Page 24 of The Bedlam Stacks

‘Thank you,’ I said, too grateful.

He studied me for a long objective moment. ‘You’re all right,’ he concluded. ‘And stop bloody lisping. I know it’s a Madrid accent but someone’s going to rob you. You sound queer.’

I laughed. As if I’d only needed to be told firmly enough, I calmed down and realised that Clem didn’t look so bad after all. When I turned again to tell Raphael he was right, he had gone back to the nail in the floor and the knotted string.

The weather fined up the next morning just as we reached the top of the pass through the Andes. The way behind us stretched back for miles, bleak and snowy, the road a purer white line because it was flat. The cold was cutting. Up ahead, the pass plunged us down through ravines. Halfway down, a chunk of snow sloughed away from the surface under Raphael, who was leading his horse, but he didn’t fall and only let himself glide for twenty yards or so.

‘Well,’ said Clem. He had stopped to wait for me. He hadn’t talked yesterday, too ill, but he was better today. I was too, but shaky. I could remember having been frightened in the night and that Raphael had said something, but I couldn’t think what. It was like a fever dream. The more I chased it, the less real it felt. ‘Do you suppose he’s a wronged but admirable man, or just a grumpy bastard?’

I laughed. ‘Not sure.’

‘Did you talk to him much at Martel’s?’

‘No. Martel locked him in his room straight after dinner.’

‘Locked?’

‘They seemed to think he might attack someone otherwise.’

‘Or maybe he’d fuck off home before you idiots could remember what he looked like,’ Raphael called back, and we both stopped, because he had said it in English. He had no accent, or rather, he had our kind of accent, with what might have been a foreign edge. ‘Get down here. It’s a way even to the river and we’ll have ten miles on the boat after that.’

‘Interesting English you’ve got there,’ Clem said after a lag. ‘Where did you learn?’

‘Hurry up,’ was all he said.

Clem lifted his eyebrows at me. ‘Told us. Off we hop.’

I couldn’t let the horse go any faster than I already was without the jolt hurting too badly to sit through, so I fell behind. Through a fog of altitude stupidity, I tried to think why Raphael had said one thing at Martel’s table and then told us to turn back when he had spoken to me through the wall. It felt ominous, but in the end I couldn’t decide why. Ahead of me down the slope, Clem’s nose started to bleed again and he slung a handful of blood sideways to sprinkle vivid and steaming against the snow.

It was soon obvious why Raphael wanted us to go quickly. There was nowhere to stop. Even up to Crucero there had been inns, but there was nothing now. On one side of the road the cliffs rose up black, straight into clouds. They were a thousand feet at least, sheer and snowy. On the other side was a kingfisher-blue lake, and beyond that, the white mass of a glacier, which mumbled somewhere inside the ice. It must have been moving fast, because every half-hour or so another chunk fell from it and smashed over the rocks. It was all too huge to seem real. Before long I started to feel edgy. It didn’t seem like the sort of place humans were meant to be. But only a couple of miles after the glacier, we found the farming terraces: gigantic steps eight feet broad built into the mountainside so that crops could be grown on the flat surfaces. They were Incan, abandoned, but the shapes of them were still clear. There were a hundred and five on one side, stretching up and up the cliff. It was bigger than anything I’d seen in China, any tea plantation or temple. Perched in impossible places were the ruins of houses. Clem knocked my arm. If he had still been annoyed with me for agreeing to a guide, it was all gone now and he had turned glowing and joyous.

‘How about that? Eat your heart out, Emperor Hadrian.’

‘I didn’t know it was like this.’ The terraces covered such a great swathe of land that although the grass and overgrown trees were nodding in the wind, the only things that really seemed to move across them were the shadows of the clouds. It was grand, but there was something horrible about it too.

‘Like what?’

‘I don’t know. Just . . .’

‘Actually brilliant, rather than comparatively brilliant?’ He was grinning. ‘I know. One’s so used to saying, yes, your stick-man painting is marvellous, considering you’re a pygmy in a mud hut. They weren’t pygmies in huts, though. They were as good and as strong as Rome. Historical fluke the Spanish ever managed to get the better of them.’

‘How did they?’ I said, wanting suddenly and badly to know.

‘Smallpox,’ he said. ‘It wasn’t strategy or anything like that. The Spanish brought smallpox with them when they landed in Mexico. It arrived in Peru before they did. And the Inca had built a wonderful, efficient road system for it to travel on. The royal family was obliterated in five years, the administration of the empire collapsed, and Pizarro took the whole thing with five thousand men. One of the most ridiculous confluences of bad luck in history.’

I’d never been interested before, not even a bit. Whenever Clem talked about South American history, it sounded as though there were a hundred uninteresting abortive empires kicking around and the Inca had blurred into it all, but they were almost still here. Someone must have been proud to live in those mad houses. There weren’t ghosts – I don’t believe in ghosts – but standing there I wished I did, because ghosts would have meant they were less lost.

‘Do you know who built this?’ Clem called to Raphael. ‘Which king?’

‘Won’t have been a king. The royal estates are much bigger.’

‘Bigger,’ I echoed. I was lagging again.

‘How’s the leg?’ Clem said.

‘Fine,’ I said, having decided we’d stop when I fainted and not before.

Raphael had decided something else. ‘We’re stopping, I’m starving. We’re out of the wind here at least.’