Once Clem had written the letter – I said he needn’t bother since he was going himself, but he pointed out that if he was laid up by mountain sickness again he would need something to pass along – we waited for the hazy sun to reach noon for a sextant reading and spent an hour or so going over the map, adding latitude lines as best we could estimate them. I drew Raphael’s frieze map and annotated it as much as I could, with a guessed scale and an explanation of the border and the size of the stacks, and how the lensed light through them affected the river route.
I saw Clem off from the base of the stacks. He knew where he was going and he had a revolver, but four days in the Andean highlands alone was not a stroll from Hyde Park through Kensington, and when we parted we were both nervous-brash and brief. I sat down on a glass boulder to watch him go, my heart thudding still too quickly in the thin air. Between the massive cliffs and the sweep of the river, he was miniature. He had to go carefully at first because the glass of the stacks had intensified the sun and melted the ice in long strips, but after a few hundred yards he was past that and out on to the river. He was walking near the bank, the side where the salt wasn’t. The ice looked likely to hold; or, if it didn’t, the water there was only knee deep anyway. He turned at the sharp bend and waved. I waved back but stayed where I was, not sure what to do now. The sun had come out for an afternoon foray and the glass near me was heating up, the river steaming.
I had to move before the water started to boil, and by the time I was at the top of the stacks again I was frozen. I retreated back to the church. Raphael came in before long and asked what I’d done with Clem. For a second after I told him Raphael stood very still, then nodded and cooked some lunch. He didn’t mention it again, but the terseness he’d had at Martel’s was back, although I couldn’t tell why. I’d thought he would be glad to have only the slower of us to watch.
‘Do you have a barrel of pineapples somewhere?’ I asked, for something to say, when another appeared.
‘Mm. Help yourself. On the left without.’
‘Without what?’
He pointed outside.
‘Right,’ I said, feeling stupid. ‘Thank you.’
He coiled into himself like a fern, and I gave up and tried to concentrate on eating. I would have gone out to explore the town but I couldn’t face the idea of risking the ice on the bridges again. The heel of my hand already ached where I’d leaned too hard on my cane on the way back from seeing Clem off. It was starting to bruise. I was relieved when Raphael went out instead. Part of me knew it would be hard for anything to happen to me if I stayed inside by the stove, so I did, and drew one of the pollen lamps to show Sing. Raphael was out until dark, when I saw his pollen trail coming back from the border. I hid in the chapel and wondered what he had been doing out there for so long.
The snow didn’t melt. In the morning there was another new, brilliant layer, and the cold was deeper and sharper. Clem was right to have gone; there would be no thaw soon. But with the pipes in the chapel running hot, I slept well again. Impatient with myself for feeling worried about walking into town, for all the nearest stack and the houses perched on it were thirty yards away, I went out with my sketchbook to draw some of the howling carvings on the border. There was mist again and they were eerie where they faded off into the white, which glowed sometimes where things had disturbed the pollen.
I jumped when a pine cone landed in my lap. It was stone solid and completely closed. I sat back suddenly, annoyed with myself for not having understood sooner.
‘Of course they’re bloody explosive,’ I said to St Thomas. ‘They’re sequoias. And we’re sitting on glass cliffs in damp weather.’
It should have been obvious as soon as I saw the obsidian stratum in the stacks. The glass lensed the sun hot enough to burn ordinary wood and grass, so any other kinds of tree that grew here would be periodically wiped out. But sequoias love fire. Here, because the climate was wet and fires otherwise might not have caught often enough, the whitewoods helped the process along. Something in the heartwood was inflammable. The big trees had bark like armour, so they survived, but the pine needles and the twigs went up like dynamite. The whole forest floor would blaze, damp or not. The fires opened the fallen pine cones and the heat rising into the canopy opened the unfallen ones. All the other vegetation would be burned off, which left the new whitewood seedlings room to grow. They were perfect for the place. I couldn’t think of another tree that would manage forest fires and rain or snow at the same time.
‘Well. Do you suppose my brain will grow back or that I’m permanently slow now?’ I slung the pine cone over the border and into the denser pollen, where it cometed away into a patch of candle ivy. St Thomas managed to look sympathetic. I smiled a little. The markayuq were all unsettling, but there was something kind about the way his eyes had been carved.
He turned his head. I only had time to think I hadn’t moved enough to set off his clockwork, and that there must be someone behind me, before whoever it was hit me hard over the back of the neck and knocked me forward into the pine needles.
His clothes smelled of charred honey, the same as Raphael’s, and for a second I was sure it was him; but in a spinning-penny moment of clarity I remembered that Raphael was smaller than me and whoever this was most certainly wasn’t. The man let me collapse and did it again, and then everything exploded into a bright black. By the time I could turn over, whoever it was had gone. St Thomas was still looking beyond the border. Knowing it was a terrible idea in the snow, I let my head touch back against the ground and waited to be able to move.
*
When I opened my eyes, it was raining under the trees: big, painfully heavy drops that felt like someone had spilled a case of bullets on me. I was half-frozen to the ground and I had to tear free to turn onto my side. The pine needles were all gullied by tiny silver streams. They didn’t look like water at all, shivering and shining as they sank into the earth. Little rivulets ran off my coat too and plinked as they hit the ground. I rubbed my eyes and winced when I felt the bruises shift over my ribs. Someone had been shouting my name for a while but it was only then that it sounded distinctly separate from a dream.
‘Merrick.’ It was Raphael, right next to me now. He was kneeling in the pine needles. He gave me a cigar case. It must have had embers in it, because it was hot. Pins and needles soared down my hands when I took it, and then the feeling came back. ‘Can you sit up?’ he asked. The Quechua edge that had been in his consonants yesterday night and earlier this morning was completely gone. His English was cleaner now than mine, which had brine and jetsam in it. He was concentrating, to be as clear as he could; I must have looked concussed.
‘Someone came up behind me. I didn’t see.’ When I was upright, my ribs panged and I had to stand with my hand pressed to them. He brushed pine needles off me. I wanted to say I was shaking because I was angry, not frightened. A few years ago no one would have been able to do that to me, nothing close, and never without my seeing. ‘Stop, I’m fine.’
‘They don’t want people on the border. Markham will have set them off yesterday.’ He said it softly, as if someone might overhear. The back of my neck crawled with the certainty that there was still a man behind me. I twisted around, knowing there wasn’t really. There was only the empty air, then the carvings on the border. Things moved beyond it, but only little ones with little pollen trails.
‘I’ve lost my sketchbook,’ I said, trying to look about, but it was difficult to turn on the spot. My leg hurt. I’d fallen awkwardly.
‘It’s here.’ He had found the pencil as well. He swept the moss off them both before he gave them back.
‘Thank you,’ I said. It came out annoyed-sounding and I tipped my hand, trying to say I wasn’t angry with him. He nodded before I had to scrape together a sentence and walked slowly so that I could lean on his shoulder. At the church, he hesitated.
‘You’ll be better coming down to the river. It’s hot down there and the water is salt. You can go under once and you don’t have to spend half an hour cleaning every cut.’
I wanted not to move any more. ‘Will I?’
‘You have to. Or you’ll have a . . .’ He sighed. ‘This is wrong; tell me what the word is.’
‘Say what you think?’ I said, glad to have something to think about that wasn’t a complete failure to keep myself safe.
‘Calenture.’
‘Fever. No, I know. You’re right.’
‘Hold on,’ he said, and went inside. He came out again straightaway with his coat. I thought he would put it on, but he took mine from me and gave me his instead. It was lined with a fine pelt which might have been sealskin or something more foresty, but it was twice as warm as mine. He had broad shoulders and I didn’t particularly, so it fitted well even though I was taller. It smelled of beeswax. I had to look behind me again. The trees were talking now that the sun had been out for a while – the green cluck of settling wood – but there was nobody there.
‘Mine was all right—’
He had hung it over the woodpile, where it dripped, although I hadn’t been aware of its being wet. It was too cold. ‘There’s mercury in the pockets.’
‘There’s what in the pockets?’ I said, still slow anyway and not improved by the bang on the head.
‘M— doesn’t matter.’ He steered me towards the cliff, but away from the bridge. ‘It isn’t far. Straight down there.’ He pointed to a place just along from us where the surface caved in, into a narrow blowhole, although it couldn’t have been, there being no tide. He took me to the edge, where there was a little winch, much smaller than the main one on the last stack and perched on the cliff like a gallows. Far down below was a little loop of the river sheltered by a cave, the water turquoise and steaming. It was just shy of one of the glass shadows of the stacks; the current must have moved it just enough to cool it down.
The winch lowered us to the rocks just by the pool. Raphael had brought a bag of laundry as well as his rifle and as soon as we were down he left me to it and went to the main river to scrub the crumpled clothes out. None of them were his. It was as much privacy as I would get. Further on from us, around the base of the second stack, there were fishermen. They threw the nets out like Scandinavians do, standing thigh deep in the water. Behind them, on the beach, the river boiled where it touched the hottest parts of the glass.
The water was as hot as a bath. I eased down on some rocks that had been polished smooth and made into steps. It was a pool, with walls. I couldn’t tell if they were natural or not. On one side was a fine mesh to keep fish out, or perhaps something worse. The water, though, seemed mostly dead, and I wasn’t surprised. It was so salty I could feel the buoyance, and it stung, sharp and clean, in all the grazes I hadn’t known were there along my ribs.
Quartz crystals sparkled on the rocks just next to me. They had formed in perfect cubes, slightly stuck to the rocks, but one of them came off when I pulled. It wasn’t quartz; a corner ground off easily. Salt. I’d heard of it forming that way on the banks of the Dead Sea, but not anywhere else. I took a cube back to my things to show Clem later.
‘What happened there?’ Raphael said suddenly. It made me jump.
‘Where?’ I looked around, expecting to see him pointing somewhere, but he was watching me. He spun his hand in the air to tell me to turn around again. He meant my back. I couldn’t feel the lash-scars. ‘Oh. Clem happened. We were in the Navy together.’ Looking how I did now, I heard how like a lie it sounded. I turned my arm around so that he could see the anchor tattoo over the veins between my elbow and my wrist. It had been done much better than I’d paid for and it hadn’t faded or blurred yet.
‘What did you do?’
‘Insubordination.’
I couldn’t remember why. It was one of those lighthouse memories around which everything else was dark. All I could remember was that it had been drizzling on the day. Clem had been new on board and I’d shouted at him about something even though he had outranked me, something that must have mattered immensely at the time – there had been a child, one of the cabin boys – but I couldn’t reach it.
‘And now you’re . . . best friends,’ Raphael said.
‘Is that strange? People who clash at first often get on later. He was always interested in Peru. Then he found out my father had come here a lot . . .’
He watched me for what felt like a long time. ‘Places like this amplify all the things that have ever gone wrong for you. There’s no insulation, no trains or doctors or space to get away from someone. It’s bad enough with people who once fell out over late rent, but it would be dangerous to go into the woods with someone who once had you publicly flogged.’
‘We didn’t know each other then; it wasn’t falling out. We don’t fall out. He gets cross and then he forgets about it. He’s got a quick temper, but it’s quick in both directions. He forgives people within fifteen minutes of shouting at them. If you were to take an average he’d work out as straight as a spirit level.’
‘So would these mountains,’ Raphael said, with a little razor blade in the lining of his voice. I had to concentrate not to shy away from him. Having to argue had sharpened things and the memory came back. The cabin boy had stolen bread. He was meant to be whipped for it. That was the row.
‘If he so much as shakes his finger at you, you’re both going back to Azangaro.’
‘That’s not . . . he will shake his finger. He will lose his temper. That doesn’t make him bad. He’s just a bit of a Cleopatra.’ I didn’t feel too indignant. I was enjoying how much he disapproved.
‘It’s hard to trust a man in his thirties who still loses his temper.’
‘As opposed to one in his forties who lives in a permanent state of having already lost it,’ I said, waving at him. ‘Come on, he deserves the benefit of the doubt. You’ve only known him ten seconds and nine of those have been while he was mountain sick.’
I thought he would be angry, but he smiled. ‘If you say so.’
‘I do. What are you worried about, anyway? That we’ll start bickering at the wrong moment and be eaten by jaguars?’
‘No. That there will be a moment, another one, when one of you has to help the other, and you hesitate, and I’m eaten by jaguars.’
I laughed, because I couldn’t remember the last time I’d disagreed with someone and not offended them. ‘He’s all right. You’ll see.’
He made a doubting sound and turned back to the washing. I dropped my head against my arms. The salt took my weight and the current tugged me gently to one side, but not enough to move me. The heat had reached my bones. I could feel all the vertebrae down my spine and they were bending more than they had for months. Like a warm pressure on the back of my neck, I could feel too that he was watching me. It snuffed out the lingering suspicion that there might be someone behind me, or at least, any sense that it would be important if there were. He would have shot anyone who was. I must have fallen asleep there, because it made me jump when he tapped my shoulder with the back of his hand. He was just in front of me on the rocks, smelling of laundry soap. He would have to take it all back up to the top to rinse it out in fresh water if he wanted to get rid of the brine, which confused me, because it would have been easier to do it in the church to begin with, until I realised he had only brought it so that he could look busy while he kept an eye on me.
‘I’m going back up. I’ll send the winch back down for you,’ he said.
‘Thanks.’
I watched him go, then I climbed out and dried off on my shirt. The heat stayed with me even once the winch came back down and lifted me up into the cold air beyond the glass shadows. I rode sitting on the bar rather than standing, my cane over my knees and elbow locked over the rope beside me. By the time I got back to the church, Raphael had the stove built up and open. I took a bowl outside to rinse the salt off my skin and then caught sight of my reflection in the window when I turned. There was only one bruise on my face. I went back in, pleased. I could say to Clem that I’d bumped into a tree or something, if he noticed. I didn’t even want to touch the idea of telling him someone had attacked me from behind and I hadn’t seen one solitary atom of them.
Raphael had climbed up the ladder that led up to his attic to start hanging the damp things over the rungs. There was a clothes-line too, between the side of the ladder and the nail that usually held a crucifix on the wall. The crucifix had been relegated to the top of the coffee jar now. I climbed on to a chair to help.
‘Get down,’ he said.
‘I’m fine.’
‘No, it’s rude here. You let the strongest work. You shouldn’t even be making me coffee.’
‘I . . . don’t care if it’s rude.’ I shifted when he frowned. ‘Look, the most frightening thing I can think of isn’t losing the leg, or getting shot or beaten up by angry Indians. It’s the moment I think yes, I should be sitting down, and he should be doing everything for me.’
He gave me some pegs. ‘By the hems.’
‘I know. I do it at home.’
‘Aren’t you rich?’
‘No. It’s me and my brother and a part-time kitchen maid who thinks I don’t know she calls us Walking Cain and Nearly Abel. He has polio,’ I explained.
He nodded, then smiled. ‘You’re Abel, aren’t you?’
‘Oh, shut up.’
He pegged my sleeve to the line, which made me laugh, partly because he didn’t seem at all like someone who played and it was a relief to find that he did.
‘Is it worth all this, for cinchona cuttings?’ he asked after a while. The bruise must have been darker by then. ‘You can just leave.’
‘I can’t. If I don’t do this I’ll have to rot in a parsonage in Truro. Am I in danger in here too?’
‘I don’t know. You should have been all right even sitting on top of the border, never mind where you were. Markham must have made them nervous.’
‘Well, we’ll hear if anyone breaks in.’
He was quiet, but it was the strange hollow quiet he had when he wanted to say something. Whatever it was, he swallowed it. I thought suddenly it was lucky to the point of unlikely that he had come to find me in the twenty minutes it would have taken before I died of cold. He’d had no reason to look for me, unless he’d known something would happen. It explained why he had been so gentle when he found me. Guilt is a good propellant for kindness. But I wasn’t sure enough to accuse him. Or perhaps I wanted too much for it to be real kindness.