The King’s Last Song

Then, more graceful, the palace women swayed forward, nursing their candles behind cupped hands.

‘Oh hell!’ one of the boys yelped. ‘You stupid little civet, you’ve pissed all over my feet!’

Prince Nia burst into giggles at the idea of the noble prince having to shake pee-pee from his feet.

The boy was mean and snarled at the little girl. ‘You’ve defiled a holy day. The guards will come and peel off your skin. Your whole body will turn into one big scab.’

The little girl wailed.

Nia laughed again. ‘You’re just trying to scare her.’

Scaring a baby wasn’t much fun. Fun was telling a big boy that he was a liar when there wasn’t enough space to throw a punch. Nia turned to the little girl. ‘They won’t pull your skin off. We’re not important enough. He just thinks his feet are important.’

Nia laughed at his own joke and this time, some of the other children joined in. The older boy’s eyes went dark, and seemed to withdraw like snails into their shells.

Endure. That was the main task of a royal child.

Suddenly, at last, the elephant lurched forward. They were on their way! The Prince stood up higher, propping his thighs against the railing. He could see everything!

They rocked through the narrow passageway towards the main terrace. Nia finally saw close up the sandstone carvings of heavenly maidens, monsters, and smiling princes with swords.

They were going to leave the royal house. I’m going to see them, thought the Prince; I’m going to see the people outside!

They swayed out into the royal park.

There were the twelve towers of justice, tiny temples that stored the tall parasols. Miscreants were displayed on their steps, to show their missing toes.

The howdah dipped down and the Prince saw the faces of slave women beaming up at them. The women cheered and threw rice and held up their infants to see. No men, their men were all in the parade as soldiers.

Beyond them were their houses – small, firm and boiled clean in tidy rows. Planks made walkways over puddles. The air smelled of smoke, sweat, and steaming noodles. The Prince tried to peer through the doorways to see what hung from the walls or rested on the floors. Did they sleep in hammocks? What games did the children play?

‘What are you looking there for, the tower’s over there!’ said one of the boys and pointed.

Tuh. Just the Meru, the Bronze Mountain. They could see that any day. Its spire was tall, but everybody said that the King’s great new temple was taller.

The road narrowed into shade and they passed into the market. The Prince saw a stall with an awning and a wooden box full of sawdust. Ice! It came all the way from the Himalayas on boats in layers of sawdust. He saw a Chinese man press a chip of it to his forehead. He had a goatee, and was ignorant enough to wear royal flower-cloth. The Khmer stall-wife was smiling secretly at him.

The howdah slumped the other way. The Prince saw sky and branches; he steadied himself, clinging to the rail, and looked down. Beyond the stalls were ragged huts, shaggy with palm-frond panels. A woman bowed before a beehive oven of earth, blowing air into it through a bamboo pipe.

The air smelled now of rotten fruit and latrines. The Prince saw a dog chomp on the spine and head of a fish.

Splat! The little girl squealed in fear. Over-ripe rambutan had splattered over their shoulders. Overhead, boys grinned from the branches of trees and then swung down. One of the kamlaa took off after them with a stick.

Along the road, other people watched in silence.

One of them gazed back at Nia. His mouth hung open with the baffled sadness of someone mulling over the incomprehensible. How is it, he seemed to ask, that you stand on an elephant in flowered cloth, and my son stands here with no clothes to wear at all?

The man standing next to him was so lean that every strand of muscle showed in lines like combed hair. His gaze turned to follow the howdah, insolent, fierce, and angry.

These were the great people of Kambujadesa? The young prince didn’t like them at all. They were ugly, their houses were ugly, and they smelled.

This was Yashodharapura, abode of the Gods, the perfect city. The soldiers should come and take away all such people.

The procession moved on, into the precinct of the holy mountain, Yashodharaparvata.

Here in the old centre of the City, everything was better. Wives of temple workers, all of them royal tenants, waved tiny banners. Their hair was held in handsome fittings, and they wore collars of intricate bronze.

Nice people, smiling people. They dipped and bowed and held up their hands for princes, as was fitting.

Their houses stood on firm stilts and were linked by covered walkways. Airy cloth bellied outward from the rooms. The Prince glimpsed the canals beyond, full of boats. Amid fruit trees, carved stone steps led down to small reservoirs.

Prince Nia turned around and saw stone steps going all the way up the miraculous hill of Yashodharaparvata. The trees were hung with celebratory banners, and the gates to the hilltop temple had sprouted poles that supported ladders of coloured cloth. From the top of the hill, golden kites swooped and dipped. The kites reflected white sunlight that continued to dapple the inside of the Prince’s eyes long after he looked away.

The procession passed into orchards and rice fields and dust began to drift over the howdah like smoke.

Suddenly they came upon a new, raw desert. All the trees had been cleared, their fresh yellow stumps staring out of the earth. Dust blew as if out of a thousand fires, and above rose the new temple, the Vishnuloka.

The Prince was disappointed. The five towers were not that much bigger than the spire of Mount Meru. They were made of raw uncarved stone, unfinished and undecorated blocks that bore down on each other. The towers looked like the toy buildings he himself made out of clay cubes. Some banners trailed limply from the scaffolding.

Ahead of them, pickaxes rose and fell out of a great ditch. Men struggled up the banks, passing baskets of dirt to queues of women and children who swept the baskets away hand-to-hand into the distance. Boys ran back with empty baskets. To the Prince the workers looked like busy termites swarming around their nests.

More banners bobbed on poles that marked where the entrance would be. The elephant passed between them and rocked the children up onto a causeway that crossed the moat. The moat looked like a dry riverbed running due north, sweltering with a few puddles.

The elephant did a slow dance round to join a row of waiting elephants. The Prince saw the puffy faces of other children in howdahs sagging in the sun. They waited again, on a plain of churned earth.

The Prince craned his neck to the right. ‘I can’t see the rest of the parade,’ he said.

‘Aw, poor little baby,’ said the boy whose feet had been peed on.

Another elephant full of unwanted princes churned up the dust and came to rest beside them. Dust polished the Prince’s eyes every time he blinked.

Finally an elephant strode past them, shaded by two heaving parasols. The howdah was carved and balanced on a beautiful rug, and on it stood a high-born warrior. He wore a felt coat and a diadem and a bronze tiara, rising up like an open lotus. He stood holding his arrows in his hand.

That was more like it!

White horses pranced, lifting their feet high, but holding to formation. Their riders rode on their unsaddled backs, hands on hips.

Behind the horsemen came a ballistic elephant, a crossbow on its back. Its protecting infantry marched in rows alongside it.

A third elephant followed, with a solid shell of wood over its back. Resting one foot outside the ornate howdah, a real warrior prince stood in full armour with a crown and a metal breastplate tied across his chest.

Prince Nia squealed in delight, and leaned so far out of the howdah that he nearly fell.

Soldiers trooped past. These were nobles. They wore flower-cloth chemises and their topknots were held in metal tiaras in the shape of totemic beasts: eagles or tigers or deer, which showed that they were fast, or fierce.

More horses wheeled past, white like falling water. The Prince’s military heart danced. Then, oh! Their riders stood up and pulled back their bows and let loose flaming arrows. They arched up into the blue sky over the southern moat.

Nia was beside himself. He yelled and shouted and pummelled the shoulders of the bigger boys next to him. Suddenly affectionate, they laughed with him, pleased by his fervour, sharing it.

‘Steady, Little Warrior,’ one of them chuckled.

The other rocked him by the shoulders. ‘You will have your chance of battle soon enough.’

The little prince cried aloud. ‘We are the soldiers of the world! We are the warriors of the Gods!’

Some of the troops heard him, and they waved and smiled. The sun was in the sky at the same time as a pale daylight moon. Auspicious or what?

The soldiers passed and boring high-rankers followed. Women reclined in carved palanquins. Fly whisks and fans replaced swords. The elephants had a bit more glitter, but who cared? Glitter does not need skill.

One elephant, bigger than the rest, heaved its way through the fog of dust. The howdah was a bit bigger than most, too. An old man wearing a temple-tower tiara stood up in the howdah with all the usual stuff. He had a lean, pinched face like an old woman.

It was not until the man had passed with a forest of parasols and nothing further followed that Prince Hereditary Slave realized: that must have been the King. That old man had been Sun Shield, Suryavarman. The King, it seemed, was just another soldier.

The dust settled, but the thought remained.

April 11, 2004

Luc Andrade steps down a little stiffly from a white Toyota pick-up.

He feels thin-legged and pot-bellied. Too old really for beige Gap jeans and blue tennis shoes. Out in front of him stretch the plains of Cambodia.

Luc sighs. He loves the heat, the silver sky, and the wild flowers clustering in the shade. The palm trees always remind him of Don Quixote with his lance – tall, stretched thin and riding off into the blue distance. And perhaps of himself.

In the back of the pick-up truck, Map and two of his friends from the Patrimony Police are gathering up tents and rifles. Mr Yeo Narith steps out of the cab. Luc has spent a lifetime reading Cambodian smiles and Narith’s wan, tight smile is still angry.

No one is supposed to excavate anywhere in the precincts of Angkor without an APSARA representative being present. APSARA defends the interests of the artefacts and the monuments. They contend with tourist agencies, art thieves, airways passing too near the monuments, or museums in Phnom Penh – interests of all kinds. The last thing APSARA needs is to find it cannot trust its archaeological partners.

‘Allons-y,’ says Luc. Narith is of the generation who finds it easier to speak French. He nods and extends an arm for Luc to precede him down the bank.

Out in the field, the contractor is guarding his find, next to a motorcycle and William, the spare driver.

Luc skitters a little awkwardly down into the field. Underfoot, the harvested rice crackles like translucent plastic straws.

It’s April, the end of the dry season and horribly hot. Luc is Director of the United Nations archaelogical project. Most of his UN dig team have gone home, except for one Canadian excavator and Sangha, the Cambodian dig manager. Work is normally finished by the end of March, but the project might not get financing for next year. Since the JPL/NASA overhead flights four years ago gave them a radar map of the old road and canal system, their trench has uncovered one unremarkable stone yoni and nothing else.

A white sheet is spread out on the ground, and rocks and earth are lined up in order along it. Village children squat, peering at the stones. As Luc approaches, the contractor and William the driver stand up. The children chew the bottoms of their torn T-shirts. The contractor from the university hangs his head and kicks the white dust.

So, thinks Luc, he came out here with William and took a risk. The augur, a long slim white tube a bit like a hunting stick, lies abandoned. The contractor grasps two full lengths of pipe. God knows how he got the augur that deep in all this dry ground. William probably sat on the handles.

The contractor is called Sheridan. He’s a microbiologist, out here to identify where he will core in the rainy season. Like Luc, he works at the Australian National University. The UN dig has paid for only four days of his time.

Sheridan launches into his apologies. They sound heartfelt, but Luc shakes his head. ‘I still don’t understand how it happened. You know the rules.’

‘I knew this was where a bridge crossed a canal. The ground was still very wet, and I thought: why not just do a test, see if this will be wet enough in rainy season …’ His voice lowers. ‘I was trying to save you money.’

At least he hasn’t laid the gold out on the ground for the village children to see. They walk back towards the pick-up to look at the find.

At the top of the embankment, Map guards the truck. Map jokes with someone, an old farmer. The farmer has a face Luc has often seen in Cambodian men of that age. The eyes are sad and insolent all at once. The man glares at Luc over half-moon spectacles and stalks away. Map shakes his head and calls, ‘Hey, Luc!’ then surfs down the embankment on his heavy police boots.

‘Oh-ho, is that guy ever unhappy with me. He came and said this is his field and we can’t stay.’ Map strolls companionably alongside Luc. ‘I told him to go buy a mirror and practise smile. I said that you guys find something that Cambodians can’t use – knowledge.’ Map claps his hands together. ‘He used to be my CO in the Khmers Rouges, and he didn’t like me then, either.’

Map outrages people. He drives the APSARA guides crazy by stealing their business. He exasperates the Tourist Police by taking elderly foreigners to stay in country farmhouses. A single red cotton thread barricades his wrists with some kind of magic and his long fingernails are a mottled white like the inside of oyster shells. Luc once wondered if Map was an exorcist, a kru do ompoeu. Map told him that he uses the fingernails for fighting, ‘like knife’.

But he takes good photographs, speaks French, English and German and knows HTML.

Inside the cab of the pick-up, away from the village children, Sheridan reaches into his rucksack and takes out a disk about twice the size of a silver dollar, dull yellow with crinkled cookiecutter edges. Luc sees Sanskrit.

Gold. Writing. From Angkor.

‘We’ve got to excavate as soon as we can,’ Luc says to Narith. Narith then telephones. They already knew they were going to have to camp out all night to guard the find. Mr Yeo asks for more police, with guns.

Outside, the old farmer marches up and down the dyke. Wind blows dust up around him, Map, all of them, like the smoke of war.

They dig through the long afternoon.

The walls of the tent run with condensed sweat. Luc, two volunteers from the Japanese dig and Jean-Claude from Toronto are crouched inside a trench, brushing away dirt.

Slowly, rows of packets wrapped in linen are emerging.

‘Meu Deus!’ mutters Jean-Claude. For some reason he always swears in Portuguese. He gestures towards the packets. ‘There’s at least ten packets there,’ he says to Luc, in French. ‘Ten to a packet, that’s one hundred leaves.’

They’ve found a book. An Angkorean book made of gold.

Map darts from side to side taking photographs from many angles.

William, the motoboy, leans over the trench, looking forlorn. Luc can’t let him leave in case he tells anyone about the find. He’s trapped here. He knows that.

Luc pulls himself out of the trench and gets cold cokes from the chest. He passes one to William.

‘What we’re trying to do,’ Luc explains to William in Khmer, ‘is to get as much information as we can about the earth around the object. See the side of the trench? See, it’s in layers, white soil, brown soil, then black soil? That will tell us a lot about when the leaves were buried.’

William dips and bows and smiles.

Map intervenes. ‘Hey, Luc. You think we should take the book out of those packets and photograph it here?’

Luc shakes his head. ‘No. The packets will have information too. We could photograph what the augur pulled up. The disks.’

The ten torn disks are laid out on the ground. The gold is brown, thicker than paper, but not by much. A light slants sideways across their surfaces, to make the incisions clearer.

Luc can read them.

The text comes in torn snatches across the face of the ten disks. Luc’s breath feels icy as he reads.

…who conserves perpetuity…

…men seek for heaven and its deliverance…

…the ninth day of the moon …

‘We have a saka date,’ Luc announces. The Japanese volunteers stand up to hear. Luc is so skilled at this that he can do the conversion to the European calendar in his head. The text is about a consecration in 1191 AD.

‘It’s twelfth century. The time of Jayavarman Seven.’

‘One hundred leaves from the time of Jayavarman?’ Even Yeo Narith rocks back on his feet. Map looks up, his face falling.

‘Plus que ça,’ mutters Jean-Claude inside the trench. He holds out his hands as if at a Mass. He has brushed aside all the loam. Inside his trench, lined up in rumpled, pitch-coated linen, are fifteen packets of ten leaves each. ‘Plus there is one smaller packet to the side,’ he says.

One hundred and fifty leaves of gold?

Art gets stolen in Cambodia. It gets chopped up, incorporated into fakes, shipped across the world, sold by unscrupulous dealers. If it’s gold, it might get melted down.

Luc turns to Yeo Narith. ‘Who do we trust in the Army?’

William can’t go home.

It’s late at night. The tent glows in the middle of the field like a filament.

Around a campfire, William and Map face each other. Working for the same boss, they should be polite and friendly with each other, but Map won’t even look at William.

Many other people sit drinking coffee: Dik Sangha, officials from APSARA, Map’s captain from the Patrimony Police, and a friend of Teacher Andrade’s from the École Française d’Extrême Orient whose name William keeps trying to catch. Patrimony Police stand guard round the field. They’ve already stopped people with shovels and metal detectors.

Map cradles his gun. He’s been sipping beer all evening and his face is bright red. He grins and tells unsuitable stories.

William is mystified. Teacher Andrade trusts Map and gives him responsibility. Map knows about the Internet and a lot about the monuments. He could teach these things to William, but he won’t.

William thinks: when I started to work for Teacher Andrade, you were friendly. Now you won’t talk to me or even look at me. I’ve done nothing to you.

Map is talking in English. ‘So my older brother and me go to shoot the Vietnamese. They have a big ammo dump behind the Grand Hotel. And my older brother Heng is crazy man. You think I’m crazy, you should see Heng. He strap grenade launcher to his wrist. One launcher on each arm. He fires both at the same time, kapow, kapow. I hear him breaking his wrist. But he keep shooting, shooting. I say, Older Brother, you are a crazy guy. Then all that Vietnamese ammo goes up, huge big fire and I have to drag Heng home.’

Map pauses. His eyes get a wild look to them.

‘He died of Sweet Water Disease. Diabetes. Nobody give him insulin.’

Another sip of beer, a shaking of the head.

We are not tourists, William thinks. There is nothing you can get from us by telling sad stories, over and over, boasting about your wars.

‘I went to look for my parents, all that time. I look all over Cambodia. I have to go AWOL to do it. And it turned out they are dead since the Lon Nol era.’

William has noted that Map’s sad stories do not add up. He also tells a story in which his uncle tells Map when he is twelve that his parents are dead and Map goes to hide in a haystack. Both cannot be true.

There is something wrong with Map’s head.

‘Cambodian joke,’ says Map and grins. He is so ugly, thinks William. He has a big mouthful of brown teeth that push out his jaw, his nose is sunken, and his face is covered in purple lumpy spots.

Map tells a story about a truck driver who has to stay in a farmer’s house. He sleeps in the same room as the farmer’s daughter. The truck driver gets to do everything he wants to with the daughter. In the morning the farmer asks, did you sleep well? The truck driver says, yes, your daughter is very beautiful, but her hands are so cold! Ah, says the farmer and looks sad, that is because she is awaiting cremation.

Map roars with laughter and pummels his foot on the dust. He looks at Teacher Andrade’s frozen smile and laughs even louder.

William shakes his head. He says in Khmer, ‘That is not a good story to tell someone like Teacher Andrade. What will he think of us?’

‘He will think we tell funny stories.’

‘He will think we are not respectable.’

Map still won’t look at him. ‘He knows more than you do.’

William shrugs. ‘He is a great teacher and of course knows more than I do.’

‘You know nothing.’ Map lights a cigarette.

William has had some beer too and his tongue is loose. ‘Why don’t you talk respectfully to me? If I have done something wrong, you should tell me what it is, so I can correct it.’

Map sneers. ‘Monks tell you that?’ He finally looks at William.

‘Yes.’

‘You’re so peaceful,’ says Map, smiling slightly. He sits back, inhales and watches. ‘I do all the fighting, you have all the getting. I march for forty years, you go to school. You have a pretty girlfriend, I have no family.’

‘My mother and father are dead,’ says William.

Map is silenced and looks away. His face closes up like a snail going into a shell and he coughs. He says nothing for a very long time.

William believes in connection. It is how he survives, and he is good at it because he practises on people whom no one else can reach.

All right, thinks William. I promise. I promise that you will be my friend. I will have your name and history in my notes, and you will know my family. We will celebrate New Year together.

There is a rumble of trucks in the dark. All the Europeans stand up. The Patrimony Police lift up their rifles. The trucks stop, their brilliant headlights go off, and a full colonel strides down the bank towards them. His lieutenant follows.

The Colonel holds up his hand, and greets Yeo Narith as if they are old friends. William’s ears prick up; he does not know this Colonel. He must be from somewhere other than Siem Reap. The Lieutenant is Sinn Rith, a man William knows is far too rich to have earned all his money from soldiering.

Teacher Andrade trusts these people?

In Banteay Chmar, it was the Army itself that stole the bas-reliefs.

They enter the light of the fire and Tan Map grins.

‘Lieutenant-Colonel Sinn Rith! My old friend!’ Map cackles with glee.

Sinn Rith is impassive behind his sunglasses. He mutters in Khmer, thinking the Europeans won’t understand. ‘The Frenchman’s brought his dog.’

Whew! William has to expel breath. They hate Map. What’s he done? Sinn Rith fingers the handle of his pistol. Map’s captain looks alarmed, eyes flickering between them.

The Colonel’s polite smile does not falter. He ignores Map, and greets the scholars, shakes their hands, and says how privileged he feels to be asked to help protect such a treasure. Can they view the find?