Page 64 of The Bedlam Stacks

I leaned to the window. There was nothing in the pollen, although I wouldn’t have seen anything from here unless they came at an angle. After a second, the bell rang again, then again, for longer, then silence. I put my coat on, and my shoulder to the door. It was frosted shut and I had to push hard. The idea of carrying a baby across the icy bridges made my ribs tighten.

There was only one candle lit on the altar, but it was enough to show that there was no baby. It was the body of a man, half-laid-out, half-dropped, and the candlelight made his hair brilliantly red.

I leaned against the edge of the altar and felt the rough places in the stone digging into my palms. It took me a long time to push past the feeling that I shouldn’t touch him. When I did, he was as cold as the altar. I had to cross my arms. He didn’t seem like himself, because he was never so expressionless, even asleep. Although I waited to feel sad or angry or something decent, all that arrived was fear, not of the woods or God but of Minna. I’d have to explain what had happened and I didn’t think I’d be able to lie, but I couldn’t decide what the truth was. When I tried to run through the memory I couldn’t tell if I’d let him go because it was right or because he had hurt me.

It was Raphael’s voice that I heard at the back of my mind, asking what the hell I’d been doing. Since we had left the Navy, Clem had meandered about on archaeology expeditions while I’d been forged into a machine on the anvil of the East India Company. I was the stronger of us by far but I’d forgotten, because I was too used to feeling broken. Then I’d lashed out, and it was so much worse than anything he could ever have done to me. And I’d done it in the church of a man who was orders of magnitude stronger than the people around him but spent his life doing their laundry. I’d never felt shame like it. It burned, silent but concentrated like a welding torch until something in me vitrified. I had to burn myself on the altar candle to shock myself out of the certainty that I’d go mad with it. It helped, and I started to think more clearly.

There were marks around his neck, deep and dark. Shaped like fingers. I measured my hand against them without touching him. They belonged to someone with a bigger reach than mine. I lifted up his hand. His fingertips were grazed. He had scratched at something hard. I tipped my lamp to his nails, some of which were broken, but if there was anything under them I couldn’t see it. Certainly no blood. Whoever had caught him, they had been wearing something substantial. I glanced out into the trees, where there was no light, though there should have been if someone had run back after ringing the bell. There were only the markayuq. No one and nothing had moved.

Because the cold seemed a better idea than underfloor heating, I left him on the altar with the candle and crossed his arms over his chest as well as I could with his muscles stiffening. I went back inside and leaned back against the door, my fingers tapping at the hook of my cane. I wanted to fetch Inti, but there was nothing she could have done but insist Catholicly on sitting a vigil in the snow. It was only wanting to talk to another person.

‘You let him go,’ I said aloud to myself. ‘Live with it.’

I went to sit by the stove and play patience.

In the morning, I let myself out once it was light, which was late, because the mountains hid the sun so well, and walked up to the border. There was something maddening about deducing things from light trails in the dark and I wanted to see the trees in ordinary light, looking ordinary. It wasn’t until I reached it that I saw the heaps of fur on the ground. There were dead wolves everywhere. They were all around the markayuq, some just on our side of the salt, some just before. Their necks were broken. I’d strayed in among them before I saw them and I stood still, listening hard, because it seemed too unlikely that they were all completely dead. But I didn’t hear any breath except mine.

They must have come for the body; they would have known it was there from half a mile away. The top half of my spine seized at the thought of having slept through it. Wolf packs weren’t quiet. They would have been calling to each other through the woods and I hadn’t heard, even though I was sure I’d only dozed. And then someone had killed them all, and still I hadn’t heard. It made listening seem very futile now. In front of me, the salt line had taken on a weird anti-magnetism. Even if I had decided to, logically and carefully, I couldn’t have crossed. For a long time I stood looking into the trees, straining to see anything – a spark or a dying pollen trail, something moving – but it was all dead and silent.

I heard leather creaking. When I turned my head, slowly because I didn’t know if I wanted to see what was there, the two nearest markayuq had twisted towards me. One was St Thomas and like always he managed to look less accusatory than curious.

‘I’m not crossing,’ I said aloud.

‘Who are you talking to?’

I swung around. Raphael had paused on the border to rearrange his bag of markayuq-cleaning things on his shoulder beside the old strap of the rifle. Once he had moved it, it left a red stripe where it had pulled his shirt to one side. He was so pale from the cold he might have been Spanish, but he was very alive.

‘Where have you been?’ I said. It came out flat.

‘In the graveyard cleaning the – you watched me go in, why are you asking me?’

‘Seventeen hours ago.’

‘Seventeen . . . hours.’ His eyes went past me to the town, where the morning light was only just coming past the mountains. Some of the houses had glass roof tiles and they sparkled.

‘Where have you been?’

‘I haven’t been anywhere, I was just . . .’

‘For God’s sake,’ I said, nearly laughing. ‘Clem is dead on the church altar. You’re telling me you just wandered off for a night-time walk? Or did you disappear so that we’d cross the border looking for you and everyone would swear to Mr Martel it wasn’t you who killed us, and you could get rid of the idiot foreigners bothering your markayuq?’

Of all the imbecile things to do, confronting someone who might have murdered half the expedition should have been high on the list. But I was ashamed enough and angry enough not to care if he was dangerous. I was dangerous too. Clem had made me remember that. I knew I could take the rifle off Raphael and shoot him with it if I had to. I was almost a head taller. People talk about seeing red, but I didn’t. I only saw in greater focus.

‘He’s what?’ His voice cracked and he put his hand to the mossy tree trunk beside us.

‘Was it you?’

‘No! Stop – stop.’ He was having trouble talking; he was breathing too fast and too shallow. Where he was holding the moss, his fingernails had lost all their colour. There were pine needles caught in the folds of his shirt, and pollen; whenever he moved, it glowed away from him in wisps, more where the wind was catching him down his left side. He might have been evanescing into the frozen morning. I frowned. It was hard to think that he’d look like this if he had been set up in a tent somewhere. A spider peeped around his collar. I scooped it off him and showed him, although not for long before it bounced out of my hand and on to the tree. He jerked away and then opened his hand properly. Strands of web stretched between his shirt cuff and the first joint of his fingers. He scrubbed it off, fast, then stayed very still. His breath was almost gone.

‘Come inside,’ I said at last.

‘I can’t move.’ He was nearly too quiet to hear. ‘I’ll be along in a minute.’

Further towards the border, where the pollen was thicker, it made those cold cinder patterns. It was difficult to believe there could be so much of it in the snow, but then, the vines in the trees were barely dead – the frost had killed them only this week. It was supposed to be high summer. My leg panged from having been still and cold for too long, but I couldn’t bring myself to sit down in the roots, which were all grey with rime. He was holding his fingertips two inches off my chest, to stop me coming any nearer. They shook.

‘Tell me what happened,’ I said. ‘And please be convincing.’

‘Just – same as always but longer.’ He was struggling in English again and I saw him reach for the word, but he couldn’t catch it. ‘It is sometimes.’