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"What did I do in Moquegua?"
"You never got there," Catarina said. "But you were flying about and yelling and trying to, ahem, write messages for us with your carpet in the sky. "
Magnus had a sudden vivid memory, wind and stars in his hair, of the things he had been trying to write. Fortunately, he didnt think Ragnor or Catarina spoke the language he had been writing in.
"We then stopped for a meal," Catarina said. "You were most insistent that we try a local specialty that you called cuy. We actually had a very pleasant meal, even though you were still very drunk. "
"Im sure I must have been sobering up at that point," Magnus argued.
"Magnus, you were trying to flirt with your own plate. "
"Im a very open-minded sort of fellow!"
"Ragnor is not," Catarina said. "When he found out that you were feeding us guinea pigs, he hit you over the head with your plate. It broke. "
"So ended our love," Magnus said. "Ah, well. It would never have worked between me and the plate anyway. Im sure the food did me good, Catarina, and you were very good to feed me and put me to bed - "
Catarina shook her head. She seemed to be enjoying this, like a nightmare nurse telling a child she did not especially like a terrifying bedtime story. "You fell down on the floor. Honestly, we thought it best to leave you sleeping on the ground. We thought you would remain there for some time, but we took our eyes off you for one minute, and then you scuttled off. Ragnor claims he saw you making for the carpet, crawling like a huge demented crab. "
Magnus refused to believe he had done any su
ch thing. Ragnor was not to be trusted.
"I believe him," Catarina said treacherously. "You were having a great deal of difficulty walking upright even before you were hit with the plate. Also, I believe the food did not do you much good at all, because then you flew all over the place exclaiming that you could see great big monkeys and birds and llamas and kitty cats drawn on the ground. "
"Gracious," Magnus said. "I progressed to full hallucinations? Its official. That sounds like . . . almost the most drunk I have ever been. Please dont ask questions about the most drunk I have ever been. Its a very sad story involving a birdcage. "
"You were not hallucinating, actually," Catarina said. "Once we stood on the hills yelling Get down, you idiot, we could see the vast drawings in the ground as well. Theyre very grand and beautiful. I think they were part of an ancient ritual to summon water from the earth. Seeing them at all was worth coming to this country. "
Magnus still had his head sunk deep in the pillow, but he preened slightly.
"Always happy to enrich your life, Catarina. "
"It was not grand or beautiful," Catarina said reminiscently, "when you were sick all over those mystical and immense designs from a civilization long gone by. From a height. Continuously. "
He briefly felt regret and shame. Then he mostly felt the urge to get sick again.
Later, when he was soberer, Magnus would go to see the Nazca Lines, and commit to memory the trenches where gravel had been cut away to show naked clay in sprawling, specific patterns: a bird with its wings outstretched in soaring flight, a monkey with a tail whose curves Magnus thought positively indecent - obviously, he approved - and a shape that might have been a man.
When scientists discovered and spent the 1930s and 1940s investigating the Nazca Lines, Magnus was a little annoyed, as if shapes scored in stone were his own personal property.
But then he accepted it. That was what humans did: They left one another messages through time, pressed between pages or carved into rock. Like reaching out a hand through time, and trusting in a phantom hoped-for hand to catch yours. Humans did not live forever. They could only hope what they made would endure.
Magnus supposed he could let the humans pass their message on.
But his acceptance came much, much later. Magnus had other things to do the day after he first saw the Nazca Lines. He had to be sick thirty-seven times.
After the thirtieth time Magnus was ill, Catarina became concerned.
"I really think you might have a fever. "
"I have told you again and again that I am most vilely unwell, yes," Magnus said coldly. "Probably dying, not that either of you ingrates will care. "
"Shouldnt have had the guinea pig," said Ragnor, and he cackled. He seemed to be bearing a grudge.
"I feel far too faint to help myself," Magnus said, turning to the person who cared for him and did not take unholy joy in his suffering. He did his best to look pathetic and suspected that right now his best was really excellent. "Catarina, would you - "
"Im not going to waste magic and energy that could save lives to cure the ill effects of a night spent drinking excessively and spinning at high altitudes!"
When Catarina looked stern, it was all over. It would be more use to throw himself on Ragnors tender green mercies.
Magnus was just about to try that when Catarina announced thoughtfully, "I think it would be best if we tried out some of the local mundane medicines. "
The way mundanes in this part of Peru practiced medicine, it appeared, was to rub a guinea pig all over the afflicted sufferers body.
"I demand that you stop this!" Magnus protested. "I am a warlock and I can heal myself, and also I can blast your head clean off!"
"Oh, no. Hes delirious, hes crazed, dont listen to him," Ragnor said. "Continue applying the guinea pig!"
The lady with the guinea pigs gave them all an unimpressed look and continued to go about her guinea pig business.
"Lie back, Magnus," said Catarina, who was extremely open-minded and always interested in exploring other fields of medicine, and apparently willing to have Magnus serve as a hapless pawn in her medical game. "Let the magic of the guinea pig flow through you. "
"Yes indeed," put in Ragnor, who was not very open-minded at all, and giggled.
Magnus did not find the whole process as inherently hilarious as Ragnor did. As a child hed taken djamu many times. There was bile of goat in that (if you were lucky - bile of alligator if you werent). And guinea pigs and djamu were both better than the bloodletting someone had tried on him in England once.
It was just that he generally found mundane medicine very trying, and he wished they would wait until he felt better to inflict these medical procedures on him.
Magnus tried to escape several times, and had to be forcibly restrained. Later Catarina and Ragnor liked to act out the time he tried to take the guinea pigs with him, reportedly shouting "Freedom!" and "I am your leader now. "
There was a distinct possibility that Magnus was still a tiny bit drunk.
At the end of the whole horrific ordeal, one of the guinea pigs was cut open and its entrails examined to see if the cure had been effected. At the sight of it Magnus was promptly sick again.
Some days later in Lima, after all the trauma and guinea pigs, Catarina and Ragnor finally trusted Magnus enough to let him have one - just one, and they were watching him insultingly closely - drink.
"What you were saying before, on That Night," said Catarina.
Catarina and Ragnor both called it that, and in both cases Magnus could hear them using the capitals for emphasis.
"Dont fret," Magnus said airily. "I no longer want to go be a cactus and live in the desert. "
Catarina blinked and winced, visibly having a flashback. "Not what I was referring to, but good to know. I meant about humans, and love. "
