‘I swear to you, I didn’t do it. I thought I was only gone for ten minutes until just now.’
There was nothing to say one way or another. Only whether or not I wanted to believe him. I did want to. The ferocious clarity that had let me stare him down before left me, draining into the pine needles, and without it I felt exhausted. Slowly, I took off my coat. He took it without arguing and shook out the last of the pollen and the needles from his own clothes before he shrugged into it. Without it, the wind cut straight through my waistcoat.
‘Thank you.’
‘Seventeen hours. You should be dead. You should have been dead sixteen hours ago, dressed like this. Were you sheltered?’
‘No. Just in the graveyard.’
He pushed his hands through his hair. There was frost in it. He frowned when he noticed what was around us. ‘Wolves. When did this happen?’
‘I don’t know. I didn’t hear anything. I think they came for Clem’s body.’
‘They will have been – they won’t let a pack of wolves into Bedlam.’ He motioned back over the salt line to say that he meant the people inside. ‘The border works both ways.’
I scanned the trees again. I couldn’t see how they could possibly stay hidden always. The pollen showed everything that moved; everything, even moths. Even trained soldiers had to shift and go for a walk sometimes.
‘Well – better go in,’ I said. I leaned against the tree to turn round on the uneven ground, which was all bumpy with roots. ‘Can you move now?’
He glanced up and nodded. At Martel’s his eyes had been black, but now they were shot through with grey penny-scratch lines. He was losing his colours. It had been happening all week. I thought of how often I’d seen red in his hair when there shouldn’t have been any, when it had been so black at first, like everyone else’s here.
‘Why did Markham go out? I’ve spent all week telling you not to.’
‘He thought that there was a camp of quinine suppliers over the border, not Chuncho, and that you’d gone to warn them we were here.’
He didn’t seem indignant or worried or even surprised. ‘Everyone who comes here thinks that before long.’ He sighed. ‘We’ll have a funeral tomorrow, if you’re happy for him to stay here.’
‘Is it not possible to take a body back over the mountains?’
‘It wouldn’t be dignified.’
‘Tomorrow, then,’ I said. I heard my own voice like it came from a long way off. I hadn’t thought I would have to leave him behind.
‘Wish it could have been you instead,’ Raphael said absently, cat’s-cradling his rosary.
‘What?’
He spun the cross once. ‘You’re quite light.’
I smiled. He pulled the church door open and turned back to help me up the step. I took his hand and let him pull me inside, the backs of my shirtsleeves cold and damp with the snow blowing in from along the valley and my teeth aching from having been set hard for too long. I still couldn’t decide whether I should believe him or not. But I was too tired and too cold to argue, and for that moment at least I loved him for having made the idea of the funeral that bit less heavy, like he had put his shoulder under mine to share the weight.
TWENTY-TWO
While we had been talking, I’d heard chinking and voices in the background, closer than the village, but I hadn’t paid any attention. They must have arrived just as I was leaving, because when we went through into the kitchen, it was full of people, and so was the flat land just outside. Martel sat back and smiled. Hernandez and Quispe were with him, still in their coats. Beyond them, through the windows, ten or twelve men were clearing the snow to stake up tents. They had already started cooking fires with the efficient domesticity of people used to moving miles between meals.
‘There you are,’ Martel said, standing up. ‘My God. We arrived and Mr Markham was dead and you two were gone and the wretched carver was telling us mad stories.’
‘I was only out for ten minutes just now,’ I said. ‘Raphael was coming back when I went.’
He smiled. ‘Coming back from where, my dear?’ he said to Raphael. ‘Just at the moment one of the expeditionaries dies and ends up on your altar. Think about it carefully.’
‘I was in the forest. I lost a day and a night.’
Martel must have known about the catalepsy, because he didn’t question it. ‘And what happened to Mr Markham?’
‘He tried to go into the woods last night,’ I said. ‘They brought him back about an hour later.’
‘So, Raphael. Did you kill him or did you only tell someone else to?’
‘Neither. It was just – I was just stuck. It’s happened before. You know it has.’
Martel’s gun was on the table, a pretty revolver with filigree work on the handle. When he picked it up, around the barrel, I thought he only meant to put it away, but he hit Raphael in the face with it. ‘Not good enough. I’m afraid I’ve got to arrest you. We’re going back to Azangaro.’
‘I don’t think—’ I began, less because I was sure of Raphael’s innocence than because it wrenched at something in me to see how the blow had spun him. ‘He’d have killed me too if—’
‘In a world that ran on common sense, yes. But he didn’t want to kill you. He did it because Mr Markham crossed the border, nothing else. It’s held a particular kind of sacrilege and you haven’t seen gibbering religious madmen until you’ve seen these people and their border. But we can’t go now, we’ve just walked up the river. Quispe, keep an eye on him, make sure he doesn’t kill anyone else. If that door has a lock on it, use it,’ he added, nodding towards the chapel.
‘I need him for the funeral,’ I said.
‘Then we shall go straight after.’
It was the moment to tell him about the quinine, but I couldn’t stand there talking any more. Raphael looked like he was about to collapse and I had a strong feeling they would have been happy to leave him on the floor. He had turned his head away just in time and the butt of the gun hadn’t taken out his eye, only grazed the bone below it. I couldn’t tell if he had felt the pain, but he had definitely felt the impact. I levered him out by his elbow to get some snow against his eye and the rest of him away from Martel. I took him into the chapel and put him by the pipes to warm up, and a blanket around him. Quispe followed but he kept back. He looked worried, like he had just watched a boy flicking pebbles at something in a zoo with flimsy fences.
‘I’m fine,’ Raphael said quietly, but he sounded hazy.
‘You can’t feel what you are, don’t be stupid. Stay there.’
‘Wait. Harry, don’t . . .’