Fury

Ryan drains the glass and closes his eyes, mumbling sleepily, ‘The sound of the clock restarting. We’re back in penalty time, you and me.’

He smiles, swaying against me a little in his seat, his eyes still closed. And the happiness that suddenly overtakes me — to be here, beside him still — makes me grasp his left hand in my left and pull his arm across my body. I lean into him, feeling the beat of his heart like bird’s wings inside his chest, as Mateo describes how it’s possible to get a one-day trekking permit without a passport, and what we’re likely to face in the morning.

After we rise from our discussion with Mateo, the children surround us, begging us to try the pumpkin soup and lomo saltado, the buding de chocolate and a sweet dish made from a kind of stewed purple maize that they fall on excitedly called mozamora morada. And we do, we do try. But though it all smells delicious, to Uriel and me the food tastes like ashes. After a while, we discreetly push it away.

Ryan only manages a tiny portion of dinner before he curls up and goes to sleep on the low settee. I beg a blanket from Gabino, our host, to cover him, then hang up his wet jeans to dry. I kneel on the floor beside Ryan’s sleeping form and move our belongings from the broken backpack into the replacement Gabino pushed into my hands earlier, made of thick felted wool and crawling with bright Peruvian needlework.

‘What’s wrong with him? What’s the “gringo sickness” they were talking about?’ I ask Uriel, who’s standing there with a strange look on his face.

‘We’re over eleven thousand feet above sea level,’ he murmurs, watching me buckle the bag shut. ‘Everything in Ryan’s body is working overtime to keep him alive. He’s not yet acclimatised to this atmosphere, and, I confess, neither am I. Explain to our hosts that I needed some air? I’ll be back before first light.’

As silently as a cat, Uriel leaves the room without drawing anyone’s attention — a feat that would be impossible for anyone else in this tightly packed space. It hits me suddenly that this may be the most time Uriel has ever spent in the company of humans. The colour and movement that so delight me must be spinning him out.

A long while later, Mayu, Gabino’s shy wife, offers me a place to sleep.

I shake my head. ‘I don’t need it,’ I whisper in Quechua with a smile, ‘but I thank you, lady. I’ll stay and watch over the gringo.’

She inclines her head at me before sweeping away in her beautiful red skirt. When I look up again, Mateo is regarding me with a strange expression in his eyes.

‘You need to get some rest,’ he says in Quechua, looking around before asking, ‘Where is your brother?’

Gabino’s father calls out, a little drunkenly, ‘Ayar Awqa cannot be caged! He has flown away into the night sky. To speak with the stars!’

‘No, really, senorita, where is he?’ Mateo says worriedly. ‘I come back for you in only a few hours. The train leaves Cusco at six, and from Kilometer 104, the trek is short but still difficult for people who are not used to our conditions.’

I look up into Mateo’s face with a smile. ‘Uriel finds the modern world a little … claustrophobic. He’s not very good with crowds, but he’s strong and sure-footed and he can walk forever. He’ll be fine, and he’ll be back before you are.’

‘Then he will feel at home tomorrow.’ Mateo looks relieved. ‘It is wild, high country where we are going: the country of gods.’

And of demons, I think, shivering despite the light and warmth and music in the room, imagining Gabriel chained by fire, in darkness, in the heart of a dead city.

19

The apartment is quiet around me — just the creaks and groans of timber settling, breathing out — when Uriel returns. One minute I’m sitting there, gazing into the darkness, peering into those of my memories I can gather together, trying to puzzle out some kind of chain, some kind of workable order — but it’s a chain that keeps collapsing, because there are more holes than chain — when he’s suddenly just there.

Ryan’s still sleeping on the settee, his breathing shallow and hoarse. Uriel kneels beside me, brushes a long curl of dark hair back from my face.

You will never see so many stars as in the skies above Cusco, he says inside my head. Not unless you are home. Don’t you miss it? he continues. How could you not yearn to return? Every moment I am away I feel it in my soul, as if I am somehow … unravelling.

I don’t tell Uriel that he’s almost described the way I feel around Ryan. It’s like we’re bound together now; as if the notion of home that I used to carry around inside me has been transposed, somehow, into him. And if we were not together any more, maybe I would unravel. It’s something I can’t bring myself to think about until all this is over — and that day is coming, I can feel it.

Uriel sits down beside me, resting his back against the sagging couch, takes my hand in his. His skin is so warm, seething with his peculiar, living fire.

I’m tired, he says. Tired of planning and plotting, protecting, fighting, moving. So tired. Am I allowed to say that? His laughter is ghostly.

I think a little honesty is permissible, I reply wryly. And you’ve never been one to hold back.

Nor you, he says. How we used to fight.

I hadn’t realised we’d called a truce! I say, before grinning.

He looks at me, really studies me in the darkness. It’s good to have you back. Even this way.

Don’t sound so delighted, I say dryly.

His expression grows embarrassed, even ashamed. When Raphael first devised a plan to find you and preserve you, I admit to being against it. I thought you were dead the instant you were cast down. All of Luc’s intent towards you was there in his face. But Raph kept insisting you were alive, and that Luc would throw everything he had into looking for you because of that vow he made, word of which had already spread to us. Even for creatures as we are, there are no secrets. Someone always hears, always knows.

To be honest, we didn’t know what condition you’d be in if you ever ‘woke’ again. Of us Eight, I think Gabriel missed you most. He missed your friendship and your singularly opinionated take on every aspect of every thing. Raphael’s idea of you is clouded by too much dangerous emotion, but Gabriel just missed you. He said you used to make him laugh — and very few things in life make Gabriel laugh. He will be glad to see you again.

If he’s still alive, I think fearfully, and Uriel squeezes my hand before releasing it.

We’ll find him alive. His reply is too quick, too certain, as if he’s trying to convince himself of the truth of his words.

We sit in the darkness for a while, shoulder to shoulder. And it may not be a feeling with any basis in reality, but I’m somehow connected again, to my people, if only for a moment. I’m part of something far greater than I am, which goes beyond merely existing, merely surviving. I hadn’t realised how much I needed to know that. Just sitting in the dark, with Uriel beside me, Ryan breathing at my shoulder, has a healing quality.

But time marches, we two can feel it. We are its keepers, its historians; it beats in us, can never be denied.

We should wake him, I say finally, reluctantly, indicating Ryan.

It is time, Uriel agrees.

He rises silently, holding out his strong hand to me, and I take it.

We’re on a tourist train bound for ‘Kilometer 104’, a station at Chachabamba, about sixty-four miles from Cusco.