The Bedlam Stacks

by Natasha Pulley

  ‘Did you call it Father?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said, drawing out the sibilant in a way that didn’t in the least encourage any more questions. ‘Shall we go? Before you freeze.’

  As soon as Raphael had turned away, Clem beamed at me and made a hallelujah gesture at the sky, and then a little apologetic bow at the mountain. I laughed. Raphael was waiting at the corner where the path turned, not for us but for a pair of men and a wooden cart with one front wheel coming the other way. The cart was the one I’d seen from the boat, full of pineapples trussed down with a lattice of rope. One of the men had a withered arm and without being asked, Raphael pulled down the hook of the winch to loop it under some of the rope straps.

  ‘Thanks very much, Father,’ the carter said in what I only just recognised as Spanish, but he was speaking carefully, and he had only started after a glance towards us. ‘Who are these gentlemen, then?’

  ‘They’re just visiting,’ Raphael said. He was so much clearer than the carter that he might as well have been speaking English. ‘Exploring. We were just introducing them to the mountain.’

  ‘Oh, lovely,’ the man said happily. He and his friend both glanced up at the mountain and then away again, just shy of an obeisance. He smiled at me. ‘He’s a good still mountain,’ he explained. ‘Not feisty at all. People here are very kind and steady.’

  ‘Oh, right,’ I said, feeling like an idiot. I’d understood all of the words and none of the sense. ‘Thank you. It was . . . good to meet you.’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ he beamed.

  Raphael helped them both on to the lift platform beside the hanging pineapples. They sank gently out of sight and lapsed into Quechua once they were away.

  ‘Padre?’ Clem echoed. ‘Are you something to do with the mountain?’

  Raphael held up his wrist to show him the rosary. ‘I’m the priest.’

  ‘You’re a priest. Right. Good. These poor people.’

  The path was a white line, the only flat place the snow had been able to settle properly. We passed houses set on broad steps hacked into the rock, and tiny gardens where goats watched us go and fishermen sat mending nets, and then there was a bridge to the next stack, which was a jumble of gantries and crooked buildings with red windmills spinning on the roofs. The bridge was so high that we were well above even the birds playing on the wind. The river was hardly anything but a shiny ribbon, curving steep off to the south and our right. A young condor was sitting on the banister of the bridge and hooted interestedly when we came by. It shuffled along with us and I went closer to see how tame it was. Very tame; it let me touch its feathers, then did a little happy dance. I laughed. It must have been someone’s pet.

  Clem thumped my arm and pointed up ahead of us. The condor flew away.

  ‘What?’ I said, disappointed.

  ‘Look at that.’

  On the opposite bank, beyond the stacks and the crooked spire of a small church on the mainland, was the forest. We were too high for tropical things; the trees were immense pines. They were almost like sequoia, but the trunks were, even in the gathering twilight, not red, but white as silver birches. They stood in a rank perhaps forty feet away from the edge of the cliff. There was no scrub or tangle of smaller plants – only the pines, hundreds of feet tall and with trunks as broad as the church. They were so different that it took me a long time to understand they were the same as the one we had at home. This was what they were supposed to be, at their natural altitude instead of stunted at the Cornish sea level. I’d never imagined they would be so vast, or so many. They sheared away down towards the next valley and then on and on into a thready mist which seemed not to care that it was sharing space with the snow. It looked like the sort of place where you should have heard wolves, but it was monkeys that were howling.

  I had never really wanted to come to Peru, never been excited about it. There had been too much to worry about: walking, the journey, Clem, the altitude, and all the hundreds of stupid things that could have killed us before we even began. I’d thought that something was gone in me and I would never be uncircumspectly pleased with anything again. But all at once it came back. The place where my father had stood and my grandfather, a place that was in my bones and stories and home but had been as lost to me as Byzantium for years – here it was. I felt like I’d drawn a door on the wall at home in chalk and gone through into an imaginary place where the river was a dragon and somewhere in the forest was something stranger than elves.

  ‘Come on, it’s freezing,’ Clem said.

  ‘Yes . . . right.’

  The forest was dark, the canopy having completely blocked the daylight. A trail of soft light flared between the trunks. I stopped again.

  ‘Did you see that?’

  ‘See what?’

  I pushed my hand over my eyes. ‘Probably nothing.’

  ELEVEN

  Raphael took us to the church. It was at the end of a narrow glass road, in the shadow of the titan trees, where the air was much colder and frost glittered on the sunless side of the spire, which was lopsided and missing a patch of its terracotta tiles. Ivy had crept over the gap. Right up to the roof, so that the whole place looked like a cabin imitation of a church, the walls were covered by stacked firewood that parted in a grudging sort of way only to make space for the windows. They weren’t big church windows, just ordinary ones. Near to it, the glass blocks of the road were being slowly prised apart by moss and sage. Everything was overgrown and dead poppies nodded in the long grass.

  A little red windmill had been built into the roof, just like all the other houses. When I turned back, they made red dots all through the grey scattering of snow, catching the very last of the light as the sun disappeared beyond the mountains. I wondered what they were for but I had a feeling that if we asked Raphael about everything that caught our interest, we’d both be shoved into the river before dinner.

  The forest stretched out for as long as the river did on either side. It had looked dense from further off, but close to it was primordial. It wasn’t the sort of forest that could have been cleared with men and axes. Standing there, it was less strange that the people had decided to build out on the stacks. There were monkeys around the roots and they weren’t big, but they didn’t move when they saw us. There must have been bigger, more dangerous things there that didn’t mind people either. Further downriver, there was nothing else. No road or other towns or a column of smoke. There were the trees, the snow, the cliffs, and that was it.

  The church’s back door was half the width of an ordinary one. Clem had to turn sideways. Instead of the vestry I was expecting, there was a kitchen, Quakerishly bare and very cold. Raphael pulled open the stove door as soon as we were inside. Next to it, sitting in a larger bucket of water as if it were gunpowder, was a copper bucket of sawdust. He threw in a handful, struck a match against the stove’s grate and pushed the grille shut straightaway. Inside, light popped into life like fireworks, flashing and crackling for a good few seconds before the heat caught on the logs and settled to a more ordinary glow.

  ‘What was that?’ I said, a little flatly, because I already knew but it was frustrating to meet someone who knew all about it when we had muddled on in uninterrupted ignorance and blown up half the house.

  ‘Whitewood. It explodes. If you light a fire, only use the wood that’s stacked outside. It’s kapok, from the other side of the river. Didn’t you say you had some, at your house?’

  I was surprised he had paid that much attention at Martel’s. ‘Yes. We . . . had a bit of an accident recently.’

  He swept his eyes down me as if he would have liked to throw me out and lock me in a well-ventilated igloo before I could explode anything important. ‘Try not to do it again.’

  ‘I won’t, but – what makes it explosive?’

  ‘I don’t know. But all the gantries in town are made of it, so no smoking, unless you want it to go up in your face. Or in here.’ He pointed upwards.

  The inside of the spire roo
f had been fixed neatly but often. The old planks, which must have patched over the first holes, had darkened and crumbled in turn and now they were interspersed with newer planks themselves. And all that was a repair of the original roof, which must have fallen in completely at some point, or else been pulled down when the place was made into a church.

  Raphael brought cheese and salted meat down from the cupboards and put them on glass plates on the table. He disappeared outside briefly and came back with a pineapple, which he diced up so fast he must have done it every day, then tipped the pieces into a glass bowl. When I tried it, it was the sweetest I’d ever tasted. He opened the grate again once the fire was going, to let some of the heat out, then pulled away a peg that kept a pulley from moving. The ropes disappeared up through the ceiling and down through the floor. Up above somewhere, something creaked and turned squeakingly. After a few minutes came a rush of water just under the stove, then a hiss as it hit something hot. The cliff curved inward, so the ropes must have gone down through it to the open air and then the river to bring up water. It seemed bizarre until I tried to think of another way to get water on glass stacks. There would be no wells.

  Another few minutes later the rush of water came again and this time there was a muttering as it poured into pipes I hadn’t noticed. They were bronze and glass, and they went all round the walls, close to the floor and under it; I soon felt the heat coming up from the tiles. Raphael stood still, watching them.

  ‘If you see anything leaking, say. All this should have been lit up last week.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘Before the frost. Cold pipes break if you heat them up too quickly.’

  I nodded, but nothing burst or broke, only rattled. In the quiet, I noticed we hadn’t heard from Clem in a little while. He was collapsed over his arms, still damp. When I nudged him, he mumbled about the altitude again. As gently as I could, I undid the buttons on his wet coat and got it mostly off him, so that it wouldn’t block the heat from the fire. The lining started to steam.

  Raphael had turned back to the stove, which had a separate boiler compartment. He dipped a pan in and tipped quinoa grain into the bottom with a soft sandy hiss. As soon as it was on the stove top, it started to bubble. While it did, he pulled open a glass-handled drawer in the base of the stove. Inside was a metal tray where salt had dried in bumpy white waves. He poured it carefully into a glass bowl, already half full. I watched him put it back.

  ‘Is that a distillation oven?’ I said. ‘How did you get that up here?’

  ‘I didn’t, it was made here. Everyone’s got one. This place has been here hundreds of years. They’ve always made salt.’ He leaned forward to touch the wall, which had been built in two stages. The base was all irregular polygons. They had been fitted curiously around a natural outcrop of the bedrock, some of which was swirled through with glass, like a splash. Into its gaps, the masons had eased specially carved and curved bricks, even though it would have been much easier if they had chipped down the original rock. The upper half of the wall was much more standard, all straight bricks, but the irregular ones blended into them. It seemed like a painstaking, unnecessary effort to make the wall look as if it had grown up out of the ground.

  The firelight threw into relief a frieze carved over the brickwork. There were pictures of trees and what might have been animals or tree gods, and mountains, and the shape of the river – our river – made simple and blocky. It was ancient. The only thing to say we weren’t in a real Incan house was an alcove that must have been carved into the wall later, because it interrupted the line of the bricks. Inside was a shrine of the Virgin Mary, only the size of a doll. She was gold, but her robes were blue glass. They swam with shadows in the firelight, and then more strongly when Raphael lit a candle from the stove and set it beside her. I touched the edge of the map, which had been worked in geometric patterns.

  ‘It’s like a . . . what do you call it, those omnibus maps where they square off all the roads.’

  Raphael rocked down into the chair next to mine and took some pineapple too. ‘Listen. The snow’s still coming. If it’s thick in the morning, you’re stuck. The path will be snowed shut and the river will freeze.’ He touched the wall again as he spoke. He was showing me the section that was us. Bedlam was marked over the river. Below it, a long path snaked round the bend.

  ‘Where are the cinchona woods?’

  He traced the path all the way west around the riverbend, which was so steep that it would in the next few thousand years become an ox-bow lake, right to a point almost directly opposite Bedlam through the forest, due south.

  ‘It looks good on there but that path is narrow.’

  ‘So that’s . . .’ I was sitting with my back to the forest, facing the stacks. The town lights winked and glowed behind him through the window. ‘Over there.’ I pointed left, through the map wall.

  ‘That’s right.’ He picked up a pencil and drew a neat compass on the stone. The map wasn’t quite orientated north; it was north-east, but they had shifted it to make the dragon shape of the river upright. When he marked on the points, he wrote the letters in schooled, old-fashioned loops.

  ‘Is it not possible to go straight through the forest?’ I asked. ‘Cut off the river, go due south? The snow wouldn’t matter under the canopy.’

  ‘No. The border I told you about is here.’ He drew a line right below the town, so close that I looked round to see if I could see through the window. There was only blackness outside in that direction, but the way he had drawn it made it look as if it could hardly be a hundred yards behind the church. He pointed the end of the pencil behind me too. ‘Chuncho territory. Do not cross the salt border. You’d be shot and hung up in a tree.’ The wind howled, ruffling loose tiles in the roof. Fighting against the cold, the hot water in the pipes muttered and clattered more loudly. Over it all, the windmill had a rhythmic squeak and in the lulls I could hear the wind pulling at its sails. ‘I don’t know what the weather’s playing at this year,’ he said quietly. ‘This is summer. It should be warm until April.’ We were still only at the beginning of February.

  ‘There’s a solar storm.’ I took out my compass and put it in front of him so that he could see how the needle was skipping. ‘It’s still going. We saw the southern lights in Peru. I think it’s affecting the weather.’

  Raphael looked at the compass and then me, not uninterested, but he must have reached his capacity for conversation that day because he lifted his bag on to his lap and took out the clocks from Azangaro. Gently, he prised the cases open and began to disassemble the clockwork, one piece at a time, with a pair of tweezers. I leaned across to Clem to see if he was awake, but he wasn’t.

  ‘Is there somewhere for him to lie down?’ I asked.

  Raphael pointed with the tweezers to a little door that would lead into the other arm of the church’s small cross. When I went through to see, it was a tiny chapel, empty except for three or four beds neatly turned out on the stone floor and another alcove-shrine, a saint this time, although I couldn’t have said which. He was gold and glass too.

  Clem got up with some help, but he was dizzy and damp and it took a while to manoeuvre him into fresh clothes and then into one of the pallet beds. I’d thought it would be cold, but the pipes ran around the walls here too, and they must have been under the floor, because it was warm enough to have heated the sheets through. They felt like they had just come off presses.

  ‘Is there a light?’ I called. Because it was dark in the chapel and light in the kitchen, the steam drifting in through the doorway glowed.

  ‘Above you. Twist the key. Like on a clock.’

  I didn’t understand until I straightened up and found what I thought was an oddly made oil lamp hanging on the wall from a piece of rope. It was made out of an old fishing float, but there was a clock’s key in the side. I turned it and heard clockwork skitter. Inside the glass ball, a dusty gold glow trailed a clock’s second-hand turning disembodied from a clock
face. The light strengthened with each tick of the brass hand, and by the time a minute had swept by, it was much brighter than a candle. When I held it close to my eye, I could see the matter of the light; it was tiny particles, floating like luminous icing sugar.

  ‘What is this stuff?’

  ‘Pollen.’

  I turned the lamp round in my hands. I didn’t hear what he’d said for a long lag. It knocked around inside my skull for three or four bounces before the thinking part of me caught it. ‘Pollen? From what?’

  He didn’t answer.

  When I came back into the kitchen, he had lit more lamps and put one on the table to read by. The light cast long, criss-crossing shadows over the dismantled clocks where it shone through the mesh of rope that caged it. A cluster of lamps, little ones, ticked near the door. The quinoa was bubbling gently, but it wasn’t even half-ready, given that the water was boiling so low. The stove was burning down too. Raphael was perfectly still and he didn’t look up when I came in.

  ‘Mind if I put some more wood on the stove?’

  I waited, but he still ignored me, so I put in all the wood from the scuttle. The stove was by a window that turned the corner of the room. One side faced the town and its lights, the other towards the forest, along the treeline. It was black except for a faint glow somewhere inside that was the same colour as the lamps’ pollen. The new wood sent out a fresh wave of heat and I almost thought about taking off my coat. Raphael was sitting in his shirtsleeves. In all the time I’d been pottering, he hadn’t turned the page. I sank down in the other chair to look at the light on the table. The pollen floated and furled, brightest at the edges of a set of tiny sails stitched on to the clock hand. It was hypnotic. My fingertips itched to open up the bulb and see what the pollen did if it was allowed to float free, but I didn’t want Raphael to punch me in the face so I sat without touching it, my hands trapped between my knees.