I shook my head.
I was allowed to touch a markayuq, but only with my undominant hand. Under no circumstances was I to let one touch me in a way that wasn’t flat-handed; if there was an unexpected lapse, I would be stuck there, and nobody was going to cut through a saint’s fingers just to save mine. Should it seem to be happening, I was to step back and say why. If I used Quechua, I was to use a register appropriate to their station. If I had trouble knotting messages, there were scribes who could help. And I would never be left in a room alone with any of them. The guards, he explained, were there for my safety. Markayuq were strong and didn’t always remember that they were. The guards would help me should an accident happen. If an accident did happen, I was not to retaliate, unless I wanted to be quartered on an altar by tomorrow morning. I wondered how often it happened, if he needed to mention it.
At last, they let me go up to the room. It was just the same. I didn’t go out on to the balcony. He was exactly where I’d left him, perfectly kept, his clothes like new. I felt as if the past twenty years had been nothing but a loop which had brought me back to the same place and the same hour. While the monastery had seemed dreamy when I’d tried to think of it before, it was everything else that seemed that way now. It was hard to believe that I’d lived more than half my adult life in the meantime.
The steward brought me some food and a brazier so that I could make my own coffee. The water boiled so low here that there was no other way to get at it fast enough while it was still hot. I watched the coal inside burn through a glass window in the front until I saw Raphael shift, as if he had just come out of a daydream, then made two cups, one black and one white, and took them out. I sat down on the bench with them rested against my knees. Behind me, near the door, the two guardsmen had stood up too. I hadn’t seen before, but coming close to the stone banister brought me into view of the floating gardens. They had been much expanded, and they were full of people, waiting. Little boats had been tied to the gantries and moorings and there were more people in those. They were too far away to hear, except for a tidal murmur I had thought before was the sound of the streets below.
Raphael looked at me sidelong, starting to smile, then stopped.
He watched me for almost half a minute. It was a brilliant afternoon and the light was hurting my eyes – it felt like the edge of snowblindness – so he must have been able to see how I’d changed. His eyes caught briefly on the rosary. The haze over them, complete now, didn’t look like a cataract. It was more like a second lens, a necessary one, not to frown into the streaming sun. Otherwise he was just the same; his colours all gone but just the same. I gave him his cup.
‘You like it black, don’t you,’ I said.
He laughed.
HISTORICAL NOTE
Clements R. Markham was a real person, and he really did lead an expedition into the Peruvian interior to steal cinchona trees in 1860. In real life, though, there was no Merrick Tremayne; Markham made it out alive but was unsuccessful. He went on to publish a Quechua dictionary, translations of various Spanish histories of Peru and an account of his own travels, which I relied on heavily when I wrote this book. A man called Charles Ledger got some live plants out eventually.
Peru is as real as I could make it until the expedition turns off onto the river that leads to Bedlam. After that it’s imaginary. But most of the imaginary things are based on existing myths and fairytales about stone, and sixteenth-century Spanish accounts of the last surviving dregs of the Inca administrative system. Especially brilliant books are Carolyn Dean’s A Culture of Stone, and Narrative Threads, edited by Jeffrey Quilter and Gary Urton.
The Inca really did write on cords. There are plenty of pictures of court scribes and accountants reading from them in Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala’s Nueva crónica y buen gobierno. The system was killed off with the arrival of the conquistadores, and while a few original examples do still survive, no one can read them any more. Current English scholarship suggests these cords were mainly for numbers or used as memory aids, but the second you speak to anyone Peruvian in Spanish they say yes, it was definitely writing. Although we have no Rosetta Stone for it – or Rosetta String – I’m with the writing camp. The people who built Machu Picchu knew the difference between magnetic and polar north, and they built earthquake-proof temples in the fourteenth century. I’m pretty sure that sending a letter wasn’t beyond them.
Heligan is a real place and very much open to visitors. As I give it here, the history of the Tremayne family is completely fictional. Henry Tremayne did not (to my knowledge) meet a markayuq in Peru, so things turned out differently for him in real life.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
First of all, I’d like to thank the Society of Authors. They funded three months of language school in Lima, accommodation, and all my travel in Peru. I wouldn’t have been able to go without their help, which means about a third of this book would be quite different and much worse.
Just as important is Peruwayna Language School in Lima. In three months, they took me from ‘hola’ to conservations about possible theories on Inca sun religions, as well as a host of things between. Outside school, Spanish opened up some amazing conversations with Quechua speakers – they really do point forward for the past – as well as a lot of historical sources.
Thanks also to Gladstone’s Library. As part of their writers in residence programme, they gave me a room for all of February 2016, fed me, kept me brilliantly supplied with copies of The Illustrated London News, and made sure I sometimes saw the inside of a pub rather than just my laptop keyboard. A significant chunk of this book was written in their cafe.
Finally, there’s my mum and dad, who put me up uncomplainingly for all the time I wasn’t in Wales or Peru, even though I single-handedly quadruple the heating bills. And thanks to my brother, Jake, who is able somehow to sort out all my narrative problems on the phone whilst doing a degree in something completely unrelated.
A NOTE ON THE AUTHOR
Natasha Pulley studied English Literature at Oxford University. After stints working at Waterstones as a bookseller, then at Cambridge University Press as a publishing assistant in the astronomy and maths departments, she did the Creative Writing MA at UEA. She later studied in Tokyo, where she lived on a scholarship from the Daiwa Anglo-Japanese Foundation, and she is now a visiting lecturer at City University. Her first novel, The Watchmaker of Filigree Street, was an international bestseller, a Guardian Summer Read, an Amazon Best Book of the Month, was shortlisted for the Authors’ Club Best First Novel Award and won a Betty Trask Award. The Bedlam Stacks is her second novel. She lives in Bath.