Page 89 of The Bedlam Stacks

‘Why do you hate Indians? You know white people are much worse, don’t you? It isn’t as though there’s some kind of international bar you’re not reaching out here. We’re terrible at everything. Lasting much past forty-five. Learning more than one language. It’s a miracle, actually; sickly prematurely ageing worryingly inbred horsey idiots have managed to convince everyone else their way is best by no other means than firmness of manner and the tactical distribution of flags. I can’t believe no one’s called our bluff yet.’

He laughed. It always took me by surprise when he did and I had to fight not to look too pleased. ‘I don’t like bad translation. I don’t like idiots who go around telling white men that the mountain’s alive and it thinks things, and that villages are watched over by special people who turned to stone.’

‘But that’s what it is.’

‘No it isn’t,’ he said, and smacked me in the chest with his knuckles. It was the very lightest tap but I could feel the weight behind it now. Any harder and I would have gone over backwards. ‘That’s terrible. That’s not how you’d say it in Spain or England, is it? You’d say, there is a particular hereditary illness in the Andean highlands that causes petrification and eventually renders the sufferers inert in a kind of permanent catalepsy and apparently part of the surrounding rock, which has led to a cultural tendency to be very careful of stone, and a religion that reveres it. That’s exactly the same thing, in the language that you actually speak rather than in Quechua but using Spanish words. Bloody Quespañol. Speak one or the other, or don’t complain when someone smacks you over the head with a Bible and calls you a moron.’

I was still laughing as we rounded the bend and beyond it was an aqueduct, almost as tall as the trees. Four markayuq stood on plinths on either side of the columns that rose over the road and they turned their heads to watch us. They were much more like guards than the Bedlam shrines. Their clothes were different; it was the same leather, but it had been made in plates and greaves, and they all carried spears. Gold, because gold would never rust. They seemed wholly awake, as awake as we were. My heart bobbed up into the back of my throat. If they were keeping track of who went in and out, and when, then they knew only one markayuq boy had been delivered in the last hundred years and they knew he was only twelve. I might have looked nearly like a turning priest but the timing didn’t add up.

But none of them made any sign to stop us. The one nearest to us only nodded a little. I thought he looked sad.

‘They would have had whole retinues to bring them here from Cuzco when they changed,’ Raphael explained quietly as we passed them. ‘I don’t think they like seeing people having to make the run from Bedlam alone. I remember . . . there was some trouble with them on the way out, when I was little. They stopped us, because there was no provision for getting back.’

‘Shame Anka doesn’t feel that way.’

‘Anka turned in Bedlam. Or as far as I can tell she did. No one helped her; I can see why she wouldn’t have much sympathy for someone else whose foreign friend’s grandson arrived at exactly the right moment. It isn’t fair.’

‘Why didn’t anyone from here go and fetch her? Why didn’t they come for you?’

‘There’s no way of telling when we’ll turn, or not without a doctor following you around. You can gauge it more or less, but I wasn’t due, when I lost the time with Harry. And once we are asleep, it’s illegal to move us. Even if someone had found her they wouldn’t have been able to do anything about it.’

‘That’s a stupid law.’

‘Where a markayuq stands is important. Everyone assumes you stood there on purpose. It would be like moving the altar of a church, or . . . I don’t know. It is stupid, you’re right.’

From vents up near where the water must have been, valves sprayed a constant, fine mist down into the trees. It had made a slick patch of black ice in the road. To keep a decent footing we went round, climbing over roots until the road was clear again. It led straight underneath one of the aqueduct’s arches, where everything took on a tiny echo. On the other side the trees looked older. The water must have been to stop any forest fires from jumping into the oldest stock. Mist coiled around everything. The air was thin and I could sense that we were very high up now, but the forest was still the forest, too dense to see through even without the mist.

‘Merrick . . .’

The life went from him, even though it left him standing still and upright. I sat down on some roots and waited, but half an hour ticked by on my watch, and then an hour. After that I stared at the second-hand, not knowing whether to wait or not. I’d started to write a note for him before I wondered whether he could still read it. I didn’t know how to leave even a simple message on a knot cord. In the end I tied our cords together, one end round his wrist and the other to the loop of a root, and carved Gone to find someone 8.15am next to it. I left my watch wound up and open, balanced on the root. I waited for a few seconds after that, trying to think of a way for him to be sure of the date too, but my watch didn’t show that. He would know at least if it had been more than a day. The springs would have wound down by then.

‘I’ll be back soon,’ I said, in case he could hear me. ‘But this isn’t a busy road. I don’t want to leave you here if nobody ever comes. See you in a minute.’

It felt stupid to speak to him. He wasn’t there. It wasn’t like speaking to a sleeping person but to a coat he had taken off.

Carefully, because in places it was icy, I set off down the road, expecting to see houses or walls at any minute, but there was nothing except a tiny tumbledown something on the left. It was overgrown completely, the stonework pulled apart by some local version of saxifrage. And then, on the edge of an outcrop, not sheared away but finished neatly in a straight line, the path ended. The outcrop overhung a valley and suddenly I had a sprawling view down. The forest went on and on in a great mist-ringed basin. There was no city, no people. I could see what had used to be a town. There were stone towers, but they were crumbled. Something gleamed between the ruins: glass, an obsidian flow that ran down from the mountainside. The forest had almost claimed it all back. Vapour clung in rags around the masonry. It had been years since anyone was here. Decades. There was a lake too. Nothing moved there except some birds.

The back of my throat gone dry and burned-feeling, I started down the valleyside. It wasn’t steep. The tree roots made steps here and there that were good enough to get down by. I went down awkwardly, hearing nothing except my own breath and the squeak of the straps on my backpack, where the doubled-over sections under the buckles rubbed together. Outcrops of stone dotted the way. I didn’t see anything in them at first but then I started to catch the turn of shoulders and suggestion of arms. If I hadn’t known what I was looking at I wouldn’t have guessed at it. The markayuq had blended into the rock, mostly. If it was possible for them to wake again at all they would have had to tear themselves free.

I’d hoped there were still people living there and the ruins were incidental, but there were no new houses or huts, or anything. There were dead people in the glass, sealed in like flies in amber. It must have rushed down when it came. A markayuq was caught in it too at the edge, waist high. I couldn’t tell if she was dead or sleeping, or only thinking. The glass had splashed on the side it had hit her, which made her look like she had been frozen for ever just in the moment she walked into the sea.

Further on, some trees had grown over the flow of obsidian and cracked its surface where their roots pushed up, but since I didn’t know how fast they grew, it was impossible to tell how long they had been there, or if the glass was a thousand years old or fifty. It would be useless to saw through a root. Whitewood trees didn’t grow rings; the wood inside the bark was formed agelessly in those tiny honeycomb patterns. There must have been a way of telling – Inti would have known – but I’d never thought to ask her.

Raphael had last been here more than a hundred years ago. I sat down on the edge of what had once been a fountain, dry now, and tried to see any sign of the age of the place. I had no idea what people had worn here a hundred years ago or two hundred, or even whether it had changed much in that time. Not far away from me, a tower had collapsed into the lake. Chunks of masonry, big enough to walk around, with little stairways and archways that led nowhere, made an archipelago of stone islands. There were phoenix ducks there and petroleum-coloured feathers on the ground nearer to me. Whatever had happened, and whenever, there was nobody left now. I stayed away from the people in the glass.

Someone moved. It was Anka and she was watching me. I couldn’t tell where she had come from.

‘Do you speak Spanish?’ I said.

She didn’t move.

‘I’m not trying to trespass. I’m here with Raphael. He’s changing. I’m trying to find someone, to help him. Is there anyone left?’

She picked up a rock and I thought she would throw it at me, but she only used it to carve into the fall of glass beside her.

Holy ground.

‘I know it is. But I can’t leave him here in the middle of nowhere if there’s nobody to help him.’