Page 91 of The Bedlam Stacks

‘It’s the altitude,’ he said. ‘We were made for up here. It’s twenty-five thousand feet. You won’t feel well.’

‘There are yak in Nepal that wouldn’t survive at twenty-five thousand feet,’ I grumbled. The fog made the cold cut-throat and someone had taken away my coat. He gave me a folded-up blanket I’d thought was a cushion. I hunched into it and then frowned. ‘Twenty-five thousand . . . there are no mountains that high in Peru. Are there?’

‘We’re not on a mountain.’ He pointed through the banisters of the balcony.

It wasn’t fog. We were in the middle of a cloud bank. Where the vapour was thin I could just make out the corners and roofs of buildings. It didn’t look like an ordinary city. Everything was on a different level, on whitewood gantries, and they didn’t stand on any ground. A garden floated at five or six different heights, just ahead of us. There were trees and flowers I’d never seen before, and colourful things in greenhouses. In a pavilion made of intertwining whitewood saplings was a bronze telescope, pointing down. A skiff with red sails wove along through the air, between the buildings. Now that I was looking more closely, they all had wharves and posts to tie up ropes. A fleet of boats hung like hot air balloons above one of them, all tied to the same ring.

‘Am I . . . allowed to be here?’

‘There are only one or two of us in a generation now. They left me in Bedlam for a hundred years and they’re feeling guilty,’ he said. ‘You can do whatever I want.’

‘They?’

‘The clerics in charge here, and the . . .’ He had to search for the word. ‘The Prior,’ he said eventually.

I caught the smell of smoke and held on to the banister. ‘Did they save the forest?’

He gave me a pair of binoculars. ‘Still saving it. There are aqueducts that cut through; it’s divided into fire zones. You’d never lose more than a fraction of it.’

I looked through the binoculars. There were ships below the clouds, waterships, moving slowly and spraying jets down on the still-smoking forest. I couldn’t see any more fires. I could taste the smoke, just, but we were a long way above it and the wind was taking it before it could filter too far into the city. I felt dizzy and had to give the binoculars back.

‘Jesus. Someone’s going to stumble over this place soon. There are rubber expeditions starting out round here, and that’s forgetting coffee and pepper farmers, and . . .’ I trailed off and tried to shake some of the fog out of my head. ‘Small countries with valuable resources always have to give them away in the end or they’re crushed. You can’t live in the middle of a nascent whitewood monopoly. Is there some kind of plan here to deal with—’

‘I’ve been here two hours, I don’t know. Calm down. It’s been hidden for four hundred years; no one’s coming in the next ten minutes.’

‘No, I know.’ I lapsed back on to the bench. ‘This is . . . I’m too altitude-stupid for good adjectives. It’s incredible.’ I leaned forward with the heels of my hands against the edges of the rail. I wanted to go to sleep.

Someone tapped me on the shoulder, on my other side. It was a man with a tangle of knot strings.

‘Oh, he doesn’t want that,’ Raphael said.

‘You don’t know. What is it?’ I asked.

‘Permission to come back when I wake. It’s not . . .’

I looked at the knots and then back at him. ‘You’d rather I didn’t.’

‘You won’t want to. It will be years and years.’

‘Well – I will, but that isn’t—’ I had to stop and try again. ‘Look, I know I’m not Harry, I know I’ve been standing in. If you don’t want me to come back I won’t. But I want to come back.’

He watched me for a long time and then reached past me to take the tapestry from the now worried-looking man.

‘What are you writing?’

‘Your name and my signature. Not Harry – you’re damn right you’re not Harry. He would never have done any of this. He worried too much about getting home to do anything much at all.’ He gave the strings back over my shoulder. The man retreated inside. ‘That isn’t binding to you, only to them,’ he said quietly.

‘I’ll be here.’

‘Yes, well,’ he said. He didn’t believe me and I didn’t try to persuade him. I knew I was sure, but there was no way to measure that for him, or to prove it was permanent. He was still watching the scribe. Once the door swung shut, he touched my arm and held something out. It was a pine cone, one of the iron-strong ones from the whitewoods, but it was charred. The fire had cracked it open, and inside the seeds were loose. Some pattered into my palm. ‘Souvenir.’

I took it carefully. ‘Am I allowed to have . . .’

‘No. But if there are other whitewood forests, no one will care too much about this one, will they?’

I sat studying the seeds and finally understood why Harry had planted an explosive tree at home. He had been seeing if whitewood would grow elsewhere. But it hadn’t grown properly; the wood had been light but it had never floated. It had failed because Heligan was at sea level. The whitewoods would need mountains, high. The Himalayas.

Someone else came into the room behind us, a stewardly man who gave the impression he had been just outside all along waiting for the scribe to leave.