Page 28 of The Bedlam Stacks

‘What does markayuq mean?’ I asked.

‘Marka means village and yuq implies ownership, or being a vessel, something like that. It’s the same yuq as in chakrayuq, but chakra means field. So owner-of-the-village, or similar. It’s another kind of shrine, just a littler one for a littler place. Not that there’s a village round this one, but there would be usually.’

‘It means warden,’ Raphael said. He didn’t sound optimistic that he was going to be able to change Clem’s translating habits.

‘This is handy, a bilingual native speaker,’ Clem said happily. He wrote ‘markayuq’ down on the corner of his map and marked the position of the shrine too.

Raphael finished his work on the statue and sat down next to his bag again to exchange the brush and the wax for his Spanish book. He fitted them neatly in, and when he lifted the book out, he was careful of the corners.

I scooped up another pebble. It glittered oddly and I paused, because it wasn’t stone at all but bluish glass. I showed Clem, who frowned and shrugged, but when we leaned down to look along the shore, there were dozens of them, and perfect glass shells, occupied by river things whose inner workings the glass exposed. The sun came out and sparkled along them all.

‘I found some of these at home,’ I said to Clem. ‘Dad must have brought them back.’

‘We’re going the right way, then. I wonder what the hell they are. How could anything form a shell from glass?’

I shook my head. We both looked along at Raphael, weighing up mystery versus asking him.

‘Raphael,’ Clem ventured at last.

He ignored us. He was holding the book open but his focus missed it. There were leather gaiters over his boots, black once and unevenly grey now, and he was just touching the water’s surface with the buckle of one, holding it perfectly still while the fish came close to the shiny bar. The long stillness was unsettling, because it’s usually something humans only do when they mean to kill something. He didn’t. He only sat. Clem said his name again to exactly the same effect. Long after we had lost interest, I heard the scratch of paper as he turned a page.

We didn’t quite wait an hour before a boat came, a little balsawood skiff with sails made of woven grass, carrying a cargo of sheepskin and one cheerful trader bundled up against the cold under a Russian-looking hat. I didn’t think we would all fit on, but the trader sat on the sheepskin bale to make room for us. There wouldn’t have been a spare inch for the mules. Thinking of the mules made me wonder again about the boys. Clem thought they had just decided against the unwelcoming weather, but they hadn’t seemed unhappy to me before. It was Raphael they hadn’t liked. As the boat drifted by cliffs that grew taller and taller, cut with fine waterfalls that fell from so high the sources were lost in the clouds, I tried to think of someone who might have made me run away as soon as I saw him – and not just run, but turn back from a good fire on a sleeting night. All I could think of was Irishmen talking quietly over dynamite boxes.

The stack of sheepskins was easily high enough to lean back against if you sat on the deck which, though balsawood splinters the second you introduce it to an overweight mouse, was properly layered and bolted together, and dry. There was a quiet conversation in Quechua going on somewhere over my head. Whatever the boys’ anxieties about Raphael, the trader didn’t share them and he was chatting, or I thought so at first. It was an elegant language. Every so often it hung mid-word like a ballet dancer where English would have rattled along on its tracks. It took me a good while, half-asleep, to realise that it wasn’t Raphael on the other side of the conversation but Clem. I could hear his English accent next to the trader’s dancing one. Now that I was paying attention, other things sounded wrong too. He was talking in an English word order. When I caught myself thinking that, I frowned, because I would have sworn to a jury I’d never learned any Quechua.

Something cold touched the back of my neck, then my hands. When I looked up, the air was grainy with snow, though the valley had narrowed so much that we were protected on either side for hundreds of feet. It was coming down heavily enough to have dusted the rocks along the banks already. I brushed the new flakes off my sleeves and got up unevenly, already stiff from the cold. Some of the rocks were the same almost-clear glass we had found on the shore by the pier, huge boulders of it smoothed into watery curves by the river. They were covered in white crystals – salt, though we must have been a thousand miles or more from the nearest sea. Raphael was sitting at the prow, half-hidden by the sail.

‘Is that salt marsh?’ I said, without much hope of getting any more of an answer out of him than we had before.

He did turn back this time. ‘Mm. There’s salt under the ground here. Used to be mines.’ He was looking up at the snow, not quite frowning, but grim, though I couldn’t see any particular reason to worry about it. In the grey light, there were red strands in his hair. It was long enough to tie back but short enough to be always falling down. I couldn’t imagine him neat.

The white motes pottered about on their way down to the water, not driven by any wind. The thin sunbeams swam with them. I’d crossed my scarf over my chest and buttoned my coat on top of it, the collar turned up, but the cold was starting to bite through everything. The only bright thing nearby was a flock of parrots perched on the bank, all red and blue and tropical in the deepening cold. Whenever we turned a bend of the river, I caught a snatch of mountains up ahead, as jagged and vast as the range we had just crossed. The peaks were already white.

Clem had taken out his map and now he was sketching the shape of the river in pencil, to the interest of the boatman, who made him mark on a little town called Phara and looked disproportionately pleased when he did.

‘This fellow’s telling me he’s originally from somewhere called Vangavilga – do you know where that is?’ asked Clem. ‘Is it round here? I think he wants me to put it on my map.’

Raphael looked across. ‘Huancavelica. No. It’s about four hundred miles away.’

‘No, he said V—’

‘Vangavilga is Huancavelica,’ he said with unexpected patience. ‘Huancavelica is how you spell it and how you’d say it in Spanish but we have a different accent round here. It’s the start of the pilgrimage route. He means his family escaped here from the old labour draft. The mines killed so many people the young men used to run before the draft captains came round. Or after, to recover from the mercury poisoning.’

‘I know where Huancavelica is,’ Clem said, shocked. ‘But that . . . the variation. It’s not in the least reflected in the Spanish spelling. You can’t read vanga for huanca in Spanish. That’s ridiculous. Is it widespread? Are there other interchangeable consonants?’

‘Plenty.’

‘That’s linguistic vandalism.’

‘They say Wank’avilka in Cuzco. Huancavelica. What’s the matter with it?’

‘What does it mean?’ I asked, to break their flow.

‘Stone idol,’ said Clem. ‘There’s a chakrayuq there, a huge one.’

Raphael looked like he might have laughed if he’d been younger and more cheerful. ‘Why are you using the Jesuit dictionary?’

‘How do you know what I’m using? And it’s the only Quechua dictionary.’