‘How long?’
I didn’t think she would reply, but she seemed to think about it, and of course she had plenty of time. A week here and there.
‘When . . . are you from?’
Born 1579.
‘And you’re only just properly awake now.’
Mercury. Turned after a miner’s funeral in the graveyard. Her hand had shaken over the last part and my teeth hurt in their roots.
‘It’s been nearly three hundred years,’ I said, because I had a terrible feeling that no one else had been able to tell her yet.
She didn’t write this time. No wonder she hadn’t wanted to talk to anyone, in her waking weeks. She must have known she was in the middle of a fractured sleep, like Raphael, but far worse. She didn’t want to talk because they would all be dead when she next noticed.
‘I need to wait. To see if anyone comes,’ I tried again. ‘They have to move him; he can’t stand out here.’
You must leave. Bones cannot disturb stone.
It sounded like a translation of something that would have been well known if I’d been from here, but I caught the gist. I was an ordinary person, or less than ordinary with one good leg. It was a special sort of offence to try and move a sleeping markayuq. I could see her bristling and my heart sounded loud inside my ears when it occurred to me that maybe even thinking of moving one was illegal in itself. Like talking about the death of a king.
‘No,’ I said anyway, before she had finished writing. I would never have imagined that an argument as slow as this, where I had to wait for a stone woman to write on glass with a shard of broken rock, would feel urgent. But it did. Anxious heat had been building up in my chest since she began to talk and now my veins sang with the need to fight or run. She had to drag the rock around curving letters and the grinding noise of it hurt to hear.
Sacrilege.
‘I don’t care.’
She only set the rock down again. I watched her for a long second through my own breath, which was clear white. My leg already ached from having come downhill.
She started to move again and I got up and walked away as quickly as I could. She followed me, not in any rush. I struggled much more on the way up than on the way down and when I looked back she was still there, still following. Halfway up the valley the trees closed in again and the pollen was bright. I stopped at the top, waiting for the pollen to fade with my pulse drumming and knowing it wasn’t going to fade enough.
I had been aiming back to the place I’d left Raphael, for no real reason except the fairytale chance he might wake if I was just desperate enough, but when I found it, he was gone.
I looked up and down for a pollen trail I could hide in, but animals seemed not to like the road. I started back along the glass towards the aqueduct. It stretched on further than I’d thought. Anka was closer now. She didn’t make any effort to rush and she caught up with me slowly. When she did, she only reached out for my arm.
Raphael pushed me out of the way and hit her full in the chest. The noise was inhuman, stone smashing into stone. He was smaller than she was and he must have known he was going to lose before he even began.
She dragged him backward and hit him across his temple. If it had been me, the bones in my skull would have clattered into the nearest tree, but he had changed enough for his not to. I was still a good way from the aqueduct. The four markayuq sentinels watched quietly. They turned their heads as I came towards them, but they were so divorced from everything else that the fight must have been only a vaguely interesting flash in among the changing whirr of the seasons. Anka, though, wasn’t coming after me. Raphael had kicked her ankle out from under her and pinned her down, but she was holding something and it took what felt like a long time to realise that it was my matches.
The pollen went up much faster than it had before. The trees were ancient and so did they. Explosions thundered like a whole fleet firing its guns at once. I ran back for the aqueduct and fell on the ice and skidded the last few yards underneath, but the fires were so strong that the misty fall of water there didn’t make much difference. More trees went up, so hard the explosions shook the ground and knocked me over again. Shrapnelled bark tore down my arm.
Raphael shouted something, not in English.
Someone grasped my shoulder and pushed me down on to the ground, until I was crouching. As soon as I did, I stopped feeling any heat. It was still hot, but nothing from the explosions hit me. Wood clattered against something close. When I looked up, the four sentinels were standing around me, leaning down, their arms interlocked and blocking almost everything. They weren’t burning. Their robes were singeing but not much, or not on my side. What did reach me though was the smoke, which smelled of chemicals, and I choked. The dark closed in on the edges of my eyes.
THIRTY
When I came to, I was in a proper bed with a velvet pillow under my head. It was soft when I moved. I lay still for a long time, very sleepy. Some of it was altitude, that same thick feeling I’d had in Crucero but worse. Once I was sitting up, my head spun, not unpleasantly. I waited for it to stop. There was a bandage on my arm and the room was too bright. It was hard to see at all at first, but when I could it was all windows. Some were doors. A brazier burned low next to me.
I got up slowly. It was painful, but not impossible. Standing, I found all the cold air, which had a real bite now. I leaned against the wall on my way to the glass doors. Raphael was sitting outside, facing the balcony. He was very still and I thought for a horrible second that I was too late, but he twisted back when he heard the door and got up to help me across. It was even brighter outside than in and, in the brilliant light, the haze over his eyes was translucent. I folded slowly onto the bench, the L of my hand propped to my forehead to keep the sun out of my eyes despite how everything around us was mostly lost in fog.
He looked better, healthier. I said so.
‘It’s the altitude,’ he said. ‘We were made for up here. It’s twenty-five thousand feet. You won’t feel well.’
‘There are yak in Nepal that wouldn’t survive at twenty-five thousand feet,’ I grumbled. The fog made the cold cut-throat and someone had taken away my coat. He gave me a folded-up blanket I’d thought was a cushion. I hunched into it and then frowned. ‘Twenty-five thousand . . . there are no mountains that high in Peru. Are there?’