Page 25 of The Bedlam Stacks

‘I thought you said we should hurry along?’ Clem said.

‘Not when there are grapes up here.’ He climbed straight from his saddle up one of the terrace walls to sit on the edge of the second lowest level, where he snapped a handful of dusky grapes off a vine and hummed at me to catch my attention before he dropped them and a piece of Martel’s sugar cake into my lap. ‘Eat something sweet. We’re still high up, you’ll get tired fast.’

Clem looked up. ‘Where are we now?’

‘This valley is Sandia.’

He was right – the grapes were sweet and I did feel better for them. They were perfectly ripe, taut in their skins.

‘Right, I see. Not much after this is charted,’ Clem said to me. He was unfolding a piece of paper from his pocket, already sketched with the tentative shapes of the mountains and the rivers. Before Crucero he had wanted to work out latitudes with the sextant he’d brought, but the sky had been clouded over all night and there hadn’t been even a glimmer of the pole star. It must have been getting towards noon now, but the sun was lost in haze. ‘We’ll have to start being more systematic soon.’

I eased down from my saddle onto the first step of the terrace, which was exactly at ankle height. The horse, an expensive mare, stayed more or less where she was to nose at some of the plants nearby. She ate them delicately. I rubbed her neck, missing Gulliver, who had good table manners too. Along from us, about twenty feet away, Quispe dropped down nearly as stiffly as I had.

Clem was hovering a pencil just above his sketch map. ‘There’s a river, isn’t there, soon. What’s it called?’ he aimed at Raphael.

‘Depends which village you’re from.’

‘Aren’t you a fountain of information.’

Raphael only looked tired and swung his legs up onto the terrace. Because he was almost directly above us, he disappeared then. If he wanted to he could walk off and leave us. He could have been doing it then and we wouldn’t see until he was a hundred yards away. Hoping Quispe knew the way too, I gave Clem some of the grapes. He sat down beside me and looked me over.

‘Well, you’re shiny and healthy at this generally atrocious altitude. Obnoxious, really. You couldn’t develop some sort of awful complication with the leg so my fragile constitution looks less ladylike, could you?’

I wished he wouldn’t lie. He wasn’t very good at it. All he did was say the opposite of what he thought and hope for the best. I was sure I’d never looked worse. ‘If Raphael will leave me a map, I can come after you at my own pace.’

‘Does it hurt that much?’

‘As long as I can take the weight off it sometimes it’s all right,’ I said, quietly because the old Navy feeling was coming from him that if I were to just buck up a bit, I’d forget about it.

‘Yes, no, obviously,’ he said. He looked away, embarrassed because, however much he didn’t want to be, he was getting impatient. I looked down at my knees. We were both at halfcapacity, but I was starting to think that only meant neither of us had the brain power for good lies. Even Quispe had folded up in an exhausted heap. His horse nudged at him to see if he was all right.

‘Raphael, are you still there?’ I said.

He dropped some more grapes at me to show that he was. When I looked up, the terraces above us were strung about with mist. It was forming in threads all along the valley. There was a sound like soft rain, but it was only the moisture dripping from the leaves of the overhanging plants.

It was uncomfortable that I was having to call him by his first name. ‘And do you have a last name?’

‘Not really.’

‘Are you sure?’ I said. It was hard to tell whether he was only being polite or if he was holding it back so that he didn’t have to give us everything.

‘What do you want?’

‘Can you leave me a map and take Mr Markham on?’ I said. ‘I’m not going to be able to go quickly, I’m sorry.’

Clem didn’t argue and glanced up with hope in his eyes.

‘No,’ Raphael said. ‘Eat your grapes.’

‘To be fair, a lazy Indian probably goes fifteen times slower than you ever would,’ Clem said, resigned to it now.

I concentrated on the grapes. The sugar was chipping away at the tiredness. The wheedling bluebottley unease that had been whining close to me since the glacier faded. We were safe. It was almost warm. For the first time in days it felt nearly like the land had noticed it was supposed to be summer. I hoped the snow at Azangaro was just a quirk of local weather, not a wider thing to do with the solar storm. I was so tired of being cold already.

I was turning a grape over between my fingertips when I saw a man coming towards us from the direction we were heading in. Clem, who was sorting through his pack, didn’t notice him. He was Spanish, wearing an old colonel’s jacket over his ordinary clothes and a rifle slung over his shoulder. It was Dutch. He leaned down close to me. He stank of old brandy.

‘I’ll cut your feet off if you so much as touch a quinine tree.’

I pushed the handle of my cane up hard into his jaw. He reeled backwards.