Page 67 of The Bedlam Stacks

He was rewinding the pollen lamps and gave me one once I came back. I put it in my pocket while I got my scarf on and the buttons done up, and it glowed a little even through the thick wool.

‘If I do anything you don’t like, shoot me.’ He gave me his rifle too. The strap was much older than the gun; it was so well-worn that the leather was soft, even at the stitched edges. I looped it on and felt strange to have the familiar weight against the back of my ribs again after so long. It made the bruises ache.

When I followed him out, he took me to the front of the church and the cliff, where the view of the town was full of lamplight that glittered in the glass places. A little stairway in the rock led to a small plateau. There wasn’t room for much, but it was full of useful things – opium poppies, a dense crop of them, dead now in the snow; cooking herbs; a stout coffee tree, planted to one side so that it would have room to walk; and, screened by that, a beehive. He hung his lamp over a hook in the side. It had a glass front. Inside the bees were sleepy but moving, just, in a way that didn’t look like it was supposed to be seen. It was more like the peristalsis inside one big thing than lots of small ones. The bees stirred more when they saw the light.

‘Can’t someone else keep a hive, if you don’t like it?’ I asked as he hinged up the lid. The bees mumbled.

‘The wax is for the markayuq, and the knot cords. It’s hieratic.’ He took his hands back too quickly. ‘You take out each rack and scrape the wax off. They won’t hurt you. Just go slowly.’

‘They’re lovely,’ I said, stroking a big one with my knuckle. It wiggled. They were black and a fine deep red. Peruvian bees were stingless, I knew from somewhere, although they did bite.

He gave me a pipette. ‘Sugar water. Put it in the leftover cells.’ He stood back with his arms folded. I ran his knife down the combs and watched them crumble. The honey was sticky enough to make them fall slowly, slowly enough for me to catch it all in a bowl. The quiet welled and I didn’t break it, waiting for him to say why we were out here.

‘Martel is a quinine supplier.’

I looked back.

‘You have to come back with us to Azangaro. Tell him you’ve given up and it’s not worth all this. Don’t argue with him, don’t try to arrange another guide. The men he’s brought, they are not here to help clear the path. The path doesn’t go anywhere. They blew it up years ago. He isn’t angry with me because Markham’s dead. He’s angry because you’re still alive and still here. He never believed you about the coffee; he knew what you came for. Those men are here to find you if you run. They’ll kill you.’

‘Did you kill Clem?’ I said again.

‘No.’

I foundered. ‘But if you were just supposed to kill us both – why did Martel send us with you in the first place? He could have just let us wander off and get shot by someone like Manuel.’

‘It isn’t impossible to go through the forest,’ he said, very quietly. ‘People have come out alive before, with quinine. I was supposed to make certain that you didn’t. Either persuade you to turn back or shoot you.’

‘Then why did you keep us waiting, why did you say there was a way around? Why didn’t you just let us go over the border when—’

‘I hoped you’d give up and go home.’ He let his breath out. ‘I’ve been trying to keep you safe. I only let you send word to Martel because I hoped waiting for him would keep you out of the forest for another few days. That was a few more days to scare you into leaving. The – man who attacked you. I asked him to, I’m sorry.’ He really did look sorry.

‘I knew it. I was too bloody polite to say. Serves me right.’

‘It seemed like the quickest way to make you leave. I didn’t know you were going to stick with it like a donkey—’

‘Or like a person who does his job properly—’

‘God, you’re mad, all of you from the bloody India Office! What, have they got your children in a shed somewhere?’

‘I’m mad – what the hell were you thinking?’ I said, feeling like I might drown in the senselessness of it. ‘What if Clem had managed to get through? You were keeping us safe but – we were walking bombs for you, all that time! If he had got anything out of those woods, the quinine suppliers would have known it had to come from round here. High-yield quinine doesn’t come from anywhere else! Bedlam would have been destroyed. Wouldn’t it? Why in God’s name didn’t you shoot us the second we arrived? Or before, when Manuel attacked us? Letting us wander about, and when you have such powerful catalepsy you might not know if you’d lost an hour or five – we could have done anything! It was idiotic! What were you playing at?’

‘What’s the point of not taking innocent men into the woods and shooting them in the head?’ he said sharply. ‘How about not wanting to? I’ve had enough.’

I was already shaking my head, annoyed to be given a moral scruple instead of a reason from someone who was plainly used to doing whatever he had to, before I heard what he had actually said. ‘Hold on. You’ve had enough – you mean you did it before,’ I said. ‘The Dutch.’

He nodded once. Everything about him exuded that old anti-magnetic pressure he’d had at Martel’s, the one that said not to ask him anything else about it and to leave him the hell alone, but I had a decent resistance to it now, like the altitude.

‘Why are we different?’ I said, still softly, because a shadow had come into the window of the church above us. Quispe, fetching a glass of water.

‘If you don’t believe me, stay.’

‘No, answer the question. If I turn back now with no quinine, I’m finished, so I need to know. Because it sounds to me like you don’t want foreigners tramping through your holy woods, so you’re telling me the one thing that will force me to leave. I can’t march up to Martel and ask him if he’s a quinine supplier; he’ll shoot me if he is. I only have your word. Come on. What’s different? Your village depends on it but you can’t bring yourself to kill me despite having done it before – why? Do you need me for something? You want me to go back to the India Office and tell them nothing’s here? I can’t. Half of India is dying of a disease that can only be cured by the medicine in those woods, so—’

‘Because I knew your grandfather,’ he snapped, and then all the fight went from him as fast as it had come and he only looked hopeless. ‘And you look like him.’

I couldn’t face him and think at the same time. I turned back to the hive and edged the last of the honey wax on to the plate. The bees had come to explore my hands, but it was a nice feeling. From the corner of my eye I could just see Raphael watching fixedly in the way I would have watched someone performing surgery on his own eye. ‘Take the honey,’ I told him. ‘I can’t carry that and the cane at once.’

I held the door open for him on the way back in. He set the honey on the table, then took out a bottle of Jamaica rum from a cupboard and poured us both a glass. Once he had given me mine, he stood breathing the fumes of his and I realised he didn’t like the smell of the honey. Of course he didn’t; he spent every day of his life smelling of beeswax from cleaning the markayuq. Which accounted for his hating the bees as well.