‘Talk, I’ll write it.’ He unwound her string until he found a blank part. ‘Go on.’
‘It – they’re buttons. You fasten up clothes with them,’ I said slowly. He had to reach past me to tie the knots. He was far quicker at it than anyone else I’d seen, but it still took him almost a full minute. He wound the string back around her wrist.
‘Good,’ he murmured. ‘Right, have you got anything you can give her?’
‘I didn’t bring salt.’
‘Anything. Left hand,’ he added, catching my right. ‘Always the one that isn’t natural; it’s like not drawing a sword in front of the King.’
In my left pocket were matches. I took them out. ‘What about these? I suppose nobody wants fire in here.’
‘No, it’s useful. But show her what they are.’
We both cupped our hands around the tiny flame. I blew it out quickly, although the pollen showed no sign of taking. When I put the rest of the book into her hand, her fingers closed over it.
‘Good. Now come away.’
I heard her moving as we eased back down into the water. By the time I reached the island again, she had opened up her hands towards us, like the Bedlam shrines asked for salt. The matches were gone.
‘Those things make my skin crawl,’ Martel said.
Quispe was only watching. He looked worried. When someone laughed and threw a bone at the statue to see if it would move, he flinched. She didn’t move. Raphael touched the small of my back as we came to the rocks.
‘Can you get away quickly if there’s a chance, in the night?’ he said by my ear.
‘Depends what you mean by quickly. I don’t think I should try much more running. But I’ll walk where you tell me.’
‘Less conspiring,’ Martel said almost comfortably. ‘You won’t get away in the night, I should say. There will always be someone watching, so put it out of your minds.’ I wondered, unsettled, if he had recognised some English words, or if he only had a knack for guessing what we were likely to be saying. ‘Raphael, come up here. I don’t want to eat by myself. Mr Tremayne?’
‘I’ll be along in a second. My leg hurts,’ I lied. Sounding worse off than I was seemed increasingly a sensible thing to do, although I hadn’t thought beyond that.
Raphael waved to catch my eye again and then jerked his hand to one side. I moved more behind the rock, so that nobody would have a clear shot. From there, I watched Martel brush his knuckle over the graze through Raphael’s eyebrow and ask how it was, like he hadn’t been the one to do it. Raphael knocked his hand away, but not hard, and under his ordinary roughness he looked glad. I let my forehead bump down on my arm.
That night, Martel posted two men to keep watch, on us as much as for other people. The forest was still except for little animal trails on the pollen side. The dark where the pollen had burned clicked and chirped. I stayed awake a long time, but there was nothing to say that anyone was there, not even in the trees where the branches were broad enough to be walkways. Raphael sat reading just behind me, propped against the tree. I watched him through the open tent flap. He had given up on paper books and instead he had what looked, right up until you got close to it, like a neat ball of string, which he unwound through his fingertips and then round his hand, slower than I could have read by sight but not much. The knots were neat and almost invisible. If I’d only glanced at him and not known what he had, I would have thought he was spooling twine. Looped around his wrist like always, like another sort of knot cord, the cherrywood beads of his rosary clacked as he moved his hands and the cross plinked against the buttons on his shirt sometimes. It was such an ordinary sound that it made everything else seem less strange.
I did sleep in the end. Even so I kept expecting to hear the snick of Martel’s filigree revolver.
TWENTY-FIVE
When I woke, I didn’t want to get up. The hot spring was heating the ground from below and the tent smelled of warm grass and canvas. The flap was still staked open. I lay watching the steam and the pollen twine in the air. After the snow, it was wonderful. I thought I was still deaf from sleep at first, but it was only quiet because no one else was up yet. I could hear the water well enough. The ducks were laughing further upstream. I closed my eyes again. I was so warm and so exactly comfortable that I felt like I was floating.
It wasn’t until I shifted that I realised Raphael was asleep against my back, his arm across me so that it would have been almost impossible for someone, even standing right above us, to shoot me without catching him too. His rosary had imprinted a circle pattern in my arm, then a suggestion of a cross, just near the top of the anchor tattoo. I closed my fingers over the beads. It was the first time I’d been in bed beside anyone, having been tritely and pointlessly in love twice with other people’s wives until I was too old to start. I’d thought perhaps I wasn’t the sort of person who could have lived close to anyone else, but that was wrong, now I was here. It would have been good, always to wake up this way.
Because I was holding that old sadness too I didn’t notice at first that there was a tremor in his hand. It wasn’t shivering. I squeezed his fingers to see if I could stop it but I couldn’t. It was a thrum, like he was lying close to a running engine from which I was insulated.
I’d never felt the absence of a medical dictionary before, but it was only a few seconds before I had to sit up, too frustrated to lie still. He was fading in front of me and the cause would be something well known. If I ever got home, there would be a doctor at a dinner party one day who would say, oh, yes, of course it would have been this; you know I didn’t think anyone died of that any more.
All I could do was pull the blanket over him again.
Once I’d ducked out into the open, meaning to see about food, I found that the other tents – there were three and all open to let in the air – were empty except for Martel and Quispe. The others’ blankets were still inside, but the men were gone. After everything that had happened to them it seemed especially stupid for them to have ventured off the island without Raphael, until I saw the shirts and waistcoats hanging over the lowest branches of the trees on the lake bank, on the pollen side. There hadn’t been enough room for everyone’s things on the island’s small tree, and there were some clothes on the ground around the markayuq as well. She had dropped her arms now but they must have tried to hang things on her.
I frowned when I noticed that none of the blankets had been slept in. A few had been more or less shaken out but they held the last few square folds from having been fitted in packs. Watching the bank for any tall pollen trails, I lifted my shirt down from the tree. Although it smelled faintly of the sulphur in the water, it was dry and warm, like it had been in an airing cupboard. I stood holding it, surprised to be there and alive at the same time.
Raphael jerked awake. ‘Merrick?’