Quispe gathered together the horses and turned straight around again without saying goodbye.
When I sat down, a swarm of fish came to inspect the soles of my boots. Clem paced for a while but then gave up and we played skimming games with the flat pebbles that covered the shoreline. Along from us, Raphael was still waxing the statue’s clothes. It seemed like a lot of work after riding as far as we had, but he was doing it carefully and something about the way he moved his arm made it look like a ritual with a specific set of motions. Clem had noticed too.
‘St Somebody, is that?’ he said.
‘No.’
I’ve never seen anyone go from wary to delighted as fast as Clem did then. He nearly bounced onto his feet. ‘You’re joking! It’s a markayuq?’
Raphael nodded ruefully. I had a feeling he had avoided saying the Quechua by way of discouraging Clem from it too.
‘I’ve never seen an anthropoid version before, I thought they were always just outcrops of the bedrock—’
Raphael looked at him past the statue’s shoulder. ‘Quiet down.’
‘You believe it’s real?’ Clem beamed. ‘That it can hear us? Sorry, he?’
‘Stop. Calm down.’
‘But you’re Catholic,’ Clem said joyfully, impervious now. I smiled, glad he was happy again. ‘But you still believe in the local . . .?’
Raphael let the silence go on for a second. ‘Speak quietly,’ he said, quietly himself.
‘Sorry! May I look at him?’
‘Look. Don’t touch. But there are six in Bedlam. You’ll have more time then.’
‘Bedlam?’ I said.
‘New Bethlehem. Joke.’ He didn’t sound as though he found it especially funny. ‘You’ll see.’
‘Six markayuq in one place?’ Clem said over us. ‘I thought it was one per village.’
‘This village is special.’
‘How?’
‘Like Canterbury. He’s here because he marks the pilgrimage route.’ He pointed along the river, left to right. There was another jetty a good way off, almost out of sight, and on it the motionless figure of a man in heavy robes. Like the one on the pier it was fantastically real-looking and nothing like the blocky things I associated with South America. They were just like the statue at home. I didn’t say anything. I would later, because I wanted to know why Dad had stolen a Peruvian shrine, but the sense of things I’d thought were unconnected connecting was too strange then.
‘In that case,’ Clem said, ‘I shall leave him be. But they’re all like this one, are they? Proper statues? They look like real people?’
‘Yes.’
Clem grinned and sat down with me again. ‘This is going to be much better than I thought.’
‘What does markayuq mean?’ I asked.
‘Marka means village and yuq implies ownership, or being a vessel, something like that. It’s the same yuq as in chakrayuq, but chakra means field. So owner-of-the-village, or similar. It’s another kind of shrine, just a littler one for a littler place. Not that there’s a village round this one, but there would be usually.’
‘It means warden,’ Raphael said. He didn’t sound optimistic that he was going to be able to change Clem’s translating habits.
‘This is handy, a bilingual native speaker,’ Clem said happily. He wrote ‘markayuq’ down on the corner of his map and marked the position of the shrine too.
Raphael finished his work on the statue and sat down next to his bag again to exchange the brush and the wax for his Spanish book. He fitted them neatly in, and when he lifted the book out, he was careful of the corners.
I scooped up another pebble. It glittered oddly and I paused, because it wasn’t stone at all but bluish glass. I showed Clem, who frowned and shrugged, but when we leaned down to look along the shore, there were dozens of them, and perfect glass shells, occupied by river things whose inner workings the glass exposed. The sun came out and sparkled along them all.
‘I found some of these at home,’ I said to Clem. ‘Dad must have brought them back.’
‘We’re going the right way, then. I wonder what the hell they are. How could anything form a shell from glass?’
I shook my head. We both looked along at Raphael, weighing up mystery versus asking him.
‘Raphael,’ Clem ventured at last.
He ignored us. He was holding the book open but his focus missed it. There were leather gaiters over his boots, black once and unevenly grey now, and he was just touching the water’s surface with the buckle of one, holding it perfectly still while the fish came close to the shiny bar. The long stillness was unsettling, because it’s usually something humans only do when they mean to kill something. He didn’t. He only sat. Clem said his name again to exactly the same effect. Long after we had lost interest, I heard the scratch of paper as he turned a page.
We didn’t quite wait an hour before a boat came, a little balsawood skiff with sails made of woven grass, carrying a cargo of sheepskin and one cheerful trader bundled up against the cold under a Russian-looking hat. I didn’t think we would all fit on, but the trader sat on the sheepskin bale to make room for us. There wouldn’t have been a spare inch for the mules. Thinking of the mules made me wonder again about the boys. Clem thought they had just decided against the unwelcoming weather, but they hadn’t seemed unhappy to me before. It was Raphael they hadn’t liked. As the boat drifted by cliffs that grew taller and taller, cut with fine waterfalls that fell from so high the sources were lost in the clouds, I tried to think of someone who might have made me run away as soon as I saw him – and not just run, but turn back from a good fire on a sleeting night. All I could think of was Irishmen talking quietly over dynamite boxes.