‘If you think that your grandfather bought the land to keep it safe in the event that anyone discovered what was there, and died before he could form any kind of legal protection round it – yes, it looks that way to me.’
Sing knew what was there. Late one night, out on the new whitewood plantations in the Himalayas, we had been celebrating. The trees, already the size of oaks, had been growing for perhaps five years, and for the first time that evening, one of the gardeners had pruned some twigs and found that they floated. Sing had known there was something odd about them before that, because they were volatile things to grow and we’d had to have heavy fire regulations right round the mountain, but I’d told him then what they could do if we could only grow them strong enough. It had felt dangerous to say it aloud, even though I had the evidence floating in front of me that we had just rendered any whitewood expedition to the Andes unnecessary. He had laughed, properly, for the first time since I’d known him, and said only that I ought to get some sort of award for shrewdness. None of it had felt shrewd. It had felt like tightrope walking, for years. I’d been ill for a while after that, with relief. There would be a whitewood trade, but not out of Peru. It would be India Office plantations, ours, and nobody would ever have to know about Bedlam, or what was in the sky above it.
I couldn’t frame what it was I wanted to ask. For what had happened to Raphael never to happen again; for it to be impossible for the next Martel to hold anything over Aquila. For no one to march in and build a cathedral or a salt mine over the town. ‘Is there a way to . . .? Can we ringfence it somehow? In . . . a trust, or – I don’t know. Build a bloody great wall around it?’
‘I’ll talk to some lawyers,’ he said. ‘We’ll be able to make it so that no one touches that place even if they find El Dorado out there.’
‘I don’t have much money to throw at something like—’
He laughed, not at me but softly. ‘Merrick. You have what – a thirty per cent share in the Himalayan whitewood plantation? Hang on to it. The heartwood is almost mature. The Navy wants it. You’re going to be very wealthy indeed soon.’
They weren’t surprised to hear from me at Raphael’s monastery in the new year. There was a post office box in Lima that they had told me about and correspondence took a couple of months, but we arranged dates and, like people tend to do in situations of limited communication, they stuck exactly to their word. At the Bedlam border, a salt trader met me and took me along the glass road, considerately with a horse. Anka wasn’t at the graveyard and no one followed. Having been to Bedlam so often, I didn’t have altitude sickness any more in the mountains and there was no delay. A little ship met us beyond the aqueduct and took us into the city. I stood by the rail and watched the clouds go past, and the first buildings, and then the huge docks where ships the size of cathedrals floated at anchor. Those hadn’t been there before.
The monastery was a ghost in the clouds. Where the sun edged through, the walls shone. They were inlaid with gold. It wasn’t that gold was fabulously valuable. They were, said the steward who met me, on the top of a gold mine. It was because in its earliest days, the place had been a sun temple, and gold reflected the light yellow. I’d been too distracted to have paid attention last time, but the halls he took me through were beautiful, and impossibly high, the masonry hauled upward by rafters and vaults of whitewood. In the heights were pollen chandeliers. They spun slowly, making tiny golden galaxies.
I’d come back to Peru often to see Inti. My Quechua was good enough now, although it sounded very modern here, even though I’d made her use only the oldest words, nothing Spanish. There had been a pronunciation shift. Up here it sounded sharp, but when the steward met me on the monastery steps, we understood each other. He seemed pleased, if terse. I wanted to say I hadn’t come with an army, and there was no need to be nervous, but it wasn’t me bothering him, or I didn’t think so.
On the stairway up to the monastery proper, where everyone lived, there was a markayuq on a plinth, holding a human skeleton kept in shape by wires and slim metal rods. The bones were slight, a girl probably. The stone man’s grasp stopped short of the bones, outlining where her body had been.
‘That’s what you have to be careful of,’ the steward said, with a sternness I didn’t deserve. He had stopped to say it and until then I hadn’t noticed that two guardsmen had followed us, towering, grim men with condor designs stamped into their armour.
It was difficult to look at the markayuq and the bones. It was plainly meant to be awful, but its being macabre wasn’t what bothered me; I’d never had any trouble with bones in themselves and these ones were kept very well. It was the same way I couldn’t look at French postcards; a kind of pointless prudishness that came from never having married. Their heads so close that they must have been kissing when the markayuq froze. Whoever the girl had been, she was crippled. One femur was twisted. A Bedlam girl. I wondered if she had died by accident, trapped like that, or if she had done it on purpose.
‘Is he awake yet?’ I asked instead. ‘Your letter said sometime this week.’
‘He’s been stirring for the last few days. The doctor has estimated that it should be some time this afternoon or in the night. Their pulses come back up to normal speed a few days beforehand. It becomes more like sleep than stasis, you see.’ He paused, with a thorny quiet. He was worried about something, or something had gone wrong, but I didn’t push. Before and now, the monastery stewards put me powerfully in mind of the Swiss Guards. It must have been a calling, and no one wanted to say anything difficult about the markayuq. Some boys sitting on the stairs stared at us.
‘Sir, is there any . . .’ They looked from him to me. They were asking about Raphael.
‘Not yet,’ he said. Then to me, abruptly, to get it out at once, ‘Sometimes they never wake properly. Something goes wrong, and . . .’ He lifted his hand towards the markayuq on the stairs but glanced up, to the next floor, and to the room beyond which was that balcony with its view over the city. He was nervous. They all were. One in a generation now; it mattered that Raphael woke and kept his mind at the same time.
‘Is he showing any sign of that?’
‘As far as we can tell, no, but it’s never certain.’ He swallowed. ‘You are of course here at his invitation, but you must be aware of the protocols. Has someone explained?’