The Bedlam Stacks

by Natasha Pulley

  ‘What do you want?’

  ‘Can you leave me a map and take Mr Markham on?’ I said. ‘I’m not going to be able to go quickly, I’m sorry.’

  Clem didn’t argue and glanced up with hope in his eyes.

  ‘No,’ Raphael said. ‘Eat your grapes.’

  ‘To be fair, a lazy Indian probably goes fifteen times slower than you ever would,’ Clem said, resigned to it now.

  I concentrated on the grapes. The sugar was chipping away at the tiredness. The wheedling bluebottley unease that had been whining close to me since the glacier faded. We were safe. It was almost warm. For the first time in days it felt nearly like the land had noticed it was supposed to be summer. I hoped the snow at Azangaro was just a quirk of local weather, not a wider thing to do with the solar storm. I was so tired of being cold already.

  I was turning a grape over between my fingertips when I saw a man coming towards us from the direction we were heading in. Clem, who was sorting through his pack, didn’t notice him. He was Spanish, wearing an old colonel’s jacket over his ordinary clothes and a rifle slung over his shoulder. It was Dutch. He leaned down close to me. He stank of old brandy.

  ‘I’ll cut your feet off if you so much as touch a quinine tree.’

  I pushed the handle of my cane up hard into his jaw. He reeled backwards.

  ‘Jesus,’ said Clem. ‘Where did he pop up from?’

  The man shoved me against the wall by the front of my shirt.

  ‘One seed. Don’t worry, everyone will be watching.’

  From the edge of my eye I saw Raphael drop down beside us, his rifle against his shoulder.

  ‘Manuel,’ he said in his quiet way. ‘Get your hands off him.’

  ‘Oh, it’s you,’ said Manuel. He laughed. ‘Don’t trust him, boys, he’s only in it to sell your guns to me. Hey?’ He slapped me, not hard enough to spin my head but enough to make my teeth ache. I slapped him back, much harder. He looked indignant and pulled out a knife, and Raphael shot him in the head. Clem yelled, which made me jump where the gunshot hadn’t. I held the back of my head where it had banged against the terrace behind me, waiting for it to stop pulsing.

  ‘Did you have to do that?’ Clem demanded.

  ‘Since you didn’t. Look at me,’ Raphael said, much more gently than I would have thought he could speak. He tipped my head to either side to be sure my pupils were even. Close to, he was younger than I’d thought; some of the lines around his eyes weren’t lines at all but the subsurface scars that boxers have.

  It was shamefully nice to be paid the attention, though it had nothing to do with real concern. Seeing him close brought back a clearer memory of the night before and a bolt of shame went right through me for having let myself go so badly in front of him then. I put my fingertips on his chest and pushed. ‘All right, no one’s burning down your village. Who was he?’ I said towards the body.

  ‘He used to be a quinine farmer before all the trees were cut back round here. He just helps maintain the monopoly now. Makes threats to any white men who come through.’ He put his rifle back over his shoulder and I caught the chemical tang of gunpowder. It was a good smell, one I’d forgotten I liked.

  ‘Thank you,’ I said, wishing I hadn’t been churlish. ‘I’ll try and be less useless.’

  That made him laugh for some reason, or almost. ‘Get on your horse. Before his son comes. And you, Markham. Quispe, we’re going,’ he added in Spanish.

  ‘And we’re leaving the body here, are we?’ Clem said.

  ‘Feel free not to, but I am.’ He rode away before Clem could argue.

  Quispe was looking at the body with a quiet satisfaction that made me think the man must have had a history of worse things than threats. I sat looking at the Dutch rifle, holding the back of my head where it hurt.

  ‘What if Raphael hadn’t had a gun, hey?’ Clem said once Raphael was out of earshot. ‘Don’t pick fights you can’t finish, Em. We both could have been killed.’

  I knew he was only annoyed with himself for having been slower than Raphael, but it stung anyway and before long I was lagging further behind them than ever. It was Clem who went ahead; Raphael waited to make sure I was still there and twice he turned down unexpected paths and left Clem to work out that we weren’t following. Quispe must have known the way, because he dawdled well behind, walking rather than riding. When we turned down one steep valley, Raphael pretended not to notice how much I was struggling for a while, then touched my arm to stop me and pointed to a spray of great boulders across the mountainside. They looked like the petrified vertebrae of a huge spine.

  ‘That’s unusual,’ he said. ‘Lucky to see one these days.’

  ‘What is it?’ I asked, leaning forward in the saddle and suspecting he had invented it as a reason to stop.

  ‘They’re called chakrayuq.’

  It sounded like a real word. He was watching the stones, not me, passing his rosary beads through and through his hands, the reins pinned under his knee.

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘It means owner-of-the-field,’ Clem called. He must have just found the turning. He sounded annoyed. ‘They’re a kind of shrine. Very old. People used to think they were alive.’

  ‘No,’ Raphael said, too quietly for Clem to hear. ‘That’s etymology. It means . . .’ His eyes went into the middle distance while he thought about it. I saw the moment he came up with what it should be, because he looked sad, like he hadn’t thought of it that way before, the Quechua word being just a word. ‘Giant,’ he said. ‘It’s a dead giant.’

  NINE

  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 re
st 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 dow
n. 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.’