Page 37 of The Bedlam Stacks

He frowned as though it was hard to think of Martel not knowing something.

When I turned back to the window again, the woman had come right up close to it and her face almost against the glass made me jump. I bit my tongue rather than make a noise. She had only come to look at me. After a second she limped away. The ghost of someone else was coming over the bridge, a man. He was huge, and he was dragging one leg behind him. I could hear it through the window, the grinding noise it made on the stone. He must have had metal encasing his shoe to keep it from wearing through. I stepped away from the window, not sure what was happening. Raphael must have heard the noise too but he ignored it. He was playing with the baby. She had his rosary and she was trying to find the end of it. Whenever she came to the cross she giggled. On the fourth or fifth time it sent her off into a burst of that deep laughter again. He smiled too.

‘We’ll see how it goes,’ he said at last. The baby was cheering him up. ‘It might all melt again this afternoon.’

I’d made two cups of coffee. When I passed him one, he frowned as if I’d offered him something dead. I didn’t move, ready to tell him not to be rude. But then he seemed to remember himself and took it.

‘Thank you.’

‘Who are those people?’ I nodded at the window.

‘There’s a ceremony soon, to choose her new parents.’

The huge man with the bad leg had stopped next to the woman. They waited close together now. Two more people had appeared in the meantime too, a young couple. The man was in a wheelchair. It had been made from an ordinary chair and wheels from a perambulator, but somebody had fixed wooden skis to the wheels so that it moved more like a small sleigh. His wife’s shoulders were uneven, so much that it must have been painful. It made pushing the sleigh-chair difficult.

‘Right; shall we go?’ Raphael said to the baby. He touched the top of her head so that she would know she was being spoken to and took her tiny hands, very gently, giving her time to get used to the idea that the rosary game was finished now. When she smiled, he took the beads back and lifted her up. He had put a fur blanket around her. ‘Up you come. Let’s go and find your new mama.’

‘Where are you going?’ Clem asked. He had just come in, bleary but better. When he wasn’t feeling well, his hair was less red. ‘Whose baby is that?’

‘About to find out,’ said Raphael. As soon as he opened the door and the cold poured in, I realised I’d only seen the latest arrivals. What I’d thought yesterday was open grass beyond the kitchen door was really an overgrown courtyard, and it was nearly full. There was no noise except for the sigh of the trees and the birds. I got up again too, at first to shut the door, but I stopped on the threshold, because there had been a tiny stirring when they all saw the baby. Clem pulled irritably at my sleeve and I explained about the bell and the church.

While I was talking, Raphael was too. He was keeping to Spanish which, even in such a short time, was starting to sound official. If he had been chatting it would have been Quechua. He was saying that the baby seemed not to have an impairment except maybe deafness. It caused another stir. Some of the people nearer the front clasped their hands. There was barely a straight figure among them. They were all twisted, or missing limbs or eyes, or whole but strangely made.

‘He wasn’t joking about its being a hospital colony, was he?’ Clem said by my ear.

‘No,’ I murmured, quiet because I’d had a sudden unexpected lash of envy. It was hard to be always the slow one and the one who everyone else made allowances for. If I’d lived in a place like this, I wouldn’t have felt so pointless. It was probably only a fantasy. I’d felt worse living with Charles. But it seemed different to that, the arrangement here.

A boy of about twelve hurried up to the front with a glass bowl, a nice one with strands of blue all through it. One by one, ten or eleven people, mainly women, came and dropped in a little piece of knotted string. I glanced back at Clem, who looked at me too with light in his eyes.

‘That’s Incan knot-writing,’ he said softly.

When he had mentioned it before, I hadn’t envisioned it properly. I almost said that I’d seen Raphael doing it on the way here, but I realised in time that doing so would mean a joyful explosion halfway through an otherwise serious public gathering.

As each person put in their string, they left something else too; a little basket of pineapples, or jars of pepper or cocoa pods, cloth.

‘Priests aren’t paid by the Church here,’ Clem explained. ‘They’re freelance. You pay them per ceremony, usually in money. He’d be rich in Azangaro, but I can’t imagine they see much in the way of real currency up here. In fact it’s probably a way to prove they have the means to look after a child, a valuable offering.’

‘Maria, you said you wanted a baby,’ Raphael said to someone. ‘Don’t be so shy.’

‘But she’s mad,’ someone protested.

‘If she wins she gets help then, doesn’t she.’

A short, round woman crept out from the crowd, holding her string too tightly. Raphael had to persuade her to let it go, then nudged her back to the others. She put down the pelt of something white and soft on her way. An older woman put her arm round her. Raphael glanced down at the pelt as if it was too much.

Once all the names were in, the boy held the bowl out to Raphael, who spun the strings around three times one way, three times the other, then drew one out. He didn’t have to look at it; he must have been able to feel the knots. Clem’s fingers closed hard over my arm.

‘God, it’s like seeing into the past. This is incredible.’

‘Juan and Francesca Huaman,’ Raphael said.

The young woman at the front, the one whose husband was in the wheelchair, clapped her hand over her mouth then half-ran forward for the baby. Everyone else cheered and clapped, and things turned to a Spanish-Quechua mix that I couldn’t understand. Clem grinned.

‘They’re saying good luck. Christ, look at that, what is that?’

People were holding little glass vials and lobbing what was inside towards the Huamans and the baby. It was the same pollen that was in the lamps, and as soon as it was out of the vials it floated up, haloing them, and a brighter glow began to trace all their movements. Raphael gave the baby to Francesca very carefully, not in the sack-of-corn way of people who are used to children. Once Francesca had her safely, he stepped back and clenched his hands. He looked worried, and sad, but nobody noticed. They were all too taken with the baby. It felt like unusual attention; there was a kind of awe, that she was so perfect.

‘It’s pollen,’ I said to Clem. ‘It’s in the lamps in here too. Boatloads in the forest.’ I told him about the pollen ghosts from the night before.