Page 87 of The Bedlam Stacks

1860

When he stopped talking, I gave him the little flask I’d brought from Bedlam. He frowned until he caught the fumes from it – I’d stolen some of his rum – and then laughed and shared.

‘Thanks.’

I swallowed some too and sat still to let it burn its way down, just as hot and good as the fire. I didn’t know what to say; I felt like more of a stranger than ever and I couldn’t say that. It had been Harry’s ghost keeping me safe. It was nothing to do with me.

‘Better go soon.’

‘Yes,’ he agreed, but then his focus turned inward and he frowned. ‘I’m tired,’ he said, puzzled.

I was too, so much that I was only just upright. It was past eleven now, and hard to think that this morning, we had been on the island with Martel. But I could see what he meant. He was always walking and always working. He wouldn’t have been unusually tired, if it were just the distance and the worry alone.

‘I bet you are.’

‘What? We’ve been sitting here for ages.’

‘Well – not only are you changing, you’re changing into something a lot heavier than you used to be. You’re lifting more weight every time you move,’ I said, and finished quietly, because I heard halfway through that it was what Harry would have said. It could have been a portrait of me, on the stairs at home.

‘I hadn’t thought of that.’

I looked out the window again. The light was just as dim as before. Anka was where we’d left her – I could see her pollen shadow. ‘There’s no reason to rush on if she’s not coming in.’

He didn’t say anything. It was like seeing clockwork wind down. He stopped gradually, and then it was that strange, absolute stillness. I watched him for a long time, hoping to God that it wasn’t going to be years. I had a feeling it wasn’t. Both the long spells I knew of had been when he was by himself, well away from people, and I would have bet money that the rest had been too, because otherwise someone would have accidentally buried him. The shorter spells, the ones I’d seen, came when other people would have daydreamt or dozed; he had been tired every time, and sitting still.

I went through our bags for some food. We had grapes and apples, and some phoenix eggs wrapped in a handkerchief. I cooked two over the fire, needlingly aware of the markayuq in the window, but he hadn’t moved at all. It didn’t come to me exactly, or not in the ordinary way of a cork popping to the surface of a pond. I must have known it since Raphael told me what they were, perhaps before, so it was sluggish, more like a cork in treacle. For years I had sat in a greenhouse opposite a breathing stone person who watched my father’s grave. And who came inside when it rained.

I fell asleep thinking about it, propped in a nest of blankets by the hearth. I didn’t know how long it lasted, though, before I came awake all at once. I listened, not sure what I could have heard. Raphael was still frozen. The fire was still going, just.

I jumped when I saw Anka outside. She was right by the window; right by the door. Not wanting to look away from her, I shook Raphael’s shoulder but it didn’t move him. The door opened gently. What had woken me was the catch. She was holding a tangle of candle ivy, full of glowing seed cases, each one as bright as a lamp. It was enough time to promise myself that she wasn’t interested in Raphael, snatch up his rifle and run for the loom room. Behind me, she lobbed the vines so close that the light slung my silhouette against the wall as pollen burst into the air. The other markayuq was exactly where we had left him, unmoving. I pushed the door to, not all the way so that it wouldn’t clank. I couldn’t see her through the gap, but I heard the hiss of her robes as she crossed the floor.

The window opened when I pushed it. I climbed out and dropped down. It was a floor and a half, because the loom room was up a little set of stairs, and the jolt jarred my leg. I pressed both hands over my mouth to keep quiet and crawled behind the woodpile.

The sparse pollen flared whenever I moved too suddenly. I tipped my hand to and fro, more and more slowly, until I found a speed that was nearly invisible. Getting up was difficult but walking wasn’t. What was hard was to stay so slow, much slower than she walked. My throat hurt with knowing I would be, to an ordinary person, in perfect, full view of the house, but no steps sounded behind me. Once I’d gone as far as I could bear, I knelt down to the level of the woods where the animals had eaten the shrubs back and shot through the clearest path I could find. The pollen trail of the bullet flashed brilliant and perfect and, because there was no wind so deep inside the forest, it hung there, almost without blurring. I walked fast to the next tree so there would be a person trail too, then stopped and forced myself to stand still. Then I eased back towards the house as she came out. Even going slowly was leaving a sparkle. I stopped again as she came nearer. She passed so close she almost touched me. A quarter of an inch more to the left and she would have knocked into my shoulder.

I stayed frozen there for a long time after she had gone. She was following the bullet trail. After I’d counted to fifty I started to move again. I kept leaving cinder snatches in the light, though never a whole ghost. She had left the door open and I felt absurdly resentful that she’d let out the heat. The cold had settled in by the time I got back inside, where the embers of her light bomb still breathed pollen on the floor. Raphael caught my wrist and pulled me up the steep step.

‘Christ, I thought she might have—’

‘She didn’t touch me.’ He pulled a blanket round my shoulders. ‘She was looking for you. I saw the last half of that. You didn’t try and snatch a coat before you went?’

‘How much can they see?’

‘They see you if you move.’ He looked out into the woods. My rifle shot was still there, and so, more faintly, was her trail. There was nothing coming back towards us, although I divided the trees into imaginary quadrants and studied each one carefully in case she was doing what I had.

‘If she’s not coming now, I should change,’ he said at last. ‘If I stop anywhere in these clothes they won’t last long.’

By the light of our pollen lamps, after I’d closed the shutters so that the glow wouldn’t show, we changed his ordinary clothes for the heavy leathers he had been making. Once I’d fastened him into them, which was difficult because they were as thick as armour, he was only a few shades away from the colour the others were. I stepped back as soon as it was done. A fortnight was a short time for him to have conditioned me to wariness around the markayuq but he had managed it. It felt wrong to stand too close to him without a salt vial or a brush in my hands. It only lasted while he stood still. When he crouched down to find some wax in the pocket of his old waistcoat and run it down his knot cord he was only Raphael again.

‘Is there a reason the others are tall and you’re ordinary-sized?’ I asked, because I couldn’t stand the quiet any more.

‘Whitewood,’ he said. He traced a line down his ribs as if he were showing me the boning inside a corset. ‘Put it on a healthy person and they grow as tall as the markayuq. We stopped doing that when the Jesuits arrived. Bad idea for native priests to be clearly identifiable. Right, let’s go. Are you warm enough? You’re not useful if you keel over.’

‘Yes . . . yes, shut up, you pointless fossil.’

He pushed me gently into the wall. I tried to push him back and couldn’t.

The trees grew closer and closer together as we walked. We kept to the glass road now, because there was no use, in the thick pollen, weaving through the trees; if Anka wanted to follow us, she would see, whichever way we tried. But if she was, I didn’t see her, only the furls and switches of light where birds and bats floated between the branches. The path coiled upward, taking us slowly higher into new mountains I couldn’t see, but the cold sharpened and the glass road clouded with frost. All the temperate plants that had grown between the trees faded away. The trees were titans and their roots had tangled through each other, interlocking sometimes in impassable brambles of foot-wide bark that encroached onto the edge of the road, and sometimes in patterns that arched right over it, which must have been guided and pruned once by an ancient forester. They made living tunnels where the air was warmer and the candle ivy still flowered, so thickly that the glow in the air looked like sourceless sunlight and we lost every last shadow. Sometimes, a corner of stonework or a hopelessly eroded carving peeped through everything, but it was impossible to say how old it was.