The Bedlam Stacks

by Natasha Pulley

  ‘I know you said it’s like being frozen but – I don’t understand how. How can you live through that?’

  His expression lifted into something gentler and, for that second, he looked exactly like St Thomas. They were related. The resemblance was as close as mine to Harry’s portrait at home. I’d never seen it before, but I couldn’t understand now how I’d missed it. Or how I hadn’t noticed that he wasn’t fading but changing, or how I’d managed to make myself deaf to Inti’s stories. She had told me that the markayuq had turned to stone, not been born that way, had been ordinary once. She had told me on the first day. ‘How do trees?’

  I must have slowed down, although I didn’t mean to, because he came back to help me over the roots. The pollen was thick there and against my wrist his fingers were the same colour as the graveyard markayuq’s had been. I climbed up after him and didn’t know what to say, so I didn’t say anything. My ribs ached with wanting to. Atom by atom he had managed to become more important than Clem or cinchona or anything else, but he was going to live for hundreds of years and I was nothing but another one in a long line of people he would never know well, who died like leaves.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  It wasn’t long before we found a road. It was glass and well maintained. Nothing had grown up through the brickwork and here and there were carved stones that looked like the kind Clem and I had seen on the ceques, the Incan highroads where they abandoned boulders in odd places.

  ‘Seven miles,’ Raphael said when he saw me looking at one. ‘The salt traders use this road. It goes almost up to Bedlam. I was trying to keep you away from it before. It’s watched more closely.’

  ‘Salt traders?’ I said. The cold felt deeper than before, although it was probably only having come out of heat on the far side of the river. The change was shocking. It had happened over about three miles, although all of those miles had been uphill. I hunched down in my coat, only just managing to follow the conversation.

  ‘They bring children and take salt back to the monastery. Bedlam is a salt colony. That’s why it is where it is. Salt is worth more than silver here.’

  ‘That sounds . . . ordinary.’

  ‘Should it not?’

  It was no good. ‘Do you mind if we stop soon?’

  ‘There’s a house up here, I think. Or there was. There used to be foresters, or . . .’ He seemed to recognise something and stepped off the road.

  I followed him more slowly. Trees had grown, or been planted, in an especially dense avenue on either side of the road, maybe to discourage people from straying, but even beyond that the way was difficult, full of little crevasses where boiling water ran and we had to find branches or stones across, and once a long wall that marked off nothing particular, crumbled and buried under vines. But eventually I saw it before he did – a round, haphazard house like a little tower. It was partly ruined, but only on one side, and there was still a clearer space in front of it that must have been the garden. There, beside a glass gravestone, a markayuq sat among the small mountain flowers, but even when we went close he didn’t move. Raphael nodded and we went past, and found the door unlocked.

  There was kapok wood stacked by the grate, old and spiderpopulous, but once I’d brushed it off, it burned beautifully and soon the fire was tall. The house stood in not quite a clearing, but a place where the trees were thinner and the pollen fainter, only just enough to see by without the firelight. The room was round except for a straight section where the hearth was. Cinders skittered over the slate as I fed in more twigs. Sitting on the windowsill, perfectly still and dormant, was another markayuq. Raphael had brushed the dust from him and waxed his clothes when we first came in, and the beeswax smell hung warm in the air.

  ‘Raphael?’ I said. He had disappeared while I was making the fire.

  ‘Up here,’ he said. His voice came from a doorway at the top of a tiny flight of steps in the far corner.

  Wrapped in a blanket, because the cold had soaked me despite having been leaning over the hearth, I went to find him upstairs. He met me in the doorway and I jumped when I saw another markayuq behind him.

  ‘Are you sure we should be here?’

  ‘They’re nearly dead; they’re old. I think whoever’s buried out there was looking after them and they’ve lost interest now he’s gone.’ He nodded past me towards the garden and the grave, which was framed by a window halfway up the little stairs. ‘Ours is following us again, did you see?’

  ‘No?’

  He pointed past my shoulder and I saw her then, stopped still beside a tree, well shy of the house. I wouldn’t have seen her at all if he hadn’t pointed her out – the markayuq were the same white as the whitewood trees – and I was about to ask how he had known when she moved her hand suddenly to wave away a bird that had tried to land on her shoulder, which flared the pollen. ‘She’s waiting for us to come out.’

  ‘Can you talk to her?’

  ‘She won’t talk back. There’s something not right with her. I’ve never been able to get a word out of her. Thomas chats, but . . . I don’t know.’ He paused, because I’d mimed knotting, not sure how a markayuq could chat, but he nodded. ‘She was at the mines. I don’t know what mercury does to markayuq, but it makes normal people angry.’

  ‘Why doesn’t she come in?’

  ‘She can’t see us in here. Their eyes look black because they have – not cataracts. But they’re meant for somewhere much brighter.’

  He looked like he wished he hadn’t mentioned the last thing, so I ignored it. ‘Even with the fire?’

  ‘If you walked right in front of it. Not if you stood to one side. It’s easier to find us in the pollen. She knows we have to come out eventually and she’s not in a rush, is she. I don’t think she’ll try to come in. Is it that cold?’ he added, because I had pulled my blanket closed and huddled into it. Away from the fire it was bitter.

  ‘Very,’ I said. I had been feeling slowly more stupid since I’d found him, but it bubbled now. ‘You know you could have told me you weren’t burning and the cold wasn’t hurting you, before. I would have nagged less. You only said you couldn’t feel it.’

  He could have interrupted me, but he let me finish before he even shook his head. He only did it once, an inch to one side. ‘It was nice to be worried over. Look, come and see this.’

  Behind him was some kind of weaver’s workshop, full of looms, all threaded up in different shades and thicknesses of alpaca string. He wound a pollen lamp, which brought out the different reds and oranges of what I’d thought were loom strings. But they weren’t the warp and weft of half-finished weaving. They were passages and passages of knotwork. It wasn’t only cord but strips of rags and old cloth too – anything that would bear twisting, much dented where they had been knotted and unknotted and reknotted.

  ‘My God. What does it all say?’

  ‘It’s how they talk to each other,’ he said. ‘I didn’t know they did. I didn’t know they wanted to.’

  The nearest rack of string was vast, a whole tapestry; a whole novel. ‘What’s that one?’

  He touched the first string. He couldn’t read them by sight any more. ‘Once there was a girl from the salt colony who . . . fairytale,’ he said. He moved along. ‘What does . . . July mean. It’s one of the new months, it’s in the middle of the year – what new months – the foreigners brought them.’ He looked back at me. ‘They talk about time a lot.’ He was still reading while he spoke and he faded off and frowned. ‘What year is it? I don’t know. Quilka – that must be who’s buried outside – Quilka says it’s the year of the sun but I think they must have changed the measuring. In the salt colony they say numbers, counting upward, but I don’t . . .’ He had to stretch for the top of the new string, the markayuq all being more than a foot taller than he was. ‘I don’t know what it is they’re measuring from. Perhaps the Sapa Inca’s creation. No, too long ago. How long have you been awake? Only today. When are you from? From when . . . the mercury mines were open. Th
is is her,’ he added over his shoulder. ‘The one who’s following us, Anka.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘She’s talking about Huancavelica. She was a doctor there. She didn’t know when it was she was last here.’

  ‘When was that?’

  ‘They never decide,’ he said. He ran both hands along the strings like a harpist would and shook his head. ‘They don’t know. It isn’t that important to them, or not the older ones. They only know each other, so the way ordinary people measure time doesn’t really matter to them. I think she leaves after this part. They go back to stories.’

  ‘What sort of stories?’

  ‘Long ones.’ He sectioned off a whole sheaf of strings to show me and, looking closely, I could just see that the knots were all done in the same way, and different to the ones on either side; it was different handwriting. ‘They’re old, these ones. They sound old-fashioned; they’re talking about the Inca courts.’

  ‘The Inca knew about them?’

  His shoulders went back. He didn’t quite tip over into laughing but he balanced on the edge. ‘Knew about them – half of life was arranged around them. The king’s bodyguards were always stone people. Puruawqa, does that ring a bell?’

  Carillons of bells. ‘Knights. Praetorians.’

  ‘Mm.’ He didn’t seem surprised that I knew, though I was. I was starting to see I hadn’t brushed off even half of what I’d forgotten. I must have been fluent in Quechua as a child, given the amount I still understood. Inti had pointed out that it was Dad’s first language. ‘Anyway, someone here used to do that, he says he misses Atahualpa. He says he had wanted to go with him to his tomb to keep watch – they do that, a lot of the old ones are in catacombs now – but there was no tomb to go to.’

  ‘Who was Atahualpa?’

  ‘The last king. Pizarro killed him. Fifteen hundred and something.’ He was still reading. ‘This is Thomas. He told me he’d known the King, I thought he was joking. They go off sometimes. I didn’t know they came here.’ He swallowed. ‘I’ve never seen anything like this before. I thought they didn’t like talking. I would have set this up in the church if one of them had said.’

  ‘Maybe the idea is to come away for a bit. And maybe others come here from the monastery. It must be a good halfway point.’

  ‘No, you’re right, probably,’ he said, but he didn’t look like he believed it. He looked tired, and left behind, and I was suddenly angry with the Bedlam markayuq. It must have occurred to them that he couldn’t make friends with ordinary people; the best he could hope for there was to outlive them later rather than sooner. It seemed like a deliberate outcasting not to tell him about this place. But then, he wasn’t like them; they were from before the Conquest. He would be one of the first in the new generation of hispanicised markayuq. However local he was by blood, he was a cultural foreigner and, even if they were polite, it was hard to imagine that they thought he belonged with them.

  ‘This way of writing. Was it invented for them?’ I came up beside him to touch the finer cords. The knots still felt clear. I did want to know, but I wanted to distract us both too, and to have a reason to stand with him instead of five useless feet away. ‘They can’t see marks on paper, they don’t speak, they need something they can feel . . .’

  He nodded. ‘Invented by them. It’s not too suited to ordinary people, it’s bloody slow, but it’s courtly so people wanted to copy it. Let’s go back to the fire,’ he finished suddenly. ‘Before you freeze. Give me your hand. I can’t see to get out of all this.’

  I fetched him out. ‘Another five minutes, before we go?’ I said.

  ‘No. We’re staying until you’re a normal colour.’

  ‘I am a normal colour. Anyway, you don’t know what a normal colour is for me—’

  ‘I knew your grandfather. You look just like him and he was never that shade of blue.’ He paused. ‘You know when Inti said she’d been named after him?’

  ‘Yes. I was confused. Isn’t Inti a sun god?’

  ‘Originally. It means sunny, now. People in town used to call him that. Because of his hair.’ He inclined his head at mine.

  ‘I’ve seen a portrait. What was he like?’

  I saw too late that I shouldn’t have asked. For me it was generations ago, and I had the same indifference to Harry Tremayne as I had to Queen Elizabeth, but it was still fresh for him and he looked away from me like he’d used to look away from Martel, as though by not seeing he could unhear.

  ‘No, I mean there’s no need . . .’ I started, feeling stupid.

  He interrupted. ‘He talks fast. Talked. He quoted things a lot; I had to read all of Shakespeare.’

  I smiled. ‘How did he come to Bedlam in the first place? Dad said he was stealing quinine and then he had to lay low, but Bedlam is quite low. Even for out here.’

  ‘He’d been shot. Bullets then were . . .’ He held his fingertips apart almost to the width of a musket ball. I thought he wouldn’t say anything else, but after a while, unexpectedly, he did.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  New Bethlehem

  1782

  Raphael was skinning a bear on the cliffside for the doctor’s new hearthrug when the children came to find him and say there was a man dead on the beach.

  He thought at first that they meant someone had fallen. It was rare, because everyone on the stacks had grown up on the gantries and the frosty patches were well known and banistered, but there were accidents sometimes in the winters, and that winter was howling. He only just remembered to scrub his hands down with snow on the way and ran trying to warm them up again. From the first bridge he looked down. The river was frozen and the snow was whirling in billows that were sometimes almost opaque and sometimes almost clear. The children were right, but he hadn’t been. It wasn’t anyone from the village. It was a foreigner in a Spanish coat, with bright blond hair that showed even from so far down. The man looked like he had come from nowhere. Later, some people said he did, although Raphael was more inclined to say he had run from Phara, which was equally impressive, because it was fourteen miles away.

  He set the counterweight light so that he could get down fast and held the rope hard as it banged to a halt eight inches above the beach. For a second he couldn’t find the man and felt a flutter under his ribs, because there were too many stories about ghosts in the snow that he didn’t quite disbelieve. But then he saw he was almost standing on top of him. The man was under the ice. The water was shallow but the glass stratum below him was deep and littered with bits of ancient masonry so that he looked like he was falling, at an infinitesimally slow pace, very far.

  The man opened his eyes and touched the underside of the ice, too weak for anything else. Raphael swore and slammed the butt of his rifle into it. It wasn’t thick and when he hauled the man out, he choked, but not enough to have breathed the water yet. Although some of it had been washed away, he was still covered in blood. The sun came out again and Raphael understood at last. The man had fallen in the hot glass shadow, in the shallow water, and when the sun had gone in, it had frozen almost on the instant and trapped him there. He shook him to wake him up more and helped him along as much as he could back to the lift. It was difficult. The man was tall.

  The children followed them to the church until he told them to go away. Inside, once it was warmer, the man explained in broken Spanish that his name was Henry Tremayne – Harry, for reasons he couldn’t explain – and that he had been upriver somewhere near the mountains stealing quinine bark when he was caught. He had got away and run, but they had shot him in the shoulder. He was brave when Raphael took the bullet out, though he was no soldier and he shook for a long time afterwards.

  Once Harry was warm and bandaged, there was time to notice that the children had moved a log under the window to see in. There was a row of eyes. When they saw Raphael they ducked, but not far enough. He let them be. They weren’t making any noise. He opened the other window, the one that overlooked the mountain.

  �
�Could you close that?’ Harry said hesitantly.

  ‘Can you see the mountain?’

  ‘The mountain?’

  ‘Just say hello.’

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘Good enough.’ He closed the window again and wondered, for the thousandth time, if those half-sentient stones in the skeleton of the earth knew, still, when strangers came; if they were interested, or if they were only caught in deep rock dreams and unconscious even of the ages skimming by, never mind the people made of bones who flashed about too fast to follow.

  Some Spanish men came later that week, looking for a foreigner. He hid Harry in the undercroft and said there was no one. They made a mess and searched the place anyway, but they didn’t know there was an undercroft. They came again in the spring, to make sure, and the lie was more difficult because Harry had been about the village in the meantime, but a great advantage of the priesthood was mass and Raphael had taken the precaution of swearing everyone to secrecy weeks before. People liked Harry anyway; he was generous and strong. The summer was short and the next winter swept in fast, and although the bullet wound had healed more or less and Harry was worried about his family in England, Raphael kept him back, afraid he would only kill himself with the cold trying to trek over the Andes.

  On the first day of real spring Harry jumped out from behind the woodshed and swung him around into the grass. Being nearly a head taller, he didn’t have to try hard to do it.

  ‘I think you’ll find this is unobservance of the Sabbath. How about you stop rushing around for one afternoon?’

  Raphael hit him, not very effectually. ‘All right, Rabbi.’

  ‘You should be grateful I haven’t organised a stoning. Dear God.’ Harry was laughing. ‘It’s such a lovely day. You can’t waste it on the bloody markayuq.’

  It was. The sky was blue and so was the river, and there was no snow anywhere but the peak of the mountain, which rumbled and sighed with a tiny earthquake like it was settling in the sun. Raphael snorted when Harry leaned across him to catch something in the grass. He had never known anyone so determined to look at crawly things. He’d tried to say once that there was such a thing as the proper use of a newspaper, but Harry had called him a savage and installed a green tarantula in what had used to be the coffee jar. It ate chicken scraps, or it had until Raphael had left it in the woods and told Harry it had escaped, with the jar, which he couldn’t bring himself to go back out and fetch.