Page 27 of The Bedlam Stacks

I inclined my head at that, because he really was fluent. Unless he’d learned English as a child it would have been nearly impossible and even then, to have retained it after years of no use, or sporadic use at best, meant a spectacular memory. I’d lost all my Chinese already. He caught me looking and flared his eyes at me to ask why. I opened my hand gently away from myself like an orator, to say he spoke well. He frowned, but his shoulders tacked shyly.

‘Can I borrow that scarf?’ Clem said to me, then screamed into it when I gave it to him. When he handed it back, he kept his face straight. ‘If I haven’t strangled him by next Tuesday, I’m to be beatified. Write to the Pope.’

If Raphael noticed, he pretended not to. He had gone ahead of us, to a single stone pier. There was nobody there, no houses, no boats. At the end of it was a statue: seven feet tall, facing out towards the water like a person.

‘What happens now?’ Clem asked when we caught up.

‘We wait for a fisherman.’

‘Is there no ferry?’

He didn’t snort, but he did show his teeth in something too humourless to be a real smile. There was a cruel curve to it, the kind of smile women call rakish before the owner abandons them pregnant in an asylum. ‘No.’ He dropped his bag on the ground and crouched down to take out a jar of wax and a brush with a bluish glass handle. With his wrists hanging over his knees, he looked up at the statue, then stood to scrub off the watermarks left by old rain and the splashes that reached it from the river. I’d thought the statue’s clothes were stone like the rest of it, but they shifted when he ran the brush over them; real leather, all of them, bleached as pale as the marble by the weather. I watched him for a while and wondered why they bothered dressing statues. But then, most of the statues of Mary in churches on the way had been wrapped up in blue silk. I caught the smell of the wax on the breeze. Burned honey.

Quispe gathered together the horses and turned straight around again without saying goodbye.

When I sat down, a swarm of fish came to inspect the soles of my boots. Clem paced for a while but then gave up and we played skimming games with the flat pebbles that covered the shoreline. Along from us, Raphael was still waxing the statue’s clothes. It seemed like a lot of work after riding as far as we had, but he was doing it carefully and something about the way he moved his arm made it look like a ritual with a specific set of motions. Clem had noticed too.

‘St Somebody, is that?’ he said.

‘No.’

I’ve never seen anyone go from wary to delighted as fast as Clem did then. He nearly bounced onto his feet. ‘You’re joking! It’s a markayuq?’

Raphael nodded ruefully. I had a feeling he had avoided saying the Quechua by way of discouraging Clem from it too.

‘I’ve never seen an anthropoid version before, I thought they were always just outcrops of the bedrock—’

Raphael looked at him past the statue’s shoulder. ‘Quiet down.’

‘You believe it’s real?’ Clem beamed. ‘That it can hear us? Sorry, he?’

‘Stop. Calm down.’

‘But you’re Catholic,’ Clem said joyfully, impervious now. I smiled, glad he was happy again. ‘But you still believe in the local . . .?’

Raphael let the silence go on for a second. ‘Speak quietly,’ he said, quietly himself.

‘Sorry! May I look at him?’

‘Look. Don’t touch. But there are six in Bedlam. You’ll have more time then.’

‘Bedlam?’ I said.

‘New Bethlehem. Joke.’ He didn’t sound as though he found it especially funny. ‘You’ll see.’

‘Six markayuq in one place?’ Clem said over us. ‘I thought it was one per village.’

‘This village is special.’

‘How?’

‘Like Canterbury. He’s here because he marks the pilgrimage route.’ He pointed along the river, left to right. There was another jetty a good way off, almost out of sight, and on it the motionless figure of a man in heavy robes. Like the one on the pier it was fantastically real-looking and nothing like the blocky things I associated with South America. They were just like the statue at home. I didn’t say anything. I would later, because I wanted to know why Dad had stolen a Peruvian shrine, but the sense of things I’d thought were unconnected connecting was too strange then.

‘In that case,’ Clem said, ‘I shall leave him be. But they’re all like this one, are they? Proper statues? They look like real people?’

‘Yes.’

Clem grinned and sat down with me again. ‘This is going to be much better than I thought.’