Page 30 of The Bedlam Stacks

Where there used to be a bridge of land, the river had worn through and made three towering stacks. Clem worked out later that they were six hundred and twelve feet high. I couldn’t see the tops of them properly, but around the bases were wharves, arranged like spokes, and then stairs and stairs and stairs, up to a tangle of wooden scaffolding that supported the corners of houses and spiralling gantries. As we came closer, I could see people moving; there was a man with a wheelbarrow full of pineapples.

The sun came out suddenly. Greenish blue shadows fell across the boat and turned the riverwater turquoise. The light was shining down through translucent parts in the stacks, which weren’t rock but glass. It had been worn shiny and clear by the weather and the river. When I put my hand out to the coloured shadow beside me, the light was hot. The boatman steered us away from it but he didn’t quite move quickly enough. Where the tip of the boom swung into the light, the grass sail caught fire. The boatman squeaked. Raphael, who had been drinking something from the cup of a flask, lobbed the contents at the little fire and put it out before it could spread. He didn’t seem worried by it, but the boatman looked shaken and steered us square down a line of unlensed sunlight.

‘My God,’ Clem said. ‘That’s obsidian. Blue obsidian. It’s formed in a strata over the – that isn’t possible.’ He said it in a nearly accusatory way towards Raphael, who was either too tired or too graceful to take him up on it.

‘Black swans,’ I said, fighting to stay mild. Raphael knew why we were really here. That he hadn’t told anyone so far didn’t mean he might not lose patience if we blamed him personally for one too many geological unlikelihoods or linguistic abnormalities. I would have told Clem to shut up if he had been Charles, but I wasn’t afraid of Charles’s temper. I’d forgotten I was afraid of Clem’s. ‘You know. More in heaven and earth. You don’t know it’s there until it pecks you.’

Clem snorted, still too annoyed with me to laugh. Raphael looked back slowly as if someone had walked over his grave. I frowned, but he shook his head to say it was nothing to do with me.

Where the light made the water clear, there were ruins on the riverbed, chunks of old masonry. I looked up again. The two bridges that connected the first and third stacks to the land were stone, but the middle ones, between the stacks, were wooden. They were recent. The whole great structure must have been eroding always.

I stood up by the prow as we reached the wharves. The river had carved out combes and caves that sang with drips as we passed. It smelled cleanly of hot salt. Rather than flowing straight between the stacks, it had cut deep gullies in the weak places and made a glass beach, almost the same as the rocky ones at home. But here the glass had been smoothed and worn into twisting shapes and dips that whirled the light and played perspective tricks. Nothing was sharp.

The trader steered us to a flat outcrop. Raphael stepped across easily. Clem struggled with it more, still pale from altitude sickness and wet from the river. The boatman held my elbow to help me down. I thought he would get out too to unload, but he only gave the beach an uneasy look and started back straightaway.

‘He wasn’t coming here, then?’ I asked, confused.

‘No, there’s a warehouse back that way. Keep out of the sun,’ Raphael added. He didn’t sound like he thought we would listen.

We followed him in the cooler, safer, unlensed path of sunlight between the left-hand and middle stacks. On the far side, the river was much stronger and foamed over rocks and little crevasses, and from further away was a quiet roar that sounded like waterfalls. The cliffs stayed close after the stacks; a kayak would have made it through, but nothing substantial. Though I could just make out the green of trees at the top, it was impossible to see what sort they were or how dense.

I tripped into a well in the glass beach and thought for a long suspended instant that I was going to fall, but it was an illusion. The dip itself was only a few inches deep, but the glass was clear for about twenty feet. The bottom was a frozen riverbed. There were fish caught mid-turn around weed caught mid-furl. None of it was burned. I leaned down, but the surface was warped into wave-shapes, and everything blurred and distorted. It sharpened again when I straightened.

Nearer the wharves, the smooth glass turned pebbly and green-blue shells lay heaped everywhere. Most of them were stuck to rocks just like ordinary shells would have been. The rocks themselves were all either obsidian entirely or half-vitrified, great chunks of glass and stone all twisted together. The granite made shapes like ink unwinding in water. The boat had been cold, but the beach was so warm now that I had to take off my coat. When I strayed into a stronger patch of sunlight, having drifted sideways trying to get out of one sleeve, I had to jerk away. The heat was fierce there. The glass stratum was about two hundred feet high in the stacks and up to that point the cliffs were pockmarked with black spots and burns, like another waterline where the light was magnified. Birds, little black coot things, had all made their nests well above it. Except for the places exactly beside the stacks, where they were glass, the cliffs were ordinary rock. The obsidian had poured down in its own narrow stream when it was first formed and drawn a great glass stripe across the land. One of the mountains must have been a volcano.

Once we were well out of the hot shadows and in ordinary sun, Raphael stopped and waited.

‘Right. Don’t come down here around midday if it’s sunny, you’ll catch fire. In the forest there is a border marked with salt and animal bones; don’t cross it. There are Indians in the woods and they do not like wandering foreigners. You’ll never see them but they’re there. Just stay away from them and they’ll stay away from you.’ He waited for us to nod. ‘This place is a hospital colony. Most people up there are sick or deformed, so don’t expect help carrying and lifting. You see to yourself, as much as you can. There are no servants.’

‘We didn’t expect to be waited on,’ Clem said.

Raphael made an unconvinced sound and turned away towards the last stack and the wharves there.

‘How quickly can we start out?’ Clem said. ‘For the coffee, I mean.’

‘I’m interested to know when you’re going to admit you’re lying about the coffee and ask me where the cinchona woods are,’ Raphael said over his shoulder. Like it often did, his voice came quiet at first and then strengthened. ‘You’re going to need to. This place is full of coffee but it isn’t full of cinchona. Look around.’

‘Now,’ I said. ‘Where are they?’

‘Merrick,’ Clem snapped.

Raphael looked back. ‘This was shut down as a supply region years ago. Everything that could be harvested has been. Anything left is in Chuncho territory. I can take you round on the road they used to use, but it’s old now and you might not find much even if it is passable. Why did you come here?’

‘We have reports from a few years ago that imply there’s something here worth going for,’ I said.

He frowned. ‘You’re talking about the Dutch. And Backhouse’s expedition. He brought an army battalion, and half those men were killed. You could have gone north. There’s boatloads of the stuff up there.’

I shook my head. ‘Those varieties have a two per cent quinine yield. What you have here is nine per cent at least. Look, we can pay. It will be worth your while, even if it is a trek.’

‘As I say, I’ll show you the path. But I don’t think you’ll find anything.’

‘And if we do?’

‘If you do – then there’s going to need to be some negotiation.’

‘Well, let’s have that out now,’ Clem said. ‘How much do you—’

‘We’re not talking about it now.’