The Bedlam Stacks

by Natasha Pulley

  ‘Is he dead?’

  ‘I think so.’ I rubbed at the string marks across my palms. My fingers were stiff and pale from having had the blood stopped and I had to wait for it to come back, in pins and needles. When I swallowed, my throat hurt. I hadn’t been breathing for almost as long as it had taken. The world cannoned into me, all the noise of the forest and the sound of my own breathing through the bones inside my ears, and it was all much too loud. Martel’s body didn’t look like a person any more. It might have been a clever sculpture. Something strange turned under my lungs and I felt as though someone must have done some kind of magic trick, swapping Martel for this.

  I rubbed my hands again. My arms had stopped aching. It hadn’t been difficult. Like it had before when I understood that Raphael wasn’t going to shoot me, the future had an odd new breadth. That Bedlam was in danger from Martel, that Raphael was, had seemed immovable a few seconds ago.

  Raphael knelt down beside me. He didn’t touch Martel, but he nodded. ‘Yes.’ He inclined his head without lifting his eyes. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I’ve never done anything more useless than that.’

  ‘You couldn’t have done anything.’

  ‘I would have taken that gun off anyone else.’ He looked away and then seemed to have to push hard to look back again. ‘I would have shot anyone else a long time ago.’

  ‘Familiar devils are important after a while, though, aren’t they? Better than nothing,’ I said, and then shook my head. I could hear how incoherent I sounded but I couldn’t see a way to sort it out.

  Raphael watched me and I misread him. His neutral expression was a half-frown and it seemed cold. I had time to worry he was angry before he hugged me. I put both arms round him and had to rest forward against him, shaking now, though I couldn’t tell from what. I didn’t feel upset, but I could feel that everything I was thinking now was only skimming the surface of things, everything else shut off. He lifted me off the body and put me on my feet again. He was much stronger than Martel or me. He turned his head to his left and the rainforest beyond the river, his temple just resting against my chin.

  ‘Who inherits his land?’ I asked, for something else to say. I had my arms under his and my wrists resting on his shoulders, and they ached, but there was blood on my palms and I didn’t want to put them down.

  ‘No one. He didn’t own it, it’s someone else’s. He said he paid rent to begin with but then he stopped and nothing happened, so he just kept it. I’d have to check with the land registry. I don’t even know where that is. But whoever he was, he didn’t come after the rent, so maybe he’s dead.’

  ‘Either way it will take a little while for him to hear. Especially if Martel stopped paying years ago.’

  ‘Someone else will move in anyway. It doesn’t have to be legal.’

  ‘Take them for a nice walk in the woods.’

  He laughed. ‘Let’s see your hands.’

  I showed him, starting to feel raw. He had to hold them still. He found his flask and cleaned up the places where the string had cut me. I hadn’t felt any of it. Across from us, an eagle swept down from the canopy and landed on Martel’s body. It was a giant white thing with evil eyes but a downy hesitancy, just a baby still, and it blinked up at us to ask if this was ours, its wings flickering and ready to fly again. We didn’t wave it away.

  ‘All right?’ he said quietly.

  ‘I – if I were less all right, I think it would be better,’ I said, not sure if I was speaking too loudly. The blood was still humming through my skull, electric. I’d never felt so awake.

  He glanced up, without moving his head. ‘Everyone feels like that. Everyone with any sense.’

  ‘No, I mean . . .’

  ‘I know what you mean. It was a bit good, is what you mean. That isn’t evil. All it means is that you won’t be one of those people who spiral off into guilty nightmares and never recover. Just . . . recognise the feeling and see the shape of it, and you won’t aim it at the wrong person.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Yes.’ He watched the eagle and I couldn’t tell what he was thinking.

  ‘We haven’t got anything to dig with,’ I said.

  ‘Have you heard of sky burials?’

  ‘No. Sounds nice.’

  ‘It’s not. It’s that.’ He nodded to the eagle, which had settled now. ‘But that’s what we can say if anyone asks. Right. Let’s go and fetch your plants. There’s a crossing up there.’

  So we walked along a little way until we found some rapids where there were rocks across the river in a kind of natural dam, although perhaps beavers had filled in the spaces. There, where the whitewood trees petered out, was another salt border. Once we were across, the relief at being on the right side of it again crashed through me like a cribbar and I floated for a while on the outrush. Raphael slowed down as we came to the rocks and the river.

  ‘I could go back to Bedlam with you now, once we have the cuttings,’ I said. ‘Without Martel.’

  ‘No. The markayuq knows you. We were lucky this time, but she’d catch you on the way back. We’d have to stop for the night again and she wouldn’t. She’s a foot taller than me. I can’t fight her.’ He looked ashamed and I wished I could say, without sounding like I was talking down to him, that I understood about Martel, that I didn’t think he was a coward for not having fought, or for not risking it against a markayuq twice his size. But I couldn’t think of a way and it just left a painful quiet before he shook his head at himself and pointed to the mountains ahead of us. They were close, very close. We must have come parallel to them. ‘This is Bolivia. Those are the Andes. You can loop back to Lake Titicaca that way.’

  ‘Is it possible?’ I said, looking down at the rainforest, and it really was the rainforest beyond the river. Dense, unbroken, roadless jungle. ‘When we planned the expedition we wrote off Bolivia quite quickly, it . . . we were told there was about to be a war. The borders are closed, they’re not letting foreigners through. The roads are full of soldiers.’

  ‘They’re not letting foreigners through. But “they” is the Bolivian government. People who live round here have nothing to do with all that.’ He managed to encompass the Bolivian government, modern borders, anything established by the Spanish, all in one bubble that ordinary people might look on with occasional interest but nothing more pressing. No government would be able to dictate anything much to people here. It was a simple matter of not being able to reach. They could stop foreigners using the roads, but there would be no way in heaven or earth they could put a man on every animal trail through the woods. ‘There’s a village of hunters about a mile south.’ He pointed. ‘I’ll go with you that far and they’ll take you over the mountains.’

  ‘Will you be all right?’ I asked.

  ‘When?’

  ‘Going back. You can’t see.’ In the shade of the trees where the daylight made the pollen invisible, he had been walking close to me to be sure of the footing, and hesitated if I’d stopped talking for too long.

  ‘I’m fine.’

  ‘How many fingers?’

  He slapped my hand. ‘Fuck off.’

  ‘That doesn’t work on bears.’

  ‘Damn. Stalked as I often am by bears hellbent on ophthalmographical studies.’

  ‘I’m not going through Bolivia and you’re not walking through that forest by yourself. We already know there’s a great chunk of it with no pollen.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I didn’t mean to imply it was your choice. And your English is hateful, I hope you know. It isn’t decent to learn another language that bloody well.’

  ‘I had to. Your grandfather was useless at languages.’ He had laughed to begin with, but he lost it when he mentioned Harry. ‘Come on.’

  The way across the river came out almost straight into a cinchona glade. I had to sit in it for a while and look at the trees and the fallen leaves and fruit and roots to be sure they were the kind we wanted. They were, and there were thousands.<
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  TWENTY-SIX

  We had arrived at half past four in the afternoon, so I took careful cuttings and then spent a happy hour with the last of the good light splitting some kapok wood for cases and packing them with the reddish moss that grew everywhere. By the time it was dark, I had them ready so that we could go first thing in the morning. I propped the makeshift cases gently against some kapok roots on my way back to the little clearing where I’d left the bags and Raphael. I stopped when I saw that his pack was gone. He had left a lit pollen lamp propped on top of mine.

  ‘Where are you?’

  There was no answer, except for the hooting birds. When I picked up the lamp, worried he was frozen somewhere and meaning to go and find him, there was a note too. It directed me to the hunters’ village, and said what to say in Quechua – they didn’t speak Spanish – when I reached it. He had gone back over the river without me.

  The lamp hadn’t been to help me see. It was to stop me seeing littler lights. I did what watchmakers always say not to and forced the winder forward to make the spring uncoil too fast and run out, then pushed the lamp under my coat where it lay over my bag to block out the last of the light. For a moment everything was only black and I stood with my eyes shut. When I opened them again the sky was indigo, and over the river there was a soft pollen trail through the trees. It wasn’t going back to Bedlam but east, further round the bend of the river. The very tail of it, faded and hazed, was still just enough to cast light on the graveyard markayuq where she stood on the riverbank, watching me. The grazes on my arm stung when I saw her.

  ‘Raphael!’ I shouted. I could still see, more or less, where the pollen trail stopped. He wasn’t that far away. ‘Where are you going?’

  His voice wasn’t strong enough to shout back and instead he traced letters in the pollen, slowly, to keep from sending it whirling off out of shape.

  Home.

  I looked further east, half-expecting to see the lights of a town, but there was nothing. He had been steering us away from the east all the time we had been in the forest. I thought of the empty room at the church, all his things packed up. He had never meant to go back to Bedlam.

  ‘Right, good, and how far do you think you’ll get, in the state you’re in? Wait for me, I’ll go with you.’

  You can’t. He drew an arrow under it, pointing back toward the markayuq.

  ‘You can’t see. What happens if you come to a place with no pollen?’

  Not far.

  ‘For God’s sake, it clearly is!’

  He didn’t reply and the pollen faded until what he had written before only looked like the suggestion of writing. I stared at it for too long and stopped being able to see it properly. Aware of my heart in my eardrums I had to stand still to think and lean into the urge just to run after him. Things chittered and howled in the woods behind me, much louder than they ever had in the whitewood forest. At last, I wound up the pollen lamp again and tied it round my sleeve while I started to gather up the kapok planks I hadn’t used for the cuttings. They were rough – I’d only split them with a little axe rather than sawn them properly – but the grain was straight and I had just enough knot cord to lash them together. It was fine and made of soft alpaca wool, but it was waxed and good enough. When it was finished, the raft wasn’t halfway big enough to take the full weight of a person, but since the markayuq wouldn’t know that, it didn’t matter. I had to hunt about to find a branch about my height and, once I had, it took what felt like hours to make a rough joint and fit it on to the raft, then longer again to tie it into place.

  Finally, expecting to see dawn at any second even though my watch said it had only been an hour, I tipped everything out of my bag that wasn’t food or clothes and packed the bound cuttings in instead. Despite everything it was hard to leave the obsidian razor Raphael had given me and harder still to leave the little clutch of Clem’s things I’d meant to give to Minna. But there was no space and something in my mind clicked into that gypsy way of thinking you get on long journeys, where unnecessary things stop mattering.

  Very carefully, I carried everything down to the water. Once I’d tied the pollen lamp to the branch, at as close to the same height as my own breastbone as I could, I pushed the raft out into the current. I waited, afraid it was going to get stuck along the banks or in the dense reeds, but it found the central rip quickly and sailed away. Within a few yards it was nothing but the firefly point of the lamp.

  On the opposite bank, the pollen stirred as the markayuq turned her head, then plumed softly when she started to walk after the light. I couldn’t see her at all, only the glow, but it was where she had been, and it was the right height. When she walked, it was shockingly quick, as quick as an ordinary person might. I stayed exactly where I was, horribly conscious that the moonlight was bright enough now to give me a shadow on the rocks. I could nearly feel the pressure of it, a little silvery weight down my left side. It glinted on the gold leaf Inti had smoothed on to some of the patterns on the whitewood band. I put my hand over it, slowly.

  She disappeared among the trees as the banks curved. The way over the river, which was all boulders and pieces of driftwood caught up between them, was difficult in the dark, even with the moon. I saw something big move in the water and almost fell in when I stopped to look at it. When I reached the top of the little cliff, which was held together by tree roots, it slid out on to the bank, but I couldn’t tell what it was. Hoping that it couldn’t climb, I set off in the paler pollen trail that still hung in the unmoving air, refreshing it with my wake but not as brightly as the markayuq had, because I wasn’t going so fast. My leg hurt and it seemed best not to upset it again, though I wanted to run and let it hurt.

  I lost sight of the markayuq’s trail before long. Because I’d expected to follow Raphael for a while before I caught up, I nearly walked into him when the trail stopped just behind a tree, only half a mile or so from the river. He had stopped to sit down among some roots and frozen there. I put his coat around him. He must have been waiting to see frost before he put it on, but the air had turned cold again. It wasn’t only altitude. The mountains had their own little climate that broke when it reached the river. Raphael wasn’t the only one who hadn’t quite noticed. A fabulous, iridescently turquoise beetle had come to visit him too, antlers tipped at a quizzical angle from where it sat on his knuckle. I moved it and clasped his hand. He was icy.

  I found a me-sized dip in the roots and sat with my sketchbook to wait. My heart thunked and I tried to ignore it. A day and seventy years was a wide margin. I couldn’t think what to do if he didn’t wake soon. There was no one to tell, unless the markayuq came back, but even then I couldn’t think she would be very interested in an ill priest when I was here desecrating her holy ground.

  ‘Jesus Christ, Merrick, do you know what that looks like? I blink and you appear from nowhere, you’ll kill me one day.’ He jerked his hand close to his heart to show what he meant. ‘What the hell are you doing?’

  ‘It’s cold,’ I said, starting a list on my fingers. ‘And you don’t know when to put on a coat. This catalepsy happens with what seems to me like increasing frequency, and if it happens for long you need someone to tell someone else where you are. You can’t stay out here for seventy years again; I don’t care if you didn’t die the first time, you’d be pushing your luck to try it twice. You can’t see. If you come to a burned patch of pollen, which you will if there are any phoenix round here, you’re stuck.’

  ‘You’ve got other things to do,’ he said flatly. ‘You’ve got cuttings to take to India.’

  ‘They’re all right for a month.’

  ‘There’s a markayuq following you.’

  ‘No, she’s following a pollen lamp I floated off down the river.’

  ‘Not forever she won’t be.’

  ‘Well, that’s more my concern than yours, isn’t it.’

  ‘Merrick,’ he snapped. ‘You’ve known me for a fortnight. What are you doing? You’re not my f
riend. You’re not your grandfather, you couldn’t be more different from him, and whatever you think, I am not very keen on having the grandchildren of someone I used to know kicking about in the forest. I am not a Tremayne family heirloom. Go home.’

  ‘I am your friend, and my whole family has spun around you and this place for three generations, so I think you’re pretty thoroughly my business, whether you want to be or not. And even if that wasn’t the case, you can’t do this by yourself. Do you want to get home or not?’

  He stared at me for a second. ‘If she catches you—’

  ‘If. Now eat something,’ I said, and threw some grapes at him, because it’s much harder to be serious whilst trying to duck flying fruit. I’d found them growing wild with the cinchona.

  ‘Why are you here?’ he said.

  ‘It’s a few extra miles. Stop making such a bloody fuss. I didn’t pay you for any of this except in clocks. I think you deserve some help now.’

  ‘It’s eight or nine miles.’

  ‘Oh, well, in that case I won’t bother.’

  He smiled, unwillingly. ‘What time is it?’

  ‘Quarter past nine. I don’t think I can go that far tonight.’

  ‘No, me neither. We’ll find somewhere to stop.’ He helped me up.

  ‘Will you die of this?’ I said, not wanting to hear it.

  He shook his head slightly. ‘No. But it gets worse and worse. There’s a place, that we all . . .’ His eyes slipped away. They were wholly grey now. ‘I should have been there years ago, but they sent no one to take over until Aquila,’ he said.

  ‘Can I take you there?’

  ‘Yes. Please.’ He was quiet for a second. ‘Keep talking to me. I can feel it coming again. It’s going to be long, soon.’

  ‘But you had it for a whole day just—’

  ‘There are short spells and long ones. The short ones are. . . five minutes, ten minutes usually. But then it’s an hour, or a day, and that’s how you know there’s a long one coming. It’s like foothills round a mountain.’