyone out of here. The army will be coming. The British army.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘No one thought we would be able to do this. Come out with cinchona cuttings, I mean. The real point of this expedition was to make a good map and give the army a reason to come. Clem is Sir Clements; his death is a good enough reason, and they’ll use it.’

  He frowned. ‘What would you have done if he hadn’t got himself killed?’

  ‘He didn’t get himself killed, I did. I could have stopped him but I didn’t because I had orders to do it if it looked like we wouldn’t be able to bring out any cuttings.’ It came out like a confession more than an explanation. I swallowed. He wasn’t even looking at me now, but hard at the floor. ‘I’m sorry. It was better than waiting for the Navy to shell Lima—’

  ‘How the fuck is it better?’

  ‘Because they won’t come at all if I can bring out some cuttings now. Do you think Martel would help if I told him it was that or the army?’

  ‘No, I think he’d shoot you for having made a fool of him.’

  ‘What about you?’ I asked, business-like and clear, and hating myself.

  He straightened as if I’d let a little firework go off too close to him. I thought he was going to kill me; for being a snake, for bringing it all to his home – for not, in the end, being a thing like my grandfather, though I’d brought his ghost. When he did speak again, his voice was weakening. ‘I can’t take plant cuttings.’ He looked up just enough to show me his eyes. There was a haze over the colour, those grey penny-scratches I’d noticed before but more pronounced even since this morning. ‘I can’t see small things close to. But I will take you through. We can go in daylight when the pollen trails won’t show so much.’

  ‘You can get us past . . . whoever watches the border?’

  ‘Yes.’

  I pushed my hand, still sore, round the hook of my cane. I was fitter than I had been at home, much, but miles through the woods and miles back was still impossible. ‘Can we ride through?’

  ‘No. But it will only take a couple of days, and I can help your leg.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘If I can get you walking, will you come with me?’

  I frowned. ‘Yes. But—’

  ‘Good. Meet me by St Thomas after the funeral. Bring what you’d be taking with you to go back to Azangaro. I’ll take the tent from Markham’s things.’ He was quiet for a second. I couldn’t tell if he was angry. It was much worse than his normal bad temper. ‘I can tell Martel you’re dead. If you go back avoiding Bedlam and Azangaro once you have your cuttings, he’ll never know different. I can show you how to go through Bolivia. There are Indians who will help you if you tell them you came from here. It’ll take years to grow a quinine plantation, won’t it?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. Exactly what I’d hoped would happen was happening, but it was a Pyrrhic victory now it was here. I hadn’t realised even when he had been gone that what he thought of me mattered. I’d been pleased, in that stupid little-boy way, that he had thought I was more or less acceptable even when Clem wasn’t.

  ‘By the time he hears of it, the cuttings could have come from anywhere.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Good then.’

  I left him riveting the markayuq leathers, slowly, because he was doing it by touch. Before I went, I fitted a bowl over the honey and put it in the cupboard so he wouldn’t catch the smell of it. In the little chapel I fell asleep wondering if he might just shoot me anyway now, whether I looked like his friend or not.

  PART FOUR

  TWENTY-THREE

  The administrative ordinariness of a death took over in the morning. The village was so small that there was no need for a delay before a funeral; Raphael rang the church bell and people came straightaway, wrapped in black shawls. I didn’t hear any of it, because I slept right up until he came in and touched my shoulder and said it was time to go. It made me jump and I caught his wrist. He only kept still and waited for me to wake up properly. He was all neat and ironed in clerical black again. In the light through the glass bricks, his hair was red – much darker than Clem’s, but still red. I didn’t ask what was happening to him. I hated it when people asked too much about my leg.

  I took my bag with me. Martel asked me why and I said it was because the church was always unlocked and some things had been stolen before. He seemed to think that was fair enough and left me with my heart going fast.

  In a rush I wanted just to get back to Azangaro and go home. I felt burned through. I’d have to tell Minna what had happened and Sing would need to know about Martel but after that I could sleep without thinking someone might kill me.

  But then I’d be packed off to the parsonage in Truro if it was still tenantless. Sing would lose his job. The army would come to Bedlam and trample it. I had to shut my eyes for a second. I’d told Raphael through the wall at Martel’s house that I’d rather be shot by a quinine supplier than leave. I’d nearly been joking, but not really. Whatever Raphael meant to do, whether it was a bullet in the head or real help, it was going to be better than home.

  Aquila had dug a grave on the far side of the border. It was a Latin mass, short, because everyone was standing and it was bitterly cold in the shade of the trees. It was a while before I noticed it was raining, and another lag before I realised how odd that was, when outside in the open, where the trees didn’t reach, snow was still coming down. Just as I did, though, other people noticed too and looked up, hands open. A heavy drop landed on my sleeve. It wasn’t water. It was liquid silver and the impact sprayed the big drop into lots of little ones that skittered away, off my arm altogether or under the cuff of my sleeve, shuddering. When I searched the ground, trying to follow one, the pine needles were covered in silvery beads. They were sinking into the earth, but for now it looked like someone had sprayed molten mirror over the whole graveyard.

  ‘It’s mercury,’ Inti said. ‘It comes from the trees. They drag it up from the graves and when it’s cold they weep.’

  I stared upward, because it shouldn’t have been possible. Mercury, even if there had been pools of it underground, should have vapoured off through the tiny capillaries in leaves or pine needles, but the air was full of it. Inti caught a handful to show me how it juddered and ran.

  ‘Lucky to see it,’ she said. ‘The forest must like Mr Markham. It’s very lucky for the quicksilver trees to cry at a funeral.’

  ‘I don’t – how is there mercury?’ I said helplessly.

  ‘Oh, from the miners. You know Huancavelica? The mercury mine. Anyway, if you work with mercury enough, it gets into you. Drives you mad, kills you. Years and years ago a doctor set up a pilgrimage route so that miners who had served out their labour draft could come here and recover. Or die. Once they’re buried, the bodies rot away but the mercury in them just runs down
hill and hits the glass. It pools right around the roots of the trees. And – quicksilver rain.’

  ‘But it shouldn’t . . .’ I gave up and sat down on a root of the nearest tree, next to a screaming face.

  ‘It doesn’t work with other kinds of tree,’ she offered. ‘Just whitewoods. That’s her, by the way.’ She pointed at the graveyard markayuq.

  ‘What?’

  ‘The doctor who brought the miners. That’s her. She doesn’t move much. There’s something wrong with her. Mercury poisoning probably, Ra-cha thinks.’

  ‘Oh . . . right.’

  After the service, I made my way over to St Thomas, where Raphael was waiting among people praying or heading across to the other markayuq with salt and glass shells and knot cords. The clinking of the salt vials dropping sounded higher, because the amphorae were fuller than before. I put one in too, slowly, not sure what I was praying for. Past me, Raphael was watching Martel, Quispe and Hernandez going back to the church, where the men they had brought were taking down the tents. Quispe had stuck close to Raphael all morning, but he had eased back for the mass with a respect for the ceremony that made it clear he would have been unhappy, trying to keep a priest in a firm grip on holy ground. Once they were out of sight, Raphael caught my eye and nodded along the border, towards the river path, still blocked by snow.

  ‘Have a walk that way. I’ll come and find you.’ He crossed the salt where we were, as if he were going to clean the graveyard markayuq. Where his steps left marks in the frosty grass, the mercury welled in the shape of his soles.

  I did as he said and walked close to the salt where the snow was thinner. Nobody noticed, or if they did, they must have thought it was natural enough for me to want to walk by myself for a little while. He ghosted with me on the other side about thirty yards in. The pollen trail was faint and I wouldn’t have seen it if I hadn’t been looking for it. He was moving slowly to match me, and slower movement meant less of a pollen flare.

  Once we were around the bend, he came back over the salt for me. Even such a short distance from town, everything was silent. The snow had muffled any noises from the woods and there was nothing except the sigh of the river, four hundred feet down the cliff. Most of it was frozen, but the three stripes of lensed sun in front of the stacks had melted it. Where it had run through to the other side and refrozen, the ice was mirrory.

  ‘Right,’ he said softly. ‘I’ve got something to help you walk. It’s from Inti. She measured you for it on that first morning.’

  He lifted a wooden band out of his backpack. It was hinged and it had a bronze clasp, and carvings of dragons chased each other through vines and trees all around it. He held it straight between both hands, then let it go in the air. Instead of falling, it spun softly between his fingertips, as if he were holding a pair of magnets. He wasn’t. He let his hands drop to show me. The gilt eyes of the dragons winked as the band moved.

  ‘It’s whitewood? But nothing in town . . .’ I trailed off when I remembered the baby’s toy horse, then Inti’s sawdust.

  He touched the tree beside us. ‘These trees are young. That wood is from further into the forest. Fewer forest fires in there. The older the tree, the better the lift. It’s how the gantries in town bear the weight of all the buildings. I don’t know what’s in it, but it works. Ready?’

  I nodded.

  He took it from the air again and held out the rifle. ‘Take that.’ He knelt down in the snow. ‘When it’s on, it will take your weight on this side. You have to lean into it or you’ll fall over.’

  I stayed still. He glanced up at me and then clicked the band round my bad leg, just above the scar. It did exactly what he’d said it would. There was suddenly no weight on my left leg. It was like I’d sat down; the pain in the scar vanished and I was nudged sideways, as though someone had started to lift me up, just from my hip. But I caught my balance in time, and like he’d said, I had to lean into it, or rather, spread my weight like I would have if there had been nothing wrong with my leg at all, but after so long limping it felt like leaning to the left.

  When I touched the wooden band, it was smooth, with no honeycomb bumps, though the pattern was visible. Inti had sealed it and varnished it watertight. I took a slow pace forward. My whole balance felt askew, but nothing hurt. I thought too much about it and stumbled. He caught my elbows and balanced me like a coin, then walked backward a few steps and held his hands out to make me follow. I did, better this time.

  ‘That’s – it doesn’t hurt.’

  ‘Good. Try a bit further. Over the roots.’

  I took his hand when he held it out and for the next few minutes he kept me balanced until I could manage properly by myself. He was cold, like always, though his coat was buttoned up. In bright light, with his hair turned that dark red and never having regained all the colour in his skin, he looked nationless.

  ‘We have to go if we’re going,’ he said. He must have felt me shaking, but he didn’t say anything about it. ‘Are we?’

  I nodded and couldn’t keep a grasp of everything. I’d never been so happy, though an idiot could have seen that Raphael might only have given me the whitewood to make sure I trusted him for now, while a gunshot would still have been heard loud and clear in town.

  I crossed the salt slowly. Even after only a week of being told not to, my heart tried to squash itself back against my spine. My breath steamed staccato because I was shivering. I expected to see arrows coming at us, but nothing did. Nothing moved in the trees at all.

  ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Whatever you see, don’t stop to look at it. Keep going and stick close to me. They won’t think you’re a foreigner if we stay together.’

  I nearly laughed. ‘How could they think I wasn’t? Look at me.’

  He glanced back. ‘Look at me. I’ll fade a lot more than this; they’ve seen blond priests before.’

  ‘What causes it?’

  ‘Same as the catalepsy. Hurry up,’ he said, as if we were on an ordinary road. I followed him, completely unable to tell if he was leading me to a burial pit somewhere or if we would have cinchona cuttings this time tomorrow. My leg still didn’t hurt.

  Within five hundred yards, the white trees stood closer together than they did at the border. The ground was always uneven with their roots, which tangled sometimes and made odd archways and lifts in the soil. The pollen traced our wakes more and more perfectly the further in we went and the thicker it became. It was still cold, but the only snow was the powdery stuff that had blown in from the cliff. When I looked back, the line of daylight already seemed distant. Under the canopy there was no light at all except the pollen. The branches were so thick I didn’t think they would have let through much sunlight even without the snow roofing them.

  There was life inside, much more than I’d thought. Above us the air was criss-crossed with light trails where birds flitted, and what might have been bats, and whatever insects had survived the cold. Somewhere, not so far off as I would have liked, a bear roared. Raphael slowed down, but not for that. There was a tree, half-choked by vines, just on the edge of what we were using as a path.

  It had grown around something, the branches warped into curves not their own. In places, tiny rags were caught in the bark. The original something had been torn free. There was new growth and new, tiny twigs poking through where they couldn’t have before, but as we came level to it, the shape of what had been there became clearer. One branch still held the outline of a person’s ribs; another, half-broken outward, just about traced a shoulder and an arm. It was part tree and part candle ivy, in blossom still. The petals, as they fell, rained golden lines down through the pollen in the air. Raphael looked away. He didn’t say anything and nor did I. He wouldn’t want to hear that I’d seen a drawing of it or that I knew there were freckles across his shoulders. He wouldn’t want to hear, either, that my father had gone over the border looking for him.

  Some of the snapped branches were thick, but it was nothing an axe couldn’t hav
e helped. But then, that would have relied on having an axe, and on knowing that Raphael had been alive to help. I’d seen how pale he had gone after even one night out in this cold. It would have been forty years by the time Dad found him; forty years of being pulled slowly back into the tree, of moss and vines and pine needles, spiders, and all the small coiling ways the woods had of making things their own. It would have taken a long, careful study to see that he wasn’t a carving and, even after that, it would have been mad to check for a pulse. This was sacrifice country. Dad would have thought he had found a dead man.

  ‘How’s the manacle?’ Raphael said.

  ‘It’s good. Thank you.’

  Where some petals had fallen across his sleeve he pushed them off. He was holding his rosary too hard. Some monkeys shrieked and shot away from us. Their tails left curls in the pollen wakes. It was hard to imagine that anyone watching could have failed to notice us by now, or notice that someone was there at least.

  He overheard me thinking. ‘We would have heard by now if anyone felt strongly about it.’

  ‘But everyone else—’

  ‘Came in here alone, without any permission, without a priest.’

  I almost asked him who Dad could have come with in that case, but stopped myself in time.

  We both looked over at a flash of person-sized movement a few trees away from us. I froze, because I thought there was a man standing there, but it was only a markayuq. It was turning its head as if it were watching us go. It looked like the one from the graveyard, but then, it made a sad sort of sense that the sculptors might have used the same model again and again, like Hadrian had – if they were all a lost empress, or someone’s son.

  ‘Aren’t we a bit far away to have set it off?’ I said quietly.

  ‘No. Keep walking. Don’t look at her. They’re shibboleths. If you go up to them to see how they work, everyone knows you’re not from round here.’