Page 41 of The Bedlam Stacks

‘Stay absolutely still,’ he murmured, concentrating too much to have heard that Raphael had already said that.

‘What is it doing?’ I asked Raphael. I could only try to throw my voice a little towards him, not confident I could turn my head without blurring the picture.

‘Just a benediction. He won’t hurt you. It’s good. They don’t do it to everyone.’

‘There must be a counter in the pressure pad,’ Clem said. ‘You know: reach out to every fifteenth person who stands there long enough, or whatever. How often is it, have you noticed? Of course you haven’t,’ he said when Raphael shook his head. ‘However often it is, it’s bloody clever. I suppose you wouldn’t be amenable to my digging to find the—’

‘Touch that ground and I’ll sacrifice you to something made of teeth,’ Raphael said flatly.

‘Not so wholly Catholic after all then, are you?’

‘Clem,’ I said.

‘Merrick, old man.’

‘Less needling of our only guide?’

‘Oh, do shut up,’ he said, not as warmly as he could have. I did shut up, and felt bleak about the chances of their not having a furious row before the week was out. It was hard to see how Clem could have spent so much time in countries like this but never noticed that success or failure depended on being a water boatman, skimming, instead of a diver and getting everyone wet with an enormous splash whenever anything interesting passed through the deep water. Standing near him and Raphael together felt a lot like standing on the banks of a half-holy lake somewhere lost in the mountains, with a St Bernard dead set on winning a swimming medal.

The statue still had his hand over my heart. If he had been a person, he would have been able to feel it beating, because it was going fast, or it had been at first. The longer I stood there, the more it eased. I felt as though there was calm coming up through the ground, and although I knew the statue was clockwork, the magic of it worked all the same. The tendons in his hands were standing and there were fine lines around his blank eyes. It would have been a lovely thing to believe in, if I could have believed in anything at all.

Very gently, the statue gave me a little push. It must have been a way of moving people along if there was a line, but it felt like the pat doctors give you on the way out to promise that you aren’t made of glass after all and you’ll be all right in the end.

‘Clem, can I move?’ I said. It wasn’t until I spoke that I noticed they had been bickering all along. I hadn’t heard any of it properly, for all they were ten feet away. ‘He’s— I mean, it’s pushing me.’

‘Y . . . es. I think that’s long enough.’ He dropped the shutter.

I stepped back and the statue let its hand drop.

‘Incredible,’ Clem said. ‘Absolutely incredible.’

Maria, ready now, edged up to Raphael and gave him her salt. He reeled her back in by her sleeve and took her by the hand to St Thomas instead, who didn’t move this time.

She hesitated, then wound her length of knotted string around the statue’s wrist. She stopped and turned away before she had quite finished when someone else came up beside her to put in some salt.

‘Maria,’ Raphael said. He gave it a Quechua intonation this time, which sounded regions warmer than that formal religious Spanish. A nickname would have sounded wrong in that. I wondered how the hell I knew. It was far too soon to have anything like a proper sense of register, but it had a weird, deep pull already. I twisted my hand to and fro on the hook of my cane, feeling, again, like I was brushing up against something I had used to know but had lost.

She said something about her mother and hurried off. Clem was dismantling the daguerreotype box, but she didn’t pause to look.

Raphael touched the trailing cord on the statue’s wrist and pulled his fingertips down it. ‘It says if she wins a baby next time, he’s invited to the baptism. I’m rigging the next lottery,’ he said.

‘It says that exactly? With a conditional and . . .?’ Clem asked. He looked like he had found heaven without having to go to the trouble of dying first.

‘No,’ said Raphael. ‘Conditional invitations are expressed indirectly with numerical adjectives and sheep.’

I snorted and then tried to pretend I hadn’t.

‘No need to be snippy. There was never any evidence for anything else. There’s not a – I don’t suppose they all learned from a particular person – you know, a proper khipukamayuq. Sorry, Em, that means master-of-the-knots—’

‘There are no proper scribes here any more,’ said Raphael. ‘You’re three hundred years too late.’ He swept his hand forward again. The far past, far ahead, into the forest again.

Clem hadn’t seen him do it at Martel’s. I understood much too late that I should have said something, but I was so busy thinking about how it worked, the past ahead, that it didn’t occur to me what it looked like to Clem, who gazed over the border, in the direction Raphael had motioned at. Without knowing what he meant, it seemed as though when he thought about an older, more complicated culture, he thought of the people in the woods.

‘No, you’re right,’ Clem said. ‘But this is a hospital colony, you told us, and it’s being replenished all the time by someone. There must be a lot more of them out there than there are of you here; maybe they still have scribes.’ He was over the border before either of us understood. Almost as soon as he was across, the pollen flared much more and he left a real wake.

There was a yell from almost everyone who saw, and a surge towards the salt that jerked short like someone had wrenched their strings.

Clem waved his arms to make the light flare. ‘Hello! I say? Anyone here?’