Page 82 of The Bedlam Stacks

‘Long ones.’ He sectioned off a whole sheaf of strings to show me and, looking closely, I could just see that the knots were all done in the same way, and different to the ones on either side; it was different handwriting. ‘They’re old, these ones. They sound old-fashioned; they’re talking about the Inca courts.’

‘The Inca knew about them?’

His shoulders went back. He didn’t quite tip over into laughing but he balanced on the edge. ‘Knew about them – half of life was arranged around them. The king’s bodyguards were always stone people. Puruawqa, does that ring a bell?’

Carillons of bells. ‘Knights. Praetorians.’

‘Mm.’ He didn’t seem surprised that I knew, though I was. I was starting to see I hadn’t brushed off even half of what I’d forgotten. I must have been fluent in Quechua as a child, given the amount I still understood. Inti had pointed out that it was Dad’s first language. ‘Anyway, someone here used to do that, he says he misses Atahualpa. He says he had wanted to go with him to his tomb to keep watch – they do that, a lot of the old ones are in catacombs now – but there was no tomb to go to.’

‘Who was Atahualpa?’

‘The last king. Pizarro killed him. Fifteen hundred and something.’ He was still reading. ‘This is Thomas. He told me he’d known the King, I thought he was joking. They go off sometimes. I didn’t know they came here.’ He swallowed. ‘I’ve never seen anything like this before. I thought they didn’t like talking. I would have set this up in the church if one of them had said.’

‘Maybe the idea is to come away for a bit. And maybe others come here from the monastery. It must be a good halfway point.’

‘No, you’re right, probably,’ he said, but he didn’t look like he believed it. He looked tired, and left behind, and I was suddenly angry with the Bedlam markayuq. It must have occurred to them that he couldn’t make friends with ordinary people; the best he could hope for there was to outlive them later rather than sooner. It seemed like a deliberate outcasting not to tell him about this place. But then, he wasn’t like them; they were from before the Conquest. He would be one of the first in the new generation of hispanicised markayuq. However local he was by blood, he was a cultural foreigner and, even if they were polite, it was hard to imagine that they thought he belonged with them.

‘This way of writing. Was it invented for them?’ I came up beside him to touch the finer cords. The knots still felt clear. I did want to know, but I wanted to distract us both too, and to have a reason to stand with him instead of five useless feet away. ‘They can’t see marks on paper, they don’t speak, they need something they can feel . . .’

He nodded. ‘Invented by them. It’s not too suited to ordinary people, it’s bloody slow, but it’s courtly so people wanted to copy it. Let’s go back to the fire,’ he finished suddenly. ‘Before you freeze. Give me your hand. I can’t see to get out of all this.’

I fetched him out. ‘Another five minutes, before we go?’ I said.

‘No. We’re staying until you’re a normal colour.’

‘I am a normal colour. Anyway, you don’t know what a normal colour is for me—’

‘I knew your grandfather. You look just like him and he was never that shade of blue.’ He paused. ‘You know when Inti said she’d been named after him?’

‘Yes. I was confused. Isn’t Inti a sun god?’

‘Originally. It means sunny, now. People in town used to call him that. Because of his hair.’ He inclined his head at mine.

‘I’ve seen a portrait. What was he like?’

I saw too late that I shouldn’t have asked. For me it was generations ago, and I had the same indifference to Harry Tremayne as I had to Queen Elizabeth, but it was still fresh for him and he looked away from me like he’d used to look away from Martel, as though by not seeing he could unhear.

‘No, I mean there’s no need . . .’ I started, feeling stupid.

He interrupted. ‘He talks fast. Talked. He quoted things a lot; I had to read all of Shakespeare.’

I smiled. ‘How did he come to Bedlam in the first place? Dad said he was stealing quinine and then he had to lay low, but Bedlam is quite low. Even for out here.’

‘He’d been shot. Bullets then were . . .’ He held his fingertips apart almost to the width of a musket ball. I thought he wouldn’t say anything else, but after a while, unexpectedly, he did.

TWENTY-EIGHT

New Bethlehem

1782

Raphael was skinning a bear on the cliffside for the doctor’s new hearthrug when the children came to find him and say there was a man dead on the beach.

He thought at first that they meant someone had fallen. It was rare, because everyone on the stacks had grown up on the gantries and the frosty patches were well known and banistered, but there were accidents sometimes in the winters, and that winter was howling. He only just remembered to scrub his hands down with snow on the way and ran trying to warm them up again. From the first bridge he looked down. The river was frozen and the snow was whirling in billows that were sometimes almost opaque and sometimes almost clear. The children were right, but he hadn’t been. It wasn’t anyone from the village. It was a foreigner in a Spanish coat, with bright blond hair that showed even from so far down. The man looked like he had come from nowhere. Later, some people said he did, although Raphael was more inclined to say he had run from Phara, which was equally impressive, because it was fourteen miles away.

He set the counterweight light so that he could get down fast and held the rope hard as it banged to a halt eight inches above the beach. For a second he couldn’t find the man and felt a flutter under his ribs, because there were too many stories about ghosts in the snow that he didn’t quite disbelieve. But then he saw he was almost standing on top of him. The man was under the ice. The water was shallow but the glass stratum below him was deep and littered with bits of ancient masonry so that he looked like he was falling, at an infinitesimally slow pace, very far.

The man opened his eyes and touched the underside of the ice, too weak for anything else. Raphael swore and slammed the butt of his rifle into it. It wasn’t thick and when he hauled the man out, he choked, but not enough to have breathed the water yet. Although some of it had been washed away, he was still covered in blood. The sun came out again and Raphael understood at last. The man had fallen in the hot glass shadow, in the shallow water, and when the sun had gone in, it had frozen almost on the instant and trapped him there. He shook him to wake him up more and helped him along as much as he could back to the lift. It was difficult. The man was tall.