Page 29 of The Bedlam Stacks

‘It’s probably shrine,’ I said, and then when Clem frowned, not understanding, ‘not idol.’

Raphael nodded to me and I smiled, because he was taking it so gently. I would have burst out laughing if someone had translated Christchurch as Heathen God Temple in front of me.

Clem sighed and I wished I hadn’t said anything. I’d always thought he was a languages genius – he was perfect in Spanish, at least. But Spanish and English aren’t different languages, only extreme dialects of Latin. It’s almost possible to translate word for word. Translation from a language unrelated to English is nothing to do with equivalent words. Whenever I’d tried to do that in Chinese I’d come out with unbroken nonsense. I had to forget the English, hang the meaning up in a well-lit gallery, stare at it hard, then describe it afresh. I was starting to think Clem was looking at Quechua like he would have looked at Spanish. He was trying to link, not translate. I couldn’t think of a way to say so without sounding like a patronising twerp, so I stayed quiet.

‘And to answer your previous question,’ Clem said to Raphael, ‘the matter with it is this. Spelling it Huancavelica, from the Cuzco dialect, crystallises one pronunciation and makes the others irretrievable unless you meet a native speaker, of which there will be none in two hundred years’ time at this rate. Come on, you know very well what I mean.’

Raphael was unmoved. ‘Spend a lot of time weeping over the lost phonemes of Pictish, do you?’

‘Phonemes.’ I murmured to no one, or to the river. I had no idea how in God’s name he could have learned a word like that. I barely knew what it meant. Neither of them noticed.

‘What’s Quechua for “philistine”?’ Clem said waspishly.

He thought about it. ‘Philistine.’

‘Oh, God, it just goes on, doesn’t it.’ Clem sighed and tapped his pencil against the map, still unhappy. ‘And this river doesn’t seem to have a name except “the river”. Or something about glass, which I guarantee also isn’t written anything like it’s pronounced.’

‘What’s written Quechua like? Can’t you write it that way?’ I said. ‘You know, in brackets.’

‘There isn’t any,’ Clem said bleakly. ‘There is no record whatsoever of an Incan writing system. The closest they had was a kind of knotting, for counting and so forth. Looks like very clumsy tapestrywork.’

‘How can you have a whole empire without legal textbooks and public records?’

‘Oral traditions, one supposes. Wiped out when the Spanish arrived.’ Clem shook his head. ‘It makes a horrible sort of sense. Writing evolves not when you want to wax lyrical about the daffodils but for tax purposes. Numbers. Nouns. Five sheep. No need for adjectives or adverbs or grammar, not at first.’

Raphael had covered his nearer eye with the heel of his hand so that he wouldn’t have to look at us.

Clem finished putting down guessed names and tipped the map towards me. ‘You’re part homing pigeon – how does that look to you? More or less?’

He had sketched a long, rounded right-angle as the river veered south towards Bolivia. His compass was still balanced on his knee, but the solar storm must still have been churning around us, because the needle was skittering in no steady direction. I steepened the curve with my fingertip. The river was starting to meander, just little swerves at the moment, but because of that it was difficult to feel that it was tilting more broadly as well.

‘Are you sure?’ Clem asked, frowning.

‘No,’ I said, not wanting to start another fight. ‘I just feel like we’ve strayed a bit further to the right.’

‘Right isn’t a cartographical term, darling,’ he laughed.

‘It looks like a dragon if you’ve got it right,’ Raphael said. His eyes caught on Clem for too long. ‘Darling’ was the sort of thing Martel would have said.

‘Nor are dragons,’ Clem said, but he tipped the map to see if he could find one. I traced out the hump of a wing, one that would be there if it leaned more to the right. The meanders made paws. ‘Oh, yes. Well, that’s neat, isn’t it? Have you got a map, then, Raphael, if you know what it all looks like?’

‘At home I have.’

‘Why didn’t you bring it?’

‘It’s carved on the wall.’

‘How useful,’ Clem said. ‘Just like the rest of you, hey?’

Raphael watched him with the same distance as when he shot Manuel. I vacillated for a long few seconds, but there were a hundred things out here he could claim to have no control over if Martel asked and, in the interest of his not ensuring that some of them happened to us, I shut my eyes and shoved Clem over the side. He landed with a splash and an explosion of swearing. I had to pretend I’d slipped, but Raphael smiled and looked more ordin-ary as he helped Clem back onto the boat, which only got him a round of his own accusations, although he hadn’t been in arm’s reach.

We all stopped talking when we saw the body on the cliff. It was hanging by its hair from a sturdy vine, not much but bones now. I couldn’t see how anyone might have got it up there, much less how to take it down. There was a Spanish sign around its neck: I stole quinine trees.

‘That’s Edgar,’ said Raphael. ‘He used to live opposite. Took cinchona trees to a Dutchman.’ He was watching me with the smallest cinder of a spark, as though he were quite looking forward to hearing how I meant to talk my way around that.

TEN

The cliffs leaned towards each other until the river was more of a creek. Even so, I didn’t expect to see what we did when it tipped us round the last, sharp bend, past the deep caves with their salt stalactites and scatterings of glass boulders.