by Kim Fay
“What are they doing with the snake?” Irene asked Clothilde, declining the drink Simone offered.
“They’re preparing to make a sacrifice,” Clothilde answered, taking a glass.
Irene had bathed as best she could in a makeshift tin-bowl sink. She had changed into clean clothes and loose canvas shoes to relieve her swollen feet, but none of this tempered the foreboding that came with Clothilde’s answer, swift as the snake that had crossed their path. According to Clothilde, they could reach the temple by tomorrow afternoon. In less than twenty-four hours they would, or would not, discover the scrolls, and with them the entire time would be these Brau, who could sneak up silently behind a rearing cobra and strike it dead.
“What is the sacrifice for?” she asked.
“I have seen a child bitten by a cobra. I held him through the seizures. I watched him take his last breath. Still, it’s not the snake that frightens me. It’s the snake’s spirit that I respect and fear,” explained Clothilde. “It’s the same for these Brau. The one who saved the boy, he will eat the snake’s heart and pray it will give him strength to fight off the naga’s spirit when it comes for him tonight.”
Intent on maintaining the minutiae of the expedition, Louis looked up from the screwdriver he was using to tighten the eyepiece on a pair of field glasses. “Superstition has always fascinated me, how half of the world has found a way past it—the advanced half, I might add—and the other half is still dominated by it.”
“I have lived in both worlds, and I have yet to find reason to stop believing in the spirits,” Clothilde said.
Carefully massaging the antiseptic into Irene’s skin, Marc asked, “What are they going to sacrifice?”
Clothilde motioned to May-ling, perched in Simone’s lap. “They caught a gibbon about an hour ago.”
At that instant Irene heard the first agitated cry of a wild animal. The air smelled deceptively civilized, of citronella and the leather boots drying in front of the flames, but the Brau had circled their own rising fire, chanting softly, stirring the night with a rhythmic moan that was echoed by stalks of bamboo groaning together against the storm. “I wish they’d chosen a place out of sight,” she said. Any curiosity she might have had about the ritual was overpowered by its eeriness and her growing apprehension.
Chuckling as he polished the lenses of the glasses, Louis glanced at Marc. “Maybe it’s biology that makes women more susceptible to hocus-pocus than men.”
The Brau tramped in a back and forth pattern around their fire, while the coolies sat in the brush and watched. The wind picked up, adding a restless clacking to the plaint of the bamboo. “My daughter came to me once in Shanghai,” Marc said, the reflection of flame wavering in his eyes. “Ghosts only appear when something isn’t finished.”
“Hell, Rafferty,” Louis chided, “how much opium did you smoke that night?”
Irene flinched as Marc’s fingers dug into her skin, roughly rubbing buffalo tallow over the inflamed blister that cupped her palm.
There was silence around the campfire, and it took a moment for Louis to realize the harshness of what he had said. “That was unnecessary.” He set his glasses aside. “This has been quite the day. Simone, I’ll take one of those drinks, if you’re still offering.”
Simone handed him a gin-tonic, then sat back in her chair and pulled her velvet jacket tighter around her. “The fact is, Louis,” she said, “human beings all need superstition to some degree. Without anything to believe in, life is simply too hard. Even you worship the Angkor temples. The secular direction the world is headed, it’s dangerous, don’t you think?”
She sounded so logical that everyone stared at her as if she were speaking in tongues.
The Brau’s chants grew louder, coarser, casting a haunting baritone over the campsite. A dagger of lightning stabbed the forest yards from the encampment, and the chanting intensified. The expedition’s stallion stamped its hooves, and the mares brayed in frightened reply.
“Too close for comfort,” Marc muttered toward the sky.
“The French have taken all of the Cambodians’ power,” Simone said. “The government has taken almost everything, except this—their beliefs. Why shouldn’t they cling to their so-called hocus-pocus?” She faltered and her eyes widened as an inhuman shriek splintered the night.
The Brau who had saved Kiri’s life seemed to be rising out of the fire. His brown skin dripped sweat as he clutched a knife in one hand and a limp gibbon in the other. Its throat was slit. The rush of its blood gleamed in the firelight. The Brau’s tribesmen undulated around him, propelled by hemp and the wind. He threw the hemorrhaging ape to the ground and raised an earthenware jug to his lips.
Simone sheltered May-ling inside her coat.
Transfixed, Clothilde whispered, “Rice wine mixed with the snake’s blood.”
Lightning flared again, and the floodgates were ruptured. The rain struck fast and hard, and everyone scrambled to their feet to run for shelter. The stallion had broken loose, galloping toward the camp chairs with two coolies stumbling behind it. Marc and Louis darted forward to cut off the spooked horse. With Simone gripping one arm and Clothilde grabbing for the other, Irene ducked to rescue her map case from the ground beside her chair and barely dodged out of the animal’s way. As she skidded through the mud, the mares ran free around her, bawling as lightning shattered the dark, illuminating the entirety of the night so that for an instant Irene saw the Brau racing toward the camp, machetes and axes raised.
Her breath came in short, petrified gasps as the Brau surged through a frenzy of coolies and horses, a sable riot tearing saddlebags, slashing tents, smashing crates.
“Get down!” Clothilde screamed, and over this Simone shouted in French for Xa, having forgotten in the madness that he did not speak the language. “Qu’est-ce qui se passe? Qu’est-ce qui se passe?” But Xa and Kiri had vanished, and everyone knew exactly what was happening. Knew finally why the chief had sent his men: to prevent the foreigners from reaching the temple. But how far would they go, fueled by drugs and blood sacrifice and the storm?
The shadows of two Brau found the shadows of the expedition’s rifles and beat them against the trunk of a tree. Simone clambered through the mud, calling frantically, “May-ling! I can’t find May-ling!” Marc caught hold of a horse. His fingers tore at its mane, but he could not tame its panic. If Louis was out there, he was not visible, and Irene could see less and less as the rain drenched her vision. Clothilde forced her into the swampy grass, hissing, “Stay down,” but Irene struggled against her. She had to defend what she’d come all this way to do. She had to drive the Brau the hell out of there before someone was hurt. She crawled toward Marc, shouting, “Your gun! Give me your gun!”
The pistol flew into the air. The horse kicked out. Marc fell. Squinting through the thundering rage of the storm, Irene saw Simone slumped on her side. She saw crumpled tents and the Brau swinging their machetes. Swiping water from her eyes, she dug the gun from the mud, but she was not fast enough. Beside her Clothilde fired her Mauser. One shot, two, three, four, then rapidly five and six, exploding into the camp until the chambers were empty and the Brau and horses had fled and one body lay motionless on the ground.
Chapter 21
The Bullet Wound
Through the steady current of the rain, Irene could barely see Marc as he bent down to pick up one end of a makeshift stretcher, which had been hastily cobbled from a broken folding cot. Louis carried the other end, and they shuffled toward the shelter they had jury-rigged out of a damaged tent. Although the worst of the storm had passed, a thick rain remained. Using a flashlight she had salvaged, Irene searched the debris around the oxcarts for the black leather satchel that contained the first aid kit. Xa and his son were nowhere in sight, and the few coolies who had not run away were talking in distraught tones nearby. If the Brau were still out there, they would make sure she did not hear them, and she kept her eye on the cracked lantern that hung within the flimsy tent
, to keep from straying too far and getting lost.
“Hurry,” Clothilde said, coming up behind Irene, the raw nerve of hysteria in her voice. “He’s going to bleed to death.”
“Whose fault is that?” Irene said, shielding her eyes from the rain with the visor of her hand as she caught sight of a dark object half-hidden in the undergrowth.
“You gave me no choice. I’m being paid to protect you.”
“I thought you were being paid to guide me.”
“This history, Irene, why does it mean so much to you? My God, how much is it really worth?”
“Now’s not the time for pretending you don’t know the answer to that question.” Setting her flashlight aside, Irene plunged her hands into the scrub. Thorny branches tore through the dirty bandage around her finger. Although it had been flung into the night, the satchel containing the first aid kit was miraculously intact. “I found it!” she shouted.
Marc and Louis had propped the stretcher on two battered trunks retrieved from the muddy chaos of the campsite. The only remaining Brau lay on his stomach, unmoving. Louis had found a vial of morphine tablets and had forced one of the large pills down his throat. Still, the man groaned, low and anguished. As Marc took the medical bag from Irene, he winced. The horse’s kick had broken one of his ribs. Louis insisted they needed to be wrapped immediately, while Marc argued that the Brau’s blood-soaked gunshot wound was more urgent.
“Take his leg and keep it elevated,” he ordered Irene. “Clothilde, start a fire and heat some water. Louis, you’re going to have to hold him. See if you can find any rope. If we can tie his arms down, that will help.”
As for Simone, she was useless. Trampled in the bedlam, her wrist had snapped like a dry branch, yet another injury to be treated in due time. She was lying semiconscious on a tarp on the ground, her velvet jacket slushy with mud, the right side of her face scraped from chin to brow, her wrist askew.
Irene scooped one hand beneath the Brau’s ankle. The skin was nearly hairless and pocked with bluish scars from a lifetime of walking barelegged in the jungle. As she raised his leg, she felt his numbed resistance, and she was sorry for the poor man, abandoned by his own, bleeding among the strangers who had maimed him. The bullet had gone through the back of his calf, and Marc grimaced against his own traumatized ribs as he pushed pads of gauze into the black, oozing holes. The Brau kicked, and even though Louis had tied his hands, he still needed all of his weight on the injured man’s back to hold his shoulders down. Irene steeled her entire body to keep the damaged leg from flailing.
“Take this,” Marc said, giving her a roll of gauze, “and keep pressure on it.”
Using the wedge of her knee to prop up the Brau’s leg, she bore down. Her touch seemed to go straight to his lungs, driving the air from his body in a vicious exhalation of pain. His jaw tensed as he gritted his teeth, and when he turned his face toward Irene, it was contorted, but she still recognized him. He was the one who had saved Kiri’s life. “Is he going to be all right?” she asked.
Blinking against the rain leaking into the shelter, Louis said, “The bullet went clean through. He’s lucky for that. Who knows? We might pull this off.”
Marc doused a cloth in antiseptic, and Irene felt light-headed from the sharp odor of alcohol. “Hold on to him as tightly as you can,” he said, peeling the gauze away from the bullet’s entry hole and squeezing the cloth into it. The cloth absorbed the blood, which continued to flow, and the Brau, his eyes wide open, rigid with pain, strained against Irene, two combatants in their own private battle. From the corner of her eye, Irene saw Clothilde take an object from the first aid kit, something metal attached to a wooden handle. “I heat it?” Clothilde asked Marc, nervously.
“Yes, but don’t let it turn red. If it turns red, it’s too hot.”
“What are you going to do?” Irene asked.
“Cauterize,” Marc explained. “We need to stop this bleeding. Now be ready to hold him down. He’s about to feel a kind of pain unlike any he’s felt before.”
With Irene, Louis, and Clothilde gripping the Brau, Marc pressed the scalding cautery against the wound. The man’s skin sizzled. His howl ripped into the night.
It was over quickly, but when Irene relaxed, Marc said, “We’re not finished. I can only apply pressure for a few seconds at a time. Otherwise I’ll burn healthy tissue.”
As he reheated the shield and stamped the welting skin again, her throat convulsed against the meaty smell of seared flesh. And she found herself thinking, Who else in this world would not find it strange that this is what is being asked of him in the name of love? How many men would even know how to do what I need done? Today, treat a bullet wound. Tomorrow, who knows what? Yet she had faith that Marc would be ready for any of it.
But now was not the time for such thoughts. She returned her focus to the Brau. She owed this man her full concentration, as he continued to weaken, sapped by his struggle against the wrenching pain.
In the middle of making tea, exhaustion overtook Clothilde. She fell asleep slouched against a carpetbag, with four mugs of hot water steaming on the tarp in front of her and four muslin bags of Ceylon tea held loosely in her hand. A combination of distress and sleeping powder from the medical kit had knocked the Brau out cold. Having offered Simone morphine, which she inexplicably refused, Marc set her wrist while she held her breath against the agony of bones being crushed back into place. Within minutes, she too succumbed to a comatose sleep. Then it was Marc’s turn.
As he stood in the center of the shelter in the waning kerosene light, Irene peeled his shirt away from his skin. The left side of his torso was dingy and swollen with bruises, and she wanted desperately to be alone with him, to take care of him. Since leaving Leh, they’d had no privacy, no chance at all to talk. There was only one tent each for the men and women, and Irene and Marc could not slip into the night. It was too dangerous. She knew how unattractive she had become, greasy and scabbed and florid, but his few intimacies toward her, even though they happened while surrounded by the others, meant more to her than any they had shared in the seclusion of a hotel room. Their bodies were a matching patchwork of scrapes. He had seen the raw flesh of her wounds. He burned leeches from her skin as tenderly as he had held her their first night together in Saigon.
The rain continued, but halfheartedly, as if even it had grown tired of itself. Louis reached into the black medical bag, and like a magician pulling a rabbit from a hat, he revealed an item that looked somewhat like a woman’s corset. “This is going to hurt like hell,” he said, matter-of-factly.
Marc raised his arms gingerly, high enough for Louis to bind his ribs. As Louis tied the laces, Marc sucked at the air in short, tight breaths. “This will ease some of the pain,” Louis said, “but take it off every few hours and breathe for as long as you can without it. It’s compressing your lungs. You could easily catch pneumonia with the moisture in the air up here. Do you have a preference?” He showed Marc the first aid kit’s collection of sedatives and painkillers.
Marc shook his head at the pills and said, “I’m old-fashioned. I suppose they smashed the whiskey?”
Louis dipped again into his bag of tricks, this time producing a flask. “Emergency rations. Irene, would you like anything?”
“Please.”
He emptied the mugs of hot water and dashed alcohol into them. While Marc undertook the difficult work of simply sitting down beside Irene, Louis perched on one of the salvaged trunks and looked into the night. “I’ll stay awake and keep an eye out,” he said.
They all knew how easily the tribesmen from Leh could maintain their surveillance of the campsite in this dark. “I’ll stay up with you,” Irene offered.
Marc drank his whiskey in one gulp and turned his body so that he lay on his back with his head resting in the pillow of Irene’s lap. As he fell asleep, she could feel the labor of his breathing. Unconsciously, he tipped to one side, favoring his damaged ribs.
While she and Louis k
ept watch, the vision of the Brau raging through the campsite played over and over again before Irene’s eyes. Were they obeying Ormond? Obeying their chief? What, she wondered, did the villagers really want? She asked, “How could Simone’s revolution help these people living up here? Do you think it’s what’s best for them?”
Louis contemplated the passed-out Brau before returning his guardian gaze to the forest. “If we give their country back to them right now, it will be a disaster. They’re not ready for the modern world, but at the same time they can’t go back to living in the past. The West progressed gradually, organically, but that’s not possible over here anymore. Colonization guaranteed that. There would always be a gap between what they were and what they had no choice in becoming.”
Simone was asleep on a second rescued cot, her bandaged wrist curled up to her side like a wounded wing. “So a revolution is useless,” Irene asked, “but not because she’s the one who wants to lead it?”
“I don’t think she would make matters any better.” Louis grinned.
Irene had gotten used to the emotion that slipped into his tone when he talked about Simone, and she wondered, after all that had happened, if he was still in love with his childhood sweetheart. She had asked him this once, in the hotel garden in Saigon, but he hadn’t answered. She was not comfortable trying again. Instead, she said, “You must have an opinion: What do you think is best for the Cambodians?”
“Do you care?”
She considered Xa’s wishes for his son, the danger the wounded Brau had been forced into, and the unhappiness of the Cambodians she had seen in Phnom Penh. She thought about Seattle and the museum’s board of trustees, and how far away she felt from what she had wanted there. Brushing her fingers over the scratches on Marc’s temple, she said, “I’ve always cared. It’s just never mattered before.”