Stars of lamplight began to come over the bridge to the mainland. When Francesca explained what was going on, there was a weird stir, more interested than worried, as if none of them believed at all in the chance of hypothermia or falling over a tree root, or bears. Even though she said we would have to look for him, they all ignored her and went automatically to the markayuq. The statues looked alive in the lamplight and they moved their hands to take things, almost constantly – salt vials and shells and knotted prayer strings – because whatever pressure pads were in the ground were being bumped on and off by everyone around them. Maria had propped herself against St Thomas, her fingers closed over his sleeve, watching the crowd with unhappy eyes.
Inti took charge when she arrived and organised a long line down the border. Maria hung back. Her mother was nowhere I could see. I fetched her out from behind the markayuq and took her with me. She held my hand too tightly at first, and I gave her our lamp so that I could hold onto her and my cane at the same time.
The pollen was just thick enough in the air to leave strange, half-visible illusion trails behind us. Further into the forest, beyond the border, the trees stopped the wind and it was possible to see where the bats were swooping, invisible themselves but leaving tangles of gold light behind them.
The trees skittered. Sometimes a stream of pine needles fell down when something passed overhead in the canopy, and every now and then stingingly heavy drops of water fell and splashed on to us. Everyone was walking slowly down the border, calling and moving their lamps, or throwing pine cones to make light arcs in the dark. Maria slowed right down after a little while. We were at the back. She had a cord tied around one of her coat buttons and she was putting new knots into it, upside down if the way Raphael did it was normal.
‘Do you want to leave a prayer with one of the markayuq?’ I said.
She shook her head. ‘My knots aren’t very good. And my hands are cold.’ I liked talking to her. Her Spanish was exactly at my level, about a middle-sized child’s. ‘I’ve spelled it wrongly.’
‘I’m sure you could just tell it to him.’
She twisted her nose and then shook her head. ‘Nobody can talk to markayuq any more. They don’t understand.’
‘Why don’t they?’
‘They’re old. They spoke another language in those days.’ She was watching a big pollen trail in the forest, the wrong shape for a person.
‘Maria, Raphael is strong. And he can fight. I don’t think anyone has taken him anywhere. He’s here somewhere, we’ll find him.’
‘He wouldn’t have had a choice,’ she said, sounding suddenly far more adult.
We still hadn’t found him after half an hour. If he had gone back to town, he couldn’t have missed the lights; if he was anywhere nearby and conscious, he certainly couldn’t have missed them. After barely half a mile, the front of the line reached a place where there was only a narrow path between the border and cliff, blocked with snow. Inti turned everyone back the other way and still there was nothing.
Clem came to walk with us.
‘Where do you think he’s gone?’ he said quietly. ‘I don’t buy that he’s been snatched. We would have seen something in the pollen, or you would have.’
‘I think he went out without a coat and it’s minus God knows. He can’t feel heat or cold. There’s something wrong with him.’
‘Christ.’ He looked out through the trees. ‘We should be looking over the border.’
‘We can’t go over the border.’
He made a face at me. ‘Gone native, have you?’
‘A bit,’ I sighed.
‘Well, let’s put it to Inti.’
But when we did, she shook her head. ‘No. You’ll be killed.’
‘But if he is out there, he isn’t very far in,’ I said. ‘I saw him go. He’ll be only just out of sight. It’s bitter out here, it’s a miracle nothing’s ever happened to him before. He was just in his waistcoat and shirt. I saw.’
She was shaking her head again. ‘No. If that’s what happened then – then it’s what they wanted.’
‘Who, the people in the woods? Why is what they want so important?’
Clem caught my arm. ‘They don’t see them like people, old man,’ he said quietly. ‘Listen to her. I told you, it’s religious. The salt line isn’t just about crippled and not crippled; it’s about unclean and holy, humans and angels. Flesh and stone.’ He nodded to the markayuq. ‘You and I are thinking of a town in there with gutters and markets and weavers, but that’s not what it means here. They’re looking at it like heaven, or Eden, and Raphael is a kind of Nephilim with one foot in either world. You’re running up against God’s will, almost. Am I right?’ he added to Inti. He had said it in Spanish.
She nodded, and looked faintly appalled that I hadn’t understood before. ‘Well – of course. Merry-cha, if they want him, you can’t try and fetch him back.’
‘Inti,’ I said. ‘For God’s sake. They don’t. They don’t even know he’s there. He could be dying.’
She caught my arm before I could cross the salt.
‘You can’t cross,’ she said, as if I were talking about going to the moon.
‘I can see him,’ Maria said, not loudly. I almost didn’t hear. She broke away from me and ran over the border before anyone could stop her. She had a bumbling, little-girl run and she laughed as she went.
Inti yelled and so did everyone else. Maria didn’t come back. I started after her but Inti caught my arm and a man with one eye snatched the back of Clem’s shirt. He was her brother, or I thought I’d heard her call him that.
‘For God’s sake, she can’t—’
‘Inti—’
‘Wait!’ she said over us. ‘Just wait. They might bring her back. She’s really just a little girl; they might bring her back.’
We could all see Maria’s pollen trail. It wove as she tried to find whatever it was she had seen. People were calling to her but if she heard she paid no attention and I had a sinking feeling in my diaphragm. She was about seven, on the inside. No amount of calling would have made much of a dent on me when I was that age if I’d seen Dad over an arbitrary line in the ground.
Another trail flared as it came out from behind a tree.
Clem caught my sleeve. ‘Christ, is that him?’
I shook my head. ‘Can’t tell.’ But it was moving wrongly for Raphael, and although it was difficult to judge in nothing but light and black, I was nearly sure it was taller than me. Other people thought so too and the shouts took on a raw edge. Inti was quiet.
When the man reached her, Maria’s pollen ghost straightened up as if someone had said something to her. They came back together. Whoever it was shepherded her, slightly in front of him. He didn’t come all the way but stopped just behind the roots of a tree to watch her keep going and around him the pollen started to fade. Maria’s light trail resolved into Maria herself as she came into the lamplight. Someone snatched her back over the salt.
‘Maria, you silly girl,’ Inti burst out. ‘What will we tell your poor mother?’
Maria seemed not to mind. ‘I saw Raphael,’ she said. ‘It’s all right. He isn’t stolen.’
‘Who brought you back?’ I said.
‘St Thomas did,’ she replied, and everyone seemed to think that was a perfectly good answer.
‘Well, you’re damn lucky he recognised you,’ Inti said, still shaken. ‘Come on, let’s find you some holy water.’
I stared hard at the place where the man beyond the border had stopped and moved away from the crowd so that I’d see the last of the pollen glow undrowned by everyone’s lamps. It was there, just, an afterglow still hanging in the air where he had walked. I lost it behind trees sometimes because they were so broad, and sometimes it looked as if he had walked under their high roots, but I followed the trail in stops and starts along the salt. It turned towards the border about halfway along, a straight right-angle of half-light whose end I didn’t see before the wind gusted and sparked the pollen fresh, destroying the tiny glow that had been left. But the line had been there and I followed it. I had to bypass another tree before I could see where the trail would have come out, if it had come out. It was where St Thomas had been standing before, but, although the grass and the frost were dented from the weight, there was no statue there now.
Clem had hurried after me, and Inti’s brother.
‘How did they do that?’ I said after a long silence.
‘They could have . . . moved the original statue behind a tree and dressed a man up,’ Clem said slowly. ‘Make a bit of a show.’
I couldn’t imagine anyone being able to move a markayuq with any subtlety. ‘What for?’
‘To prove there’s someone there. To prove to us that there’s someone there. To keep us out.’
I had closed my teeth too tightly and when I spoke again I heard a tiny crackle of cartilage inside my jaw, like I’d bitten a few grains of sugar.
‘Sounds to me,’ Clem added when I didn’t say anything, ‘like he’s gone talk to them about us, doesn’t it. Perhaps give them a bit of a warning to watch out, if we can’t clear the snow on the path. I suspect he’s less missing than we think.’
Rather than go back to her own house, Inti stayed with us at the church and sat by the stove for a long time. She must have known I was on the edge of crossing the salt, because she brought her brother, who could have stopped me just by standing in the doorway. He was a quietly mannered man, polite, but there was no escaping why he was there and in a graceless and resentful sort of way I made them both coffee and watched them wince over it. Neither of them had as much difficulty moving about as I did.
‘We’re going to have to get his things together,’ she said to me. ‘Aquila will live here now.’
‘Inti, it’s been less than a day,’ I said. ‘He might—’
‘He disappeared for seventy years last time,’ she interrupted. ‘It doesn’t get shorter. If he comes back at all, it won’t be in our lifetimes.’ Then, more gently, ‘He’s gone, Merry-cha. Everyone knew it would happen sooner or later. Honestly, I think he was just holding on until Aquila was old enough.’
‘So you’re going to move everything of his out and install Aquila? What if he does come back?’
‘We’ll put it all back again. But he won’t come back. And I don’t think he’s got much, anyway. I’ll get started in a minute.’
I knew I couldn’t claim to have got an especially detailed understanding of him in a week, and he might not have minded in the least, but it struck me as something Raphael would mind a great deal, for Inti to see where he slept. He was in and out for twenty hours a day, with no privacy except in that tiny loft beside the bells. It would have been horrible enough anyway that he should have to offer that up as well, but given that he must have vowed chastity as well as poverty and service, it was infernal. I couldn’t think of anything less sacerdotal than letting a brisk pretty woman go through his clothes. The idea of having to explain it to him when he came back made me push my fingernails into the wooden ladder.
‘I’ll do it,’ I said.
‘No—’
I hooked my cane over a rung of the ladder by way of staking a claim. When I climbed up to the loft, I expected it to be full of the furniture and clutter that wasn’t downstairs, but there was hardly anything at all. There was a bed, a pallet exactly the same as the ones set up in the chapel, and by its side was a falling-apart copy of the Bible in Latin. Opposite, built into the wall, was a wardrobe, which was bare. There were shelves under the round window, empty and dusted. In the corner, once I’d wound up the lamp, I found a box. There were books inside, packed up, all in Latin. The bookplates on the flyleaves had the seals of the Vatican printed on them. Raphael’s name was written in, although they were thoroughly second-hand; the publication dates were from the seventeen hundreds. Harry’s letter was there too, and some sewing things; leather like the statues wore. He was making something for one of them, halfway through the riveting of a seam. Under those were his own clothes, clean and folded. That was it. I had to keep my head down because the bells were right above me. They moved slightly in the draught, not nearly enough to knock together, but the bronze hummed and gave a metal edge to quiet.
‘There’s nothing left to do,’ I called down. ‘Just a box. He’s . . . packed everything away already.’
‘Well, that’s something,’ Inti said unhappily from below. ‘All ready for Aquila then. He must have known it would be soon.’
‘Mind if I visit?’ Clem said.
‘Plenty of space. But mind your head.’ I propped my cane against the wall and sat down on the bare floorboards. It was cold. There were no pipes. The ladder creaked as Clem climbed, and when he appeared his breath steamed. He looked around and then lifted his eyebrows at me.
‘Heavens. He really has packed up.’
‘He knew he was going,’ I said. ‘Did Inti tell you the story, about how the priests always disappear?’
‘She did.’ He came to sit next to me on the floor. Together we looked like something from an abandoned toyshop. He was all round and gold and I had to sit with my good leg folded and the bad one crooked, like a puppet someone had dropped from a height. Listen, ‘I don’t think there are wild Indians in the woods, Em. I think there are henchmen from the quinine barons. There’ll be a semi-permanent camp out there. They feed the border myth, which is the perfect excuse for them to shoot anyone who strays in, no questions asked. We’ve been planning to go around, but we might not be able to, if Martel’s men can’t clear the snow. So Raphael’s gone in to warn them we might try to go straight through.’
‘But I don’t see why he would be packed up like this.’
‘He probably wants to get out of here as soon as his duty’s done. It must be coercion. He’s clearly not getting a cut.’
I pushed my hand over my face. ‘But it would be dangerous to keep a camp out there. I mean maybe it is quinine men, but there are Indians round here.’
‘How do you know?’
‘Martel said it was . . .’
‘What if they’ve been cleared out? It’s such a good set-up. The people living here keep anyone from crossing the border because they believe it’s blasphemy. It’s self-policed; it’s brilliant. They’re not surprised if someone who crosses doesn’t come back, so there’s no murder accusation. Stop seeing the frills and look at the actual result of what’s going on. Someone inside the forest is stopping people from crossing, and killing those who do. What do we know is on the other side? Quinine. Come on, Em. Wake up.’
I pulled my clasped hands apart and then again. It made the joints hurt but I couldn’t keep myself from it.
‘He could have just told us that. Don’t go in the forest here, there are quinine thugs with guns. That’s far simpler than Indians and abandoned children and walking statues. And . . . much more likely. I’d have believed that.’
‘Yes, but Em, what an Indian man born and raised in the middle of nowhere imagines to be likely or necessary isn’t what you or I would. I should think he didn’t think quinine men sounded frightening enough.’ He paused. ‘Look, take it from me: there’s almost no point in trying to work out why the natives do some things. Their way of thinking is so far from ours that no effort at translation will ever have more subtlety than smoke signals over a canyon. There will be factors here we don’t know, cultural, religious, all sorts. He speaks English but he thinks like a Quechua Indian, you know he does. Think about that past-in-front business. That won’t be the only difference, just the symptom of something much wider.’
I didn’t say that I thought Clem was a bad translator, or that I didn’t believe there was any such thing as an impassable gulf in the thinking of two human beings. Of course you couldn’t translate everything, but you could damn well explicate, particularly if you both spoke such a sprawling monster of a language as English. ‘What’s gone before you, and what will come after,’ I said instead.
‘Beg pardon?’
‘The past ahead. Time is like a river and you float with the current. Your ancestors set off before you did, so they’re far ahead. Your descendants will sail it after.’
‘No need to nitpick, old man, you know what I mean.’
I nodded, not wanting to have a fight under the bells. It would have resounded. ‘Sorry.’
‘Actually, this is rather good,’ Clem said cheerfully. ‘I think we ought to seize the day, don’t you?’
‘How do you mean?’
‘I can set off through the forest now, say I’m looking for Raphael if anyone tries to stop me. And I assume I won’t find him – what a shame – but we’ll have our specimens.’
‘Christ, Clem. If there are suppliers camped . . .’
‘Then I shall see them a mile away in the pollen, shan’t I?’
‘And they’ll see you.’
‘Are your tools in your bag? You know, the knife to take the cuttings, string, all that?’ He was already on his way down the ladder.
I tagged down after him just as he emptied out the last of my pack on to the windowsill in the chapel. Inti, who had been talking to her brother by the fire, plainly hadn’t guessed what we were saying. ‘They’re in that roll. But Clem – they’re going to see you.’
‘From a distance a person looks like an animal in that pollen, I’m certain, and I’ll see a big group of men long before they see me. I’ll manage.’
‘I don’t think you will. People have disappeared; half an army battalion disappeared in these woods.’
He came past me into the kitchen to take some food, which he did calmly and vaguely and must have looked, to Inti, as if he were only foraging for some dinner. ‘Yes, exactly. Whole expeditions, battalions, clunking about and setting off the pollen and the markayuq. Of course they were caught. One man is quite a different story. Stop fretting.’
‘We don’t even know how far it is. There’s no scale on that map, if it’s to scale at all—’
‘I’ll manage,’ he said again, with too much emphasis, like he was talking to a child. He came back with enough fruit and bread for a couple of days if he was careful.
‘No – Clem. Even if it’s near, you never managed to take a decent cutting on the ship. It will be wasted effort.’
‘Well, if I don’t try, no one will, will they,’ he snapped. ‘You can’t go and you frightened Minna off. There’s no one else to do it.’
‘I didn’t frighten her—’
‘For God’s sake, of course you did.’ He rounded on me much faster than he usually moved and pulled the chapel door closed behind him so that Inti and her brother wouldn’t hear that we were arguing. ‘You’ve been worse than useless since the start. First Minna, and then you had one thing to do, one: convince anyone we ran into we were here for coffee. And you told Raphael we were here for quinine the second he asked. Then I said to keep an eye on him and what did you do? You upset him so much he’s barely spoken to you for days. Of course he’s gone to tell the quinine men that we’re here. You can’t pretend you’ve been anything less than a catastrophic influence on this expedition. Much as I love you, get out of my way, calm down, and see if you can’t think of something to say to anyone who asks where I am, if they notice. Can you manage that?’
‘Clem, wait. What if you’re wrong? What if there’s something to these stories—’
He smacked me with the roll of tools he was holding. It snapped my head sideways and made me see stars.
‘You’re hysterical,’ he said. ‘Local priests are not spirited away by elves or fairies or whatever, and for God’s sake, Occam’s razor. What’s the simplest explanation for this border? An Inca-related culture so advanced they built clockwork statues in the whateverteenth century and still police a hundred-mile stretch of border watching over their rejected and less holy children, or some men guarding the quinine woods and feeding some old origin story from years ago, with the sense to order in a few Spanish church marvels and tell everyone they’re local miracles?’
‘I’m not saying elves,’ I said, slowly, because it was shocking how much it hurt to be hit in the face without having expected it, and on top of the old bruise. ‘I’m saying, what if there’s someone there? Organised people, not necessarily advanced, but organised. We saw those terraces in Sandia; there’s nothing like that even in Rome and I wouldn’t want to take on Romans. If this is their place, if they do watch the border – they’ll find you a hell of a lot faster than a few quinine men.’
‘Look, I know you had an impoverished education, but I’m telling you, categorically, the border is a piece of staged rubbish by people who know the locals are superstitious.’
‘I didn’t have an impoverished education.’
‘Yes, I expect the Bristol naval academy was very thorough—’
‘Hold on a minute. You didn’t go to university either. Wasn’t it some grammar school in the middle of—’
‘I was surrounded by people who did, always! I’ve published books, Merrick, papers. I don’t even know how many scholarly societies I belong to – look, I don’t want to go through listing everything. Just – perhaps, for once, defer to someone who might actually know what he’s talking about. I have to be honest with you, you’re bloody jumped up.’
‘Above my station, you mean.’
‘Well, yes,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry, but it’s true. You have a good name, and don’t get me wrong, Tremayne is a very respectable name indeed, but a name makes not a gentleman. You don’t know enough. You need to stop pretending you’re anything more than an able seaman converted into an India Office smuggler. Things will go a lot less wrong.’
‘You brought me because I’m qualified.’
‘I brought you because you can keep plants alive anywhere in the world. Of course you’re qualified for that, more than. Just let me fetch them, all right? I’m in charge of this expedition, so let me worry about the decisions. You concentrate on getting the wretched cuttings to India.’
I stayed quiet and saw the two ways ahead as clearly as memory. Down one, I turned around to Inti and her brother and told them what he meant to do. Inti’s brother was big and between us we would be able to lock Clem in the chapel, and he would be safe until Martel arrived, although by then, if there were quinine men in the woods, the path around by the river would almost certainly have been blocked or blown up and we would go home. I’d never work again. Sing would be sent to file things in a cellar somewhere. Bedlam would stay as it was for perhaps five years, and then someone somewhere would find a reason to shell Lima until the Peruvian government agreed to let British troops into Caravaya. If there were Indians, those troops would not wait about wringing their hands. They would burn the forest.
Down the other way, I let Clem go, and perhaps he came back with cuttings, but probably he would be caught and killed, like everyone else. There would be no cuttings, but his death would be all the reason the India Office needed to send a legion; any idiot would be able to see that. If the army’s arrival was a clear inevitability rather than a vague threat years in the future, it could be used as a bargaining chip. Someone in the supply line might let through some cuttings if the only other option were British artillery regiments camped over the Andes.
My cheekbone still throbbed and I stood paralysed for what felt like minutes and minutes. I wished he hadn’t hit me. It was hard to see past that and hard to know if the reasons for letting him go were good ones or just an excuse for revenge.
‘Yes,’ I said finally. Even as I said it, I had a terrible feeling that I’d decided for no better reason than that this was what Sing had told me to do, and the mountain air had stolen any capacity I might have had to imagine not doing it. I looked without meaning to at the jagged black shape outline beyond the town in stars and had a stupid vision of a cave somewhere in those razor crags where the logic of everyone who had tried to take things from this place lay stacked in little glass boxes. ‘You’re right. You’d better go to bed for now. I’ll play cards with Inti. They can’t stay here, there’s nowhere for them to sleep. They’ll have to go eventually.’
He let his breath out. ‘Yes. Yes, good. We’ll try and keep it a secret once I’ve got the cuttings.’
‘What are you two nattering about?’ Inti asked as we came through.
‘Gardening,’ I said. I dropped into the chair next to hers and played cards with them while Clem went to get some sleep. They lasted much longer than I’d hoped, long into the night, but eventually they went home. Before they left, Inti made me swear not to go anywhere, so I swore and then went to wake Clem.
As he disappeared into the dark, I stood in the doorway with both hands on my cane, waiting to see the pollen flare as he went into the woods. Although I was breathing and my heart was beating, my ribs felt hollowed, like there were no organs left there, having all been scooped neatly out and left in canopic jars elsewhere. The pollen flared beyond the markayuq. I went out a little way to see the town. The last week had been like being allowed to visit somewhere imaginary. I’d thought it was imaginary: the grim forest and the glass, the man who disappeared. People sang songs and told stories I knew from being a child, echoes from that gold jumble of half-memories that were all I had from before Dad died. Inti had said, welcome home.
I had no idea if I was helping Bedlam or if I’d just destroyed it.