Page 81 of The Bedlam Stacks

‘Should it not?’

It was no good. ‘Do you mind if we stop soon?’

‘There’s a house up here, I think. Or there was. There used to be foresters, or . . .’ He seemed to recognise something and stepped off the road.

I followed him more slowly. Trees had grown, or been planted, in an especially dense avenue on either side of the road, maybe to discourage people from straying, but even beyond that the way was difficult, full of little crevasses where boiling water ran and we had to find branches or stones across, and once a long wall that marked off nothing particular, crumbled and buried under vines. But eventually I saw it before he did – a round, haphazard house like a little tower. It was partly ruined, but only on one side, and there was still a clearer space in front of it that must have been the garden. There, beside a glass gravestone, a markayuq sat among the small mountain flowers, but even when we went close he didn’t move. Raphael nodded and we went past, and found the door unlocked.

There was kapok wood stacked by the grate, old and spiderpopulous, but once I’d brushed it off, it burned beautifully and soon the fire was tall. The house stood in not quite a clearing, but a place where the trees were thinner and the pollen fainter, only just enough to see by without the firelight. The room was round except for a straight section where the hearth was. Cinders skittered over the slate as I fed in more twigs. Sitting on the windowsill, perfectly still and dormant, was another markayuq. Raphael had brushed the dust from him and waxed his clothes when we first came in, and the beeswax smell hung warm in the air.

‘Raphael?’ I said. He had disappeared while I was making the fire.

‘Up here,’ he said. His voice came from a doorway at the top of a tiny flight of steps in the far corner.

Wrapped in a blanket, because the cold had soaked me despite having been leaning over the hearth, I went to find him upstairs. He met me in the doorway and I jumped when I saw another markayuq behind him.

‘Are you sure we should be here?’

‘They’re nearly dead; they’re old. I think whoever’s buried out there was looking after them and they’ve lost interest now he’s gone.’ He nodded past me towards the garden and the grave, which was framed by a window halfway up the little stairs. ‘Ours is following us again, did you see?’

‘No?’

He pointed past my shoulder and I saw her then, stopped still beside a tree, well shy of the house. I wouldn’t have seen her at all if he hadn’t pointed her out – the markayuq were the same white as the whitewood trees – and I was about to ask how he had known when she moved her hand suddenly to wave away a bird that had tried to land on her shoulder, which flared the pollen. ‘She’s waiting for us to come out.’

‘Can you talk to her?’

‘She won’t talk back. There’s something not right with her. I’ve never been able to get a word out of her. Thomas chats, but . . . I don’t know.’ He paused, because I’d mimed knotting, not sure how a markayuq could chat, but he nodded. ‘She was at the mines. I don’t know what mercury does to markayuq, but it makes normal people angry.’

‘Why doesn’t she come in?’

‘She can’t see us in here. Their eyes look black because they have – not cataracts. But they’re meant for somewhere much brighter.’

He looked like he wished he hadn’t mentioned the last thing, so I ignored it. ‘Even with the fire?’

‘If you walked right in front of it. Not if you stood to one side. It’s easier to find us in the pollen. She knows we have to come out eventually and she’s not in a rush, is she. I don’t think she’ll try to come in. Is it that cold?’ he added, because I had pulled my blanket closed and huddled into it. Away from the fire it was bitter.

‘Very,’ I said. I had been feeling slowly more stupid since I’d found him, but it bubbled now. ‘You know you could have told me you weren’t burning and the cold wasn’t hurting you, before. I would have nagged less. You only said you couldn’t feel it.’

He could have interrupted me, but he let me finish before he even shook his head. He only did it once, an inch to one side. ‘It was nice to be worried over. Look, come and see this.’

Behind him was some kind of weaver’s workshop, full of looms, all threaded up in different shades and thicknesses of alpaca string. He wound a pollen lamp, which brought out the different reds and oranges of what I’d thought were loom strings. But they weren’t the warp and weft of half-finished weaving. They were passages and passages of knotwork. It wasn’t only cord but strips of rags and old cloth too – anything that would bear twisting, much dented where they had been knotted and unknotted and reknotted.

‘My God. What does it all say?’

‘It’s how they talk to each other,’ he said. ‘I didn’t know they did. I didn’t know they wanted to.’

The nearest rack of string was vast, a whole tapestry; a whole novel. ‘What’s that one?’

He touched the first string. He couldn’t read them by sight any more. ‘Once there was a girl from the salt colony who . . . fairytale,’ he said. He moved along. ‘What does . . . July mean. It’s one of the new months, it’s in the middle of the year – what new months – the foreigners brought them.’ He looked back at me. ‘They talk about time a lot.’ He was still reading while he spoke and he faded off and frowned. ‘What year is it? I don’t know. Quilka – that must be who’s buried outside – Quilka says it’s the year of the sun but I think they must have changed the measuring. In the salt colony they say numbers, counting upward, but I don’t . . .’ He had to stretch for the top of the new string, the markayuq all being more than a foot taller than he was. ‘I don’t know what it is they’re measuring from. Perhaps the Sapa Inca’s creation. No, too long ago. How long have you been awake? Only today. When are you from? From when . . . the mercury mines were open. This is her,’ he added over his shoulder. ‘The one who’s following us, Anka.’

‘What?’

‘She’s talking about Huancavelica. She was a doctor there. She didn’t know when it was she was last here.’

‘When was that?’

‘They never decide,’ he said. He ran both hands along the strings like a harpist would and shook his head. ‘They don’t know. It isn’t that important to them, or not the older ones. They only know each other, so the way ordinary people measure time doesn’t really matter to them. I think she leaves after this part. They go back to stories.’

‘What sort of stories?’