Page 33 of The Bedlam Stacks

Raphael brought cheese and salted meat down from the cupboards and put them on glass plates on the table. He disappeared outside briefly and came back with a pineapple, which he diced up so fast he must have done it every day, then tipped the pieces into a glass bowl. When I tried it, it was the sweetest I’d ever tasted. He opened the grate again once the fire was going, to let some of the heat out, then pulled away a peg that kept a pulley from moving. The ropes disappeared up through the ceiling and down through the floor. Up above somewhere, something creaked and turned squeakingly. After a few minutes came a rush of water just under the stove, then a hiss as it hit something hot. The cliff curved inward, so the ropes must have gone down through it to the open air and then the river to bring up water. It seemed bizarre until I tried to think of another way to get water on glass stacks. There would be no wells.

Another few minutes later the rush of water came again and this time there was a muttering as it poured into pipes I hadn’t noticed. They were bronze and glass, and they went all round the walls, close to the floor and under it; I soon felt the heat coming up from the tiles. Raphael stood still, watching them.

‘If you see anything leaking, say. All this should have been lit up last week.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘Before the frost. Cold pipes break if you heat them up too quickly.’

I nodded, but nothing burst or broke, only rattled. In the quiet, I noticed we hadn’t heard from Clem in a little while. He was collapsed over his arms, still damp. When I nudged him, he mumbled about the altitude again. As gently as I could, I undid the buttons on his wet coat and got it mostly off him, so that it wouldn’t block the heat from the fire. The lining started to steam.

Raphael had turned back to the stove, which had a separate boiler compartment. He dipped a pan in and tipped quinoa grain into the bottom with a soft sandy hiss. As soon as it was on the stove top, it started to bubble. While it did, he pulled open a glass-handled drawer in the base of the stove. Inside was a metal tray where salt had dried in bumpy white waves. He poured it carefully into a glass bowl, already half full. I watched him put it back.

‘Is that a distillation oven?’ I said. ‘How did you get that up here?’

‘I didn’t, it was made here. Everyone’s got one. This place has been here hundreds of years. They’ve always made salt.’ He leaned forward to touch the wall, which had been built in two stages. The base was all irregular polygons. They had been fitted curiously around a natural outcrop of the bedrock, some of which was swirled through with glass, like a splash. Into its gaps, the masons had eased specially carved and curved bricks, even though it would have been much easier if they had chipped down the original rock. The upper half of the wall was much more standard, all straight bricks, but the irregular ones blended into them. It seemed like a painstaking, unnecessary effort to make the wall look as if it had grown up out of the ground.

The firelight threw into relief a frieze carved over the brickwork. There were pictures of trees and what might have been animals or tree gods, and mountains, and the shape of the river – our river – made simple and blocky. It was ancient. The only thing to say we weren’t in a real Incan house was an alcove that must have been carved into the wall later, because it interrupted the line of the bricks. Inside was a shrine of the Virgin Mary, only the size of a doll. She was gold, but her robes were blue glass. They swam with shadows in the firelight, and then more strongly when Raphael lit a candle from the stove and set it beside her. I touched the edge of the map, which had been worked in geometric patterns.

‘It’s like a . . . what do you call it, those omnibus maps where they square off all the roads.’

Raphael rocked down into the chair next to mine and took some pineapple too. ‘Listen. The snow’s still coming. If it’s thick in the morning, you’re stuck. The path will be snowed shut and the river will freeze.’ He touched the wall again as he spoke. He was showing me the section that was us. Bedlam was marked over the river. Below it, a long path snaked round the bend.

‘Where are the cinchona woods?’

He traced the path all the way west around the riverbend, which was so steep that it would in the next few thousand years become an ox-bow lake, right to a point almost directly opposite Bedlam through the forest, due south.

‘It looks good on there but that path is narrow.’

‘So that’s . . .’ I was sitting with my back to the forest, facing the stacks. The town lights winked and glowed behind him through the window. ‘Over there.’ I pointed left, through the map wall.

‘That’s right.’ He picked up a pencil and drew a neat compass on the stone. The map wasn’t quite orientated north; it was north-east, but they had shifted it to make the dragon shape of the river upright. When he marked on the points, he wrote the letters in schooled, old-fashioned loops.

‘Is it not possible to go straight through the forest?’ I asked. ‘Cut off the river, go due south? The snow wouldn’t matter under the canopy.’

‘No. The border I told you about is here.’ He drew a line right below the town, so close that I looked round to see if I could see through the window. There was only blackness outside in that direction, but the way he had drawn it made it look as if it could hardly be a hundred yards behind the church. He pointed the end of the pencil behind me too. ‘Chuncho territory. Do not cross the salt border. You’d be shot and hung up in a tree.’ The wind howled, ruffling loose tiles in the roof. Fighting against the cold, the hot water in the pipes muttered and clattered more loudly. Over it all, the windmill had a rhythmic squeak and in the lulls I could hear the wind pulling at its sails. ‘I don’t know what the weather’s playing at this year,’ he said quietly. ‘This is summer. It should be warm until April.’ We were still only at the beginning of February.

‘There’s a solar storm.’ I took out my compass and put it in front of him so that he could see how the needle was skipping. ‘It’s still going. We saw the southern lights in Peru. I think it’s affecting the weather.’

Raphael looked at the compass and then me, not uninterested, but he must have reached his capacity for conversation that day because he lifted his bag on to his lap and took out the clocks from Azangaro. Gently, he prised the cases open and began to disassemble the clockwork, one piece at a time, with a pair of tweezers. I leaned across to Clem to see if he was awake, but he wasn’t.

‘Is there somewhere for him to lie down?’ I asked.

Raphael pointed with the tweezers to a little door that would lead into the other arm of the church’s small cross. When I went through to see, it was a tiny chapel, empty except for three or four beds neatly turned out on the stone floor and another alcove-shrine, a saint this time, although I couldn’t have said which. He was gold and glass too.

Clem got up with some help, but he was dizzy and damp and it took a while to manoeuvre him into fresh clothes and then into one of the pallet beds. I’d thought it would be cold, but the pipes ran around the walls here too, and they must have been under the floor, because it was warm enough to have heated the sheets through. They felt like they had just come off presses.

‘Is there a light?’ I called. Because it was dark in the chapel and light in the kitchen, the steam drifting in through the doorway glowed.

‘Above you. Twist the key. Like on a clock.’

I didn’t understand until I straightened up and found what I thought was an oddly made oil lamp hanging on the wall from a piece of rope. It was made out of an old fishing float, but there was a clock’s key in the side. I turned it and heard clockwork skitter. Inside the glass ball, a dusty gold glow trailed a clock’s second-hand turning disembodied from a clock face. The light strengthened with each tick of the brass hand, and by the time a minute had swept by, it was much brighter than a candle. When I held it close to my eye, I could see the matter of the light; it was tiny particles, floating like luminous icing sugar.

‘What is this stuff?’

‘Pollen.’

I turned the lamp round in my hands. I didn’t hear what he’d said for a long lag. It knocked around inside my skull for three or four bounces before the thinking part of me caught it. ‘Pollen? From what?’