He looked just as surprised to be thanked, and disapproving, but he didn’t say anything and only dropped my bag into my arms by way of telling me not to get too used to it.
Inside the inn, I wedged myself into a corner with a blanket, near Clem, so that I’d notice if he stopped breathing. It was a bizarre feeling, having half my brain taken away, but it meant that to sit and do nothing was much less boring than it would have been usually. We were sharing the place with other people, Indians crossing back over the mountains after trading, so I watched them for a while. Closer to me, Raphael drove an old tent peg into the dirt floor and looped a piece of string around it. He had a book open in his lap in Spanish, and while he read, he tied knots into the string. After a while, I noticed that all the other Indians had crowded over the far side of the room, although there was plenty of space to sleep nearer to him if they had wanted to stretch out. Eventually, one of them came up to him and crouched down to give him a vial full of something white, and spoke in earnest Quechua. He nodded and put it into his bag. He saw me watching, but he didn’t explain.
Beside me, Clem was almost translucent, his lips colourless. He was breathing hard.
‘We need to get him down from here,’ I said to Raphael, barely able to bring out Spanish at all now.
Raphael glanced across, too quickly to have taken in much but that Clem was lying down. ‘He’s fine.’‘No, look at him. I know you were born up here but he could die of this, for Christ’s sake, people die—’
‘No.’ He left the knots and knelt down in front of me, and caught my shoulders. I shied, certain he meant to bang my head back against the wall to make me shut up.
‘Don’t—’
‘Listen. I’ve seen men die of it. It doesn’t look like that.’ He nodded at Clem. ‘This panic you’re feeling is part of mountain sickness. It’s nothing to do with him. Feel how fast your heart’s going.’ It was thundering when he put my hand against my chest.
‘What?’ I said weakly. That he hadn’t hit me was confusing more than it was any relief.
‘You can’t get enough air,’ he said, quiet and slow. ‘That’s all. You panic when you drown, you panic up here. It’s the same but stranger, because you’re still breathing. But neither of you is anything like close to dying. If you were, I wouldn’t be sitting reading. Do you believe me?’
I nodded, shocked to find I was starting to cry. ‘God, it’s strong, isn’t it.’
He dipped his head once and didn’t seem surprised or annoyed that I was so upset. ‘Very. You’re right, it can kill you. But it’s not going to kill you this minute.’ He gave me some coca leaves. Like everyone he seemed to carry them around always. ‘Take those.’
‘How do you . . .?’
‘Just chew. Keep them behind your back teeth.’
I took them from him like a little boy and concentrated while I tried them. It was a bitter grassy taste, much worse than the tea. He tucked the bag of it next to me under the hem of the blanket.
‘Thank you,’ I said, too grateful.
He studied me for a long objective moment. ‘You’re all right,’ he concluded. ‘And stop bloody lisping. I know it’s a Madrid accent but someone’s going to rob you. You sound queer.’
I laughed. As if I’d only needed to be told firmly enough, I calmed down and realised that Clem didn’t look so bad after all. When I turned again to tell Raphael he was right, he had gone back to the nail in the floor and the knotted string.
The weather fined up the next morning just as we reached the top of the pass through the Andes. The way behind us stretched back for miles, bleak and snowy, the road a purer white line because it was flat. The cold was cutting. Up ahead, the pass plunged us down through ravines. Halfway down, a chunk of snow sloughed away from the surface under Raphael, who was leading his horse, but he didn’t fall and only let himself glide for twenty yards or so.
‘Well,’ said Clem. He had stopped to wait for me. He hadn’t talked yesterday, too ill, but he was better today. I was too, but shaky. I could remember having been frightened in the night and that Raphael had said something, but I couldn’t think what. It was like a fever dream. The more I chased it, the less real it felt. ‘Do you suppose he’s a wronged but admirable man, or just a grumpy bastard?’
I laughed. ‘Not sure.’
‘Did you talk to him much at Martel’s?’
‘No. Martel locked him in his room straight after dinner.’
‘Locked?’
‘They seemed to think he might attack someone otherwise.’
‘Or maybe he’d fuck off home before you idiots could remember what he looked like,’ Raphael called back, and we both stopped, because he had said it in English. He had no accent, or rather, he had our kind of accent, with what might have been a foreign edge. ‘Get down here. It’s a way even to the river and we’ll have ten miles on the boat after that.’
‘Interesting English you’ve got there,’ Clem said after a lag. ‘Where did you learn?’
‘Hurry up,’ was all he said.
Clem lifted his eyebrows at me. ‘Told us. Off we hop.’
I couldn’t let the horse go any faster than I already was without the jolt hurting too badly to sit through, so I fell behind. Through a fog of altitude stupidity, I tried to think why Raphael had said one thing at Martel’s table and then told us to turn back when he had spoken to me through the wall. It felt ominous, but in the end I couldn’t decide why. Ahead of me down the slope, Clem’s nose started to bleed again and he slung a handful of blood sideways to sprinkle vivid and steaming against the snow.
It was soon obvious why Raphael wanted us to go quickly. There was nowhere to stop. Even up to Crucero there had been inns, but there was nothing now. On one side of the road the cliffs rose up black, straight into clouds. They were a thousand feet at least, sheer and snowy. On the other side was a kingfisher-blue lake, and beyond that, the white mass of a glacier, which mumbled somewhere inside the ice. It must have been moving fast, because every half-hour or so another chunk fell from it and smashed over the rocks. It was all too huge to seem real. Before long I started to feel edgy. It didn’t seem like the sort of place humans were meant to be. But only a couple of miles after the glacier, we found the farming terraces: gigantic steps eight feet broad built into the mountainside so that crops could be grown on the flat surfaces. They were Incan, abandoned, but the shapes of them were still clear. There were a hundred and five on one side, stretching up and up the cliff. It was bigger than anything I’d seen in China, any tea plantation or temple. Perched in impossible places were the ruins of houses. Clem knocked my arm. If he had still been annoyed with me for agreeing to a guide, it was all gone now and he had turned glowing and joyous.
‘How about that? Eat your heart out, Emperor Hadrian.’