‘God, don’t worry about that, of course it’s hard. Arriving here for the first time is like breathing with one lung. Mulatto is half-black. Mestizo is half-Indian. And if one parent is mestizo and the other is Indian, that’s something else again.’ Martel smiled. ‘We’re so short of real white men out here that mestizos tend to be counted as white these days, I’m afraid. It’s shocking, but . . . well, we’re all Peruvian now, of course. No more Spain.’
I watched him while he was talking. I couldn’t tell if he was the kind of person he would have been if he had said it in English in London, the kind who wanted to round up all the Jews and sink them in the Thames again. He was cheerfuller and gentler than that type at home. Although we had crossed Peru widthwise by then, we had never stopped anywhere for long enough to have a proper conversation with anybody, and I had only a hazy idea of where the walls built by the good men were, and what they walled in or out. The only thing I was sure of was that the boundaries would be different to the English kind. Not as different as China, I hoped, because that had been exhausting – to be friends with people who were kind and amiable to me but kept their wives like crippled prisoners in a back room somewhere – but it would be different.
‘You look very thoughtful,’ he laughed.
‘No, I’m just slow.’ I pushed my hand across my forehead. The altitude headache had become familiar and comfortable, but I could nearly see the fog. I would have been able to decide what sort of person he was at sea level, easily. I looked up when Hernandez set some coca leaves down by me too. Martel smiled a little as he leaned across and dropped them in a cup, which he filled with water from the kettle between us. A deep grassy smell steamed up from it.
‘The Indians say it’s a crime to have it as tea, but I think sometimes half the problem is the cold,’ he explained. ‘Just give it until it goes green.’
‘Thank you,’ I said again. I faded back in my chair, listening to my heart thump loud around the bones inside my ears, which hurt.
‘Pardon me, but did you say your name was Tremayne?’ Martel said. He had taken his coat off too and underneath he had a beautiful brocade waistcoat, the same red as the wine. ‘I feel sure that sounds familiar?’
‘My family have been here before. My grandfather came in . . .’ The unexpected numbers pulled me up short. They never had in London. Like a fever echo, I heard how slowly I was talking. It wasn’t unnatural, not like being drunk, but it was noticeable. I prodded the coca leaves with a spoon to hurry them along and tried a sip while I hauled together the names of the years. It tasted like any other herbal tea. ‘Seventeen . . . eighty?’
Martel nodded encouragingly.
‘He was stealing quinine bark. He got caught and he had to hide in an Indian village for a while, then got interested in Quechua and kept coming back for twenty years or so. My father was born there. He came for a few months every year.’
When he had mentioned Raphael, I’d thought Martel was talking about a dog, but Quispe came back with a man. Martel pushed out the chair opposite mine with his ankle but didn’t introduce him and left a vague impression in the air of some kind of clerk or bodyguard, someone whose name wouldn’t matter. The man didn’t seem like either. He held himself very straight, not like a servant, in good but old clothes that must just have been ironed, because I caught the smell of hot cotton when he came in past me. He was Indian, but from a different nation to Quispe and Hernandez and the boys. He didn’t have the Incan nose and his hair was cut short, and he was far taller. He moved so slowly it was ostentatious, the way very strong men do, and I wrote him off after about half a second as probably an arrogant bastard, although after meeting so many beaten-down people on the road, it was a relief to see someone who looked like he might punch anybody trying to make him sweep a yard.
He stopped when he saw me, just before reaching his chair. His expression opened as if he knew me, but then he saw he was wrong and sat down. Martel thumped him to say hello. It didn’t sway him in the least and Martel looked as if he might have hurt his hand. Raphael was still watching me hard, taking measurements. Whoever he had mistaken me for, I must have been a good lookalike.
‘Merrick Tremayne,’ I said, when nobody introduced us properly.
They still didn’t, and nor did he, but he shook my hand. He felt like he was made of hydraulics. He only glanced at me before his eyes skipped past my shoulder. Our boys were staring at him. Quispe was trying to give them some bread. The younger one shrank close to the older one, who finally noticed the bread and took it quickly. Hernandez rubbed the little one’s hair and said something in Quechua to distract him. Raphael looked away from them and down at the edge of the table. That he knew he had frightened them was written across his face, but he seemed resigned too and I wondered if there was caste trouble I didn’t know about, something that couldn’t be made better by smiling.
‘What was all that?’ I asked him, but it was Martel who answered.
He was pouring me some wine. ‘The Indian nations beyond the mountains are known for their savagery, you see. It’s often hard to make any Indians from this side work with them. They call them all Chuncho. They say it means barbarian, but I think barbarian sounds rather more genteel than what it really is. Heard the term?’
‘Viking,’ I said, feeling odd, because I knew them from stories, but since Dad had put them in with elves and dragons I hadn’t thought they were real. They were the men who came from the deep woods in winter and burned everything they didn’t take, from Indians or from white men. They weren’t either one, and nobody – not the Inca nor the Spanish kings – had ever made much of a dent in their lands beyond the mountains; if anyone tried, all that was left in the end was charcoal and salted ground. ‘I mean . . . raiders.’
Martel laughed. ‘No, that’s good. Vikings. I’ll steal that from you, if you don’t mind. It’s rather difficult to explain to foreigners what they are.’
Raphael looked away from us in a way that made it clear he thought it was all hyperbole. It was hard not to agree with him. If he was from one of the tribes in the rainforest, he was thoroughly hispanicised. His clothes were all Spanish and he had a rosary around his wrist; no tattoos, no native jewellery, not even an earring.
‘But . . . you two are colleagues?’ I said, not sure why Martel had called him down.
‘Raphael works for me. He’ll take you over the mountains.’
‘Mr Martel,’ I said in the pause that followed, struggling, ‘you said before that you were expecting us. I’m . . . worried that you might have mistaken us for someone else.’