The King’s Last Song

Someone shouts urgently. A bony butt sits on the most fragile part of his ribcage. The engine revs and the truck jerks forward, bouncing over ruts and slamming the metal floor against his shoulders and head. The truck swings back around on to pavement and accelerates away. Luc assumes it has U-turned back towards town.

The strange things you think when you are in trouble. Luc finds he is worried about the duct tape pulling off his eyebrows and jerking out his hair. He thinks of Mr Yeo and wants to tell him, see how brave I’m being? He thinks of his mother. See Maman? I don’t feel any fear at all. This is bad, this is very bad, but I’m not panicking. He wants someone to be proud of him, to sit up and take notice.

He remembers Tintin. Tintin always remembered how many turns, left or right, and the kind of terrain, and the kind of noises.

So he pretends he is in a Tintin comic book. As they whine along the airport highway he counts to sixty five times. Then they shudder over open ground to the count of sixty times twelve. After a couple of almost vengeful crashes over humps he loses count.

They slow to a stop. He smells dust and something else, metallic and sour, which he realizes is probably blood, his own or the General’s.

The back of the truck thumps down. ‘Out, out,’ someone says, ‘let’s go!’ Luc shifts, feeling his way out of the pick-up. He is seized, hauled out, and thrust forward. Stumbling blindly over the ground he thinks: I will have to learn Braille in case I ever go blind. Why did I wear my good shoes, they’ll be all dusty.

Well, mon cher, they will look very branchée at your funeral. OUCH the stones are like teeth jabbing through the thin soles. Scrub crackles, prickling ankles.

Luc hears the pick-up rattle back onto the road behind him.

Then his feet go out from under him and he slides down a dirt slope onto rocks. A wrench and a folding-under and he knows that his ankle is twisted. Someone crouches down on top of him. He hears sirens wail past on the road above them. We’re down a ditch, he thinks. A ditch or a channel for floods in the dry season. You’d need to know it was here. These are local people.

The sack is thrown over him again. Some tiny insect nips him. Daylight mosquitoes, they carry dengue fever. He tries to slap it, and realizes that he can’t – his hands are tied. He tries experimentally to talk through the tape.

‘You say nothing!’ The voice is so close to his face that he feels breath on his nose. An insect bites him again.

He tries to count how long they wait, but then Tintin loses his nerve. Very suddenly Tintin wants to go home.

You are local people. I’ve probably seen your faces. All smiles. Well Cambodia is smiling now, isn’t it? I can see it grinning at me.

See, Cambodia is saying, you thought you could love us out of ourselves. Well here it is. This is what everyone else in Cambodia went through. Do you love it now? See how powerful love is? How long did you think you could be in Cambodia and avoid this? How long did you think you could avoid the strong men, the gangs, and the armed ex-soldiers? This is Siem Reap on Highway 6, one of the most dangerous parts of Cambodia for most of the thirty years of conflict.

Your turn, Luc, to be in a war.

April 1142

The teacher could not grow a beard.

This was a great sadness for him and probably an embarrassment for his students. The teacher was a Brahmin, originally from India, Kalinga. His people could grow beards. It was a mark of their holiness. This Brahmin wondered if he had sinned in a previous life. Or perhaps his beard refused to come because of his lack of courage. He was too lax with challenging the boys especially the one who called himself Prince Slave.

For the sake of my beard, the Brahmin promised himself, the next time Nia questions authority, I will put him in his place.

In the class they were discussing the ordering of castes, and Nia sighed and said, ‘There are no castes of people in Kambujadesa. In Kalinga, I’m sure these things hold firm, but here everyone is either a noble or some kind of slave.’

Now, the Brahmin thought, I must act now. ‘Do you deny the ordering of categories?’

The Slave Prince said with a sideways smile, ‘I am sure the categories are orderly in a country where everyone can grow a beard.’

The silence in the room was clenched.

Prince Nia continued. ‘Here everyone keeps telling us to support the ordering of categories and professions, but I can never tell if they are talking about Varna or Jakti. I don’t think they can either.’

‘Your problem, Prince,’ said the Brahmin, ‘is that you think words have no power. You use them too freely.’

‘I think truth has power. Words have power when they are pushed out of you by truth.’

‘You have no humility.’

The young prince paused. ‘Not enough, it is true.’

‘You should learn humility, Prince.’

‘That’s true too. From whom should I learn it, guru?’

‘From the King!’

‘There is no possibility of learning anything other than humility when confronted by a king. I find it more instructive to learn it from slaves.’

Like a clam, the jaw of the Brahmin slammed shut. Too, too clever, this Slave Prince. The Brahmin tried to humiliate him. ‘You speak of your little friend.’

‘She is my friend. She sweeps and scrubs and fans and whisks. But she has a loyal heart.’

Just lately, the Brahmin had noticed, the children were not laughing at Nia. The other princes hung their heads and looked sullen, hiding something. The Brahmin had a terrible thought. This Nia is recruiting them. Recruiting them to what? The Brahmin had no words, but he felt this overturning prince was an enemy of religion.

‘I think you learn pride from her,’ said the Brahmin.

The cursed boy just looked thoughtful. ‘There is pride there, for I find her an exceptional person and so I am proud that she has condescended to be my friend.’

‘Upside-down boy! She is the slave, you are the Prince.’

‘So I should learn pride, not humility?’

He was a treacherous lake that made the boats unsteady.

‘You … you take pride and turn it into humility and then turn it into pride!’ The Brahmin knew that he sounded weak and shaken.

A danger, this one. This one is a danger.

Who knows what this danger to the Gods will bring? War? Famine? Drought? Severe lack of observance always brought the wrath of gods.

Even at twelve, this overturning Slave Prince must be brought down.

Shivering with the importance of what he was about to do, the teacher visited Steu Rau, the Master of the King’s Fly Whisk.

The Master’s family had whisked kings in public for generations. Family members had also been the Guardian of the Royal Sword and the Superintendent of the Pages. They were not Brahmin but they were definitely Varna. The Fly Whisks understood loyalty and the meaning of the categories.

Steu Rau agreed. ‘Yes, yes, you are right. You have no idea how this friendship unsteadies the palace girls. They keep looking for similar favours. Why, some of them have even offered themselves to me.’

‘Shameful!’

‘In the house of the King!’

The King was supposed to sleep with them, not the officers.

‘It is the singling out that is the problem,’ the teacher said. ‘The lower categories have to understand that they lack distinction, that they are as alike as cattle. That they earn distinction slowly, life after life, through obedience.’

‘This girl shoots up like a star!’

‘Through the attention of a capsizing prince. So. I think we must remove this attention by separating them. Permanently.’

‘Yes! Yes! Kill her!’

The Brahmin admired Fly Whisk’s energy. But he also thought that perhaps the girl might have offended Fly Whisk. ‘I do not think the killing of a female nia would earn merit. It might have the reverse effect.’

‘Humph! Well. You are the expert in these matters, guru.’

‘I think the King will be making donations of land to a temple soon, and that she should be one of the gifts. She should be donated to work in the fields. No serving in the temples. In other words, the attention of this capsizing prince will have resulted in a lowering of her status. It will have taken her even farther from heaven.’

The Master enjoyed the idea. ‘Yes, yes, that would be an object lesson. And a donation will earn merit.’

‘For all who are part of it.’ The Brahmin smiled and held up his holy, bestowing hands.

Suryavarman had many names, and would have another name after his death.

He slept each night at the summit of the palace temple. At least that got him away from his wives. Attendants had strung up his hammock and lowered draperies to keep out the night air. In the old days a woman might have been left with him, for the sake of form.

But the Universal King was old now. He did not want women with him. He did not like the way they searched his face and looked at his old body. He was exhausted with the impudent stripping gaze of everyone who saw him. They searched his face for signs of glory and found only a man after all.

And yet, what he had done! He was the Sun King, who had swamped his enemies. Might not a little of that show on his face?

Nowadays, Suryavarman turned might into merit. He had built the biggest temple in the world in honour of Vishnu and all the Gods. Perhaps doubt was the burden that gods lay on kings for coming too close to them.

You sluiced water around a stone, and claimed it was holy. You did not know whether it was or not. You never saw a god, or felt a god. At times you used the Gods strategically, to frighten or threaten or shame your rivals.

Sometimes you wondered if any of it was true.

At night, lying awake and listening to the sounds of insects, you would know: you were tough and strong but sometimes that strength crushed things you wished to keep. You had a mean streak, you had a fearful streak, and you had a mind that always played chess with people’s lives. You took pleasure in all the politicking; you promised yourself that you would stop. You tried to convince yourself that you had finally won and could afford to be more forgiving. Something in you prevented it.

Bigger and bigger temples, more and more stones piled high, more exiles, more confiscations, more setting families off against each other. And at night, loneliness.

Something fluttered in the shadows of the candle. It slipped around the draperies, like a gecko.

‘I am child,’ a boy said, and flung himself down onto the stone.

I can see that, thought Suryavarman and sat up. The boy must have avoided the stairs by climbing up the sides of the temple, on the carvings. ‘Have you ruined the stucco?’ the King demanded.

‘I took care to avoid doing harm, Great King. I am small and light. I do not come for myself, King, but for another.’

The King beadled down on him. ‘Whose son are you?’

‘Yours,’ said the boy, and then hastened to add, ‘in spirit I am yours, for I have grown up in your house, but my father is Dharan Indravarman, who serves you as a small king in the northeast.’

‘I know him,’ rumbled Suryavarman. My cousin, not particularly troublesome, a man of no obvious faults and a Buddhist, so doubly harmless. ‘You can sit up, I want to see your face.’

The boy was a plump little fellow only about twelve years old, with a big round face and thick peasant lips. No matter what he said, his serious, regarding eyes had no trace of real fear.

The King asked him, ‘What makes you think you are not in a lot of trouble?’

The boy replied, ‘Because you are a Universal King. A Universal King is brave and has faced terrible danger. Such a king would have no need to frighten me.’

‘You are troubling my sleep.’ Like bad dreams.

The little fellow bowed and crawled closer. Determined, wasn’t he?

‘King. You are generously setting up new temples, and you are to give to these establishments great gifts of land and water and parasols and oil and wax and people.’

‘Yes?’ Dangerous stuff, little fellow, for these gifts are the canals of politics. Gold and silver and obligation flow down them. And blood.

‘There is a slave girl. Her name is Fishing Cat. She was honoured to be made part of our household when she was five. She is so happy to be here, she has not thought of her village since. She does not even remember its name. But I have checked the records and I see she must have come from the villages near Mount Merit. If …’ Here the child faltered, bit his lip, became a child again. ‘If that is where you are planning a temple, then perhaps if she is sent there, that would be a good thing. She could see her family again.’

‘Is that all you want?’

‘I have been very foolish,’ said the child in the tiniest possible voice. ‘I became friends with her. It was easy for me, it was fun. I had no thought of the danger for her. It is my fault, but she is the one being punished.’

The King could not help but smile. ‘You climbed up here for a slave girl?’

The boy sompiahed, yes. ‘My guru says I must learn humility.’

The King chuckled. ‘A strange way to show humility, to wake up a king with demands.’ The boy went still and looked down.

Impossible to gauge, little fellow, how much of a danger you will be. But what a heart you have. A brave heart and a good heart, to care so much for a slave girl. ‘All right. I will order it.’

The boy flung himself face-down onto the stone. Then the little imp sat up and made sure the King remembered. ‘Her name is Fishing Cat. Mount Merit.’

The King nodded. He stood up. His chest had sagged, his belly swelled, his calves had shrivelled. He shuffled into his sandals. ‘Come along, little fellow, I will get you past the guards.’

‘Don’t punish them,’ said the boy, suddenly alarmed. ‘I am very small and quiet.’

The King had to laugh. The boy’s heart is a kingdom; it could contain everyone. He cares for guards! They would kill him at a nod from me.

‘I won’t punish them,’ promised the King.

Suryavarman quickly calculated. Little Buddhist, you have ten more years before you become a danger. By then, I will be dead. With all this sudden trouble over my wife’s brother in Champa and with the Vietnamese in the north, someone somewhere will betray me soon. And so I know who you are. You are the danger to whoever is my successor. You can be my harrow.

If you love me.

‘Can I tell you who you are?’ Suryavarman said, as they walked. ‘Your father is my first cousin. Your mother was from Mahidharapura, the same pastures from which my own family came.’ His hand on the boy’s shoulder pressed down hard. ‘So I am fond of your family, that is why I asked especially for you to be here. Really.’

He nearly laughed aloud again; the boy’s eyes were so completely unfooled.

‘That is why I said you are my father,’ whispered the boy.

‘But now I will remember you as the boy with the good heart. You know the greatest pleasure in being King? It comes when you know you have done something good.’ Suryavarman mounted his kindly, regal countenance. It was a heaving great effort.

The boy narrowed his eyes and considered. You’re not supposed to think, lad, about what the King says. You’re supposed to agree.

‘Yes,’ the boy said. ‘Yes. That must be the greatest pleasure. That would be the whole reason to be King.’

‘Yes, but bees make honey, only to lose it. Are you good with a sword, young prince?’

The boy seemed to click into place. Good heart or no, he had a man’s interest in all things military. ‘I’m better with a bow. Better with a crossbow on an elephant’s back. Swords or arrows, the thing is to have a quiet spirit when you use them.’

Oh, yes! thought Suryavarman. You will be my revenge; you will be my scythe. I pity the poor cousin who succeeds me.

‘I want to train you specially,’ said Suryavarman. ‘In the art of war.’

Everyone learned how the beardless Brahmin’s scheme had backfired.

Why exactly the King favoured his cousin’s son no one knew. A cousin’s son was there to be held hostage, ground down, watched and limited. Not raised up.

Instead, the King demanded that the case be taken up by the Son of Divakarapandita himself, who had consecrated three kings. This highest of the Varna was to go to the consecration personally and ensure the foundation was well done, and it was said, ensure that the slave girl had the right to return to her own home.

Some of the Brahmin said, see how the King listens, he is making sure they are separated.

Then why does the King show the boy favours? He gave him a gift of arrows, and sent him to train two years early. And why were the palace women – wives and nannies, cooks and drapers alike – all told to let the boy and the slave girl be friends?

The only one who seemed mutely accepting of these attentions was the Slave Prince himself.

The rumour went round the palace that on the night before the slave’s departure, the Prince had called for a meal of fish and rice to be laid on a cloth, and invited the girl Fishing Cat to share it with him.

The girl had knelt down as if to serve.

‘No, no,’ Prince Nia said.

But he could not stop her serving. She laid out a napkin, and a fingerbowl.

He reached up to try to stop her. ‘No, don’t do that.’

Cat’s sinewy wrists somehow twisted free. Out of his reach, she took the lamp and lit scented wax to sweeten the air, and drive away the insects.

‘Leave the things.’

Fishing Cat looked up with eyes that were bright like sapphires. ‘I want to do this. I won’t have this chance again.’

‘Don’t be sad. We will always be friends,’ he said. ‘I will still hear you talking inside my head. I will ask how should a king behave, and you will say, how am I to answer that, baby? And I will say, with the truth. And you will say, the King should not lie like you do. And you will remind me of the time I hid my metal pen and made you look for it. It will be like we are still together.’

‘But we won’t be.’

‘Huh. You will not even remember the name of the palace or one of its thousand homeless princes.’

Both her eyes pointed down. ‘I will never forget.’

The Prince teased her. ‘You forgot the name of your home village.’

‘I was a child.’

‘You are still a child. Like me. We can say we will always be friends and believe it.’ He smiled at this foolish hope.

Then Nia jumped as if bitten by an insect. ‘Oh. I have a present.’ He lifted something off his neck. ‘Soldiers wear these into battle. See, it is the head of the Naga. It means no harm can come to them.’ He held it up and out for her.

‘Oh, no, Nia, if I wear a present from you, I will be a target.’

‘Ah, but no harm can come anyway.’

‘It is for a well-born person.’

‘Like kamlaa warriors, who go to their deaths? Look, there is no protection really. It is just something to have. You don’t have to wear it. Just keep it.’ He folded it into her hands. ‘When you have it you will think, I had a friend who wished that no harm could come to me, who wanted me to know my parents.’

Cat looked down at the present and it was as if he could feel her heart thumping. I wanted to make her happy and now maybe she thinks I have sent her away.

‘Fishing Cat,’ he said, holding onto her hand. ‘I stand waiting with all those kids who hate each other, and I think of my last day at home. I was being taken away, and I was sad and frightened, but everyone in the house kept smiling. They had to look happy or risk being thought disloyal, but I didn’t know that. My mother was allowed to kiss me, once. She whispered in my ear instead and she told me, “We did not ask for this. We are not sending you away. I will think about you every day. I promise. Just when the sun sets, I will think of you.” So whenever the sun sets, I know my mother thinks of me.’

Fishing Cat thinned her mouth trying to be brave. The Prince said again, ‘I am not sending you away. I will think of you every day. I promise. Just as the sun sets.’

A slave cannot afford unhappiness for long. Cat managed to smile. ‘I will think of you too, Nia. Whenever the sun sets. I will tell my parents about you, and how you brought me back to them. I will ask them to offer prayers for you.’

‘And I will hear you in my head,’ promised the Prince. ‘Now. Eat.’

April 13, April 14, 2004

People heard the shots and thought at first that they were fire-works.

Then sirens streamed out towards the airport and ambulances screamed back. Soldiers had been shot. It was said the King had left his residence, his large dark-windowed car squealing as it pulled out of the drive.

Pirates in the back of pick-up trucks drove around the city, their faces covered with kramars. They had guns and took aim at hotel signs. All along the airport road, it was said, every hotel sign had been shot. Tourists walking on Sivutha Street had been screamed at. They turned, and saw a rifle and a deadly grin pointed straight at them.

Cambodians in town for New Year scurried to their cars with suitcases. Traffic began to build. More shots were heard. Buses full of tourists came back from the airport and gathered in the hotels, forlornly asking if they could have their rooms back. At New Year? ‘I don’t know what’s goin’ on,’ said an American. ‘But they closed the airport. No more flights and all these big ugly dudes are stopping all the traffic and checking everybody’s bags.’

Then the power went. The hotels outlined in Christmas-tree lights, all the blazing karaoke signs, and all the brightly lit forecourts fell dark. In an instant, the music booming out of beer gardens and bars went silent.

People panicked. The last time the Khmers Rouges attacked Siem Reap was in 1993, and it was just like this. They closed the airport and the power station.

Soon the streets leading out of Siem Reap were crowded with unmoving cars stuffed with plastic bags, aunts, and wide-eyed children. Workers trudged home, holding their good city shoes and walking barefoot. Dust billowed up like a fog. Murky car headlights crept through it. Motorcycles weaved unsteadily around pedestrians. A woman lay on the side of the road, unconscious, bundles scattered, her tummy being plucked by anxious, helpful passers-by.

Just outside town, the cars encountered the first roadblocks. Furious-looking soldiers pulled people out of cars and emptied luggage onto the street.

‘Our colleagues have been shot and killed!’ the soldiers shouted.

People despaired. Was war really still this close? All it took was a few shots, and here they were, repeating history. Evacuating the city.

It’s late in the evening at New Year, but the restaurants outside Angkor Wat are dark and silent.

The temple guards are glad.

Normally at New Year, cars stop at the crossroads to beam their headlights on the temple towers. From across the moat, the karaoke drums, the pounding of feet and voices, the revving of engines, the celebratory beeping of car horns and the light-scattering mist of exhaust fumes, all would usually have risen up as a haze of light and noise.

This New Year, poor people keep their privilege of having Angkor Wat to themselves at night. Only moonlight shines on the temple. The towers are ice-blue and streaked with black like solidified ghosts. Bats flit across the moon.

The guards sit on the steps of the main temple entrance, the gopura, at the end of the long causeway. APSARA guides and Patrimony Police relax together. They lean against the wall in shorts or kramars and wish each other Happy New Year in quiet voices that the night swallows up.

Poor people still have to work. Village boys lead their oxen to pasture in the wide grounds of the temple enclosure. Farmers putter past on motorcycles.