‘No,’ I said, not wanting to start another fight. ‘I just feel like we’ve strayed a bit further to the right.’
‘Right isn’t a cartographical term, darling,’ he laughed.
‘It looks like a dragon if you’ve got it right,’ Raphael said. His eyes caught on Clem for too long. ‘Darling’ was the sort of thing Martel would have said.
‘Nor are dragons,’ Clem said, but he tipped the map to see if he could find one. I traced out the hump of a wing, one that would be there if it leaned more to the right. The meanders made paws. ‘Oh, yes. Well, that’s neat, isn’t it? Have you got a map, then, Raphael, if you know what it all looks like?’
‘At home I have.’
‘Why didn’t you bring it?’
‘It’s carved on the wall.’
‘How useful,’ Clem said. ‘Just like the rest of you, hey?’
Raphael watched him with the same distance as when he shot Manuel. I vacillated for a long few seconds, but there were a hundred things out here he could claim to have no control over if Martel asked and, in the interest of his not ensuring that some of them happened to us, I shut my eyes and shoved Clem over the side. He landed with a splash and an explosion of swearing. I had to pretend I’d slipped, but Raphael smiled and looked more ordin-ary as he helped Clem back onto the boat, which only got him a round of his own accusations, although he hadn’t been in arm’s reach.
We all stopped talking when we saw the body on the cliff. It was hanging by its hair from a sturdy vine, not much but bones now. I couldn’t see how anyone might have got it up there, much less how to take it down. There was a Spanish sign around its neck: I stole quinine trees.
‘That’s Edgar,’ said Raphael. ‘He used to live opposite. Took cinchona trees to a Dutchman.’ He was watching me with the smallest cinder of a spark, as though he were quite looking forward to hearing how I meant to talk my way around that.
TEN
The cliffs leaned towards each other until the river was more of a creek. Even so, I didn’t expect to see what we did when it tipped us round the last, sharp bend, past the deep caves with their salt stalactites and scatterings of glass boulders.
Where there used to be a bridge of land, the river had worn through and made three towering stacks. Clem worked out later that they were six hundred and twelve feet high. I couldn’t see the tops of them properly, but around the bases were wharves, arranged like spokes, and then stairs and stairs and stairs, up to a tangle of wooden scaffolding that supported the corners of houses and spiralling gantries. As we came closer, I could see people moving; there was a man with a wheelbarrow full of pineapples.
The sun came out suddenly. Greenish blue shadows fell across the boat and turned the riverwater turquoise. The light was shining down through translucent parts in the stacks, which weren’t rock but glass. It had been worn shiny and clear by the weather and the river. When I put my hand out to the coloured shadow beside me, the light was hot. The boatman steered us away from it but he didn’t quite move quickly enough. Where the tip of the boom swung into the light, the grass sail caught fire. The boatman squeaked. Raphael, who had been drinking something from the cup of a flask, lobbed the contents at the little fire and put it out before it could spread. He didn’t seem worried by it, but the boatman looked shaken and steered us square down a line of unlensed sunlight.
‘My God,’ Clem said. ‘That’s obsidian. Blue obsidian. It’s formed in a strata over the – that isn’t possible.’ He said it in a nearly accusatory way towards Raphael, who was either too tired or too graceful to take him up on it.
‘Black swans,’ I said, fighting to stay mild. Raphael knew why we were really here. That he hadn’t told anyone so far didn’t mean he might not lose patience if we blamed him personally for one too many geological unlikelihoods or linguistic abnormalities. I would have told Clem to shut up if he had been Charles, but I wasn’t afraid of Charles’s temper. I’d forgotten I was afraid of Clem’s. ‘You know. More in heaven and earth. You don’t know it’s there until it pecks you.’
Clem snorted, still too annoyed with me to laugh. Raphael looked back slowly as if someone had walked over his grave. I frowned, but he shook his head to say it was nothing to do with me.
Where the light made the water clear, there were ruins on the riverbed, chunks of old masonry. I looked up again. The two bridges that connected the first and third stacks to the land were stone, but the middle ones, between the stacks, were wooden. They were recent. The whole great structure must have been eroding always.
I stood up by the prow as we reached the wharves. The river had carved out combes and caves that sang with drips as we passed. It smelled cleanly of hot salt. Rather than flowing straight between the stacks, it had cut deep gullies in the weak places and made a glass beach, almost the same as the rocky ones at home. But here the glass had been smoothed and worn into twisting shapes and dips that whirled the light and played perspective tricks. Nothing was sharp.
The trader steered us to a flat outcrop. Raphael stepped across easily. Clem struggled with it more, still pale from altitude sickness and wet from the river. The boatman held my elbow to help me down. I thought he would get out too to unload, but he only gave the beach an uneasy look and started back straightaway.
‘He wasn’t coming here, then?’ I asked, confused.
‘No, there’s a warehouse back that way. Keep out of the sun,’ Raphael added. He didn’t sound like he thought we would listen.
We followed him in the cooler, safer, unlensed path of sunlight between the left-hand and middle stacks. On the far side, the river was much stronger and foamed over rocks and little crevasses, and from further away was a quiet roar that sounded like waterfalls. The cliffs stayed close after the stacks; a kayak would have made it through, but nothing substantial. Though I could just make out the green of trees at the top, it was impossible to see what sort they were or how dense.