Raphael made a soft agreeing sound and then we both waited in silence, watching the warped view of the way we had come through a glass boulder and the fading light of the disturbed pollen. Small things were already zinging new trails through it, pulling the shapes to one side and the other. Something squirrelly traced a bouncing line of light halfway down a tree, then launched itself into the air and glided to the next. Its trail looked like a billowing flag. The ground sent up a high, sudden loop of brightness that must have been a jumping frog.
Slowly, my hands got used to the hot water and stopped hurting. Little aches washed up and down my spine. I felt like an old man and suddenly I missed how I’d used to be much more than I had for a long time. Three years ago I could have run for miles. Everybody says you don’t notice health until it’s gone, but I’d noticed, all the time, the same as I’d noticed warm sunbeams. It was probably just as well to have enjoyed it while it lasted, but I wished I could have been less fit then. It would have been less of a contrast.
There were no more shots. Gradually, I stopped expecting them.
The stream-bed was all glass pebbles, smoothed down until together they were like treasure. There were shells too, miniature, occupied by even tinier things stuck to the rocks. Nestled in the glass pebbles diagonally below me were a clutch of what looked like much more perfect pebbles, with yellow spheres suspended inside. Raphael saw too and dived for them. When he came back up with some, he set them gently on the rock in front of me for me to see. They were eggs.
‘Water’s not quite hot enough to cook them,’ he explained. ‘The ducks lay them underwater to incubate.’
I touched the curve of one, and it really was glass. Other things must have been mixed into it, because like ordinary duck eggs it was bluish close to. They were lovely things. He had left two in the nest; they had chicks in them.
We waited a while longer, watching the forest back the way we had come, but nothing else human disturbed the pollen. The silence began to sound less like silence. It had the ordinary clicks and creaks and hoots. The trees were so big that the wooden sound any tree will make in a place of varying temperature was more like muttering. Sometimes, when it turned to a staccato rumble of settling bark, it sounded like arboreal laughter.
‘Can you see any?’ he said at last. ‘Ducks, I mean.’
I let the current of the lake spin me. I hadn’t seen them at first because they were smart and black, and they blended neatly with the shadows in the pollen glow, but there was a little flock of them in the reeds on the other bank. He nodded when I pointed.
‘I’ll see if I can get one.’
I wanted to say it was all right, I wasn’t hungry, but I was. I let my cheek rest against the rock to watch. My hands had started to shake.
One of the ducks had wandered closer to us, away from the others. Raphael eased up to it and it seemed not to mind. He clapped his hands hard by its head and it squawked and exploded. Or rather, it went up in white blue flames, and within about four seconds there were no feathers left, only a roasted carcass. He lifted it out of the water and tore off a leg.
‘It’s cooked, try it.’
‘What . . . in God’s name was that?’
‘It’s how they make glass eggs. They’re full of flammable chemicals and then when the time’s right . . .’ He opened his hand to mime an explosion. ‘But if you startle them they go off pretty well too.’
‘They’re phoenixes.’
‘I suppose.’
‘And you haven’t made a fortune exporting them because?’
‘I haven’t got your fine criminal mind. Eat your phoenix. Christ,’ he said suddenly, stock still.
I jumped when I saw the markayuq. She was standing on the edge of the lake, just where the hotter water tumbled down over the glass.
‘Can’t believe we didn’t see that before,’ I said. It was unsettling, not to have seen it, and I looked round again, expecting Martel and his men to be waiting for us to notice them beyond the island. They weren’t. ‘Well. I’ll do the eggs.’
‘No, hold on.’ He went to the statue and unwound a length of string from its wrist, ran some wax down it – he always had some in his pocket – and started to flick knots into it, as fast as a fisherman tying netting, until most of the string was taken up. He wound it back round the statue’s wrist. When he saw me watching, he shook his head slightly. ‘Just a prayer. Give me the eggs, will you? Don’t go too close to her.’ He took the eggs carefully, but he looked unhappy as he carried them towards the hotter water.
‘Don’t burn yourself,’ I said, anxious now.
‘It doesn’t matter if I do.’
‘I talk to the air. Just because you can’t feel it—’
I was cut off by more gunshots close by. I jerked behind the boulders again, but no bullets hit the island or the water. Raphael came back.
‘They’re going to spark the pollen in a minute—’
Exactly as he said it, the pollen ignited. It was like a flour bomb and I saw the edge of the flame race outward. It stopped when it reached the edge of the water, because there wasn’t enough above the stream to maintain any flame, and in its wake it left darkness. Light did needle down through the canopy in tiny, fishing-wire beams, but not enough to see by. Raphael pulled himself up on to the island.
‘Martel, you idiot, stop shooting before you set fire to the whole forest! Get over here.’
Nothing happened for a moment, except that the markayuq on the bank lifted her head. It was because he’d moved, but it looked for all the world like she recognised the sound of Spanish and didn’t wholly approve.
Men came out of the dark, five or six, some patting at cinders on their sleeves. One was Martel.
‘I’ll get you out of here if you leave us alone,’ Raphael said tightly.
‘Excellent,’ said Martel. ‘Come along, gentlemen. What have you done with Mr Tremayne?’ he added as he waded across.
The island was too little to hide on for long. ‘He’s here. Touch him and I’ll walk you straight back the way you came.’
‘Yes, no need to labour the point. Help me up.’
Raphael pulled him up on to the rocks and Martel squeezed his shoulder, pleased to see him despite everything and, I thought, reminding him who he belonged to. Around him, the other men were climbing up too. They looked rattled, and a couple of them were singed from the pollen blast. Here and there on the edge of the lake the grass smoked. None of it looked serious enough to set off the trees, but it was plain that was only luck. They set their guns gingerly against the whitewood tree.
‘Hello,’ Martel said when he saw me. ‘You disappeared; we came out to find you.’ He made an effort to sound offhand, but it came out brittle. ‘I was worried something Indian might have gone through Raphael’s head.’
‘What happened to you?’ I said.
‘Attacked,’ he said. ‘There were twelve of us. Rather accomplished, really. I never once saw them, did any of you?’
There was a quiet chorus of no’s and maybe’s.
He sat down stiffly on the rocks. ‘This wretched pollen. You think you can see, but you can’t. You can only see what moves. They were waiting, not moving. Behind trees, among the roots. I saw trails, plenty of trails, but they know how to hide in it.’
‘How many?’ Raphael said.
I expected him to say dozens, but he looked pensive. ‘I think only three. It took them some time. We lost the first man a few hours ago. It wasn’t until the fifth that we saw anything at all.’