‘Oh, do shut up,’ he said, not as warmly as he could have. I did shut up, and felt bleak about the chances of their not having a furious row before the week was out. It was hard to see how Clem could have spent so much time in countries like this but never noticed that success or failure depended on being a water boatman, skimming, instead of a diver and getting everyone wet with an enormous splash whenever anything interesting passed through the deep water. Standing near him and Raphael together felt a lot like standing on the banks of a half-holy lake somewhere lost in the mountains, with a St Bernard dead set on winning a swimming medal.
The statue still had his hand over my heart. If he had been a person, he would have been able to feel it beating, because it was going fast, or it had been at first. The longer I stood there, the more it eased. I felt as though there was calm coming up through the ground, and although I knew the statue was clockwork, the magic of it worked all the same. The tendons in his hands were standing and there were fine lines around his blank eyes. It would have been a lovely thing to believe in, if I could have believed in anything at all.
Very gently, the statue gave me a little push. It must have been a way of moving people along if there was a line, but it felt like the pat doctors give you on the way out to promise that you aren’t made of glass after all and you’ll be all right in the end.
‘Clem, can I move?’ I said. It wasn’t until I spoke that I noticed they had been bickering all along. I hadn’t heard any of it properly, for all they were ten feet away. ‘He’s— I mean, it’s pushing me.’
‘Y . . . es. I think that’s long enough.’ He dropped the shutter.
I stepped back and the statue let its hand drop.
‘Incredible,’ Clem said. ‘Absolutely incredible.’
Maria, ready now, edged up to Raphael and gave him her salt. He reeled her back in by her sleeve and took her by the hand to St Thomas instead, who didn’t move this time.
She hesitated, then wound her length of knotted string around the statue’s wrist. She stopped and turned away before she had quite finished when someone else came up beside her to put in some salt.
‘Maria,’ Raphael said. He gave it a Quechua intonation this time, which sounded regions warmer than that formal religious Spanish. A nickname would have sounded wrong in that. I wondered how the hell I knew. It was far too soon to have anything like a proper sense of register, but it had a weird, deep pull already. I twisted my hand to and fro on the hook of my cane, feeling, again, like I was brushing up against something I had used to know but had lost.
She said something about her mother and hurried off. Clem was dismantling the daguerreotype box, but she didn’t pause to look.
Raphael touched the trailing cord on the statue’s wrist and pulled his fingertips down it. ‘It says if she wins a baby next time, he’s invited to the baptism. I’m rigging the next lottery,’ he said.
‘It says that exactly? With a conditional and . . .?’ Clem asked. He looked like he had found heaven without having to go to the trouble of dying first.
‘No,’ said Raphael. ‘Conditional invitations are expressed indirectly with numerical adjectives and sheep.’
I snorted and then tried to pretend I hadn’t.
‘No need to be snippy. There was never any evidence for anything else. There’s not a – I don’t suppose they all learned from a particular person – you know, a proper khipukamayuq. Sorry, Em, that means master-of-the-knots—’
‘There are no proper scribes here any more,’ said Raphael. ‘You’re three hundred years too late.’ He swept his hand forward again. The far past, far ahead, into the forest again.
Clem hadn’t seen him do it at Martel’s. I understood much too late that I should have said something, but I was so busy thinking about how it worked, the past ahead, that it didn’t occur to me what it looked like to Clem, who gazed over the border, in the direction Raphael had motioned at. Without knowing what he meant, it seemed as though when he thought about an older, more complicated culture, he thought of the people in the woods.
‘No, you’re right,’ Clem said. ‘But this is a hospital colony, you told us, and it’s being replenished all the time by someone. There must be a lot more of them out there than there are of you here; maybe they still have scribes.’ He was over the border before either of us understood. Almost as soon as he was across, the pollen flared much more and he left a real wake.
There was a yell from almost everyone who saw, and a surge towards the salt that jerked short like someone had wrenched their strings.
Clem waved his arms to make the light flare. ‘Hello! I say? Anyone here?’
People were turning back to Raphael and half-sentences came at us, all interrupted by the others: what is he, you have to, he’ll be, for God’s sake. It was real shock and it only lasted a moment before Raphael went after him. He didn’t go quickly. He came up behind him and tapped him on the shoulder.
‘Markham.’
When Clem turned round, Raphael punched him in the face. It floored him. Raphael caught the collar of his coat and dragged him back over the salt. He threw him the last yard and Clem landed in a spray of pine needles, still conscious, just. No one seemed startled. Instead there was a collective easing. Some of the women sighed and turned away back to town. A few young men hovered near the border, watching the forest like they expected something to come howling out.
‘Jesus Christ,’ Clem coughed. ‘You – raving lunatic—’
‘Shut up.’ Raphael pulled him up and dragged him back towards the church. Clem twisted, but Raphael was exactly as immovable as he looked and none of the struggling swayed him so much as half an inch.
‘Put him down,’ I said. I sounded like a Navy officer still. ‘It was a mistake.’
‘I’m not going to hurt him, I’m going to rebaptise him.’
‘You’ll hurt him by accident. Stop.’ However badly balanced I was now, I was still taller and I thumped my forearm into his chest to make him stop. He thought about making me move and I saw it, and then I saw it fade, but not altogether. He leaned back slowly.
‘It was a misunderstanding,’ I said. ‘He thought you were pointing to the people in the woods when you talked about scribes. He hasn’t seen you talk about time. He was unconscious at Martel’s.’
‘People won’t talk to him unless he’s baptised again,’ he said, much more quietly. I felt like I was trying to stand directly in front of a furnace. It was worse for knowing he was justified; Martel had said that everyone here would be killed if Clem were. ‘Get out of my way.’
I stood aside, and helped Clem up. He was too heavy for me to support and still foggy, so Raphael took him by the arm, not gently but not roughly either. The new baptism wasn’t much more than having his head dunked into the font, but when I looked back people were watching.
‘In nomine of whatever you think is looking after you. There. Congratulations.’ He dumped him on the ground, protected from any accusations of unceremoniousness because nobody else spoke English. ‘I’ll find you a towel.’
Clem propped his wrists on his knees. ‘He’s bloody strong.’
‘I saw.’ I knelt down too, slowly, then had to sit and cross my legs. ‘Are you all right?’
‘I’m fine. I suppose being attacked by the natives is part and parcel of the job. Minna will love it.’ He cracked his jaw and winced. ‘I thought he was going to kill me.’
‘You’re all right.’