Page 80 of The Bedlam Stacks

‘There’s a markayuq following you.’

‘No, she’s following a pollen lamp I floated off down the river.’

‘Not forever she won’t be.’

‘Well, that’s more my concern than yours, isn’t it.’

‘Merrick,’ he snapped. ‘You’ve known me for a fortnight. What are you doing? You’re not my friend. You’re not your grandfather, you couldn’t be more different from him, and whatever you think, I am not very keen on having the grandchildren of someone I used to know kicking about in the forest. I am not a Tremayne family heirloom. Go home.’

‘I am your friend, and my whole family has spun around you and this place for three generations, so I think you’re pretty thoroughly my business, whether you want to be or not. And even if that wasn’t the case, you can’t do this by yourself. Do you want to get home or not?’

He stared at me for a second. ‘If she catches you—’

‘If. Now eat something,’ I said, and threw some grapes at him, because it’s much harder to be serious whilst trying to duck flying fruit. I’d found them growing wild with the cinchona.

‘Why are you here?’ he said.

‘It’s a few extra miles. Stop making such a bloody fuss. I didn’t pay you for any of this except in clocks. I think you deserve some help now.’

‘It’s eight or nine miles.’

‘Oh, well, in that case I won’t bother.’

He smiled, unwillingly. ‘What time is it?’

‘Quarter past nine. I don’t think I can go that far tonight.’

‘No, me neither. We’ll find somewhere to stop.’ He helped me up.

‘Will you die of this?’ I said, not wanting to hear it.

He shook his head slightly. ‘No. But it gets worse and worse. There’s a place, that we all . . .’ His eyes slipped away. They were wholly grey now. ‘I should have been there years ago, but they sent no one to take over until Aquila,’ he said.

‘Can I take you there?’

‘Yes. Please.’ He was quiet for a second. ‘Keep talking to me. I can feel it coming again. It’s going to be long, soon.’

‘But you had it for a whole day just—’

‘There are short spells and long ones. The short ones are. . . five minutes, ten minutes usually. But then it’s an hour, or a day, and that’s how you know there’s a long one coming. It’s like foothills round a mountain.’

‘I know you said it’s like being frozen but – I don’t understand how. How can you live through that?’

His expression lifted into something gentler and, for that second, he looked exactly like St Thomas. They were related. The resemblance was as close as mine to Harry’s portrait at home. I’d never seen it before, but I couldn’t understand now how I’d missed it. Or how I hadn’t noticed that he wasn’t fading but changing, or how I’d managed to make myself deaf to Inti’s stories. She had told me that the markayuq had turned to stone, not been born that way, had been ordinary once. She had told me on the first day. ‘How do trees?’

I must have slowed down, although I didn’t mean to, because he came back to help me over the roots. The pollen was thick there and against my wrist his fingers were the same colour as the graveyard markayuq’s had been. I climbed up after him and didn’t know what to say, so I didn’t say anything. My ribs ached with wanting to. Atom by atom he had managed to become more important than Clem or cinchona or anything else, but he was going to live for hundreds of years and I was nothing but another one in a long line of people he would never know well, who died like leaves.

TWENTY-SEVEN

It wasn’t long before we found a road. It was glass and well maintained. Nothing had grown up through the brickwork and here and there were carved stones that looked like the kind Clem and I had seen on the ceques, the Incan highroads where they abandoned boulders in odd places.

‘Seven miles,’ Raphael said when he saw me looking at one. ‘The salt traders use this road. It goes almost up to Bedlam. I was trying to keep you away from it before. It’s watched more closely.’

‘Salt traders?’ I said. The cold felt deeper than before, although it was probably only having come out of heat on the far side of the river. The change was shocking. It had happened over about three miles, although all of those miles had been uphill. I hunched down in my coat, only just managing to follow the conversation.

‘They bring children and take salt back to the monastery. Bedlam is a salt colony. That’s why it is where it is. Salt is worth more than silver here.’

‘That sounds . . . ordinary.’