Page 26 of The Bedlam Stacks

‘Jesus,’ said Clem. ‘Where did he pop up from?’

The man shoved me against the wall by the front of my shirt.

‘One seed. Don’t worry, everyone will be watching.’

From the edge of my eye I saw Raphael drop down beside us, his rifle against his shoulder.

‘Manuel,’ he said in his quiet way. ‘Get your hands off him.’

‘Oh, it’s you,’ said Manuel. He laughed. ‘Don’t trust him, boys, he’s only in it to sell your guns to me. Hey?’ He slapped me, not hard enough to spin my head but enough to make my teeth ache. I slapped him back, much harder. He looked indignant and pulled out a knife, and Raphael shot him in the head. Clem yelled, which made me jump where the gunshot hadn’t. I held the back of my head where it had banged against the terrace behind me, waiting for it to stop pulsing.

‘Did you have to do that?’ Clem demanded.

‘Since you didn’t. Look at me,’ Raphael said, much more gently than I would have thought he could speak. He tipped my head to either side to be sure my pupils were even. Close to, he was younger than I’d thought; some of the lines around his eyes weren’t lines at all but the subsurface scars that boxers have.

It was shamefully nice to be paid the attention, though it had nothing to do with real concern. Seeing him close brought back a clearer memory of the night before and a bolt of shame went right through me for having let myself go so badly in front of him then. I put my fingertips on his chest and pushed. ‘All right, no one’s burning down your village. Who was he?’ I said towards the body.

‘He used to be a quinine farmer before all the trees were cut back round here. He just helps maintain the monopoly now. Makes threats to any white men who come through.’ He put his rifle back over his shoulder and I caught the chemical tang of gunpowder. It was a good smell, one I’d forgotten I liked.

‘Thank you,’ I said, wishing I hadn’t been churlish. ‘I’ll try and be less useless.’

That made him laugh for some reason, or almost. ‘Get on your horse. Before his son comes. And you, Markham. Quispe, we’re going,’ he added in Spanish.

‘And we’re leaving the body here, are we?’ Clem said.

‘Feel free not to, but I am.’ He rode away before Clem could argue.

Quispe was looking at the body with a quiet satisfaction that made me think the man must have had a history of worse things than threats. I sat looking at the Dutch rifle, holding the back of my head where it hurt.

‘What if Raphael hadn’t had a gun, hey?’ Clem said once Raphael was out of earshot. ‘Don’t pick fights you can’t finish, Em. We both could have been killed.’

I knew he was only annoyed with himself for having been slower than Raphael, but it stung anyway and before long I was lagging further behind them than ever. It was Clem who went ahead; Raphael waited to make sure I was still there and twice he turned down unexpected paths and left Clem to work out that we weren’t following. Quispe must have known the way, because he dawdled well behind, walking rather than riding. When we turned down one steep valley, Raphael pretended not to notice how much I was struggling for a while, then touched my arm to stop me and pointed to a spray of great boulders across the mountainside. They looked like the petrified vertebrae of a huge spine.

‘That’s unusual,’ he said. ‘Lucky to see one these days.’

‘What is it?’ I asked, leaning forward in the saddle and suspecting he had invented it as a reason to stop.

‘They’re called chakrayuq.’

It sounded like a real word. He was watching the stones, not me, passing his rosary beads through and through his hands, the reins pinned under his knee.

‘What does that mean?’

‘It means owner-of-the-field,’ Clem called. He must have just found the turning. He sounded annoyed. ‘They’re a kind of shrine. Very old. People used to think they were alive.’

‘No,’ Raphael said, too quietly for Clem to hear. ‘That’s etymology. It means . . .’ His eyes went into the middle distance while he thought about it. I saw the moment he came up with what it should be, because he looked sad, like he hadn’t thought of it that way before, the Quechua word being just a word. ‘Giant,’ he said. ‘It’s a dead giant.’

NINE

When we found the river, it was unexpected. There were no reeds or marshy patches to announce it; only the water, suddenly. It stretched off in either direction, already broad and slow. Clem looked up and down, disorientated. He asked Raphael where it came out at either end, but although they might have been talking about the same places, they were using different names and never overlapped, except at countries.

‘Does it ever run into Bolivia?’

‘Bolivia?’ Raphael looked almost interested, but only as though Bolivia were a philosophical notion he had learned at school and hadn’t come across very often since, rather than what it was, which was the Peruvian version of Wales. ‘Where’s the border?’

Clem was plainly having to do his best not to explode. ‘You live on the Bolivian border and you don’t know?’

‘No. Bloody great forest in the way.’