Page 65 of The Bedlam Stacks

At first I didn’t understand, but then I fell very still and realised I was either being told the honest truth, or a lie he had been preparing since he had first frozen by the statue on the river in Sandia.

‘Catalepsy,’ I said for him. ‘For that long?’

‘There are long spells. Longer than this, but I didn’t expect . . . I wasn’t due one. Or I would have told you,’ he said, much more hotly than before. ‘I would have told you to watch for it.’

I tried to decide. He didn’t meet my eye again. At Martel’s house he had been like something from a goldsmith’s, but he was as pale as me now and somehow even his hair was faded. It was brown, not black. All that seemed certain was that he had been outside for all that time. I couldn’t tell if it was a feat of endurance someone strong enough and zealous enough might just manage on willpower.

‘If I’d killed him, I wouldn’t be talking to you now,’ he said softly. He had to go into Spanish. If he was pretending panic, I’d never seen anyone pretend so well or so accurately. ‘I’d have shot you. No?’

‘There are a thousand things here I don’t know. I feel like we’ve been edging around a set of laws nobody can explain since we arrived.’ I motioned at the border. ‘I’m not nearly in possession of all the facts, I do know that. I don’t know anything beyond the border. I don’t know who you talk to in there, I don’t know how the hell they make statues look like they walk or why, I don’t understand what your religion is, or what it might require of you. None of it makes any sense. I am in no position to make grand sweeping deductions about what you might or might not have done.’

‘I swear to you, I didn’t do it. I thought I was only gone for ten minutes until just now.’

There was nothing to say one way or another. Only whether or not I wanted to believe him. I did want to. The ferocious clarity that had let me stare him down before left me, draining into the pine needles, and without it I felt exhausted. Slowly, I took off my coat. He took it without arguing and shook out the last of the pollen and the needles from his own clothes before he shrugged into it. Without it, the wind cut straight through my waistcoat.

‘Thank you.’

‘Seventeen hours. You should be dead. You should have been dead sixteen hours ago, dressed like this. Were you sheltered?’

‘No. Just in the graveyard.’

He pushed his hands through his hair. There was frost in it. He frowned when he noticed what was around us. ‘Wolves. When did this happen?’

‘I don’t know. I didn’t hear anything. I think they came for Clem’s body.’

‘They will have been – they won’t let a pack of wolves into Bedlam.’ He motioned back over the salt line to say that he meant the people inside. ‘The border works both ways.’

I scanned the trees again. I couldn’t see how they could possibly stay hidden always. The pollen showed everything that moved; everything, even moths. Even trained soldiers had to shift and go for a walk sometimes.

‘Well – better go in,’ I said. I leaned against the tree to turn round on the uneven ground, which was all bumpy with roots. ‘Can you move now?’

He glanced up and nodded. At Martel’s his eyes had been black, but now they were shot through with grey penny-scratch lines. He was losing his colours. It had been happening all week. I thought of how often I’d seen red in his hair when there shouldn’t have been any, when it had been so black at first, like everyone else’s here.

‘Why did Markham go out? I’ve spent all week telling you not to.’

‘He thought that there was a camp of quinine suppliers over the border, not Chuncho, and that you’d gone to warn them we were here.’

He didn’t seem indignant or worried or even surprised. ‘Everyone who comes here thinks that before long.’ He sighed. ‘We’ll have a funeral tomorrow, if you’re happy for him to stay here.’

‘Is it not possible to take a body back over the mountains?’

‘It wouldn’t be dignified.’

‘Tomorrow, then,’ I said. I heard my own voice like it came from a long way off. I hadn’t thought I would have to leave him behind.

‘Wish it could have been you instead,’ Raphael said absently, cat’s-cradling his rosary.

‘What?’

He spun the cross once. ‘You’re quite light.’

I smiled. He pulled the church door open and turned back to help me up the step. I took his hand and let him pull me inside, the backs of my shirtsleeves cold and damp with the snow blowing in from along the valley and my teeth aching from having been set hard for too long. I still couldn’t decide whether I should believe him or not. But I was too tired and too cold to argue, and for that moment at least I loved him for having made the idea of the funeral that bit less heavy, like he had put his shoulder under mine to share the weight.

TWENTY-TWO

While we had been talking, I’d heard chinking and voices in the background, closer than the village, but I hadn’t paid any attention. They must have arrived just as I was leaving, because when we went through into the kitchen, it was full of people, and so was the flat land just outside. Martel sat back and smiled. Hernandez and Quispe were with him, still in their coats. Beyond them, through the windows, ten or twelve men were clearing the snow to stake up tents. They had already started cooking fires with the efficient domesticity of people used to moving miles between meals.

‘There you are,’ Martel said, standing up. ‘My God. We arrived and Mr Markham was dead and you two were gone and the wretched carver was telling us mad stories.’