New Bethlehem
1782
Raphael was skinning a bear on the cliffside for the doctor’s new hearthrug when the children came to find him and say there was a man dead on the beach.
He thought at first that they meant someone had fallen. It was rare, because everyone on the stacks had grown up on the gantries and the frosty patches were well known and banistered, but there were accidents sometimes in the winters, and that winter was howling. He only just remembered to scrub his hands down with snow on the way and ran trying to warm them up again. From the first bridge he looked down. The river was frozen and the snow was whirling in billows that were sometimes almost opaque and sometimes almost clear. The children were right, but he hadn’t been. It wasn’t anyone from the village. It was a foreigner in a Spanish coat, with bright blond hair that showed even from so far down. The man looked like he had come from nowhere. Later, some people said he did, although Raphael was more inclined to say he had run from Phara, which was equally impressive, because it was fourteen miles away.
He set the counterweight light so that he could get down fast and held the rope hard as it banged to a halt eight inches above the beach. For a second he couldn’t find the man and felt a flutter under his ribs, because there were too many stories about ghosts in the snow that he didn’t quite disbelieve. But then he saw he was almost standing on top of him. The man was under the ice. The water was shallow but the glass stratum below him was deep and littered with bits of ancient masonry so that he looked like he was falling, at an infinitesimally slow pace, very far.
The man opened his eyes and touched the underside of the ice, too weak for anything else. Raphael swore and slammed the butt of his rifle into it. It wasn’t thick and when he hauled the man out, he choked, but not enough to have breathed the water yet. Although some of it had been washed away, he was still covered in blood. The sun came out again and Raphael understood at last. The man had fallen in the hot glass shadow, in the shallow water, and when the sun had gone in, it had frozen almost on the instant and trapped him there. He shook him to wake him up more and helped him along as much as he could back to the lift. It was difficult. The man was tall.
The children followed them to the church until he told them to go away. Inside, once it was warmer, the man explained in broken Spanish that his name was Henry Tremayne – Harry, for reasons he couldn’t explain – and that he had been upriver somewhere near the mountains stealing quinine bark when he was caught. He had got away and run, but they had shot him in the shoulder. He was brave when Raphael took the bullet out, though he was no soldier and he shook for a long time afterwards.
Once Harry was warm and bandaged, there was time to notice that the children had moved a log under the window to see in. There was a row of eyes. When they saw Raphael they ducked, but not far enough. He let them be. They weren’t making any noise. He opened the other window, the one that overlooked the mountain.
‘Could you close that?’ Harry said hesitantly.
‘Can you see the mountain?’
‘The mountain?’
‘Just say hello.’
‘Hello?’
‘Good enough.’ He closed the window again and wondered, for the thousandth time, if those half-sentient stones in the skeleton of the earth knew, still, when strangers came; if they were interested, or if they were only caught in deep rock dreams and unconscious even of the ages skimming by, never mind the people made of bones who flashed about too fast to follow.
Some Spanish men came later that week, looking for a foreigner. He hid Harry in the undercroft and said there was no one. They made a mess and searched the place anyway, but they didn’t know there was an undercroft. They came again in the spring, to make sure, and the lie was more difficult because Harry had been about the village in the meantime, but a great advantage of the priesthood was mass and Raphael had taken the precaution of swearing everyone to secrecy weeks before. People liked Harry anyway; he was generous and strong. The summer was short and the next winter swept in fast, and although the bullet wound had healed more or less and Harry was worried about his family in England, Raphael kept him back, afraid he would only kill himself with the cold trying to trek over the Andes.
On the first day of real spring Harry jumped out from behind the woodshed and swung him around into the grass. Being nearly a head taller, he didn’t have to try hard to do it.
‘I think you’ll find this is unobservance of the Sabbath. How about you stop rushing around for one afternoon?’
Raphael hit him, not very effectually. ‘All right, Rabbi.’
‘You should be grateful I haven’t organised a stoning. Dear God.’ Harry was laughing. ‘It’s such a lovely day. You can’t waste it on the bloody markayuq.’
It was. The sky was blue and so was the river, and there was no snow anywhere but the peak of the mountain, which rumbled and sighed with a tiny earthquake like it was settling in the sun. Raphael snorted when Harry leaned across him to catch something in the grass. He had never known anyone so determined to look at crawly things. He’d tried to say once that there was such a thing as the proper use of a newspaper, but Harry had called him a savage and installed a green tarantula in what had used to be the coffee jar. It ate chicken scraps, or it had until Raphael had left it in the woods and told Harry it had escaped, with the jar, which he couldn’t bring himself to go back out and fetch.
‘I can’t breathe.’
‘No, I know, but it’s worth it,’ Harry said. He had caught a mouse and moved it to show him, his elbow sharp in Raphael’s ribs. ‘Look at this. I don’t think anyone where I’m from knows he exists. I might write something.’
‘Will anyone read it?’
‘The flora and fauna of South America are a subject of fascination for everybody who’s anybody,’ Harry said, archly, because in fact it was an impression of his father. Raphael had understood that late, but he was pleased to have understood. Irony was a difficult thing to catch in a new language, and more so because not all languages had it, not even all local languages. He was nearly sure that if Harry had chanced on a village a hundred miles further east, he would have offended someone by now and been thrown in a gorge.
‘Does that mean you and your four friends at your club?’
‘I think four might be generous,’ Harry laughed. He let the mouse go. It trundled off in no particular hurry. He had a knack with animals. He would poke and prod anything, but nothing seemed to want to bite him. Raphael was waiting to come in one night and find him playing cards with a bear.
Harry stayed still for a while, then sighed. ‘You don’t fancy coming to have a look at England, do you?’
‘I can’t go anywhere.’
‘No, of course.’ He sat up and leaned forward against his knees, looking out at the stacks and the mountain. The wind swayed the tips of his hair between his shoulder blades, although not strongly enough to tug any from the black ribbon. ‘But you’ll lose your English, you know. Real bugger to get so fluent and forget the lot.’
Raphael had started to learn after it became obvious that Harry had the linguistic abilities of a pigeon. He could stumble along in Spanish with the broadest English accent it was possible to have, but sometimes he forgot what he was supposed to be doing and lapsed towards the end of sentences into a weird mix of both. Quechua was too different even to try. Since English was only one more slightly westward hop after Latin and Spanish, it had been easier for Raphael to put it together than labour over trying to make Harry understand what grammar was. ‘You’ll have to come back.’
Harry smiled. ‘I will, then.’
Raphael looked away at the flowers in the grass. It was only a story; no one would go to and fro between England and the Peruvian mountains. But it was a good story. He could feel himself half-believing it, the same way he believed in heaven. It wasn’t belief of the mathematical reasoned kind, only the sort that arises when the alternative would mean becoming one of those men who worked like machines and never spoke to anyone, old at forty.
The light changed. It was night and the galaxy was a stripe across the sky. Raphael jerked upright. The blanket that had been tucked over his shoulders fell into his lap. There was a light inside the church but no moving shadow. He got up and pushed the door open, his chest hurting because his heart wouldn’t move. The last time had been ten years.
‘Harry?’
‘There you are. I’m cooking, not very well; I was hoping you’d come round in time to properly supervise. Or at least tell me how in God’s name you’re supposed to cook quinoa.’
Raphael pushed his hands together, because they were shaking. It had only been the afternoon. He folded the blanket over the back of a chair. ‘Not like that. What’s the point of you?’
‘I’m ornamental.’
‘Sit down and don’t touch anything.’
Harry sat down obediently next to the stove. Even sitting he seemed tall. The lamplight had turned him all gold, sunspun. People called him that – Sunny, Inti – and he was. He didn’t look like a human. He was too broad and too bright.
Raphael put a plate down in front of him and folded into the chair opposite, aware as he did of the stiffness in his joints. They didn’t hurt. It felt as though whoever had made him had come back and tightened all the screws. He was starting to find that he couldn’t slouch. Or not couldn’t; but he could let his weight hang forward without moving his spine, and each vertebra felt as if it were strong enough to lift much more than it was.
Harry was editing some notes, probably about the mouse, going through in red ink and adding things in the margins. Raphael watched him write. He did it easily and quickly, for fun. It wasn’t an unfamiliar idea, but there was still a novelty in seeing it.
‘So the thing about mice here,’ Harry said, without looking up, ‘is that they rather resemble European voles, which is interesting, because they can’t possibly be related. It implies that the shape of animals happens in the way bubbles do. A bubble will form in a sphere in Europe or Peru. They don’t suddenly go square when you hit the tropics. It’s starting to look like a mouse will always be mouse-shaped.’
‘As opposed to tiny fluffy octopuses?’
‘Well, exactly. Where are the cyclopes? Where are the one-legged men or the tripods, and why are there never mice that are blue or in possession of eight legs? You know? More things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy – except there aren’t.’ He paused. ‘You don’t care,’ he laughed.
‘I don’t.’
‘Happily that doesn’t bother me at all. Are you turning into a markayuq?’
‘What?’
‘Well,’ said Harry, as if they were still talking about mice. ‘Odd thing number one: walking statues who are in fact men and women. Odd thing number two: you have lost almost as much time as you’ve lived – more if you count these smaller spells of yours. And they’re getting longer.’ He smiled a little. ‘There are more things in heaven and earth than in my philosophy, but there are not many more. It would be extraordinary to find two at once and unrelated. It seems to me that it would make more sense for them to be in fact one, larger, odd thing. No?’
‘Yes.’
Harry looked pleased. ‘And all this stop-start exponential catalepsy is in fact a kind of stop-start metamorphosis, and each time you’re a little different and a little stronger and one day different altogether. What a lovely creature you are.’
Raphael felt himself redden. ‘Eat your bloody quinoa.’
‘I am, I am.’ He did for a while, then looked up suddenly as if a thought had bumped into him sideways. ‘You swear damn well for someone who’s only learned English for a year. You do all sorts of things well.’
‘Languages get easier the more of them you speak—’
‘No, no, no. You’ve got an incredible memory. Graven in stone, isn’t it? You’re made of different stuff and it works differently. You utter stinking cheating bastard.’ He kicked him under the table. ‘Oh, Harry’s so stupid, Harry can’t learn Quechua, look at my fancy English.’
‘Ow.’
‘I’m going to read this essay to you,’ he said vengefully. ‘Tell me if it sounds clunky.’
‘Oh, I don’t want to hear—’
‘Part One,’ Harry said over him. ‘On the idiosyncratic features of the lesser Peruvian mouse.’
Raphael sat still to listen. He had never known it till recently, but he liked being read to. The pollen lamps were running down by the time Harry had finished. He let them. Harry faded almost to sleep before he jerked awake and apologised and started getting ready for bed. It was only the ordinary routine but Raphael watched him while he still could, awake because of the lost hours. Once Harry was gone, it would be back to knowing the exact time to wind up the lamps in the evening, and noticing how that moment retreated or advanced by its weekly minutes as it tided up to and away from midsummer.
Harry dropped Don Quixote into his lap. They had been working through it in an effort to improve Harry’s horrible Spanish. ‘Your turn.’ He sat down again and shifted his chair closer so that he could follow the text too, smelling of soap and a fresh shirt for bed. He wound up the lamps again.
Raphael found their place and didn’t say there would be no need for it soon. Harry wouldn’t stay much longer and he wouldn’t come back. He had a wife at home, and a little girl. He wasn’t a natural expeditionary; he worried about them and wrote letters he couldn’t send. The quinine men watched the post.
‘Still with me?’ Harry asked after a little while.
‘Yes. Just finding the place.’
‘It’s there.’
‘I know that.’
‘Read it then.’
‘Shut up.’
*
Raphael didn’t sleep and then went out early, resigned to being tired all day. Spring had thoroughly sprung; there were bees and big butterflies everywhere, even though last week there had been a frost. Over the border, the graveyard markayuq was missing. He hunted around for a while and then found snapped twigs and trudged after her.
They did wander every so often, for a change of scene, but it made him uneasy when they did. If there had been fires in the forest, or if it had been a harsh winter, they got lost in the deep patches of dark where the pollen had faded and it took days, sometimes, to find them by lamplight. The trees were soon denser and the new pollen flared around him. The warmth from outside was starting to seep into the woods. He had come out without his coat and didn’t need it even in the shadows. Stirring through the trees, the wind was warm too.
When he still couldn’t find her after an hour, he gave up. She would come back eventually and, if she didn’t, he would go out again when he was awake instead of nearly sleepwalking. He paused, leaning against a tree, to brush a blue butterfly from the back of his sleeve. With his head resting against the bark he closed his eyes for a second, feeling heavy. He didn’t usually mind being so bound to one place, but sometimes he could feel the weight of the anchor. The chain would barely stretch to Azangaro, never mind to England. When he opened his eyes, his breath steamed.
He couldn’t move. He was clamped into place by something. It was a vine, candle ivy, thick and twined around his chest and his arm, pulling it behind his back. He wasn’t standing; his whole weight was being held up, a foot clear of the ground, by roots that had grown up under him and formed round him. They were grey with frost. It was only panic strength that let him tear through. Once he had half-fallen out of it, the tree was a monstrous broken cage. He raked his hands through his hair. There were strands of frozen web caught in it. It was plainly winter and there was nothing alive anywhere, but it made him shudder so hard it hurt his shoulder when he thought of what summer must have been like. When he looked down at himself, his clothes were rags where the branches hadn’t saved them from the weather, but he didn’t feel cold. Ground frost crunched under him. The forest floor was springy with pine needles.
The trees on the way back to the border had changed. The roots had interlaced. He had to climb to get through, and when he found the graveyard, Anka was there, sleeping now; they had a different quality of stillness when they were asleep. He found the border, still well kept, and almost bumped into a little boy cleaning St Thomas. The boy stared at him. Thomas recognised him and touched his arm with one knuckle. He could be expressive; it had the quality of, you’re late.
‘Um . . . good morning, sir,’ the boy managed.
‘Morning,’ he said. He couldn’t tell if the boy was one he’d known as a baby, but he didn’t think so. There was nothing wrong with him. They had sent one, finally. In another few years, he could leave. ‘What – can you tell me what year it is?’
The boy was still little enough to be asked about arbitrary facts and he didn’t stumble over it like an adult would have. ‘Eighteen fifty-six, sir.’
He had to rock back a step. ‘Are you sure?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Is there a priest at the church?’
‘No, sir. The church is empty. No one goes in unless there are visitors.’
‘I see. Thank you.’
Raphael left him there and went to the church. The door was locked but like it always would, a decent shove just at shoulder height juddered the latch open. Inside, everything was cold and still. Despite what the little boy had said, he had half, abortively hoped it wasn’t real and that Harry would be there just the same, but he was gone. Nobody had been there for a long time. The air tasted undisturbed.
Everything had been cleared away, neatened up, but it was all there. Don Quixote was still on the table, closed on what looked like the right page over a letter. When he slipped it out, the ink on the envelope had faded to a strange brown. It was addressed to him. He opened it.
Raphael,
You’ve been gone for a month and I must go home. But I’ll come back. Write to me when you see this.
Harry
There was an address in England underneath. He read it twice more and eventually he put it down and dragged himself up the ladder to see if his clothes were still there. They were, and the bolt of Indian cotton Harry had brought. He didn’t look at it. Instead he found some warm things to take downstairs and draped them over the chairs to air while he set the windmill going and waited for water. He expected the rope to break after so long, but someone must have come in and kept it turning every now and then. He built the stove up very slowly, trying to ease the heat into the pipes instead of rushing it all in at once. They creaked but didn’t burst.
He was cleaner than he would have thought but not clean. He scrubbed it all off, too hard, and had to stop when he scratched himself. He didn’t feel it. He stood watching points of blood well in the mark on his arm and waited, but there was nothing. He could feel the pressure but not the sting.
More slowly, because his hands had started to shake, he got dressed again and then didn’t know what to do next once he was. After a long, limbo silence, he sat down in front of the book and touched it gradually, afraid to set the weight of his hand on it, but it didn’t turn to dust. He found the place easily, because the print was faded where it had sat for a long time in the sun. The paper should have been cold, but he couldn’t feel that either.
Someone tapped on the door. He didn’t say anything, because he felt four miles to the side of it all, but a woman came in. She was holding a flask and a bowl that steamed.
‘This is for you,’ she said. She waited until he took it. She was neat and quick as a robin, tall, with only one hand. He saw her scan him and the little lift of her head when she noticed he was healthy. ‘My son told me that he found you on the border. He said that St Thomas knew you and that you enquired after the date?’
‘Was it right, what he said?’
‘It was. Twenty-third of July, eighteen fifty-six. Were you expecting something else?’
He nodded.
‘You’re him, aren’t you?’ she said. It wasn’t a real question. She didn’t sound surprised. ‘Everyone wondered what had happened to you.’
‘Delayed. Why is there no one else here?’ he asked.
‘No other priest? Nobody knows,’ she said. ‘There was no sufficiently healthy person until Aquila.’ She looked around, worried. ‘It should all have been maintained as you left it.’
‘It’s fine.’
‘Are the pipes functioning properly?’
‘So far,’ he said, wondering why she was talking to him as if they were in an official report for Lima. ‘I’ve got spares if they’re not. Or I had.’
‘No one’s disturbed anything,’ she said quickly. ‘But I’m not sure it was ever inventoried, so perhaps a few items might have, you know, over the years . . .’
‘I think it’s all here.’ He stopped, because it had occurred to him, piecemeal, that she wasn’t being lofty at all. Her tone was wrong for that. The language had changed. There was more Spanish in it. ‘Is that coffee?’
‘It is.’
He took down a pair of cups and rinsed away the dust, and shared out the coffee between them. It steamed, but he couldn’t feel the heat of it. He couldn’t tell if he’d burned himself.
‘You’d better eat, before it goes cold,’ she said, nodding at the stew in front of him. It was rich. They must have been doing well.
‘I’m sorry, I’m not hungry.’ Breakfast had been seventy years before, but only an hour ago.
‘You should eat it anyway. You’ll be hungry in a minute.’
‘Why?’
She nodded at the window, to the overgrown courtyard outside. People were starting to gather there in twos and threes. More were coming from over the bridge.
‘You’ve seventy years of baptisms and confessions to do.’
He had to eat slowly, because his taste had changed, or rather, faded. It was barely there.
‘I’m Inti,’ she said, and his eyes must have caught on her for too long, because she twisted her nose. ‘I know. I didn’t select it. My mother wanted a boy.’
‘Raphael.’
She nodded as if she already knew that.
He pushed his hand over his wrist without meaning to. He kept feeling spider webs. But his knuckles had gone red; the water must have been hotter than he’d thought, which meant at least that if there were any leftover spiders, they were cooked. He tried the coffee. It tasted bizarre now that he couldn’t tell at once if it was hot or not, but not bad. It was strong enough to taste, at least.
‘What’s your boy’s name again?’ he asked at last.
‘Aquila. I think he might be concealed in your woodshed. He wants to come in but he’s terrified of being accidentally rude. Have I been accidentally rude?’ she added.
‘No.’ He set the coffee aside. ‘Right. Let’s go out and see what we can do with everyone. But I’ll need Aquila to help me. I don’t know their names.’
He’d always felt impatient when old people waxed lyrical about it, but it was easy to spot people’s grandchildren and great-grandchildren, and it was unsettling. There were eyes that never changed, deformities, and that was unremarkable, but there were other things that had swept down the lines too. There was a girl who spoke with her hands just like her great-grandmother, despite never having met her and her mother having nothing like the same style. He had gone out expecting strangers and some were, because a good third of them were altar children or the sons and daughters of altar children, but in the main it was a colony of ghosts.
By the time he had met everyone who wanted to be met, it was late. He locked himself in, although he never usually held with locking a church. With his back against the door he looked around at the room. It was all the same: the ladder up to the loft, the kitchen, the stiff side door into the chapel. But it wasn’t the same, either. The roof had been repaired twice and needed it again. There were books on the shelf behind the ladder that weren’t his. They were in English. His heart bumped into his diaphragm to think of Harry coming back to an empty church, but when he opened them, the Ex Libris notes said that they belonged to someone called Charles Backhouse. There must have been expeditions here; Harry had said there would be. It needled that they had been put up in the church, but then, they had left it all as they had found it and it wasn’t as though there was a nice inn and coach house in town.
In the deep silence, the clockwork in the pollen lamps clicked. So did the wood in the stove. The windmill rope creaked around its pulley and under it was the roar of the wind in the forest. The winter must have been long already, because there was almost no pollen in the air.
For a long time he looked down at the letter without touching it. Harry had told him about Heligan. Somewhere in a churchyard on that side of the Atlantic were familiar bones.
Or here they were, in this place. Somewhere was another church – his – where Harry was cutting up pineapples, but it was too far gone. Harry had kept sailing while he had stayed still and there was no tacking ahead to find him again, no catching up, and there would have been no waiting, the current being too strong. He had fallen too far behind.
Not able to sit any more, Raphael went upstairs to fetch the Indian cotton and laid it out on the table. With all the pollen lamps lit, there was enough light to unpick the stitching on his waistcoat. After a few hours it was all undone and he lifted out the worn-out old lining to lay it over the cotton as a pattern. It was complicated, but he had always mended things and it was only a matter, really, of cutting straight, and an obsidian knife was as good as a scalpel. It was light outside before he had finished, but he did finish. Once he had he went straight out, because there were people he had promised to see and, even if there hadn’t been, it seemed best to muck in. It would pass the time.