Because the cold seemed a better idea than underfloor heating, I left him on the altar with the candle and crossed his arms over his chest as well as I could with his muscles stiffening. I went back inside and leaned back against the door, my fingers tapping at the hook of my cane. I wanted to fetch Inti, but there was nothing she could have done but insist Catholicly on sitting a vigil in the snow. It was only wanting to talk to another person.
‘You let him go,’ I said aloud to myself. ‘Live with it.’
I went to sit by the stove and play patience.
In the morning, I let myself out once it was light, which was late, because the mountains hid the sun so well, and walked up to the border. There was something maddening about deducing things from light trails in the dark and I wanted to see the trees in ordinary light, looking ordinary. It wasn’t until I reached it that I saw the heaps of fur on the ground. There were dead wolves everywhere. They were all around the markayuq, some just on our side of the salt, some just before. Their necks were broken. I’d strayed in among them before I saw them and I stood still, listening hard, because it seemed too unlikely that they were all completely dead. But I didn’t hear any breath except mine.
They must have come for the body; they would have known it was there from half a mile away. The top half of my spine seized at the thought of having slept through it. Wolf packs weren’t quiet. They would have been calling to each other through the woods and I hadn’t heard, even though I was sure I’d only dozed. And then someone had killed them all, and still I hadn’t heard. It made listening seem very futile now. In front of me, the salt line had taken on a weird anti-magnetism. Even if I had decided to, logically and carefully, I couldn’t have crossed. For a long time I stood looking into the trees, straining to see anything – a spark or a dying pollen trail, something moving – but it was all dead and silent.
I heard leather creaking. When I turned my head, slowly because I didn’t know if I wanted to see what was there, the two nearest markayuq had twisted towards me. One was St Thomas and like always he managed to look less accusatory than curious.
‘I’m not crossing,’ I said aloud.
‘Who are you talking to?’
I swung around. Raphael had paused on the border to rearrange his bag of markayuq-cleaning things on his shoulder beside the old strap of the rifle. Once he had moved it, it left a red stripe where it had pulled his shirt to one side. He was so pale from the cold he might have been Spanish, but he was very alive.
‘Where have you been?’ I said. It came out flat.
‘In the graveyard cleaning the – you watched me go in, why are you asking me?’
‘Seventeen hours ago.’
‘Seventeen . . . hours.’ His eyes went past me to the town, where the morning light was only just coming past the mountains. Some of the houses had glass roof tiles and they sparkled.
‘Where have you been?’
‘I haven’t been anywhere, I was just . . .’
‘For God’s sake,’ I said, nearly laughing. ‘Clem is dead on the church altar. You’re telling me you just wandered off for a night-time walk? Or did you disappear so that we’d cross the border looking for you and everyone would swear to Mr Martel it wasn’t you who killed us, and you could get rid of the idiot foreigners bothering your markayuq?’
Of all the imbecile things to do, confronting someone who might have murdered half the expedition should have been high on the list. But I was ashamed enough and angry enough not to care if he was dangerous. I was dangerous too. Clem had made me remember that. I knew I could take the rifle off Raphael and shoot him with it if I had to. I was almost a head taller. People talk about seeing red, but I didn’t. I only saw in greater focus.
‘He’s what?’ His voice cracked and he put his hand to the mossy tree trunk beside us.
‘Was it you?’
‘No! Stop – stop.’ He was having trouble talking; he was breathing too fast and too shallow. Where he was holding the moss, his fingernails had lost all their colour. There were pine needles caught in the folds of his shirt, and pollen; whenever he moved, it glowed away from him in wisps, more where the wind was catching him down his left side. He might have been evanescing into the frozen morning. I frowned. It was hard to think that he’d look like this if he had been set up in a tent somewhere. A spider peeped around his collar. I scooped it off him and showed him, although not for long before it bounced out of my hand and on to the tree. He jerked away and then opened his hand properly. Strands of web stretched between his shirt cuff and the first joint of his fingers. He scrubbed it off, fast, then stayed very still. His breath was almost gone.
‘Come inside,’ I said at last.
‘I can’t move.’ He was nearly too quiet to hear. ‘I’ll be along in a minute.’
Further towards the border, where the pollen was thicker, it made those cold cinder patterns. It was difficult to believe there could be so much of it in the snow, but then, the vines in the trees were barely dead – the frost had killed them only this week. It was supposed to be high summer. My leg panged from having been still and cold for too long, but I couldn’t bring myself to sit down in the roots, which were all grey with rime. He was holding his fingertips two inches off my chest, to stop me coming any nearer. They shook.
‘Tell me what happened,’ I said. ‘And please be convincing.’
‘Just – same as always but longer.’ He was struggling in English again and I saw him reach for the word, but he couldn’t catch it. ‘It is sometimes.’
At first I didn’t understand, but then I fell very still and realised I was either being told the honest truth, or a lie he had been preparing since he had first frozen by the statue on the river in Sandia.
‘Catalepsy,’ I said for him. ‘For that long?’
‘There are long spells. Longer than this, but I didn’t expect . . . I wasn’t due one. Or I would have told you,’ he said, much more hotly than before. ‘I would have told you to watch for it.’
I tried to decide. He didn’t meet my eye again. At Martel’s house he had been like something from a goldsmith’s, but he was as pale as me now and somehow even his hair was faded. It was brown, not black. All that seemed certain was that he had been outside for all that time. I couldn’t tell if it was a feat of endurance someone strong enough and zealous enough might just manage on willpower.
‘If I’d killed him, I wouldn’t be talking to you now,’ he said softly. He had to go into Spanish. If he was pretending panic, I’d never seen anyone pretend so well or so accurately. ‘I’d have shot you. No?’
‘There are a thousand things here I don’t know. I feel like we’ve been edging around a set of laws nobody can explain since we arrived.’ I motioned at the border. ‘I’m not nearly in possession of all the facts, I do know that. I don’t know anything beyond the border. I don’t know who you talk to in there, I don’t know how the hell they make statues look like they walk or why, I don’t understand what your religion is, or what it might require of you. None of it makes any sense. I am in no position to make grand sweeping deductions about what you might or might not have done.’