Page 36 of The Bedlam Stacks

‘Bizarre thing to do, leaving them here,’ I said.

‘Is it?’

‘Yes. Slinging unwanted babies off a cliff isn’t bizarre. That saves time, food, labour over someone who’s never going to be useful. But leaving them somewhere . . . they’re not saving themselves anything, are they? They must have spared people to look after the first ones, and people here farm land and take up space and territory, same as they would if they hadn’t been left here – they might as well keep everyone together. Same effort.’

He had been looking at me, but he turned his head slowly away while I talked. ‘I wouldn’t try and talk about Indians and common sense at the same time.’

‘I hate to break it to you but . . .’

‘There is a tribe,’ he said, over me, ‘about sixty miles up the road who decided it was a good idea to make women give birth alone in little huts two miles from everyone else, on the edge of a cliff. They’re well on their way to killing themselves off. Leave humans in a place like this for ten thousand years and you breed a special sort of moron. We’re not very impressive, as a race.’

‘The Inca were pretty bloody impressive,’ I protested.

‘The Inca lived in Cuzco, not in the Antisuyu.’ It wasn’t the first Quechua word he had used since coming back inside, I realised suddenly, but my hindbrain had parsed them without noting them. The Antisuyu was the land beyond the mountains. Anti, Andes. He had more of an accent now that he was tired too, with sharper consonants and those tiny sharp pauses mid-word which sounded profoundly more dextrous than English. However ambivalent I felt about his company, I could have listened all night. It was like hearing the moment when a ballerina stops walking and begins to spin. ‘We are not them. Are we?’ he said to the baby, who seemed not to hear. ‘Maybe she’s deaf,’ he murmured.

‘What happens to her now?’ I said. ‘And can you call her Ivy, please, because it would be a shame not to.’

He almost smiled. ‘She isn’t mine to name. We’ll find her a family in the morning.’

As if she didn’t like that idea, she began to cry. I gazed at them both and felt bleak about trying to sleep in a house with a crying baby in it. I saw Raphael’s nerves fraying with it too, but he didn’t shake her. Instead he only touched the back of her head to settle her again, then gave her a little toy horse. I didn’t see where he had taken it from, but she seemed pleased with it and bit the stitching on the saddle interestedly.

‘I’m going to bed,’ he said once she was quiet. ‘I’ll leave a light on the ladder.’ I looked, because I hadn’t noticed a ladder before. It led up into the belfry, which must have been where he slept. There were no more rooms down here. ‘There’s an obsidian razor for you in the drawer behind you. They stay sharper than metal ones. Soap on the third shelf of the cupboard.’ He was losing his voice again. ‘There’s a basin below that.’

‘Thanks.’

It seemed odd that he knew exactly where everything was until I remembered how orderly you can be, living alone.

He got up slowly, the baby on his hip. She sat straight, looking around, then seemed to run out of steam and bumped her nose against his chest again. He put the toy horse softly down on the table on his way out. I tried not to feel envious when he climbed the ladder smoothly and one-handed. The baby had her nose resting against his shoulder, so I could only see her eyes, but they narrowed when she smiled at me. I waved and she put her head down, embarrassed.

When I went outside, snowflakes settled on my hands for half a second each before they melted. It had never quite gone from the air and in the light it was blowing like the last disparate bits of fluff from old dandelions. A tiny kelly lamp burned in the outhouse to keep the intricate pipes from freezing. I didn’t remember his having gone to light it. On the church roof, the windmill kept on its uneven staccato creaking in the wind, and every couple of minutes new water rattled into the pipes.

I fed the fire again once I was back and then sat down with a book, easily tired enough for bed but wanting to give the baby time to go to sleep before I tried. I jumped when I saw something fall off the table from the corner of my eye, then thought I’d imagined it when nothing clunked. I leaned down to see.

It was the toy horse. It was a rocking horse and it was rocking gently on its runners. It hadn’t made a sound. When I tried to pick it up, I misjudged the distance and only knocked it. It spun gently, still silent. Wondering if I was going deaf, I poked it, and felt it sink and knock into the floor. As I took my hand away, it lifted again. Distrustful of myself, I got down on my hands and knees to put my temple right against the floor. The toy was floating a quarter of an inch off the flagstones. I could slide about twenty pages of the book under it, and the cover. Once I had, the horse sat on that. Eventually I picked it up and rinsed it off with boiling water. I put it in the middle of the table where it couldn’t scoot off again. It sat there like anything else would, rocking gently. It made me think of the statue at home again, whose closing hand I’d shunted off out of real memory like it had happened in a dream. I should have knocked it off the table again to make sure it fell properly this time, but I didn’t dare.

THIRTEEN

I woke up of my own accord, not too early, and nothing hurt. Because the room didn’t look in daylight how I’d thought it would, I didn’t understand where I was at first and had to lie still while I pieced it together. Instead of proper windows, there were glass bricks in the polygonal masonry, about one to every twenty stones. They let in irregular patches of light, tinged green and blue and, sometimes, where some sort of metal had melted into the vitrifying flow, a coppery gold. All together they made colourful light pebbles over the floor. A pipe must have run right beneath where I was lying, because although small shadows fell through the light where the snow was still coming down, there was deep, gorgeous heat under my spine. I sat up and linked my arms round my knees, feeling like someone had sewn up all my worn-out patches. Raphael must have leaned in at some point, because there was a candle burning beside the little shrine in the wall.

Clem was breathing hard, even in his sleep. The air was better than it had been in Azangaro or Crucero but it still felt diluted. I folded his blanket back to move that small weight off his chest. I’d left my jumper out, but it was so warm now I didn’t need it. I leaned on my cane for a minute once I was standing, waiting. My leg was sore, but not half as bad as I’d expected. When I checked, the scar was much less angry than it had been in Crucero. It wasn’t until I saw how much better it was that I realised how much I’d been worried about it, or how I’d been seeing everything through the penumbral soot of a fear whose coals I hadn’t let myself look at, though I’d been carrying them – that if it got worse, there would be nothing to do out here except cut the leg off. Of their own accord, my shoulders relaxed. I hadn’t known I’d been holding them stiff. I felt like I’d surfaced from a mine.

The kitchen smelled of laundry powder and fresh vapour, because there were shirts draped over the glass pipes to dry. The baby, who was sitting on the table, burbled at me and held up a wooden building block, either to stretch or to show me. I went over to tickle her and she laughed a deep viola laugh that sounded like it ought not to have come from something so small. She had new clothes, white, and Raphael was dressed like a priest. It was odd to see him neat all in black. He looked like someone else. He didn’t say anything and I didn’t blame him – it was only just past seven and that was early for a third language – but he touched the little brass tap on the stove to say there was hot water. By the stove was a bowl of ground coffee and a little triangle stand with some calico stretched across it to make a filter.

The corner window next to the stove had a hazy view of the town. Because we were so hemmed in by mountains, the light was still dim and our lamps cast my reflection in stronger colours over the view. Everything was covered in snow. All the thatched roofs were white triangles now, the windmills brilliantly red. The trees on that side weren’t the strange pines, just conifers and sickly kapoks whose ambition had exceeded their tolerance for the altitude, and the snow in their branches made a thick new canopy. I polished the glass, which was clouding from the drying laundry. Up close, the panes were all odd thicknesses and irregular sizes – they were chipped-out shards, not blown and moulded.

‘The snow’s heavy,’ I said at last.

‘The river’s frozen.’ Raphael let his hands drop and the bones in his wrists thumped against the tabletop. The baby looked down to see what had made the vibration. It didn’t make her jump, though it did me. It was loud, one of those broad things that already broad men do to take up more space. However much he had mellowed yesterday night, he didn’t want me in his kitchen now. ‘You’re stuck here, unless you walk back to Azangaro.’

I clenched my hands when I found I’d backed myself almost into the window. I had to force myself to turn away and trust he wasn’t going to make any sudden movements. Out of all the difficulties my leg brought, the limping and the tiredness and everything else, that anxiety was the stupidest and most wearing and I was starting to think that what I really needed was to just get into a proper fight, win or lose.

I forgot about him when I saw the woman standing outside. She was in the long grass between us and the bridge, stock still. Her back was curved forward and she was propped up with a cane. It made her look old, but she was my age. She was staring at the house.

I had to reach for the thread of what we’d been saying. ‘Well, we’ll pay you for however long we’re here.’

‘Mr Martel wouldn’t hear of it.’

‘No need to tell him then.’