Page 88 of The Bedlam Stacks

Every now and then was a clear patch in the pollen. Nothing seemed to have caused it exactly; it was like the abysses in deep space, the patches of darkness where the stars happened not to have scattered, and whenever we reached those, Raphael hesitated. He didn’t ask for help, but I kept talking and steered us to the middle of the road.

I had to stop too when we came to a place where something had smashed down through the trees. It had left a hole in the canopy, a big one, and through it came a glimmer of the stars. Partly on the road was a gigantic chunk of masonry, old, part of an archway.

‘What . . . in God’s name is that? How did it get there? Catapult or . . .? Do people build in the trees?’

‘Don’t know. I haven’t been here since I was little. Which was . . . more than a hundred years ago.’ He looked brittle as he said it, like he might have slowed and never moved again if he stared for too long at the idea.

‘Give me a hand,’ I said, to bring him back to now. I climbed up on to the stone to see down under it. ‘Well – it fell a good way, it’s smashed the glass.’ There was a great shatterweb in the road’s glass bricks. Some of them had crumbled away, long enough ago for the rain to have worn down the sharper edges.

‘Careful,’ he said.

‘Of what?’ I asked, and then bumped my head on something as I straightened up. It didn’t hit me hard and I felt it veer away. ‘Ow. What was that?’

He climbed up with me and stretched across, past me, to catch it. It was a log, floating in the air, and when he let it go for me to see, it spun gently. Some moss tipped off the edge of it. I looked up. There were more of them, many more, half-branches, some of them still, some of them turning very slowly. The hole ripped through the canopy didn’t have ragged edges. Some of the displaced twigs and pine needles had already risen that high and bumped into the broken branches, and started to clog the gaps. There was no breeze to chase the pollen back into the space, which was much darker than everything else, a column of dark that came down in straight lines nearly like sunlight would have. I stretched up to tap the log. I had to pull it to make it dip, about half the strength in my arm. It would have been strong enough for a child to sit on.

‘Come on. Better not stay.’

I looked back. ‘I haven’t seen her.’

‘It isn’t her I’m worried about. I feel a bit . . .’ He shook his head. ‘The gates are just up here. You can leave me there. Someone should be about that way.’

‘All right. We’ll find someone and then I’ll go.’ I watched him slide down ahead of me and hesitated, because it was steep on the other side. He lifted me down. There was no strain at all in his hands now. I might have been a doll.

‘Thank you.’

He let me go.

‘Will you go back to Bedlam, once you’re . . . finished?’ I said.

‘No. They’ve got their markayuq, and Aquila. I’m allowed to return, but I think I might go mad and end up in bits on the riverbank. I’ll probably stay at the monastery.’

‘Will I be able to come back to see you?’

‘There are dispensations,’ he said slowly. ‘But I don’t think you’ll want to in twenty or thirty years, or whatever it is.’

‘How do you know it will be that long? You’ve just come out of seventy years and you’ve only been awake for a few. Why do you think it will be . . .’

‘It takes a hundred years to change. More or less.’ He paused. ‘If I’d been in a safe place and not out in the middle of the woods, last time – with Harry – I would never have woken so quickly. I shouldn’t be awake now. These last few years . . . it’s like waking up in the middle of the night.’

‘So the next one . . .’

‘I don’t know. It could be half an hour like just now or it could be much longer. It’s like falling asleep. It happens in snatches but you keep waking and then you don’t.’

‘And then after?’ I said, not able to say what I meant. If I woke up in the middle of the night, even if I walked around the house and talked to the dog and opened windows, I never remembered it the next day, and always felt strange about the open windows when I saw them.

‘And then afterwards if I’m lucky I’ll be like Thomas. You know. Up and about if I want. Thinking, talking. Slowly.’ He rubbed his hand over the knot cord on his other wrist.

I didn’t try to say it wasn’t what I’d meant. Asking if he would forget me, because I’d arrived in this tiny wakeful space, could only sound like bleating. He wouldn’t give a damn if he forgot me; I suspected he might even be glad to. All I’d done was remind him of a dead man. ‘Then what?’ I said.

‘Then they’re awake usually but then they sleep for a few months at a time. Then awake again. Repeat for six hundred years and then you sleep more and more, and then you never wake but you don’t exactly die either. They sink into the bedrock in the end. Dead markayuq don’t look like people. You wouldn’t know, usually.’

‘Which is why people used to build around the bedrock.’

He nodded. ‘You should have seen the fuss when they built the cathedral in Cuzco. Smack through the ground, huge trenches through the rock. I went once, when it was nearly finished. Gave me the creeps.’

I laughed. ‘No one explained to the Spanish?’

‘Of course they explained, but the engineers told them not to be idolatrous and to sod off. Only reasonable response, really. I can’t think anyone approached them in a very measured or un-Indian way.’