‘I knew it. I was too bloody polite to say. Serves me right.’
‘It seemed like the quickest way to make you leave. I didn’t know you were going to stick with it like a donkey—’
‘Or like a person who does his job properly—’
‘God, you’re mad, all of you from the bloody India Office! What, have they got your children in a shed somewhere?’
‘I’m mad – what the hell were you thinking?’ I said, feeling like I might drown in the senselessness of it. ‘What if Clem had managed to get through? You were keeping us safe but – we were walking bombs for you, all that time! If he had got anything out of those woods, the quinine suppliers would have known it had to come from round here. High-yield quinine doesn’t come from anywhere else! Bedlam would have been destroyed. Wouldn’t it? Why in God’s name didn’t you shoot us the second we arrived? Or before, when Manuel attacked us? Letting us wander about, and when you have such powerful catalepsy you might not know if you’d lost an hour or five – we could have done anything! It was idiotic! What were you playing at?’
‘What’s the point of not taking innocent men into the woods and shooting them in the head?’ he said sharply. ‘How about not wanting to? I’ve had enough.’
I was already shaking my head, annoyed to be given a moral scruple instead of a reason from someone who was plainly used to doing whatever he had to, before I heard what he had actually said. ‘Hold on. You’ve had enough – you mean you did it before,’ I said. ‘The Dutch.’
He nodded once. Everything about him exuded that old anti-magnetic pressure he’d had at Martel’s, the one that said not to ask him anything else about it and to leave him the hell alone, but I had a decent resistance to it now, like the altitude.
‘Why are we different?’ I said, still softly, because a shadow had come into the window of the church above us. Quispe, fetching a glass of water.
‘If you don’t believe me, stay.’
‘No, answer the question. If I turn back now with no quinine, I’m finished, so I need to know. Because it sounds to me like you don’t want foreigners tramping through your holy woods, so you’re telling me the one thing that will force me to leave. I can’t march up to Martel and ask him if he’s a quinine supplier; he’ll shoot me if he is. I only have your word. Come on. What’s different? Your village depends on it but you can’t bring yourself to kill me despite having done it before – why? Do you need me for something? You want me to go back to the India Office and tell them nothing’s here? I can’t. Half of India is dying of a disease that can only be cured by the medicine in those woods, so—’
‘Because I knew your grandfather,’ he snapped, and then all the fight went from him as fast as it had come and he only looked hopeless. ‘And you look like him.’
I couldn’t face him and think at the same time. I turned back to the hive and edged the last of the honey wax on to the plate. The bees had come to explore my hands, but it was a nice feeling. From the corner of my eye I could just see Raphael watching fixedly in the way I would have watched someone performing surgery on his own eye. ‘Take the honey,’ I told him. ‘I can’t carry that and the cane at once.’
I held the door open for him on the way back in. He set the honey on the table, then took out a bottle of Jamaica rum from a cupboard and poured us both a glass. Once he had given me mine, he stood breathing the fumes of his and I realised he didn’t like the smell of the honey. Of course he didn’t; he spent every day of his life smelling of beeswax from cleaning the markayuq. Which accounted for his hating the bees as well.
‘Where did you find Jamaica rum out here?’ I asked, picking up the bottle. It was three-quarters full still, although the date on the label was from the middle of last century. ‘This is what the smugglers at home bring in,’ I said.
‘I know.’
I felt the way I did when I was about to dive into deep water. The last pause was to look for shadows that might be rocks. There were plenty that might have been, but nothing broke the surface and the more I looked the fewer there were. ‘Which is . . . why you speak last century’s English. And you recognised me. At Martel’s. And . . . that letter was for you, not your uncle.’
He nodded once, very slightly.
‘Inti’s story was true. You disappeared for seventy years.’
‘Yes.’
‘Where?’
‘Just . . .’ he waved towards the forest. ‘About half a mile inside. It was the same as yesterday. But longer.’
‘Jesus, Raphael.’
‘What was I meant to say?’ he snapped.
‘I’m not Jesusing at you. I meant, what a bloody horrible thing to happen to anyone. What happens, how do you not starve to death? Or – age?’
He lifted his shoulder. ‘It isn’t sleep. You stop, it’s like being frozen. Blink and it’s gone. When you wake it looks like the light changes suddenly.’ He was quiet for a while. ‘You go out for a few days at first when you’re small, then a month, then a year, then three; little intervening spells in-between – fifteen minutes, twenty – but those get longer too when you come up to a big one. Anyone here will tell you, everyone knows how priests are, everyone . . . counts, from the second you arrive.’ He looked tired. ‘Harry soon found out. I mean your grandfather. He was here when it happened.’ He was looking into the rum. ‘When I came back there was a letter from him with his address.’
‘Did you write?’
‘No. Inti said his son had stopped coming. It seemed a bit late.’
I poured us both some more rum, thinking. ‘How long can it last? One of these . . . frozen spells.’
‘A hundred years, if you’re healthy otherwise. If not . . . two hundred. Longer. You never wake properly.’ He sounded like he was staring into an endlessly deep gorge. I didn’t ask if he knew anyone who had slept for two hundred years.
‘So all priests have it . . . how?’
‘Other way round. If you have it, you become a priest here.’
‘How do they know which children to send? The – people who bring children, I mean,’ I said, not wanting to say Chuncho when he didn’t like the word. ‘You wouldn’t know if a baby had catalepsy.’
‘They bring us when we’re ten.’ He breathed between sentences, for long enough to let me squeak if I wanted to, to make him say what was in the forest, who the people were, but I didn’t want to. ‘There are only a few families left that carry the disease, so they know more or less who to watch. It’s rare now; sometimes you wait a hundred years for a child to manifest it. Which is why it was so late, before they brought Aquila. He’ll be next, after me, when he’s old enough. Well. He almost is. I was his age when I took over.’
‘And when he can take over, what happens to you?’
‘I can leave.’
‘And go where?’