When we found the river, it was unexpected. There were no reeds or marshy patches to announce it; only the water, suddenly. It stretched off in either direction, already broad and slow. Clem looked up and down, disorientated. He asked Raphael where it came out at either end, but although they might have been talking about the same places, they were using different names and never overlapped, except at countries.
‘Does it ever run into Bolivia?’
‘Bolivia?’ Raphael looked almost interested, but only as though Bolivia were a philosophical notion he had learned at school and hadn’t come across very often since, rather than what it was, which was the Peruvian version of Wales. ‘Where’s the border?’
Clem was plainly having to do his best not to explode. ‘You live on the Bolivian border and you don’t know?’
‘No. Bloody great forest in the way.’
I inclined my head at that, because he really was fluent. Unless he’d learned English as a child it would have been nearly impossible and even then, to have retained it after years of no use, or sporadic use at best, meant a spectacular memory. I’d lost all my Chinese already. He caught me looking and flared his eyes at me to ask why. I opened my hand gently away from myself like an orator, to say he spoke well. He frowned, but his shoulders tacked shyly.
‘Can I borrow that scarf?’ Clem said to me, then screamed into it when I gave it to him. When he handed it back, he kept his face straight. ‘If I haven’t strangled him by next Tuesday, I’m to be beatified. Write to the Pope.’
If Raphael noticed, he pretended not to. He had gone ahead of us, to a single stone pier. There was nobody there, no houses, no boats. At the end of it was a statue: seven feet tall, facing out towards the water like a person.
‘What happens now?’ Clem asked when we caught up.
‘We wait for a fisherman.’
‘Is there no ferry?’
He didn’t snort, but he did show his teeth in something too humourless to be a real smile. There was a cruel curve to it, the kind of smile women call rakish before the owner abandons them pregnant in an asylum. ‘No.’ He dropped his bag on the ground and crouched down to take out a jar of wax and a brush with a bluish glass handle. With his wrists hanging over his knees, he looked up at the statue, then stood to scrub off the watermarks left by old rain and the splashes that reached it from the river. I’d thought the statue’s clothes were stone like the rest of it, but they shifted when he ran the brush over them; real leather, all of them, bleached as pale as the marble by the weather. I watched him for a while and wondered why they bothered dressing statues. But then, most of the statues of Mary in churches on the way had been wrapped up in blue silk. I caught the smell of the wax on the breeze. Burned honey.
Quispe gathered together the horses and turned straight around again without saying goodbye.
When I sat down, a swarm of fish came to inspect the soles of my boots. Clem paced for a while but then gave up and we played skimming games with the flat pebbles that covered the shoreline. Along from us, Raphael was still waxing the statue’s clothes. It seemed like a lot of work after riding as far as we had, but he was doing it carefully and something about the way he moved his arm made it look like a ritual with a specific set of motions. Clem had noticed too.
‘St Somebody, is that?’ he said.
‘No.’
I’ve never seen anyone go from wary to delighted as fast as Clem did then. He nearly bounced onto his feet. ‘You’re joking! It’s a markayuq?’
Raphael nodded ruefully. I had a feeling he had avoided saying the Quechua by way of discouraging Clem from it too.
‘I’ve never seen an anthropoid version before, I thought they were always just outcrops of the bedrock—’
Raphael looked at him past the statue’s shoulder. ‘Quiet down.’
‘You believe it’s real?’ Clem beamed. ‘That it can hear us? Sorry, he?’
‘Stop. Calm down.’
‘But you’re Catholic,’ Clem said joyfully, impervious now. I smiled, glad he was happy again. ‘But you still believe in the local . . .?’
Raphael let the silence go on for a second. ‘Speak quietly,’ he said, quietly himself.
‘Sorry! May I look at him?’
‘Look. Don’t touch. But there are six in Bedlam. You’ll have more time then.’
‘Bedlam?’ I said.
‘New Bethlehem. Joke.’ He didn’t sound as though he found it especially funny. ‘You’ll see.’
‘Six markayuq in one place?’ Clem said over us. ‘I thought it was one per village.’
‘This village is special.’
‘How?’
‘Like Canterbury. He’s here because he marks the pilgrimage route.’ He pointed along the river, left to right. There was another jetty a good way off, almost out of sight, and on it the motionless figure of a man in heavy robes. Like the one on the pier it was fantastically real-looking and nothing like the blocky things I associated with South America. They were just like the statue at home. I didn’t say anything. I would later, because I wanted to know why Dad had stolen a Peruvian shrine, but the sense of things I’d thought were unconnected connecting was too strange then.
‘In that case,’ Clem said, ‘I shall leave him be. But they’re all like this one, are they? Proper statues? They look like real people?’
‘Yes.’
Clem grinned and sat down with me again. ‘This is going to be much better than I thought.’
‘What does markayuq mean?’ I asked.
‘Marka means village and yuq implies ownership, or being a vessel, something like that. It’s the same yuq as in chakrayuq, but chakra means field. So owner-of-the-village, or similar. It’s another kind of shrine, just a littler one for a littler place. Not that there’s a village round this one, but there would be usually.’
‘It means warden,’ Raphael said. He didn’t sound optimistic that he was going to be able to change Clem’s translating habits.
‘This is handy, a bilingual native speaker,’ Clem said happily. He wrote ‘markayuq’ down on the corner of his map and marked the position of the shrine too.
Raphael finished his work on the statue and sat down next to his bag again to exchange the brush and the wax for his Spanish book. He fitted them neatly in, and when he lifted the book out, he was careful of the corners.
I scooped up another pebble. It glittered oddly and I paused, because it wasn’t stone at all but bluish glass. I showed Clem, who frowned and shrugged, but when we leaned down to look along the shore, there were dozens of them, and perfect glass shells, occupied by river things whose inner workings the glass exposed. The sun came out and sparkled along them all.
‘I found some of these at home,’ I said to Clem. ‘Dad must have brought them back.’
‘We’re going the right way, then. I wonder what the hell they are. How could anything form a shell from glass?’
I shook my head. We both looked along at Raphael, weighing up mystery versus asking him.
‘Raphael,’ Clem ventured at last.
He ignored us. He was holding the book open but his focus missed it. There were leather gaiters over his boots, black once and unevenly grey now, and he was just touching the water’s surface with the buckle of one, holding it perfectly still while the fish came close to the shiny bar. The long stillness was unsettling, because it’s usually something humans only do when they mean to kill something. He didn’t. He only sat. Clem said his name again to exactly the same effect. Long after we had lost interest, I heard the scratch of paper as he turned a page.
We didn’t quite wait an hour before a boat came, a little balsawood skiff with sails made of woven grass, carrying a cargo of sheepskin and one cheerful trader bundled up against the cold under a Russian-looking hat. I didn’t think we would all fit on, but the trader sat on the sheepskin bale to make room for us. There wouldn’t have been a spare inch for the mules. Thinking of the mules made me wonder again about the boys. Clem thought they had just decided against the unwelcoming weather, but they hadn’t seemed unhappy to me before. It was Raphael they hadn’t liked. As the boat drifted by cliffs that grew taller and taller, cut with fine waterfalls that fell from so high the sources were lost in the clouds, I tried to think of someone who might have made me run away as soon as I saw him – and not just run, but turn back from a good fire on a sleeting night. All I could think of was Irishmen talking quietly over dynamite boxes.
The stack of sheepskins was easily high enough to lean back against if you sat on the deck which, though balsawood splinters the second you introduce it to an overweight mouse, was properly layered and bolted together, and dry. There was a quiet conversation in Quechua going on somewhere over my head. Whatever the boys’ anxieties about Raphael, the trader didn’t share them and he was chatting, or I thought so at first. It was an elegant language. Every so often it hung mid-word like a ballet dancer where English would have rattled along on its tracks. It took me a good while, half-asleep, to realise that it wasn’t Raphael on the other side of the conversation but Clem. I could hear his English accent next to the trader’s dancing one. Now that I was paying attention, other things sounded wrong too. He was talking in an English word order. When I caught myself thinking that, I frowned, because I would have sworn to a jury I’d never learned any Quechua.
Something cold touched the back of my neck, then my hands. When I looked up, the air was grainy with snow, though the valley had narrowed so much that we were protected on either side for hundreds of feet. It was coming down heavily enough to have dusted the rocks along the banks already. I brushed the new flakes off my sleeves and got up unevenly, already stiff from the cold. Some of the rocks were the same almost-clear glass we had found on the shore by the pier, huge boulders of it smoothed into watery curves by the river. They were covered in white crystals – salt, though we must have been a thousand miles or more from the nearest sea. Raphael was sitting at the prow, half-hidden by the sail.
‘Is that salt marsh?’ I said, without much hope of getting any more of an answer out of him than we had before.
He did turn back this time. ‘Mm. There’s salt under the ground here. Used to be mines.’ He was looking up at the snow, not quite frowning, but grim, though I couldn’t see any particular reason to worry about it. In the grey light, there were red strands in his hair. It was long enough to tie back but short enough to be always falling down. I couldn’t imagine him neat.
The white motes pottered about on their way down to the water, not driven by any wind. The thin sunbeams swam with them. I’d crossed my scarf over my chest and buttoned my coat on top of it, the collar turned up, but the cold was starting to bite through everything. The only bright thing nearby was a flock of parrots perched on the bank, all red and blue and tropical in the deepening cold. Whenever we turned a bend of the river, I caught a snatch of mountains up ahead, as jagged and vast as the range we had just crossed. The peaks were already white.
Clem had taken out his map and now he was sketching the shape of the river in pencil, to the interest of the boatman, who made him mark on a little town called Phara and looked disproportionately pleased when he did.
‘This fellow’s telling me he’s originally from somewhere called Vangavilga – do you know where that is?’ asked Clem. ‘Is it round here? I think he wants me to put it on my map.’
Raphael looked across. ‘Huancavelica. No. It’s about four hundred miles away.’
‘No, he said V—’
‘Vangavilga is Huancavelica,’ he said with unexpected patience. ‘Huancavelica is how you spell it and how you’d say it in Spanish but we have a different accent round here. It’s the start of the pilgrimage route. He means his family escaped here from the old labour draft. The mines killed so many people the young men used to run before the draft captains came round. Or after, to recover from the mercury poisoning.’
‘I know where Huancavelica is,’ Clem said, shocked. ‘But that . . . the variation. It’s not in the least reflected in the Spanish spelling. You can’t read vanga for huanca in Spanish. That’s ridiculous. Is it widespread? Are there other interchangeable consonants?’
‘Plenty.’
‘That’s linguistic vandalism.’
‘They say Wank’avilka in Cuzco. Huancavelica. What’s the matter with it?’
‘What does it mean?’ I asked, to break their flow.
‘Stone idol,’ said Clem. ‘There’s a chakrayuq there, a huge one.’
Raphael looked like he might have laughed if he’d been younger and more cheerful. ‘Why are you using the Jesuit dictionary?’
‘How do you know what I’m using? And it’s the only Quechua dictionary.’
‘It’s probably shrine,’ I said, and then when Clem frowned, not understanding, ‘not idol.’
Raphael nodded to me and I smiled, because he was taking it so gently. I would have burst out laughing if someone had translated Christchurch as Heathen God Temple in front of me.
Clem sighed and I wished I hadn’t said anything. I’d always thought he was a languages genius – he was perfect in Spanish, at least. But Spanish and English aren’t different languages, only extreme dialects of Latin. It’s almost possible to translate word for word. Translation from a language unrelated to English is nothing to do with equivalent words. Whenever I’d tried to do that in Chinese I’d come out with unbroken nonsense. I had to forget the English, hang the meaning up in a well-lit gallery, stare at it hard, then describe it afresh. I was starting to think Clem was looking at Quechua like he would have looked at Spanish. He was trying to link, not translate. I couldn’t think of a way to say so without sounding like a patronising twerp, so I stayed quiet.
‘And to answer your previous question,’ Clem said to Raphael, ‘the matter with it is this. Spelling it Huancavelica, from the Cuzco dialect, crystallises one pronunciation and makes the others irretrievable unless you meet a native speaker, of which there will be none in two hundred years’ time at this rate. Come on, you know very well what I mean.’
Raphael was unmoved. ‘Spend a lot of time weeping over the lost phonemes of Pictish, do you?’
‘Phonemes.’ I murmured to no one, or to the river. I had no idea how in God’s name he could have learned a word like that. I barely knew what it meant. Neither of them noticed.
‘What’s Quechua for “philistine”?’ Clem said waspishly.
He thought about it. ‘Philistine.’
‘Oh, God, it just goes on, doesn’t it.’ Clem sighed and tapped his pencil against the map, still unhappy. ‘And this river doesn’t seem to have a name except “the river”. Or something about glass, which I guarantee also isn’t written anything like it’s pronounced.’
‘What’s written Quechua like? Can’t you write it that way?’ I said. ‘You know, in brackets.’
‘There isn’t any,’ Clem said bleakly. ‘There is no record whatsoever of an Incan writing system. The closest they had was a kind of knotting, for counting and so forth. Looks like very clumsy tapestrywork.’
‘How can you have a whole empire without legal textbooks and public records?’
‘Oral traditions, one supposes. Wiped out when the Spanish arrived.’ Clem shook his head. ‘It makes a horrible sort of sense. Writing evolves not when you want to wax lyrical about the daffodils but for tax purposes. Numbers. Nouns. Five sheep. No need for adjectives or adverbs or grammar, not at first.’
Raphael had covered his nearer eye with the heel of his hand so that he wouldn’t have to look at us.
Clem finished putting down guessed names and tipped the map towards me. ‘You’re part homing pigeon – how does that look to you? More or less?’
He had sketched a long, rounded right-angle as the river veered south towards Bolivia. His compass was still balanced on his knee, but the solar storm must still have been churning around us, because the needle was skittering in no steady direction. I steepened the curve with my fingertip. The river was starting to meander, just little swerves at the moment, but because of that it was difficult to feel that it was tilting more broadly as well.
‘Are you sure?’ Clem asked, frowning.
‘No,’ I said, not wanting to start another fight. ‘I just feel like we’ve strayed a bit further to the right.’
‘Right isn’t a cartographical term, darling,’ he laughed.
‘It looks like a dragon if you’ve got it right,’ Raphael said. His eyes caught on Clem for too long. ‘Darling’ was the sort of thing Martel would have said.
‘Nor are dragons,’ Clem said, but he tipped the map to see if he could find one. I traced out the hump of a wing, one that would be there if it leaned more to the right. The meanders made paws. ‘Oh, yes. Well, that’s neat, isn’t it? Have you got a map, then, Raphael, if you know what it all looks like?’
‘At home I have.’
‘Why didn’t you bring it?’
‘It’s carved on the wall.’
‘How useful,’ Clem said. ‘Just like the rest of you, hey?’
Raphael watched him with the same distance as when he shot Manuel. I vacillated for a long few seconds, but there were a hundred things out here he could claim to have no control over if Martel asked and, in the interest of his not ensuring that some of them happened to us, I shut my eyes and shoved Clem over the side. He landed with a splash and an explosion of swearing. I had to pretend I’d slipped, but Raphael smiled and looked more ordin-ary as he helped Clem back onto the boat, which only got him a round of his own accusations, although he hadn’t been in arm’s reach.
We all stopped talking when we saw the body on the cliff. It was hanging by its hair from a sturdy vine, not much but bones now. I couldn’t see how anyone might have got it up there, much less how to take it down. There was a Spanish sign around its neck: I stole quinine trees.
‘That’s Edgar,’ said Raphael. ‘He used to live opposite. Took cinchona trees to a Dutchman.’ He was watching me with the smallest cinder of a spark, as though he were quite looking forward to hearing how I meant to talk my way around that.