Page 39 of The Bedlam Stacks

Clem touched the grain of one, which made me flinch. They weren’t for touching. The one he had chosen was a man contorted like a monster, tendons standing out hard from his throat. ‘I’ve never seen dendrographs like this.’

When the wind furled down through the trees, it moaned in the carvings. Raphael came back from the salt line and dropped the backpack he had brought among the roots of the closest tree. The thump made the pine needles on the ground jump.

‘That’s all I wanted you to see.’

‘What about these markayuq then?’ Clem said. ‘I was promised anthropoid markayuq, damn it.’

Raphael hesitated but after a second he pointed to our north-west, then north-east, then east. They were there, perhaps forty yards apart, statues seven feet high and standing just before the border. I could see the ghosts of two more further away through the morning haze. People who had been at the ceremony were walking towards them too, some very slowly, having trouble in the cold. Soon the first of them stopped in front of the closest statues and began to pray. I couldn’t see the sixth markayuq at first. It was closer than I’d thought, just by the church but beyond the border, its back to us. It was looking over a little clearing of glass crosses and cairns.

‘Don’t swear in front of them,’ Raphael said. ‘If you go up to one, give it some salt.’ He held out a handful of little vials to us, full of white crystals. It was exactly what the Indian man in Crucero had given to him. Along the border, glass flashed where other people were holding vials too.

‘No, no, no,’ Clem said. ‘Come on, show me properly. I want to see a proper prayer.’

‘I’m a Catholic priest,’ Raphael said.

Clem laughed. ‘I know how people round here are with religion. You’re like Italians with cheese. I know you must pray to these things too, don’t be shy.’

‘I’ll tell you how to do it.’

‘Shy,’ Clem said happily. ‘Do you consider it more private then, the native side of things?’

‘I consider it not sanctioned by Rome or the Cuzco bishropic,’ Raphael said. He inclined his head at the nearest markayuq. ‘He might have been built by Indians but officially that’s St Thomas. Do you want me to tell you or not?’

‘Tell, tell,’ Clem said. He was bouncing on the balls of his feet, which was sometimes a restive habit or an enthusiastic one or both. Raphael took him to the statue and I half-meant to wander, but Clem caught my sleeve and said firmly that it was Culture and that a man couldn’t subsist altogether on chlorophyll. Raphael gave him a salt vial. Close to, the statue was looming, a head taller than me.

‘Why salt?’ Clem asked.

Raphael lifted his jaw towards the forest beyond the border. Because we were so close, the pollen trails we left were brighter and it was possible to move only slightly but leave a clear line in it. There was no need for anything as strong as pointing. It would have looked like a firework. ‘It’s an offering for the people in there, in exchange for the children. It’s worth as much as silver this far from the sea. Are you doing this or not?’

I looked again at the border. Martel had implied a tribe of angry savages, but something about that didn’t ring true. They had carvers, salt traders, and if they didn’t use all the salt, money. Guards for a hundred-mile border and enough children to reject three or four every year. That didn’t sound like a tribe. It sounded like a town, an organised one. If the other expeditions had assumed they were facing a few hunters with spears and then run up against half an army, it would explain a lot.

As Clem held out the salt, the statue lifted its hand, palm up. It made us both jump.

‘My God,’ Clem smiled. ‘They’re clockwork. Hence the real clothes, is that right? Covers up the joints?’

The statue was still moving. I thought it would stop to be given the salt, but it extended its arm sideways to invite Clem to put the salt vial into the glass amphora just next to it. There was no sound but the creak of leather. I stared at it for a long time.

‘Can I – so they do move, do they?’ I said.

I’d thought Raphael would ask why I was being so dense, but he seemed to recognise what I might be talking about. ‘You’ve seen one before.’

‘We’ve got one in the garden at home. My father brought it back. I saw it move its hand and I thought I was going mad.’

‘Your father stole a markayuq?’ Clem laughed.

‘He didn’t steal it, he was asked to take it,’ Raphael sounded like he was measuring out words with great care now and he paused while he waited to see if the scales would tip. ‘The villagers . . . considered that it was unhappy here and ought to be taken somewhere else.’

‘They believe these things are alive?’ Clem said shining.

Only half-listening to them, I looked along the line. Other statues were moving too. The next one along only shifted fractionally, but the one after that had put both hands right down, because the little boy talking to it was too small to reach the amphora. There was one that didn’t move at all, and the people praying to it were easing the salt vials into the amphora very quietly, as though they were edging around somebody who was asleep. Close to us, Maria, the unhappy woman who was shy about joining the lottery for the baby, had stopped to wait for her turn with St Thomas. She passed her salt vial to and fro between her hands, her eyes a long way off.

‘There you are, Em, not mad at all,’ Clem said to me. He dropped the salt vial into the amphora. It clinked somewhere near the bottom. As he straightened up, he looked at the tooling on the statue’s clothes. ‘So these designs are native, but the statues themselves . . . well, they’re obviously Spanish church marvels, aren’t they. So they were shipped over here as saints, and then reclaimed as markayuq?’

‘No. They’re from here, they were here hundreds of years ago.’ Raphael moved his hand forward as he spoke, like he was pushing something well away from himself. It was such an emphatic thing to do, and completely contradicted what he had just said, that I was confused for a second before I understood. Hundreds of years ago was about forty yards in front of him, near the graveyard statue. He had done the same thing at Martel’s, forward for the past, back for the future. ‘The Jesuits claimed them as saints.’

Clem tipped his head. ‘You’re telling me that an Amerindian culture had, in the sixteenth century, invented clockwork set off by pressure pads?’ He bounced on the springy ground to see if the statue would move again but it didn’t. Pine needles skipped.

‘The first missionaries here wrote about them in their – don’t touch them,’ he said suddenly when Clem reached out to move the statue’s sleeve aside.