Page 78 of The Bedlam Stacks

‘No one. He didn’t own it, it’s someone else’s. He said he paid rent to begin with but then he stopped and nothing happened, so he just kept it. I’d have to check with the land registry. I don’t even know where that is. But whoever he was, he didn’t come after the rent, so maybe he’s dead.’

‘Either way it will take a little while for him to hear. Especially if Martel stopped paying years ago.’

‘Someone else will move in anyway. It doesn’t have to be legal.’

‘Take them for a nice walk in the woods.’

He laughed. ‘Let’s see your hands.’

I showed him, starting to feel raw. He had to hold them still. He found his flask and cleaned up the places where the string had cut me. I hadn’t felt any of it. Across from us, an eagle swept down from the canopy and landed on Martel’s body. It was a giant white thing with evil eyes but a downy hesitancy, just a baby still, and it blinked up at us to ask if this was ours, its wings flickering and ready to fly again. We didn’t wave it away.

‘All right?’ he said quietly.

‘I – if I were less all right, I think it would be better,’ I said, not sure if I was speaking too loudly. The blood was still humming through my skull, electric. I’d never felt so awake.

He glanced up, without moving his head. ‘Everyone feels like that. Everyone with any sense.’

‘No, I mean . . .’

‘I know what you mean. It was a bit good, is what you mean. That isn’t evil. All it means is that you won’t be one of those people who spiral off into guilty nightmares and never recover. Just . . . recognise the feeling and see the shape of it, and you won’t aim it at the wrong person.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Yes.’ He watched the eagle and I couldn’t tell what he was thinking.

‘We haven’t got anything to dig with,’ I said.

‘Have you heard of sky burials?’

‘No. Sounds nice.’

‘It’s not. It’s that.’ He nodded to the eagle, which had settled now. ‘But that’s what we can say if anyone asks. Right. Let’s go and fetch your plants. There’s a crossing up there.’

So we walked along a little way until we found some rapids where there were rocks across the river in a kind of natural dam, although perhaps beavers had filled in the spaces. There, where the whitewood trees petered out, was another salt border. Once we were across, the relief at being on the right side of it again crashed through me like a cribbar and I floated for a while on the outrush. Raphael slowed down as we came to the rocks and the river.

‘I could go back to Bedlam with you now, once we have the cuttings,’ I said. ‘Without Martel.’

‘No. The markayuq knows you. We were lucky this time, but she’d catch you on the way back. We’d have to stop for the night again and she wouldn’t. She’s a foot taller than me. I can’t fight her.’ He looked ashamed and I wished I could say, without sounding like I was talking down to him, that I understood about Martel, that I didn’t think he was a coward for not having fought, or for not risking it against a markayuq twice his size. But I couldn’t think of a way and it just left a painful quiet before he shook his head at himself and pointed to the mountains ahead of us. They were close, very close. We must have come parallel to them. ‘This is Bolivia. Those are the Andes. You can loop back to Lake Titicaca that way.’

‘Is it possible?’ I said, looking down at the rainforest, and it really was the rainforest beyond the river. Dense, unbroken, roadless jungle. ‘When we planned the expedition we wrote off Bolivia quite quickly, it . . . we were told there was about to be a war. The borders are closed, they’re not letting foreigners through. The roads are full of soldiers.’

‘They’re not letting foreigners through. But “they” is the Bolivian government. People who live round here have nothing to do with all that.’ He managed to encompass the Bolivian government, modern borders, anything established by the Spanish, all in one bubble that ordinary people might look on with occasional interest but nothing more pressing. No government would be able to dictate anything much to people here. It was a simple matter of not being able to reach. They could stop foreigners using the roads, but there would be no way in heaven or earth they could put a man on every animal trail through the woods. ‘There’s a village of hunters about a mile south.’ He pointed. ‘I’ll go with you that far and they’ll take you over the mountains.’

‘Will you be all right?’ I asked.

‘When?’

‘Going back. You can’t see.’ In the shade of the trees where the daylight made the pollen invisible, he had been walking close to me to be sure of the footing, and hesitated if I’d stopped talking for too long.

‘I’m fine.’

‘How many fingers?’

He slapped my hand. ‘Fuck off.’

‘That doesn’t work on bears.’

‘Damn. Stalked as I often am by bears hellbent on ophthalmographical studies.’