The stack of sheepskins was easily high enough to lean back against if you sat on the deck which, though balsawood splinters the second you introduce it to an overweight mouse, was properly layered and bolted together, and dry. There was a quiet conversation in Quechua going on somewhere over my head. Whatever the boys’ anxieties about Raphael, the trader didn’t share them and he was chatting, or I thought so at first. It was an elegant language. Every so often it hung mid-word like a ballet dancer where English would have rattled along on its tracks. It took me a good while, half-asleep, to realise that it wasn’t Raphael on the other side of the conversation but Clem. I could hear his English accent next to the trader’s dancing one. Now that I was paying attention, other things sounded wrong too. He was talking in an English word order. When I caught myself thinking that, I frowned, because I would have sworn to a jury I’d never learned any Quechua.
Something cold touched the back of my neck, then my hands. When I looked up, the air was grainy with snow, though the valley had narrowed so much that we were protected on either side for hundreds of feet. It was coming down heavily enough to have dusted the rocks along the banks already. I brushed the new flakes off my sleeves and got up unevenly, already stiff from the cold. Some of the rocks were the same almost-clear glass we had found on the shore by the pier, huge boulders of it smoothed into watery curves by the river. They were covered in white crystals – salt, though we must have been a thousand miles or more from the nearest sea. Raphael was sitting at the prow, half-hidden by the sail.
‘Is that salt marsh?’ I said, without much hope of getting any more of an answer out of him than we had before.
He did turn back this time. ‘Mm. There’s salt under the ground here. Used to be mines.’ He was looking up at the snow, not quite frowning, but grim, though I couldn’t see any particular reason to worry about it. In the grey light, there were red strands in his hair. It was long enough to tie back but short enough to be always falling down. I couldn’t imagine him neat.
The white motes pottered about on their way down to the water, not driven by any wind. The thin sunbeams swam with them. I’d crossed my scarf over my chest and buttoned my coat on top of it, the collar turned up, but the cold was starting to bite through everything. The only bright thing nearby was a flock of parrots perched on the bank, all red and blue and tropical in the deepening cold. Whenever we turned a bend of the river, I caught a snatch of mountains up ahead, as jagged and vast as the range we had just crossed. The peaks were already white.
Clem had taken out his map and now he was sketching the shape of the river in pencil, to the interest of the boatman, who made him mark on a little town called Phara and looked disproportionately pleased when he did.
‘This fellow’s telling me he’s originally from somewhere called Vangavilga – do you know where that is?’ asked Clem. ‘Is it round here? I think he wants me to put it on my map.’
Raphael looked across. ‘Huancavelica. No. It’s about four hundred miles away.’
‘No, he said V—’
‘Vangavilga is Huancavelica,’ he said with unexpected patience. ‘Huancavelica is how you spell it and how you’d say it in Spanish but we have a different accent round here. It’s the start of the pilgrimage route. He means his family escaped here from the old labour draft. The mines killed so many people the young men used to run before the draft captains came round. Or after, to recover from the mercury poisoning.’
‘I know where Huancavelica is,’ Clem said, shocked. ‘But that . . . the variation. It’s not in the least reflected in the Spanish spelling. You can’t read vanga for huanca in Spanish. That’s ridiculous. Is it widespread? Are there other interchangeable consonants?’
‘Plenty.’
‘That’s linguistic vandalism.’
‘They say Wank’avilka in Cuzco. Huancavelica. What’s the matter with it?’
‘What does it mean?’ I asked, to break their flow.
‘Stone idol,’ said Clem. ‘There’s a chakrayuq there, a huge one.’
Raphael looked like he might have laughed if he’d been younger and more cheerful. ‘Why are you using the Jesuit dictionary?’
‘How do you know what I’m using? And it’s the only Quechua dictionary.’
‘It’s probably shrine,’ I said, and then when Clem frowned, not understanding, ‘not idol.’
Raphael nodded to me and I smiled, because he was taking it so gently. I would have burst out laughing if someone had translated Christchurch as Heathen God Temple in front of me.
Clem sighed and I wished I hadn’t said anything. I’d always thought he was a languages genius – he was perfect in Spanish, at least. But Spanish and English aren’t different languages, only extreme dialects of Latin. It’s almost possible to translate word for word. Translation from a language unrelated to English is nothing to do with equivalent words. Whenever I’d tried to do that in Chinese I’d come out with unbroken nonsense. I had to forget the English, hang the meaning up in a well-lit gallery, stare at it hard, then describe it afresh. I was starting to think Clem was looking at Quechua like he would have looked at Spanish. He was trying to link, not translate. I couldn’t think of a way to say so without sounding like a patronising twerp, so I stayed quiet.
‘And to answer your previous question,’ Clem said to Raphael, ‘the matter with it is this. Spelling it Huancavelica, from the Cuzco dialect, crystallises one pronunciation and makes the others irretrievable unless you meet a native speaker, of which there will be none in two hundred years’ time at this rate. Come on, you know very well what I mean.’
Raphael was unmoved. ‘Spend a lot of time weeping over the lost phonemes of Pictish, do you?’
‘Phonemes.’ I murmured to no one, or to the river. I had no idea how in God’s name he could have learned a word like that. I barely knew what it meant. Neither of them noticed.
‘What’s Quechua for “philistine”?’ Clem said waspishly.
He thought about it. ‘Philistine.’
‘Oh, God, it just goes on, doesn’t it.’ Clem sighed and tapped his pencil against the map, still unhappy. ‘And this river doesn’t seem to have a name except “the river”. Or something about glass, which I guarantee also isn’t written anything like it’s pronounced.’
‘What’s written Quechua like? Can’t you write it that way?’ I said. ‘You know, in brackets.’
‘There isn’t any,’ Clem said bleakly. ‘There is no record whatsoever of an Incan writing system. The closest they had was a kind of knotting, for counting and so forth. Looks like very clumsy tapestrywork.’
‘How can you have a whole empire without legal textbooks and public records?’
‘Oral traditions, one supposes. Wiped out when the Spanish arrived.’ Clem shook his head. ‘It makes a horrible sort of sense. Writing evolves not when you want to wax lyrical about the daffodils but for tax purposes. Numbers. Nouns. Five sheep. No need for adjectives or adverbs or grammar, not at first.’
Raphael had covered his nearer eye with the heel of his hand so that he wouldn’t have to look at us.
Clem finished putting down guessed names and tipped the map towards me. ‘You’re part homing pigeon – how does that look to you? More or less?’
He had sketched a long, rounded right-angle as the river veered south towards Bolivia. His compass was still balanced on his knee, but the solar storm must still have been churning around us, because the needle was skittering in no steady direction. I steepened the curve with my fingertip. The river was starting to meander, just little swerves at the moment, but because of that it was difficult to feel that it was tilting more broadly as well.
‘Are you sure?’ Clem asked, frowning.