Page 71 of The Bedlam Stacks

I took his hand when he held it out and for the next few minutes he kept me balanced until I could manage properly by myself. He was cold, like always, though his coat was buttoned up. In bright light, with his hair turned that dark red and never having regained all the colour in his skin, he looked nationless.

‘We have to go if we’re going,’ he said. He must have felt me shaking, but he didn’t say anything about it. ‘Are we?’

I nodded and couldn’t keep a grasp of everything. I’d never been so happy, though an idiot could have seen that Raphael might only have given me the whitewood to make sure I trusted him for now, while a gunshot would still have been heard loud and clear in town.

I crossed the salt slowly. Even after only a week of being told not to, my heart tried to squash itself back against my spine. My breath steamed staccato because I was shivering. I expected to see arrows coming at us, but nothing did. Nothing moved in the trees at all.

‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Whatever you see, don’t stop to look at it. Keep going and stick close to me. They won’t think you’re a foreigner if we stay together.’

I nearly laughed. ‘How could they think I wasn’t? Look at me.’

He glanced back. ‘Look at me. I’ll fade a lot more than this; they’ve seen blond priests before.’

‘What causes it?’

‘Same as the catalepsy. Hurry up,’ he said, as if we were on an ordinary road. I followed him, completely unable to tell if he was leading me to a burial pit somewhere or if we would have cinchona cuttings this time tomorrow. My leg still didn’t hurt.

Within five hundred yards, the white trees stood closer together than they did at the border. The ground was always uneven with their roots, which tangled sometimes and made odd archways and lifts in the soil. The pollen traced our wakes more and more perfectly the further in we went and the thicker it became. It was still cold, but the only snow was the powdery stuff that had blown in from the cliff. When I looked back, the line of daylight already seemed distant. Under the canopy there was no light at all except the pollen. The branches were so thick I didn’t think they would have let through much sunlight even without the snow roofing them.

There was life inside, much more than I’d thought. Above us the air was criss-crossed with light trails where birds flitted, and what might have been bats, and whatever insects had survived the cold. Somewhere, not so far off as I would have liked, a bear roared. Raphael slowed down, but not for that. There was a tree, half-choked by vines, just on the edge of what we were using as a path.

It had grown around something, the branches warped into curves not their own. In places, tiny rags were caught in the bark. The original something had been torn free. There was new growth and new, tiny twigs poking through where they couldn’t have before, but as we came level to it, the shape of what had been there became clearer. One branch still held the outline of a person’s ribs; another, half-broken outward, just about traced a shoulder and an arm. It was part tree and part candle ivy, in blossom still. The petals, as they fell, rained golden lines down through the pollen in the air. Raphael looked away. He didn’t say anything and nor did I. He wouldn’t want to hear that I’d seen a drawing of it or that I knew there were freckles across his shoulders. He wouldn’t want to hear, either, that my father had gone over the border looking for him.

Some of the snapped branches were thick, but it was nothing an axe couldn’t have helped. But then, that would have relied on having an axe, and on knowing that Raphael had been alive to help. I’d seen how pale he had gone after even one night out in this cold. It would have been forty years by the time Dad found him; forty years of being pulled slowly back into the tree, of moss and vines and pine needles, spiders, and all the small coiling ways the woods had of making things their own. It would have taken a long, careful study to see that he wasn’t a carving and, even after that, it would have been mad to check for a pulse. This was sacrifice country. Dad would have thought he had found a dead man.

‘How’s the manacle?’ Raphael said.

‘It’s good. Thank you.’

Where some petals had fallen across his sleeve he pushed them off. He was holding his rosary too hard. Some monkeys shrieked and shot away from us. Their tails left curls in the pollen wakes. It was hard to imagine that anyone watching could have failed to notice us by now, or notice that someone was there at least.

He overheard me thinking. ‘We would have heard by now if anyone felt strongly about it.’

‘But everyone else—’

‘Came in here alone, without any permission, without a priest.’

I almost asked him who Dad could have come with in that case, but stopped myself in time.

We both looked over at a flash of person-sized movement a few trees away from us. I froze, because I thought there was a man standing there, but it was only a markayuq. It was turning its head as if it were watching us go. It looked like the one from the graveyard, but then, it made a sad sort of sense that the sculptors might have used the same model again and again, like Hadrian had – if they were all a lost empress, or someone’s son.

‘Aren’t we a bit far away to have set it off?’ I said quietly.

‘No. Keep walking. Don’t look at her. They’re shibboleths. If you go up to them to see how they work, everyone knows you’re not from round here.’

So I kept going, without looking to the side, although every so often, especially if we paused, which we still had to because while the whitewood band took the weight off my leg it didn’t negate the pull of the scarring altogether, I saw slow movement from the corners of my eyes: markayuq being set off and shifting, never close.

‘The whole forest floor must be rigged with clockwork,’ I said after a while, feeling strange, because if it was rigged with clockwork it was too easy to imagine what else it might be rigged with.

‘Just don’t pay any attention to them. Let’s stop properly. We’ll eat something, and I want to teach you a prayer in Old Quechua. If you know it you’re going to sound more genuine if push comes to shove. Like neck verse.’

We settled down among the roots of a tree full of dying blossom and candle ivy seedheads caging their tiny caches of pollen. While he taught me the words, he held a knot cord to show me how they were written too. It didn’t sound like modern Quechua. Or, it did; it was recognisably the same language, but it had no Spanish in it, none of the Spanish rhythms that I hadn’t even noticed before. It sounded heavy to me, although I couldn’t have said why. The knotting was too complicated to understand in a twenty-minute sitting. It was done in numbers, but numbers together formed codes that, like Chinese characters, ran together to make meanings. My brain stalled when he tried to explain it.

‘It clicks one morning,’ he said in the end. ‘You’d see it if you looked at it for long enough. Anyway. All right to go on?’

I nodded. I felt peculiar, because I was starting to realise that if he meant to shoot me in a mile’s time, he wouldn’t have bothered to teach me prayers or knot writing. It wasn’t even relief. In my mind I’d narrowed my expectations of the future down to about an hour. To have it open up suddenly, into what might have been days or years, felt like coming out from a wardrobe onto a great wide beach. Although I didn’t understand it, I kept running my fingertips across the knot cord he had tied round my wrist, feeling the bumps and the grain of the twine. It was a reassuring thing to touch.

‘So you’re not angry, then?’ It felt like a jinx to ask but I couldn’t help it.