Once Clem had written the letter – I said he needn’t bother since he was going himself, but he pointed out that if he was laid up by mountain sickness again he would need something to pass along – we waited for the hazy sun to reach noon for a sextant reading and spent an hour or so going over the map, adding latitude lines as best we could estimate them. I drew Raphael’s frieze map and annotated it as much as I could, with a guessed scale and an explanation of the border and the size of the stacks, and how the lensed light through them affected the river route.
I saw Clem off from the base of the stacks. He knew where he was going and he had a revolver, but four days in the Andean highlands alone was not a stroll from Hyde Park through Kensington, and when we parted we were both nervous-brash and brief. I sat down on a glass boulder to watch him go, my heart thudding still too quickly in the thin air. Between the massive cliffs and the sweep of the river, he was miniature. He had to go carefully at first because the glass of the stacks had intensified the sun and melted the ice in long strips, but after a few hundred yards he was past that and out on to the river. He was walking near the bank, the side where the salt wasn’t. The ice looked likely to hold; or, if it didn’t, the water there was only knee deep anyway. He turned at the sharp bend and waved. I waved back but stayed where I was, not sure what to do now. The sun had come out for an afternoon foray and the glass near me was heating up, the river steaming.
I had to move before the water started to boil, and by the time I was at the top of the stacks again I was frozen. I retreated back to the church. Raphael came in before long and asked what I’d done with Clem. For a second after I told him Raphael stood very still, then nodded and cooked some lunch. He didn’t mention it again, but the terseness he’d had at Martel’s was back, although I couldn’t tell why. I’d thought he would be glad to have only the slower of us to watch.
‘Do you have a barrel of pineapples somewhere?’ I asked, for something to say, when another appeared.
‘Mm. Help yourself. On the left without.’
‘Without what?’
He pointed outside.
‘Right,’ I said, feeling stupid. ‘Thank you.’
He coiled into himself like a fern, and I gave up and tried to concentrate on eating. I would have gone out to explore the town but I couldn’t face the idea of risking the ice on the bridges again. The heel of my hand already ached where I’d leaned too hard on my cane on the way back from seeing Clem off. It was starting to bruise. I was relieved when Raphael went out instead. Part of me knew it would be hard for anything to happen to me if I stayed inside by the stove, so I did, and drew one of the pollen lamps to show Sing. Raphael was out until dark, when I saw his pollen trail coming back from the border. I hid in the chapel and wondered what he had been doing out there for so long.
The snow didn’t melt. In the morning there was another new, brilliant layer, and the cold was deeper and sharper. Clem was right to have gone; there would be no thaw soon. But with the pipes in the chapel running hot, I slept well again. Impatient with myself for feeling worried about walking into town, for all the nearest stack and the houses perched on it were thirty yards away, I went out with my sketchbook to draw some of the howling carvings on the border. There was mist again and they were eerie where they faded off into the white, which glowed sometimes where things had disturbed the pollen.
I jumped when a pine cone landed in my lap. It was stone solid and completely closed. I sat back suddenly, annoyed with myself for not having understood sooner.
‘Of course they’re bloody explosive,’ I said to St Thomas. ‘They’re sequoias. And we’re sitting on glass cliffs in damp weather.’
It should have been obvious as soon as I saw the obsidian stratum in the stacks. The glass lensed the sun hot enough to burn ordinary wood and grass, so any other kinds of tree that grew here would be periodically wiped out. But sequoias love fire. Here, because the climate was wet and fires otherwise might not have caught often enough, the whitewoods helped the process along. Something in the heartwood was inflammable. The big trees had bark like armour, so they survived, but the pine needles and the twigs went up like dynamite. The whole forest floor would blaze, damp or not. The fires opened the fallen pine cones and the heat rising into the canopy opened the unfallen ones. All the other vegetation would be burned off, which left the new whitewood seedlings room to grow. They were perfect for the place. I couldn’t think of another tree that would manage forest fires and rain or snow at the same time.
‘Well. Do you suppose my brain will grow back or that I’m permanently slow now?’ I slung the pine cone over the border and into the denser pollen, where it cometed away into a patch of candle ivy. St Thomas managed to look sympathetic. I smiled a little. The markayuq were all unsettling, but there was something kind about the way his eyes had been carved.
He turned his head. I only had time to think I hadn’t moved enough to set off his clockwork, and that there must be someone behind me, before whoever it was hit me hard over the back of the neck and knocked me forward into the pine needles.
His clothes smelled of charred honey, the same as Raphael’s, and for a second I was sure it was him; but in a spinning-penny moment of clarity I remembered that Raphael was smaller than me and whoever this was most certainly wasn’t. The man let me collapse and did it again, and then everything exploded into a bright black. By the time I could turn over, whoever it was had gone. St Thomas was still looking beyond the border. Knowing it was a terrible idea in the snow, I let my head touch back against the ground and waited to be able to move.
*
When I opened my eyes, it was raining under the trees: big, painfully heavy drops that felt like someone had spilled a case of bullets on me. I was half-frozen to the ground and I had to tear free to turn onto my side. The pine needles were all gullied by tiny silver streams. They didn’t look like water at all, shivering and shining as they sank into the earth. Little rivulets ran off my coat too and plinked as they hit the ground. I rubbed my eyes and winced when I felt the bruises shift over my ribs. Someone had been shouting my name for a while but it was only then that it sounded distinctly separate from a dream.
‘Merrick.’ It was Raphael, right next to me now. He was kneeling in the pine needles. He gave me a cigar case. It must have had embers in it, because it was hot. Pins and needles soared down my hands when I took it, and then the feeling came back. ‘Can you sit up?’ he asked. The Quechua edge that had been in his consonants yesterday night and earlier this morning was completely gone. His English was cleaner now than mine, which had brine and jetsam in it. He was concentrating, to be as clear as he could; I must have looked concussed.