The Bedlam Stacks

by Natasha Pulley

  So I kept going, without looking to the side, although every so often, especially if we paused, which we still had to because while the whitewood band took the weight off my leg it didn’t negate the pull of the scarring altogether, I saw slow movement from the corners of my eyes: markayuq being set off and shifting, never close.

  ‘The whole forest floor must be rigged with clockwork,’ I said after a while, feeling strange, because if it was rigged with clockwork it was too easy to imagine what else it might be rigged with.

  ‘Just don’t pay any attention to them. Let’s stop properly. We’ll eat something, and I want to teach you a prayer in Old Quechua. If you know it you’re going to sound more genuine if push comes to shove. Like neck verse.’

  We settled down among the roots of a tree full of dying blossom and candle ivy seedheads caging their tiny caches of pollen. While he taught me the words, he held a knot cord to show me how they were written too. It didn’t sound like modern Quechua. Or, it did; it was recognisably the same language, but it had no Spanish in it, none of the Spanish rhythms that I hadn’t even noticed before. It sounded heavy to me, although I couldn’t have said why. The knotting was too complicated to understand in a twenty-minute sitting. It was done in numbers, but numbers together formed codes that, like Chinese characters, ran together to make meanings. My brain stalled when he tried to explain it.

  ‘It clicks one morning,’ he said in the end. ‘You’d see it if you looked at it for long enough. Anyway. All right to go on?’

  I nodded. I felt peculiar, because I was starting to realise that if he meant to shoot me in a mile’s time, he wouldn’t have bothered to teach me prayers or knot writing. It wasn’t even relief. In my mind I’d narrowed my expectations of the future down to about an hour. To have it open up suddenly, into what might have been days or years, felt like coming out from a wardrobe onto a great wide beach. Although I didn’t understand it, I kept running my fingertips across the knot cord he had tied round my wrist, feeling the bumps and the grain of the twine. It was a reassuring thing to touch.

  ‘So you’re not angry, then?’ It felt like a jinx to ask but I couldn’t help it.

  ‘Angry about what?’

  ‘All this.’

  ‘No.’ He waited for me to catch up. ‘Just – glad of the company.’

  I didn’t understand, and then I did. He didn’t mean for the walk. The worst anyone else in Bedlam had done probably involved a bit of unkindness or some stolen pineapples. It would have been lonely to be the only one who had done worse.

  Off to our left, a markayuq watched us go. It was closer than the last ones. Raphael veered away from me to give it a prayer cord too and came back without saying anything.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  Crossing the forest floor was so slow we barely covered a mile an hour. I felt, in my foundations, which Clem said were magnetic ore, that we were curving. Twice we had to double back, and when we did I felt like we had cut too steeply into that curve. It was like tracing the outer edge of an hourglass. I wondered what we were avoiding, but I didn’t ask. All the while, I didn’t see anyone – not one solitary glimpse of an arrow fletching in the trees – but the sense of being watched never went away.

  Despite the whitewood band, my leg started to feel sore after every mile or so and we paused often, never too close to a markayuq and always facing away from it, which felt itchy, but I was a lot better at this kind of thing than Orpheus and I never looked back. I started to enjoy the walk. The way tipped us gradually downhill and it was getting warmer – even the ground was starting to feel warm, which must have been something volcanic more than falling altitude, but either way it was lovely. The tree roots trapped the heat. There wasn’t much space to sit comfortably and Raphael bumped down with his shoulder against mine, which propped me up just at the angle that kept my back from aching. I shut my eyes, not asleep but not sure I could go on much further either. As he knotted another string I felt the tendons in his arm moving. After a while he stopped and I straightened up.

  ‘You’re very pale,’ he said. He was holding the cord wound over his hands like a garrotte, but slack.

  ‘Just tired.’

  ‘There are hot springs a bit further up, if you can make it. We can stop there overnight.’

  ‘Is it safe to?’

  ‘No one’s objected so far.’ He helped me up.

  A gunshot went off somewhere behind us. Between the trees, a very straight, brilliant line of light arced out before the bullet thunked into a trunk. Other shots went off too.

  ‘That’s Martel,’ I said. ‘He’s got a revolver. I saw it at the church. They sound like that.’

  He caught my arm. ‘Run. One wrong spark and everything in here will go up like a bomb, we need to be in the water if it does.’

  ‘I can’t—’

  ‘You’ll be surprised,’ he said, and shoved me.

  The shock of having to run was like being dunked in cold water and all at once I was awake and not tired. The air to our south-west was shot through with bullet trails, but we were too far off to see if they had hit anything. Even with the whitewood, running hurt. Without it, though, I would have crumpled on the first step.

  Something smelled sulphury, and then suddenly we were on the banks of a little lake. There was an island in the middle and a single sapling whitewood tree, only about three times the height of a person and bound by candle ivy flowering happily in a moonbeam haze of pollen that swum and glowed on the thermals above the hot water. The banks under the moss, the pebbles on the lake bed and the boulders round the island were all glass. Raphael went out as far as he could on the land, slung his bag and coat across then dived in to swim the last. I copied him. Shouts came from behind us, muffled in the trees. I didn’t notice until it seemed suddenly dimmer than before, but there was no pollen over the water; our trail stopped on the lake edge. The water was almost too hot. After the intense cold outside, my hands burned as the feeling came back into them. The pollen over the bank was a wall of diffuse light. Further up, some of the rocks had a yellow tinge where the sulphur in the water had crystallised.

  Raphael motioned to say go round to the other side of the island. Once we were there, we held on to some smoothed-off glass. I half-curled up in the water, waiting for my leg to stop hurting.

  ‘How was he following us?’ I said.

  ‘The pollen trails hang in the air a long time on a still day. There’s a shimmer if you know how to look for it. Quispe knows; he’s from this side of the mountains though he pretends he’s not. He knows not to bloody shoot into it either.’

  ‘I can’t imagine Martel would listen to him.’

  Raphael made a soft agreeing sound and then we both waited in silence, watching the warped view of the way we had come through a glass boulder and the fading light of the disturbed pollen. Small things were already zinging new trails through it, pulling the shapes to one side and the other. Something squirrelly traced a bouncing line of light halfway down a tree, then launched itself into the air and glided to the next. Its trail looked like a billowing flag. The ground sent up a high, sudden loop of brightness that must have been a jumping frog.

  Slowly, my hands got used to the hot water and stopped hurting. Little aches washed up and down my spine. I felt like an old man and suddenly I missed how I’d used to be much more than I had for a long time. Three years ago I could have run for miles. Everybody says you don’t notice health until it’s gone, but I’d noticed, all the time, the same as I’d noticed warm sunbeams. It was probably just as well to have enjoyed it while it lasted, but I wished I could have been less fit then. It would have been less of a contrast.

  There were no more shots. Gradually, I stopped expecting them.

  The stream-bed was all glass pebbles, smoothed down until together they were like treasure. There were shells too, miniature, occupied by even tinier things stuck to the rocks. Nestled in the glass pebbles diagonally below me were a clutch of what looked like much more perfect pebbles,
with yellow spheres suspended inside. Raphael saw too and dived for them. When he came back up with some, he set them gently on the rock in front of me for me to see. They were eggs.

  ‘Water’s not quite hot enough to cook them,’ he explained. ‘The ducks lay them underwater to incubate.’

  I touched the curve of one, and it really was glass. Other things must have been mixed into it, because like ordinary duck eggs it was bluish close to. They were lovely things. He had left two in the nest; they had chicks in them.

  We waited a while longer, watching the forest back the way we had come, but nothing else human disturbed the pollen. The silence began to sound less like silence. It had the ordinary clicks and creaks and hoots. The trees were so big that the wooden sound any tree will make in a place of varying temperature was more like muttering. Sometimes, when it turned to a staccato rumble of settling bark, it sounded like arboreal laughter.

  ‘Can you see any?’ he said at last. ‘Ducks, I mean.’

  I let the current of the lake spin me. I hadn’t seen them at first because they were smart and black, and they blended neatly with the shadows in the pollen glow, but there was a little flock of them in the reeds on the other bank. He nodded when I pointed.

  ‘I’ll see if I can get one.’

  I wanted to say it was all right, I wasn’t hungry, but I was. I let my cheek rest against the rock to watch. My hands had started to shake.

  One of the ducks had wandered closer to us, away from the others. Raphael eased up to it and it seemed not to mind. He clapped his hands hard by its head and it squawked and exploded. Or rather, it went up in white blue flames, and within about four seconds there were no feathers left, only a roasted carcass. He lifted it out of the water and tore off a leg.

  ‘It’s cooked, try it.’

  ‘What . . . in God’s name was that?’

  ‘It’s how they make glass eggs. They’re full of flammable chemicals and then when the time’s right . . .’ He opened his hand to mime an explosion. ‘But if you startle them they go off pretty well too.’

  ‘They’re phoenixes.’

  ‘I suppose.’

  ‘And you haven’t made a fortune exporting them because?’

  ‘I haven’t got your fine criminal mind. Eat your phoenix. Christ,’ he said suddenly, stock still.

  I jumped when I saw the markayuq. She was standing on the edge of the lake, just where the hotter water tumbled down over the glass.

  ‘Can’t believe we didn’t see that before,’ I said. It was unsettling, not to have seen it, and I looked round again, expecting Martel and his men to be waiting for us to notice them beyond the island. They weren’t. ‘Well. I’ll do the eggs.’

  ‘No, hold on.’ He went to the statue and unwound a length of string from its wrist, ran some wax down it – he always had some in his pocket – and started to flick knots into it, as fast as a fisherman tying netting, until most of the string was taken up. He wound it back round the statue’s wrist. When he saw me watching, he shook his head slightly. ‘Just a prayer. Give me the eggs, will you? Don’t go too close to her.’ He took the eggs carefully, but he looked unhappy as he carried them towards the hotter water.

  ‘Don’t burn yourself,’ I said, anxious now.

  ‘It doesn’t matter if I do.’

  ‘I talk to the air. Just because you can’t feel it—’

  I was cut off by more gunshots close by. I jerked behind the boulders again, but no bullets hit the island or the water. Raphael came back.

  ‘They’re going to spark the pollen in a minute—’

  Exactly as he said it, the pollen ignited. It was like a flour bomb and I saw the edge of the flame race outward. It stopped when it reached the edge of the water, because there wasn’t enough above the stream to maintain any flame, and in its wake it left darkness. Light did needle down through the canopy in tiny, fishing-wire beams, but not enough to see by. Raphael pulled himself up on to the island.

  ‘Martel, you idiot, stop shooting before you set fire to the whole forest! Get over here.’

  Nothing happened for a moment, except that the markayuq on the bank lifted her head. It was because he’d moved, but it looked for all the world like she recognised the sound of Spanish and didn’t wholly approve.

  Men came out of the dark, five or six, some patting at cinders on their sleeves. One was Martel.

  ‘I’ll get you out of here if you leave us alone,’ Raphael said tightly.

  ‘Excellent,’ said Martel. ‘Come along, gentlemen. What have you done with Mr Tremayne?’ he added as he waded across.

  The island was too little to hide on for long. ‘He’s here. Touch him and I’ll walk you straight back the way you came.’

  ‘Yes, no need to labour the point. Help me up.’

  Raphael pulled him up on to the rocks and Martel squeezed his shoulder, pleased to see him despite everything and, I thought, reminding him who he belonged to. Around him, the other men were climbing up too. They looked rattled, and a couple of them were singed from the pollen blast. Here and there on the edge of the lake the grass smoked. None of it looked serious enough to set off the trees, but it was plain that was only luck. They set their guns gingerly against the whitewood tree.

  ‘Hello,’ Martel said when he saw me. ‘You disappeared; we came out to find you.’ He made an effort to sound offhand, but it came out brittle. ‘I was worried something Indian might have gone through Raphael’s head.’

  ‘What happened to you?’ I said.

  ‘Attacked,’ he said. ‘There were twelve of us. Rather accomplished, really. I never once saw them, did any of you?’

  There was a quiet chorus of no’s and maybe’s.

  He sat down stiffly on the rocks. ‘This wretched pollen. You think you can see, but you can’t. You can only see what moves. They were waiting, not moving. Behind trees, among the roots. I saw trails, plenty of trails, but they know how to hide in it.’

  ‘How many?’ Raphael said.

  I expected him to say dozens, but he looked pensive. ‘I think only three. It took them some time. We lost the first man a few hours ago. It wasn’t until the fifth that we saw anything at all.’

  ‘Why didn’t you turn back?’

  ‘Well, we had to find you,’ he said. ‘You’re heading to the quinine woods after all, I suppose?’

  ‘Yes, and you aren’t going to touch him.’

  ‘Why would I do that?’

  ‘You’re a quinine supplier,’ I said. ‘Come on, Martel, you’re up to your neck in it. You must be the richest man in Caravaya. You keep up the monopoly here, no one touches the calisaya woods, and the suppliers in the north pay you to do it. Right?’

  He laughed, only a little, and I realised that he didn’t altogether like earning his living that way. ‘Well, no one touches the calisaya woods while the Bolivian border is closed. One would usually go round that way. But Bedlam is a good honey trap. It looks so much more straightforward than Bolivia. We find it’s terribly good for catching unwanted expeditionaries.’ He touched Raphael’s shoulder. I thought Raphael would throw him off, but he only glanced at him and it was there in the lines and the small scars around his eyes, that he was glad Martel was all right. When I tried to sound out what would happen if Martel refused his terms and shot me, to see whether Raphael really would walk the wrong way and get them all killed, I found I had no idea. I almost didn’t hear what Martel said next. ‘Raphael keeps up the stories, and eventually everyone decides to try their luck in the forest, and generally they don’t come out again, and since everyone thinks there are mad Indians here nobody questions it.’

  ‘But there are Indians here. Why did you risk it?’

  ‘You can get through if you go fast. I’ve seen that before. You lose some men, but if you keep going it’s perfectly possible.’ He nodded slowly, which sheened pollen light in his hair. ‘Scientific expeditions do like to hang about looking at the distracting statues. When Mr Backhouse came a battalion went with him and half of
them came back. Those are good enough odds for me when the alternative is so dire.’ He watched me for a moment. ‘I can’t let you take those cuttings.’

  ‘If I don’t, the army will come.’ I aimed it more at Raphael than Martel.

  ‘Fighting on territory like this, a hundred miles from any decent supply line? Difficult prospect,’ Martel said gently. ‘I was an army man myself. A campaign like that won’t last a month.’

  ‘You weren’t in the army that’s coming,’ I said. ‘They don’t care about difficult terrain. They’ll force the interior provinces to open. You’ll be bringing them the quinine yourself by the end of it. The Navy will come; they’ll put everything along the coast under heavy artillery fire. Lima is on the coast. Cities can stand for a while under fire from ironclads but the Navy can keep it up for days. They shelled Canton for nearly a week not long ago. And then one day you’ll get a very official order from your government to escort an army battalion up here and see them to the calisaya woods.’

  ‘That won’t be my fault,’ he said seriously. ‘Letting a crippled Englishman through my woods certainly is. It would be my head, if the monopoly were to break on my stretch.’ He was still holding Raphael’s shoulder. He looked shaken and I realised that knowing he had the reins of someone so strong was giving him a kind of strength too. ‘My head last,’ he corrected himself. ‘After all the other parts of me. But let’s not talk about it now. We’re all tired and I should think there’s some arrangement we can come to later. We’ve got plenty of food to go around. Is it possible to cook in this water?’ he said to Raphael.

  ‘Over there where it’s hot.’ He was quiet for a second. ‘Don’t touch the statue.’

  ‘Oh, why would anyone touch your wretched heathen statue?’ Martel said, but not rudely exactly. He sounded glad to have a familiar argument. I could imagine they had disagreed about the markayuq quite often. ‘My God.’

  So a bizarre sort of peace settled over the island. Some of Martel’s men started to bring out food and Raphael took them into the water to show them how to cook it. The others began to hang some of their wet clothes up in the little tree. One kept watch, a rifle across his lap, his eyes on the pinstriped darkness back the way they had come. Out there, new pollen was just starting to smoke from the last of the candle ivy. They were visible only as after-image shimmers, but they were there. I watched them for a while, still hanging in the water. My leg felt better and I could have climbed up, but it seemed like tempting fate to sit too close to Martel.