When I came to, I was in a proper bed with a velvet pillow under my head. It was soft when I moved. I lay still for a long time, very sleepy. Some of it was altitude, that same thick feeling I’d had in Crucero but worse. Once I was sitting up, my head spun, not unpleasantly. I waited for it to stop. There was a bandage on my arm and the room was too bright. It was hard to see at all at first, but when I could it was all windows. Some were doors. A brazier burned low next to me.
I got up slowly. It was painful, but not impossible. Standing, I found all the cold air, which had a real bite now. I leaned against the wall on my way to the glass doors. Raphael was sitting outside, facing the balcony. He was very still and I thought for a horrible second that I was too late, but he twisted back when he heard the door and got up to help me across. It was even brighter outside than in and, in the brilliant light, the haze over his eyes was translucent. I folded slowly onto the bench, the L of my hand propped to my forehead to keep the sun out of my eyes despite how everything around us was mostly lost in fog.
He looked better, healthier. I said so.
‘It’s the altitude,’ he said. ‘We were made for up here. It’s twenty-five thousand feet. You won’t feel well.’
‘There are yak in Nepal that wouldn’t survive at twenty-five thousand feet,’ I grumbled. The fog made the cold cut-throat and someone had taken away my coat. He gave me a folded-up blanket I’d thought was a cushion. I hunched into it and then frowned. ‘Twenty-five thousand . . . there are no mountains that high in Peru. Are there?’
‘We’re not on a mountain.’ He pointed through the banisters of the balcony.
It wasn’t fog. We were in the middle of a cloud bank. Where the vapour was thin I could just make out the corners and roofs of buildings. It didn’t look like an ordinary city. Everything was on a different level, on whitewood gantries, and they didn’t stand on any ground. A garden floated at five or six different heights, just ahead of us. There were trees and flowers I’d never seen before, and colourful things in greenhouses. In a pavilion made of intertwining whitewood saplings was a bronze telescope, pointing down. A skiff with red sails wove along through the air, between the buildings. Now that I was looking more closely, they all had wharves and posts to tie up ropes. A fleet of boats hung like hot air balloons above one of them, all tied to the same ring.
‘Am I . . . allowed to be here?’
‘There are only one or two of us in a generation now. They left me in Bedlam for a hundred years and they’re feeling guilty,’ he said. ‘You can do whatever I want.’
‘They?’
‘The clerics in charge here, and the . . .’ He had to search for the word. ‘The Prior,’ he said eventually.
I caught the smell of smoke and held on to the banister. ‘Did they save the forest?’
He gave me a pair of binoculars. ‘Still saving it. There are aqueducts that cut through; it’s divided into fire zones. You’d never lose more than a fraction of it.’
I looked through the binoculars. There were ships below the clouds, waterships, moving slowly and spraying jets down on the still-smoking forest. I couldn’t see any more fires. I could taste the smoke, just, but we were a long way above it and the wind was taking it before it could filter too far into the city. I felt dizzy and had to give the binoculars back.
‘Jesus. Someone’s going to stumble over this place soon. There are rubber expeditions starting out round here, and that’s forgetting coffee and pepper farmers, and . . .’ I trailed off and tried to shake some of the fog out of my head. ‘Small countries with valuable resources always have to give them away in the end or they’re crushed. You can’t live in the middle of a nascent whitewood monopoly. Is there some kind of plan here to deal with—’
‘I’ve been here two hours, I don’t know. Calm down. It’s been hidden for four hundred years; no one’s coming in the next ten minutes.’
‘No, I know.’ I lapsed back on to the bench. ‘This is . . . I’m too altitude-stupid for good adjectives. It’s incredible.’ I leaned forward with the heels of my hands against the edges of the rail. I wanted to go to sleep.
Someone tapped me on the shoulder, on my other side. It was a man with a tangle of knot strings.
‘Oh, he doesn’t want that,’ Raphael said.
‘You don’t know. What is it?’ I asked.
‘Permission to come back when I wake. It’s not . . .’
I looked at the knots and then back at him. ‘You’d rather I didn’t.’
‘You won’t want to. It will be years and years.’
‘Well – I will, but that isn’t—’ I had to stop and try again. ‘Look, I know I’m not Harry, I know I’ve been standing in. If you don’t want me to come back I won’t. But I want to come back.’
He watched me for a long time and then reached past me to take the tapestry from the now worried-looking man.
‘What are you writing?’
‘Your name and my signature. Not Harry – you’re damn right you’re not Harry. He would never have done any of this. He worried too much about getting home to do anything much at all.’ He gave the strings back over my shoulder. The man retreated inside. ‘That isn’t binding to you, only to them,’ he said quietly.
‘I’ll be here.’
‘Yes, well,’ he said. He didn’t believe me and I didn’t try to persuade him. I knew I was sure, but there was no way to measure that for him, or to prove it was permanent. He was still watching the scribe. Once the door swung shut, he touched my arm and held something out. It was a pine cone, one of the iron-strong ones from the whitewoods, but it was charred. The fire had cracked it open, and inside the seeds were loose. Some pattered into my palm. ‘Souvenir.’
I took it carefully. ‘Am I allowed to have . . .’
‘No. But if there are other whitewood forests, no one will care too much about this one, will they?’
I sat studying the seeds and finally understood why Harry had planted an explosive tree at home. He had been seeing if whitewood would grow elsewhere. But it hadn’t grown properly; the wood had been light but it had never floated. It had failed because Heligan was at sea level. The whitewoods would need mountains, high. The Himalayas.
Someone else came into the room behind us, a stewardly man who gave the impression he had been just outside all along waiting for the scribe to leave.
I got up. ‘I’ll make some coffee,’ I said, a bit loudly, in case the steward had enough Spanish to guess at some English. ‘Do you want some?’
‘Please.’
While I looked in my bag to find the coffee, I slipped the seeds through a worn patch and into the lining. The steward had stoked the brazier and brought some water.
It only took me a minute to make some coffee, but it was too much. Raphael was gone by the time I went back out. I sat with him for a little while longer, in case vestigially he was still there, but I didn’t think he was. Before anyone could see – I don’t know why – I took his rosary.
I called to the steward, who called for doctors. I waited for half an hour before one of them explained in unsettlingly good Spanish that this wasn’t one of the short spells.
Without him they didn’t like my being there. I stayed close to my bag in case I had to run, though I had no idea how I was supposed to escape from a floating city, but when the soldiers arrived it wasn’t to arrest me. The doctor translated, gently, that they wanted to know where I should be taken, because there was a heavy chance I would die of the altitude in the next twenty-four hours. Any visitor was usually required to stay on the mountain for at least a month before risking the extra height of the city.
‘One of the markayuq told me I wasn’t meant to be here,’ I said, still slow and proving their point. The more I tried to speak the more I realised they were right. It was worse now than when I’d first woken.
The doctor winced. ‘Correctly. The border is closed. But frankly to refuse a retinue for turning markayuq is idiotic, and an unintended side-effect of the quarantine laws. Unfortunately many of our laws are made by markayuq and so it can take . . . rather a long time to change anything.’ He said it quickly, not liking to criticise them. ‘You brought him home safely. At this point I rather think it would be political suicide for anyone to say you shouldn’t have.’
I nodded and felt like I was going to cry. I must not have looked well, because the doctor gave me a cup of chocolate, spiced with something warm.
If Clem had been there he would have loved it. The soldiers had their hair shaved back from their temples and gold hoops around their arms that showed, I found out a lot later, their rank. They were the closest to Incan I’d ever seen in real life or in a book, but sitting there with them, I couldn’t summon up any curiosity. They seemed just to belong to the place. I wasn’t surprised to see orders passed along on knot cords; that the short swords they carried were made of obsidian, not steel; that their armour was gold-plated squares that rippled when they turned, or that they spoke that older Quechua which Raphael had taught me for the prayer in the forest. I had a faint, faint sense of being lucky to have seen them. It felt like having been dropped into a place where Rome never fell and there were still Caesars, but broad principles are hard to catch when the thing at hand is to work out how to read latitude on someone else’s map.
They had brought me a Spanish map, but it was old and I struggled to find Arequipa on it. Once I had, I sat back and felt hollowed out. The doctor sent the soldiers away and they went, oddly too respectful. I had a feeling it meant something here, that I’d arrived with a markayuq, but nobody said what it was.
I left a note for Raphael with my address on it, the same one Harry had left, feeling hopeless, because I couldn’t promise that anyone would still live at Heligan by the time he came around. They said it would be, by their best calculation, twenty-one years and six months.
They took me at night. The ship was small, but the sails caught the wind well and once we were above the forest, there was a blackout on board. I sat in the dark in a loop of rigging rope. I’d tied it myself and no one had stopped me. I swung gently, pushing off a little sometimes from the rail. There were lights under the clouds, a big spray of them that might have been Azangaro. I had been sitting straight, but something about seeing a familiar place took the last strength out of the bones in my spine and I let my head bump against the ropes.
Twenty-one years and six months. It was a long way. Looking at the distance made me feel so tired I didn’t even want to begin. Even if it had been less, there was no one to walk with. It ought not have been surprising. I’d never thought there would be anybody and it was spoiled to imagine that I had any right to company. In a few weeks, or months, I wouldn’t be sad any more and back to all my old indifference, which was ordinary enough, but just then it seemed monstrous. I squeezed the cross on Raphael’s rosary until my hand bled.
They left me just outside Arequipa. The ship couldn’t dip below a certain height – the whitewood lift was too much – but they let me down on a rope wound to a silent pulley. To anyone watching from the ground it would have looked like I was being lowered by a considerate cloud, though I don’t think anyone saw. The fields outside the town were deserted. I walked the last of the road up to the house where Minna was staying. The upstairs window was alight. Although I stared at it for a while, I couldn’t go up. I asked a beggar for the next nearest inn, where, because it was the off season for the herders, most of the rooms were empty and as good as free.