Page 74 of The Bedlam Stacks

‘Hello,’ Martel said when he saw me. ‘You disappeared; we came out to find you.’ He made an effort to sound offhand, but it came out brittle. ‘I was worried something Indian might have gone through Raphael’s head.’

‘What happened to you?’ I said.

‘Attacked,’ he said. ‘There were twelve of us. Rather accomplished, really. I never once saw them, did any of you?’

There was a quiet chorus of no’s and maybe’s.

He sat down stiffly on the rocks. ‘This wretched pollen. You think you can see, but you can’t. You can only see what moves. They were waiting, not moving. Behind trees, among the roots. I saw trails, plenty of trails, but they know how to hide in it.’

‘How many?’ Raphael said.

I expected him to say dozens, but he looked pensive. ‘I think only three. It took them some time. We lost the first man a few hours ago. It wasn’t until the fifth that we saw anything at all.’

‘Why didn’t you turn back?’

‘Well, we had to find you,’ he said. ‘You’re heading to the quinine woods after all, I suppose?’

‘Yes, and you aren’t going to touch him.’

‘Why would I do that?’

‘You’re a quinine supplier,’ I said. ‘Come on, Martel, you’re up to your neck in it. You must be the richest man in Caravaya. You keep up the monopoly here, no one touches the calisaya woods, and the suppliers in the north pay you to do it. Right?’

He laughed, only a little, and I realised that he didn’t altogether like earning his living that way. ‘Well, no one touches the calisaya woods while the Bolivian border is closed. One would usually go round that way. But Bedlam is a good honey trap. It looks so much more straightforward than Bolivia. We find it’s terribly good for catching unwanted expeditionaries.’ He touched Raphael’s shoulder. I thought Raphael would throw him off, but he only glanced at him and it was there in the lines and the small scars around his eyes, that he was glad Martel was all right. When I tried to sound out what would happen if Martel refused his terms and shot me, to see whether Raphael really would walk the wrong way and get them all killed, I found I had no idea. I almost didn’t hear what Martel said next. ‘Raphael keeps up the stories, and eventually everyone decides to try their luck in the forest, and generally they don’t come out again, and since everyone thinks there are mad Indians here nobody questions it.’

‘But there are Indians here. Why did you risk it?’

‘You can get through if you go fast. I’ve seen that before. You lose some men, but if you keep going it’s perfectly possible.’ He nodded slowly, which sheened pollen light in his hair. ‘Scientific expeditions do like to hang about looking at the distracting statues. When Mr Backhouse came a battalion went with him and half of them came back. Those are good enough odds for me when the alternative is so dire.’ He watched me for a moment. ‘I can’t let you take those cuttings.’

‘If I don’t, the army will come.’ I aimed it more at Raphael than Martel.

‘Fighting on territory like this, a hundred miles from any decent supply line? Difficult prospect,’ Martel said gently. ‘I was an army man myself. A campaign like that won’t last a month.’

‘You weren’t in the army that’s coming,’ I said. ‘They don’t care about difficult terrain. They’ll force the interior provinces to open. You’ll be bringing them the quinine yourself by the end of it. The Navy will come; they’ll put everything along the coast under heavy artillery fire. Lima is on the coast. Cities can stand for a while under fire from ironclads but the Navy can keep it up for days. They shelled Canton for nearly a week not long ago. And then one day you’ll get a very official order from your government to escort an army battalion up here and see them to the calisaya woods.’

‘That won’t be my fault,’ he said seriously. ‘Letting a crippled Englishman through my woods certainly is. It would be my head, if the monopoly were to break on my stretch.’ He was still holding Raphael’s shoulder. He looked shaken and I realised that knowing he had the reins of someone so strong was giving him a kind of strength too. ‘My head last,’ he corrected himself. ‘After all the other parts of me. But let’s not talk about it now. We’re all tired and I should think there’s some arrangement we can come to later. We’ve got plenty of food to go around. Is it possible to cook in this water?’ he said to Raphael.

‘Over there where it’s hot.’ He was quiet for a second. ‘Don’t touch the statue.’

‘Oh, why would anyone touch your wretched heathen statue?’ Martel said, but not rudely exactly. He sounded glad to have a familiar argument. I could imagine they had disagreed about the markayuq quite often. ‘My God.’

So a bizarre sort of peace settled over the island. Some of Martel’s men started to bring out food and Raphael took them into the water to show them how to cook it. The others began to hang some of their wet clothes up in the little tree. One kept watch, a rifle across his lap, his eyes on the pinstriped darkness back the way they had come. Out there, new pollen was just starting to smoke from the last of the candle ivy. They were visible only as after-image shimmers, but they were there. I watched them for a while, still hanging in the water. My leg felt better and I could have climbed up, but it seemed like tempting fate to sit too close to Martel.

The others were still eating when Raphael nudged me and gave me the waxed string from round his wrist. It was kinked from old knots but there were none in it now.

‘See if we can’t convince them you’re one of us,’ he explained as he wound it round my wrist over the other string, the prayer from before. He did it in a particular pattern, each strand criss-crossed over the last, then tucked the end under them all. I tried to make out the shadows in the trees, wondering if he had seen someone. There was no sign of anyone, but I was much less confident about seeing anything in the surviving pollen after hearing what Martel had said. ‘That’s for if you find a markayuq without his own cord. When you clean them, you wax the cord too. They’re outside all the time. The cords rot if they get too damp.’

I nodded.

‘Look.’ He gave me the glass-handled brush I’d seen him use on the markayuq every day in Bedlam. ‘You make a pattern in the pollen with it. Starts like this, see? Eights over eights.’

When I tried, I could do it, but it was difficult, like patting your head and rubbing your stomach at the same time, and satisfyingly hypnotic once I got the hang of it. He watched the pollen and nodded.

‘Right. Go and try on her.’

‘Going native, Mr Tremayne?’ Martel laughed from where he and Quispe were sitting.

‘Eat your food,’ Raphael murmured. He took the wax jar from his bag too and gave it to me to carry across to the markayuq. He came with me.