Page 79 of The Bedlam Stacks

‘I’m not going through Bolivia and you’re not walking through that forest by yourself. We already know there’s a great chunk of it with no pollen.’

‘No.’

‘I didn’t mean to imply it was your choice. And your English is hateful, I hope you know. It isn’t decent to learn another language that bloody well.’

‘I had to. Your grandfather was useless at languages.’ He had laughed to begin with, but he lost it when he mentioned Harry. ‘Come on.’

The way across the river came out almost straight into a cinchona glade. I had to sit in it for a while and look at the trees and the fallen leaves and fruit and roots to be sure they were the kind we wanted. They were, and there were thousands.

TWENTY-SIX

We had arrived at half past four in the afternoon, so I took careful cuttings and then spent a happy hour with the last of the good light splitting some kapok wood for cases and packing them with the reddish moss that grew everywhere. By the time it was dark, I had them ready so that we could go first thing in the morning. I propped the makeshift cases gently against some kapok roots on my way back to the little clearing where I’d left the bags and Raphael. I stopped when I saw that his pack was gone. He had left a lit pollen lamp propped on top of mine.

‘Where are you?’

There was no answer, except for the hooting birds. When I picked up the lamp, worried he was frozen somewhere and meaning to go and find him, there was a note too. It directed me to the hunters’ village, and said what to say in Quechua – they didn’t speak Spanish – when I reached it. He had gone back over the river without me.

The lamp hadn’t been to help me see. It was to stop me seeing littler lights. I did what watchmakers always say not to and forced the winder forward to make the spring uncoil too fast and run out, then pushed the lamp under my coat where it lay over my bag to block out the last of the light. For a moment everything was only black and I stood with my eyes shut. When I opened them again the sky was indigo, and over the river there was a soft pollen trail through the trees. It wasn’t going back to Bedlam but east, further round the bend of the river. The very tail of it, faded and hazed, was still just enough to cast light on the graveyard markayuq where she stood on the riverbank, watching me. The grazes on my arm stung when I saw her.

‘Raphael!’ I shouted. I could still see, more or less, where the pollen trail stopped. He wasn’t that far away. ‘Where are you going?’

His voice wasn’t strong enough to shout back and instead he traced letters in the pollen, slowly, to keep from sending it whirling off out of shape.

Home.

I looked further east, half-expecting to see the lights of a town, but there was nothing. He had been steering us away from the east all the time we had been in the forest. I thought of the empty room at the church, all his things packed up. He had never meant to go back to Bedlam.

‘Right, good, and how far do you think you’ll get, in the state you’re in? Wait for me, I’ll go with you.’

You can’t. He drew an arrow under it, pointing back toward the markayuq.

‘You can’t see. What happens if you come to a place with no pollen?’

Not far.

‘For God’s sake, it clearly is!’

He didn’t reply and the pollen faded until what he had written before only looked like the suggestion of writing. I stared at it for too long and stopped being able to see it properly. Aware of my heart in my eardrums I had to stand still to think and lean into the urge just to run after him. Things chittered and howled in the woods behind me, much louder than they ever had in the whitewood forest. At last, I wound up the pollen lamp again and tied it round my sleeve while I started to gather up the kapok planks I hadn’t used for the cuttings. They were rough – I’d only split them with a little axe rather than sawn them properly – but the grain was straight and I had just enough knot cord to lash them together. It was fine and made of soft alpaca wool, but it was waxed and good enough. When it was finished, the raft wasn’t halfway big enough to take the full weight of a person, but since the markayuq wouldn’t know that, it didn’t matter. I had to hunt about to find a branch about my height and, once I had, it took what felt like hours to make a rough joint and fit it on to the raft, then longer again to tie it into place.

Finally, expecting to see dawn at any second even though my watch said it had only been an hour, I tipped everything out of my bag that wasn’t food or clothes and packed the bound cuttings in instead. Despite everything it was hard to leave the obsidian razor Raphael had given me and harder still to leave the little clutch of Clem’s things I’d meant to give to Minna. But there was no space and something in my mind clicked into that gypsy way of thinking you get on long journeys, where unnecessary things stop mattering.

Very carefully, I carried everything down to the water. Once I’d tied the pollen lamp to the branch, at as close to the same height as my own breastbone as I could, I pushed the raft out into the current. I waited, afraid it was going to get stuck along the banks or in the dense reeds, but it found the central rip quickly and sailed away. Within a few yards it was nothing but the firefly point of the lamp.

On the opposite bank, the pollen stirred as the markayuq turned her head, then plumed softly when she started to walk after the light. I couldn’t see her at all, only the glow, but it was where she had been, and it was the right height. When she walked, it was shockingly quick, as quick as an ordinary person might. I stayed exactly where I was, horribly conscious that the moonlight was bright enough now to give me a shadow on the rocks. I could nearly feel the pressure of it, a little silvery weight down my left side. It glinted on the gold leaf Inti had smoothed on to some of the patterns on the whitewood band. I put my hand over it, slowly.

She disappeared among the trees as the banks curved. The way over the river, which was all boulders and pieces of driftwood caught up between them, was difficult in the dark, even with the moon. I saw something big move in the water and almost fell in when I stopped to look at it. When I reached the top of the little cliff, which was held together by tree roots, it slid out on to the bank, but I couldn’t tell what it was. Hoping that it couldn’t climb, I set off in the paler pollen trail that still hung in the unmoving air, refreshing it with my wake but not as brightly as the markayuq had, because I wasn’t going so fast. My leg hurt and it seemed best not to upset it again, though I wanted to run and let it hurt.

I lost sight of the markayuq’s trail before long. Because I’d expected to follow Raphael for a while before I caught up, I nearly walked into him when the trail stopped just behind a tree, only half a mile or so from the river. He had stopped to sit down among some roots and frozen there. I put his coat around him. He must have been waiting to see frost before he put it on, but the air had turned cold again. It wasn’t only altitude. The mountains had their own little climate that broke when it reached the river. Raphael wasn’t the only one who hadn’t quite noticed. A fabulous, iridescently turquoise beetle had come to visit him too, antlers tipped at a quizzical angle from where it sat on his knuckle. I moved it and clasped his hand. He was icy.

I found a me-sized dip in the roots and sat with my sketchbook to wait. My heart thunked and I tried to ignore it. A day and seventy years was a wide margin. I couldn’t think what to do if he didn’t wake soon. There was no one to tell, unless the markayuq came back, but even then I couldn’t think she would be very interested in an ill priest when I was here desecrating her holy ground.

‘Jesus Christ, Merrick, do you know what that looks like? I blink and you appear from nowhere, you’ll kill me one day.’ He jerked his hand close to his heart to show what he meant. ‘What the hell are you doing?’

‘It’s cold,’ I said, starting a list on my fingers. ‘And you don’t know when to put on a coat. This catalepsy happens with what seems to me like increasing frequency, and if it happens for long you need someone to tell someone else where you are. You can’t stay out here for seventy years again; I don’t care if you didn’t die the first time, you’d be pushing your luck to try it twice. You can’t see. If you come to a burned patch of pollen, which you will if there are any phoenix round here, you’re stuck.’

‘You’ve got other things to do,’ he said flatly. ‘You’ve got cuttings to take to India.’

‘They’re all right for a month.’