He set the counterweight light so that he could get down fast and held the rope hard as it banged to a halt eight inches above the beach. For a second he couldn’t find the man and felt a flutter under his ribs, because there were too many stories about ghosts in the snow that he didn’t quite disbelieve. But then he saw he was almost standing on top of him. The man was under the ice. The water was shallow but the glass stratum below him was deep and littered with bits of ancient masonry so that he looked like he was falling, at an infinitesimally slow pace, very far.
The man opened his eyes and touched the underside of the ice, too weak for anything else. Raphael swore and slammed the butt of his rifle into it. It wasn’t thick and when he hauled the man out, he choked, but not enough to have breathed the water yet. Although some of it had been washed away, he was still covered in blood. The sun came out again and Raphael understood at last. The man had fallen in the hot glass shadow, in the shallow water, and when the sun had gone in, it had frozen almost on the instant and trapped him there. He shook him to wake him up more and helped him along as much as he could back to the lift. It was difficult. The man was tall.
The children followed them to the church until he told them to go away. Inside, once it was warmer, the man explained in broken Spanish that his name was Henry Tremayne – Harry, for reasons he couldn’t explain – and that he had been upriver somewhere near the mountains stealing quinine bark when he was caught. He had got away and run, but they had shot him in the shoulder. He was brave when Raphael took the bullet out, though he was no soldier and he shook for a long time afterwards.
Once Harry was warm and bandaged, there was time to notice that the children had moved a log under the window to see in. There was a row of eyes. When they saw Raphael they ducked, but not far enough. He let them be. They weren’t making any noise. He opened the other window, the one that overlooked the mountain.
‘Could you close that?’ Harry said hesitantly.
‘Can you see the mountain?’
‘The mountain?’
‘Just say hello.’
‘Hello?’
‘Good enough.’ He closed the window again and wondered, for the thousandth time, if those half-sentient stones in the skeleton of the earth knew, still, when strangers came; if they were interested, or if they were only caught in deep rock dreams and unconscious even of the ages skimming by, never mind the people made of bones who flashed about too fast to follow.
Some Spanish men came later that week, looking for a foreigner. He hid Harry in the undercroft and said there was no one. They made a mess and searched the place anyway, but they didn’t know there was an undercroft. They came again in the spring, to make sure, and the lie was more difficult because Harry had been about the village in the meantime, but a great advantage of the priesthood was mass and Raphael had taken the precaution of swearing everyone to secrecy weeks before. People liked Harry anyway; he was generous and strong. The summer was short and the next winter swept in fast, and although the bullet wound had healed more or less and Harry was worried about his family in England, Raphael kept him back, afraid he would only kill himself with the cold trying to trek over the Andes.
On the first day of real spring Harry jumped out from behind the woodshed and swung him around into the grass. Being nearly a head taller, he didn’t have to try hard to do it.
‘I think you’ll find this is unobservance of the Sabbath. How about you stop rushing around for one afternoon?’
Raphael hit him, not very effectually. ‘All right, Rabbi.’
‘You should be grateful I haven’t organised a stoning. Dear God.’ Harry was laughing. ‘It’s such a lovely day. You can’t waste it on the bloody markayuq.’
It was. The sky was blue and so was the river, and there was no snow anywhere but the peak of the mountain, which rumbled and sighed with a tiny earthquake like it was settling in the sun. Raphael snorted when Harry leaned across him to catch something in the grass. He had never known anyone so determined to look at crawly things. He’d tried to say once that there was such a thing as the proper use of a newspaper, but Harry had called him a savage and installed a green tarantula in what had used to be the coffee jar. It ate chicken scraps, or it had until Raphael had left it in the woods and told Harry it had escaped, with the jar, which he couldn’t bring himself to go back out and fetch.
‘I can’t breathe.’
‘No, I know, but it’s worth it,’ Harry said. He had caught a mouse and moved it to show him, his elbow sharp in Raphael’s ribs. ‘Look at this. I don’t think anyone where I’m from knows he exists. I might write something.’
‘Will anyone read it?’
‘The flora and fauna of South America are a subject of fascination for everybody who’s anybody,’ Harry said, archly, because in fact it was an impression of his father. Raphael had understood that late, but he was pleased to have understood. Irony was a difficult thing to catch in a new language, and more so because not all languages had it, not even all local languages. He was nearly sure that if Harry had chanced on a village a hundred miles further east, he would have offended someone by now and been thrown in a gorge.
‘Does that mean you and your four friends at your club?’
‘I think four might be generous,’ Harry laughed. He let the mouse go. It trundled off in no particular hurry. He had a knack with animals. He would poke and prod anything, but nothing seemed to want to bite him. Raphael was waiting to come in one night and find him playing cards with a bear.
Harry stayed still for a while, then sighed. ‘You don’t fancy coming to have a look at England, do you?’
‘I can’t go anywhere.’
‘No, of course.’ He sat up and leaned forward against his knees, looking out at the stacks and the mountain. The wind swayed the tips of his hair between his shoulder blades, although not strongly enough to tug any from the black ribbon. ‘But you’ll lose your English, you know. Real bugger to get so fluent and forget the lot.’
Raphael had started to learn after it became obvious that Harry had the linguistic abilities of a pigeon. He could stumble along in Spanish with the broadest English accent it was possible to have, but sometimes he forgot what he was supposed to be doing and lapsed towards the end of sentences into a weird mix of both. Quechua was too different even to try. Since English was only one more slightly westward hop after Latin and Spanish, it had been easier for Raphael to put it together than labour over trying to make Harry understand what grammar was. ‘You’ll have to come back.’
Harry smiled. ‘I will, then.’
Raphael looked away at the flowers in the grass. It was only a story; no one would go to and fro between England and the Peruvian mountains. But it was a good story. He could feel himself half-believing it, the same way he believed in heaven. It wasn’t belief of the mathematical reasoned kind, only the sort that arises when the alternative would mean becoming one of those men who worked like machines and never spoke to anyone, old at forty.
The light changed. It was night and the galaxy was a stripe across the sky. Raphael jerked upright. The blanket that had been tucked over his shoulders fell into his lap. There was a light inside the church but no moving shadow. He got up and pushed the door open, his chest hurting because his heart wouldn’t move. The last time had been ten years.