‘Give me a hand,’ I said, to bring him back to now. I climbed up on to the stone to see down under it. ‘Well – it fell a good way, it’s smashed the glass.’ There was a great shatterweb in the road’s glass bricks. Some of them had crumbled away, long enough ago for the rain to have worn down the sharper edges.
‘Careful,’ he said.
‘Of what?’ I asked, and then bumped my head on something as I straightened up. It didn’t hit me hard and I felt it veer away. ‘Ow. What was that?’
He climbed up with me and stretched across, past me, to catch it. It was a log, floating in the air, and when he let it go for me to see, it spun gently. Some moss tipped off the edge of it. I looked up. There were more of them, many more, half-branches, some of them still, some of them turning very slowly. The hole ripped through the canopy didn’t have ragged edges. Some of the displaced twigs and pine needles had already risen that high and bumped into the broken branches, and started to clog the gaps. There was no breeze to chase the pollen back into the space, which was much darker than everything else, a column of dark that came down in straight lines nearly like sunlight would have. I stretched up to tap the log. I had to pull it to make it dip, about half the strength in my arm. It would have been strong enough for a child to sit on.
‘Come on. Better not stay.’
I looked back. ‘I haven’t seen her.’
‘It isn’t her I’m worried about. I feel a bit . . .’ He shook his head. ‘The gates are just up here. You can leave me there. Someone should be about that way.’
‘All right. We’ll find someone and then I’ll go.’ I watched him slide down ahead of me and hesitated, because it was steep on the other side. He lifted me down. There was no strain at all in his hands now. I might have been a doll.
‘Thank you.’
He let me go.
‘Will you go back to Bedlam, once you’re . . . finished?’ I said.
‘No. They’ve got their markayuq, and Aquila. I’m allowed to return, but I think I might go mad and end up in bits on the riverbank. I’ll probably stay at the monastery.’
‘Will I be able to come back to see you?’
‘There are dispensations,’ he said slowly. ‘But I don’t think you’ll want to in twenty or thirty years, or whatever it is.’
‘How do you know it will be that long? You’ve just come out of seventy years and you’ve only been awake for a few. Why do you think it will be . . .’
‘It takes a hundred years to change. More or less.’ He paused. ‘If I’d been in a safe place and not out in the middle of the woods, last time – with Harry – I would never have woken so quickly. I shouldn’t be awake now. These last few years . . . it’s like waking up in the middle of the night.’
‘So the next one . . .’
‘I don’t know. It could be half an hour like just now or it could be much longer. It’s like falling asleep. It happens in snatches but you keep waking and then you don’t.’
‘And then after?’ I said, not able to say what I meant. If I woke up in the middle of the night, even if I walked around the house and talked to the dog and opened windows, I never remembered it the next day, and always felt strange about the open windows when I saw them.
‘And then afterwards if I’m lucky I’ll be like Thomas. You know. Up and about if I want. Thinking, talking. Slowly.’ He rubbed his hand over the knot cord on his other wrist.
I didn’t try to say it wasn’t what I’d meant. Asking if he would forget me, because I’d arrived in this tiny wakeful space, could only sound like bleating. He wouldn’t give a damn if he forgot me; I suspected he might even be glad to. All I’d done was remind him of a dead man. ‘Then what?’ I said.
‘Then they’re awake usually but then they sleep for a few months at a time. Then awake again. Repeat for six hundred years and then you sleep more and more, and then you never wake but you don’t exactly die either. They sink into the bedrock in the end. Dead markayuq don’t look like people. You wouldn’t know, usually.’
‘Which is why people used to build around the bedrock.’
He nodded. ‘You should have seen the fuss when they built the cathedral in Cuzco. Smack through the ground, huge trenches through the rock. I went once, when it was nearly finished. Gave me the creeps.’
I laughed. ‘No one explained to the Spanish?’
‘Of course they explained, but the engineers told them not to be idolatrous and to sod off. Only reasonable response, really. I can’t think anyone approached them in a very measured or un-Indian way.’
‘Why do you hate Indians? You know white people are much worse, don’t you? It isn’t as though there’s some kind of international bar you’re not reaching out here. We’re terrible at everything. Lasting much past forty-five. Learning more than one language. It’s a miracle, actually; sickly prematurely ageing worryingly inbred horsey idiots have managed to convince everyone else their way is best by no other means than firmness of manner and the tactical distribution of flags. I can’t believe no one’s called our bluff yet.’
He laughed. It always took me by surprise when he did and I had to fight not to look too pleased. ‘I don’t like bad translation. I don’t like idiots who go around telling white men that the mountain’s alive and it thinks things, and that villages are watched over by special people who turned to stone.’
‘But that’s what it is.’
‘No it isn’t,’ he said, and smacked me in the chest with his knuckles. It was the very lightest tap but I could feel the weight behind it now. Any harder and I would have gone over backwards. ‘That’s terrible. That’s not how you’d say it in Spain or England, is it? You’d say, there is a particular hereditary illness in the Andean highlands that causes petrification and eventually renders the sufferers inert in a kind of permanent catalepsy and apparently part of the surrounding rock, which has led to a cultural tendency to be very careful of stone, and a religion that reveres it. That’s exactly the same thing, in the language that you actually speak rather than in Quechua but using Spanish words. Bloody Quespa?ol. Speak one or the other, or don’t complain when someone smacks you over the head with a Bible and calls you a moron.’
I was still laughing as we rounded the bend and beyond it was an aqueduct, almost as tall as the trees. Four markayuq stood on plinths on either side of the columns that rose over the road and they turned their heads to watch us. They were much more like guards than the Bedlam shrines. Their clothes were different; it was the same leather, but it had been made in plates and greaves, and they all carried spears. Gold, because gold would never rust. They seemed wholly awake, as awake as we were. My heart bobbed up into the back of my throat. If they were keeping track of who went in and out, and when, then they knew only one markayuq boy had been delivered in the last hundred years and they knew he was only twelve. I might have looked nearly like a turning priest but the timing didn’t add up.