Page 32 of The Bedlam Stacks

‘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 roof 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.