Very carefully, I carried everything down to the water. Once I’d tied the pollen lamp to the branch, at as close to the same height as my own breastbone as I could, I pushed the raft out into the current. I waited, afraid it was going to get stuck along the banks or in the dense reeds, but it found the central rip quickly and sailed away. Within a few yards it was nothing but the firefly point of the lamp.
On the opposite bank, the pollen stirred as the markayuq turned her head, then plumed softly when she started to walk after the light. I couldn’t see her at all, only the glow, but it was where she had been, and it was the right height. When she walked, it was shockingly quick, as quick as an ordinary person might. I stayed exactly where I was, horribly conscious that the moonlight was bright enough now to give me a shadow on the rocks. I could nearly feel the pressure of it, a little silvery weight down my left side. It glinted on the gold leaf Inti had smoothed on to some of the patterns on the whitewood band. I put my hand over it, slowly.
She disappeared among the trees as the banks curved. The way over the river, which was all boulders and pieces of driftwood caught up between them, was difficult in the dark, even with the moon. I saw something big move in the water and almost fell in when I stopped to look at it. When I reached the top of the little cliff, which was held together by tree roots, it slid out on to the bank, but I couldn’t tell what it was. Hoping that it couldn’t climb, I set off in the paler pollen trail that still hung in the unmoving air, refreshing it with my wake but not as brightly as the markayuq had, because I wasn’t going so fast. My leg hurt and it seemed best not to upset it again, though I wanted to run and let it hurt.
I lost sight of the markayuq’s trail before long. Because I’d expected to follow Raphael for a while before I caught up, I nearly walked into him when the trail stopped just behind a tree, only half a mile or so from the river. He had stopped to sit down among some roots and frozen there. I put his coat around him. He must have been waiting to see frost before he put it on, but the air had turned cold again. It wasn’t only altitude. The mountains had their own little climate that broke when it reached the river. Raphael wasn’t the only one who hadn’t quite noticed. A fabulous, iridescently turquoise beetle had come to visit him too, antlers tipped at a quizzical angle from where it sat on his knuckle. I moved it and clasped his hand. He was icy.
I found a me-sized dip in the roots and sat with my sketchbook to wait. My heart thunked and I tried to ignore it. A day and seventy years was a wide margin. I couldn’t think what to do if he didn’t wake soon. There was no one to tell, unless the markayuq came back, but even then I couldn’t think she would be very interested in an ill priest when I was here desecrating her holy ground.
‘Jesus Christ, Merrick, do you know what that looks like? I blink and you appear from nowhere, you’ll kill me one day.’ He jerked his hand close to his heart to show what he meant. ‘What the hell are you doing?’
‘It’s cold,’ I said, starting a list on my fingers. ‘And you don’t know when to put on a coat. This catalepsy happens with what seems to me like increasing frequency, and if it happens for long you need someone to tell someone else where you are. You can’t stay out here for seventy years again; I don’t care if you didn’t die the first time, you’d be pushing your luck to try it twice. You can’t see. If you come to a burned patch of pollen, which you will if there are any phoenix round here, you’re stuck.’
‘You’ve got other things to do,’ he said flatly. ‘You’ve got cuttings to take to India.’
‘They’re all right for a month.’
‘There’s a markayuq following you.’
‘No, she’s following a pollen lamp I floated off down the river.’
‘Not forever she won’t be.’
‘Well, that’s more my concern than yours, isn’t it.’
‘Merrick,’ he snapped. ‘You’ve known me for a fortnight. What are you doing? You’re not my friend. You’re not your grandfather, you couldn’t be more different from him, and whatever you think, I am not very keen on having the grandchildren of someone I used to know kicking about in the forest. I am not a Tremayne family heirloom. Go home.’
‘I am your friend, and my whole family has spun around you and this place for three generations, so I think you’re pretty thoroughly my business, whether you want to be or not. And even if that wasn’t the case, you can’t do this by yourself. Do you want to get home or not?’
He stared at me for a second. ‘If she catches you—’
‘If. Now eat something,’ I said, and threw some grapes at him, because it’s much harder to be serious whilst trying to duck flying fruit. I’d found them growing wild with the cinchona.
‘Why are you here?’ he said.
‘It’s a few extra miles. Stop making such a bloody fuss. I didn’t pay you for any of this except in clocks. I think you deserve some help now.’
‘It’s eight or nine miles.’
‘Oh, well, in that case I won’t bother.’
He smiled, unwillingly. ‘What time is it?’
‘Quarter past nine. I don’t think I can go that far tonight.’
‘No, me neither. We’ll find somewhere to stop.’ He helped me up.
‘Will you die of this?’ I said, not wanting to hear it.
He shook his head slightly. ‘No. But it gets worse and worse. There’s a place, that we all . . .’ His eyes slipped away. They were wholly grey now. ‘I should have been there years ago, but they sent no one to take over until Aquila,’ he said.
‘Can I take you there?’
‘Yes. Please.’ He was quiet for a second. ‘Keep talking to me. I can feel it coming again. It’s going to be long, soon.’
‘But you had it for a whole day just—’
‘There are short spells and long ones. The short ones are. . . five minutes, ten minutes usually. But then it’s an hour, or a day, and that’s how you know there’s a long one coming. It’s like foothills round a mountain.’
‘I know you said it’s like being frozen but – I don’t understand how. How can you live through that?’
His expression lifted into something gentler and, for that second, he looked exactly like St Thomas. They were related. The resemblance was as close as mine to Harry’s portrait at home. I’d never seen it before, but I couldn’t understand now how I’d missed it. Or how I hadn’t noticed that he wasn’t fading but changing, or how I’d managed to make myself deaf to Inti’s stories. She had told me that the markayuq had turned to stone, not been born that way, had been ordinary once. She had told me on the first day. ‘How do trees?’
I must have slowed down, although I didn’t mean to, because he came back to help me over the roots. The pollen was thick there and against my wrist his fingers were the same colour as the graveyard markayuq’s had been. I climbed up after him and didn’t know what to say, so I didn’t say anything. My ribs ached with wanting to. Atom by atom he had managed to become more important than Clem or cinchona or anything else, but he was going to live for hundreds of years and I was nothing but another one in a long line of people he would never know well, who died like leaves.
TWENTY-SEVEN