‘There you are, Em, not mad at all,’ Clem said to me. He dropped the salt vial into the amphora. It clinked somewhere near the bottom. As he straightened up, he looked at the tooling on the statue’s clothes. ‘So these designs are native, but the statues themselves . . . well, they’re obviously Spanish church marvels, aren’t they. So they were shipped over here as saints, and then reclaimed as markayuq?’
‘No. They’re from here, they were here hundreds of years ago.’ Raphael moved his hand forward as he spoke, like he was pushing something well away from himself. It was such an emphatic thing to do, and completely contradicted what he had just said, that I was confused for a second before I understood. Hundreds of years ago was about forty yards in front of him, near the graveyard statue. He had done the same thing at Martel’s, forward for the past, back for the future. ‘The Jesuits claimed them as saints.’
Clem tipped his head. ‘You’re telling me that an Amerindian culture had, in the sixteenth century, invented clockwork set off by pressure pads?’ He bounced on the springy ground to see if the statue would move again but it didn’t. Pine needles skipped.
‘The first missionaries here wrote about them in their – don’t touch them,’ he said suddenly when Clem reached out to move the statue’s sleeve aside.
‘Catholic priest,’ Clem said, laughing. ‘They’re as important to you as anyone. I’m an anthropologist, not an inquisitor; you can just say, you know.’
Raphael looked tired. ‘I don’t want you interfering with St Thomas any less than anyone else wants you interfering with a markayuq.’
‘Of course, of course. But I’m not making a report to Rome, honestly. Right! Merrick, stay there: daguerreotype time.’
We both watched him rush back to the church.
‘What’s a daguerreotype?’ Raphael asked.
‘A sort of photograph,’ I said, then saw he was still waiting. ‘Which . . . is a way of recording an image on glass. The glass is treated with a light-sensitive chemical and when it’s exposed to the sun, it reacts to light in front of the lens, which makes a black and white image. Light and dark. It’s much more accurate than drawing. I don’t know exactly how it works. But it doesn’t affect the thing in the image any more than painting it would.’
He had been listening carefully. ‘How long does it take?’
‘A few minutes.’
‘Minutes,’ he said.
‘You don’t have to be in it if you don’t want to stand still for that long,’ I said, and then realised he hadn’t meant that minutes was a long time.
He was looking at St Thomas with a strange unhappiness, but he said nothing else.
‘Is it all right to have a picture of them?’ I asked.
‘Why wouldn’t it be?’
‘Some people don’t like it.’
I had thought he had a habit of staring hard at whoever he was talking to, but I saw his focus change then. He was only thinking; he just didn’t look away to do it. Instead he retreated behind some closed doors inside his own skull and left the rest of himself exactly as it had been before. I saw him come back too. ‘Are those people usually stupid?’
‘Y . . . es.’
‘Maria?’ he added to the woman, who was still waiting. He moved a little aside to show the statue was hers if she wanted.
She didn’t. She shook her head quickly and showed him a string she was knotting. ‘Not finished,’ she said in a child’s Spanish.
‘Can I?’ I asked.
He gave me a vial. The statue did the same thing again. However it was made, it had been done better than any of the clicking little automata I’d seen in London. My heart was going fast and a startled animal part of me was sure it must be alive, but I hadn’t travelled enough to have seen proper church marvels before. There were saints who cried blood and moved in Spanish cathedrals still and lots of people believed they were real. They must have been convincing too. I stayed where I was to watch the statue let its arm drop again. Its sleeve moved gently, the creases levelling out into darker diamonds and lighter borders round them.
Clem came back, the daguerreotype box under one arm and three sticks the same length to make an improvised tripod.
‘Got it!’ he called. ‘I think the light looks all right, don’t you? Good and even? This pollen is a gift. Raphael, come and tie some string around this for me, there’s a good fellow.’
Clem fussed and adjusted as the sticks tipped and didn’t quite do what he wanted, and eventually Raphael smacked his hand away and banged the tripod into the ground. It sunk an inch and a half and stuck.
‘Christ, what were you before the priesthood, circus strongman?’ Clem laughed.
‘Get on with it, he’s standing there on one good leg.’ Raphael said.
Clem frowned, puzzled. ‘Did St Thomas only have one leg?’
It came out sounding like a joke, but it wasn’t his sort of joke and because I was watching I saw his ears flush when he understood. I tried to catch his eye to say I didn’t mind, but he was tying the camera into place.
Raphael looked like he was listing all the Christian reasons not to kick Clem in the head. When he glanced at me and the statue again, his expression opened.
‘Stay still,’ he said.
The statue was moving again. I’d half-seen it from the corner of my eye, but it was so slow I hadn’t recognised it. It touched my chest, fingertips first, then flattened its hand to my breastbone. I shut my eyes to listen, but even so close I couldn’t hear cogs. Off to my left, Clem made a delighted squeaking noise. I heard him take the cap from the daguerreotype camera.
‘Stay absolutely still,’ he murmured, concentrating too much to have heard that Raphael had already said that.
‘What is it doing?’ I asked Raphael. I could only try to throw my voice a little towards him, not confident I could turn my head without blurring the picture.
‘Just a benediction. He won’t hurt you. It’s good. They don’t do it to everyone.’
‘There must be a counter in the pressure pad,’ Clem said. ‘You know: reach out to every fifteenth person who stands there long enough, or whatever. How often is it, have you noticed? Of course you haven’t,’ he said when Raphael shook his head. ‘However often it is, it’s bloody clever. I suppose you wouldn’t be amenable to my digging to find the—’
‘Touch that ground and I’ll sacrifice you to something made of teeth,’ Raphael said flatly.
‘Not so wholly Catholic after all then, are you?’
‘Clem,’ I said.
‘Merrick, old man.’
‘Less needling of our only guide?’