‘I won’t be shooting into the pollen. I’ll be shooting into his head.’
Raphael was still for a second, then came back towards us. Martel pulled me away from him to let him pass.
I let my breath out slowly and felt Martel’s arm sink as my ribs did, then lift again with them. He was strong but he had been living easily. His gun was an old one, well kept but not meticulously, a clunky thing, beneath the silverwork, that I couldn’t imagine had come from anything like the ferocious accuracy of the American workshops. He wouldn’t be able to shoot Raphael with it from here, or not with any real certainty.
‘You’re taller close up,’ Martel said to me in his friendly way.
‘I know. I’d forgotten too. It’s funny, isn’t it.’
He laughed. I pushed my elbow hard into his stomach and twisted the gun out of his hand. As he lurched, I spun him onto his front on the ground and thumped down after him with my knee in his back. He was still stronger than me and so, although it might have been kinder to give him a moment or two to offer him some other chance, I wasn’t sure enough that I could hold him there, or of what he had said about not firing into the pollen, so I pulled the knot string from round my wrist and strangled him with it instead. I waited until well after he had stopped struggling. When I sat back, my arms ached. Raphael came to us slowly and unevenly.
‘Is he dead?’
‘I think so.’ I rubbed at the string marks across my palms. My fingers were stiff and pale from having had the blood stopped and I had to wait for it to come back, in pins and needles. When I swallowed, my throat hurt. I hadn’t been breathing for almost as long as it had taken. The world cannoned into me, all the noise of the forest and the sound of my own breathing through the bones inside my ears, and it was all much too loud. Martel’s body didn’t look like a person any more. It might have been a clever sculpture. Something strange turned under my lungs and I felt as though someone must have done some kind of magic trick, swapping Martel for this.
I rubbed my hands again. My arms had stopped aching. It hadn’t been difficult. Like it had before when I understood that Raphael wasn’t going to shoot me, the future had an odd new breadth. That Bedlam was in danger from Martel, that Raphael was, had seemed immovable a few seconds ago.
Raphael knelt down beside me. He didn’t touch Martel, but he nodded. ‘Yes.’ He inclined his head without lifting his eyes. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I’ve never done anything more useless than that.’
‘You couldn’t have done anything.’
‘I would have taken that gun off anyone else.’ He looked away and then seemed to have to push hard to look back again. ‘I would have shot anyone else a long time ago.’
‘Familiar devils are important after a while, though, aren’t they? Better than nothing,’ I said, and then shook my head. I could hear how incoherent I sounded but I couldn’t see a way to sort it out.
Raphael watched me and I misread him. His neutral expression was a half-frown and it seemed cold. I had time to worry he was angry before he hugged me. I put both arms round him and had to rest forward against him, shaking now, though I couldn’t tell from what. I didn’t feel upset, but I could feel that everything I was thinking now was only skimming the surface of things, everything else shut off. He lifted me off the body and put me on my feet again. He was much stronger than Martel or me. He turned his head to his left and the rainforest beyond the river, his temple just resting against my chin.
‘Who inherits his land?’ I asked, for something else to say. I had my arms under his and my wrists resting on his shoulders, and they ached, but there was blood on my palms and I didn’t want to put them down.
‘No one. He didn’t own it, it’s someone else’s. He said he paid rent to begin with but then he stopped and nothing happened, so he just kept it. I’d have to check with the land registry. I don’t even know where that is. But whoever he was, he didn’t come after the rent, so maybe he’s dead.’
‘Either way it will take a little while for him to hear. Especially if Martel stopped paying years ago.’
‘Someone else will move in anyway. It doesn’t have to be legal.’
‘Take them for a nice walk in the woods.’
He laughed. ‘Let’s see your hands.’
I showed him, starting to feel raw. He had to hold them still. He found his flask and cleaned up the places where the string had cut me. I hadn’t felt any of it. Across from us, an eagle swept down from the canopy and landed on Martel’s body. It was a giant white thing with evil eyes but a downy hesitancy, just a baby still, and it blinked up at us to ask if this was ours, its wings flickering and ready to fly again. We didn’t wave it away.
‘All right?’ he said quietly.
‘I – if I were less all right, I think it would be better,’ I said, not sure if I was speaking too loudly. The blood was still humming through my skull, electric. I’d never felt so awake.
He glanced up, without moving his head. ‘Everyone feels like that. Everyone with any sense.’
‘No, I mean . . .’
‘I know what you mean. It was a bit good, is what you mean. That isn’t evil. All it means is that you won’t be one of those people who spiral off into guilty nightmares and never recover. Just . . . recognise the feeling and see the shape of it, and you won’t aim it at the wrong person.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Yes.’ He watched the eagle and I couldn’t tell what he was thinking.
‘We haven’t got anything to dig with,’ I said.
‘Have you heard of sky burials?’
‘No. Sounds nice.’
‘It’s not. It’s that.’ He nodded to the eagle, which had settled now. ‘But that’s what we can say if anyone asks. Right. Let’s go and fetch your plants. There’s a crossing up there.’
So we walked along a little way until we found some rapids where there were rocks across the river in a kind of natural dam, although perhaps beavers had filled in the spaces. There, where the whitewood trees petered out, was another salt border. Once we were across, the relief at being on the right side of it again crashed through me like a cribbar and I floated for a while on the outrush. Raphael slowed down as we came to the rocks and the river.
‘I could go back to Bedlam with you now, once we have the cuttings,’ I said. ‘Without Martel.’