The trees cast everything into shade. The canopy had blocked the snow, but frost crunched in the grass and our footsteps stayed frozen in it behind us. The spider webs strung through the grass snapped and fell whole, winking where tines of light cut down through the branches. When no sun filtered through at all and we were past the first of the trees, each of their roots as thick as an ordinary birch, a shimmer started to follow my cane hand, like yesterday but much fainter and only as bright as the imprint of the sun on closed eyes. Ahead of me Clem was waving his hand to and fro in front of his face.
‘It’s the pollen,’ I said. ‘It’s thicker further in, you’ll see.’
Raphael looked back. He had left the ghost of a wake that looked more like a less shadowy patch of shadow than its own light. ‘If you can ever see by it, you’ve strayed too far.’
When we were both paying attention to him and not doing light experiments, he pointed to a broad line of dead earth, which was greyish although the soil wasn’t clay, then above it, to the animal bones hanging in the trees. It stretched in both directions for as far as I could see, disappearing into the hazy morning on one side and round the cliff on the other.
‘This is the border. You can’t miss it. Salt, bone,’ he said, pointing down and then up. ‘It’s well maintained for fifty miles in either direction. They’re always here; they always watch it, and they’ll see it like a lighthouse if you cross. They’ll kill you.’ He stood on the salt line and lifted both arms. It gave him light wings and showed the red in his hair. While it lasted, just for a few seconds, he looked like his namesake must have when archangelic work still hinged on wrestling prophets. ‘Please don’t wander,’ he said quietly.
‘Oh, God.’ I jerked back from what looked like a man clawing his way out of the ground right beside me, but it was only a clever carving in the roots of the nearest tree. Something about seeing it shifted the way I was looking at the trees and then I saw them all. They were everywhere: howling carvings straining away from the salt. I stepped back again, then shuddered when something cold dropped down the back of my collar.
Clem touched the grain of one, which made me flinch. They weren’t for touching. The one he had chosen was a man contorted like a monster, tendons standing out hard from his throat. ‘I’ve never seen dendrographs like this.’
When the wind furled down through the trees, it moaned in the carvings. Raphael came back from the salt line and dropped the backpack he had brought among the roots of the closest tree. The thump made the pine needles on the ground jump.
‘That’s all I wanted you to see.’
‘What about these markayuq then?’ Clem said. ‘I was promised anthropoid markayuq, damn it.’
Raphael hesitated but after a second he pointed to our north-west, then north-east, then east. They were there, perhaps forty yards apart, statues seven feet high and standing just before the border. I could see the ghosts of two more further away through the morning haze. People who had been at the ceremony were walking towards them too, some very slowly, having trouble in the cold. Soon the first of them stopped in front of the closest statues and began to pray. I couldn’t see the sixth markayuq at first. It was closer than I’d thought, just by the church but beyond the border, its back to us. It was looking over a little clearing of glass crosses and cairns.
‘Don’t swear in front of them,’ Raphael said. ‘If you go up to one, give it some salt.’ He held out a handful of little vials to us, full of white crystals. It was exactly what the Indian man in Crucero had given to him. Along the border, glass flashed where other people were holding vials too.
‘No, no, no,’ Clem said. ‘Come on, show me properly. I want to see a proper prayer.’
‘I’m a Catholic priest,’ Raphael said.
Clem laughed. ‘I know how people round here are with religion. You’re like Italians with cheese. I know you must pray to these things too, don’t be shy.’
‘I’ll tell you how to do it.’
‘Shy,’ Clem said happily. ‘Do you consider it more private then, the native side of things?’
‘I consider it not sanctioned by Rome or the Cuzco bishropic,’ Raphael said. He inclined his head at the nearest markayuq. ‘He might have been built by Indians but officially that’s St Thomas. Do you want me to tell you or not?’
‘Tell, tell,’ Clem said. He was bouncing on the balls of his feet, which was sometimes a restive habit or an enthusiastic one or both. Raphael took him to the statue and I half-meant to wander, but Clem caught my sleeve and said firmly that it was Culture and that a man couldn’t subsist altogether on chlorophyll. Raphael gave him a salt vial. Close to, the statue was looming, a head taller than me.
‘Why salt?’ Clem asked.
Raphael lifted his jaw towards the forest beyond the border. Because we were so close, the pollen trails we left were brighter and it was possible to move only slightly but leave a clear line in it. There was no need for anything as strong as pointing. It would have looked like a firework. ‘It’s an offering for the people in there, in exchange for the children. It’s worth as much as silver this far from the sea. Are you doing this or not?’
I looked again at the border. Martel had implied a tribe of angry savages, but something about that didn’t ring true. They had carvers, salt traders, and if they didn’t use all the salt, money. Guards for a hundred-mile border and enough children to reject three or four every year. That didn’t sound like a tribe. It sounded like a town, an organised one. If the other expeditions had assumed they were facing a few hunters with spears and then run up against half an army, it would explain a lot.
As Clem held out the salt, the statue lifted its hand, palm up. It made us both jump.
‘My God,’ Clem smiled. ‘They’re clockwork. Hence the real clothes, is that right? Covers up the joints?’
The statue was still moving. I thought it would stop to be given the salt, but it extended its arm sideways to invite Clem to put the salt vial into the glass amphora just next to it. There was no sound but the creak of leather. I stared at it for a long time.
‘Can I – so they do move, do they?’ I said.
I’d thought Raphael would ask why I was being so dense, but he seemed to recognise what I might be talking about. ‘You’ve seen one before.’
‘We’ve got one in the garden at home. My father brought it back. I saw it move its hand and I thought I was going mad.’
‘Your father stole a markayuq?’ Clem laughed.
‘He didn’t steal it, he was asked to take it,’ Raphael sounded like he was measuring out words with great care now and he paused while he waited to see if the scales would tip. ‘The villagers . . . considered that it was unhappy here and ought to be taken somewhere else.’
‘They believe these things are alive?’ Clem said shining.
Only half-listening to them, I looked along the line. Other statues were moving too. The next one along only shifted fractionally, but the one after that had put both hands right down, because the little boy talking to it was too small to reach the amphora. There was one that didn’t move at all, and the people praying to it were easing the salt vials into the amphora very quietly, as though they were edging around somebody who was asleep. Close to us, Maria, the unhappy woman who was shy about joining the lottery for the baby, had stopped to wait for her turn with St Thomas. She passed her salt vial to and fro between her hands, her eyes a long way off.
‘There you are, Em, not mad at all,’ Clem said to me. He dropped the salt vial into the amphora. It clinked somewhere near the bottom. As he straightened up, he looked at the tooling on the statue’s clothes. ‘So these designs are native, but the statues themselves . . . well, they’re obviously Spanish church marvels, aren’t they. So they were shipped over here as saints, and then reclaimed as markayuq?’
‘No. They’re from here, they were here hundreds of years ago.’ Raphael moved his hand forward as he spoke, like he was pushing something well away from himself. It was such an emphatic thing to do, and completely contradicted what he had just said, that I was confused for a second before I understood. Hundreds of years ago was about forty yards in front of him, near the graveyard statue. He had done the same thing at Martel’s, forward for the past, back for the future. ‘The Jesuits claimed them as saints.’
Clem tipped his head. ‘You’re telling me that an Amerindian culture had, in the sixteenth century, invented clockwork set off by pressure pads?’ He bounced on the springy ground to see if the statue would move again but it didn’t. Pine needles skipped.
‘The first missionaries here wrote about them in their – don’t touch them,’ he said suddenly when Clem reached out to move the statue’s sleeve aside.
‘Catholic priest,’ Clem said, laughing. ‘They’re as important to you as anyone. I’m an anthropologist, not an inquisitor; you can just say, you know.’
Raphael looked tired. ‘I don’t want you interfering with St Thomas any less than anyone else wants you interfering with a markayuq.’
‘Of course, of course. But I’m not making a report to Rome, honestly. Right! Merrick, stay there: daguerreotype time.’
We both watched him rush back to the church.
‘What’s a daguerreotype?’ Raphael asked.
‘A sort of photograph,’ I said, then saw he was still waiting. ‘Which . . . is a way of recording an image on glass. The glass is treated with a light-sensitive chemical and when it’s exposed to the sun, it reacts to light in front of the lens, which makes a black and white image. Light and dark. It’s much more accurate than drawing. I don’t know exactly how it works. But it doesn’t affect the thing in the image any more than painting it would.’
He had been listening carefully. ‘How long does it take?’
‘A few minutes.’
‘Minutes,’ he said.
‘You don’t have to be in it if you don’t want to stand still for that long,’ I said, and then realised he hadn’t meant that minutes was a long time.
He was looking at St Thomas with a strange unhappiness, but he said nothing else.
‘Is it all right to have a picture of them?’ I asked.
‘Why wouldn’t it be?’
‘Some people don’t like it.’
I had thought he had a habit of staring hard at whoever he was talking to, but I saw his focus change then. He was only thinking; he just didn’t look away to do it. Instead he retreated behind some closed doors inside his own skull and left the rest of himself exactly as it had been before. I saw him come back too. ‘Are those people usually stupid?’
‘Y . . . es.’
‘Maria?’ he added to the woman, who was still waiting. He moved a little aside to show the statue was hers if she wanted.
She didn’t. She shook her head quickly and showed him a string she was knotting. ‘Not finished,’ she said in a child’s Spanish.
‘Can I?’ I asked.
He gave me a vial. The statue did the same thing again. However it was made, it had been done better than any of the clicking little automata I’d seen in London. My heart was going fast and a startled animal part of me was sure it must be alive, but I hadn’t travelled enough to have seen proper church marvels before. There were saints who cried blood and moved in Spanish cathedrals still and lots of people believed they were real. They must have been convincing too. I stayed where I was to watch the statue let its arm drop again. Its sleeve moved gently, the creases levelling out into darker diamonds and lighter borders round them.
Clem came back, the daguerreotype box under one arm and three sticks the same length to make an improvised tripod.
‘Got it!’ he called. ‘I think the light looks all right, don’t you? Good and even? This pollen is a gift. Raphael, come and tie some string around this for me, there’s a good fellow.’
Clem fussed and adjusted as the sticks tipped and didn’t quite do what he wanted, and eventually Raphael smacked his hand away and banged the tripod into the ground. It sunk an inch and a half and stuck.
‘Christ, what were you before the priesthood, circus strongman?’ Clem laughed.
‘Get on with it, he’s standing there on one good leg.’ Raphael said.
Clem frowned, puzzled. ‘Did St Thomas only have one leg?’
It came out sounding like a joke, but it wasn’t his sort of joke and because I was watching I saw his ears flush when he understood. I tried to catch his eye to say I didn’t mind, but he was tying the camera into place.
Raphael looked like he was listing all the Christian reasons not to kick Clem in the head. When he glanced at me and the statue again, his expression opened.
‘Stay still,’ he said.
The statue was moving again. I’d half-seen it from the corner of my eye, but it was so slow I hadn’t recognised it. It touched my chest, fingertips first, then flattened its hand to my breastbone. I shut my eyes to listen, but even so close I couldn’t hear cogs. Off to my left, Clem made a delighted squeaking noise. I heard him take the cap from the daguerreotype camera.
‘Stay absolutely still,’ he murmured, concentrating too much to have heard that Raphael had already said that.
‘What is it doing?’ I asked Raphael. I could only try to throw my voice a little towards him, not confident I could turn my head without blurring the picture.
‘Just a benediction. He won’t hurt you. It’s good. They don’t do it to everyone.’
‘There must be a counter in the pressure pad,’ Clem said. ‘You know: reach out to every fifteenth person who stands there long enough, or whatever. How often is it, have you noticed? Of course you haven’t,’ he said when Raphael shook his head. ‘However often it is, it’s bloody clever. I suppose you wouldn’t be amenable to my digging to find the—’
‘Touch that ground and I’ll sacrifice you to something made of teeth,’ Raphael said flatly.
‘Not so wholly Catholic after all then, are you?’
‘Clem,’ I said.
‘Merrick, old man.’
‘Less needling of our only guide?’
‘Oh, do shut up,’ he said, not as warmly as he could have. I did shut up, and felt bleak about the chances of their not having a furious row before the week was out. It was hard to see how Clem could have spent so much time in countries like this but never noticed that success or failure depended on being a water boatman, skimming, instead of a diver and getting everyone wet with an enormous splash whenever anything interesting passed through the deep water. Standing near him and Raphael together felt a lot like standing on the banks of a half-holy lake somewhere lost in the mountains, with a St Bernard dead set on winning a swimming medal.
The statue still had his hand over my heart. If he had been a person, he would have been able to feel it beating, because it was going fast, or it had been at first. The longer I stood there, the more it eased. I felt as though there was calm coming up through the ground, and although I knew the statue was clockwork, the magic of it worked all the same. The tendons in his hands were standing and there were fine lines around his blank eyes. It would have been a lovely thing to believe in, if I could have believed in anything at all.
Very gently, the statue gave me a little push. It must have been a way of moving people along if there was a line, but it felt like the pat doctors give you on the way out to promise that you aren’t made of glass after all and you’ll be all right in the end.
‘Clem, can I move?’ I said. It wasn’t until I spoke that I noticed they had been bickering all along. I hadn’t heard any of it properly, for all they were ten feet away. ‘He’s— I mean, it’s pushing me.’
‘Y . . . es. I think that’s long enough.’ He dropped the shutter.
I stepped back and the statue let its hand drop.
‘Incredible,’ Clem said. ‘Absolutely incredible.’
Maria, ready now, edged up to Raphael and gave him her salt. He reeled her back in by her sleeve and took her by the hand to St Thomas instead, who didn’t move this time.
She hesitated, then wound her length of knotted string around the statue’s wrist. She stopped and turned away before she had quite finished when someone else came up beside her to put in some salt.
‘Maria,’ Raphael said. He gave it a Quechua intonation this time, which sounded regions warmer than that formal religious Spanish. A nickname would have sounded wrong in that. I wondered how the hell I knew. It was far too soon to have anything like a proper sense of register, but it had a weird, deep pull already. I twisted my hand to and fro on the hook of my cane, feeling, again, like I was brushing up against something I had used to know but had lost.
She said something about her mother and hurried off. Clem was dismantling the daguerreotype box, but she didn’t pause to look.
Raphael touched the trailing cord on the statue’s wrist and pulled his fingertips down it. ‘It says if she wins a baby next time, he’s invited to the baptism. I’m rigging the next lottery,’ he said.
‘It says that exactly? With a conditional and . . .?’ Clem asked. He looked like he had found heaven without having to go to the trouble of dying first.
‘No,’ said Raphael. ‘Conditional invitations are expressed indirectly with numerical adjectives and sheep.’
I snorted and then tried to pretend I hadn’t.
‘No need to be snippy. There was never any evidence for anything else. There’s not a – I don’t suppose they all learned from a particular person – you know, a proper khipukamayuq. Sorry, Em, that means master-of-the-knots—’
‘There are no proper scribes here any more,’ said Raphael. ‘You’re three hundred years too late.’ He swept his hand forward again. The far past, far ahead, into the forest again.
Clem hadn’t seen him do it at Martel’s. I understood much too late that I should have said something, but I was so busy thinking about how it worked, the past ahead, that it didn’t occur to me what it looked like to Clem, who gazed over the border, in the direction Raphael had motioned at. Without knowing what he meant, it seemed as though when he thought about an older, more complicated culture, he thought of the people in the woods.
‘No, you’re right,’ Clem said. ‘But this is a hospital colony, you told us, and it’s being replenished all the time by someone. There must be a lot more of them out there than there are of you here; maybe they still have scribes.’ He was over the border before either of us understood. Almost as soon as he was across, the pollen flared much more and he left a real wake.
There was a yell from almost everyone who saw, and a surge towards the salt that jerked short like someone had wrenched their strings.
Clem waved his arms to make the light flare. ‘Hello! I say? Anyone here?’
People were turning back to Raphael and half-sentences came at us, all interrupted by the others: what is he, you have to, he’ll be, for God’s sake. It was real shock and it only lasted a moment before Raphael went after him. He didn’t go quickly. He came up behind him and tapped him on the shoulder.
‘Markham.’
When Clem turned round, Raphael punched him in the face. It floored him. Raphael caught the collar of his coat and dragged him back over the salt. He threw him the last yard and Clem landed in a spray of pine needles, still conscious, just. No one seemed startled. Instead there was a collective easing. Some of the women sighed and turned away back to town. A few young men hovered near the border, watching the forest like they expected something to come howling out.
‘Jesus Christ,’ Clem coughed. ‘You – raving lunatic—’
‘Shut up.’ Raphael pulled him up and dragged him back towards the church. Clem twisted, but Raphael was exactly as immovable as he looked and none of the struggling swayed him so much as half an inch.
‘Put him down,’ I said. I sounded like a Navy officer still. ‘It was a mistake.’
‘I’m not going to hurt him, I’m going to rebaptise him.’
‘You’ll hurt him by accident. Stop.’ However badly balanced I was now, I was still taller and I thumped my forearm into his chest to make him stop. He thought about making me move and I saw it, and then I saw it fade, but not altogether. He leaned back slowly.
‘It was a misunderstanding,’ I said. ‘He thought you were pointing to the people in the woods when you talked about scribes. He hasn’t seen you talk about time. He was unconscious at Martel’s.’
‘People won’t talk to him unless he’s baptised again,’ he said, much more quietly. I felt like I was trying to stand directly in front of a furnace. It was worse for knowing he was justified; Martel had said that everyone here would be killed if Clem were. ‘Get out of my way.’
I stood aside, and helped Clem up. He was too heavy for me to support and still foggy, so Raphael took him by the arm, not gently but not roughly either. The new baptism wasn’t much more than having his head dunked into the font, but when I looked back people were watching.
‘In nomine of whatever you think is looking after you. There. Congratulations.’ He dumped him on the ground, protected from any accusations of unceremoniousness because nobody else spoke English. ‘I’ll find you a towel.’
Clem propped his wrists on his knees. ‘He’s bloody strong.’
‘I saw.’ I knelt down too, slowly, then had to sit and cross my legs. ‘Are you all right?’
‘I’m fine. I suppose being attacked by the natives is part and parcel of the job. Minna will love it.’ He cracked his jaw and winced. ‘I thought he was going to kill me.’
‘You’re all right.’
‘No more getting in the way of psychopaths, hey?’ he said, nearly smiling, but not quite. ‘He could have hurt you.’
I nodded. He could have. But it felt good to have stood in front of him without flinching and, however stupid it was, I wanted to do it again. ‘He didn’t though.’
‘God, I really thought . . .’ Clem had the shaken look new recruits have when they see guns go off for the first time at a real ship instead of a hulk in the Bristol Channel. ‘He’s mad, isn’t he. He would have done it if I’d been too far in to drag out.’
‘I think he could have dragged you quite far,’ I said. I found his handkerchief and scooped up some snow with it so that he could hold it to his chin. ‘But I don’t think he’s mad. Martel will raze the place if anything happens to us and everyone certainly thought something was about to happen.’
‘Yes.’ He sniffed, then winced. ‘That was interesting. That was fear-of-God shock, not fear of some fellow with a bow and arrow. Or Martel. You know, I’ve got a theory about this place.’
‘What?’
He pushed his wet hair back. I’d never noticed before, but he was beginning to lose it, just up from his temples. ‘You know the Incas practised human sacrifice? You find the bodies sometimes, miles up in the mountains. All the victims are children. Completely perfect children, which isn’t a coincidence in a society that didn’t know siblings marrying was a bad idea. Perfect teeth, virgins, everything. The idea is, you see, nothing impure for the gods.’ He lifted his eyebrows. ‘Notice it was him who fetched me. No one else crossed, even though it was an emergency and they wanted to. He’s the only healthy person we’ve seen here. That’s why he can go over. It’s holy ground.’
I looked back at the town and the ragged line of people limping over the bridge. ‘So cripples and invalids are . . . impure.’
‘Right, exactly. So not allowed. They’re left here, past a clearly marked line, in salt, which in itself is all about cleanliness, isn’t it. And the graveyard, and the altar, look – both beyond the salt.’
I hadn’t noticed before about the altar but he was right. It was exactly on the salt, or where the salt would have been under the church floor. Standing in front of it yesterday, Raphael and I had still been on the Bedlam side, but the statue behind it wasn’t. Which was why, I realised, the church’s layout was inverted, with the altar at the wrong end of the cross. The building was a lot older than the Conquest; it must have been a native shrine long before it was a church. When the Jesuits arrived they must have tacked on the spire and kept the old altar in place.
‘That’s interesting,’ I said dutifully. ‘Was testing your theory worth being punched in the head?’
‘Are you joking? There are about fourteen academic papers in that, which you’d know if you ever stirred yourself to join any societies.’ He looked back at the border. ‘I wonder why he went in after me.’
‘Martel.’
‘I bet he could get away with losing one of us,’ Clem muttered. ‘One could be an accident.’
‘You’re right, I probably could,’ Raphael said. He pushed the door open and dropped a towel on Clem. ‘So don’t do that again.’
‘Is that what happened to the last expeditions?’ I said. ‘They crossed the border?’
He nodded.
‘Why would they do that?’ Clem asked.
‘Because the cinchona woods are that way.’ I pointed. ‘Through the forest. The river path traces a big loop. They thought they could save time.’
Clem looked towards the salt line again, then the path that stretched on around the river – or what should have been the path. It was nothing now except a space where snow heaped five feet high against the tree trunks. ‘How long did you say the snow would be here for?’
‘I don’t know,’ Raphael said, ‘but I doubt it will be long. It’s summer now, it should be warm. Why? Just be patient; it won’t kill you. Crossing the border will.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘It’s not impatience. We’re going to have timing problems if we wait too long. If we hit the Indian monsoons, we won’t be able to plant anything. They start in June and last until September. We need to be well clear of them, which means we have to arrive in Ceylon at the end of May, at the latest. It will take a month to get back to port from here, and another three weeks at sea, if everything goes smoothly. If we’re to have any kind of safe leeway, we need to leave in three weeks. If we don’t stick to that, we’ll reach India with nothing but a handful of very expensive firewood, even if we manage to retrieve cuttings.’
He watched me for a second and I thought he would hit me. I leaned both hands on my cane and decided he would just have to do it, because I wouldn’t be moving.
‘That it’s problematic for you doesn’t change anything. You can’t cross the border.’
‘Can we employ someone to help clear the snow on the path around?’
‘No. People here aren’t fit enough and you can’t take the fitter ones from the cocoa farm. They have to hit their quotas or Mr Martel won’t pay. Just wait,’ he said quietly. ‘Wait another week. No one knows what the weather’s doing. This might all be gone tomorrow. This is summer. There shouldn’t be snow at all.’
‘Then I can write to Martel and ask him to send men to help clear the path,’ I said, aware I was rubbing him up the wrong way but I didn’t want to think of what I was meant to do if we couldn’t get through. ‘We can say the coffee we want is down in the valleys. After this snow, the stuff you grow around here is definitely dead now.’
‘Someone would have to walk on the river back to Azangaro for you to send a letter to him,’ Raphael said, a little dangerously.
‘We can pay. Money isn’t in short supply,’ Clem broke in. ‘I think that’s an excellent idea.’
Raphael didn’t reply at once and I could see him making a survey of the possible futures. If he forbade us from sending the letter and the snow stayed, there would be no choice this time next week but to try through the forest, and he couldn’t watch us for every minute of every day. If he said yes, we would wait for Martel. He didn’t seem angry about it any more; we were making him anxious. Not even anxious. He was starting to look frightened.
‘You won’t make yourself any friends if he comes in two days’ time only to find the snow has already gone,’ he said.
‘I’ll say I made you. He can’t be angry with you.’
‘Fine,’ he said, almost too quietly. ‘Ask around town, find someone who has the time.’
He had brought his bag out as well as the towel for Clem and he went back to the St Thomas statue to wind Maria’s prayer around its wrist properly. Once he’d done that, he took out the same glass-handled brush and wax he’d used on the way here. When he began to clean the statue’s breastplate this time, though, his hand left soft trails in the pollen and before long there was a perfect geometric pattern hanging in the light.
Everyone had gone by then and the morning mist had cleared just enough to show the farmland. It was a patchwork of allotments, crammed into the space between the cliff and the border. I helped Clem up.
‘Let’s write that letter and see if we can’t find someone to take it,’ he said. ‘I’d feel a damn sight better with twenty strong men keeping an eye on Raphael, even if they can’t do much about the snow.’
‘Yes. Good idea. And we should send off your maps too. And make a sketch of the one on his wall.’
‘Why?’
‘Because then if we’re killed, the India Office will still have their charts. Which is what will be important, for whoever comes next.’
He looked queasy at that. ‘They do train you up a particular way, don’t they,’ he said.
‘I know, I’m sorry. But we still should.’
‘No, no, you’re right. The map’s done.’ He paused. ‘Em, what the hell are we going to do? It will take days for Martel to come, if he even feels like coming.’
‘Settle in, do some drawing.’
‘And wait for his temper to fray?’ He nodded back at Raphael, then winced and mouthed a much worse word than he would have said aloud. ‘It’s pretty damn frayed already and we shot ourselves in the foot telling him about the cinchona plan. All he has to say is that we were here for quinine after all and judging from what you told me, Martel would be only too glad for us to be killed by Chuncho instead of caught by quinine barons who might hold him responsible for letting us through in the first place.’
‘If he were sure Martel would believe him, he wouldn’t be so worried—’
Clem was already shaking his head. ‘No. We can’t bet our lives on that. Look, he has to like one of us at least and it’s not going to be me.’
‘I’m not his favourite soul either—’
He caught my arms too hard. ‘Just – you need to find a way and you need to start now.’
I looked across to where Raphael was still cleaning the statue. ‘Right. All right, I’ll try.’
‘Good,’ he mumbled. He made himself another snow poultice. ‘I’ll go and draft that letter to Martel.’
‘You should go.’
‘What?’
‘To Martel’s. Raphael can’t hurt you if you’re not here.’
Clem swallowed. He wanted to go.
‘I don’t want to leave you here with him, Em. I don’t like this at all. He doesn’t want foreigners here – he certainly doesn’t want us round the border or the markayuq and I think it might be verging on sacrilege for us even to be asking about them, never mind disturbing them – and there are so many accidents that could happen in snowy weather if he gets it into his head that you’re pushing too much or . . .’
‘No, look – it’s better if you go. Then you can courier the maps to Minna too. I’ll be fine.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Fifty-fifty. It’s good enough.’
‘All right.’ He deflated, relieved. ‘I shouldn’t be more than four days.’
I crushed the little boy in me that was frightened of being left behind. Clem wasn’t a coward. Someone had almost killed him and if he stayed, he would be resentful, which would annoy Raphael even more. He had to get away for a while.
‘Well, you go inside, I’ll . . . be with you in about ten seconds, I imagine, after he’s thrown something at me. There’s something I want to ask him.’
Clem patted my arm and turned away and into the church. He went slowly, holding his head at a careful angle. I crunched over the frosted pine needles towards Raphael and the markayuq and stopped two yards shy of them.
‘If you’re trying to be quiet, you’re not,’ he said without looking around.
‘No. But . . . listen. The statue – the markayuq, I mean – that my father brought home. My mother thought it killed her dog when I was small. Went to an asylum for it. Could a markayuq do that?’
He didn’t seem to think it was an unusual question. He went back to the waxing, and I thought he wouldn’t speak again, but he did. It sounded unwilling. I wondered why he bothered to make an effort. Martel hadn’t said he had to be polite to us. ‘What was the dog doing at the time?’
‘Biting me, I think.’
I’d been sitting with Dad, outside. It had been a hot evening. Heat is a difficult thing to remember in cold but I’d only had one jumper at the time and I hadn’t been wearing it, and there had been flowers everywhere. The dog had been a gigantic thing that, like Caroline, was well meaning but had a snappish disposition. It had come up to us calmly enough and tried to nudge me away from Dad, who it didn’t like. When we tried to chivvy it on, it caught my sleeve firmly enough to drag me up. I pulled back and it had clamped its teeth round my arm instead – that I remembered clearly, because now, under the anchor tattoo on that arm, there were still tiny scars. Caroline came out from the house to see what the noise was about and they argued over my head.
And then they’d both yelled, and the dog was dead on the ground. The crack of its neck had been like a thick twig snapping hard.
I still wasn’t sure if Dad had killed it, or me, or someone else.
‘You set them off standing near, never mind having a fight with a dog,’ Raphael said. ‘They move slowly but if they catch you wrongly they’ll break your arm. Certainly kill an animal.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Yes. Write to the asylum. She’s not mad.’
I nodded, although I couldn’t imagine that Charles would believe me even if I told him.
By then, Raphael had been standing there for long enough to set the clockwork off again. The statue put its hand against his chest to give him the same little push it had given me, but instead of stepping back, he leaned into it, letting his weight hang forward against the stone. More than anything the statue looked as if it had just picked up a rag doll, a good one, but worn out. I went to another to watch it move. Clem had sneered at the idea that Indians had made them, but the Ancient Greeks had had clockwork temple marvels, hydraulic doors, steam-engine toys, everything. There was nothing to say that somebody else, undisturbed by Christians burning the libraries, hadn’t thought of it too.