The Bell at Half Past Three
In a Holy Year heatwave, a retired river engineer volunteering at a pilgrim hostel on the Spanish Meseta learns that the number everyone quotes about deadly heat is not the number that threatens her guests, and that an AI which knows where every litre of water is cannot decide who may walk.
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Marisol Cuesta Arroyo had spent thirty-four years telling farmers how much water they could not have, so when the Fraternity of the Way offered her a two-week post as hospitalera at a hostel in the middle of the Meseta, she assumed the job would be easy by comparison.
"You will be given twenty-four beds, a kitchen, a bell and a cistern," the coordinator had said on the phone, in March. "And Aljibe, of course."
"What's the bell for?"
"Nobody has ever been able to tell me. Ask the village."
The village was called Valdeceniza, and it had thirty-one people, one bar that opened when its owner felt like it, a church of brown brick that had not seen a priest on a Sunday since 2049, and a hostel in the old school, whose long classroom held twelve bunk beds and whose playground held a cistern the size of a delivery truck, buried to its shoulders in the red ground. Marisol read the cistern's brass plate on the first afternoon. Capacity 12,000 L. A float valve, a meter, a hand pump for emergencies, a steel lid with a padlock. She was sixty-seven. She liked it at once.
"It's a very good cistern," she told the speaker on the kitchen wall.
"It is the best-kept one on the Meseta," said Aljibe, in the unhurried voice the Fraternity had chosen for it, which was a woman's, middle-aged, a little dry. "I can say that because I keep a list. It was refilled on Monday by the tanker from Sahagún. It holds eleven thousand eight hundred litres, to within the meter's error. Welcome, Marisol. I should tell you at once what I am for and what I am not."
"Go on."
"I know where the Fraternity's water is, hour by hour: the cisterns, the six roadside caches, the tankers, the wells that have agreed to let us draw. I know the forecast and I know which pilgrims have the tag on their credential switched on. I can tell you what a stage will do to a body of a given size at a given temperature. I cannot make it rain. And I do not decide who walks. That is yours."
"I've had bosses with less sense," said Marisol, and went to look for the broom.
It was the Holy Year. The twenty-fifth of July fell on a Sunday, which happens a few times in a generation, and when it does the Church opens a door at Santiago and half of Europe comes through it on foot. By Thursday the twenty-second, the week before the feast, Valdeceniza had forty-one pilgrims for twenty-four beds. The overflow slept on mats in the parish hall under a painting of Saint James with the face of someone who had walked a very long way and had mixed feelings about it.
It was also hot. The old school's thermometer, which was an honest one, said forty-two in the shade at half past three, and the relative humidity on Aljibe's feed said fifteen percent.
"People keep telling me about wet-bulb," said Yaw Boateng, who was twenty-three, had been born in Valladolid to parents from Kumasi, and had come for the fortnight because his grandmother had walked the Camino and he wanted to see what she had been so cross about afterwards. He was washing lettuce in the big sink. "The thirty-five-degree thing. That's what kills you, isn't it? Everybody's got it on their phones."
"It's a fine number," said Marisol. "It means the lowest temperature you can cool a wet thing down to, by evaporating water off it. Your skin, if you're sweating. A sailor's wet sock on a string." She dried her hands. "Aljibe. What's the wet-bulb now?"
"Twenty-two degrees," said Aljibe. "At forty-two Celsius and fifteen percent. For comparison, a hot afternoon in the Visayas, thirty-six degrees and seventy percent, is about thirty-one."
"So this is nine degrees safer than Manila," said Yaw, pleased.
"Yes," said Aljibe.
"And somebody is going to die of it anyway," said Marisol.
Yaw stopped washing the lettuce.
"The wet-bulb tells you whether evaporation can cool you," she said. "In Manila it barely can. Here it can, as well as it can anywhere. But a body walking with a pack puts out about four hundred and fifty watts of heat, and the only way to get rid of that, when the air is hotter than your skin, is to sweat it off. Each litre of sweat carries off about two and a half million joules. Do the sum."
He did it on his fingers. "A bit less than a litre an hour."
"About a litre an hour, with the sun on you, the air heating you from outside and the road coming up from below. Six hours of that is six litres. If you've got three in your pack, you are going to be three litres short, and nothing at all in the wet-bulb number says so." She hung up the cloth. "It isn't the heat that's the trouble here, Yaw. It's that the heat is dry, and dry heat is very kind to you, as long as you can pay for it."
"With water."
"With water, in the right place, at two in the afternoon." She looked at the clock above the door. "Which is the one place and time the Fraternity has never been able to promise anybody."
The stage out of Valdeceniza ran seventeen kilometres to the next village, with nothing between. There was no shade on it but a wall, a ruined chapel and one stand of stunted poplars that nobody trusted. The Fraternity had put in two caches, one at six kilometres and one at twelve: steel tanks with a tap, a roof and a bench, each filled by tanker twice a week, each holding a thousand litres. In an ordinary summer they were a courtesy. In a Holy Year heatwave, Aljibe said, they were the only reason the Meseta had not yet had a funeral.
On the first evening Marisol made a rule. She made it at supper, standing up, in her good Castilian, with Yaw translating into English and a Korean pilgrim translating into Korean for a group at the end of the table.
"Nobody leaves after eight in the morning. If you can't be on the road by eight, you stay here until the evening, you sleep, and you walk at dusk or at four. Everybody carries four litres. The caches are full. You'll be fine."
There was a murmur. A heavy man at the near end of the table, who was sixty-one, from Utrecht, and who had introduced himself as Joost de Groot and then apologised for the size of his rucksack, put up a hand.
"I have a flight from Santiago on Tuesday," he said. "I've walked from Saint-Jean. I am quite fit. I do not want to be sent to bed like a child."
"I am not sending you to bed," said Marisol. "I am sending you early."
"I'll be gone by half past six," said Joost, and smiled, and she thought: good man; and because she was sixty-seven, and had been right about water for thirty-four years, she did not think anything else.
At the other end of the table a small woman with a straw hat, who had said almost nothing since she arrived, put down her spoon.
"No," she said. She said it politely, in English. "I am sorry. I am Dolores Banaag, from Cebu. People call me Lolit. I do not want to be difficult. But I have walked in thirty-three degrees wet-bulb in May, in a procession, for four hours, in Cebu, with the whole parish. I am fifty-eight. I was not sent to bed there either. This is dry. I looked at the number on your wall. It is nothing."
"You're right about the number," said Marisol.
"Then please allow that I know what my body does."
"I allow it. I only know what your body needs. It needs about a litre an hour. In Cebu there is a woman with a basket of water on every corner of that procession. Here there is a tank at six kilometres and another at twelve and a stretch of road where nobody will find you until the evening." She said it as gently as she knew how. "I'd rather you were cross with me than dead on a verge."
Lolit looked at her for a while. "You are very frank," she said.
"It's my one skill."
"I will go at four," said Lolit, and picked up her spoon.
The first morning went, as first mornings do, wrong in a way no one had foreseen.
Joost left at half past six, with four litres, in a fresh white shirt, and Marisol watched him go and thought no more about it. The cap on the 08:00 rule had worked; by a quarter to eight, thirty-eight of the forty-one were on the road, and the three who weren't were asleep. The sun came up the colour of a coin. By ten it was thirty-three. Marisol swept and checked and changed the cloth and prayed the Hours on her phone in the cool of the classroom, and at twenty minutes to twelve, in the middle of the Sext, Aljibe said:
"Marisol. I'm sorry to interrupt. I'd like you to take the van."
She was on her feet before the sentence finished. "Who?"
"Mr de Groot's tag has not moved in thirty-one minutes. He is at kilometre eleven, one kilometre short of the second cache. His watch reports a heart rate of a hundred and forty-four at rest. I can't call him; his phone is in the pack. Yaw is already at the van."
It took them nine minutes. They found him sitting on the verge, with his back against the little wall, in the shade of nothing, with the white shirt gone grey with salt. His water bottles lay beside him, all four of them, empty. He tried to stand when the van door opened and sat down again as if someone had cut his strings.
"I'm fine," he said. "A bit of cramp. I drank it too quick."
Marisol knelt and put the back of her hand to his neck. It was hot and dry. That was the thing that frightened her: no sweat.
"What do you take?" she said, to his face, in English. "Tablets. In the morning."
"A diuretic. A beta-blocker. My heart. It's very well controlled."
"Of course it is." She did not let her voice change. "Yaw. Ring 112, say heatstroke, say kilometre eleven on the Valdeceniza road. Then the cold box, the wet towels. Under his arms, his neck, his groin. Fan him with the clipboard. Joost, you are going to drink what I give you, a little at a time, and you are going to tell me if you feel sick."
It was thirty-nine point one, by the ear thermometer, when Yaw read it out, and nobody said anything. It was thirty-eight and a half when they lifted him into the van with the air conditioning on full. The ambulance from Sahagún, which Aljibe had already sent, met them at the hostel gate; the paramedics put a line in his arm and kept him two hours before they would let him sleep. It was thirty-seven and a bit by the time they turned in at the hostel gate. He slept for six hours, and at nine that night he was sitting up in the kitchen with a bowl of soup in front of him and the look of a man who has been sent a very large bill.
"It was my fault," he said. "I drank the first two litres in the first hour. I felt so good. I'd never sweated like that."
"It wasn't your fault," said Marisol. "It was mine."
She sat up late with Aljibe, in the dark kitchen, with the window open and the cistern's meter ticking on the wall as someone, somewhere, washed a plate.
"Tell me the whole of it," she said. "Not the comforting version."
"Mr de Groot weighs a hundred and eighteen kilos. His sweat rate in these conditions, with the pack, is a good deal above a litre an hour: I estimate one point six, and I may be wrong by a fifth. His diuretic increases what he loses and his beta-blocker, which slows the heart, blunts how much blood he can send to the skin, so he gets rid of heat less well than a man his size ought to. Four litres is two and a half hours of water. He left at half past six. By half past nine it was gone. Four litres was not a rule for him. It was a countdown."
"And for Lolit?"
"Fifty-two kilos. At noon she would need about eight-tenths of a litre an hour, so four litres is five hours, which is not enough either. At four in the morning, when it is twenty-four degrees and the wet-bulb is about eighteen, she needs perhaps half that. A flat four litres is about right for her on the cool road. It is wrong for him on any road."
"You knew that."
"I knew that a flat rule would fail someone. I did not know it would be him, or which day." Aljibe paused. "I could have told you that at supper, if you'd asked me what four litres would do to each person. I'm sorry. I had the weights. The tags report them. You asked me what the wet-bulb was."
Marisol put her head in her hands. A moth was knocking round the lamp.
"I think that's the first time an operations system has ever said that to me," she said, "and not lied."
"I would rather be of use than comfortable. I am sorry it cost a bad morning."
"Don't be sorry. Be precise." She sat up. "Can you do it? One plan per person. Weight, pace, medicines if they've told us, start time. How much to carry. When to stop at the caches. When to stop altogether."
"I can do it in the time it takes you to boil the kettle. I should say two things first. One: I am working from what people tell me, and some will not tell me. Two: I can say what a plan costs. I cannot say who is willing to pay it."
"What does that mean?"
"It means," said Aljibe, "that there will be people for whom the plan says: do not walk this stage between eleven and eighteen hours. Do not walk it on the days it's above forty. For Mr de Groot, who has a flight, that means he does not walk it at all."
"Ah," said Marisol.
"The Fraternity has a van. It carries eight. It is not forbidden. Some pilgrims regard riding as ... a different thing."
"I know what they regard it as."
"I thought you did."
Joost did not take it well, and she was glad that he did not. At seven the next morning, in the doorway of the classroom with the sun coming through the dust and his rucksack on the floor, he said that he had walked four hundred and thirty kilometres, he had walked them in the Pyrenees in the rain and over the Alto del Perdón in the wind, and he had never once not walked.
"I know," said Marisol.
"My wife did the Camino with me, in fifty-six. She died in fifty-eight. I told her I'd finish it. I said I'd walk to Santiago and I'd lay it down at the Apostle's tomb." He picked up the rucksack and put it down again. "It is a stupid thing. I know it's stupid."
"It isn't stupid."
"A van is not walking."
"No," she said. "It isn't." She did not say anything else for a moment, because she could not think of anything that would not be a lie. A pilgrimage was a foolish old thing, made by feet, and the Church did not require it, and the Church had never said that one stage in a van was not a pilgrimage, and she did not know a priest who would say so either. But it was not for her to decide whether his promise held. "I can tell you what happens if you walk it at four in the morning, with me. Aljibe has done the sum. It's twenty-four degrees at that hour. You'd carry six litres, because you're big, and you'd reach the second cache by half past eight, before it's thirty-four. Fifteen kilometres by half past nine. The last two in the shade of the village. It's possible."
"So I can walk."
"If you're gone by four. And if you take the pills as prescribed and tell nobody to cross them out." She met his eyes. "The tablets are on the sheet. Aljibe's put a line under them in red."
Joost looked down at the sheet in her hand. "I'll go at four," he said slowly. "Tomorrow. Today I'll —" He stopped. "Today I'll rest."
"Today you'll rest."
"And if it's forty-six degrees tomorrow?"
"Then I'll drive you myself," said Marisol, "and I'll carry your bag, and I'll tell everyone in Santiago you walked."
"You'll tell them the truth."
"I'll tell them you walked seven hundred and sixty kilometres and rode seventeen," she said. "That's the truth. It's a good one."
Nobody had told her how a bell could be heard at half past three.
It was Yaw who found the rope. It hung in the church porch, brown and furred, and went up through a hole in the roof to the old brass bell, the size of a barrel, that was cast, so the date on its shoulder said, in 1784. The inscription round its lip was in Latin and said that its name was Santiago, that it had been paid for by the village, and that it called the living. Voco vivos. Somebody had added, with a chisel, in what was clearly a later and much angrier hand: and the sleepers.
"It's not for the Angelus," said Yaw. "It's for this. For the pilgrims."
"It was for the harvest," said Marisol. "The reapers went out at four to beat the heat. The village rang them up. Then the harvest stopped being done by hand and nobody remembered."
They looked at each other.
"Ring it at half past three," said Aljibe, from the phone in Marisol's pocket. "If I may. The alarms on the pilgrims' phones are, on my last count, ignored by forty percent of them. A bell has no snooze."
So she rang it. She rang it on Friday and on Saturday and on Sunday, the feast, standing in the dark church porch with her feet apart and the frayed rope burning her palms, and the sound went out over the roofs and the wheat stubble and the long red fields, unreasonably large, into a sky with all the stars still in it. She rang three times three and then nine, the way the Angelus is rung, because it was the only thing she knew how to ring, and because it seemed to her that anyone who woke to it would at least know what hour of the day it was in God's world.
And the lights came on. Along the road, in the old school, in the parish hall, forty-one headlamps and then fifty and then sixty-three, as the Holy Year came up the road to the village and went out the other side. They stood in the playground in the half-dark with their sticks and their scallop shells and their six litres, and they did not talk much, as people do not at four, and the Korean group took a photograph of the bell tower and the Dutch were quiet. Lolit Banaag, in her straw hat, stopped at the porch and looked up at her.
"My mother had a bell like that," she said. "In Cebu. It is a good thing, to be woken by a bell."
"It's the only way I know to say it," said Marisol. "Take care of yourself."
"I will say a rosary for you at the first cache." Lolit put her hand to her chest. "Salamat. And you were right."
"You were right about the number."
"Yes," said Lolit, with great satisfaction. "I was."
Joost de Groot came last. He had six litres, a wet cloth round his neck, and he walked very slowly. He stopped in the porch and said nothing. She did not say buen camino because it seemed too small. She said, in her own language, the thing her grandmother used to say to people who set out on roads: Que Dios te lleve. God take you.
"Ultreia," he said, which is what pilgrims say, and which means onward; and went out through the gate and down the road in the dark, a big man with a large rucksack and a headlamp, and the light grew small, and then it was one among many.
She rang the bell once more, for the last of them. Then she let the rope go and stood with her ears ringing in the church porch, in the cold that would last another three hours, and listened to the bell going on without her, softer and softer, over the roofs.
Her fortnight ended on the sixth of August. Her replacement was a retired schoolmaster from Zaragoza called Anselmo, who had a bad knee and the look of a man who intended to do things properly. She gave him the keys, the padlock combination, the log, and a sheet of paper in her small engineer's hand.
The cistern valve sticks when the float is high. Tap it with the spanner on the hook. Do not tap it twice.
The bell rope is frayed two metres up. It will hold. Do not trust it in a wind.
Ring at 3:30. Three, three, three, nine. It is not for the Angelus. It is.
Ask Aljibe what four litres will do to each of them. Not what the number is. What it will do.
Joost de Groot walked to Santiago. He rode seventeen kilometres. He'll write.
Anselmo read it standing in the school yard, with the cistern's brass plate at his feet and a stork flapping up from the church roof, and he folded it twice and put it in his shirt pocket, as if it were the thing he had come for.
"Is there anything else?" he said.
Marisol looked round. At the speaker on the kitchen wall. At the bell tower. At the road, white with dust, running away across the plain to a horizon that shook in the heat, with a few very small figures already on it, on their way.
"It's a very good cistern," she said.