The Caravaya whitewood forest
1860
When he stopped talking, I gave him the little flask I’d brought from Bedlam. He frowned until he caught the fumes from it – I’d stolen some of his rum – and then laughed and shared.
‘Thanks.’
I swallowed some too and sat still to let it burn its way down, just as hot and good as the fire. I didn’t know what to say; I felt like more of a stranger than ever and I couldn’t say that. It had been Harry’s ghost keeping me safe. It was nothing to do with me.
‘Better go soon.’
‘Yes,’ he agreed, but then his focus turned inward and he frowned. ‘I’m tired,’ he said, puzzled.
I was too, so much that I was only just upright. It was past eleven now, and hard to think that this morning, we had been on the island with Martel. But I could see what he meant. He was always walking and always working. He wouldn’t have been unusually tired, if it were just the distance and the worry alone.
‘I bet you are.’
‘What? We’ve been sitting here for ages.’
‘Well – not only are you changing, you’re changing into something a lot heavier than you used to be. You’re lifting more weight every time you move,’ I said, and finished quietly, because I heard halfway through that it was what Harry would have said. It could have been a portrait of me, on the stairs at home.
‘I hadn’t thought of that.’
I looked out the window again. The light was just as dim as before. Anka was where we’d left her – I could see her pollen shadow. ‘There’s no reason to rush on if she’s not coming in.’
He didn’t say anything. It was like seeing clockwork wind down. He stopped gradually, and then it was that strange, absolute stillness. I watched him for a long time, hoping to God that it wasn’t going to be years. I had a feeling it wasn’t. Both the long spells I knew of had been when he was by himself, well away from people, and I would have bet money that the rest had been too, because otherwise someone would have accidentally buried him. The shorter spells, the ones I’d seen, came when other people would have daydreamt or dozed; he had been tired every time, and sitting still.
I went through our bags for some food. We had grapes and apples, and some phoenix eggs wrapped in a handkerchief. I cooked two over the fire, needlingly aware of the markayuq in the window, but he hadn’t moved at all. It didn’t come to me exactly, or not in the ordinary way of a cork popping to the surface of a pond. I must have known it since Raphael told me what they were, perhaps before, so it was sluggish, more like a cork in treacle. For years I had sat in a greenhouse opposite a breathing stone person who watched my father’s grave. And who came inside when it rained.
I fell asleep thinking about it, propped in a nest of blankets by the hearth. I didn’t know how long it lasted, though, before I came awake all at once. I listened, not sure what I could have heard. Raphael was still frozen. The fire was still going, just.
I jumped when I saw Anka outside. She was right by the window; right by the door. Not wanting to look away from her, I shook Raphael’s shoulder but it didn’t move him. The door opened gently. What had woken me was the catch. She was holding a tangle of candle ivy, full of glowing seed cases, each one as bright as a lamp. It was enough time to promise myself that she wasn’t interested in Raphael, snatch up his rifle and run for the loom room. Behind me, she lobbed the vines so close that the light slung my silhouette against the wall as pollen burst into the air. The other markayuq was exactly where we had left him, unmoving. I pushed the door to, not all the way so that it wouldn’t clank. I couldn’t see her through the gap, but I heard the hiss of her robes as she crossed the floor.
The window opened when I pushed it. I climbed out and dropped down. It was a floor and a half, because the loom room was up a little set of stairs, and the jolt jarred my leg. I pressed both hands over my mouth to keep quiet and crawled behind the woodpile.
The sparse pollen flared whenever I moved too suddenly. I tipped my hand to and fro, more and more slowly, until I found a speed that was nearly invisible. Getting up was difficult but walking wasn’t. What was hard was to stay so slow, much slower than she walked. My throat hurt with knowing I would be, to an ordinary person, in perfect, full view of the house, but no steps sounded behind me. Once I’d gone as far as I could bear, I knelt down to the level of the woods where the animals had eaten the shrubs back and shot through the clearest path I could find. The pollen trail of the bullet flashed brilliant and perfect and, because there was no wind so deep inside the forest, it hung there, almost without blurring. I walked fast to the next tree so there would be a person trail too, then stopped and forced myself to stand still. Then I eased back towards the house as she came out. Even going slowly was leaving a sparkle. I stopped again as she came nearer. She passed so close she almost touched me. A quarter of an inch more to the left and she would have knocked into my shoulder.
I stayed frozen there for a long time after she had gone. She was following the bullet trail. After I’d counted to fifty I started to move again. I kept leaving cinder snatches in the light, though never a whole ghost. She had left the door open and I felt absurdly resentful that she’d let out the heat. The cold had settled in by the time I got back inside, where the embers of her light bomb still breathed pollen on the floor. Raphael caught my wrist and pulled me up the steep step.
‘Christ, I thought she might have—’
‘She didn’t touch me.’ He pulled a blanket round my shoulders. ‘She was looking for you. I saw the last half of that. You didn’t try and snatch a coat before you went?’
‘How much can they see?’
‘They see you if you move.’ He looked out into the woods. My rifle shot was still there, and so, more faintly, was her trail. There was nothing coming back towards us, although I divided the trees into imaginary quadrants and studied each one carefully in case she was doing what I had.
‘If she’s not coming now, I should change,’ he said at last. ‘If I stop anywhere in these clothes they won’t last long.’
By the light of our pollen lamps, after I’d closed the shutters so that the glow wouldn’t show, we changed his ordinary clothes for the heavy leathers he had been making. Once I’d fastened him into them, which was difficult because they were as thick as armour, he was only a few shades away from the colour the others were. I stepped back as soon as it was done. A fortnight was a short time for him to have conditioned me to wariness around the markayuq but he had managed it. It felt wrong to stand too close to him without a salt vial or a brush in my hands. It only lasted while he stood still. When he crouched down to find some wax in the pocket of his old waistcoat and run it down his knot cord he was only Raphael again.
‘Is there a reason the others are tall and you’re ordinary-sized?’ I asked, because I couldn’t stand the quiet any more.
‘Whitewood,’ he said. He traced a line down his ribs as if he were showing me the boning inside a corset. ‘Put it on a healthy person and they grow as tall as the markayuq. We stopped doing that when the Jesuits arrived. Bad idea for native priests to be clearly identifiable. Right, let’s go. Are you warm enough? You’re not useful if you keel over.’
‘Yes . . . yes, shut up, you pointless fossil.’
He pushed me gently into the wall. I tried to push him back and couldn’t.
The trees grew closer and closer together as we walked. We kept to the glass road now, because there was no use, in the thick pollen, weaving through the trees; if Anka wanted to follow us, she would see, whichever way we tried. But if she was, I didn’t see her, only the furls and switches of light where birds and bats floated between the branches. The path coiled upward, taking us slowly higher into new mountains I couldn’t see, but the cold sharpened and the glass road clouded with frost. All the temperate plants that had grown between the trees faded away. The trees were titans and their roots had tangled through each other, interlocking sometimes in impassable brambles of foot-wide bark that encroached onto the edge of the road, and sometimes in patterns that arched right over it, which must have been guided and pruned once by an ancient forester. They made living tunnels where the air was warmer and the candle ivy still flowered, so thickly that the glow in the air looked like sourceless sunlight and we lost every last shadow. Sometimes, a corner of stonework or a hopelessly eroded carving peeped through everything, but it was impossible to say how old it was.
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.’
‘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.’
Leave.
‘Is there anyone left?’
Don’t know. Not awake for long enough.
‘How long?’
I didn’t think she would reply, but she seemed to think about it, and of course she had plenty of time. A week here and there.
‘When . . . are you from?’
Born 1579.
‘And you’re only just properly awake now.’
Mercury. Turned after a miner’s funeral in the graveyard. Her hand had shaken over the last part and my teeth hurt in their roots.
‘It’s been nearly three hundred years,’ I said, because I had a terrible feeling that no one else had been able to tell her yet.
She didn’t write this time. No wonder she hadn’t wanted to talk to anyone, in her waking weeks. She must have known she was in the middle of a fractured sleep, like Raphael, but far worse. She didn’t want to talk because they would all be dead when she next noticed.
‘I need to wait. To see if anyone comes,’ I tried again. ‘They have to move him; he can’t stand out here.’
You must leave. Bones cannot disturb stone.
It sounded like a translation of something that would have been well known if I’d been from here, but I caught the gist. I was an ordinary person, or less than ordinary with one good leg. It was a special sort of offence to try and move a sleeping markayuq. I could see her bristling and my heart sounded loud inside my ears when it occurred to me that maybe even thinking of moving one was illegal in itself. Like talking about the death of a king.
‘No,’ I said anyway, before she had finished writing. I would never have imagined that an argument as slow as this, where I had to wait for a stone woman to write on glass with a shard of broken rock, would feel urgent. But it did. Anxious heat had been building up in my chest since she began to talk and now my veins sang with the need to fight or run. She had to drag the rock around curving letters and the grinding noise of it hurt to hear.
Sacrilege.
‘I don’t care.’
She only set the rock down again. I watched her for a long second through my own breath, which was clear white. My leg already ached from having come downhill.
She started to move again and I got up and walked away as quickly as I could. She followed me, not in any rush. I struggled much more on the way up than on the way down and when I looked back she was still there, still following. Halfway up the valley the trees closed in again and the pollen was bright. I stopped at the top, waiting for the pollen to fade with my pulse drumming and knowing it wasn’t going to fade enough.
I had been aiming back to the place I’d left Raphael, for no real reason except the fairytale chance he might wake if I was just desperate enough, but when I found it, he was gone.
I looked up and down for a pollen trail I could hide in, but animals seemed not to like the road. I started back along the glass towards the aqueduct. It stretched on further than I’d thought. Anka was closer now. She didn’t make any effort to rush and she caught up with me slowly. When she did, she only reached out for my arm.
Raphael pushed me out of the way and hit her full in the chest. The noise was inhuman, stone smashing into stone. He was smaller than she was and he must have known he was going to lose before he even began.
She dragged him backward and hit him across his temple. If it had been me, the bones in my skull would have clattered into the nearest tree, but he had changed enough for his not to. I was still a good way from the aqueduct. The four markayuq sentinels watched quietly. They turned their heads as I came towards them, but they were so divorced from everything else that the fight must have been only a vaguely interesting flash in among the changing whirr of the seasons. Anka, though, wasn’t coming after me. Raphael had kicked her ankle out from under her and pinned her down, but she was holding something and it took what felt like a long time to realise that it was my matches.
The pollen went up much faster than it had before. The trees were ancient and so did they. Explosions thundered like a whole fleet firing its guns at once. I ran back for the aqueduct and fell on the ice and skidded the last few yards underneath, but the fires were so strong that the misty fall of water there didn’t make much difference. More trees went up, so hard the explosions shook the ground and knocked me over again. Shrapnelled bark tore down my arm.
Raphael shouted something, not in English.
Someone grasped my shoulder and pushed me down on to the ground, until I was crouching. As soon as I did, I stopped feeling any heat. It was still hot, but nothing from the explosions hit me. Wood clattered against something close. When I looked up, the four sentinels were standing around me, leaning down, their arms interlocked and blocking almost everything. They weren’t burning. Their robes were singeing but not much, or not on my side. What did reach me though was the smoke, which smelled of chemicals, and I choked. The dark closed in on the edges of my eyes.