Raphael took us to the church. It was at the end of a narrow glass road, in the shadow of the titan trees, where the air was much colder and frost glittered on the sunless side of the spire, which was lopsided and missing a patch of its terracotta tiles. Ivy had crept over the gap. Right up to the roof, so that the whole place looked like a cabin imitation of a church, the walls were covered by stacked firewood that parted in a grudging sort of way only to make space for the windows. They weren’t big church windows, just ordinary ones. Near to it, the glass blocks of the road were being slowly prised apart by moss and sage. Everything was overgrown and dead poppies nodded in the long grass.
A little red windmill had been built into the roof, just like all the other houses. When I turned back, they made red dots all through the grey scattering of snow, catching the very last of the light as the sun disappeared beyond the mountains. I wondered what they were for but I had a feeling that if we asked Raphael about everything that caught our interest, we’d both be shoved into the river before dinner.
The forest stretched out for as long as the river did on either side. It had looked dense from further off, but close to it was primordial. It wasn’t the sort of forest that could have been cleared with men and axes. Standing there, it was less strange that the people had decided to build out on the stacks. There were monkeys around the roots and they weren’t big, but they didn’t move when they saw us. There must have been bigger, more dangerous things there that didn’t mind people either. Further downriver, there was nothing else. No road or other towns or a column of smoke. There were the trees, the snow, the cliffs, and that was it.
The church’s back door was half the width of an ordinary one. Clem had to turn sideways. Instead of the vestry I was expecting, there was a kitchen, Quakerishly bare and very cold. Raphael pulled open the stove door as soon as we were inside. Next to it, sitting in a larger bucket of water as if it were gunpowder, was a copper bucket of sawdust. He threw in a handful, struck a match against the stove’s grate and pushed the grille shut straightaway. Inside, light popped into life like fireworks, flashing and crackling for a good few seconds before the heat caught on the logs and settled to a more ordinary glow.
‘What was that?’ I said, a little flatly, because I already knew but it was frustrating to meet someone who knew all about it when we had muddled on in uninterrupted ignorance and blown up half the house.
‘Whitewood. It explodes. If you light a fire, only use the wood that’s stacked outside. It’s kapok, from the other side of the river. Didn’t you say you had some, at your house?’
I was surprised he had paid that much attention at Martel’s. ‘Yes. We . . . had a bit of an accident recently.’
He swept his eyes down me as if he would have liked to throw me out and lock me in a well-ventilated igloo before I could explode anything important. ‘Try not to do it again.’
‘I won’t, but – what makes it explosive?’
‘I don’t know. But all the gantries in town are made of it, so no smoking, unless you want it to go up in your face. Or in here.’ He pointed upwards.
The inside of the spire roof had been fixed neatly but often. The old planks, which must have patched over the first holes, had darkened and crumbled in turn and now they were interspersed with newer planks themselves. And all that was a repair of the original roof, which must have fallen in completely at some point, or else been pulled down when the place was made into a church.
Raphael brought cheese and salted meat down from the cupboards and put them on glass plates on the table. He disappeared outside briefly and came back with a pineapple, which he diced up so fast he must have done it every day, then tipped the pieces into a glass bowl. When I tried it, it was the sweetest I’d ever tasted. He opened the grate again once the fire was going, to let some of the heat out, then pulled away a peg that kept a pulley from moving. The ropes disappeared up through the ceiling and down through the floor. Up above somewhere, something creaked and turned squeakingly. After a few minutes came a rush of water just under the stove, then a hiss as it hit something hot. The cliff curved inward, so the ropes must have gone down through it to the open air and then the river to bring up water. It seemed bizarre until I tried to think of another way to get water on glass stacks. There would be no wells.
Another few minutes later the rush of water came again and this time there was a muttering as it poured into pipes I hadn’t noticed. They were bronze and glass, and they went all round the walls, close to the floor and under it; I soon felt the heat coming up from the tiles. Raphael stood still, watching them.
‘If you see anything leaking, say. All this should have been lit up last week.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘Before the frost. Cold pipes break if you heat them up too quickly.’
I nodded, but nothing burst or broke, only rattled. In the quiet, I noticed we hadn’t heard from Clem in a little while. He was collapsed over his arms, still damp. When I nudged him, he mumbled about the altitude again. As gently as I could, I undid the buttons on his wet coat and got it mostly off him, so that it wouldn’t block the heat from the fire. The lining started to steam.
Raphael had turned back to the stove, which had a separate boiler compartment. He dipped a pan in and tipped quinoa grain into the bottom with a soft sandy hiss. As soon as it was on the stove top, it started to bubble. While it did, he pulled open a glass-handled drawer in the base of the stove. Inside was a metal tray where salt had dried in bumpy white waves. He poured it carefully into a glass bowl, already half full. I watched him put it back.
‘Is that a distillation oven?’ I said. ‘How did you get that up here?’