‘No. The markayuq knows you. We were lucky this time, but she’d catch you on the way back. We’d have to stop for the night again and she wouldn’t. She’s a foot taller than me. I can’t fight her.’ He looked ashamed and I wished I could say, without sounding like I was talking down to him, that I understood about Martel, that I didn’t think he was a coward for not having fought, or for not risking it against a markayuq twice his size. But I couldn’t think of a way and it just left a painful quiet before he shook his head at himself and pointed to the mountains ahead of us. They were close, very close. We must have come parallel to them. ‘This is Bolivia. Those are the Andes. You can loop back to Lake Titicaca that way.’
‘Is it possible?’ I said, looking down at the rainforest, and it really was the rainforest beyond the river. Dense, unbroken, roadless jungle. ‘When we planned the expedition we wrote off Bolivia quite quickly, it . . . we were told there was about to be a war. The borders are closed, they’re not letting foreigners through. The roads are full of soldiers.’
‘They’re not letting foreigners through. But “they” is the Bolivian government. People who live round here have nothing to do with all that.’ He managed to encompass the Bolivian government, modern borders, anything established by the Spanish, all in one bubble that ordinary people might look on with occasional interest but nothing more pressing. No government would be able to dictate anything much to people here. It was a simple matter of not being able to reach. They could stop foreigners using the roads, but there would be no way in heaven or earth they could put a man on every animal trail through the woods. ‘There’s a village of hunters about a mile south.’ He pointed. ‘I’ll go with you that far and they’ll take you over the mountains.’
‘Will you be all right?’ I asked.
‘When?’
‘Going back. You can’t see.’ In the shade of the trees where the daylight made the pollen invisible, he had been walking close to me to be sure of the footing, and hesitated if I’d stopped talking for too long.
‘I’m fine.’
‘How many fingers?’
He slapped my hand. ‘Fuck off.’
‘That doesn’t work on bears.’
‘Damn. Stalked as I often am by bears hellbent on ophthalmographical studies.’
‘I’m not going through Bolivia and you’re not walking through that forest by yourself. We already know there’s a great chunk of it with no pollen.’
‘No.’
‘I didn’t mean to imply it was your choice. And your English is hateful, I hope you know. It isn’t decent to learn another language that bloody well.’
‘I had to. Your grandfather was useless at languages.’ He had laughed to begin with, but he lost it when he mentioned Harry. ‘Come on.’
The way across the river came out almost straight into a cinchona glade. I had to sit in it for a while and look at the trees and the fallen leaves and fruit and roots to be sure they were the kind we wanted. They were, and there were thousands.
TWENTY-SIX
We had arrived at half past four in the afternoon, so I took careful cuttings and then spent a happy hour with the last of the good light splitting some kapok wood for cases and packing them with the reddish moss that grew everywhere. By the time it was dark, I had them ready so that we could go first thing in the morning. I propped the makeshift cases gently against some kapok roots on my way back to the little clearing where I’d left the bags and Raphael. I stopped when I saw that his pack was gone. He had left a lit pollen lamp propped on top of mine.
‘Where are you?’
There was no answer, except for the hooting birds. When I picked up the lamp, worried he was frozen somewhere and meaning to go and find him, there was a note too. It directed me to the hunters’ village, and said what to say in Quechua – they didn’t speak Spanish – when I reached it. He had gone back over the river without me.
The lamp hadn’t been to help me see. It was to stop me seeing littler lights. I did what watchmakers always say not to and forced the winder forward to make the spring uncoil too fast and run out, then pushed the lamp under my coat where it lay over my bag to block out the last of the light. For a moment everything was only black and I stood with my eyes shut. When I opened them again the sky was indigo, and over the river there was a soft pollen trail through the trees. It wasn’t going back to Bedlam but east, further round the bend of the river. The very tail of it, faded and hazed, was still just enough to cast light on the graveyard markayuq where she stood on the riverbank, watching me. The grazes on my arm stung when I saw her.
‘Raphael!’ I shouted. I could still see, more or less, where the pollen trail stopped. He wasn’t that far away. ‘Where are you going?’
His voice wasn’t strong enough to shout back and instead he traced letters in the pollen, slowly, to keep from sending it whirling off out of shape.
Home.
I looked further east, half-expecting to see the lights of a town, but there was nothing. He had been steering us away from the east all the time we had been in the forest. I thought of the empty room at the church, all his things packed up. He had never meant to go back to Bedlam.
‘Right, good, and how far do you think you’ll get, in the state you’re in? Wait for me, I’ll go with you.’
You can’t. He drew an arrow under it, pointing back toward the markayuq.
‘You can’t see. What happens if you come to a place with no pollen?’
Not far.
‘For God’s sake, it clearly is!’
He didn’t reply and the pollen faded until what he had written before only looked like the suggestion of writing. I stared at it for too long and stopped being able to see it properly. Aware of my heart in my eardrums I had to stand still to think and lean into the urge just to run after him. Things chittered and howled in the woods behind me, much louder than they ever had in the whitewood forest. At last, I wound up the pollen lamp again and tied it round my sleeve while I started to gather up the kapok planks I hadn’t used for the cuttings. They were rough – I’d only split them with a little axe rather than sawn them properly – but the grain was straight and I had just enough knot cord to lash them together. It was fine and made of soft alpaca wool, but it was waxed and good enough. When it was finished, the raft wasn’t halfway big enough to take the full weight of a person, but since the markayuq wouldn’t know that, it didn’t matter. I had to hunt about to find a branch about my height and, once I had, it took what felt like hours to make a rough joint and fit it on to the raft, then longer again to tie it into place.
Finally, expecting to see dawn at any second even though my watch said it had only been an hour, I tipped everything out of my bag that wasn’t food or clothes and packed the bound cuttings in instead. Despite everything it was hard to leave the obsidian razor Raphael had given me and harder still to leave the little clutch of Clem’s things I’d meant to give to Minna. But there was no space and something in my mind clicked into that gypsy way of thinking you get on long journeys, where unnecessary things stop mattering.